Amid the recent flurry of presidential executive orders, and in the interest of true democracy, I’d like to propose a few executive actions of my own. Feel free to send me some of the ones you’d enact and I can do a follow-up column that includes our reader responses.
I’ll go first.
By the authority vested in me by absolutely no one, it is hereby ordered as follows:
- Robocalls and spam text messages are banned, including those seeking political donations — for anyone. That’s it. End of discussion. (I’ll give my dad credit for this one. He and I don’t agree on much in politics, but we’re fully aligned on this.)
- In the interest of airline comfort and common sense: when the plane has landed and is safely on solid ground, people may unshackle themselves and stand up like the adults we are. Once a plane is taxiing to a gate, it is moving slowly enough to be passed by a stand-up e-scooter. Meanwhile, we have high-speed trains, subways and buses with no seatbelts in sight, and no rules requiring people to remain seated. Hell, we let people dangle off San Francisco cable cars that climb 45-degree hills. But a giant airplane, on the ground, moving at 20 mph, poses such a significant safety threat that rational, reasonably intelligent adults have to remain strapped in and risk being harshly reprimanded — over the loudspeaker — if they have the audacity to unclip their seatbelt and rise to a bent-over crouch to alleviate a leg cramp.
- In addition, all flights 45 minutes or longer will be equipped with free wifi and TV screens on the seat backs.
- Modernize the U.S. Postal Service.
The entire operation is archaic given today’s technology. Why do stamps still exist and why are they not available in vending machines everywhere? Surely we can come up with some sort of prepaid postage account and a bunch of free-standing postal kiosks and package dropboxes all over town. If the USPS must charge by weight, then equip each kiosk with a scale and let me tap a card or use my phone to pay the required postage, drop my package in the repository and move on with my life. Publix trusts me to weigh my own bananas at the self-checkout. Surely the postal service can trust me to set a box or envelope on a metal square. If I don’t pay, my package goes nowhere. Simple. But then again, the air travel industry still finds it necessary to explain the intricacies of a seatbelt before every flight. So perhaps I’m asking a bit much.
I don’t even know how much a stamp costs these days, but I do know that any reasonably intelligent American would be more than willing to pay a whopping $1 to mail a letter if it would fund basic technological upgrades that would seemingly solve nearly all of the postal service’s problems and go a long way toward helping to alleviate its financial problems that are not entirely its fault, but rather a result of ridiculous financial rules put in place by the federal government, which doesn’t even fund the USPS.
- Self-checkout technology is reserved for people smart enough to use it.
- Hotels must have ice machines on every floor.
- Servers and bartenders are hereby required by law to inform a customer when a gratuity has been included in their bill OR print such a notice on the bill. Anything less is fraudulent deception.
