Side Effects forces us to face up to – rather than ignore or deny – the realities of balancing the vast sums that can be spent on a single, seriously ill patient against the “distressing conditions in which many frail and elderly people live out their final years, often as a result of lack of adequate funding”. It is all too tempting, Haslam recognises, to dismiss as abhorrent the act of attaching a price tag to a person – as though their worth can be measured in pounds and pence. A human life, surely, is priceless? No amount of mere money or stuff comes close? But anyone who is actually involved in the real, messy world of healthcare knows full well this is nothing but rhetorical posturing.
Later that afternoon I was talking to a guy who is married to an emergency medicine doc in London. With the cost of living adjustment, she can expect to earn 80,000 pounds per year (i.e., $80,000!) after 15 years of slavery for the NHS (age 40). “A train driver will earn more,” he noted, “because their union is actually effective.”
Who is smarter than the Brits for running a universal health care system that doesn’t bankrupt everyone? Africans! “Middle class Nigerians who need any kind of advanced medical treatment will come here on a tourist visa,” my friend explained, and go straight from Heathrow to an NHS hospital. Once they’re in the system they get treated just like anyone else. After consuming what might be hundreds of thousands of pounds in services and recovering, they go back to Nigeria.”
What else did they have in the bookstore? It’s “smart thinking” to fight structural racism:
An American hero who inspires Biden voters can also inspire the British:
Although the age of consent in the UK is 16 (e.g., a 16-year-old could consent to have sex with a rich guy after a Gulfstream flight to somewhere luxurious) and prostitution is a legal career for an 18-year-old, the British are apparently shocked about what Jeffrey Epstein was allegedly up to:
Anyone who isn’t a cisgender heterosexual white male is in trouble:
England was saved from German invasion by women of color who were willing to risk their lives in combat while white men relaxed in the safety of their country homes:
Despite the fact that some heroines exist, the entire Earth is, literally, toast because of those who Deny the Science (i.e., unlike World War II, this is not a war that can be won by women alone):
An entire section of the front of the bookstore was devoted to a personage who by right should have been King of England and was denied this position purely on account of her gender ID:
Circling back to the British health care system… if we aren’t willing to use death panels or at least a quality-adjusted life year calculation the way that the Brits do, how are we going to keep health care from growing to consume 25 percent of American GDP (a shrinking quantity in the aggregate and, since the population continues to grow via immigration, an even more dramatically shrinking quantity on a per-capita basis)?
This was supposed to be the big year for Rainbow Flagism in Norway. Tourists are promised Queer Culture Year 2022:
My 2SLGBTQQIA+ celebration experience got off to a reasonable start. Although I did not notice any rainbow flags in the airport, the underground train station carried an “Oslo PRIDE” backlit billboard:
Once above ground, however, I discovered that the entire city has fewer rainbow flags than a typical white heterosexual suburban town in the Northeast USA. Private initiative in the direction of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community is apparently rare. In fact, I never saw a single private home or automobile displaying the rainbow flag. Here are the only businesses that I observed conforming to the U.S. norm (a restaurant, a bar, and a bookstore with a balloon and umbrella):
As in the U.S., the progression from Christianity to Rainbow Flagism is a short and easy journey. At the downtown cathedral:
The city government itself has painted some benches in a rainbow pattern. King Christian IV of Denmark, the founder of modern Oslo, loved music and dance. Here he is with a bench commemorating his love of Broadway shows:
The Munch museum did not have any rainbow flags, but the bookstore featured the standard Holy Trinity of Victimhood:
If the neighbors aren’t displaying the proper flag, one can wear it:
The Oslo City Museum has an exhibit devoted to Queer Culture Year 2022. A school class for 9th and 10th graders was required to create artistic “queer products”:
A “Gay Kid” is defined as “a boy or a girl who will fall in love with a person of the same sex later on in life.” This statement contains quite a bit of heresy against 2SLGBTQQIA+ dogma. There are only two genders for children? Gender ID and sexual orientation are not fluid?
For completeness, from the adult-oriented content of the exhibit:
The Scandinavian Leather Men sign fails to note the CDC’s Scientific monkeypox-at-the-bathhouse advice: “Leather or latex gear also provides a barrier to skin-to-skin contact; just be sure to change or clean clothes/gear between partners and after use.”
