Re: “ ” (Page A1, Sept. 3). Thank you, Dieter Kurtenbach, for your sage observations of how greed is killing what was great about college football and local college culture.
To the ACC leadership, most of us on the West Coast didn’t care about your schools before. Cal and Stanford joining you from 2,500 to 3,000 miles away doesn’t change that. To Cal and Stanford leadership, I wonder what beneficial influence 10- to 12-hour round trip flights could possibly have on your student-athletes (and staff and their families)? How might it influence students’ grades and ability to study well and attend classes? I wouldn’t approve of my student-athlete child joining your teams.
Since we won’t be watching, we also won’t notice the absent alumni in ACC stands. In addition, your teams will burn up to five times more greenhouse gases for travel. No doubt your environmental studies teachers will note that in lectures.
Re: “ ” (Page A1, Sept. 3). The age of fiefdoms is over.
We fought a bloody revolution against this kind of imperialism and yet it is happening again here because billionaires like Jan Sramek are being allowed to pillage from generational land owners using thug tactics and intimidation, filing frivolous lawsuits that he can afford but his defendants cannot. Perhaps Sramek should return to his native Czechoslovakia and ply his antics there and see how far he gets. Make no mistake, Sramek is interested in only one thing — controlling the future.
Land is one of the few commodities that won’t vanish when financial markets collapse — and Sramek knows this. He is dangerous. In his own words, which he borrowed from Ayn Rand, “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.
” Somebody needs to. And soon. Re: “ ” (Page A12, Sept.
3). Keiko Mertz is dreadfully uninformed. Sites Reservoir would have a capacity of .
Shasta Lake, the largest, can hold . Sites is also the largest reservoir among those proposed in the Proposition 1 funding applications. It would do no damage to rivers as it would be filled exclusively from runoff.
Instead, Proposition 1 funds were used for Pacheco and Los Vaqueros, total capacity 415,000 acre-feet. Sites may be a drop in the bucket, but the two fully funded projects are little more than a heavy fog. The migrant crisis in the home of the Statue of Liberty shows how broken our system is.
We need to start over. How many people do we need to let in to keep our economy strong and how will we get them? Economists can decide the first. For the second we have a solution for other situations where the demand far exceeds the supply — a lottery.
Tickets would be issued only at a U. S. embassy, and any entrants without a ticket caught at the border would be immediately returned.
We would do a hard stop on our current undocumented mess by granting green cards to all now in the United States. We could require employers to confirm legal status to further reduce illegal crossings. Global warming will only exacerbate the number of people wanting to get into the United States — a lottery is the only fair way to handle this imbalance.
Re: “ ” (Page A6, Sept. 7). Related Articles Professor Colleen Grogan incongruously argues that reducing prices for pharmaceutical companies’ drugs will have little effect on drug research.
While NIH funding is involved in 99% of all new drugs, it only contributes 49% of all research spending with pharmaceutical companies contributing 51% according to her article. Obviously reducing pharmaceutical company revenues will reduce money available both for research and for turning research into usable drugs and getting them into people’s hands. .
From: eastbaytimes
URL: https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2023/09/08/letters-1402/
