Letters to the Editor
Justin Bur
Published Letters: 22 Editor's Choice: 8
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calling the firemen
[Read the article: Beyond the Multiplex]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I very much enjoyed the film (just opened this week in Montreal), the interview, and Xrandadu's paean to Julie Delpy.
This was a film about Paris that felt much like my real-life experience there (amplified and caricatured quite a bit, of course). The beautiful romantic stuff in other films is true, too, but only for about three days a year when everything is miraculously perfect. Then there are the numerous films where people get into terribly serious discussions about their life and relationships and I suppose that happens too, but it's a lot less fun than Julie Delpy's version of things.
A note to Andrew O'Hehir: it's not that crazy to call the firemen if you have a water problem in Paris. In particular, if the problem is at the neighbors' and the water is gushing through your ceiling and they're not home to do anything about it, then calling the firemen is the appropriate thing to do. On the other hand, if it's your own pipes that are bursting, no need for fire brigade assistance. Marion's mother overreacted – but of course that's what she does all the time, right?
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H.264 is also the iPod/iPhone video codec
[Read the article: A new Flash Player heralds the age of high-def YouTube]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Apple has supported H.264 in QuickTime, on the iPod, and in the iTunes Store since 2005. YouTube first started encoding video in H.264 at the end of June for the iPhone. It's good to hear that Adobe Flash is now supporting this standard (a true international standard sponsored by MPEG and ITU).
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for Pedestrian0
[Read the article: Katrina, 9/11 and disaster capitalism]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Disaster capitalism": making a profit by exploiting disaster. Naomi Klein's examples are diverse and disparate, but there is a common theme. When people are disoriented or disrupted after a shock, their defenses are down and they don't put up much of a resistance. This offers an opportunity for governments or corporations that want to implement unpopular policies to go ahead and do so with little opposition. In some cases, the shock may have been deliberately applied to enable the policy change. In most cases, the shock is the result of a natural disaster or an external disruption, and the policy change is opportunistic. It could be argued that this is the natural way, the survival of the fittest by tooth and nail. The problem is that so often it is governments acting against their own citizens, corporations acting against their own customers, exploiting a temporary extreme power imbalance to further disrupt the lives of millions.
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Getting trains into the system
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's starting to get a little repetitious, Patrick writing about airport congestion while carefully avoiding any mention of the *rest* of the transportation system, and we letter writers making repeated calls for a decent intercity rail system to pick up much of the traffic in the 0-500 mile range. Well, it bears repeating so let's just keep repeating it.
Perhaps the situation will unblock when one of the airlines - probably a secondary carrier in an important, congested market - finally notices that they could offer faster, more frequent, and especially more reliable service if they arranged to transport their passengers (holding air tickets) on a comfortable high-speed train instead of the congested, unreliable air link being used by their competitors. Such a far-seeing airline would lobby *for* immediate upgrades to the rail system (instead of fighting it tooth and nail), say the proposed Midwest corridors converging on Chicago or the California High Speed Rail project, with stops both in city centers and right in the airport terminals for connecting flights. And that airline would see their market share go up by quite a few points... until the other airlines got in on the deal too.
(Why not the Northeast? Because Amtrak already has > 50% of the air/rail market between NYC and DC - this is a rare legacy of the U.S.'s 1930s world leadership in ground transportation - and I don't see as much of an opportunity for a big shift there.)
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More on the Maeklong commuter railway
[Read the article: When trains and markets collide]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The place is Maeklong market at Samut Songkhram, about 65 km southwest of Bangkok.
Some notes on the railway line:
http://2bangkok.com/2bangkok/MassTransit/maeklong.shtml
More details by the same Richard Barrow whose page was posted by another reader: see
http://www.thai-blogs.com/index.php?blog=5&p=1136
I had never heard of this place or train before, but I am suitably intrigued now.
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Kucinich as mayor of Cleveland
[Read the article: Stop lying to yourself. You love Dennis Kucinich]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Dennis Kucinich was mayor of Cleveland for only two years, from 1978 to 1980. He can hardly be accused of running the city into the ground over such a short period. He was elected at age 31, far younger than most big-city mayors. Moreover, the Wikipedia article that Rebecca Traister linked to discusses in detail Kucinich's struggle to keep the municipal electric company in public hands, despite machinations by its competitor along with a bank to force the city to sell. Kucinich didn't give in to the bullying; he kept to his principles. It later became clear that the decision was the right one for the people of Cleveland, despite the negative consequences at the time.
So before dismissing Kucinich's aptitude on the basis of his tumultuous mayoralty, consider two things: can his management abilities now be judged on his performance almost 30 years ago, when he was one of the youngest mayors ever to hold office? And just how bad was that performance, considering that he accomplished at least one act of great political courage with beneficial effects for the long term?