The Pnebleu Blog

It is pretty well understood that there is a finite amount of oil left in the ground. The rate we are pumping it out continues to grow as more markets open up in developing nations. Most likely within my lifetime the impacts of a decreasing and harder to reach supply will have severe consequences on the world economy. As the price of traditional energy increases, so does everything that uses it, crashing the economy.

When oil is gone we are going to have to move to other high density energy sources or face human disasters the world has never seen. Wars, famine, disease, and the breakdown of today’s society. Clean coal and nuclear energy are the most easily expandable sources of energy within the small time frame we have left. Cars will have to be moved to electricity to plug into these sources. Alternative energy will continue to be researched, but I don’t see them replacing oil as the dominate source of everyone’s energy.

Within the next few decades, increasing petroleum prices will wreck havoc on our economy and individual lives. I’m not sure we will be able to survive as we are now. Populations are probably going to decrease, as food costs are going to go up. People will leave the cities because they can’t afford to be there, and more land will revert back to farms. What ever happens, the end of oil will be painful.

Where did personal responsibility go? How did we even get to the point as a nation of considering nationalized healthcare? Why do we have individuals and family units living for years on welfare? Why don’t people stand up and take responsibility for their actions, criminal or morally wrong? Why do people fresh out of high school seem to go wild and crazy after they move out? Why is blame always shifted to someone else or to some external force? Most problems and issues can be narrowed down to a root cause of personal responsibility or lack thereof.

The growing trend for citizens to keep relying on the government for more and more is quite disturbing. FEMA, Social Security, welfare, and universal healthcare are programs where an individual’s responsibilities have been taken or moved over to the government to manage, as if it could manage it better. People need to step up and take charge. The government doesn’t need to do everything for you. It wasn’t designed to do that. If we are going to live in a nanny state, why would anyone want to work and provide for themselves? The incentive would be to take the government handouts and do nothing in return. This is completely wrong. It’s immoral, unproductive, and un-American. We are called to be the best we can be, both by God and by the capitalist system. If you live in America you have been give so many blessing by God, working your hardest is the least you can do in appreciation. In the capitalist system, rewards are give to success; leaching off of the success of others hurts the economy and reduces the incentives for hard workers (because they’re rewards will be taken by the government and redistributed to the undeserving “failures” in capitalism).

Let me make this clear, I do not think pure capitalism is the way we need to go. Welfare is very important and I’m not saying it should be abolished. However, I think it should be run by the states and should have a time period or some limit. This limitation would prevent people from staying on government welfare their entire lives. Private charity would play an even larger part than it does today, if you removed national welfare, the tax burden that causes, and the current state welfare systems and replaced them with a limited welfare program by the states.

National universal healthcare is appalling to me. It removes my right to have no healthcare plan and just pay for expenses as they come. Setting up a system like this removes everyone’s responsibilities. They’re saying you’re too stupid to go out an choose you method of paying for healthcare, so we are going to step in and make that decision for you. Look, you even get to choose a level of service! The supporters are going to say that the program is for the poor and underprivileged, so they can get health insurance. This may seem harsh, but it’s not the government’s job to bail out the “failures” of the capitalist system. By providing them with free or cheap healthcare when they cannot afford to attain it without government assistance, what incentives to work harder and move up in “class” does this procure?

Back down on the personal level, people always seem to find someone or something else to blame. Grow up! Be a mature individual and take responsibilities for any of your actions, right and wrong. If you make poor grades in school, don’t blame the professor or the test. Take responsibility for doing poorly and study harder next time. At work, mistakes happen, confess if you’ve done something incorrectly.

Financial responsibility has disappear with the arrival of the credit card. The amount of debt in this country is astounding! You people out there need to stop buying stuff you can’t afford! Be responsible and buy only what you need if you are in debt. Don’t purchase items on credit, save up until you can afford it. If you do finance something, pay each payment out fully or more. Don’t let the interest grow! Hard work and a tight wallets lead to prosperous lives. Be a responsible consumer.

This country has become, or maybe always was, a sissy state. Both on the national and personal levels people are lacking in responsibility for themselves and their actions. This is a major problem. If everyone is telling the government to take care of them, then no one is left to to take care of anyone, because we are the government in this country. We have to stand up and take responsibility.

Parents don’t get the credit they need. Mine have provided me with so many things lately. This month, for instance, my parents (‘rents for short) bought me a nice sports coat (I’ll put up photos when I get the jacket; they are making adjustments) and some groceries. They already pay for all of my school at Texas A&M, my car & health insurance, and a few other expenses. They take care of us from the time we are born until we stop letting them or become adults. My parents have loved me enough to ask where I was going and who I was going with. They’ve loved me enough to say no. They are, in essence, responsible for who I am, and the values I hold. My work ethic, morals, and sense of responsibility have all been molded by my parents. I, obviously, couldn’t have made it here where I am today without them. I am so thankful for my parents and what they done in raising me. Thank you, Mom & Dad!

