everyday

A French company, Eiffage, has constructed the world’s tallest bridge, know as the Millau Viaduct. The pictures look absolutely amazing! I wonder how long it will be until someone tries to jump off of it (hopefully with a parachute!).

I often sit and wonder why the world is the way that is. Why we have so many problems that have seemingly simple solutions. Just fix it! It’s easy, right? Unfortunately, at least for me in my corner of the world, we have it too easy. Everything is too cheap. Why would we push for mass transit, cleaner air, high density housing, socialized medicine or good schools when all of those things that we know need major improvements are just good enough to make us accept them as is.

For example, the way to fix the traffic and air pollution problems is to create a viable mass transit system. In order to do this, we need to increase the cost of not having a mass transit system. Fuel for an automobile needs to be $5.00 per gallon, all highways need to be toll roads, the CAFE standards need to be considerably higher and the standards for vehicle emissions need to be more stringent. Doing this would make mass-transit a cheaper alternative to driving, thereby causing people to want it.

The problem with the above scenario is that we, the collective we, will never impose these higher costs upon ourselves. We will wait for external influences to drive these costs higher (oil shortages, elevated smog levels, etc…). Of course, during the course of waiting for these costs to rise on their own, we will have destroyed a number of natural resources and increased costs for associated things, not to mention the unintended consequences that we can’t forsee.

I am completely disgusted with the content of the major nation-wide news outlets. Over the past few days I have seen nothing but sensationalized and over dramatized stories about people that I could care less about. There must be some real “news” out there somewhere that they could be reporting on. I know it isn’t necessarily the news outlet’s fault, they are simply providing a service to the public and this is probably what the public wants, but come on now… Just because some redneck in a trailer park wants to hear about a lady that has lost her mind over a failed relationship, doesn’t mean that he should see it on TV. Why can’t the news outlets take the onus of providing worthwhile, intellectually stimulating content to the masses? I know it is all driven by advertising dollars, but it seems to me that there should be at least a couple of stations that could provide real news. I am sure they could make money from advertising, albeit not from McDonald’s or WalMart. Maybe this is the wave of the future… The target audience will be fragmented, instead of trying to be all things to all people we will see a news station that appeals to the white-collar, luxury car driving crowd as opposed to the blue/gray collar, big-ol-dumb-ass truck driving crowd.