Nine Shift

The World As We Know It Has Ended

The world as we know it has ended, author Virginia Woolf wrote about December 31, 1909.

Woolf, one of the last century's greatest authors, properly was chronicling the big turning point moving from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age.

100 years later, we again are at the big turning point, moving from the Industrial Age to the Internet/Information/Innovation Age of the 21st century.

Unaware, America is pretty much ignoring this New Year's Eve and the big turning point. Originally, we had thought everyone would understand Nine Shift by now, and our futurist predictions, blogging,and speeches would be over. We were wrong. People still do not understand the great transition.

So on to the exciting second decade of the 21st century !  

Coming Up: A Thousand Auto Museums

One of the interesting things one discovers driving through small towns all over the country is the number of them that have train museums.  Even towns of less than 2,000 people may have a train museum.

   It’s easy to predict that auto museums will multiply in this century.  The biggest auto museum web site directory for the U.S. lists 184 auto museums right now.  Double that number to 400 to be on the safe side.

   As cars decline, and more auto companies go out of business, people with nostalgia for cars will create local auto museums all over the country.  The supply of vintage cars will be good. And nostalgia will be great for the auto.

   So we will predict around 4,000 auto museums by 2050.  You will be able to take a train to visit one of them!

Latest Auto Prediction

We predict that around 2012, in just two years, that the American Automobile Association (AAA) will eliminate its discount for members riding Amtrak. 

By 2012 AAA will finally wake up and realize trains are a threat to cars.

First Anti-Train Ad Appears

The year 2010 starts out with another new development.

My brilliant co-author Julie has seen the first anti-train ad.  In the ad, a girl runs frantically to catch the train, arrives at her destination at 2 a.m., and then loses her luggage.  Meanwhile, the family driving gets home with ease.  Really, no one loses their luggage on a train! 

   The anti-train ad marks a new stage in trains replacing cars.  Pro-auto folks will wage a hard but futile fight to save the car.

   The ad is a positive step in the growing recognition that trains are better than driving. The ads won’t influence Gen Y at all, but this great train ad might.

Television is dead

Great story in NY Times Dec 4 by Brian Stelter. Here's the lead paragraph.

"As she prepared her daughter for college, Anne Sweeney insisted that a television be among the dorm room accessories.
   'Mom, you don't understand. I don't need it,' her 18 year old responded, saying she could watch whatever she wanted on her computer, at no charge.
   That flustered Ms. Sweeney, who happens to be president of ABC Television Group.
   'You're going to have a television if I have to nail it to your wall,' she told her daughter. 'You have to have one.'  But she does not, actually."

 

The fight over sending kids to college

We are now in the midst of another 21st battle, the battle to send more kids to college.

The government, colleges and many schools are bent on providing "sub-baccalaureate" education to our nation's kids. Nine Shift knows that 50% of our kids, eventually more, require a four year undergraduate degree to become knowledge workers and support the rest of the work force.

I gave the keynote at the Alabama Association of School Boards conference in Birmingham, AL, last week, and got a very open and friendly reception.  Told them the new mission of K-12 was not to produce high school graduates (that was last century) but to prepare children to successfully complete college.

Photo: high school honor guard at the opening session.

Is WalMart a force for good or evil?

Overall, ethically and morally, has WalMart been a force for good or evil?  Vote now!

EVIL.
-Has destroyed Main Street and small business in the USA.
-Has lowered wages in the US.
-Bums off the government to help pay its own workers health insurance.
-Did not invent cheap disposable goods to fill dumps and landfills and destroy the environment, but arguably has perfected it.
-Could be blamed for accelerating the move of manufacturing and jobs overseas.
-And as an obscenely profitable company, hoards money and fails to distribute it to the rest of society.

GOOD.
-It has almost single handedly increased the standard of living for 25% of the world's population (the Chinese), boosting a quarter of the world's population (give or take) from peasant poverty status to factory worker industrial age car buying apartment purchasing levels, roughly ten times the standard of living as before.

Photo: Huge ocean going freighter bringing tennis shoes and lead-based toys from China to the U.S. I took the photo last month at our conference in Savannah. This is the amazing view out the window from the Savannah Convention Center. Click on it to enlarge.

OK, your turn. Just hit "Comments" and Vote now!

The True Cost of Automobiles

The true cost of driving automobiles is staggering.

Forget the fuzzy social costs, air quality, lung cancer and all that.  Just look at the hard numbers costs, both to each of us as individuals, and to government.  I was at a train meeting when Wisconsin Assemblywoman Penny Bernhard Schaber asked what the cost of highways is.  Someone in the audience mentioned the book Asphalt Nation.  So I read it.

Then I did my own math, based on the most recent statistics.  Here's what I get.

My conservative, low-balling estimate:  $1 Trillion a year cost that each of us pays directly for gas, insurance, maintenance, cars, etc.   PLUS  $500 billion a year government spends on highways, state police and other "concrete" verifiable costs.

If you want breakdowns, or do your own math, or see a higher estimate, see CommuteSolutions.org  They put the numbers closer to $3 Trillion a year.

People think trains are expensive. Now I'm beginning to understand trains are cheaper than cars.