I had never heard of the Detroit People Mover before reading the excellent article below. The guy writing the article is absolutely correct. When you let government bureaucrats control what infrastructure projects should be undertaken, they will fuck it up beyond all hope. The three mile long Detroit People Mover is 25 years old and it costs the city $10 million per year to run. The idiots who built it projected ridership of 75,000 per day. Ridership is 5,000 per day. Missed by that much. Obama and his union minions would scorn the suggestions made in this article. They believe that government knows best. They believe the people need to obey, not think. Entreprenuership is evil. Anyone trying to make a profit must be punished. There is no hope for Detroit or this country with the government and their corporate fascist cronies in control.
Viewpoint: Big project binge fueled Motor City meltdown
When I hear free-spending national leaders call for more infrastructure investment, I think of Detroit’s absurd People Mover monorail gliding above empty streets. That’s unfair, I know. Yet the city’s epic tragedy, which entered a new stage last week when Mayor Dave Bing lost financial control, provides broader perspective on the potential consequences of mixing economic distress with bad policy making.
Here are five somewhat contradictory lessons from the Motor City’s sad history that relate to the larger national debate about America’s future.
Lesson No. 1: Government can do good things. Long before Ford’s Model T’s, Detroit — the “Straits” — rose as a great inland port because of large-scale public investment. The economic ecosystem of Great Lakes cities depended on the access to the East Coast created by a farsighted public servant, DeWitt Clinton, who used public funds to dig the Erie Canal.
Detroit’s early entrepreneurs, such as Hiram Walker (who avoided Michigan’s puritanical streak by distilling his Canadian Club Whiskey a few miles across the Canadian border), would never have set up shop without water access to the Atlantic. In the early 19th century, private financial markets weren’t developed enough to finance a great canal.
Erie Canal
The antecedent of the Erie Canal doesn’t refute the People Mover example, but the juxtaposition of the two projects as bookends of Detroit’s history provides necessary nuance. Public infrastructure investment can do much good and much harm. The canal was valuable because it reduced transportation costs along an important route. No new infrastructure today is likely to reproduce that magic; it is much easier to get around the country now than it was in 1820.
The canal’s success also reminds us that financing can determine function. As Adam Smith emphasized 237 years ago, investments such as the Erie Canal that are expected to cover their full costs with user fees are more likely to deliver real value. That lesson seems lost on the authors of the Senate’s proposed budget for 2014, which offers $50 billion more for transportation investment, in keeping with our unhealthy new pattern of funding highways with general tax revenue.
The correct middle path between untrammeled spending and parsimony is to favor robust outlays on projects developed by public-private partnerships that will recoup their expenditures with tolls rather than taxes.
Lesson No. 2: It takes a cluster. There was a dustup last summer when President Barack Obama echoed Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s statement that no one ever got rich on their own. The political implication that they seemed to draw — that the U.S. needs more public spending — wasn’t logical to me. Nonetheless, the statement carries much truth. Henry Ford bestrides our economic history like a colossus, but he was no solitary actor.
Ford was a protege of Thomas Edison and became deeply embedded in Detroit’s cluster of automotive genius. The Dodge Brothers, the Fisher Brothers, David Dunbar Buick, Ransom Olds and William Durant (in nearby Flint) were some of the automotive innovators connected throughout greater Detroit. These men supplied each other with parts, financing and, above all, ideas. Collectively, they created the affordable automobile: A tremendous gift to America’s far-flung farmers and the nation’s would-be commuters.
No decent idea has ever been created in a vacuum, and Detroit, like Silicon Valley in the 1970s, reminds us that America is great because our metropolitan areas have enabled the collaborative competition of connected entrepreneurs.
Innovative clusters
This doesn’t imply that local governments can magically create innovative clusters or that we should just increase public spending. But it does suggest that we all depend on the genius of others. Investing intelligently in education, particularly in math and science through charter schools, increases the odds of empowering potential innovators. Opening our borders to talented foreigners by increasing the size of the H-1B visa program is an even easier way to strengthen the talent pool.
