$10 million a day–how would you use it?

The latest estimate that I read, in the Sacramento Bee, is that the war in Iraq costs about $10m a day. We have had several discussions here regarding this. Generally, the talks revolve around what we, the United States, could do with this much money if we weren’t funding this insane war. Leaving out what one thinks of the war–hard to do, but give it a try–what could we do? Several things pop up without too much thought. Health care in this country, and around the world, seems like a good place to start. I think that there are quite a few advances that could take place, in cancer research for instance, if the effort was funded well enough. Partnering with researchers from around the world perhaps could hasten a cure for most of the cancers out there. Mass transit comes to mind as well. Europe has transit down pretty well. Funding for mass transit could solve several problems,not the least of which is removing what would be a huge number of cars from the road, radically reducing the pollution that accompanies them, reducing the amount of oil we use and perhaps spurring the auto industry to make cars that actually get decent gas mileage. The search for alternative, sustainable energy certainly deserves a few million a day. When we, in partnership with other countries, figure that one out, the dependence on oil from the mid-east would plummet, and I think that can only be a good thing. Diversity in the energy industry seems like a decent thing to have. Perhaps we could even get together with the other countries in our part of the world and help to eliminate the poverty that forces so many people to abandon their own countries to seek simple sustenance in the US. Education, health care, transportation, energy–I think I could put the $10m per day to much better use. The rest of the world might appreciate such an effort. Who knows, maybe we would even get out of the basement of world opinion. What would you do with the money?

Copyright:Anyone paying attention?

I read an interesting post at cjwriter about copyrights. The internet has certainly made the protection of one’s work much more complicated. How can you ever know if your writing/photos/music/posts have simply been purloined by someone and used elsewhere without your knowledge, permission and without pay or credit to you? Seems like a full time job just to track your creative ventures. I always like to be payed for my writing efforts and I want to be credited for them as well. The ease with which the internet allows everyone with electricity, computer, and a connection to view and potentially download massive amounts of information makes it almost impossible to know what has or hasn’t been used. The mind set of internet community–millions of us I would guess–has absolutely changed regarding free use of what is on the net. The music people are fighting what I think is a never ending battle against what they call music theft off the net. Most unfortunately for them the crowd that downloads the most music is also the crowd that probably really doesn’t care about copyright/fair use et al. My training and practice is to always give credit where credit is due, and to pay others for their work if I use it–after all, it’s what I want for my self. I don’t know if anything of mine has been taken off the net, but an editor once allowed someone on her staff to take a piece I wrote for publication to take pieces of it and combine it with some other bits and pieces to make a completely different story–no credit to anyone except the person who cobbled together others’ work. No pay either. I did confront the editor, who absolutely should have known better. I send myself a wingnote whenever I think that something I have written seems to have been used by someone else–pure chance in running across that by the way. Is this a bigger problem with blogs? I don’t know. I don’t have the time to find out. I also don’t put anything on here that I am writing for publication. Who can keep track of 1 million plus blogs? Is copyright infringement a problem for anyone else out there? Probably. Write and let  me know.

wingnote

A quick visit to wingnote.com can result in a very nice addition to your cell phone text messaging. As a freelance writer and public school teacher I often have a need to write notes to myself. They usually end up on a piece of paper, a scrap of paper actually, that ends up mashed in my pocket or floating around the car or house. I’m always happy to find these scraps when I need to remember what it was that I wrote to myself. With wingnote (no cost to use by the way, a definite plus) I can text the message to my computer from my cell phone. When I get around a computer, I simply log in and there is the note! I can even retreive the note from my phone if I need to. I find this to be far more reliable than the scrap of paper approach. A friend directed me to the wingnote site and even an old guy like me was able to handle it.With all of the information that we all are faced with and generate each day keeping track of things can be a bit complicated. Bloggers–take a look at the site–could save you some rummaging around either in your head or your car for that last, great idea that you intended to write about. Technology–amazing stuff. Since I don’t really understand electricity or radios, I love all of the fantastic things that pop up out there, most especially the ones that work and are simple enough for me to use.Technorati should put up a list of things like this on a regular basis for all of us to take a look at. Of course that assumes there would be enough hours in the day to look at them. Let me know what you think.

last child

I just finished a book by Richard Louv, “Last Child in the Woods”. It is a very decent read. It centers around the disconnet between todays’ children and the natural world, their immersion in the electronic world, and attention deficit disorders. If one pays attention to the pace of idea/visual changes that are on TV (news segments are short, followed by more short segments), MTV, video games etc., it becomes apparent, at least to me, that we are teaching our children to focus on the pace of the changing screen rather than the substance, or lack of it, being presented. In nature, children, when left alone to explore freely, have to slow down and focus on what they are seeing–it is unlikely to change quickly. Louv believes that ADD type children benefit from this interaction with the forces of nature. I think that it is true, and see it in my own Kindergarten classroom. Has anyone else noticed this? Read the book? Let me know.