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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (595995)	12/20/2010 4:34:30 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583869

I don't believe that Ten. I'm an agnostic. With what we know about the universe today, it's completely ridiculous to assume we hold any special place before God, if there is one. If there IS a God that created all this, it seems he graced us with the ability to control evolution eventually, and direct it to our will. If you've studied comparative religion as I have, you'd know that any particular creed or belief is just as superstitiously cult-like as the next. Why believe in any of them? Men know nothing of God.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (595995)	12/20/2010 5:31:11 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583869

Bentway, looks like you're in the minority: > while 16% believe that humanity evolved without divine intervention. Yes, Americans tend to be backwards for first worlders.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (595995)	12/20/2010 5:33:25 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1583869

Britain shamed by Heathrow’s terminal misery By Philip Stephens Published: December 20 2010 21:51 To fly from Istanbul to London is to travel from the first to the third world. Ataturk international airport sparkles with steel and glass modernity – a monument to Turkey’s status as a rising power. Heathrow’s Terminal 3, scarred by broken travelators, exposed ceiling voids and filthy carpeting has become an emblem of national decline. No one should have been surprised by the latest snow-induced standstill at one of the world’s busiest airports. Heathrow is not quite so dreadful as it was three or four years ago. It is still a disgrace – a two-fingered jeer at any notion that London’s future is as a global economic hub. I caught an inkling last Friday of the chaos that was to ensue at the weekend. By early afternoon London had felt only a gentle powdering of snow. My British Airways flight from Tokyo had, for once, arrived on schedule. Miracle of miracles, instead of polluting the skies above the capital for 30 minutes or so while waiting for a landing slot, it touched down on first approach. Too good to be true? Absolutely. There was a slight hitch, the pilot told us as we taxied. None of the stands at the so-called flagship Terminal 5 were available. Because the temperature had dropped below zero, departing aircraft had to be de-iced. We would have to wait for 15 or 20 minutes for a stand. By the time 15 minutes had become three hours, the problem was obvious enough. The skies were clear, but the airport did not have sufficient de-icing equipment. If planes could not leave, the dozens of aircraft on the tarmac had to wait to arrive. With the terminal in plain view a couple of hundred yards away, one or two passengers mused about using the emergency slides. Mostly, resignation took the edge off anger. Regular victims of Heathrow know what to expect. I used to think that the problem was simple enough. BAA, the operator at Heathrow, owned all the big airports in southern England. BAA’s owner, the Spanish Ferrovial, had borrowed heavily to buy the airport operator. It had big debts to service. Thus BAA shunned investment in basic infrastructure in favour of quick profits. The only real money spent on Heathrow went on expanding the terminals’ lucrative retail concessions. In all this, BAA was aided and abetted by the regulatory hopelessness of the Civil Aviation Authority. The analysis was right as far as it went. And, in a way, you could hardly blame BAA for extracting monopoly rents. That is what companies do in such circumstances. But the operator was too greedy, and public clamour at the appalling state of Heathrow led the competition authorities to order BAA to sell its two other London airports. Gatwick, under new ownership, has already begun to show what can be done when an airport pays attention to the demands of its customers. A modest level of competition, however, is clearly not enough. BAA has not abandoned its bad old ways – extracting as much money as possible from Heathrow to meet Ferrovial’s debt service payments. Yes, the airport’s terminals are gradually being refurbished; but to a standard, and at a speed, that would shame most big cities. Even with diversified ownership, the present system of regulation at Heathrow needs to be overhauled. The CAA has been indifferent to standards of service and to the lack of investment in basic equipment. BAA’s answer to such criticism is to complain that the airport is overloaded. Because it operates so close to capacity, the smallest disturbance ricochets through the system. The airport, it says, needs an additional runway. Thankfully, the government has already said No. Because what BAA really wants is to entrench the hegemony of Heathrow over Gatwick and Stansted, and thus restore its licence to print money. An operator unwilling to invest at the present volume of traffic cannot be trusted with any expansion of capacity. Heathrow, however, also exposes a deeper problem – a culture of private ownership, financial engineering and short-term financial reporting that militates against long-term investment in major infrastructure. Alongside this sits a failure to recognise that regulation has not fulfilled its proper task of balancing the profits of privately-owned utilities with the interests of consumers. For the world’s rising states, international airports – and indeed their national airlines (Turkish Airlines beats BA hands down on the Istanbul route) – are a statement of modernity. They speak both to national pride and to integration in the global economy. In Britain, the fixation on private ownership and quarterly earnings per share does not allow for such flights of fancy. This, incidentally, also explains why the country does not have anything resembling a half-decent railway system. I am tempted to say that Heathrow should be nationalised – or at the very least handed over to Boris Johnson, the London mayor. No one could do a worse job than BAA. Whatever the specifics of ownership and regulation, however, it is time Britain recognised the public interest in the dismal condition of the nation’s privately-run infrastructure. ft.com