I think a closer corollary would be euthanasia.

oh, that's even better.

And now I have to go to four hours of meeting. At least there's food.

Your coworkers do not count as food. Unless there's ketchup.

Concept toaster.

Toasts between two pieces of heated glass so you can see when your toast is done. Brilliant!

Co-workers can be a good source for food--I just got a mini-Nestle bar from just down the aisle. First thing I've eaten since last night; I've got to finish unpacking the kitchen stuff tonight so I can make up some tuna casserole for dinner and lunch for the next few days.

Whiny first-world sulk:

Yesterday morning I brought Monday night's fancy-dinner-out leftovers for lunch (potato gnocchi in a possibly vodka-spiked cream marinara sauce with spinach and mushrooms), and then there was unexpected free food at lunch, so I left the leftovers for today. Now they're gone. The fridge presently contains food dating back from last November, so thrown-out is unlikely. Someone just stole my tasty leftovers! Stole them! Out of the department chair's office!

Also, the cafeteria is really smelly today and all the lines will be really really long until well past 1:00, so now I'm screwed. Well, I have an apple, so I'm not totally screwed. But an apple is thin consolation when one was expecting potato gnocchi in vodka cream marinara sauce.

If I find out which cow-orker poached from me (I suppose I can just wander the hallways looking for someone in a blissed-out food stupor), I'm eating the poacher. With or without ketchup. I'm not fussy.

Kathy, if I Paypal you some money, would you promise to eat something healthy?

If I find out which cow-orker poached from me

Welcome to my world, yo.

Kathy, if I Paypal you some money, would you promise to eat something healthy?

I'm picking up bread (for tuna fish sandwiches) and milk on the way home, and am venturing into my frozen veggie/fruit stash for my vitamins, so healthy is not a problem--just finding the pots to cook them in is! Unpacking is such a pain...

Also, Dad doesn't know it yet, but I'm going to see if he'd like to join me in a grocery store trip on Saturday, perhaps accompanied by a visit to the local gas station.

Perkins around?

Well, it's not like butanol or E85 is going to be cheap per gallon. There should be plenty of market incentive to make more efficient vehicles.

Here is the weird thing. (I documented it somewhat it the article, but I've got more extensive evidence in the book.) Market incentives don't seem to work well for efficiency. If you have higher prices, cars get more efficient, but not that much more efficient. An example from the article regarding natural gas/electricity is that most attics in the U.S. are underinsulated - in the sense that you could increase insulation in most of them and get a four year payback (even given prices back in the 90's.) You certainly expect in a well-functioning market that most homeowners would do this. Even for renters - you would expect landlords to insulate then charge slightly higher rents because of the value of lowered heating/cooling consumption. (Where landlords provide heating/cooling and include it in rent, you can think of even more incentives for them to make the investment.)

I can think of a lot reasons this doesn't happen and I'll bet you can as well - but it is an example market incentives not working well in this area; people don't respond well to the incentives we already have. We would be a lot better off today if CAFE regulations had not been stalled under Reagan, and never recovered.