Céad Míle Fáilte ~ A Hundred Thousand Welcomes!

Here we seek a rest in the shade, some cool water and a little kindness. This blog is dedicated to peace, truth, justice and a post- industrial, post-petroleum illumined world in spite of all odds against it. I very much like the line about the ancient knight (see poem below) "His helmet now shall make a hive for bees" It is reminiscent of "beating swords into ploughshares" a sentiment I heartily approve of. Thank you for visiting ~ I hope you return!

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Monday, December 15, 2008

Infrastructure, Infrastructure, Infrastructure

Just as "Location, location, location" is the thing for any business, so infrastructure is "the thing" which glues societies and economies together. And ours is not doing so very well.

From The Economist

QUOTE The need is undeniable. Many old industrial cities have rich networks of roads and railways, dating from a time when they were much bigger. These are now crumbling. Last year a bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, killing 13 people. A tunnel that brings water to New York sprang a leak in the 1980s and is currently losing about 20m gallons a day. Philadelphia has been flooded with sewage. The most recent infrastructure “report card” by the American Society of Civil Engineers contains nothing but Cs and Ds.

Matters are even worse in the desert West and lowland South, where population growth has been so rapid that basic infrastructure is often non-existent. Las Vegas (population 560,000) is linked to Phoenix (1.6m) by a rural road that trundles over the Hoover Dam. The West struggles with a water system, built by the federal government in the early 20th century, that serves farmers much better than city-dwellers. The scarcity of power lines is holding up efforts to generate electricity from sun and wind. UNQUOTE

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