A Sign of the Times

The library of these times is WiFi -- and not more of the same 19th century libraries.

That has become the central feature of most public libraries now -- allowing people with business downtown to maintain their connectivity and therefore productivity. The library is no longer just about books, newspapers and magazines -- but about access to information at the state of the art.

Books were the best at doing so at one time. Now the computers allow one to have access to all information in the world, at virtually one's finger tips -- but they're still trying to get (teaching) people to read books in the traditional way, doing things as they've always been done in Hawaii before -- as though that was an intelligent thing to do.

Whenever people propose that things ought to be done differently, these bureaucrats will insist that there is no money to do it differently -- in addition to doing things as they've always been done before!

I don't think these government bureaucrats get it.

Thus government in Hawaii doesn’t improve but simply adds another layer to a decaying foundation -- rather than supplanting the old wholly with the new. One of the major objections to the proposed new rail system is that it doesn’t supplant or replace the existing mass transit system, but instead, makes it subservient to the rail system. That is, instead of most people being able to take the bus from close to where they live to where they do business, those presently taking the bus, would instead be taken to a rail transit station -- to make it useful.

So then not only would the rail be running around the clock regardless of whether there is demand for it outside of peak hours, but the entire feeder system would also have to maintain those more hours or obviously, people wouldn’t be able to get to those stations in the first place -- which makes excessive and unjustifiable costs skyrocket off the charts.

If You’re going to build a rail station where people have to get there by some other means than walking, it obviously increases that traffic immeasurably -- merely adding more trips, which looks good for mass transit systems trying to justify their continued existence and expansion.

In this way, they’re not much different from other government operations that exist to perpetuate and expand their need -- rather than properly reducing it. But that seems to be the standard of how government measures its own “success,” rather than rightfully reducing that need so they can pursue their own happiness.