Lesson No. 3: Manufacturing is an unreliable source of employment. Detroit’s problems have often been associated with the failures of the automobile industry, but that’s a mistaken view. Detroit’s decline as a city began in the 1950s and ’60s, which were golden years for the Big Three automakers. Its downfall has more to do with the Big Three’s success than their failures.
The industry followed a standard pattern. During an initial phase, small manufacturing startups cluster in cities, but as they come to require larger factories, they move from the urban core to sites such as River Rouge, Michigan. Ultimately, corporate logistics enable production anywhere with fewer and fewer workers. The Big Three are still alive after a century (albeit with federal help), but their endurance doesn’t entail much more employment in the Detroit area. Similarly, the U.S.’s continued strength in manufacturing hasn’t done much to reduce underemployment, because most manufacturing is so highly capital-intensive.
Moreover, manufacturing’s success has a downside. Big corporate structures can crowd out alternative entrepreneurial activities. My work with Bill Kerr and Sari Pekkala Kerr showed that cities that were endowed with valuable mines at the start of the 20th century developed larger mining and manufacturing companies but ended up with less entrepreneurship and growth at the end of the century.
The Big Three sucked in talent and turned a former hub of entrepreneurship into a place defined by large corporate hierarchies.
Urban renewal
Lesson No. 4: The government can also do foolish things. As Detroit’s job dynamo sputtered, and cars enabled suburbanization, both local and federal governments took action. The federal government sponsored urban-renewal projects that built new structures, often in declining areas that didn’t need them, along with local public-transport projects, such as the People Mover. Detroit’s longtime mayor, Coleman Young, favored large-scale construction projects (another arena anyone?) and industrial policy, such as using eminent domain, to create General Motors Co.‘s Hamtramck plant.
These policies relied on three errors. First, they followed a Potemkin Village strategy that favored visible, physical projects rather than building up the human capital that is the real source of urban success. Second, they accepted the magical thinking that large-scale infrastructure projects will reinvent a place, instead of evaluating each project with careful cost- benefit analysis. Third, these policies assumed that the public sector could figure out long-term job creation. The best policy for local economic development is to attract and train smart people and then get out of their way.
Lesson No. 5: The American dream can go terribly wrong and we aren’t on a good path.
Detroit, like the rest of the country, can only come back if the power of its human capital is unleashed. That can only happen with better education, limited regulations and stricter rule of law. To improve education, Detroit should follow New Orleans and move toward a system that is primarily made up of charter schools.
Bing should take a meat cleaver to the rules that make life difficult for would-be entrepreneurs, such as food-truck operators. My colleagues at the Manhattan Institute are helping Detroit to learn from New York’s safety success, and with luck that will also bear fruit.
The broadest lesson of Detroit is that simple-minded nostrums calling for more or less government are foolish. Government can be helpful — and absolutely necessary when it comes to helping the most vulnerable — but also wasteful or worse. To save Detroit, smart government must provide good schools and safe streets, and eschew foolish infrastructure spending and unnecessary regulations.
Administrator says:
The Detroit People Mover Still Serves
as “a Rich Folks’ Roller Coaster”
A poor city subsidizes 20 years of failure
By Ken Braun |
The Detroit People Mover, a light rail transportation system, celebrated its 20th birthday in July. More than a year before People Mover opened in 1987, Time magazine printed an unflattering preview of the coming attraction titled “Horizontal Elevator to Nowhere.” Estimating the project to be a year late and 50 percent over budget, Time detailed numerous defects and problems, with the most notable mistake being the decision to build it at all. One Detroit resident was quoted as saying that it was “a rich folks’ roller coaster,” and a Reagan administration transit chief predicted that it could become “the least cost-effective transit project in the last 20 years.” The People Mover has repeatedly revisited these themes as if they were stations on its tiny circuit.
