Todd's thoughts/ideas

As I go through life, I see things that seem obvious to me, or that I think should and can, in a creative way, be fixed. This is one place where I hope to start noting them.

In the format of:

Question

Answer

OK? Let's begin.

Why do radios not work during storms?

Radios must not work correctly due to radio waves being interefered with by storms and objects and heavy winds; otherwise RADAR would not work.

How can that effect be worked around so that emergency crews during the most critical times they can communicate better

I will leave that for other(s) more inclined.

How can the deadly situation at McWane, Inc. (that I saw on a PBS show) be fixed?

Put the heads in jail and setup self-preserving work for the employees, including gardening and teaching and basic medical. AmeriCorps*NCCC and other programs can train them.

When can we end affirmative action?

When the goal is met.

What could the goal be?

The goal of Affirmative Action could be to have at least one mentor for every minority in every industry.
As each industry gets several active mentors, affirmative action can be evaluated for getting rid of.
Therefore also, some criteria should be smartly created for promoting the best of the minorities for the mentoring.
Also, the people doing the activities should be smartly worked through, if we want to grow as a society and have different views presented for democratic debate.

If the goal of some is to minimize government as much as possible, what is the minimum government would do?

One of governments functions should be the control of greed. I'm not sure that greed can be controlled through self-monitoring.

How can more people become employed?
Perhaps one way of getting more people involved is to find some out-of-work executives (if in fact they are really needed, which I really doubt in many instances) and get some out-of-work workers together, find what skills they can contribute, and start some strong small companies to give some people some pride of "working" while they look for long-term paying employment.

Teachers may be needed for retraining, and I think it would benefit many companies to hire great customer service representatives for their companies.

One notion that half the country seems to be lacking is pride (the other half is at "war" with terrorism and Saddam Hussein). We should, and still can, take pride in what we do well, whether or not a "boss" keeps us under contract for the forseeable future. Maybe I'm just naive.

What can the 2nd place person get, in the winner-take-all system?
I'm still looking for the answer to that.

Essays/rants

U.S. domestic and global security issues:

Security involves 2 concepts, which both need to be in place. The first is physical security, meaning that someone physically can't do damage. Barackades and locks are an example. Second is prevention, meaning winning the hearts and minds of others so they don't want to do damage. I don't know of any examples.
We're not neccessarily safe from physical threats if there hasn't been an attempt. Just becuase someone has not physically caused damage because they don't want to, doesn't mean we're secure. Also, we should be acting as the best of us to advertise ourselves as good so other's wont want to harm us. But that does not mean not physically securing us. We should be doing tons of outreach to show how good we are. How about U.S. liberals (so despised in our own country) taking their case of the good side of the US around the world?

I agree that Iraqi's should be able to decide on their own future. That includes some of them not wanting to give each other power. We need to prepare for that possiblity. What if some people don't want to do what we want them to do, yet we want all to be equal and democratic/one person one vote?

Being literal can answer some issues:

Justice

Can we not go back to the idea/I would like to see us go back to the idea that justice (as much as is practical) goes back to undoing wrongs to make things right again. In the case of robbery, return the item, with additional money if you damage the item, for repairs. In the case of murder, prison. In the case of rape, prison for life, which is equal to what you have sentensed the victum to.

I realize that we have thankfully left the idea of "penitent"iary behind (or at least I hope we have) , but the concept of "guilt"y or "innocen[t]/innocence", IMHO smacks too much of Bible action influencing the justice system. The question (I think) ought to be "Did you do it? If so, what should your punishment be / how can we make the world whole again (fine, some Bible here).

Insurance

Someone ought to rename health INSURANCE health ____. There should be a difference between health INSURANCE, as in car INSURANCE where you endless amounts in and only (try to) retrieve money when there has been an incident(. You normally don't expect your insurance to pay for your gas or oil changes.), and what seems something like national health CARE, which someone pays on an ongoing basis, and expects someone else to pay a larger amount of money on a ongoing basis.

That would reduce the price of "catastrophic" health insurance which we ALL still need, and would set realistic prices for "non-catastrophic" health care.

Of course one payee into the health care system would probably be the companies that are polluting the environment and overtaxing the workers which is causing the health care problems and would also tell the companies and their shareholders the proper cost of doing their business.