A reader sent me this Calvin and Hobbes comic strip (from August 17, 1989), with the subject line "Calvin predicts the peck."
Calvin's original plan is to charge people to drink his "curative elixir," but in the end he decides to call it a "debilitating disease drink" and charge people not to drink it. The joke relies on the commonsense understanding that people are willing to pay to get something good, but that anything they're willing to pay not to get must be bad.
The 2020s, however, are stranger than fiction. We are told that the birdemic peck is totally safe, offers protection against a deadly disease that cannot be treated in any other way, and is obviously in everyone's own self-interest to get -- and that people need to be bribed with donuts and joints and lottery tickets to get it, and penalized if they don't. The message is, essentially, "Calvin's curative elixir: $1.00 not to have any."
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