Compared to the Scandinavian Leather Men, how much fun can a heterosexual cisgender man have? Here’s Gustav Vigeland’s example of inner peace achieved via fatherhood:
The Nobel Peace Center bookshop offers some Pride-themed material:
The history museum had an outdoor PRIDE exhibit, but it had been taken down and the only remnants were posters and some books:
(I am confused as to why Frida Kahlo, who became famous after marrying an old guy who was already super famous in her chosen field, is a “hero”. Is her method of getting to the top of the art world something that we think the typical young artist can replicate?)
Where Norway seems most deficient is in restroom labeling. The implication, even in buildings that were completed in 2022, the country’s Queer Culture Year, is that there are only two genders. From the Munch museum (opened 2021):
From the National Museum (opened 2022):
I never saw an “all-gender” or “gender-neutral” restroom.
That’s the report from the world of jet lag. I feel that I am almost accustomed to the time zone here and, naturally, it will be time to get on the Norse Atlantic 787 back to FLL tomorrow.
In between bouts of outrage regarding the death of Roe v. Wade (the suffering of the world’s poor and the Ukrainians under artillery attack are insignificant compared to what is experienced by a pregnant American who must travel in order to get abortion care at 28 weeks of pregnancy), my friends on Facebook remain outraged about the fact that Americans remain able to buy and own guns that are then used in mass shootings (day-to-day shootings in major cities are not upsetting, by contrast).
My big take-away from the recent tragedies in the news is that Americans under 25 should neither be allowed to vote (unless they’ve worked for at least 8 years) nor purchase guns (see In the wake of Uvalde, can we abandon the fiction that today’s 18-year-olds are adults?). But since people keep asking Why Here? I thought it might make sense to look at what makes the U.S. unique among human societies worldwide and historically.
Let’s start with how we live: car-dependent suburbs. Many of us are probably the loneliest humans who have ever existed because, even before coronapanic, it required so much effort for a suburbanite to get together with another person. Note that one of my pet non-profit ideas for evil billionaires is “Latin American-style Towns for the U.S.”:
When computer nerds get rich, their charitable thoughts turn to helping Africans (see Bill Gates). They make a spreadsheet of the quantifiable aspects of the human condition, sort by misery, and the Africans come out on top. Peace Corps workers who return from a couple of years in small African villages tell a different story. They come home to their parents’ materially magnificent suburban homes and immediately suffer from loneliness and depression. Maybe we should feel sorry for Americans who live in suburbs and need to get in the car to shop or work and need to make an appointment before there is any possibility of seeing a friend. What are the problems with suburban living, the dominant mode of American life? A shallow problem is that the car is required to accomplish any task outside of the home. Suburbanites waste their lives, and a lot of energy, driving to the strip mall to shop, driving to their place of work, driving to see friends or to an entertainment venue. Suburbanites cause horrific traffic jams that turn their nightmarish 45-minute commute into a hellish 2-hour commute. Giving how spread out houses are in the suburbs, it is impossible for a business that depends on pedestrians or bicyclists to succeed. A strip might might support a coffee shop, but it won’t be a place where people drop in as a casual part of their day. The more serious problems with the suburbs start with social isolation. You won’t have a chance encounter with a friend when you drive point to point. A suburbanite in theory could make an appointment to see a friend, but this is tough to arrange when everyone works 8-9 hours per day plus commutes for another 1-2 hours. Zoning laws ensure that nobody can run a business, even one that is clean and quiet, from his or her home. Thus the typical suburban youth will never see an adult at work. As far as suburban teenagers are concerned, cash is something obtained mysteriously by adults and brought home after an exhausting commute.
Latin Americans often come up near the very top of the world’s happiest people, despite a material prosperity that is very pale compared to that we enjoy in the United States. Nearly every small town in Latin America is built around a central plaza where the citizens gather at various hours to meet friends, play chess, eat meals in restaurants, etc. Small streets radiate from the plaza and hold all of the shops that are essential to daily life, including supermarkets and hardware stores. Housing is built up to a three story height, dense enough to support businesses, but not so dense that people are isolated in concrete towers with elevators. Smaller workshops are mixed in with housing, introducing young people to the texture of business.
The U.S. offers some enjoyable walkable neighborhoods, mostly developed before the rise of the automobile. Examples include many neighborhoods within New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston. These neighborhoods, however, are small and can hold only a tiny minority of Americans. Consequently, houses within walkable neighborhoods typically cost over $1 million. As the U.S. population heads toward 500 million, these livable neighborhoods will become even more out of reach of the average citizen.
