Universal health coverage. And I like the train idea and urban neighborhood gardens (some already being utilized). It's amazing at all the money that's wasted by this govt in not providing what real people need. Hopefully, we'll see major changes in Obama's first term.\
Get rid of the corporate vampires that call themselves "lobbyists" also. Make our elected officials work for US, not be at the whim of their corporate contributors. That should be a crime, anyway; the Founders are probably rolling over in their graves at the idea that a corporation is a "person."
dad
· 1 year ago
better/more trains would be good
both passenger and freight.
Keith Thompson
· 1 year ago
One thing I've heard (and I don't know how accurate this is) is that our passenger rail system is very poor, but our freight train system is perhaps the best in the world. Supposedly there's a tradeoff; having a good freight system makes it more difficult to have a good passenger system. Given the extent to which our economy depends on freight trains, it's entirely possible we made the right choice.
MRBill30560
· 1 year ago
Lord, Yes, a National Arts project that actually helps artists. And when we build the electrical infrastructure and the bridges and other works, these structures need to be beautiful and lasting. I'm not talking extravagance, but good design, not the brutal stuff of so much modern engineering. I live near several TVA dams. They are massive, but beautifully and well built. Even the plan drawings of them are works of art. We need to encourage and celebrate modern design and the new architecture.
If you want a somewhat depressing look at the state of American architecture and urban design, look at Skyscraperpage's "Diagrams of World Skyscraper Construction 2008". http://skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?25002165 Notice how few of the tallest buildings going up are in the US, and compare them with the daring and incredible designs from Dubai and China. The few US entries are timid boxy affairs. Just scan the first few pages.
houstonray
· 1 year ago
Wow, thank you for that Skyscraper link, that was amazing! Beautiful buildings going up and of course, other than the Freedom Tower, most of the US buildings look like any other.
MRBill30560
· 1 year ago
And compared to the remarkable structures being built outside the US, Freedom Tower looks a bit tame. And I've said before it looks uncomfortable, with it's corner's pulled in, like a basketball player trying to fold his shoulders in.. And I just don't think the top in the diagrams and renderings I've seen is, well, convincing. Like a spike thru a beanie.. And one can play around with the Skyscraper site, and different ways of displaying the building designs (as well as city photos..). I'm sure there is room for some conclusions to be drawn about American power, as revealed in it's buildings..
Btalk314
· 1 year ago
A national vocational education system for prisons.
MsJoanne
· 1 year ago
Yes! Something to create not just self worth but the ability to actually earn a living outside of a criminal lifestyle. I remember reading about a prison in MN which was doing that. I have a feeling that that was before the time of privatized prisons, though. Now, they use prisoners for corporate slave labor.
AdrianBrowne
· 1 year ago
I don't know. Asking for something everyone could root for that doesn't involve incinerating people in far off lands might be too much.
tbhull
· 1 year ago
Elevate maglev trains along all US interstates.
Turbines just off the atlantic shoreline at all levels from the floor to just below the surface so as not to destroy ship traffic and to destroy sub traffic, but primarily to take advantage of the free flow of the gulf stream to spin turbines to generate electric power without unsightly windmills and with the appropriate covers to protect marine life. Rest assured someone has a patent pending on this one.
melanie
· 1 year ago
you're so practical, john. i, too, would love a train system like that but i say ALL OF THE ABOVE.
tbhull
· 1 year ago
This inquiry is perhaps the most exceptional ever posted on this blog (with all due respect for others before) in that it encourages (without prediciting success) collective thought for the common good versus the old approach of viewing ideas as property and primarily and almost exclusively only discussed/worthwhile/pursued if they generate a profit for the originator.
Thoughts and ideas having meaning and worth independent of the abstraction of money and today sharing those ideas and working out meta glitches with others worldwide in real time is possible.
With that said, I need more weed.
