The old-world media love to beat this stuff up:
Last year three of the highest speeds recorded on Queensland roads occurred on the M1, including two at Stapylton of 243km/h and 237km/h and one at Helensvale, of 235km/h.
Let me guess, they were probably young males in one of (a) turbocharged grey market Nissan Skylines; (b) another brand of after-market hotted up Japanese car or (c) high-end US-style V8 sedans (what some of us imagine to be “Aussie” cars, simply because we build or assemble some part of them here). But they could just have easily have been white-shoed cardigan wearers in their Maseratis, Ferraris or Astons. Except they aren’t as news-worthy, unless of course they are a “celebrity” or a politician responsible for road safety.
Of course it goes without saying that the police are “exasperated“. And naturally it’s downplayed as just lucky that there have been “no fatal crashes on the motorway so far this year.
We can all draw the pictures in our minds, of these criminally insane law-breakers tearing around at stupidly excessive speed, but truth be told every motorist exceeds the posted speed limit at some point in their driving lives. Perhaps not by these speeds, but certainly by non-trivial amounts. Perhaps you choose to do it, I don’t know. But whereas here in this article we are looking at just 3 incidences of clearly deliberate and excessive speeding on one motorway, the majority of otherwise law-abiding “speeders” are equally deliberately going 10, 20 or 30 kilometres an hour over the limit, usually on potholed suburban streets littered with intersections, driveways, cyclists and pedestrians to boot. Now whilst we can easily say that “if they crash (at these extreme speeds), they’ll likely die – police” we can also quite justifiably say that far more people are taking equally life-threatening risks on a daily basis. Sometimes they do it deliberately, sometimes by carelessness or ignorance. But tell me, why focus on the extreme “hoons” when the greater risk is all around us?
Why indeed do we make, sell or modify road-registerable cars that can easily double the speed limit? And why do we spend so much money replacing narrow, curvy roads with straighter, safer and faster multi-lane motorways? If we seriously wanted to reduce speeding we’d govern cars and restrict traffic flow (ok, we do that now – they are called traffic jams). Fact is, humans like to get places faster, not slower, and they enjoy some degree of personal risk-taking; indeed some of our community simply enjoy living closer to the edge.
None of which is particularly helpful in reducing death or injury on our roads, or saving us from our wasteful, unsustainable selves. But it does give us something to read in the press.
The old-world media love to beat this stuff up:
Last year three of the highest speeds recorded on Queensland roads occurred on the M1, including two at Stapylton of 243km/h and 237km/h and one at Helensvale, of 235km/h.
Let me guess, they were probably young males in one of (a) turbocharged grey market Nissan Skylines; (b) another brand of after-market hotted up Japanese car or (c) high-end US-style V8 sedans (what some of us imagine to be “Aussie” cars, simply because we build or assemble some part of them here). But they could just have easily have been white-shoed cardigan wearers in their Maseratis, Ferraris or Astons. Except they aren’t as news-worthy, unless of course they are a “celebrity” or a politician responsible for road safety.
Of course it goes without saying that the police are “exasperated“. And naturally it’s downplayed as just lucky that there have been “no fatal crashes on the motorway so far this year.
We can all draw the pictures in our minds, of these criminally insane law-breakers tearing around at stupidly excessive speed, but truth be told every motorist exceeds the posted speed limit at some point in their driving lives. Perhaps not by these speeds, but certainly by non-trivial amounts. Perhaps you choose to do it, I don’t know. But whereas here in this article we are looking at just 3 incidences of clearly deliberate and excessive speeding on one motorway, the majority of otherwise law-abiding “speeders” are equally deliberately going 10, 20 or 30 kilometres an hour over the limit, usually on potholed suburban streets littered with intersections, driveways, cyclists and pedestrians to boot. Now whilst we can easily say that “if they crash (at these extreme speeds), they’ll likely die – police” we can also quite justifiably say that far more people are taking equally life-threatening risks on a daily basis. Sometimes they do it deliberately, sometimes by carelessness or ignorance. But tell me, why focus on the extreme “hoons” when the greater risk is all around us?
