Ways to make the (first) world a better place

-Recipes that bother with calorie counts should also include the calories burned preparing the dish. Sure, there's a stick of butter in these (purely theoretical) muffins, but smashing it up into bits must do something, right? Also worth including: calories spent hand-washing all relevant materials and cleaning all implicated surfaces. And, the as-yet-unstarted No Dishwasher Cookbook gets one new idea.

-There should be just one currency, at least in the US and EU. I'm sure this would have all kinds of economic (or is it financial?) implications my humanities-and-vacation-addled brain can't get around, but it would at least mean buying discounted CK, DKNY, and other acronymic underwear at Century 21 would not mean getting coughed on and/or trampled by the whole of Western Europe. I've found a kind I like, but am afraid to go back because Hans and Lars and Nicolas are all in the lingerie section accompanying their ladyfriends, who are just as excited as NYC women about cheap socks and bras, but who are only here for one week, and must buy them all at once.

-This one is NYU-specific: The library must find a way to allow you to leave with books you've taken out, without having to show each and every one to the student or guard whose job it is to make sure there's a stamp in each. Other schools seem to have figured this out. Why not NYU? It's all well and good if you've got this one book you took out this one time, and you can go daintily show it to the guard; retrieve it; place it in your ironic hipster mini-purse and go about your day. But if you're a grad student with a backpack full of 'em, you have to take each book out and, because the library's just that well-designed, return them to your bag one by one while standing in the way of the exit, because there's really nowhere else to do this. And all the while, as you're filling up the bag once more (less efficiently than you did in the stacks, because you're rushing because you're being trampled, this time by fellow students rather than European tourists), it occurs to you that you've renewed all your books online five times anyway, so the stamp the guard is allegedly 'checking' provides no relevant information. You could just be walking out with any book from the library, provided it had, at one point or another, been stamped. Can't something just beep if you've taken a book you weren't supposed to? Is there something I'm missing?