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It's a Rare Chance To Do It Better This Time.... Bury Them! Not immediately, of course. Service must be restored. It's TERRIBLE being without electricity in September in the SouthEast. No air conditioning is torture. No refrigeration is sickening. No traffic lights is dangerous.  BUT... Don't spend all the money it takes to totally rebuild the same old system . At least get a start on a weather-proof distribution grid. Do the absolute minimum to restore service, and start...... MAGG! M AKE A MERICA'S G RID G REAT It's not going to happen. Those poles will be replace with MORE POLES! Instead of putting these guys to work everywhere, unleash the fast trenching machines , buy miles of new, high tech, super tough underground cables, and never have the grid knocked down again! Talk about improving the infrastructure! Whether it's hurricanes, ice storms, tornadoes or drunk drivers taking down our vital electric grid, the cure-all is BURY

Oh Sure, You've Heard About the Latest Trump Noise...      ...But so very much important, significant, progressive, hopeful news is buried under the crashing cymbals of our Distractor in Chief.      Like this earth-shaking bit... * " Fifty-six percent of doctors registered either strong support or were somewhat supportive of a single-payer health system, according to the  survey  by Merritt Hawkins, a physician recruitment firm." 56%!  That's way up from just a few years ago. How come? you might ask. Did docs suddenly become libtards? Why would they care when they get paid, how they get paid? And that's it... getting paid through the tangled morass of for-profit insurance companies' rules and legal dances (different for every company) is a pain in the prolapsed rectum. "P hysicians often say they are tired of dealing with billing and paperwork, which takes time away from patients," is putting it more politely. A one-doc office might have

No More Floods; No More Droughts (Future) Historical fiction (Revisited) As our Congress messes around doing absolutely nothing about improving America's infrastructure, I can't resist pulling up my RBI (Really Big Idea) from 2003.  Put on your "government could really work" rose-colored glasses and read this. May 2020     The Mississippi River is approaching flood stage in Illinois, Indiana and Missouri.  The Corps of Engineers monitors the levees and dikes with the giant web of depth gauges and flow meters.  The U.S. Weather Bureau is predicting major rainstorms in several of the watersheds.  Supercomputers are crunching trillions of numbers and putting options in clear graphical displays in front of Corps decision makers.   The top Corps engineer picks up the Red Phone and calls the White House.  Connections are made and the Secretary of the Interior, the Vice President and The Woman Herself come online and listen to the report. “It’s an e

Can't Put It Clearer Than This Study: $2 trillion needed for U.S. infrastructure. “Infrastructure should be part of the larger conversation about ‘what do you want government to do and how do you want to pay for it?’ ” said Jay Zukerman of Ernst & Young, which conducted the institute’s study. Great piece . And oh how I agree ! And how I answer the last part of the question. Read the whole thing here.

Make Our Infrastructure Into A Super-Infrastructure In a fool's paradise, who is the fool? The big Midwestern floods just put an explanation point on the truth most of us know but seem powerless to do anything about: Our infrastructure is crumbling. “We” are powerless because we let the people who can do something, our elected federal officials, do nothing. Are we stoopid or unconscious or what? And we all just witnessed dikes breaking and homes, businesses and farms being ruined. Again. "We need profound changes," said engineer Kumares Sinha of Purdue University. "We can't live in a fool's paradise." (From the same Reuters article) Elected officials are afraid of the word “tax.” If something worthwhile needs doing and takes money to do it, our Congress and our Administration act like we are teenagers with credit cards. Actually pay for what we need? Horrors! Politicians who have the guts ask our citizens to sacrifice a bit to pa