Here’s another one for anyone with common sense. I already alluded to it in the post. Don’t we need to fix all of those aging bridges? Consider this post by Jared Bernstein on the boring-ness of infrastructure.

So one reason to make public investments is that if we fail to do so, we’ll all be worse off. If our highway system is falling apart — the U.S. Department of Transportation has identified more than 6,000 high-priority, structurally deficient bridges that need to be replaced — if our schools are physically inadequate to the task at hand — in New York City alone, officials have identified $1.7 billion of deferred maintenance projects on 800 city school buildings — we will fail to realize our economic potential, no matter what happens in corporate America.

I had lunch today with a former employer who argued that our energy needs could be met if only we were allowed to drill for oil in wildlife refuges, a solution that he claims McCain promises and Obama rejects. Guess what news station he favors?

Idiocracy is a mediocre execution of a fine idea. There’s no question that far too many people are happy with tiny bits of information that have been pre-chewed and regurgitated into their minds. Give them sound bites, easy-to-remember statistics, and prepackaged opinions, and they’re happy. If you tell them what they want to hear, they have no motivation to look for additional information or check the veracity of what they’re told. People are so used to being sold to, you can sell them almost anything.

Also, in case anyone might think that all this standardized testing is going to help matters, the truth will out very soon. Kids who’ve learned to spit back out what they’ve been told so they can score well on a multiple choice exam are going to be even worse. Critical thinking skills will continue to be eroded, and when these kids are old enough to be called upon to make decisions, they’ll be even more likely to make the ones they’ve been told to make. It’s frightening.

This idea has merit. Consider the fact that America’s wealth is becoming concentrated in the hands of an ever-smaller percentage of the population. This might not be just the result of Republican tax policy; it might also be the result of basic evolutionary statistics. If poor/ignorant people reproduce more rapidly than rich/educated ones, and if there is only very limited redistribution of wealth, then wealth will inevitably become more concentrated with each generation. Over time, a smaller and smaller cadre of rich will need larger and larger security forces to protect them from civil unrest. Prisons will fill, police and military spending will balloon, and the rich will increasingly need to rely on propaganda to delude and confuse the masses. Sound familiar?

Thanks.

The feedback loops between consumers and corporations, voters and government, etc. produce this rather destructive culture of convenience.

Just a simple one: Guess what happens when you build houses on flood planes near rivers? Oh dear, oh dear, our houses are being flooded! How can this be?
BTW, the medieval fortress towns in that area simply dropped in their wooden water barriers + a lot of sand bags and sailed through the problem as they had always done before.