Archive for September, 2007
stop condos
Living on the east side of Milwaukee, I can relate.
Here’s another gem:
Filed under Milwaukee, culture : Comments (2) : Sep 29th, 2007
May Or May Not – A Kaleidoscope of Egos
I’ve been reading a music/mash-up blog for awhile now and I’m a big fan: www.thehoodinternet.com (Note that their site is down at the moment. They must be getting popular because they just exceeded the bandwidth limit on their host!)
Imagine my delight when I discovered that they released a full length album of original music! For free!
May Or May Not | A Kaleidoscope of Egos [via Rapidshare; 72MB zip]
May Or May Not | A Kaleidoscope of Egos [via Sendspace; 72MB zip]
It gets better: they’re from Chicago! So for any of you Chicago readers, keep a look out for these guys. They’ve got some talent.
Filed under culture : Comments (0) : Sep 29th, 2007
hacked
Posted by mobile phone:
perhaps?
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (2) : Sep 29th, 2007
Mass transit
When I was a kid, you could buy a gallon of gasoline for under a dollar. Those day are long since past, with gas prices hovering near $3/gallon and $4 on the horizon.
Surprisingly, American drivers don’t seem to mind. Our collective memory is so short that whenever gas drops by a few cents we forget that it just went up by a quarter. $2.89 gas doesn’t hurt so bad once you’ve purchased $3.25 gas for a few weeks.
The trouble is that we’re not doing anything substantial to provide options to drivers. I live in Milwaukee and currently have two choices to get to work: drive 15 minutes by car or ride the bus for nearly an hour. Not surprisingly, I choose the former. (Actually, I am working on a third option involving my bicycle, but that’s for another post).
What we need are some new options.
As the price of gas climbs, the economics of mass transit changes. The number of commuters who would ride metro train when gas is at $4/gallon is much higher than the number of riders at $2/gallon. The trouble is, gas prices can rise much faster than we can build mass transit alternatives. It’s time that we made some forward-looking predictions and planned for the extremely likely occurrence of gasoline prices continuing to rise.
The primary reason mass transit development is so hard is that it has high up-front costs. Building a light rail system requires planning and capital investment. (Two skills that most state and federal legislators lack). The critical flaw in calculating the cost of a mass transit system is that we don’t give it a fair comparison. In the 1950s and 60s, the booming post-war economy invested billions of dollars building the interstate highway system. Due to our collective memory problem (remember?) we assume the cost of highways to be zero. Worse, the highway system is so ingrained in our culture that we mindlessly shovel billions of dollars each year to keep it running.
And our highway system is dying. This year, highway congestion will cost $100 billion in lost productivity. This problem will only get worse as demand increases with limited change in supply. Are these costs factored into the economic analysis of mass transit? Hardly.
We need to start building mass transit solutions now. This year. Today. We need express bus lanes, metro and regional rail. We need to proactively plan (gasp!) for increased gas prices and increased demand. We simply cannot wait for $5/gallon gas to come around because by then it will be too late.
Filed under Milwaukee, climate change, economics, politics : Comments (4) : Sep 27th, 2007
Google payday
I reached another milestone in my blogging career: my second Google payday!
Long-time readers will note that I first implemented Google Adsense in February 2006. In the last year and a half, I’ve migrated to Wordpress, grown my readership, and increased posting frequency. Together, these factors have contributed to a successful and profitable blog. My expenses of hosting are now supported by reader ad-clicks. Great!
I’m coming up on my three year anniversary of launching tadfad.com so I’m planning a retrospective look back through the years. Thanks to all of you who read the blog and thanks especially to everyone who comments. I really enjoy writing this thing and hope to keep improving in the years to come.
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (1) : Sep 27th, 2007