The system is a model of inefficiency. According to reports submitted to the Federal Transit Administration for the decade 1997-2006, the People Mover’s operational costs exceeded $3 per passenger mile every year and topped $5 per passenger mile for five of those years. In 1999, it spiked to $14.64. Consider that New York City’s famously efficient subways regularly run at around 30 cents per passenger mile and that most of Michigan’s largest city bus systems do the job for around $1 or less — including the Detroit Department of Transportation buses that run within the People Mover’s route.
The federal government’s estimated number of daily rides steadily eroded from 70,000 to 20,000 as the People Mover project stumbled from planning toward completion. After the first eight months in operation, The Detroit News reported that the government’s daily rider expectation was just 16,500, and that even this would probably not be met because only 13,207 daily rides had been given during its very best single month to that point.
The “people” are still not being moved. According to a December 2006 Detroit News article, about 10 percent of the tram’s seats are used, and ridership figures reported to the FTA for 2006 worked out to 6,323 rides per day. Largely because Detroit hosted a Super Bowl during the reporting period, the underwhelming total for 2006 reflects the best People Mover year of any of the previous 10. For the four prior years, the rides per day worked out to an average of just 3,915.
Some years were worse. A People Mover station was planned to help the financially struggling yet historic J.L. Hudson retail outlet, but the store closed its doors before the system was completed, leaving a track that still went past an empty 439-foot-tall building. Before imploding the old store in October of 1998, then-Mayor Dennis Archer stated, “Today, we say goodbye to years of frustration.” But frustration continued for the People Mover, as falling rubble damaged the track. The resulting service delays through 1999 cut usage that year to 2,090 rides per day.
Mayor Coleman Young was the People Mover’s original champion and the first to experience its frustrations. When ridership during the first year was falling well short of expectations, he proposed a city budget that would have increased the system’s subsidy from $5.9 million to $8.3 million. Demonstrating questionable priorities, his budget also proposed a $9.8 million cut to the city police. This would have eliminated 264 law enforcement jobs at a time when the violent crime rate was rising and people were referring to the Motor City as the “Murder City.”
This subsidy eventually became standard practice. For most of the past decade, 85 to 90 percent of the annual bill for the system’s operating expenses has come from the city budget — usually over $8 million and sometimes more than $10 million — in a city with one of the nation’s highest poverty rates. Ironically, a 2004 survey by The Detroit News revealed that fewer than 30 percent of the People Mover’s riders are Detroit residents.
Another telling statistic about the users: Ride figures for Saturdays routinely dwarf those for weekdays. The vast majority of the system’s users are clearly suburbanites and out-of-town visitors, who pay only a 50 cent-per-ride fare that regularly covers less than 10 percent of the line’s annual operating cost (and often less than 5 percent). The People Mover celebrates many wasteful accomplishments as it turns 20, but few stand taller than fulfilling what that wise Detroiter predicted back in 1986: It really is a rich folks’ roller coaster.
Ken Braun is a policy analyst for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
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23rd March 2013 at 11:43 am
a cruel accountant says:
Michigan got rid of collective bargaining.
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23rd March 2013 at 11:53 am
Stucky says:
I’ve riden that baby many times. Cool ride, like Disney’s monorail.
The ride snakes through downtown Detroit. In other words, for less than a buck you get to see what a shithole that city is. Very educational.
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23rd March 2013 at 12:37 pm
nof says:
Archived footage of the people mover debates: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEZjzsnPhnw
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23rd March 2013 at 1:16 pm
Thunderbird says:
The author says: “Detroit, like the rest of the country, can only come back if the power of its human capital is unleashed.”
What human capital is he talking about?
Then he really sticks his foot in his mouth when he says:
“That can only happen with better education, limited regulations and stricter rule of law.”
He uses New Orleans charter schools as an example of education.
He uses most of his intelligent words to tell you story but hardly anything goes into real solutions. Intellectual word fog.
Our educational system from the top down has failed us so our educational system will add little to nothing to the solution. Also our education districts are run by public unions and administrators not interested in finding a solution; but rather getting paychecks. They are paid way too much.
Limited regulations? Which ones in particular? Generalizations?
Stricter rule of law? Punishment… What does he mean? People need to feel hope not punishment for an already bad situation.
