Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Read the News Dissector this morning
I’m off to the 9th circuit hearings this morning. While I’m away, please just click over to Danny Schecter, who has put together a compendium of articles that I hope everyone will read.
Danny writes about Obama’s inner circle, healthcare reform and the Obama Summit (“not a chance”), Haiti, insurance rate hikes, and more.
Sam Smith’s Undernews is also a good read today. One of my favorite bits is on transit. This snippet is plucked from the middle of an article on high speed rail:
The problem became permanently embedded in my mind after I asked a transportation engineer to identify the best form of mass transit. His immediate answer: "Stop people from moving around so much." So simple, yet so wise and so alien to almost every discussion of the topic you will hear.
If we were really smart, we would be spending far more effort, for example, on redesigning neighborhoods so travel isn't so necessary. What if every urban neighborhood had minibus service to help people get to necessary services? Or a business center with high quality video conference and other equipment so that more people could work at home often?
Scroll down to learn how Obama plans to get rid of the snow in Washington.
A very wise man put it like this:
"..moving around causes loss of time proportional to the amount of energy which is poured into the transport system, so that the speed of the fastest traveler correlates inversely to the equality as well as freedom of the median traveler.."
Those interested in such notions might want to check out Ivan Illich's essay, Energy and Equity: http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/energyEquity/
: February 10, 2010 at 2:48:00 PM HST << Home
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