Watch out for this sort of thing
I spotted this sign just south of downtown, St. Louis, Missouri. I suspect that the railroad was getting too many frantic calls about "runaway locomotives":
Cost of our new high-speed trains is dwarfed by the tax dollars we waste in our Afghanistan and Iraq “wars.”
President Obama has recently announced that he will allocate $8 billion ($4 billion each year, over two years) to develop a new system of high-speed passenger rail service. This is an excellent idea. The new rail lines will be created within 10 geographical corridors ranging from 100 to 600 miles long.
Note, however, that the high-speed rail line system will be an extremely expensive project, and that the $8 billion bill will need to be paid by 138 million tax-paying Americans. Dividing the $8 billion cost by the number of taxpayers, we can see that, on average, each taxpayer will pay almost $60 ($30 per year, for two years) to support this massive new high-speed rail service.
Again, this high-speed rail project will cost an immense amount of money. Consider, though, how small this pile of rail money looks when compared to the amount of money we are wasting in the "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan. For 2009, the United States spent approximately $87 billion for Iraq and $47 billion for Afghanistan. The fiscal 2010 budget requests $65 billion for Afghanistan operations and $61 billion for Iraq. the cost of these two "wars" together is $126 billion for 2010.
Compare these expenditures on a bar chart:
Founder of Whole Earth Catalog gives us an update
Stewart Brand was the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. He's been doing a lot of thinking over the years, and gave an update at TED. He discussed the 1 Billion people living in squatter cities, soon to be 2 billion. There's a lot of desperation and a lot of crime, but it's not all bad news. There is a scale of efficiency about these cities. Talk about compactness! Go to the 6 minute mark of this video within a video and watch what happens immediately after the train goes by. Brand suggests that coming to the city gives people hope that they will be better off financially, which inexorably brings down the birth rate. He has nothing good to say about coal--it is the cause of the climate change we see. He has nothing bad to say about nuclear power; it is a "green" fuel. According to Brand, we can't get rid of coal fast enough. We are going to be facing massive climate change, faster than we can imagine. This will cause many millions of "climate refugees" and ongoing "resource wars" such as the one in Darfur.
Tornado versus freight train
This video will give you a good idea of the power of tornadoes.
The luckiest unlucky guy alive
He lives in Turkey and here's what happened to him. I've watched this video 8 times and I still wonder how in the world he is alive, after surviving this truck-train accident. He threaded the needle.