People need to see a new model. Present government and monopoly corporations cannot provide that model because the function of these entities is to control and to suck out the life blood of the community. The Detroit slums have nothing to offer but big chunks of land that can be plowed and farmed or made into large commercial developments. How will this help the people now living in those areas?
The people currently living there cannot adopt to standard commercial development under the current codes of the government and policies of the corporations. They need something else. They need a simple economy under different codes and policies. Look there for solutions; not the current system.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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23rd March 2013 at 1:40 pm
Kill Bill says:
WHy not just change the city name to “Detollet” and be done with it.
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23rd March 2013 at 2:37 pm
Stucky says:
Detroit human capital unleashed
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23rd March 2013 at 4:45 pm
Ron says:
Whatever the government states,the opposite is the truth. Like single payer Obama care well save money.
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23rd March 2013 at 6:14 pm
TeresaE says:
Having lived my entire life in Michigan, and more than 15(!) years around Detroit, he gives a semi-liberal, thumbnail sketch of the truth.
1. The reason that small biz didn’t/doesn’t survive in areas with giant subsidies – like the disaster Hamtramck plant – is that in order to pay for them, they go after the little guys. Detroit has, has had, and will continue to have, the highest tax rates in the state – unless you are one of the gifted cronies.
2. The People Mugger opened up in the mid 80s when the crack epidemic exploded in the formerly prosperous, primarily middle class, neighborhoods that were still trying to hang on. It was doomed to fail from the start, as the middle class flight continued unabated and all that was left was the scum and indigent. I can remember reading about multiple crimes on it during the 80s. Thankfully, by the late 90s, the crime was down but the decay in the city had spread, thus making the PM a continued waste of money.
3. Trying to teach the 50% (or more, lots of things in our environments are ABSOLUTELY adding to the increased lowering of our IQs, but that’s another rant) that are INCAPABLE of higher learning in math and science is futile, at best. Hiring a few dozen Ivy League teachers doesn’t change the fact that Detroit students – by and large, not all – are physically/psychologically unable to learn higher levels of much of anything. Why can’t we – especially liberals – SPEAK the truth. A person with an IQ below 100 is going to have one helluva rough time every grasping – and being able to use – trigonometry or advanced chemistry. Smarter education would help, more money and higher overall standards will continue to produce diminishing results, just like they have been for decades.
4. H1-B visas have been/are being used to depress the wages in the technology (and other) job markets. We are allowing the same number of H1-Bs in (and their families too, whom can work), that we were during the HEIGHT of the tech boom. The same number. Does anyone here think that there are same number of high tech/computer jobs there were in 1999? If you do, you are delusional, cause they are long, long, gone. Until our current grads and older experienced workers are employed in tech and science again, we are fools to import their competition while we pay for the American families food stamps. Pet peeve of mine that I gave up bitching about long ago. People don’t want to believe that we lost millions of upper 5 and 6 figure jobs in 2000. See what Homeland Security, vaccinations and the murder business is good for?
Once again someone that almost gets it, put is way too good at pointing out symptoms and lousy at identifying root causes.
Detroit was destroyed by inhibiting entrepreneurship, discouraging pride in home/business ownership by taxing success and home maintenance AND income, and the welfare systems enabling of the continued breakdown of families.
Since none of the solutions paraded about ever include things like teaching self-pride, hard work, accountability, competition and the love of learning, it doesn’t matter what the progressive morons, or conservative ones for that matter, think.
As for the PM, it needed closed down years ago. But without bankruptcy and between the liberal do-gooders and the unions, it ain’t going anywhere.
I rode it for the last time about eight years ago. In the late 90s it was pretty-clean (for Detroit), mostly safe (if you did not get off at the wrong stops) and kinda fun. In ’05/’06 it was filthy and much scarier than a few years before. Or I just got wiser.
Either way, shut the POS down before maintenance is neglected to the point someone dies. It’s in Detroit, so that is just a matter of time.
