The Value of Lives vs. the Cost of Technology

Yesterday, a devastating train wreck in Dupont, Washington took human lives and caused serious injuries to dozens of passengers when a southbound train on its maiden high-speed voyage was about to encounter a looming, yet preventable, mini-Titanic situation.

Approaching a curve at 80 miles per hour instead of the designated 30-mile per hour limit, the speeding train (Amtrak Cascades 501)  could not reverse the laws of physics as it spilled its passenger-laden rail cars helter-skelter into the woods, off an overpass, and onto an interstate.

A Youthful Contender Aims for the Brass Ring.

Of the three Bridgewater candidates in the race for two open seats on the Bridgewater-Raritan Board of Education (BR-BOE) is Zachary Malek, a recent graduate of Bridgewater-Raritan High School, and a new face in his quest for public service. 

 

Malek is in his first year at Rutgers, where he is majoring in political science.  Should he be elected, he will be one of a few, if not only the second person of his age ever to win election to such a responsibility in New Jersey.

This is not a run-of-the-mill school board election, because the other two candidates are heavily experienced in school board affairs.  One is an incumbent, while the other is a previous board member.

So why consider Zachary Malek? Why place your bet on a young man studying at Rutgers?

Equifax Reports Hack of 143 Million Consumer Records

At a time when the nation’s attention is turned to the hurricane disasters of Irma in Florida and Harvey in the Houston area, Equifax, one of three large credit reporting agencies in the U.S. chose, in true political fashion, to disclose that its customer credit data base has been compromised -- 143 million social security numbers and other personal information records are now in the hands of cyber criminals.

Equifax discovered this breach in July but did not report it until late this week and after certain executives of the company had sold some of their stock.

Company representatives said that the executives had no prior knowledge of the cyber attack.

A class-action lawsuit has already been filed against Equifax, and its stock dropped by 14% in this Friday’s trading.

Camino Island

Captivating Reading

This mystery novel spins a story of romance and local color, effectively weaving them together into a yarn with books, writers, deception, and stolen manuscripts, culminating into a frantic search to find the latter before they quietly disappear into the underground libraries of wealthy private collectors.

Author John Grisham will command your attention as he moves you through this fast-paced drama in a desperate race against time to solve the heist of five original, handwritten works by renowned author, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Allegedly stored in a rare books vault at an undisclosed location within the Firestone Library of Princeton University, Fitzgerald’s original manuscripts, Tender is the Night, The Great Gatsby, The Last Tycoon, This Side of Paradise, and The Beautiful and Damned are protected by sophisticated technology in a climate-controlled environment.

Dunkirk – The Cost of War.

Credit: Set Photo, Christopher Nolan Movie, Dunkirk

The first and most obvious cost of war is the violent loss of lives and of its aftereffects upon survivors in the form of PTSD.  The other cost, ironically, is to be unprepared for war.

 

Sounds somewhat oxymoronic, does it not? But paying for the cost of preparedness may be the precondition to avoiding or minimizing the former: This concept was demonstrated during the long years of the Cold War between America and Russia.

Dunkirk:  At the onset of World War Two, the stranding of over 300,000 British and French troops who were driven to the edge of the sea on the beaches of Dunkirk, France, by German forces, abundantly underscores the fallacy of appeasement, a disastrous policy adopted by British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.