More on recycling

Last year, the  Freakonomics guys were on Marketplace to talk about a phenomenon called conspicuous conservation. Basically, it means keeping up with the Jones by showing off the great ways that you are kind to the environment, leave no footprints, and all that. Good on you if you do that.

Sometimes, they're called Super Greenies. They're wealthy, drive Prii, and use rechargeable batteries in their whatevers.

Fine. Good. But there's a limit for all of us. Amazon showed me that limit.

Page left blank

I thought that we were done with this.

For years, in technical manuals, we'd left a blank to make the pagination work out properly. Standards and conventions dictated that the first page of a chapter or section should be on a right-read page (recto). If the previous chapter ended on a right page, we'd need a filler.

Somewhere along the line, people got worried that someone would think that something had been left out of the manual. To make sure that we dealt with that hypothetical catastrophe, we started putting "This page intentionally left blank." on blank pages that were, thus, no longer blank.

Fast forward a couple of decades. Few people care that technical manuals have chapters starting on a right-read page.  We're also more conscious of dead trees.

I was wrong. Google Ngram, which scans books for occurrences of pa phrase or keywords, shows that we've been increasing our usage of this tree-killing practice.

So, I guess I should be surprised to find that UBS sent us a four-page Form 1099 with printing one side and this on the back: