“Philosophy on the campaign trail” plus 3 more |
- Philosophy on the campaign trail
- Philosophy Lite: The best years of our lives
- Steam-age philosophy can take a nation a very long way
- Possum Philosophy: Is NASCAR killing the proverbial goose?
Philosophy on the campaign trail Posted: 14 Aug 2010 12:26 AM PDT 14 August 2010 Listen Now - 2010-08-14 |Download Audio - 14082010 Tony Abbott has been admiring cows at the Brisbane Show, Julia Gillard has, it's said, been patronising Mark Latham by brushing him down the front, but is there anything ideological happening in this election? This week, we go in search of political philosophy and ask whether the world we live in - not just Australia, but the whole of the West - is any longer a world in which political elites can articulate the issues and meet the challenges of the age. Transcript available Monday 16 August GuestsGuy Rundle PublicationsTitle: Down to the Crossroads: On the Trail of the 2008 US Presidential Title: The Opportunist: John Howard and the Triumph of Reaction (Quarterly Essay) PresenterAlan Saunders ProducerKyla Slaven Sound EngineerCharlie McCune Radio National often provides links to external websites to complement program information. While producers have taken care with all selections, we can neither endorse nor take final responsibility for the content of those sites. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
Philosophy Lite: The best years of our lives Posted: 13 Aug 2010 01:41 PM PDT By Raymond Smith If you were to stop and think back on your life, what times would you designate as the best years of your life? For some it would be when the kids were teenagers, remembering the great family times. I remember fondly those trips to Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Colorado mining camps; the canoe trips, the picnics, the hikes and the campfires. And now, I am in the twilight years of life. Yet who's to say that the best years may not still lie ahead? Cicero (106-43 B.C.) said that old age is the crown of life, but that was when the aged person was honored for the knowledge and insight he had acquired. Could we not today share some of our wisdom with the young? How do you define those best years? Do they pertain to financial success, fun times, spiritual growth, gaining knowledge and understanding, travel or adventure? America is becoming a "gray" nation. Because of developments in medicine and therapy, citizens are living much longer than a century ago. Even for those who are invalids or in poor health, the later years can offer opportunities for mental growth and some forms of service - letter writing, for example. Many retirees find that there are dozens of opportunities for serving their fellow man. Volunteerism can be a rewarding part of retirement - here are a few options: hospital and nursing home visitation, hospital and hospice volunteering, Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity, joining a service club, being a disaster volunteer, providing transportation, Mid-Coast Family Services, National Park Service, Christ's Kitchen, food bank, animal shelter, homeless shelter. Retirement is a great time to get involved in politics. Be a museum docent, serve with the Victoria Botanical Garden or deliver meals on wheels. Check with the Chamber of Commerce for a listing of clubs and organizations in Victoria. Believe it or not, retirement can be a time to donate money to charitable causes or political organizations. One doesn't have to be a rich philanthropist to donate to some worthy causes. Many successful businessmen find satisfaction in giving away their accumulated wealth. Take, for example, Andrew Carnegie, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. In those latter years, consider yourself a philosopher. Remember, a philosopher is a lover of truth, and there are many truths still waiting to be discovered. Life is a serious business, and what you discover may be shared with others. Are there regrets in the advanced years? Yes, I'm sure everyone would have done some things differently. Yet the positives outweigh the negatives. In the retirement years: We take time to smell the roses; we ponder more seriously the realities of life. We have a greater appreciation of God and His provisions for us. Unfortunately, when some people go into retirement, they find disappointment and boredom. Man was made to be creative and productive and sitting around watching TV just doesn't fit the bill. Make those latter years really count. Raymond F. Smith is a deacon at Fellowship Bible Church in Victoria and President of Strong Families of Victoria This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
Steam-age philosophy can take a nation a very long way Posted: 13 Aug 2010 09:23 PM PDT It's a good thing Tony Abbott wasn't about when plans were afoot to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge or we'd be stuck with a one lane carriageway and ''Stop and Go men'' on either side. Or, imagine the debate in 1907 when the newly formed Commonwealth of Australia decided to lay a copper wire telephone trunk line between Sydney and Melbourne. ''Look, ah, Kerry, I'm, ah, no tech head but I reckon tin cans and string backed up by, ah, smoke signals would be much cheaper.'' While it's easy to lampoon the Coalition leader's attitude towards the upgrade of our telecommunications system, his approach to public investment merely reflects the huge swing in sentiment that has swept the globe since federation. Back then, there were just 33,000 telephones across the nation and it took until 1935 for the network to be extended to Perth and finally Tasmania, all at enormous expense. It was an era when engineers dominated, when grandiose plans were dreamt up and turned into reality and when the costs were simply borne by the taxpayer in the quest for nation building. These days, economists and accountants rule. Everything has to be costed. Stringent financial tests are applied in a thousand different ways. Discounted cash-flow models, net present value, return on capital invested and replacement cost models are plugged into every major policy and project. And when it comes to infrastructure, and what once were termed essential services, governments largely have abrogated responsibility to the private sector. Power generation and distribution, transport, telecommunications, banking and to a lesser extent health all have been palmed off to private interests which have a much keener eye on efficiency and service. For anyone old enough to recall the agony of dealing with the arcane bureaucracy of the Postmaster-General's Department or Telecom Australia, the switch to private ownership and management has been a blessing, or mostly a blessing when it comes to Telstra. But there's a niggling concern. What if all our modern financial tests had been applied back at the turn of last century, when a sparsely populated nation was separated by vast distances and rugged terrain? Had the bean counters run the numbers then, it's unlikely we would have had a telephone system at all and road and rail networks most likely would have been deemed unviable. For there is one factor that all our modern tests ignore; the social return on capital invested. It is ignored for the very good reason that it is almost impossible to quantify. But without that rail system, Australia would never have become one of the world's great rural exporters. That telephone system helped the nation overcome the vast distances between production and port, connected us to the rest of the world and was crucial in attracting foreign investment and boosting exports. Those outlays were enormous in current terms. But they delivered dividends far beyond the scope of any accountant's imagination. Social return on equity requires almost a quantum leap of financial faith, a Field of Dreams kind of philosophy; build it and they will come. Of course, the dangers of wholesale adoption of that kind of thinking are obvious. Imagine if we had a megalomaniac prime minister, from Queensland for example, addicted to big spending programs and obsessed with leaving a legacy of national monuments. In the past two years, the pendulum of infrastructure development and ownership, particularly in the West, has begun to swing back towards public involvement, a trend driven mostly by desperation. In the US and Europe, governments now own everything from major banks to automobile manufacturers. And in Australia, there has been an acceptance that our national infrastructure has not kept pace with the economy, particularly during the early part of the resources boom. According to the conventional wisdom, the free market is the most efficient means of allocating scarce resources. So private enterprise is far better equipped to make investment decisions than government. That generally holds true. But private investment requires a return on equity over a fairly tight time period and certainly would not include benefits that may accrue to the community or the nation as a whole. The upgrade of our telecommunications system is a classic example. Under Sol Trujillo, Telstra used its monopoly position to thwart the Howard and Rudd governments' attempts to improve broadband services. For Telstra, the numbers just didn't stack up, particularly given the huge, though declining, returns it was extracting from the ancient copper network. Both John Howard and Kevin Rudd proposed government intervention in the telecommunications industry. So does Tony Abbott. The difference is not just the scale of the project ($7 billion as opposed to $43 billion), but also in the changes to the competitive framework. Under the Gillard proposal, Telstra no longer will have monopoly powers it can abuse. It will be a pure retailing company, competing on an equal footing with every other company. Within the telecommunications industry, there is almost universal approval of the Gillard move to a full fibre optic network. Even Telstra has agreed to hand over its customers and its hardware to the NBN. Telstra's competitors argue that if you are going to build a new national network, it is better to build the thing properly from the outset. Trying to upgrade it in 20 years' time will involve huge duplication costs. The Opposition Leader may have demonstrated a spectacular lack of knowledge of exactly what kind of telecommunications system he was proposing. He also may not consider the potential long-term economic benefits to the nation. But his single-minded devotion to the enormous costs involved in the project at least has one major benefit. It will focus the minds of those whose task it is to roll out the network to make sure it is achieved with utmost efficiency. For as we know, federal governments are not great when it comes to service delivery. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
Possum Philosophy: Is NASCAR killing the proverbial goose? Posted: 13 Aug 2010 12:35 PM PDT By ROBERT "ROCKY" CAHILL/Columnist On Saturday, Aug. 21, the Bristol Motor Speedway will host its NASCAR Sprint Cup night race for the 32nd time. This race is quite an event and is or at least has been considered the hardest ticket to obtain in NASCAR racing. The waiting list for tickets to the night race is considered one of the longest in all sports. A freelance journalist, Robert "Rocky" Cahill writes regularly for the News & Messenger. His Possum Philosophy column appears in each Saturday edition. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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