Brian Gongol
Podcast: Updated weekly in the wee hours of Sunday night/Monday morning. Subscribe on Stitcher, Spreaker, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or iHeartRadio
We were online with Twitter again this week. Hope you enjoy the brief snippets during the show.
Don't forget about the primary election coming up on Tuesday. The county auditors here in Iowa have done a very good job of getting local ballots online for your review prior to the election. Here are some local auditors' links: Aftershocks to the earthquake in China have destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes. It's really inexcusable: People are dying and losing their homes because their government won't let them have freedom in the marketplace. Natural disasters don't have to be human disasters.
There used to be a rotary traffic signal that told drivers just how long was left before a signal changed from green to yellow or yellow to red. That design was abandoned decades ago because it wasn't flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions, like the flow of morning rush-hour traffic. But can't we just use timers and LED lights to create variable-time rotary-style signals? It seems like that would help us avoid red-light running and side-impact crashes in intersections.
We're almost out of IP addresses, thanks to the fact we're using more and more Internet-connected devices all the time. We need to move on to a new system of assigning IP addresses soon, so your hot water heater and furnace can communicate with you and with each other. (Don't laugh...that kind of technology is coming sooner than you think.)
The New York Times is thinking of putting custom-publishing news racks out on the streets. Sure, it sounds neat-o, but it reveals how little most newspaper companies seem to understand about their role in the media world. If newspapers don't figure out that they have to be unique in order to really survive -- and by unique, that means not just regurgitating the same wire-service copy and nationally-syndicated columnists -- then they're not going to remain profitable in the long term.
Score one for tax competition: A Chicago suburb wants out of Cook County because county tax rates are too high. Chalk it up as evidence that city-county mergers are a bad deal.
Some people think that speculators are manipulating gas prices. That seems pretty unlikely. Oil and gas prices have risen a lot lately -- and risen quickly -- but that's probably more the result of rising world demand and a lack of new production than anything else.
Keywords in this show:
Chicago •
China •
city-county mergers •
Cook County •
disasters •
earthquakes •
elections •
free markets •
gas prices •
Internet •
IP addresses •
IPv6 •
LED lights •
newspapers •
New York Times •
oil •
on-demand publishing •
poverty •
publishing •
red-light cameras •
speculation •
suburbs •
tax competition •
traffic lights •
traffic safety