h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

LOL

I will have to agree with that.

Mostly

The unclogable toilet

A remote zapper to fix the overbased stereos in the cars of people who park outside your house & drown out your television/hifi even though you're at the back of the house and make you close the windows & suffocate so that you can think!!

Slightly agrieved Granny!

How about a machine/engine/power plant that is run entirely on sleep. the people who worked at this plant would have nothing to do but sleep, and be paid for it! you would have to sleep at least 8 hours a day, sleep and work would be the same thing, thus leaving you a ton of time to yourself. After you'd gotten off of work, all you would have to do is make yourself tired during the day, doing what you want instead of staring at a cube wall...

Let me know when you have invented that so that I can apply for a job

Granny,

Buy yourself a very loud home stereo system and some hearing protection. The next time someone parks outside your home with over based stereo in their car move your speakers to the windows and crank your favorite music up as loud as it will go until they turn their stereo down.

Peace through superior firepower.


Mostly

And you would get paid overtime for taking naps.

ahhhhh! time and half for the afternoon doze... so sweet...

Mostly, I don't need that, Grandad's a guitarist & has a lot of very powerful equipment set up in a bedroom at the front of the house. I can play the riffs to 'Smoke on the Water', 'Paranoid', 'Enter Sandman' and other little lullabies but I would like to keep the glass in the windows & the neighbours friendly, even those three streets away!!!!

Does anyone happen to know what frequency those large, cheap in-car bass speakers will blow at?

It wouldn't be frequency, it would be amperage.

So now you want to kill stupid people, sounds like eugenics to me.

Not kill them
Just don't let them breed

That´s not much better actually.

what would be the differnce? poor stupid folks would still end up a dying breed either way.... (yeah, pun intended, thats right)

how about a bathtub that is long enough to comfortably stretch out in? they are always so short that you have to kind of scrunch up to be in it at all, and can't really lie down. just a few extra feet would make such a difference..

Mostly wrote:
"A machine that prevents people with an IQ below 100 from breeding."

When I first read this post, I assumed it was in jest. Looking back at the lack of smileys or such, and at the follow-up posts, I'm led to believe that it was actually serious.

If that's the case, this is easily the most offensive posting I've ever seen on h2g2. Let me remind you that 50% of the world (by definition) has an IQ of less than 100, and that many of those people are here on h2g2. There is absolutely no evidence that IQ score has anything to do with the ability to be a nice person, or even to be a good parent.

While I have nothing against an objective, balanced debate about eugenics, I think this comment was inappropriate in a high-traffic forum frequented by newbies.


Mikey

that's true, but i've often thought it would be a good idea for there to be a parenting test to have to pass-- i think it would be what-would-you-do-if...? questions-- just simple things like basic first aid. and if they don't pass, then they should have to take a class or two and retake the test. after all, sometimes it's required for babysitting, and parenting would just be that several magnitudes more difficult, not paid, and all the time. and you can never say, "wait till your parents get home and you can ask them." also maybe if it were a little more hassle for people to become parents in the first place, and if they understood what it entailed better, maybe they wouldn't just decide to have a kid so they could have a little version of themselves.

of course, that would be almost impossible to enforce.
back to the topic- how about a *completely effective* method of birth control, where you would not have to buy anything and could just *decide* that it would work. like how some people have enough control of their bodies to be able to control their temperature, pulse, sleep whenever they want, etc. like that. something that could work for anyone.

I was very close to yikesing that post (16). I'd got the window up, typed in my complaint, and was just about to hit the submit complaint button before I reconsidered.

I reconsidered because I thought it might possibly be particularly dry humour - or it might be the considered viewpoint of someone who is in favour of eugenics. Alternatively, it might be pure discrimination against the bottom 50% of people in a test of somewhat dubious validity measuring a very small part of the range of human abilities. One doesn't know.

So, Mostly - which of the three options best represents your position, if any? And if you are genuinely in favour of eugenics, perhaps you would care to explain this in a little detail, rather than making a few throwaway one-line posts?

-Xanthia

I also considered Yikesing, but decided that would be the kind of thing that could be used as proof that we, as a community, need moderation. I figured it would be better if we could just deal with it ourselves.

Even if it was supposed to be humor, I think it was inappropriate the way it was phrased. I don't think it would have been funny regardless, but at least if there had been a or or somesuch, I would have known that the author wasn't talking seriously.

Mikey