Juggling Dynamite

With all the convenience and self-determination of human driven automobiles, it may be tempting to overlook that they have also been the most deadly weapon ever created. The internal combustion engine (ICE) motor car, driven by inherently erratic humans, has killed more people (not to mention injures and environmental damage) than both the nuclear bomb and the AK-47 assault riffle together. Fortunately EV driver-less autos are en route to alleviate the carnage. See Driverless cars may kill off the world’s deadliest invention:

About 1.25m people are killed in road traffic accidents a year, accounting for 2.2 per cent of all deaths globally, according to the World Health Organization. Accurate data on how many people in total have been killed by cars in the past century are hard to find. But 50m seems a fair guess. That compares with the 123m in all wars in the 20th century.

If that level of carnage were not bad enough, cars have also contributed massively to environmental pollution and adverse climate change. As an additional malus, the car’s thirst for oil has handed billions of dollars in revenues to some of the world’s most regressive regimes: Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela.

Fortunately, the end of the human-driven, petrol-fuelled car may be in sight…

Last week, Philip Hammond, the British chancellor, said he wanted the UK to be one of the first countries to allow “genuine driverless cars” on its roads by 2021.

The internet continues to disrupt traditional business models, and local news coverage was predictably in line; today we learn that 35 community newspapers (print and on-line) have been closed in Ontario.  See:  Communities decry the closure of their newspapers.  Full disclosure:  I was a paper delivery girl for the Barrie Examiner 40 years ago.

On one level, the closures seem understandable, natural in the digital age. On another, there is a growing sense of alarm about how democracy, community, local values, small businesses, charities and families will prosper in an age where oligopoly corporations control all our access to information, while filtering the flow to please shareholders and big business sponsors first.

In a week where Time Inc. sells itself to Meredith corp., backed by the Koch brothers, and the US government is threatening to end net neutrality for the internet, the underlying themes here should make thinking people very uneasy.  Progress is great and all, but these moves seem to be about going backwards, giving the public less access to independent assessments and non-corporate conclusions.  We can’t afford to be complacent here.

Torstar Corp. (TSX:TS.B) and Postmedia Network Inc. (TSX:PNC.A, TSX:PNC.B) announced Monday the two companies exchanged a total of 41 publications and would stop publishing all but five of them, resulting in 291 job losses.  Here is a direct video link.

Elias Demangos, president of Fortigo Freight Services, one of Canada’s larger trucking firms, on why his company has ordered trucks from Tesla. Here is a direct video link.

Given the number of people that we drive by on highways today that are reading their phones, books, papers, texting, dialing, while eating, drinking and smoking, we should all hope that autonomous vehicles spread quickly.