Proving that stupidity in government sneers at national and geographic bounds

[unixronin]

In a move planned to show its solidarity with other government bodies in findign time to fiddle while Rome burns, the EU has approved new regulations that will prohibit selling eggs by the dozen.

The new rules will mean that instead of packaging telling shoppers a box contains six eggs, it will show the weight in grams of the eggs inside, for example 372g.

[...]  The rules will not allow both the weight and the quantity to be displayed.

So you can't even mark the package "One half dozen large eggs, net weight 372g."  And I suppose the next refinement will require every carton of eggs to be individually weighed and marked with its actual weight, because, you know, you can't put 12.07 eggs in a package to make the weight come out to a nice round consistent number every time.  UK food industry experts described the new EU ruling as "bonkers" and "absolute madness", and it's hard to disagree.  There are products, like eggs, car tires etc, that it simply makes no sense to sell by weight.  Can you imagine walking into your local tire store and asking for 112kg of tires, or going to the bicycle store for 92g of replacement spokes?

Crises come and crises go, the world economy melts down, the Eurozone is facing potential collapse as bankrupt member-nation economies implode, Shari'a law is metastasizing into European nations, but never let it be said that the EU Parliament is too busy to find the time for stupid, pointless crap like saying that you can't sell a dozen eggs as a dozen eggs any more.

Comments

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

In other news, Brussels has today announced the formation of a working committee to replace the antiquated and cumbersome definitions of pi and e with more user-friendly metric definitions.

At a press conference, spokesmen announced that the member states had established the committee as a rational compromise between reactionary elements which had opposed the measure and a progressive coalition proposal that had originally included c and the masses of the various quantum particles.

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

A spokesman for the United Nations released the following statement: "There is a clear consensus among respectable physicists and mathematicians that the EU proposal on constant harmonization is vital to world peace and economic progress. We would urge peoples of the world to avoid falling prey to the flawed arguments of kooks and quacks whose alarmist arguments are held by a clear consensus to be seriously scientifically and mathematically flawed and should not be allowed to get in the way of the treaty process to address this emergency with proper international law."

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

I think the Alabama legislature already tried that, in an attempt to make pi equal to three.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That's an urban legend: http://www.snopes.com/religion/pi.asp

Ironically, the Alabama myth is based in fact, though there's no evidence the person who started the Alabama myth was aware of it. The original is the Indiana House Bill #246, of 1897 (http://sites.csn.edu/jmatovina/indiana_pi.htm). It was written by a crank who managed to get his representative to present it in the House, where it passed 67-0 (apparently because no House representative actually understood it). It then died in the Senate after it came to the attention of a math professor from Purdue who happened to be present, who proceeded to explain to the Indiana Senate that it was complete nonsense.

My favorite detail of the whole affair is that when a representative offered to introduce Professor Waldo to the bill's originator, one Dr. Goodson, Prof. Waldo declined on the grounds that he was already acquainted with as many crazy people as he wished to know.