Receipt Inflation

So, for breakfast I had a cup of yogurt. Fifty cents at Safeway. Such a deal! Statistically, it would cost me less than four bucks a day to maintain my necessary caloric intake. And then, I get the receipt.

It's fifteen inches long. I measured.

I look it over, and more than half of the receipt is a list of the "customer loyalty program" indicia for my affinity card: how many Starbucks drinks I've bought in the past year (1), how many deli sandwiches (6), and how many greeting cards (0). A customer service phone number. An offer for a fuel discount if I use their gas pumps (which this store doesn't have). An offer to cash my military service checks.

It's ridiculous. I don't even look at it that closely. I just want to know that everything I bought is on the receipt and nothing else. It's a transaction record; I don't appreciate it being a billboard for selling more.

And my tax dollars paid for your education?

Well, in my commentary about Anthony Flew, some anonymous coward chose to challenge my naturalistic world view with the following unarguable points:

How does a clown fish acquire an immunity to the poison of a sea anemone through evolution? How many clown fish die before this mechanism magically appears in a new-born clown fish?

Shouldn't there be billions of "missing links"?

Let's deal with these backwards: first of all, there are billions of "missing links." I think AC is looking for the phrase "transitional form," of which there are also billions: take a look around you. Every single one of your fellow human beings is a transitional form from the kind of people we were to the kind of people we will be. It is hubris and human short-sightedness to believe that this generation is some kind of Platonic ideal of what is "humanity". At some point, the thinking, talking, sentient occupants of this planet will be genetically incapable of interbreeding with representatives of this generation-- but then, this generation will be no more, so the whole issue is somewhat irrelevant.

It's asking too much of science to document every transitional form. This is a common creationist dodge, and is as dishonest as claiming that because one cannot find every brass button on every coat of every soldier who attended, then the Battle of Gettysburgh cannot be proven to have happened.

Secondly, the clownfish acquired its immunity to the sea anemone the same way you acquired your immunity to penicillin and nicotine, both of which are fatal to a number of other mammals: through the slow passage of time. The proto-clownfish and the proto-anemone evolved together, and as the anemone developed more powerful defenses, the clownfish developed a correspondent immunity. And here's the answer to your silliest question: ALL of the clownfish that couldn't adapt died. All of them.

Neal Stephenson put it brilliantly this way:

In some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. Like every other creature on the face of the earth, you are, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that you can trace your ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo--which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.