The market economy will not deliver Latin American-style living. We have to assume that building tract houses along the Interstate, served by strip malls a few exits down the highway, is the most profitable way to develop real estate. The handful of “New Urbanism” communities are not substitutes for the Latin American town. At Disney’s Celebration (near Orlando, Florida), for example, residents must drive more than 20 minutes to get to a supermarket, a hardware store, or a bookstore. It would be illegal to start a small business in most areas of Celebration.
In the exurbs of a rapidly growing metropolitan area, such as San Francisco or Los Angeles, we build a Latin American town, complete with central plaza ringed by three-story high buildings, the ground floor of which holds shops. We offer free rent to supermarkets, hardware stores, and other essential services. We encourage residents to start small non-industrial businesses in their homes, partly to provide jobs within the community and partly so that young people can see what adult work looks like. Once completed, the buildings are sold off for market prices and the money is recycled into building the next one.
How many of today’s mass shooters are products of the American suburbs?
Let’s also look at family structure. No society anywhere in the world or at any time in human history has ever provided the financial incentives to breaking up children’s homes that the U.S. provides. Consequently, we have double the percentage of kids living without two parents compared to the typical European nation. If you told people in 1800 that it would one day be possible for a married parent to get paid to wander off and have sex with a new friend every week they would never have believed that would be possible.
How many of today’s mass shooters are products of the U.S. family court system? (i.e., children of “single parents” or “divorced parents”?)
Speaking of family structure, let’s look at the U.S. resurrection of polygamy in light of the fact that some of the mass shooters have been identified as frustrated “incels“. Pre-1970, the parents (two back then!) could tell an unlovable son “there’s a lid for every pot.” Because of enforced monogamy, women who wanted to reproduce needed to pick the best man that they could find for a long-term partnership. For about half of the women, therefore, this meant partnering with a below-average-quality man. With current social mores and family law, however, a woman will be far better off becoming a “single mom” by having sex with a married dentist (profits vary by state) than by marrying anyone remotely like the young guys who have recently perpetrated mass shootings. A polygamous society that produces excess men also produces violence, according to the academics (example: “Polygynous Neighbors, Excess Men, and Intergroup Conflict in Rural Africa”). H.L. Mencken predicted this in 1922:
… the objections to polygamy do not come from women, for the average woman is sensible enough to prefer half or a quarter or even a tenth of a first-rate man to the whole devotion of a third-rate man.
How about shared cultural values? Has there ever been another society that doubled its population via low-skill immigration without regard to cultural compatibility? (see “Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065” (Pew 2015)) If so, what happened to that society? The latest and greatest immigration law favors those without any affinity for American culture and American society: a migrant stays in the U.S. if he/she/ze/they says “I was unsafe in my home country.” We sort by how dangerous and disordered the society from which the migrant came, not by the likelihood that the migrant will find or expects to find fellowship among his/her/zir/their brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters here in the U.S. A person who says “I hate everything about the U.S., but my spouse 4,000 miles away is abusing me” has more entitlement to live in the U.S. than a person who says “I love the U.S. and thought this would be a nice place to settle after I got my M.D. in Zurich.” Thus, the U.S. will gradually become a random assortment of people from the world’s most dangerous and disordered societies.
We don’t care when people in foreign countries die, right? (sometimes we say that we care, but we act as though we don’t care) If the U.S. becomes a random assemblage of people from around the world, why is it obvious that we must care about our fellow Americans? Omar Mateen, a child of immigrants from Afghanistan, explicitly said that his primary allegiance was not to fellow Americans:
In a 9-1-1 call made shortly after the shooting [in the Orlando nightclub] began, Mateen swore allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and said the U.S. killing of Abu Waheeb in Iraq the previous month “triggered” the shooting. He later told a negotiator he was “out here right now” because of the American-led interventions in Iraq and in Syria and that the negotiator should tell the United States to stop the bombing.
Seung-Hui Cho was a permanent resident from South Korea who killed 32 Americans at Virginia Tech. Nidal Hasan, the child of Muslim Palestinian immigrants to the U.S., killed 13 people in Fort Hood in 2009 (sentenced to death in 2013, but many years of appeal remain). Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik waged jihad against non-Muslims in San Bernardino, California. After years of living at taxpayer expense in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the immigrant Tsarnaev brothers waged jihad on infidels running the Boston Marathon (not a shooting, but a mass murder). Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa came from Syria and became a jihadi in Colorado (killing 10). Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov immigrated from Uzbekistan before killing 8 infidels in New York City (using a truck as a weapon; he has been living at taxpayer expense for five years while awaiting trial). The same phenomenon seems to occur in other countries. A recent shooting in Norway was perpetrated by an immigrant from Iran (ABC).
Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas mass shooter, was a white native-born person. But he lived in a city that is roughly 40 percent immigrants and children of immigrants and where even the native-born Americans have come from somewhere else. What is the shared cultural value that ties people who live in Las Vegas together? A belief in slot machines? A native-born shooter, Robert Gregory Bowers, explicitly stated that his motivation for killing Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue was taxpayer-funded Jewish organizations, such as HIAS, that bring migrants to the U.S. Returning to Norway, the native-born Anders Behring Breivik said that he was motivated to launch the 2011 shootings by Muslim immigration.
This is not to say that open borders are bad. Certainly they are not bad for the rich (Harvard analysis) and certainly our open borders give us a wide array of bodegas and breakfast tacos from which to choose (Dr. Jill Biden, M.D.). But our open border policy is unique so maybe our open borders policy contributes to our unique position with respect to mass killings.
We’re not unique in the world in terms of having Internet. But having Internet is unique when considered against the history of the human
Seeks to provide exposure to US companies that demonstrate greater gender diversity within senior leadership than other firms in their sector
Companies in the Index are ranked within each sector by three gender diversity ratios
The Index seeks to minimize variations in sector weights compared to the composition of the index’s broader investment universe by focusing on companies with the highest levels within their sectors of senior leadership gender diversity
There are nearly 200 holdings in the fund out of the roughly 3,500 significant publicly traded U.S. companies (Wilshire 5000, in which 3,500 is the new 5,000). In other words, roughly 5 percent of U.S. public companies do things the correct (gender diverse) way.
To celebrate Dr. Marissa Mayer‘s brave stewardship of Yahoo! (history, which included 30 days of daily new logos in 2013) we should get a custom chart comparing SHE to the Wilshire 5000 over the past 6 years from Yahoo! Finance.
The stocks of companies that failed to enter the gender diversity Olympics were up by roughly 107 percent in nominal dollars (but don’t forget that inflation eroded these gains; a house in our Florida neighborhood has gone up in price by much more than 107 percent in the same period and even the government’s cooked CPI number is up roughly 20 percent). Stocks of companies with people identifying as “not men” in leadership positions were up by 44 percent.
SARS-CoV-2 has achieved much more mindshare in Colorado than in Florida. Boulder and Denver are the centers of concern regarding COVID-19. As you enter the store…
The #1-selling book is The 1619 Project, which “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative.”
(Black Americans may be at the very center of the United States national narrative, but I did not see any employees or customers at the bookstore who appeared to identify as “Black”)
Another prominently displayed book reminds customers that there wouldn’t be any Black or white people here if the Native Americans had been more successful militarily.
Joe Biden might be able to find his next Supreme Court nominee in the children’s section:
Speaking of the Supreme Court, AOC stands next to RBG. Perhaps my dream that Joe Biden will nominate thought-leader AOC to the Supreme Court is shared by others?
According to Wikipedia, Brandon, FL is merely an unincorporated part of a county, i.e., not an actual city or town. It is home to a huge shopping mall, a bunch of strip malls, various components of the health care industry, and some car dealers. For the COVID-averse, the Westfield Mall has an outdoor dining area:
If you’re concerned that you’re not sufficiently obese for SARS-CoV-2 to get a good grip on you, you can get an entire pint of Cinnabon frosting inside the mall. Also a hijab, if you’re not satisfied with Is the face mask the Church of Shutdown’s hijab?
(It was much more common to see covered women, including in full burqas, in the Tampa area compared to in Jupiter/Palm Beach.)
The LEGO store in the mall had a huge stack of “Everyone is Awesome” rainbow kits near the register. The web site says “The new LEGO Everyone is Awesome set celebrates positivity and kindness in our families, our communities and our world.” and contains an inspirational story from the designer, Matthew Ashton: “Being LGBTQIA+ myself, I knew I needed to step up to the plate and make a real statement about love and inclusivity, and generally spread some LEGO® love to everybody who needs it. Children are our role models and they welcome everyone, no matter their background. … Being quite an effeminate kid, I was constantly told by different adults around me what I should and shouldn’t play with, that I needed to behave like a ‘real boy’ and to toughen up. I was dissuaded from doing the things that came most naturally to me. … I was actually fine with all the kids at school. … this set is not just for the LGBTQIA+ community. It’s for all of the allies – parents, siblings, friends, schoolmates, colleagues etc. – out there as well.”