Why indeed do we make, sell or modify road-registerable cars that can easily double the speed limit? And why do we spend so much money replacing narrow, curvy roads with straighter, safer and faster multi-lane motorways? If we seriously wanted to reduce speeding we’d govern cars and restrict traffic flow (ok, we do that now – they are called traffic jams). Fact is, humans like to get places faster, not slower, and they enjoy some degree of personal risk-taking; indeed some of our community simply enjoy living closer to the edge.
None of which is particularly helpful in reducing death or injury on our roads, or saving us from our wasteful, unsustainable selves. But it does give us something to read in the press.
Here’s a big call from “Carsguide”: To quote Friedman; “somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar.”
Interesting that what they seem to be saying is that a lack of top-level ‘visible’ leadership, rather than a lack of researched, developed, targeted, marketed and timely product, is root cause here. I’m pretty sure that a passionate, charismatic leader may well have still chosen to build too many of the wrong product, especially so if they were a long-term ‘car-guy’ (of either sex) and a bit blinded by their own wants or dreams.
In fact there are many, many successful companies in the US and elsewhere, with effective leadership at all levels, not just at the top. They may not garner much publicity and they may not be very charismatic – but they do get results. Is it important that they be charismatic like Jobs, or for that matter like Obama, or even – going to extremes – Hitler or Mussolini? There’s a danger here that a so-called ‘great leader’ will in fact take us where we shouldn’t actually want to go.
As for Jobs being the master of innovation and success, he’s been in and out of Apple, come back as the messiah and in many senses lucked into marketing a true game-changer at the right time – because Apple was almost as close to the edge as GM is now. He made sure Apple’s MP3 player was slick, and priced it correctly. He made it look and feel better than the competition, and marketed it brilliantly. What has come since is a series of slick updates and a sideways move into hyped-up cell phones. Whilst they have technically excellent product, they remain a packaging and marketing company with a deft spin on look and feel. Is that what a car company needs to survive? Maybe. Or maybe they just need to step back, look at where we are headed with global warming, peak oil and so on and just take a big, brave bet on something very different.
Rather than simply re-working what we’ve had since the turn of last century.
And a willingness to blame everyone bar ourselves.
Well that’s my take on the global financial melt-down. And climate change. And just about everything. Phew.
So how can it be that huge financial institutions crumble and fall? Well you can take a philosophical stance and say it’s part of the ‘natural’ cycle of things, that it will fall and rise over time and we have just hit a big, bad fall. Sure, it will correct itself, but if we leave it to the pure market folk it’ll fall further and harder and may take a long, long time to recover. So be it? I think not. We need to intervene now and soften the blow. We don’t sacrifice people’s lives to our monetary theories any more.
So it is that we should have intervened earlier, when we could sense something was amiss. Greed was afoot. If we go back to the immediate post-War period, say 1950 or so, we embarked on a voyage of rebuilding. Great strides were made to make peace, build strong, uncorrupted institutions and create wealth. However these new – and positive – political and social connections between nations and the advent of faster transport options meant that we began to link peace, wealth and freedom with travel, consumption and freedom. It used to be that freedom meant freedom to move about, or to speak our minds. Gradually we allowed it to mean freedom to buy a car, an airline ticket or anything we wanted, irrespective of the hidden costs of doing so. It became an expectation that everyone should have everything. What got left behind was reality.
One of these unrealities was linking income streams with a global commodity market. So popular musicians could leverage high selling albums and singles to generate inordinately large incomes. The record companies siphoned off even more of this income, as did everyone else involved, depending upon their individual bargaining “power”. Big deals, big payouts. Fat cheques to artists, fatter cheques to executives. It was so good an idea that it spread. Every CEO wanted in on it. Sports stars. Even bankers. As we globalised, commoditised and held out for better offers we bumped up the cost of everything we desired as surely as we sucked in the cash. Big cars. Big houses full of big TV screens. And big loans as we borrowed to make up the difference.
We knew one day it would catch up with us; but the huge CEO salaries, the multi-millionaire entertainers and sports stars, the mega-rich media moguls and the wannabe financial traders kept on keepin’ on. And we all supped on our lines of credit, if we had one. And now it’s pay-back time.