Big Time Patriot
· 1 year ago
Hmmm, where oh where would this transcontinental railrod go? Perhaps one end would be in New York city? America is sending billions of dollars into Wall Street, perhaps our "stimulus" money could benefit some OTHER part of the nation, hey, just maybe? Maybe just a taste for the rest of the country? But hey, that's just my opinion, a citizen of the VAST country outside of New York who could use some help also.
sukabi1
· 1 year ago
After visiting Hawaii for the first time this summer, I was dumbfounded that they hadn't embraced wind, wave, solar and geothermo power technologies... they have the perfect environment for all and would be a perfect development environment for all of the above... instead they import petroleum for all their energy generation needs...
There are only a couple of wind farms.... one of which is non-operational and falling down and they were getting ready to close the other one....
MsJoanne
· 1 year ago
Rooftop farming across all major cities would be wonderful. Some cities have already adopted that. It serves several purposes; creates local food, insulates buildings, creates more of the good stuff that plants put into the air.
HOV lanes in all cities.
Corporate cooperation in telecommuting.
Uhm...capitol punishment for the Ken Lay types? :-)
BroD
· 1 year ago
How about we fix municipal sewer systems? Yeah, I know, not particularly visionary and all that but kinda worth doing--ya know?
cab02149
· 1 year ago
Mass transportation within cities first and foremost. City to City last. Improved air traffic control system. Improve the electric grid. Increase alternate sources of energy but really get into co-generation in the home. Fix bridges. Honda, Toyota, Nissan have fuel cell cars on the roads. Implement them first then, maybe, electrics.. Hydrogen fuel needs a fast track. We need much more primary care. Fast track medical technicians, don't need doctors. Support them with the internet. Need Internet II. Need fiber Optic networks. Need agriculture closer to cities. Need "fairness doctrine". The unregulated media is a propaganda tool. End it now.
burro
· 1 year ago
A major focusing on the oceans and the Gulf of Mexico. I'm not even sure what I mean by that but the oceans are a huge mystery and we are fouling them and destroying the life in them before we have a clue as to what we are losing. And we are losing a lot. Fast.
Really, both the earths megaflora and the oceans should be surveyed and inventoried and real action should be taken to understand the earths atmospheric machinery and how we are screwing it up. And then we need to quit screwing it up.
Capitalism needs to be scrutinized and a system more compatible with human survival should be adopted.
Deacon_Blues
· 1 year ago
Lots of good ideas. More trains are definitely a good idea -- I'd love to see the routes this country used in the last century brought back.
As for my own idea, my own two cents, in my humble opinion the best thing we could do for the education system in this country is to do away with all the damned testing. I know too many teachers who spend too much time "teaching the test" instead of teaching thinking and ideas. I don't know what they do in other countries, but surely someone has a better model than ours.
mirth
· 1 year ago
Oh this is a great post! Thanks Sean/John.
A Big Yes to transcontinential, hi-speed trains, and to the other suggestions, expecially a national arts project.
Not near as grand, I would like to see a national emphasis on healthy food grown simply to full ripeness and/or in wholesome conditions in our individual communities. No more huge pig or chicken farms, fewer poisons, and luscious tomatoes. :) And nix completely genetically modified seeds.
Best of all is that we can once again dream of societal advances that benefit people as much as mega-corps.
edit:
One more: no more blasting away our mountaintops to get at coal. Stop this hideous destruction forever.
TimK
· 1 year ago
I think the quickest and best way to make an impact on the transportation front is to build high-speed rail links at short and medium distances between cities. A high-speed line connecting, say, New York and Los Angeles -- or even just New York and Chicago -- would be tremendously expensive and would still have difficulty competing with the point-to-point times offered by air travel. However, at shorter distances high-speed rail CAN compete with air travel very effectively, and putting the bulk of those trips onto trains will help our overburdened air travel system as well.
I strongly believe that we need better mass transit in our cities; the problem is that few of our cities are built in such a way that they can support and take advantage of high-quality mass transit. Until that changes, or at least until our cities change their land-use regulations so that the land uses themselves CAN be reformed, there is no point in building mass-transit systems that no one will use. However, that said, there is significant room for improvement in the mass-transit systems of many of our larger cities that are built in a way that will support it. The most obvious example that comes to mind is the Second Avenue subway line in New York.
ao
· 1 year ago
How about a real "Big Change For A Big Century". Let's do something about this ( http://zfacts.com/p/461.html ) . That is the best investment we can make for our children and grandchildren.
