Tragedy in Reno...

   When I work on a computer, I occasionally multi-task: if there's a process that cooks on its own, like a backup, restore or virus scan, I'll take a quick peek at a news website.
   Last night a particularly harrowing one caught my eye: a vintage plane crashed during the Reno Air Show, killing the pilot, and injuring or killing quite a few spectators.
  I'm not an aviation enthusiast, but I really enjoyed the Balloon Race that took place during the GBR.  As the sun came up and I watched balloons inflate and ascend, I caught two overflights of vintage propeller driven fighters with my video camera.  In both instances they flew in perfect, tight "v" formation, although one group peeled off to honor the "missing man."  It was a glorious sight.
  What I hope comes out of this: a renewed appreciation for the dedication, time, money and effort it takes to keep vintage aircraft running, as well as the skill to fly them.  And perhaps a slight re-jiggering of spectator positioning and participant flight corridors to further minimize the chances of casualties if another plane experiences such a massive mechanical failure in the air.
  What I hope doesn't come out of this are hordes of brainless safety fascists, who will regulate events like this out of existence.  The problem is that they usually aren't happy "solving" the "problem at hand."  There's potential for them to expand their mandate to anything that burns petrol, makes lots of horsepower and noise, and goes really fast.
  Regulations have their place, but there are limits.  You can't engineer perfect safety into our world, but there are starry-eyed, brain-dead bureaucrats who will quench all legitimate risk-taking in an attempt to get us to that point.
 

Who's to blame for this one?

Empire is/was a "company town" in northwestern Nevada - now numbering about five souls, it once was a reasonably lively place, whose inhabitants were employees of US Gypsum.  They worked at the local gypsum mine, now sporting a shiny perimeter fence around the white mounds of excavated product, ostensibly to keep out those enterprising gypsum thieves.  The factory supplied wallboard to construction sites all over the US, but mostly to the booming Las Vegas area.  When the housing crash arrived, it hit southern Nevada harder than most.  Demand for USG's products dried up and blew away.  The people working for the firm occupied company-owned homes leased to them cheaply, and of couse with no factory, their homes were taken away, along with their jobs.  Several score jobs doesn't sound like that many, but it has a huge impact in a sparsely populated state like Nevada, and with an overall terrible scarcity of work in that state, people have had to uproot themselves and drift pretty far to find a steady paycheck.

Who can we blame for the demise of this town?  People would love to point a finger at George W Bush or Barack Obama, but there were a lot of cooks brewing up this disaster.  How about the banks that disastrously lowered their lending standards?  Borrowers whose stomachs knotted even as they smiled
and signed on the dotted line, knowing they couldn't really sustain the payments?  Or how about Alan Greenspan and his successors, who've likely kept interest rates lower than they should have?   Or the various investment houses who bought and sold securitized mortgates, creating a byzantine chain of loan ownership and very little accountability? Or US Gypsum itself, which let a town die rather than find a way to save some of those jobs until demand for their product picks up?

It's human nature to find a figurehead to bury in the sand and hurl cabbages at, but in reality there are many, many contributors to our most difficult problems, and we certainly don't do ourselves any favors by singling out one guilty party while letting the rest go scot free.