Eat your spinach.

I am typing this by the light of fluorescent bulbs. We didn't buy them to save the earth, we bought them because the 4-bulb overhead light fixture in the office here at Roseholme Cottage is lit most all day and well into the night. Even running sixty watt bulbs, that'll spin a meter, and when combined with the waste heat of as many as three computers, it can get pretty toasty in summer, so as the last round of incandescents burned out, one by one, they were replaced with their CFL equivalents.

I've been using CFLs for exactly that reason nearly as long as they've been around; the chandelier at my old crib chewed through 100W bulbs at a ferocious clip until I switched, and then the same four 100W-equivalent CFLs ran day and night for years, never needing replacement. (There are other places where I prefer incandescents, like for cozy little bedside reading lamps, or lamps that only go on and off rarely, like closets or the basement. Mostly, though, I prefer the choice of buying the bulb I want for the job I need, and the more choices, the better.)

I felt kinda cool and leading edge, and then the government announced that it was going to make everybody eat their CFL spinach. Suddenly, people who expose themselves to possibly harmful levels of noise and stand around breathing heavy metal vapors for a hobby dug in their heels and whined "They have mercury in them!" People who make fun of others for knowing the difference between beige, ecru, and eggshell were saying "I just don't like the quality of the light!" (perhaps unaware that 2700K CFLs have been available for years.)

It's much the same with fuel economy. I loved commuting on my Suzuki RF; not only would it out-accelerate a Ferrari, but it would also out-mileage a Civic, which was kinda important to me when my daily round-trip commute was 100 miles. Of course, the most important thing in a vehicle for me is performance, for others it's seating capacity, or how much trailer it will pull, but with all other things being equal, why wouldn't you pick the one that did it cheaper?

But no, Nanny Gov wants everybody to eat their fuel mileage spinach, too, and so otherwise-sane people brag about what crappy fuel economy their cars get. Hey, you want to know what wastes gas even faster than a Ford Earthf*cker? Pouring it on the ground and setting it on fire. If Ford released the Earthf*cker Gaia Edition tomorrow, that performed in every way identically to the original except for getting 25% better fuel economy, these people wouldn't buy it because apparently efficiency is effete and for hippies or something.

You see it with everything: People talk about preparedness and "grid down" and stuff like that, and what could be more prepared for grid-down than having a small wind turbine or solar array (or both) to back up your generator? But no, the government wants you to eat your "clean energy" spinach, too, and so that becomes verboten.

When are the nanny staters going to learn that there's a wide swath of the American public who are going to do exactly the opposite of what you tell them, because Americans don't like to be bossed around? The fastest way to encourage Americans to do something is to ban it. The fastest way to get them to stop doing something is to mandate it. We just don't like being told what to do.

And you know what? When the world started treating me like an adult, I found out I liked spinach just fine. As long as nobody was standing over me making me eat the stuff, because you still ain't the boss of me.
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