Rich Kids
My latest advice is for rich kids - those children who come from the extremely wealthy families and end up with fucked up lives because they don't need to work and everything is given to them and they have no purpose and so don't understand life. This is directed at them and it's mostly about spending their money.
The first idea was to hire a bunch of tanker trucks to suck up water from the floods in Texas and drive them to Arizona and California to be used on forest fires.
Sounds dumb, right? Sure it is. Essentially it's a joke, something a comedian would say. But the
reason they would say it is because it seems like the most logical answer to the problem: one part of the country is too dry; one part of the country is too wet. Well, why not take the water from the
too wet part and put it on the
too dry part? Simple, right?
Of course it's simple - if the country was 20 times smaller. And the fact that there was some oil mixed in with foodwaters in Oklahoma probably wouldn't make it much good for fighting forest fires. (Can you imagine that? It makes me chuckle. Good joke to follow up with in that fiction act I talked about.)
But maybe it could help a little bit. And if you've got access to large amounts of money, why not try it, simply because the only things stopping it from happening are logistics and money and the latter can help enormously with the former.
So fill some tanker trucks with flood waters and drive them to AZ and CA. Better yet, fly them there. (I don't know how easy that is. Can you attach tankers to the bottom of a super-strong helicopter? [Aren't there helicopters that carry ship containers?] Or would you have to drive them into one of those huge military-style planes? [Also a cross-country trip by helicopter seems ....um.... - doesn't seem feasible; I don't know how long helicopters go for and whether it's hard to fly them long distances.]) Let the firefighters hook up hoses and compressors to the tanker trucks and use the water to fight the fire. Rent fifty of them. That seems like a significantly absurd number. And they could rotate, coming in and out, constantly driving back and forth (perhaps you could switch out the drivers), like one of those conveyer belts that scoops up grain from a silo and then drops it in a truck.
Just try it. It might actually help.
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Idea two: There was
a story in the New York Times yesterday (July 19th) about a woman who was attacked in a housing project in West Palm Beach, Florida. Now my response to these incidents is always visceral; I want to put snipers on top the buildings and have someone point out the aggressors, or bail them out of jail so I can take them somewhere and execute them myself (well, probably not
myself but I imagine someone doing it). But from reading the story it seems what is needed is some security around the projects. Maybe someone from the outside could fund 20 or 50 or 100 people to be private security force for the complex, much like a UN security force in an unstable country. (The parallels between poor African American society and war-torn African nations popped into my head and make me a bit uncomfortable.) (Aha! The common factor is
poverty, not race. I knew I was being stupid.)
But I wouldn't mind paying someone to assassinate the rapists, either.
A third idea would be to relocate the victim and her son or a number of or
all of the families from the housing project to one of the new condo buildings that are going up in the area. Imagine that: buying condos for 100 families and tranfering them out of a housing project into a brand-new luxury building. I'm sure the owners would go crazy and fight it (and they would probably find a way to block them, even if you paid for the condos outright) but I think it would be a pretty cool project.
That said, it's also easy to imagine that they would bring the "culture" with them; that there might be people living in the projects who are dealing drugs or are in gangs and then would then be in the new living space as well, causing problems there. There's no guarantee that a new location would shake off the problems. And the new owners might bring some bad habits with them from the projects that might get them kicked out of the building - things they were not as fastidious about before that condo associations and building owners enforce. But I could be wrong and they could be fierce in their new ownership. It would be an interesting experiment.
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That same day in the New York Times there was
an editorial about gangs and a Congressional bill aimed at curbing them. The approach of the bill is apparently a law-and-order approach, which the Times says has been proven not to work and just alienates the community and ends up putting the wrong people in jail, including children.
What
does seem to work (or at least the Times thinks so) are programs for children that keep them from getting
in to gangs. But it's difficult to fund such efforts, so it would help if someone would step up and maybe contribute to starting programs for kids around the city and particularly in those areas that are especially plagued by gangs.
Maybe funding could be expanded for a program that's already working, allowing it to work with more people or open new centers. And if the funders volunteered at the center one day a month, just to hang out with the kids or help them study or tutor them or just
play with them, maybe that would be a way to find something of meaning for them, to feel connected to other people and their lives.
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Today I'm reading about greening - specifically,
a column in
Slate that talks about how journalists are slipping in their objectivity regarding green technology and activities.
Whenever I read about green technology, I want to expand it. I want to do something crazy, like outfit 100 homes in one area with solar panels that cut their electricity bills by 70%. (Did anyone read the story about the guy in New Jersey with the windmill who cut his electric bills to $9.50 a month?) ("Windmill Cuts Bills, but Neighbors Don't Want to Hear It," NYT, July 11)
The logical place for this to happen (or
start) is in California, where the sun seems to shine every day all day. But I would like to see it happen anywhere - here in the Washington, D.C. area would be fine - as long as it realistically demonstrated the power of solar panels to cut people's power bills.
What I tend to not know about is the whole conversion situation: is it easy to wire the solar power into the power you use in your house or is that tricky and you have to save it in a battery and use it for specific things? I guess I should educate myself about that.
When I think about this area, I think about my brother who lives in Maryland, where people have had their power rates raised 50% in the last two years as a result of deregulation. Isn't deregulation supposed to make prices go
down?
