BEIRUT: Anyone out for a late-afternoon stroll on the Beirut’s Corniche on Saturday may have got a bit of a shock. A pair of actors spat, slapped, made obscene gestures, shouted, cheek-squeezed, hair-patted, mocked and mingled with the audience. Thankfully, the reaction comprised mainly helpless guffaws, the most adverse reaction being a slight recoil.
In fact, it was the interaction between performers and audience that made “Rickshaw” – a piece of physical theater from Dansk Rakkerpak – such a success.
2. Apparently, an improvised "performance" of rickshaw theater broke out in NYC:
More than nine years after the city killed Turtle Taxi, its last rickshaw-based business, “PJ” Patrick James Lynch is ready to give it another go.
Lynch, a former manger and operator of Charleston Bike Taxi in South Carolina, left the company, packed his belongings in the back of his car and moved to New Orleans in July with the intention of resurrecting pedicabs in the Big Easy.
“There are over 100 cities in the U.S. that have these and there is no city more perfect for it than New Orleans,” Lynch said. “This is a flat city that is heavily based on tourism. Plus the speed limit isn’t fast on most roads so it’s safe. Over the last two years it seems like, from a tourism perspective, New Orleans is really coming back and I want to get on board.” ... But Lynch will be going up against the taxi cab companies who were instrumental in defeating Turtle Taxi and are prepared to go to the mat to defeat any new venture that could possibly cut into their business, said United Cab Co. President Pat Murphy.
I suddenly have more sympathy for the rickshaw driver in the video.
4. Kevin "Dow 36,000" Hassett and the Heritage Foundation's J.D. Foster mock Obama's "Green Jobs" incentives, and sarcastically argue that promoting the rickshaw industry would be the logical conclusion to all this talk of green technology and renewable energy. Foster writes:
Rickshaws are the way to go for green jobs. There are no rickshaw drivers in the United States today, so every rickshaw job is a new job. Even more new jobs would be created as the auto companies shift, with a little urging from Uncle Sam, to rickshaw production in the United States...
Often wrong, never in doubt, Hassett and Foster's record at forecasting is so spotty, they should get jobs as hacktacular economic pundits.
A 26-year-old American tourist travelling in India hitched a ride in a rickshaw last week and married the driver a few days later, a report said Friday.
Whitney from Chicago met her prince charming in Jaipur in Rajasthan, a state west of the capital famous for its stately palaces, after hailing a motorised rickshaw and hiring the driver for her stay in the city, the Mail Today newspaper said.
"On the third day, he surprised me by popping the question," Whitney told the paper. "'I want to spend the rest of my life with you', he told me. I fell in love."
Heritage's reductio ad absurdum argument against "green jobs" by arguing for rickshaws is actually pretty apt. You can't saw that jobs are really "created" when the capital in question would have been used more productively but for a government regulation. We could certainly cut emissions and create a huge new job market by using rickshaws, but that would actually result in a net loss in jobs.
The problem with "green jobs" is this: Unless everyone adopts stringent environmental regulations *and* we gain a competitive advantage in low-emission technologies without relying mainly on government subsidies, greenhouse gas regulations will be a sunstantial net loss for the economy. It's certainly possible that a miracle will occur, and inventors across the land will come up with low-emission technologies and we'll make a fortune selling them to Europe and Asia -- but does anyone think that's likely?
And even if that did occur, it would still be a net loss to the global economy, unless we assume (erroneously, in my mind) that the global greenhouse gas regulations actually prevent catastophic environmental conditions that would have an even greater impact on the economy, and that the cost of adapting to those conditions is greater than the cost of preventing them.
We disagree about the aptness of Foster's reductio. It's not really an absurdum because a massively expanded rickshaw industry is not absurd in any formal sense.
Why do you perceive American ingenuity as a "miracle"? I used to have quite a lot of faith in it.
Don't have to "assume that the global greenhouse gas regulations actually prevent catastophic environmental conditions"-- you can assume that there is a fair chance that they may prevent catastrophe, and that the ecominc "risk" is worth it. Call it Gore's wager.
[(Often wrong, never in doubt), Hassett and Foster's record at forecasting is so spotty, they should get jobs as hacktacular economic pundits.] {I didn't know how else to bracket such para'leveled pundit pun'ishment.} Parenthetically speaking, Dude, that is some blitchin' phrasing!
I would argue that it's absurd to suggest that forcing people to use rickshaws is a net benefit for the economy. The idea is that you're forcing recourse to a primitive technology, and even though that would create its own cottage industry, it defies reason to believe that this would actually increase GDP.
And I don't regard American ingenuity as a "miracle" -- but at the same time I'm humble enough to admit that other countries can innovate as well. When you have a net drain on the economy, you have to wonder weather we'll really be so deft at cornering the market on green technologies such that we're shielded from the negative economic effects. If you want to present this as a gamble, great. But that's not what Van Jones and his ilk were preaching.
Finally, with respect to the notion that there's a "fair chance" that greenhouse gas regulations will present catastrophe, I'd argue that's an oversimplification of the situation. There may be a "fair chance" of out-and-out catastrophe, but only a small chance that proposed regulatory schemes could really mitigate those severe outcomes. Or there could be only a small chance of abject catastrophe, but a "fair chance" that greenhouse gas regulations would be successful of mitigating any negative effects.
All the while, there is (in my view) a near certainty that greenhouse gas regulations will have serious economic consequences. It could also be that there's a "risk" that the economic consequences of regulation will be extreme and won't actually prevent catastrophic environmental harm. In short, Gore's wager isn't self-evidently correct.