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23rd March 2013 at 9:40 pm
mabuk says:
“Detroit, like the rest of the country, can only come back if the power of its human capital is unleashed. That can only happen with better education, limited regulations and stricter rule of law.”
No doubt, education is primary of any solution (because we are a democracy at least in name, so it follows that issues of regulations and subsidies can only be argued to approximate success by an educated public electing approximately successful leadership to speak for it), but education is just a barge where every turn of the wheel takes a generation to see the outcome. Assuming we agree to take a very recent success story from New Orleans as the model and scale that out immediately and sparing no expense or special interest group (pardon the absurdity, this is just a thought experiment) then we could expect to see little result for a period of 20 years. Given our historical trends in natural resource consumption, productivity, debt, attention spans and critical thinking skills in the public at large, etc., is it possible to imagine this heroic cavalry arriving in time? Further, can our current culture — born out of poor stewardship during the previous two generations — steer this ship or even rationally discuss our present course? Does the average Joe even know where the wheelhouse is at this point?
To paraphrase GK Chesterton, it’s not that the American public can’t see the solution, they can’t even see the problem.
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23rd March 2013 at 10:13 pm
Novista says:
TeresaE
That damn PM looks like it rolled off the set of a Batman movie.
What do you know about the real history of the Erie Canal? From my reading, it appears ‘internal improvements’ were code for cronyism and corruption.
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23rd March 2013 at 11:00 pm
Thunderbird says:
TeresaE: Could it be that the 50% of children in Detroit that cannot grasp higher education still have the slave mentality from their ancestors in their genes?
The ghettos are a big problem for the cities. The ghettos are the containers for these types of people you are talking about that can’t be educated in the highers levels of math and science. These people are fine with living off the back of society; and the politicians accommodate them.
So what is the solution?
What about putting them on reservations like we did the Indians?
Did that statement trigger a response in the binary part of your brain? If it did then you now know how in the box your thinking is contained.
Detroit is the result of the collective binary thinking that exists there. It is not going to get better until this thinking pattern changes in the people there. Good luck with that. It will take a major shock to wake people up and then once awake people may not be able to handle it. It is more comfortable to live in the lie.
Whenever anything is changed and leaves its bounds, instantly this brings death to that which was before. LUCRETIUS
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23rd March 2013 at 2:27 pm
llpoh says:
Teresa said “A person with an IQ below 100 is going to have one helluva rough time every grasping – and being able to use – trigonometry or advanced chemistry. ”
She is quite correct. The problem is very serious.
Half the nations people have IQ’s below 100. These people will indeed struggle,a s a group, to learn math or science – even basic math or science. Much less cumputer tech/info tech/etc.
So just what the fuck is this half the population going to do in the modern world to add value? Low level, grunt-work manufacturing jobs hae disappeared, and are disappearing. Farming is automated. Etc etc etc. So that leaves manual labor such as gardening, and service jobs like Walmart and McDonald’s for this half of the population.
So half of the population will not be able to acquire the skills necessary to reach a reasonable standard of living almost no matter what they do. Of the remaining half, a lot of folks will not make good decisions, etc., and will also not acquire good skills. Others will have a bad temperment. Or addictions. Or personal issues. Etc.
So, in my estimation, there are perhaps 1/4 of the population that is going to be smart enough driven enough, educated enough, etc., to compete in a global market and make a reasonable standard of living.
The middle class is no more. It is over. The numbers will continue to plummet. There will be the top quartile, and then there will be everyone else.
If anyone disagrees, please explain to me what jobs the bottom half are going to be able to do so as to compete in a global economy so as to command high wages.
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23rd March 2013 at 6:35 pm
Olga says:
Labors place at the table was decided long ago – they are not welcome – particularly when they get uppity and go out on strike. What better way to deal with labor than to off-shore the whole lot of them.
Perhaps Detroit’s problems stem from the “power” labor had in achieving an unacceptable slice of the pie – but no worries – between the corrupt unions and politicians Detroit is once again at the forefront of what Capital can do when it controls government. First you get the Erie Canal – then the GDP moves to China.
