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Showing posts with the label gdp

Economic Growth and Highway Speeds - my thesis

Pretend I am a fancy Harvard grad (with an impossible to pronounce last name) associated with a think tank (not tanked thinking) based in Washington.  Therefore I am about to postulate a lot of mumbo jumbo but this might just be true. As I was doing my usual inane driving to work I got to thinking of how many people were being transported from point A to B to C and beyond (if they were not paying attention...) on American highways as compared to a recent trip to the isles of New Zealand where a four car sighting is cause for concern - is that a traffic jam?  Also posted road speeds in aggregate are much lower in New Zealand (perhaps a sentiment shared by their airports where if you show up couple hours ahead of your flight the monitor display actually says 'RELAX' for flight status) compared to the American highways. So going back to the thinking - I get to run through the many roadway experiences in different places I have had the fortune to visit and it points to ...

Stop Press

These two words were quite mysterious, growing up or when I first started understanding the English language.  Also my growth (as it were) amidst a bunch of relatives that had an occupation that involved printing literature in the local newsmedia added to the puzzle. Who had to stop and what did they press?  Of course the realization that 'Press' meant anyone from the news organization (at least at that time) or a journalist of some kind impressed me with the idea that stopping them during their runabouts was not a smart thing to do. If you see a frenzied journo the last thing you want to do is get in their way.  You will be the one that gets pressed much akin to being gored by a bull during the inhuman sporting practice followed by people in Northern Spain.  They call it running with the bulls.  Now who has more sense in the melee that follows is debatable but you get the idea. Anyway the reason for the title and the long preamble to the main me...