Letters to the Editor
calcareous
Published Letters: 303 Editor's Choice: 50
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Nationalize for quality improvement? You must be kidding!
[Read the article: Nationalize the rating agencies!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One thing that can be said of private companies is that they are at least accountable to their shareholders. The shareholders can demand transparency, call for audits, and sack executives at will.
This is simply not true of government agencies. During this administration we've seen individual agencies display the highest level of incompetence with virtual impunity. Should an administration choose to rework them, it will generally do so by placing allies in charge, and restructuring it to its own ends. The only time the shareholders (citizens) get a say in the matter is every 4 years, and these elections are never focused on the small details. An american who voted for Bush can't be said to have had much say in the appointment of Chertoff to FEMA, or his retention after its colossal failure of serving the victims of hurricane Katrina. After convincing the voters to elect it initially, an administration only needs to face a single referendum on its performance to enjoy eight years of free reign. That is if the second term election even qualifies as a referendum, with its issues being framed as broad ideas and decided mostly by gut feelings, rather than being grounded in a rational evaluation of the specifics.
The best way to keep a private agency accountable is to affect its bottom line, and motivate its shareholders to maintain quality control out of personal self interest. All of the businesses that relied on Moody's (and the others) for their objective and accurate ratings have excellent grounds to sue them for failing to deliver the services they claimed to sell. This seems like a simple matter, as the inaccuracy of their ratings at this point is beyond dispute, and the reasons for it aren't material. Be it wishful thinking, willful incompentence, or even a completely blameless and unpredictable failure to execute - they didn't deliver the services they were paid for, and as such have defrauded their customers, who can rightfully demand their money back. Now is the time for the extraction of a pound of flesh, and let that be a lesson to them and their shareholders not peddle snake oil in the future. Make the damages awarded to their customers even a small fraction of what they've lost, and you won't see this happen again easily.
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you CAN"T rebuild nature, we WILL replace it
[Read the article: Is humanity running out of technological tricks?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You can't rebuild nature. Nature is what happens when the world is left untouched. There is no place on the surface of the earth that is completely unaffected by humanity, and increasingly few where the effect is minimal.
Our technology can and will replace nature. More and more, maintaining a semblance of the prior environment requires direct human intervention. We replant harvested forests, establish fish hatcheries for salmon, and set up arbitrary boundaries for the protection of the wolf. We will probably continue in this direction for as long as we are able to maintain the illusion of nature, but inevitably our children (or maybe even our older selves) will be forced to confront the stark fact that we are for all practical purposes running the show.
It also seems likely that should climate change occur as predicted, no matter how hard we try, we simply won't be able to maintain things that even resemble the way they used to be. At that point, the illusion of stewardship of the land will be replaced by direct engineering, and we will arbitrarily choose what new and hopefully more environmentally suited system we want to replace the prior one with.
While I hold out hope that technology will be able to aid us in these things, let us not forget that is what got us into this situation in the first place. Electric cars are the technological equivalent of "hair of the dog" after a night of heavy drinking. But our scientists are clever, our technology powerful, and we can expect to wield increasingly powerful tools. The real question is what we will do with them. While we have raced forward in our physical technology, it has not been met with comparable progress in our philosophies and religions. We have a great capacity to do things, and a poor capacity to choose what should be done. Technology is our strong suit - ethics, morality, and prudence our weak suits. While we continue to develop new tools, we shouldn't forget where the real work needs to be done. What our future looks like will hinge more on developments in the humanities, society, politics, religion and economics, than it will on the hard sciences.
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diverse would have been a better word
[Read the article: Quote of the day]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Diverse is probably a better word than balance. Any organization can suffer from a suffocating culture and the dangers of group think if it lacks adequate diversity. Gender diversity is important, but so is racial, ethnic, religious and class diversity.
It isn't only the minorities that get stifled in a non-diverse environment. Sometimes soft-spoken people of the dominant group are as well, and unfortunately outspokenness doesn't have a correlation with the quality of ideas an individual possesses.
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No means no.
[Read the article: Lust in translation]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]> Just as men are misreading women's indirect resistance, women are miscalculating how men will interpret their cues to slow down or stop.
Thats right ladies! Be clear, be concise, and use the minds you have and the language you know how to speak - say what you mean. Miscommunication by ambiguity is the fault of the speaker, not the listener.
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cognitive disconnect? I wish.
[Read the article: Miley Cyrus: Daddy's little hurl]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I've never understood this aspect of our culture. It seems the majority of the population might support public torture and hanging of convicted child molestors on one hand, while at the same time buying their underaged daughters provocative clothing with the other hand. Make up your minds people!
My sinking suspicion is that this isn't a situation of cognitive disconnect, but rather a case of actually enjoying the savoring of forbidden fruit.