Give me what i want for my money
Tax season is approaching in the United States and like most people I am concerned about where my money will go. A few days ago the state of the union address was taking place and of course the hot topics these days are job creation and ways that united states can retain its position as the world superpower. While there has be a increase of unemployment recently, I am still very strongly against welfare hand out systems and I believe that if people cant find jobs on their own because there is a shortage, jobs need to be created that will benefit the people that are paying for them, IE the tax payers. As they say, there is always work to be done.
About 55 Years ago, Eisenhower dumped $25 Billion into creating interstate highways and this kind of investment has been paying off ever since. It created American jobs and has also benefited the people that paid for it. Because of it, our economy was strengthened and many people that would otherwise have been left out, were given opportunities they needed to get back on track.
While we still need to appropriate money into our road system, we now need new types of infrastructure to be built to facilitate new types of commerce. For this reason, I have created a list of several areas which I consider good places for America to invest as a nation.
Communications
In 1996, when the telecom act was passed, the communications industry became open for anyone to participate in and numerous new companies sprang up. This allowed for companies to provide services where the larger companies didn't think there would be a significantly large market and a lot of people that would of otherwise had no access to a lot of services were not left out in the dark anymore. Unfortunately when you jump ahead 15 years there are still a lot of problems that didn't get solved. In the rural areas, it is still impossible to get high speed internet, and in most cities there is still very little competition. In the areas where broadband is available it is very slow compared to some other industrialized nations and as our reliance on it continues to increase it needs to be built up.
Today there is very little distinction over what is internet traffic and what is being pushed over conventional mediums such as phone wire and coax video cable. While this physical network shift doesn't necessary dictate a reason for an upgrade, it allows for people to inherently have more choices as they have access to more media distribution channels than what we currently have the capacity to support. Recently, as an illustration, there have been several new opportunities for consumers to rent videos over the internet and the jump to high definition television has required more bandwidth to be allocated per program. As this becomes the standard, and as more people start to rely on digital communication to go about their daily lives, we need to be sure that we have a communication system that is capable of keeping up with it.
Power Transportation
Another area which could use some upgrades is the power grid. When electric cars start rolling out, and at the current pace it seems sooner rather than later, we are going to be using a lot more electricity than before.
With this increased demand they are going to have to solve several problems and the main one is that when power companies generate energy there is usually no where to store it so you have to have to create as much as the highest predicted demand calls for. When it falls under that demand, the electricity is wasted since it can not easily be stored for later use. However, there are several experimental ways of storing energy now such as magnetically suspended flywheels which would be beneficial, but another improvement we need is a nation wide power system. With this we would have more opportunities to shift demand and consumption around as needed.
Before we start building a nationwide grid we need to address another problem, leaky power cables. The copper cables we are currently using lose about 5% of all the energy that is put through them. There are new cables that being developed right now that do not lose energy to resistance. They use traditional copper as a transport medium and in the middle of the thin copper ring is a pipe of liquid nitrogen that is used to cool the cables down to a superconducting state so that a large amount of transmission waste is curbed.
Power Generation
Because of this increase in demand I don't think its really time that we start implementing new types of power generation on a large scale yet since the technology is no where near mature yet. There have been improvements to traditional power generation methods that should be implemented as stepping stones before we truly reach a next generation power system. Before these new systems are ready we still need to have a large amount of new plants built as the demand for electricity to increase largely over the next couple of years.Water
Unfortunately I don't know as much about water infrastructure as I like, but I do know that it is ageing and needs to be replaced. In areas of the NE they say that after being processed about 50% of the water leaks into the ground after it has been treated and before it gets into your home. In the ground there are still old wooden pipes that have been in place for about 200 years.Posted on January 31, 2010
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