Rob Mule
· 1 year ago
Pinching Bush's squandered pennies won't give our children dreams...
Rob Mule
· 1 year ago
Anyone remember Gerard K. O'Neill's L5 Society? Uncle Sugar's NASA and the big aerospace corps have given us what we have now...sort of like our crony-packed financial system strapped to thrusters except for a few hotbeds of robotic exploration. http://www.orbitalvector.com/Space%20Structures...
Yeah, I was a member of the L5 Society. Still have all the books. I was going to retire in space; they've got 10 years to get it built, or I'll miss the boat!
Bush should resign. If he had any honour he would.
Anyone else notice the deluge of Mormon web adverts???? The folks at HRC had better counter attack the Mormon's on-line charm offensive.
Steve_in_CNJ
· 1 year ago
absolutely. fast trains for passengers AND freight. doesn't have to be magnetic. just get all that 18-wheeler crap off the roads. save some lives and some money. conservatives love to 'rail' against subsidizing rail but, um, do you know how much we subsidize federal roads? something like $40 billion last year. huge subsidy to trucking industry.
mirth
· 1 year ago
No more privately employed soldiers, police officers, prison guards.
All states vote on the same day in the primaries.
Abolish recreational drug penalties and bans.
Establish that no Texan can ever again be elected prez.
End "part time" employment that puts a person just short of benefits.
Require companies to have adequate customer service persons to answer their damn phones.
Hi Nigel! ♥
tbhull
· 1 year ago
Not even Rick "Governor Goodhair" Perry?
Please tell me no.
mirth
· 1 year ago
No! No exceptions!
:)
tbhull
· 1 year ago
Well shave my balls with rusty straight razor on a cold night.
I guess reluctantly or not I must agree.
mirth
· 1 year ago
tb
Not to be too critical, but I could have done without that image now bored into my brain. ;) Besides, there are much better things to do with balls.
Note to self: Mirth, put the bowl down and back away from the keyboard.
MsJoanne
· 1 year ago
AND a National Election Day which is a no-work day.
BooksAlive
· 1 year ago
Railroad companies in Illinois have been stymied in the effort to get to higher speeds like, 100-110 mph, on the Chicago-Springfield-St Louis route. Money was put into developing a high-tech signal system that they couldn't get to work, so they went back to something older and safe, but doesn't allow the higher speeds.
Anyway, the Nov. 25 Daily Kos report on the Kerry-Specter High Speed Rail for America Act of 2008 was posted on our Prairie State Blue website, then we discussed it on Open Left. For more info, go here.
I've sent off a suggestion to Obama's Change.gov about being sure to give voice and visibility to our artists and performers. I can't recall which person it was who inspired me, but I thought that when Barack is inaugurated and gives his Saturday radio and video, he ought to ask for another five minutes and have a representative of some exciting art form take the mic and share his story to help inspire our future writers, speakers and performers.
AdmNaismith
· 1 year ago
"-A national Arts project similar to the Roosevelt’s WPA with the goal of uplifting or refining or further perfecting our humors, society, culture and spaces through traditional arts and new digital uses"
You mean like the naked boobs on the statue at the Dept of Justice? I'm all for that, so long as we cut the defense budget to pay for it.
Boobs, not Bombs.
Hell, if we cut all the funding to that stupid Star Wars program, you could probably pay for the mag-lev train out of left-over petty cash.
unrepentant_expat
· 1 year ago
OT but I guess the thread can handle the traffic. Look at the contrast north of the border...
PRINCE ALBERT, Sask. - A marriage commissioner is suing the Saskatchewan government after being fined $2,500 for refusing to marry a gay couple.
A Saskatchewan human rights tribunal cited Orville Nichols for discrimination in May for refusing to perform the same-sex marriage. Nichols told the tribunal last year that he refused to marry the couple in 2005 because it went against his Baptist faith.
