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How long must we wait?

Here are two great ideas I can guarantee won't be taken up by the authorities any time soon.

First, a solution to the labelling of unhealthy foods, which we know to contribute to premature deaths from heart disease and cancer. Forget traffic lights. Why not show the number of cigarettes a food product is equivalent to?

I don't know the facts, obviously. Leave that to a boffin in a research institute. But a cheap, own-brand lasagne, packed full of salt, saturated fat and horse, would be, say, 10 ciggies. A couple of deep-fried Mars bars would be 20. Instantly, we'd see what we were doing to ourselves at a glance.

Here's my other idea, drawing from innovations we've seen online.

You know how when you go on Google Street View now, they show the names of the roads as if they've been painted in large letters by a gang of virtual municipal workers? Why not ACTUALLY paint the names on roads in real life? Then we'd always know where we were.
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  1. James Evans8:31 AM

    "boffin in a research institute". Why does the media continue to treat "scientists" as people somehow distinct from society. Easy, because the media is mostly populated by social scientists who never really got on with the computer scientists, physicists and medics at University and, now they are in charge of the "agenda", are getting their own back. Discuss

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