Friday, April 24, 2009

Two Questions and a Comment

Thanks to the wonders of modern science, telekinesis is now something that is technologically feasible. We also have robots - sort of, that child robot I saw on the news looked more creepy than useful - and I am sure it is within our technological capability to create cars that fly and jet packs. We have a system called "Teh Internet" that we can connect to literally almost everywhere, plugging into a worldwide grid of people and information. We can position ourselves exactly by satellite and get it downloaded to a telephone.

We're every 1950's-era teenage boy's dream world, except for the thing where we're not on Mars yet.

So how is it that we can't seem to do anything about global warming?

Brendan thinks it's because global warming is about getting people to get their collective acts together, not solving something in a lab or whiz-kid's garage. I agree partially, but also think that some of it can be solved in a lab (chemical that turns all the carbon dioxide in the air into breathable oxygen, solidifying the carbon which we would then collect, anyone?). I mean we've figured out alchemy. It costs several million dollars but we can turn a little lead into gold if we want.

Second question - newspapers have massive readerships online. Huge. People around the world can now read papers that they had no access to just a decade or two ago. Those online papers are chock-full of advertisements. Some of them are quite annoying - they open out and obscure the story and you have to click them away - or they roll down from a banner, or they look like photos that go with the article but are really ads. Sometimes they're in the middle of the article. I accept all that as a necessary evil.

But then, with all those readers and all those ads, how is it that newspapers are not profitable anymore, and so many are in trouble? Are they not charging enough for these ads? Are they not choosing good ads that people may actually click on? Newspapers in ye olden days were profitable because of their advertising, not because of their subscription fees...those barely paid for the paper the paper was printed on. So what's the deal?

I'm sure there'll be some comment with two perfectly logical answers that I, a being of lesser intelligence, didn't think of. But hey. Ya gotta ask.

In Taiwan-related news, the members of the Taiwanese legislature are getting slap-happy. A KMT rep (Li) called a DPP rep (Chiu) a "violent shrew" and Chiu, who may not be a shrew but certainly is a little violent, opened a can of whoop-ass (apologies for sounding like a teenager from the '90s) on him. It would be wonderful if it weren't terrible. Hitting is never OK, but I'm all in favor of metaphorically beating down people who use sexist terms like "shrew" as if they're acceptable. I realize this is one incident - though not an uncommon one - and I probably can't judge a whole party based on the words of one representative but...err...I'm going to do it anyway.

It makes me wonder what other reactionary, old-skool, woman-hating beliefs the KMT holds, if they think it's acceptable to call a woman a 'shrew' in this day and age.

And it makes me wonder how on earth such a violent streak made it into the elected representatives of the DPP, if they think it's OK to go slap slap slappin'. Though anyone who wants to say "see, the DPP is the violent party" needs to take a really close look at history. From, oh, say, 1950-1975 the violent party (the only party) was most definitely the KMT.

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