my sometimes-skeptical social commentary

Archive for February, 2010

Today’s Buffalo News has an editorial encouraging readers to make a comment on the latest stage of the planning process of a new Peace Bridge. I’m commenting on the Peace Bridge web site, but I’m also encouraging people to consider the following.

I’m still waiting for someone to explain why Buffalo would want a new Peace Bridge. The reasons that I’ve heard so far are unconvincing. Here are a few:

1. More traffic. Buffalo will benefit from having more trucks drive through it.
2. More tourists. Buffalo needs another architectural feature to draw people to its West Side.
3. More jobs. Buffalo needs the jobs that would be created for construction workers.

Let’s start with the last one, jobs. Who gets these jobs, residents of Buffalo? I don’t think so. Bridge construction is a specialized field, so the men and women working on a new bridge won’t be from Buffalo. And won’t half of the workers be Canadians?

Next up, tourists. From what I’ve seen of the plans, a new bridge will only be able to be seen from the highway–the already chopped up Front Park will lose even more of its space. There won’t be any place to park near it and take photos. Also, let’s say that there were a nice place to stand and take photos of the bridge. Can anyone point out how that would be a positive impact, economically? Are they seriously expecting a huge increase in postcard sales?

Lastly, more traffic? Seriously, who thinks that would be a good idea? More trucks means more pollution. More asthma for the residents of that neighborhood. More accidents. More noise. Fewer homes. I’ve heard people say that those trucks will stop and buy stuff as they pass through Buffalo. How can people really think that? A trucker who just spent a couple hours waiting to get through customs is not going to find the nearest coffee shop and take a break. Not going to gas up, either. Show me the statistics of how many truckers are currently stopping for gas or coffee once they cross the Peace Bridge.

So, WHY is a new Peace Bridge needed?

The mid-Atlantic is getting a lot of snow, and we want it. They are not capable of handling snow like we are, they don’t want it, they can’t do anything with it, and it’s way more dangerous to people in the Washington DC-area who have no clue how to drive on snowy roads than it is to people here in WNY who have 8 months of the year to practice our snowy-road driving.

Who among us Western New Yorkers doesn’t recall with fondness when we got 6 feet of snow in only 3 days? And wasn’t the October Storm, for all its semi-benign destruction of power lines and cable TV wires, the most calm and relaxing week-long natural disaster in history?

So, it seems odd to those of us who lived through those snowstorms to have to sit back and watch the weather radar, with that distinct line of clouds that just sits right below our border with Pennsylvania. And the constant updates on facebook from our friends in Virginia, the Washington-DC area, and eastern PA–bragging to us about how much snow they’re getting, and how much more is forecast to fall before the storm is over.

And here we are, with some snow on the ground, but without full coverage. Because some of our snow has melted or blown off our lawns, we’re literally green with envy.

I love that there are so many tech gadgets available now. When I was a kid, I was the 2nd person in my Area Code to buy his own Commodore VIC-20. (No, I have no way of proving I was the 2nd…. But I do know that I wasn’t the first, because my friend Craig bought his first.) I never would have dreamed that things like the iPad would ever be created, much less at a price that we commoners could afford.

I am not shopping for cool tech gadgets myself, but I like to know about them. So, I look at their specs, their features, prices, and I even read background articles about how the designs were developed, how they affect (or are affected by) other tech gadgets that are available, etc. With all that info, it is easy to form an opinion, and it is easy to picture how I might use the gadget. But it is not any easier to choose one gadget out of the available set of gadgets.

If I had to actually make a decision and pick one of the new gadgets that has come out in the past month, I don’t know which I would choose. First of all, I don’t think I actually need anything. It’s all a matter of want, which I think most commoners would agree is also the case with them. What can’t we do without gadgets? I probably have more gadgets than I can fully utilize as it is, but please don’t ask me to be circumspect about my consumerism, I don’t know if I have enough headache pills to handle that.

One of my best friends bought a Kindle, and when he showed it to me, I was amazed. It is very good at what it does. And it does some things that aren’t necessarily advertised, which my friend was quick to show me. Cool. If I were a person who does a lot of reading (oh, I miss grad school), I would need a Kindle.

And then along came the iPad, which also lets you do a lot of reading, but it does a lot more than the Kindle, too. And a lot of the things that the iPad does are things that I like to do: look at photos, read web sites, listen to music, find stuff on a map, etc. Cool. If I were a person who didn’t already have a laptop computer, I would need an iPad.

But then I read in the tech news web sites that Google is going to try to get in on this game too. Google published some pictures of what a portable flat computer thingy might look like if it were running the Chrome web browser (which Google gives away for free). Google is also putting out operating systems for mobile phones and computers now, so the only cost involved in using their product is the hardware, which is mainly produced by other people.

You may know that I prefer Apple computers over Windows computers, but I do use Windows (I’m writing this blog entry on an old Windows XP desktop), and I use Linux a lot, too (specifically, ubuntu). My newest computer, a netbook I use for meeting with clients on-site, runs both Windows 7 and the netbook remix of Ubuntu, and I like both of those systems about the same. So, at least in terms of operating systems, I don’t have to choose one–I use whatever is handy at the moment, and whatever best suits the activity or project that I’m working on.

And that’s what guides my decision-making process for the mobile gadgets I started this post with. I have a mobile phone that is not a smart phone. Would I like a phone running Android? Sure, you bet. Would I like an iPhone? No doubt. But neither of those mobile gadgets is better suited to accomplish what my current phone does for me. And while they are cool, I won’t be buying a Kindle, an iPad, or a Chrome-something, because, as far as the developers have brought them so far, they don’t suit me any better than the gadgets I already have.

I’m hoping for a longer winter, because I’ve only had one chance to go skiing so far this season.