We knew it was wrong. It will still be wrong when we climb out of this hole and forget about it all again. It’s just a cycle, after all.
Filed under Society, TV by Rob.
Filed under Society, TV by Rob.
Let me ramble for a while. It’s been Easter these past few days, a Christian holiday apparently usurping a Pagan fertility tradition, celebrated by the mass eating of chocolate rabbits and eggs. Now I can understand why it was so hard to decide upon fixed dates for events that happened (or possibly happened) 2,000 years ago, for which there were few records that actually make any sense, but why settle on this strange pagan equinoctial timing thing? First Sunday (a day named after Sun-worship after all) after the first Full Moon (surely worshipping the Moon) after the northern hemisphere’s Vernal Equinox, a date everyone celebrated anyway because it heralds the good times we know as spring. OK, so it was effective marketing, and I have no qualms about supporting religions that preach social orderliness, compassion and peace. But I do find it hard to accept these somewhat arbitrary and cynical celebration dates. Christmas is similarly blighted by Christian church pragmatism. And both Easter and Christmas are noteworthy for excess – as in excessive spending on food and presents. It’s not a good look when we Westerners go on a consumption binge to celebrate a man, or an idea, or a prophet who fairly clearly preached the opposite to what we are actually doing. I guess this is what happens when humans get control over spiritual things. They get carried away with the smoke and mirrors, the colour and the movement.
Whilst I have no special affiliation with any particular organised religion and will happily consider any belief, I do especially enjoy researching the history of these things, trying to work out why particular messages are presented in these somewhat arcane ways. And I enjoy the search for truth and explanation that’s inherent in all religions or faiths, from Buddhism to Zoroastrianism. And good luck to anyone who has found that trust and belief in any one faith.
A lot is happening out there in techno-land, but it’s mostly hidden from view. We see the shiny new gadgets, we wonder what’s next. Well we can imagine what’s next by looking at what’s out there now and extrapolating. We can also factor in the alternatives plus all possible eventualities to arrive at a probability analysis of “the future”. Let’s do all that in one quick blog post, eh?
- We have ever-smaller, ever-more-powerful gadgets (think cell phone and PDA)
- We have more types of gadget than ever before (think cell phone, flash drive, digital cameras, GPS, watt meters on bicycles)
- These gadgets can connect to an ever-more-pervasive Internet
- These digital gadgets are getting cheaper.
What can we extrapolate from that? Competition will drive down price, volume drives down cost. Gadgets will get smaller, will connect seamlessly with online resources and converge. So you get cell phone with camera, then cell phone with camera and GPS, then cell phone/camera/GPS/PDA and finally cell phone/camera/GPS/PDA/watt meter, or more likely and generally cell phone/camera/GPS/PDA/accelerometer. Which is really a whole new gadget, because this new device can communicate wirelessly, store data, capture images, sense where you are and even sense what you are doing. It can tell if it’s moving, or upside down. Logically it can detect light and guess if it’s in a bag or if it’s on a table. It knows if you are walking, driving, riding a bike: and how fast. It can tell you how much energy you burned during the day. It can download or upload data, or features, as needed. With this power to download new features as needed it could morph into something entirely new just by sensing where it is, what other people or gadgets do in these situations or what you did with it last time it was in this position. It becomes one portable tool for all places, all uses.
You could think along the same lines with television and radio, or anything really. You could find yourself with small portable devices that adapt to a situation – you get in a car, it takes on the navigation, communication or entertainment chores without any instruction. It may even carry your personal preferences as to seating position or driving style, communicate this to the car, and the car adapts to you. You step out, sit in an office at a desk with a Bluetooth keyboard, it senses that object and that location and becomes a powerful business computer. It downloads your work data and applications – and away you go.
OK, so we have a way of predicting what could be, but what about probabilities? What are the possible alternatives? What are the threats? Well a quick look in the news will tell you that political instability, changes of government, increasing pollution, competition for resources, global warming and cost of oil are all things to factor in. Can this gadget survive, or even prosper, when oil runs out? Can we power it? Is it sustainable?
