Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: teevee who wrote (97165)	12/16/2012 9:05:12 AM
From: alanrs	Respond to of 217836

Roads are critical economic infrastructure. If the billions of dollars of fuel taxes collected for roads actually went back into building and maintaining roads (instead of general revenues for pork barrel politics), the highway systems wouldn't be as decrepit as they are. The problem is that for the system to work as you envision it, people would have to be a different species, not prone to misappropriating funds to their own purposes. To say the system works, the problem being that people don't follow it is just another way of saying the system doesn't work. A lot of governmental seems to be based on a theoretical or idealized view of how people behave, which leads to more government in the inevitable struggle to get them to actually behave that way. Seems ass backwards to me. Keynesian economics is a perfect example of a system that might even work, in theory. Put aside surplus in the good times to finance economic activity in the bad times, or go into debt in the bad times and pay the debt off in the good. Either way, a good idea in theory. The problem is that people don't seem to be able to implement it. My guess is that an intellectual colony of ants would make a great success of Keynes whereas a really smart group of grasshoppers wouldn't. ARS

To: teevee who wrote (97165)	12/16/2012 4:21:26 PM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Respond to of 217836

The highway systems I see around the world, and use, are pretty good. The universal problem is lack of pricing. Free things are always overused to incapacity if they have value so their economic value is destroyed. People who need to get things done of high value cannot because low value people doing low value things block them. It's the same with free wifi - people gobble it up so it runs slowly and people needing to do valuable things cannot. In many countries, there is already more than enough roading. Pricing is the missing ingredient at present. But the other big thing needed is to make cars automatic. Allowing large primates to drive cars is ridiculous. Their reaction time is as much as quarter of a second and their concentration span is pathetic. They make errors of judgment and get drunk. When they crash, they block roads for hours because police do not price clearing the debris and like to take their time. Road tolls would mean no traffic jams. Google cars would mean no crashes with vehicles traveling at ten or twenty times the speed at 5 times the density, with less drag [and therefore less fuel]. Mqurice