You guys have all swallowed the Kool-Aid. Things like high speed trains or HOV lanes for all or no more private cops are nibbling around the edges.
I would, if asked by President Barry (and even if not so asked) recommend we re-think the issue. The urgent pressing need is for jobs now. Good jobs linked to production, not linked to continuing our consumerist, credit-addicted ways. In sector after sector, we have nothing more complex this mis-allocated resources.
Consider housing. We are facing a lack of affordable housing, and have been for 30 or more years. We also have scads of unemployed construction workers and others desperate to work. The trick is to get those people working, producing the goods we need.
Same thing in almost every area. Education, transport, public services, medical care, infrastructure, etc.
I would open up a series of job centers in every town. (That's a bunch of jobs right there, no?) Those looking for work could register there and get registered. I'd then form producers' councils, in effect, getting all the builders and developers together to develop a plan as to what they need to get these people to work. If they need capital, let them have some of the billions otherwise going to Citi's creditors. And I'd give the whole thing a one year deadline.
I'm sure there are a million reasons to object to this. But if we really committed to do this, we could. Yes, we could.
Kewalo
· 1 year ago
Well, I guess I have drank the kool-aid because my imagination has soared lately and it's just great and been a lot of fun.
I happened to see a Discovery channel show on orbital solar panels and had this vision of getting all our electricity from satellites. Sound crazy? They're working on it as I type.
Some people are also working on buoys that create electricity from waves. Pretty cool huh? Can't you just imagine those buoy supplying all the electricity that an island nation could use?
I really hope to God there are people all over the country that are "drinking the kool-aid" because we need good old fashioned American ingenuity.
I've been thinking about the intercontinental maglev train for a while now. That would be a great infrastructure project that would hire thousands of people. . . If they built one inside a vacuum tunnel it could go so fast that it could compete with airplanes. . we're talking express from NYC to LA in like an hour. The estimated cost of a tunnel maglev from NYC to Europe was about 150 billion. Intercontinental would be cheaper in some respects.
Mark
· 1 year ago
The end of imported oil by 2025
By 2015 all new cars must use renewable energy, no emissions.
50% of all energy produced in the US must be renewable: Solar, wind, geothermal, wave, etc.
A manned mission to another solar system
stefanzo
· 1 year ago
While I'm totally for fast trains, I think there should be caution in high-tech transportation projects - in the end those don't ease the commute problem for average workers. What the New Deal created was a lot of labor intensive projects like building national park buildings. I think some creative LOW tech projects would be best for the meat of the work, plus some selective high-tech 'moon project' type endeavors like advanced photovoltaics or improved battery technology.
gmoke
· 1 year ago
Here in Cambridge, MA we've been doing weatherization barnraisings. The next one will include a blower door and infrared camera before and after test. I would like to see this idea go viral and cross-country. I'd even like to see Obama use his mailing list to kickstart the idea. Weatherization and insulation would have immediate benefits in terms of comfort and energy savings and would pay off within a few months to a couple of years. The savings would certainly help in these hard economic times and the improved energy efficiency would make renewables more feasible as it would reduce the heating and cooling loads so that the solar or wind installations could be smaller and less expensive.
Everybody likes to go directly to solar electricity or windmills but the truth is that weatherization and insulation are necessary first and probably where the most jobs will be. It ain't dramatic but it's real.
stonejaxx
· 1 year ago
great ideas.
I'd like to see monorails going from center city to the high speed train. In school districts without busing, I would love to see mini electric buses ferrying students from depot to school. In some cities they could be cable cars.
white house as environmental example: solar roof ir, a fleet of electric, hybrid, biofuel or hydrogen American made crossover or smaller getting in excess of 35 mpg.
start using state of the art fake grass in parks and urban areas particularly in the south west. Begin offering it to residences.
Nancy Green
· 1 year ago
A new, green New Orleans built by the people who live there.
All Comments
Get rid of the corporate vampires that call themselves "lobbyists" also. Make our elected officials work for US, not be at the whim of their corporate contributors. That should be a crime, anyway; the Founders are probably rolling over in their graves at the idea that a corporation is a "person."
both passenger and freight.
