Our Daily Bleg: Help Honest Michiganders Get Their Camping Fix

A reader named Gregory Riffe wants the Freakonomics blog readership to help solve a dilemma:

I live in Michigan and like many other Michiganders, I like to go camping in the state parks in the summer. This is such a popular pastime that weekend campsite reservations are in high demand, which has led to people gaming the system to get weekend campsite reservations at the expense of overall utilization of the campgrounds. I was wondering if you could suggest a system whereby the awarding of campsite reservations in Michigan state parks could be more equitably distributed and increase the total utilization of the campgrounds.

The state's Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has provided a nice online reservation system that allows people to make reservations for campsites up to six months in advance of your arrival date. So for instance, if one wants to camp on the Friday and Saturday of July 16-17, one can make a reservation on January 16 for the two days. The maximum number of days a campsite can be reserved is 15.

Experienced users will game the system by booking 10-15 days at a time to get a weekend, then canceling all the days but the weekend they want. For example: I want to camp on Thursday through Saturday, July 15-17. The earliest I can book just the weekend is January 15 (6 months in advance of the arrival date). However, on January 3, I can book 15 days (July 3-17). I can then cancel the days leading up to July 15 and keep the three weekend days. Anyone who wants to book just the weekend will find very few openings because they will already be taken by people making long reservations and canceling the portions they never intend to use.

This prevents anyone else from reserving a campsite that will ultimately be empty until the gamer decides to cancel the portion that they have no intention of using. It also penalizes everyone who has not learned to game the system by denying them any chance at weekend reservations. The DNR has instituted a penalty for canceling reservations, but the penalty for canceling is just $18 and the cost of a day

When Should You Go For the Extended Warranty?

Daniel Hamermesh

You shouldn

LED Astray

Technological innovation has cut many of the trickiest environmental Gordian knots. As readers of SuperFreakonomics know, at the end of the 19th century the American city was tottering on the brink of environmental catastrophe. The cause: byproducts of transportation, specifically the horse-drawn variety (more here). Manure, flies, accidents and disease abounded, until the timely arrival of a technology which at the time was hailed as an environmental savior -- the internal combustion automobile.

Of course, those who celebrated did not fully realize that the miracle technology would bring troublesome consequences of its own. Today we face the specter of global warming, to which the automobile is an important contributor.

Just like our ancestors in the fin-de-siecle city, we are using new technology to fight the shortcomings of the old. And unsurprisingly, like our ancestors, we are bound to find that our technological fixes can have unintended, malign consequences of their own.

Consider the seemingly noncontroversial replacement of conventional traffic signals with LED bulbs. What

Engineers Among the Terrorists

A study by sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog reveals that engineers are "three times more likely to become violent terrorists than their peers in finance, medicine, or the sciences," as reported in Slate. So why the career change? Among the sociologists' hypotheses: Lack of jobs for engineers in Arab countries and "a particular mind-set among engineers that disdains ambiguity and compromise."