The Fine Print: Produce Urine in a Timely Fashion or We’ll Charge You
Freddie DeBoer writes me:
On my local Indiana news just now: apparently there’s a law around here that if a local government employee can’t produce a urine sample in “an appropriate amount of time,” the city gets fined—$15 for a half hour, $30 for an hour, and $45 for 2 hours. A local municipality just passed an ordinance that passes these fines on to the workers themselves, under the mayor’s theory that they need to watch every dollar and “it’s part of their job to produce urine in a timely fashion.”
So they’re forcing people to pee in cups while they watch and charging them if they can’t do it fast enough.
Luckily, the city backed down; back story is unclear.
Here’s a link to the video of the story, in which the Mayor talks about “shy bladder syndrome” and the financial costs it imposes upon the cash-starved city. You’ve got to watch it.
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4 Comments
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best part is the one dude who said most fo the people who take too long are a positive….smells like redneck libertarians again seeking the freedom to oppress others.
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Bart
How about for each negative, the eager watcher has to drink up the cup?
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The city is cash starved, but not too cash starved to require invasive and useless drug testing. It’s all about priorities folks. Somehow western civilization did just fine for thousands of years without drug testing during which time drug use was even more common than it is today. It’s a waste, of course. But even more, it’s pathetic.
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Not really pertinent to the post, but I do have a question pertinent to the reactionary mind: what character from literature might you identify as the archetype of the thorough-going reactionary? I was thinking of Dostoyevksy’s the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov, but you may know of others that fit the bill.