I’ll let you decide the probabilities on all of that.
I’m sitting here in Australia wondering about how things work. Oh, I’ve figured out how some things work – I can tie my shoelaces, just. But what about the grander things in life, like democracy?
Democracy seems to be linked with with words like “freedom”, “choice” and “fast food”. But we seem to complain about it a lot – or is that just the media amplifying something (or perhaps something out of nothing)? It’s never as simple as just voting for a representative; it’s also about how those representatives manage to sort through competing interests and magically arrive at the best balance between planning or doing, and between spending big or saving for later. They also have to balance right from wrong; as in it’s right to plan for the future and do what’s best overall, but it’s wrong to do that if they get voted out again. They also have to tax us silly to pay for it all but offer tax cuts at the same time. So we have essential services run on a shoestring because that’s what we want, until we want those essential services to umm, serve us.
So we run down public transport because it costs a lot, and build roads instead. But then we hit some snag, like people don’t want a freeway where they live, and they compromise by making the road go through a tunnel or whatever (at great expense). And then fuel prices go up and people want to catch trains but they simply can’t because they are so run down and anyway they don’t go where people now live (because people bought cars in abundance and moved out to cheaper suburbs well away from shops and public transport). It’s not easy juggling this stuff, but reading the local papers you’d swear it was simple.
So how do we as a community deal with these competing interests? Take petrol (read gasoline) prices. We whinge when gas prices go up, even though we choose to allow a free (or almost free) market in the stuff (that’s democracy in action, on both sides). We don’t think it’s fair that it goes up, especially when we want to use it. Typically we use it to get to work or take holidays, and so prices rise in response. This is pretty simple economics, after all. Yet we still think it’s unfair, or it’s “collusion” or it’s just big business ripping us off. We actually don’t want a free market now, we want price control, and that’s not capitalism but socialism. It’s still democracy, but it’s a society choosing control over choice.
So we ask for control because we feel powerless and without a choice. Seems like we are digging ourselves a deeper hole. It’s as though we have no choice already, as though our choices are invisible. So let’s dump ‘em. (I thought freedom of choice was part of the social contract. My mistake?) It’s as though we have to drive, or drive a big thirsty car. (I’m sure that was a choice, wasn’t it?) And the flip side is that some people are trapped in their large cars and their big houses a long way from public transport. Again it’s not their fault, rather the government, the planners and the developers somehow “forced” them to accept suburbia and all that it entails. It’s like a shared community dream, or perhaps a dog chasing its tail. Or maybe we should ask ‘which came first – the chicken or the egg?’. Suburbia or the suburban dream? And of course it’s been a secret that we are nearing (or have passed) peak oil, so gas is just going to get dearer from here. Well maybe a small secret. So everyone who commutes by car will be in an increasing financial pickle of their own making. Or our making.
But of course despite the fact that it isn’t really a secret, and that we actually do have choices in life, some people will feel pain. They were misled by a greedy government in the past – greedy for power. Aren’t they all? They were lured into debt and encouraged to be “aspirational” by a sadly unaware government. So it’s not all their own fault, as it’s true: we have been conned for years. There is a price to pay for affluence, and the invoice is arriving right now.
Of course here in Australia the guilty party – mostly the Liberal and National parties – have conveniently jumped ship and left the coming crunch to be dealt with by the Labor party. Isn’t that how democracy works?
For the record, I thoroughly and utterly support the charter of the Pedestrian Council of Australia. I love cars, especially Italian sports cars starting with the letter A, but the damage being done by our over-indulgence in motorised transport is plainly ridiculous. We are destroying our society and our planet whilst somehow managing to justify subsidising the destruction at the same time. Where’s the sense?
For the record, I thoroughly and utterly support the charter of the Pedestrian Council of Australia. I love cars, especially Italian sports cars starting with the letter A, but the damage being done by our over-indulgence in motorised transport is plainly ridiculous. We are destroying our society and our planet whilst somehow managing to justify subsidising the destruction at the same time. Where’s the sense?
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