Tsunami, I'm glad to hear someone is horrified to the degree I am about equating a human consciousness to a tree.
Thoul wrote:The media focuses on negative stories because that is what most people will watch.
Thus intentionally excluding the good stories. I agree they are giving most of the masses what they want to see in order to make more money, and therefore intentionally selecting the horrible stories. I'm not just condemning the media; I'm condemning a culture that gets pleasure out of such stories.
Before moving on to the other points, (which are going to take a minor essay,) I'd like to focus directly on the tragedy of the bridge, and why it happened.
If people don't ever want to see something like this again, they should take action against what caused it; the government. The city government repeatedly ignored warning of the instability of such a hazard. The bridge, and the road was public property, a fallacious concept. As long as the government claims ownership to such things as public thoroughfares, such tragedies will be repeated.
Why? Look at where the blame is directed. People will sue the "city" for this negligence. But there is no such entity as the "city". And, the city has no money of its own; it only has what it extorts in taxation from its citizens. Therefore,
the blame has been passed from the city to the citizens of the city! The victims' families will be suing their neighbors, everyone else in their state, and themselves!
Such is the fallacy of "public property". The government won't be punished for this horrible transgression; it will raise taxes to compensate, and bleed it out of the other citizens. What incentive will the government have to not repeat an act of this kind when its negligence goes unpunished? None. Tragedies of this sort will continue until people demand the privatization of all roads, and other forms of "public property". If the road was owned by a business,
they would be the only ones punished for their negligence, as they would have to pay up in a lawsuit. Quality can only exist when the concept of accountability has not been invalidated.
Moving on...
I have to disagree; A successful life is often one that overcomes suffering or tragedy. The presence of those things doesn't make success impossible, just more rewarding when it is achieved.
Absolutely. Success can come through difficulty and be a rewarding struggle. The point is that by only presenting these tragedies and ignoring the successes in life, the implication is that
the only successful life can be achieved through suffering and pain, and that a successful life without suffering is impossible. When the good is ignored, it is made to be the unusual, and suffering is to be the natural state of mankind. As for the good that comes out of tragedies: heroism does not require running into burning buildings to save children, though this is heroism. Heroism is an intransigent devotion to a moral code, and is faced by everyone, everyday. The only difference is in the scope of the danger involved.
My point didn't come across very well. If there were friendly replacements for all tech made available tomorrow, people still wouldn't use it because they're attached to the unfriendly stuff. Take, for example, people with classic cars they've restored to near original condition. If they could swap out their smog spewing engines for clean burning engines, most wouldn't. The experience wouldn't be the same for them.
Sure, I nor any other intelligent consumer will buy a cleaner automobile until it is cheaper than what is currently on the market. There's no conclusive evidence that man has any significantly damaging effect on our environment. Because of this, capitalistic practices will rule; continuing to seek out the best product for the lowest price. If evidence existed that the environment is significantly influence by ethanol vehicles, then companies will necessarily devote their production processes to cleaner cars, and the price will drop accordingly, as there are more production facilities for these new vehicles. If the companies don't adapt, then they can be sued for damaging someone else's property, i.e. polluting the air on your property, but not until there is actual proof, not a movement that simultaneously declares an impending ice age and global warming.
That doesn't make any sense to me at all. The government enforcing minimum regs doesn't prevent anyone from going beyond that if they choose to do so. AFAIK, the reason those regs were set in place is that businesses weren't doing anything at all to be environmentally friendly before hand. I don't see how that has anything to do with quality.
Businesses aren't just about quality - they're also about cost. You can have the best quality product in the world, but if it costs too much to make or sell, you're still going bankrupt. I'm not saying that "it costs too much to switch to environment friendly tech" is a good argument, but it is one that a lot of businesses use.
Government regulations intend to protect consumers by setting standards that businesses must measure up to, with the idea that this will guarantee quality products from every business. This is terribly false, and encourages terrible products to be created.
Government regulations set a standard whereby anyone meeting it has all of that particular product labeled as automatically "good". This grants an advantage to unscrupulous businesses that they could never have in a free market, and therefore destroying the difference between an honorable business and a dishonorable one, and therefore also destroying the concept of quality.
Inspections to make sure a business reaches minimum standards are inherently flawed. Inspectors aren't omniscient; they can't possibly check everything to make sure it reaches their "good" standard. The great majority of products don't get inspected, but are automatically branded good. That invites every dishonest goon to get into business, make some minimal products, and then proceed to fleece the public by selling dangerous goods that are sold under the endorsement of the government as good products, and hoping they won't get caught by the unsuspecting consumers that believe the product is good because the government decreed it to be so. This floods the market with a variation along a spectrum between horrible goods, and wonderful goods, with the distinction blurred in regard to the consumer. All the consumer knows is that all these products are "good" because the government said so, so there isn't any reason to try a product that costs a little more that could be much better, since they're all just "good".
On a free market, there is a much better inspector, for he is omniscient, because the inspector is every consumer. Rotten businesses can't survive for long cranking out low-quality products because they have to answer to everyone, not just one person who can be bribed to give an artificial stamp of approval. A company cannot bribe every consumer; it would go out of business. One of the greatest qualities a company can have is a respected brand-name, which takes years to establish as a quality name through a diligent pursuit toward creating better and better products. One slip-up and that name is tarnished, and that company doesn't just suffer from a lawsuit over a dangerous product; their profits are negatively effected for years.
Thus, a free market protects itself, a government disarms consumers against criminals. Compare the amount of product recalls of today to that of when the economy was freer in the 19th century. The data speaks for itself.
Regardless, such regulations were entirely unnecessary. If a company was dumping sewage into drinking water, then governmental regulations were still unnecessary. The individual's right to property allows for any person that could prove their water was tainted, could sue that company. That's the safeguard to pollution. Regulations are arbitrarily assigned by bureaucrats, not by scientists, and are not the most efficient business processes. This hampers a business from finding the optimal process, because they are the experts in producing their own product, not some governmental official, and thus damages their profitability, and the entire economy.
And all this says nothing of the heinously evil violation of individual rights that the government is committing. There is no distinction between a business and an individual; a business is merely a group of individuals. When a government decides they can dictate how productive a business is, they are claiming ownership of how productive the people they are supposed to serve are. If you own the productivity of man, you own man. That's a giant step toward dictatorship.
Business are about both price and quality. The product that is the best quality for the lowest price wins out. This necessarily encourages businesses to continually better their products and ability to produce in order to keep up with competitors. Despite the government's best(worst?) efforts, this principle still nearly always wins out. The exceptions to this rule today are all because of the socialist measures in our economy. A free economy has never completely existed, but that's a topic so broad that it exceeds the length of this one.
"Impossible is just a word people use to make themselves feel better when they quit." Vyse, Skies of Arcadia Legends.
Some great discussion and opinions on this last subject, or subjects. 
Very interesting ones too.