Hindsight is 20/20, yet it gets blurry real fast. We don’t look at the mistakes from the past, very often, before we make them again in the present. Sometimes we look back at the past and wonder why we felt the way we did. You forget your own perception from the past. This isn’t confined to people as individuals, it can be expanded to include countries and even the human race in general. Life happens in cycles. We may develop new technologies and have different details, but people do the same things over and over. There are wars for land and resources. There are cycles of civic and social growth, which are followed by decadence, the Roman Empire for example. People are born, grow up and learn, find love, procreate, grow old, and finally die. Then, the next generation does the same thing over again. There is nothing more cyclical. If we want to break the cycle in some places and improve our existence, it requires looking a the past, learning from other’s mistakes and doing things differently in the future. But, you still have to teach the next generation or they will “forget” and the cycle begins again.

Breaking from the circle of life, to use a cliché, is not always a positive thing. The break from traditional nuclear families during the last half of the 20th century has had some negative consequences on the children of non-traditional families. The rise in youth violence, youth depression and other mental illness, and lowering education scores may have something to do with the new family structures that are increasingly in use. Just because this is the most advanced time in human history and we are able to do things people a few decades ago couldn’t even imagine if they wanted to, doesn’t mean we know everything and should try to change the nature cycle. We may just inadvertently wreck havoc on basic human existence. We should be careful when we change tradition, look at all of the consequences. If you look to the past for the future, you may just find it; we’re doing the same things people did before us.

Why are we, young people, so stubborn? What makes us think we know everything and want to do everything our way? It must be some innate drive or behavior that rares it’s ugly head in our late teens and early twenties. Advice from our parents is heard, but we still do things the way we think they should be done. Correctness either way isn’t the issue. It’s about independence. It must be the underlining motivation to leave the nest.

Lately, I’ve seen it represent itself strongly in me. In looking for housing in College Station, or in looking for and applying for jobs down there. The twang of stubbornness has made me do just the opposite of what I was kindly given the suggestion to do: Turn in applications before we went on vacation. But no, something compelled me to wait until we got back and then sit around and wait for word from potential employers. I’ve been beating myself up for not ignoring that little voice in my head telling me to wait until we got back.

Obstinance seems to get the best of us, however. It also hits us in the prime of life. But the majority of people grow out of it with time. Hopefully, my unfruitful doggedness will soon be outgrown, for it’s causing me more problems than benefits.

As I mentioned in my previous post about unmarked police car pullovers, I don’t like revenue enhancement coming from traffic law enforcement. An issue has recently been brought to my attention again by the Battalion. Drivers running red lights have become an increasing problem in the College Station area. The city of College Station wants to put in cameras at the intersections to take pictures of the offending cars and send the tickets in the mail, without a patrol officer doing a single thing. This doesn’t do the most effective job of reducing red light runners. Having a timer in the yellow light to indicate the amount of remaining time before the red light would solve several problems.

First, for the law-abiding drivers, it gives them the time left to make a judgment call if they need to slam on the brakes or continue through. For that matter, you might as well have timers in all colors of the signal: red, yellow, and green.

Second, for the red light runners, it gives them no excuse for running the light. They knew how much time was left before it turned red. Now, after the timers are in place, I agree with the installment of the cameras, because the government in charge did everything to increase public safety without revenue enhancement, before they started ticketing people.

Third, for the city planners, studies would need to be done, but the timer lights may improve traffic efficiency slightly and increase driver patience. When motorists can count down the time left for green, it helps increase driver satisfaction with the length of the lights. There have been times when I could swear the red light for my time to go was three times as long as the cycle before me.

Just because we’ve had the standard green, yellow, red traffic signal lights for all of this time doesn’t mean we can’t change or improve on them if it would increase efficiency or safety. Adding timers to the lights would allow drivers to know exactly the time left before the next light. I know this would a beneficial addition to my driving experience.

This afternoon I was traveling around the world. One thing I noticed from San Francisco, USA to Perth, Australia to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil were the suburbs. In each country they were plainly identifiable. Most certainly they had their differences, but they were overtly similar. Are the suburbs taking over the world?

I think they might be. Bill Vaughan said, “Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.” The problem with suburbs is that they constantly grow larger and larger, instead of growing up, or down. If suburbs continue to grow we will eventually run out of land suitable for construction. But before that, we will run out of land where a person can be completely alone in the wilderness.

Don’t get me wrong, I love developments and futuristic fantasies, such as Coruscant, but I also love the isolation created by the vast expanses of nature without any human feature or touch. No roads, power lines, radio or cellphone towers; the flawless creation of God. If we don’t examine our urban sprawl and look to developing a smarter growth solution, it might be a very gray world with a few, small perfectly-pruned and watered patches of green.

A quick Google search and you’ll find many organizations and articles fighting urban sprawl and promoting smart developing methods, yet I live in the exurbs, at the moment, and the signs of growth are still building. Do you want the world to look like this picture on every piece of stable ground? What can you or I do to promote smart development plans? I don’t know, but we need to do something before it’s too late; before we are looking at trees in a museum.