Mr. Ratan N. Tata, Chairman of the Tata Group and Tata Motors, today unveiled the Tata ‘NANO’ - The People’s Car from Tata Motors that India and the world have been looking forward to. A development, which signifies a first for the global automobile industry, the People’s Car brings the comfort and safety of a car within the reach of thousands of families. The People’s Car will be launched in India later in 2008.
“I observed families riding on two-wheelers - the father driving the scooter, his young kid standing in front of him, his wife seated behind him holding a little baby. It led me to wonder whether one could conceive of a safe, affordable, all-weather form of transport for such a family. Tata Motors’ engineers and designers gave their all for about four years to realise this goal. Today, we indeed have a People’s Car, which is affordable and yet built to meet safety requirements and emission norms, to be fuel efficient and low on emissions. We are happy to present the People’s Car to India and we hope it brings the joy, pride and utility of owning a car to many families who need personal mobility.”
– Mr. Ratan N. Tata, Chairman of the Tata Group and Tata Motors, speaking at the unveiling ceremony at the 9th Auto Expo in New Delhi.
Now you know why China frightens me…and why “I, Robot” may not be so far off…
It’s mind boggling — almost incomprehensible for me.
Hugs…
Mind-boggling? Robots? What is this fellow yammering about?
Technology isn’t the Latest Big Thing. Technology is what we have been using for millennia to enhance our senses and increase our capabilities. Technology is a fancy way of saying “tools.” Any sufficiently advanced human can distinguish technology from witchcraft. Witchcraft? Burn the Witch! (Damn, burning witches again… apologies to my Wiccan friends.)
Globalization happened already. It’s done, it’s over. We’re now in the phase where we carefully adjust Americans’ salaries to match Chinese and Indian salaries - and lifestyles. If they do it right - well, you know, like boiling a frog slowly from cold water. Maybe they’ll find new career paths for everyone whose job description is now outsourced to India. Maybe we’ll learn to downsize our lifestyles to accommodate our globalized pay rates. Maybe the U.S. economy won’t collapse. We have to get all this done before China gets into full production.
You can get off your high horse and join the rest of the world, or you can outfit your army with bibles, flags and guns and send them out to stop human evolution. I’m more afraid of one ignorant, neurologically stagnant American politician than I am of all of Asia.
The US is very backward technologically. To put new technologies in place requires the regulatory equivalent of an Act of God. The people themselves are psychologically and neurologically resistant to change, so much so that a large percentage of Americans deny that something as basic as evolution can occur. At the personal level, this means most Americans believe that self-improvement is a fallacy. Well, I don’t accept that adults can’t learn.
The recent movie “I, Robot” is an abomination, intended only to reinforce the average American’s fear of innovation. Please read the book by Isaac Asimov, a prolific writer of the 20th century. The hard-wired personalities of the robots in it started with three laws that prevented them from harming a human or even, through inaction, allowing us to be harmed. Any attempt to break those laws resulted in a mechanical breakdown. I wish humans were wired this way.
Innovation… in parts of Asia you can walk up to a vending machine and call its number on your cell phone to get a soda or an instant-heating boxed meal. I can’t even get cellphone service at my sister’s house on the Delmarva peninsula, much less dial up a soda.
China is going to need about 10 times the oil we need when they get up to speed. That’s 10 times the pollution, 10 times the greenhouse gases. No, more than 10 times the pollution, as they don’t have strict air quality standards. The cloud of pollution over China is clearly visible on NASA satellite photos. We’ve know about Global Warming since the ’50s.
As larger purchasers, India and China will shape what products are available in the entire world. An example of this economic inevitability, the state of Texas is the largest textbook purchaser in the U.S and for that reason Texas creationists influence public education by asking for textbooks promoting their point of view. Every bookseller wants Texas as a customer - you stock what your best customer wants. These are then made available to all American schools. You can find a number of links on this topic on Constitution.org. I hope y’all can use chopsticks.
