«Penn Says: The Free Market»

Penn Says: Viewer Mail - The Free Market


Yeah, in a Utopian world maybe... In the real world corporations will do anything to cut manufacturing costs, even at the expense of their customers' health. Then bribe the private "consumer reports" companies. The problem with private consumer reports is that all they can do is report; they can't enforce.

Without some government oversight there will come to rise a single company as a monopoly of a particular product or service, able to force/buy out competitors. There will not be any alternatives, so customers will have to make due with whatever quality of product is available.

I'd like to call myself a Libertarian, too. But I'm also a realist that knows we don't live in a Utopia, and never will.

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«Juan Enriquez: Homo Evolvus»

Something to think about.

Juan Enriquez: Tech evolution will eclipse the financial crisis


He has a damn good point. I'm not sure that it will happen quite as soon as he says. I'd imagine that as Homo Evolvus comes closer to a reality there will be a bit of legal red tape that gets in the way of the research. However, I do believe it will come. Humanity will get swept along with the

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«The Bridge to Nowhere»

I said earlier in my Gravina Island image post that I'd talk about the Gravina Island access bridge.

I'm sure some of you have heard about the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" proposed to be built in Ketchikan, Alaska. Nearly as long as the Golden Gate Bridge and taller than the Brooklyn Bridge. It made national, even global news. It was called a prime example of run-away pork-barrel spending on pet projects. The project was shut down after an outcry from the mis-informed public. They ridiculed it as being a "bridge from mainland Alaska to an island with a population of 50". That statement alone shows they are completely ignorant of the issue.

Let me (being a local resident of Ketchikan) correct a few facts for the "Bridge to Nowhere".

Technically, it would be 2 bridges, using Pennock Island as a stepping stone. The bridge does not have anything to do with mainland Alaska, I don't know where that even came from. It has nothing to do with the 50 residents of Gravina Island, and everything to do with the airport that's located on that island. It's to connect the 14,000 people of Revillagigedo Island (8,000 within the city limits of Ketchikan, but 14,000 in the Ketchikan Gateway Borough) to the Ketchikan International Airport, located on Gravina Island. Ketchikan is the only city in Alaska without road access to its airport, and the federal government promised 30 years ago that we'd get a bridge.

Both Pennock Island and Gravina Island would have been opened up for development and recreation. There's a significant amount of flat land over there (a rare commodity in Ketchikan, nearly the entire town is built on the side of a mountain). Had the bridge been built, the "Bridge to Nowhere" would become a bridge to somewhere pretty quick due to development and expansion.

Ketchikan has a thriving tourism industry. Setting aside for the moment an impressive bridge would attract more tourists, around 850,000 people already come and go by cruise ship each year. The bridge must be tall enough for cruise ships to pass under; hence, why it has to be so tall.

A significant number of people come and go through the Ketchikan International Airport as well. In total for the year 2007, there were 222,249 passengers that used the airport. 406,664 people and 107,609 vehicles used the current airport ferry system in place to get to and from the airport (source). It's that near half million in traffic volume per year the bridge would have been built for. Instead, we have to pay ferry tolls to get there. $5.00 per person (round-trip if in the same day), and $6.00 per car (one way, not including driver or passengers). No-one else has to pay to get to their airport. Also, a bridge would make it faster and easier for emergency vehicles to get to the airport, if something were to happen.

So what happened instead? The State of Alaska still got the federal funds, but with the earmarks for the bridge removed. So our governor, Sarah Palin, vetoed the bridge. However, they forgot to remove the earmarks for the $25 million road over on Gravina Island that was to connect to the bridge. The road is under construction now. It's a true "Road to Nowhere", complete with a tunnel under the runway (as you can see in the pictures I took). All we're going to get is a useless dead-end road and a new ferry. The least they could have did is subsidize the cost of the ferry so we wouldn't have to pay to access our own airport.

The rest of the funding got siphoned off to other projects for Anchorage; it didn't even stay in Southeast Alaska. Meanwhile, our roads are quickly deteriorating and Sarah Palin vetoed the money that's needed to fix them. She really has it out for Southeast Alaska for some reason. But that's going off on a tangent with a different issue.

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«An Easy Solution to the Oil Dependency»

Environmentalists always find a problem with every source of energy. Now they're complaining about biofules. I never did think biofules were all that good. It's not the most efficient process of extracting it and I feel it's the wrong direction for our fuel. It's still a pollution causing form of energy and it is driving up the cost of corn. There's all sorts of foods that have corn products in them, and we don't need our food to cost more.

I favor types of natural, renewable energy. Take hydroelectric for example. That's a wonderful source of energy. Or wind turbines, that's another great one. Solar panels should be on the roof of every house in sunny areas such as California, Nevada, and Arizona. Geothermal is a good source of energy. Even tidal and wave action can be harnessed. The technology is all there to have all the electricity we need, and then some, without burning oil. Once you have a surplus of electricity, it's no big deal to use some of that to get hydrogen from methane gas or even water. Then we can use hydrogen in our cars, trucks, and even trains. Suddenly, our dependence on oil is gone.

It would also help the economy. Not only would it stop US dollars from going overseas for oil, but it would create a ton of jobs in the US to build and maintain the various power plants. It would dramatically lower the cost of electricity, reducing the cost of manufacturing (not the mention the common household's power bill). Producing hydrogen with the excess electricity would reduce shipping and transportation costs. All of this would cause a surge in the economy. The cost of building and maintaining would quickly be paid for by what would otherwise be spent on oil.

Measures can be taken to make sure the fish can get around the hydroelectric dams. That's one of the things environmentalists complain about. Some of their other complaints get kinda stupid, like the wind turbines injuring birds. The large wind turbines don't move that fast anyway.

Trains should be used everywhere. They are far better and more fuel efficient for long distance freight than individual trucks. The trucks can haul the few miles from the train station to individual factories and stores. That would also keep a good deal of the trucks off the highways and ease traffic. Not to mention prevent the ruts they cause in the pavement.

Oh, speaking of environmentalists, you know those nature documentaries they have on TV? They always seem to show a nuclear power plant when they're talking about pollution. Nuclear power plants are absolutely clean. That's only steam coming from the cooling towers, not smoke!

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«Realm of Marf»

I doubt anyone would even notice the similarities (color scheme especially) of this blog and Realm of Marf. In fact, unless you know me personally you've probably never even heard of that website. Realm of Marf was a little project I did to teach myself HTML. The GooglePages servers are too limiting to do what I wanted for a website. So as much as I didn't want to admit it, it turned into a blog. One that required a lot of manual coding for each entry, and I'm just too lazy to do that on a regular schedule.

I suppose my ultimate goal for a website would be similar to the Alien Adoption Agency (A3 for short), a text-based role playing game. I play A3. My alien name is Marf, game ID 96151. If I ever were to make a similar game, I'd have NPC battling as well as PvP. And I wouldn't do an alien theme. A game like that requires server-side scripting and databases, none of which GooglePages supports.

The stock market didn't crash as hard as I expected it to today. World stock markets plummeted on January 21, from Canada to Australia to India to Europe to China. Here's a Wikipedia article on the issue. I've never been one to watch the stock market all that closely; I don't own any stocks. I'm definitely not a risk taker.

Do you believe there's some people saying the Scientology website is getting more traffic lately, saying it like it's a good thing for Scientology? It has more traffic because it's being DDoS attacked by Anonymous. See the Project Chanology website for their plan of attack (Note: I personally have no affiliation with this site, nor does this blog).

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