And when we build the electrical infrastructure and the bridges and other works, these structures need to be beautiful and lasting. I'm not talking extravagance, but good design, not the brutal stuff of so much modern engineering.
I live near several TVA dams. They are massive, but beautifully and well built. Even the plan drawings of them are works of art. We need to encourage and celebrate modern design and the new architecture.
If you want a somewhat depressing look at the state of American architecture and urban design, look at Skyscraperpage's "Diagrams of World Skyscraper Construction 2008". http://skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?25002165
Notice how few of the tallest buildings going up are in the US, and compare them with the daring and incredible designs from Dubai and China. The few US entries are timid boxy affairs. Just scan the first few pages.
And I've said before it looks uncomfortable, with it's corner's pulled in, like a basketball player trying to fold his shoulders in..
And I just don't think the top in the diagrams and renderings I've seen is, well, convincing. Like a spike thru a beanie..
And one can play around with the Skyscraper site, and different ways of displaying the building designs (as well as city photos..). I'm sure there is room for some conclusions to be drawn about American power, as revealed in it's buildings..
Turbines just off the atlantic shoreline at all levels from the floor to just below the surface so as not to destroy ship traffic and to destroy sub traffic, but primarily to take advantage of the free flow of the gulf stream to spin turbines to generate electric power without unsightly windmills and with the appropriate covers to protect marine life. Rest assured someone has a patent pending on this one.
Thoughts and ideas having meaning and worth independent of the abstraction of money and today sharing those ideas and working out meta glitches with others worldwide in real time is possible.
With that said, I need more weed.
There are only a couple of wind farms.... one of which is non-operational and falling down and they were getting ready to close the other one....
HOV lanes in all cities.
Corporate cooperation in telecommuting.
Uhm...capitol punishment for the Ken Lay types? :-)
Fix bridges.
Honda, Toyota, Nissan have fuel cell cars on the roads. Implement them first then, maybe, electrics.. Hydrogen fuel needs a fast track.
We need much more primary care. Fast track medical technicians, don't need doctors. Support them with the internet.
Need Internet II.
Need fiber Optic networks.
Need agriculture closer to cities.
Need "fairness doctrine". The unregulated media is a propaganda tool. End it now.
Really, both the earths megaflora and the oceans should be surveyed and inventoried and real action should be taken to understand the earths atmospheric machinery and how we are screwing it up. And then we need to quit screwing it up.
Capitalism needs to be scrutinized and a system more compatible with human survival should be adopted.
As for my own idea, my own two cents, in my humble opinion the best thing we could do for the education system in this country is to do away with all the damned testing. I know too many teachers who spend too much time "teaching the test" instead of teaching thinking and ideas. I don't know what they do in other countries, but surely someone has a better model than ours.
A Big Yes to transcontinential, hi-speed trains, and to the other suggestions, expecially a national arts project.
Not near as grand, I would like to see a national emphasis on healthy food grown simply to full ripeness and/or in wholesome conditions in our individual communities. No more huge pig or chicken farms, fewer poisons, and luscious tomatoes. :) And nix completely genetically modified seeds.
Best of all is that we can once again dream of societal advances that benefit people as much as mega-corps.
edit:
One more: no more blasting away our mountaintops to get at coal. Stop this hideous destruction forever.
I strongly believe that we need better mass transit in our cities; the problem is that few of our cities are built in such a way that they can support and take advantage of high-quality mass transit. Until that changes, or at least until our cities change their land-use regulations so that the land uses themselves CAN be reformed, there is no point in building mass-transit systems that no one will use. However, that said, there is significant room for improvement in the mass-transit systems of many of our larger cities that are built in a way that will support it. The most obvious example that comes to mind is the Second Avenue subway line in New York.
Uncle Sugar's NASA and the big aerospace corps have given us what we have now...sort of like our crony-packed financial system strapped to thrusters except for a few hotbeds of robotic exploration.
http://www.orbitalvector.com/Space%20Structures...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=Articl...
