An excerpt from “Macrowikinomics”, one of the books I am currently reading:
” Imagine that you’ve landed on a planet a lot like Earth a century ago and you’ve been given an assignment to design the dominant mode of transportation to move people around. Your design criteria are as follows: The system must maximize the consumption of fuels and the surface area of the planet – using as much farmland and other space as possible.
Your system should produce the most toxins and use more physical materials (steel, glass, rubber, leather, synthetics) than available alternatives. It must be the system that will result in the largest possible number of deaths and injuries (hint: have free movement vehicles and make every pilot an amateur). It should also be the least predictable system, giving passengers little idea how long a trip home might take, and it should slow down to a crawl, not speed up, the more people use it. Plus you get bonus points for pitting inhabitants against one another and, in extreme cases, causing travellers to fly into an uncontrollable rage.
It’s hard to imagine a better solution to these design criteria than an automobile powered by an internal combustion engine.”
… followed by some suggestions about how we can make it better yadda yadda. However, if I may, I’d like to pick up where my title left off….
“.. HHHHHHH!!!!!!”