Why do we ignore problems instead of dealing with them? I bet you’ve heard at least one person say, “Don’t bring that into my universe” or “ERASE ERASE ERASE” - with a cute little crossing and recrossing the arms - to avoid talking about Global issues. Like a little kid putting his hands over his ears so that he can’t hear you asking him to take out the trash.
The video mentioned new books - how many books have you read this month? Not magazines, not graphic novels, but real paper and ink books? How about this year? Were any of them non-fiction?
I’m interested in what you really thought about the video. I thought it was trite. It’s rather startling to me that any citizen of the world could respond with anything other than “tell me something I don’t already know.”
Last month, he expressed fondness for his home planet, telling an Associated Press reporter that he had left three times and had found nowhere else to go. He spoke during interviews about the dust clouds he saw over India and China in the first decade of space travel and worried about pollution. He also talked about seeing the world as one home, rather than a globe divided by borders. One month before crossing his own final frontier, he said in an AP interview: “Please take care of Spaceship Earth.”
Let’s think it through… If we got bin Laden, Bush would have had no boogeyman to frighten us with. So the military let bin Laden slip off into Pakistan. He’s 6-foot-tall, a giant among Arabs, with a seriously damaged arm and possibly dragging a kidney machine. How hard could it really be to find him? Trust me, he is in a comfortable, air-conditioned apartment somewhere in Pakistan.
Pakistan - their President, Musharraf, gets a lot of mileage out of being an ally in the “War on Terror”. The Pakistani Muslim schools - madrasses - are veritable terrorist kindergartens. They teach the kids from before they can walk that giving their life to kill an infidel is the greatest gift they can give their god. How does a moderate Pakistani president remain in power in an Islamic extremist country? With lots of aid from the U.S., of course.
My thought was that Pakistan knew where bin Laden was from the time he got away from the caves in Tora Bora. I thought Bush was going to pull him out of his hat just before the election. It turned out he’d poisoned the well in Ohio so he didn’t need to.
Ohio, yeah, we knew about that too, didn’t we? Remember all the complaints the day after the election, and how quickly they went away?
But I digress… Pakistan also needs us to protect them from their enemy, India, another nuclear power. If they give us bin Laden, if a Islamic extremist government gets in power, that’s all over. We drop our friend Pakistan like a hot potato and India starts pushing on their borders again. So they keep bin Laden to themselves and dish out low-level terrorists at appropriate intervals. Everybody wins except the American people.
The military and the government have little euphemisms that they use to obfuscate the situation. You are probably familiar with the term, “extreme prejudice.” That’s a left-handed way of saying “shoot the fucker where he stands.” It’s all like that. You don’t kill the enemy, you “engage” him. Well, anytime they quote some government mouthpiece directly, you have to look at the unfamiliar word combinations and figure out what they’re really saying. It helps if you read a few books about the military. Tom Clancy novels are a relatively painless intro to spook-speak, if you skip the parts where he masterfully makes love to his wife. His stuff can be kind of technical, though. John le Carre is a good choice for non-technical people. You know, the ones with social skills.
Incidentally, in Clancy’s 1999 book, Rainbow SixExecutive Orders, a Japanese terrorist flies an airliner into the Capitol building. How can the U.S. government pretend they had never considered the possibility of such an attack?
Working in the defense industry for several years is another way to get an intro to military slang. I don’t recommend it.
I can’t help thinking that truthout is merely documenting it for history.
Information age
technology
magic
Arthur C. Clarke
Globalization
China
I, Robot
tools
witchcraft
global economy
evolution
politician
Asia
self-improvement
Isaac Asimov
Innovation
Delmarva peninsula
Zero Population Growth
ZPG
One-child Policy
greenhouse gases
Global Warming
creationists
public education
Astronaut
Wally+Schirra
space+travel
Spaceship+Earth
pollution
are a relatively painless intro to 