The most impressive commitment to Arts funding since LBJ. Must Read:
"Coming and Going in Style"
at: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/18384
Anyone else notice the deluge of Mormon web adverts???? The folks at HRC had better counter attack the Mormon's on-line charm offensive.
All states vote on the same day in the primaries.
Abolish recreational drug penalties and bans.
Establish that no Texan can ever again be elected prez.
End "part time" employment that puts a person just short of benefits.
Require companies to have adequate customer service persons to answer their damn phones.
Hi Nigel! ♥
Please tell me no.
:)
I guess reluctantly or not I must agree.
Not to be too critical, but I could have done without that image now bored into my brain. ;) Besides, there are much better things to do with balls.
Note to self: Mirth, put the bowl down and back away from the keyboard.
Anyway, the Nov. 25 Daily Kos report on the Kerry-Specter High Speed Rail for America Act of 2008 was posted on our Prairie State Blue website, then we discussed it on Open Left. For more info, go here.
I've sent off a suggestion to Obama's Change.gov about being sure to give voice and visibility to our artists and performers. I can't recall which person it was who inspired me, but I thought that when Barack is inaugurated and gives his Saturday radio and video, he ought to ask for another five minutes and have a representative of some exciting art form take the mic and share his story to help inspire our future writers, speakers and performers.
You mean like the naked boobs on the statue at the Dept of Justice? I'm all for that, so long as we cut the defense budget to pay for it.
Boobs, not Bombs.
Hell, if we cut all the funding to that stupid Star Wars program, you could probably pay for the mag-lev train out of left-over petty cash.
PRINCE ALBERT, Sask. - A marriage commissioner is suing the Saskatchewan government after being fined $2,500 for refusing to marry a gay couple.
A Saskatchewan human rights tribunal cited Orville Nichols for discrimination in May for refusing to perform the same-sex marriage. Nichols told the tribunal last year that he refused to marry the couple in 2005 because it went against his Baptist faith.
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/sask_same_se...
I would, if asked by President Barry (and even if not so asked) recommend we re-think the issue. The urgent pressing need is for jobs now. Good jobs linked to production, not linked to continuing our consumerist, credit-addicted ways. In sector after sector, we have nothing more complex this mis-allocated resources.
Consider housing. We are facing a lack of affordable housing, and have been for 30 or more years. We also have scads of unemployed construction workers and others desperate to work. The trick is to get those people working, producing the goods we need.
Same thing in almost every area. Education, transport, public services, medical care, infrastructure, etc.
I would open up a series of job centers in every town. (That's a bunch of jobs right there, no?) Those looking for work could register there and get registered. I'd then form producers' councils, in effect, getting all the builders and developers together to develop a plan as to what they need to get these people to work. If they need capital, let them have some of the billions otherwise going to Citi's creditors. And I'd give the whole thing a one year deadline.
I'm sure there are a million reasons to object to this. But if we really committed to do this, we could. Yes, we could.
I happened to see a Discovery channel show on orbital solar panels and had this vision of getting all our electricity from satellites. Sound crazy? They're working on it as I type.
Some people are also working on buoys that create electricity from waves. Pretty cool huh? Can't you just imagine those buoy supplying all the electricity that an island nation could use?
I really hope to God there are people all over the country that are "drinking the kool-aid" because we need good old fashioned American ingenuity.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/visi...
http://money.cnn.com/2006/12/14/magazines/fsb/n...
By 2015 all new cars must use renewable energy, no emissions.
50% of all energy produced in the US must be renewable: Solar, wind, geothermal, wave, etc.
A manned mission to another solar system
Everybody likes to go directly to solar electricity or windmills but the truth is that weatherization and insulation are necessary first and probably where the most jobs will be. It ain't dramatic but it's real.
I'd like to see monorails going from center city to the high speed train. In school districts without busing, I would love to see mini electric buses ferrying students from depot to school. In some cities they could be cable cars.
white house as environmental example: solar roof ir, a fleet of electric, hybrid, biofuel or hydrogen American made crossover or smaller getting in excess of 35 mpg.
start using state of the art fake grass in parks and urban areas particularly in the south west. Begin offering it to residences.