If you need some body shape inspiration before hitting the food court, the mall includes a manatee sculpture:
Inconsistent with the town’s status as the World Center of Deplorability (not only in Florida, but also named “Brandon”), there is apparently a high demand for Alfa Romeos:
I’ve been listening to Return from the Stars, which Stanisław Lem wrote in 1961. The book is set in approximately 2088 when a 40-year-old astronaut returns to Earth after 127 years of high-speed travel with consequent time dilation.
Lem’s vision of economics is pure Marx. Despite a proliferation of humans, there is no scarcity. Not only is electricity too cheap to meter, but also apartments, food, clothing, and transportation. It is unclear how this happened, but perhaps it is due to robots, which are the workers in restaurants and hotels (also free). On the third hand, the novel describes a “real” star who lives in a fabulous suburban villa. So there are some people who live way more luxuriously than others, but there is no mechanism for dealing with scarcity for lifestyle items.
I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century. … No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in the hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They could be read with the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons—lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation. Only scientific publications having a very limited distribution were still printed, on a plastic imitation paper. Thus all my purchases fitted into one pocket, though there must have been almost three hundred titles. A handful of crystal corn—my books. I selected a number of works on history and sociology, a few on statistics and demography, and what the girl from Adapt had recommended on psychology. A couple of the larger mathematical textbooks—larger, of course, in the sense of their content, not of their physical size. The robot that served me was itself an encyclopedia, in that—as it told me—it was linked directly, through electronic catalogues, to templates of every book on Earth. As a rule, a bookstore had only single “copies” of books, and when someone needed a particular book, the content of the work was recorded in a crystal.
The originals—crystomatrices—were not to be seen; they were kept behind pale blue enameled steel plates. So a book was printed, as it were, every time someone needed it. The question of printings, of their quantity, of their running out, had ceased to exist. Actually, a great achievement, and yet I regretted the passing of books. On learning that there were secondhand bookshops that had paper books, I went and found one. I was disappointed; there were practically no scientific works. Light reading, a few children’s books, some sets of old periodicals.
So the bookstore is somehow linked via a network, but the network can’t reach into homes or pockets. Speaking of pockets, Lem did not anticipate wearable or pocketable technology. There are no smartphones. There is no email. People send telegrams at “the post office” (Lem didn’t imagine that Bad Orange Man would dismantle this institution in 2020!).
Lem envisions a world of fantastically advanced construction technology. Although the city of 1961 looked a lot like the city of the 1830s, he expected the cities of the 2080s to be spectacularly different. I.e., the very field that has been most stagnant he expected to undergo the most dramatic changes and the very field that has seen skyrocketing costs he expected to become almost free. (Again, maybe the prediction is based on the fact that Lem has envisioned a world in which there are 18 robots for every human.)
Lem correctedly predicted the end of monogamy (some real life history). There are still marriages, but they are brief and easy for one partner to dissolve unilaterally (not too many couples have children, so litigation over profitable child support isn’t possible). An old doctor advises the returned astronaut:
Once, success used to attract a woman. A man could impress her with his salary, his professional qualifications, his social position. In an egalitarian society that is not possible. … Take in a couple of melodramas and you will understand what the criteria for sexual selection are today. The most important thing is youth. That is why everyone struggles for it so much. Wrinkles and gray hair, especially when premature, evoke the same kind of feelings as leprosy did, centuries ago . . .
Marriages, to the extent people bother with them, last about seven years before people move on to new/additional sex partners. Perhaps more commonly, marriages end automatically after a one-year trial period.
On the other hand, the OLED section at Costco would not have surprised Lem:
I realized that what I had in front of me was a wall-sized television screen. The volume was off. Now, from a sitting position, I saw an enormous female face, exactly as if a dark-skinned giantess were peering through a window into the room; her lips moved, she was speaking, and gems as big as shields covered her ears, glittered like diamonds.
Big TVs are used as ceilings with video feeds so that everyone in this heavily populated Earth can see the sky.
Lem completely missed coronaplague and the terrified flight to the suburbs and exurbs. The multi-level cities he created would be the perfect breeding ground for an enterprising virus. On the other hand, he foresaw that humans would become dramatically more risk-averse and therefore it is fair to say that he foresaw cower-in-place as a response to the novel coronavirus. On the third hand, in trying to understand how an astronaut died, a character asks “Could he have had a corona?” (maybe we need to adopt this coinage?)
