When Money Flows Like Water

I recently watched a documentary titled Who Killed The Electric Car and also started reading/listening to The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria. I know that's a lot of heavy input, but after finishing up the most recent David Sedaris book, I felt the need to give a little back to society. I'll spare you my reviews, but they both provided me with a large number of facts and figures that I had not known or considered before. As a sample:

• China is big... really big, yet despite their huge economy and impending world dominance, their GDP per capita is still quite low.
• The US is the largest consumer of almost everything, but the largest producer of very few things.
• Wal-Mart brings in almost 8 times as much money as Microsoft each year.
• If you were to combine the work forces of GM, Ford, and General Electric, they do not come close to matching the work force of Wal-Mart. What does this say about our culture and values?
• Hundreds of years before Columbus's voyage to the new world, China had far more ships than did Europe, their ships were vastly larger, and they were technically superior in almost every way. Why did China not discover the new world instead of Europe? Chinese leadership at the time virtually made sailing illegal for reasons apparant at the time. That seemingly simple choice may be the only reason China is not the single dominant super power in the world today.
• As a country, the US is one of the most arrogant and hypocritical entities in all of history. The fact that we are despised by so much of the other countries of the world is not at all surprising.
• The electric cars of 25 years ago are still superior in many ways to equivalent modern concept vehicles. What happened?
• Over 20% of our nation's electricity is generated from nuclear power plants, which are far more green than coal burning plants. Far less environmental and direct damage to human life has been produced by nuclear power plants than almost all other types of energy generation in the last 30 years. Why then, have no nuclear plants been built in the last 30 years while hundreds of coal burning plants have?
• Hydrogen fuel cell cars, while being promised as a "within 15 years" reality for the past 30-40 years, still consistantly fail to be cost-effective solutions and have virtually no fueling infrastrucutre. Why then is this the technology that almost every politician focuses on as the transportation enerty source of the future?
  
• Purchasing water in a bottle, of any sort, is stupid. Unless you happen to live in a place that has unsafe drinking water or none at all (which means you most likely don't live in the United States), there is no excuse for drinking bottled water. The actual water is less safe, not at clean, far more expensive, and about as anti-green as one can be. The cost of fuel that is wasted in the United States simply by shipping bottled water across the country in one year is staggering. How staggering: analysts estimate the the amount of money wasted by drinking bottled water rather than tap water in the United States in one year is enough to provide basic potable drinking water sources to almost everyone in the world within the same amount of time. Think of that the next time you walk past the drinking fountaing and blow $1.29 on a 20 oz bottle of water.
• Evian, a popular bottled water vendor, is NAIVE spelled backwards. Those French are tricky. ;-)

Anyway, you can do what you want with this, but it's certainly food for thought.