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Wake Up, America. We're Driving Toward Disaster.
James Howard Kunstler, in today's Washington Post, came to the same conclusion as I did about America's impending travel problem:
Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the country's oil consumption. The fact that we're not talking about it -- especially in the presidential campaign -- shows how confused we are. The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire any more employees and have already offloaded their pension obligations and outsourced their repairs. At least five small airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past two months. If we don't get the passenger trains running again, Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.
He probably has a slightly larger readership than I do, though.
ID - protection ads come back to bite pitchman
Todd Davis has dared criminals for two years to try stealing his identity: Ads for his fraud-prevention company, LifeLock, even offer his Social Security number next to his smiling mug....
Davis acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press that his stunt has led to at least 87 instances in which people have tried to steal his identity, and one succeeded: a guy in Texas who duped an online payday loan operation last year into giving him $500 using Davis' Social Security number.
Ohmygosh! I totally didn't see that coming!
The airline industry has no future. The same is true for airfreight. No air carrier has a viable plan to make a profit with oil at current prices—much less in years to come as the petroleum available to world markets dwindles rapidly.
Interestingly enough, I'd never thought about that before but it makes a great deal of sense. What this article doesn't point out but I coincidentally discussed at a party I attended last week is how trains have been forgotten in our culture. The only image conjured by train travel in America is Amtrak, and it's a failed business. It's a operating failed business—thanks to government subsidies—but failed nonetheless. There are two primary problems with the current incarnation of Amtrak:
Hence, no pressure at all to do any better than physically keep up and running. The point I was making at the party was that train travel is actually kind of fun, and all Amtrak needs is to get off their ass and play by the same rules everyone else in capitalism needs to play. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they need to start marketing. For real. This doesn't count.
They need commercials on television, ads in newspapers, synergistic partnerships... I'm talkin' the whole nine. They need to drop the line of "you should ride the train instead of flying because riding the train is sooooo fun. Yeah, it is fun, but that's not a reason that has enough draw with most people to overcome the downside of a trip time that is literally an order of magnitude longer (even if it's 150% cheaper). They need to start riding the carbon wave. Point out exactly how much better a train is for your carbon footprint. Start investing in alternative energy (hybrid, hydrogen) engines. It would be a shoe-in to get congress to toss them a grant to buy a few hybrid trains.
With reletively little effort, the train can become the travel method of The People again.
It's not very often that you see such grace and elegance in a reply to criticism. Props to Ian.
We just finished recording a new episode of Geek Muse (finally!), so expect an update sometime next week.
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