Germany’s appreciation for labor AND education has given them a strong manufacturing base joined with an educated work-force. Not perfect but still an interesting set of priorities.
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23rd March 2013 at 7:22 pm
AWD says:
“Half the nations people have IQ’s below 100″
i wonder if it’s the 100 million on welfare half that are paid to reproduce and vote, and have no interest in jobs, education or family. This has gone on for 40 years, the government has sponsored reproduction of people otherwise unable to support themselves or have families. The whole scheme is upside-down, as educated people now have massive debt and no jobs. Better to be on welfare, or (hope and pray) the gold standard of entitlement programs: disability.
They built a light rail in St. Louis also. It ran from E. St. Louis to downtown. The only problem was E. St. Louis is a destitute shithole. The democrats spent tens of millions on this light rail so their underprivileged population would have a free ride to jobs downtown. The only problem was, they could barely read or write. And nobody was interested in getting a job anyway; they didn’t have to. They live on a democratic slave plantation, just like every other one in the U.S. Taxpayers got nailed again for a useless rail system that nobody ever uses. People can’t even take the rail to football games because E. St. Louis is far to dangerous to leave your car or even wait for light rail train to come.
Meet the fine Mayor Alvin Parks of E. St. Louis. Bringing home the free shit for years now
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23rd March 2013 at 7:38 pm
Thunderbird says:
llpoh asks: “please explain to me what jobs the bottom half are going to be able to do so as to compete in a global economy so as to command high wages?”
Did you not say before that, that the middle class is gone?
We are headed into a collective society where individualism is gone in conscious thought. Reflect on this a minute…
What types of societies in nature are collective in nature? How about Ants and Bees.
Ants and Bees don’t think about wages for what they do and they are totally dedicated to the Queen so high wages are becoming a non factor in the future. And the added bonus is Ants or Bees in the colony don’t compete; they work together. So all types of labor jobs can be created at the pleasure of the Queen to keep the Ants or the Bees busy.
Collective societies have always lowered the IQ of humanity in our human history. So you can sleep well knowing that high wages are no longer a factor to worry about.
Communism has been growing in this country for some time now. So no one should be surprised that the schools are not raising the IQ of our children. This is a product of collective societies.
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23rd March 2013 at 12:19 am
NickelthroweR says:
Greetings,
One thing not mentioned in the article is the fact that 50% of the inhabitants of Detroit are functionally illiterate. We must ask ourselves how a public educational system that spends $100,000+ dollars per child produces an adult that can not read, write or understand basic math. Clearly that system is broken.
As Benjamin Franklin observed long ago:
I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.
I agree with Mr. Franklin and believe that we must have a means test for any public assistance. Those that can not read and write should be denied public assistance. After a few thousand of them starve to death in the street, the rest will quickly begin to value education. As a nation, we are willing to sacrifice our soldiers (I was a soldier for 8 years) for the greater good so why not sacrifice a few of the poor? Tough love is the only way forward.
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23rd March 2013 at 2:26 pm
TeresaE says:
Thunderbird
I didn’t say that 50% of Detroit’s kids have a below 100 IQ, I said OUR nation.
If we looked at just Detroit, throw in the fact that most of the best and brightest fled decades ago, I’ll bet it is closer to 75%.
You’re funny, throw them in the reservation. What the hell would you call Detroit, the south side of Chicago, Gary, Indiana, Trenton, New Jersey?
The ghettos ARE the reservations and they “put” themselves – and their own families – there without us herding them. Most CHOOSE to live in squalor and poverty and crime-ridden neighborhoods. The privilege of living in the shithole is expensive. Rents are higher than in most ‘burbs, car and house insurance is nearly double and you have a 3% income tax paid to the city (only around 12 cities in Michigan have income tax). It is a CHOICE to stay there.
Why can’t we face TRUTH? The TRUTH is that not ALL PEOPLE are intelligent enough to gain value from advanced educations.
Grandstanding, calling “fairness” and trying to equate the truth with disguised racism is what we have been doing for the past 40 years. When are we going to try something that might work?
