New York City nanny mayor, Michael Bloomberg, knows what's best for the citizens of New York. He must - he keeps passing laws to make citizens healthier. He knows what people should and shouldn't eat so he passed a law that salt, that evil, blood pressure raising substance, cannot be on tables in restaurants. "If you don't see it, you won't use it" is his theory.
He passed a law that banned soft drink sales in cups larger than 16 ounces. Everyone knows that drinking a 20 or 32 ounce soda will kill you. OK, not everyone. But Mayor Bloomberg knows it so he banned the large size - well... except for stores like Seven Eleven and Whole Foods. Somehow they were exempt. He made it necessary to go to one of those stores to buy the big one. He told all the other stores, restaurants and hot dog vendors they couldn't sell them. What he didn't do was put a limit on how many 16 ounce sodas one could buy so I'm not sure what he accomplished.
The mayor, always concerned with the health of New Yorkers, banned smoking outdoors in public places such as parks and at the beaches. Apparently second hand smoke is a problem out in the open air.
And speaking of cigarettes, he now has a proposal that would force store owners who sell cigarettes to hide them somewhere rather than display them. Again, he believes "if you can't see them you won't buy them." Mostly what it will do is inconvenience the store clerks.
Gee - I can't imagine why every health conscious person wouldn't move to New York immediately.
But it seems not everyone agrees that Mayor Bloomberg should have the nanny powers he's claiming. In May of this year a New York City Supreme Court judge overturned the mayor's "arbitrary and capricious" ban on large sodas saying there was no basis for banning the sale of the drinks from one retailer but allowing another to sell them. In the decision the judge wrote: “The simple reading of the rule leads to the earlier acknowledged uneven enforcement even within a particular city block, much less the city as a whole. The loopholes in this rule effectively defeat the stated purpose of the rule.”
The mayor, of course, appealed the decision but the Appeals Court upheld the Supreme Court's ruling. The ban on large sodas is sufficiently squashed. Wonder what all those people who were planning to make money from black market sodas will do now?
But the mayor isn't done. Not by a long shot. He has more plans to make New Yorkers even healthier. Gotta love him. He has decided that elevators are bad for you and that you should take the stairs instead - so he wants to make elevators go so slowly that people will choose the stairs over the elevators. Most likely it will make people consistently late for work but the nanny, er... mayor, wants to force people to climb. Wonder how it will effect people who work on the 56th floor of a high rise?
The mayor also wants to ban people from using headphones or earbuds that are turned up too loud. In an effort to save people's hearing, the mayor wants to decide how loud you can have your music.
Yesterday he announced his plans to ban electronic cigarettes because "the perpetuate nicotine addiction." Even though they have helped millions of people quit smoking real cigarettes, he wants to either ban them or regulate them as a tobacco product. They do not contain any tobacco but that's a detail the mayor won't worry about.
Mayor Bloomberg is going to force New Yorkers to get healthy one way or another. If one law gets overturned he'll simply pass another. And his mind is always working on new things to ban. Styrofoam recently became another obsession...
Yup - I think health conscious people should all move to New York. The taxes are a bit high but you won't have to worry about salt, second hand smoke, smokeless e-cigarettes, or the guy next to you listening to his headphones too loud. And you can get a job on the 22nd floor of a building and walk up to it every morning. Just think how much better off you'll be!
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