Lem is stuck in the European perspective that children are products of marriage (US vs. Europe stats). There are no “single parents” in the novel. But children are also essentially products of eugenics. Those who can’t pass an exam can’t breed:
It was considered a natural thing that having children and raising them during the first years of their life should require high qualifications and extensive preparation, in other words, a special course of study; in order to obtain permission to have offspring, a married couple had to pass a kind of examination; at first this seemed incredible to me, but on thinking it over I had to admit that we, of the past, and not they, should be charged with having paradoxical customs: in the old society one was not allowed to build a house or a bridge, treat an illness, perform the simplest administrative function, without specialized education, whereas the matter of utmost responsibility, bearing children, shaping their minds, was left to blind chance and momentary desires, and the community intervened only when mistakes had been made and it was too late to correct them. So, then, obtaining the right to a child was now a distinction not awarded to just anyone.
What’s the technology by which risk has been eliminated from this timid society?
Every vehicle, every craft on water or in the air, had to have its little black box; it was a guarantee of “salvation now,” as Mitke jokingly put it toward the end of his life; at the moment of danger—a plane crash, a collision of cars or trains—the little black box released a “gravitational antifield” charge that combined with the inertia produced by the impact (more generally, by the sudden braking, the loss of speed) and gave a resultant of zero. This mathematical zero was a concrete reality; it absorbed all the shock and all of the energy of the accident, and in this way saved not only the passengers of the vehicle but also those whom the mass of the vehicle would otherwise have crushed. The black boxes were to be found everywhere: in elevators, in hoists, in the belts of parachutists, in ocean-going vessels and motorcycles.
The other core technology is modifying humans in early childhood via “betrization,” which renders them incapable of perpetrating violence.
So… the big misses for this futurist were (1) Internet, (2) battery-powered personal electronics, (3) portable communication, and (4) stagnation, not innovation, in architecture and construction.
(Lem also failed to predict a world obsessed with politics. There are no materially comfortable people protesting BLM or anything similar in Return from the Stars. Material comfort has apparently made people content with whatever the government is. Lem didn’t anticipate that the richer a society got the more pissed everyone would be!)
What is the answer? Why do we accept that hundreds of thousands of Americans will die in the next 10-20 years because of our failure to invest in engineering and infrastructure today, but we can’t accept that up to hundreds of thousands of Americans will die in the next year because we didn’t do a sufficiently thorough shutdown?
Is it too soon to start asking what we could do to save lives if we invested coronapanic-scale money on something other than coronapanic?
Jim Brainard, the city’s mayor since 1996, has made roundabouts Carmel’s most characteristic feature. Within the 48-square-mile city of 100,000, located just northwest of the state’s capital of Indianapolis, Brainard has built 132 roundabouts. He’s also become America’s—and perhaps the world’s—most adamant cheerleader for roundabout adoption.
“Roundabouts have reduced traffic fatalities by 90% in Carmel,” said Brainard, a lawyer by training. “The U.S. average fatality rate per 100,000 people is 14. It tends to be higher in suburban areas because the roads are built wider for faster speeds. Indianapolis has done a little bit better than normal—11.7 per 100,000. The average in Carmel is two.”
Now that the U.S. will have to give up on public transport #BecauseCorona, is there hope for getting more flow through our existing road network to accommodate the existing 330 million plus the next 100 million immigrants?
The smaller the circles are, the safer they become. “We have higher crash rates in our double lane roundabouts then our single lane roundabouts,” Brainard said. “But they’re still a vast improvement over stoplights. We can move 50% more cars per hour through roundabouts than we could through stoplights. If you have constant flow, you don’t have to add more lanes.”
These can’t be retrofit easily to cities, but if the future of America is suburban (#BecauseCorona), maybe this is part of the answer!
From the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2019, evidence of a bad traffic light encounter?
The exhibits on the bad shape that the world was in, circa June 2019.
Do we credit these artists for prescience? The “Vague Anxiety” is no longer vague! “Acts of Mourning” is no longer a metaphor, as only 99.965 percent of the Irish people remain alive, the remaining 0.0035 percent having been killed by Covid-19.
From the bookstore, is it possible this would be considered insulting by those who call themselves “feminist”?
The rest of the bookstore was unobjectionable, except to those who had faith that public-key encryption would enable a secure Internet.