Reality is that NO culture has ALL highly-intelligent people. The really advanced cultures recognize each individual’s value and set the individual up to succeed by giving them the training and education they can actually use, not just the cookie-cutter endorsed by a committee of unionists and Ivy Tower educators.
Reality is that spending more money trying to turn round pegs into square pegs won’t work. Proof is in the fact it HASN’T WORKED UNTIL NOW!
No, what I suggest is making people WORK, even if said work is shoveling shit, cleaning up trash or washing windows for their free shit.
Of course I’ve always advocated that high school ends at 16 for the majority and that only those that are CAPABLE of higher learning move on. Those that aren’t should be taught how to run a household, hold a job (any job), advance at a job (show up, do your job, etc), basic contracts and using the internet to learn things – not just Facebook and look at porn.
BUT, the unions won’t allow the FSA to do “their” jobs. People don’t want to work – nor hold anyone responsible for destroying their neighborhoods, they want “fairness” and free shit.
This is the reason why I’m firmly in the “nothing can be done to stop it” camp now.
Even bright, aware, awake, citizens are still clueless when it comes to the human experience and reality.
Spending trillions to teach kids with IQs of 85 to learn higher math will only accomplish 3 things: 1-waste our money, 2- further entrench cronies & unions and 3-frustrate the kids to the point they NEVER learn anything again after escaping the public schools.
You do realize that over 75% of people in this country NEVER read another book again after leaving school. NEVER AGAIN. I think a large part of this is because or one-sized fits all education turns off the lower IQs and frustrates them to the point they learn to detest education and growth – even self-education and self-growth.
Yet we are so conceited as to think that with the right level of spending and the right unionist, progressive teachers that magically these same people are going to become rocket scientists or engineers?
bwaaahaaaaa. good one.
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23rd March 2013 at 8:17 pm
llpoh says:
Teresa – nice stuff. You forgot to mention that many of the low IQ kids go on to become …. teachers. Despite not being able to read/spell/write/do math.
The quality and IQ of teachers has dropped markedly over the years. Ain’t that special.
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23rd March 2013 at 8:24 pm
Thunderbird says:
TeresaE: I am in total agreement with your observations.
I lived and worked in the Pacific Islands, including Micronesia and Hawaii for 18 years. There are many islands in the Pacific. One of the Islands I lived on for four years was 12 miles long, 3 miles wide, had a sabana and the highest elevation at the dormant volcanic crater was 1650 feet high. The population was 3600 people.
I was so impressed with how the people got along and worked including the infrastructure like water & power (I was the technical adviser for the deputy director of the utilities there) that I wrote a plan of how to lay out a new self contained community to support 3600 people with work and utilities infrastructure. I titled my plan communities of the 21st century. I sent this plan the Jesse Jackson along with a letter asking him to look my plan over and tell me his thoughts if this would work for lifting people out of the ghettos into a better life.
I never got an answer.
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23rd March 2013 at 10:01 pm
Bruce says:
I’d ride the people mover if I ever go to Detroit. Only been there twice and that was long ago. I love trains, trollies, trams about anything that runs on rails or even one rail. When we lived in Dallas we often rode the Dart Rail to downtown and then would ride the trolly up and down McKinney Street. Both my daughter and son loved the trains too. Unfortunately they both liked to ride the bus too so sometimes we took the bus into downtown and came back on the train to the same car park. Commuter rail would probably be a good thing if people would use it but in a lot of places not enough will.
Eventually fuel costs will rise and maybe become so high that rail systems running everywhere like they once did in cities, towns and across the nation will make a come back. Hopefully if that is the case Government will get out of the way, help with removing restrictions and private enterprise can build up the new systems.
As I wright this my O scale trolly runs back and forth on a narrow high shelf around the top of my office room. The people mover monorail though yet another stupid government project could still make for an interesting very colorful model that could run in a very small space.
Anyway even if the gooberment can’t run rail systems ( and they shouldn’t) efficiently or that even make sense trains are still way cool.
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23rd March 2013 at 2:47 am