Can you suggest any uses for an e-voting machine?

I’m thinking we could rent them out for Lisbon Treaty referenda — free for the first 30 minutes — and hope that users wouldn’t return them!

An idea prompted by the fact that Dublin’s new bicycles have hit the streets at last : 450 bright and robust machines in a scheme that provides cheap efficient transport for short journeys.  Fingers crossed that this will be a great success.

Meanwhile, another, ostensibly high-tech machine was also in the news again: the ongoing saga of those e-voting machines. Storing the 7,500 machines this year is going to cost us €800,000, or a little over €100 each.  That’s on top of all the costs to date, not to mention the public’s loss of trust in technology.

So, could we not put them to some use instead?

Maybe give one to every school . . . they could be used for civics lessons in democracy, and technology classes for how not to design an e-voting machine.

Or install them in libraries and public spaces, for local referenda and community surveys (what to call Dingle/An Daingean, for instance) .

Or offer them to artists.  Surely someone out there can come up with a creative idea for an installation using a bank of these?  There’s even a precedent: Dublin City Council gave artists use of the (now vanished) kiosks on Capel Street bridge for a while, when they proved uncommercial.

We could have a competition for suggestions, but no e-voting allowed.

Or, maybe we should rent them out like bicycles.  And if you don’t return the machine within the allocated time, we give you €100!

Cheaper than this long-term storage, and save us all a big headache as well.

We’ve been watching a car crash unfold here over the last few days, as the future of General Motors was decided.  Or at least, the short-term future.

I’m posting this from southern Ontario, where in fairness thousands of jobs currently depend on the American auto industry.

As it happens, this is also the homeland of the Iroquois
people, whose Great Law requires that “in every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations”.

Looking at the long-term, 150-200 year impact of your actions and decisions, is surely the essence of sustainability. Sadly, that’s not how the decisions about General Motors were reached this weekend.

GM, remember, is the company that gave us the Hummer.

The good news is that GM will no longer make Hummers as part of its “reinvention” as a “leaner, greener ([sic], faster and stronger” company.  The bad news is that some other company has bought the brand, and clearly believes there is a future in gas-guzzling tanks.

Time was, people used to say that ‘what is good for General Motors, is good for America ‘. Actually, that’s a misquote. But understandable, given how central the motor car was to the American dream for the last 100 years.

The question now should be, as the Iroquois would ask, what about the next 100 years.

But governments here are looking, at best, to the next couple of years.  They’ve agreed to pump billions into GM in a bid to save jobs, and presumably in the belief that this 20th-century dinosaur can be turned around, and in no time at all. This despite the competition from more efficient Japanese imports, and the competition that will soon be coming from the new Chinese and Indian car industries.

In the run-up to the bankruptcy decision, I wondered if there was any chance that GM might actually be sacrificed?  After all, a number of banks have been let fail over the last couple of years, something that would have been unthinkable a few years before.

But while banks may be essential to the financial system, the American car industry employs far more people, and more voters.

I may not know much about cars, the auto industry and mega restructuring deals, but I do know that North America’s 20th-century car industry is not a sustainable future.

But carrying extra fuel adds to the weight of any vehicle, so it makes fuel-efficiency and environmental sense to carry as little as possible. Which is why motorists should take Ryanair’s recommendation on board.

Driving with a tank full of petrol means you get fewer kilometres per litre when your tank is full, it costs you money, and your car produces more pollution for every mile that you drive.

If the price of petrol dropped after, say, the first 25 litres, then it might make sense to bulk buy. But it doesn’t. Instead, your fuel efficiency drops. Put another way: bulk buying is costing you money. Better to half-fill the tank instead.