As Jerry Maguire has shouted: "Show me the money"! Let's face the elephant in the room. It's about money/economy. Why do people care about global warming now? inspired by Al Gore? ;) Some of you might have already guessed... it's the correlation with the $100+/barrel oil. However I would like to stress, the world is not black or white; or in our case, green or blue, environment or development. Only elementary school kids divide people to bad or good guys. We are much more educated than that. Or are we not?! ;)

Let's try to answer some questions before we start:

• Would you leave your current condo abandoned and buy a new condo just because the toilet is clogged?
• Would you burn woods inside the house in winter, if heater is available?
• Would you eat overcooked meat with MSG, if local-grown organic meat is available at the same price?
  

If the answer is no to all of the above, why would the government decide to:

• build a new highway because the old expressway is too slow
• introduce impacts to villages, natural habits and environments, if the following alternatives are available:
  

1. carrying bicycles on the train (good example: http://udn.com/NEWS/NATIONAL/NAT5/4248990.shtml). More family and people would love such a fun activity. Hopping on a train and having no worry about driving is the best way to get to the destination before starting the activities. Such service is either free or almost no charge in many US and European cities, which contributes to the popularity of traveling to US and European destinations. Also, I am not sure why it’s always hard to get tickets between Taipei and Taitung. Adding more trains to East Taiwan will alleviate the problem.
2. running free shuttle buses in loops for tourist sites. Make the bus come every 10 mins for rush hours and every 20 mins for non-rush hours. Such shuttle service can co-run with industry partners. Don’t forget to make the translation consistent and the buses clean. No one likes to drive and find parking if shuttle service is so easy and frequent. Zion National Park is a great example for using shuttle to solve the traffic/parking problem.
3. maintaining our natural beauty clean and secure. Singapore is a great example given their limited nature resources. Coming back to reality, it’s much more likely that you step on glasses and needles and who-knows-what-that-is in the beaches of Hualien than Pebble Beach of California. Not only do we need the laws, but more urgently do we need them enforced, really enforced 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
4. making travel information handy. Provide not just the official information, but rate (similar to BBB) and provide local shops and services information. Pretty much wherever I visited in the world, may it be Ireland or Malaysia, Tokyo, or even Beijing, I could find travel information at every corner. It’s literally every corner.
   
5. updating and maintaining the government website. Lots of the so-called “e” government sites have broken links and outdated information.
   

A state is like a person, in her early development, she needed something basic to fill her stomach, regardless if that might be bad for her heart, or might be cancer inducing. She was starving after all. When she is better off, she realizes how carelessly she treated herself before and starts to live healthier. She sustains her life longer in a meaningful way, not just survives. The above alternatives are by no means an exhausted list and not necessarily the best suggestions. However, I do hope that people from Hualien and Taiwan have the chance to:

• be informed about the pros and cons by the experts and professionals from different fields
• have open and honest discussions, definitely not the last one hosted by 張子敬  -_-|||
• decide themselves… however, if and only if the first two items are done. Without being fully informed, the decision is simply a joke.

The alternative "soft" sustainable development is our third way, among the possible 4th, 5th, ..., more creative ways. “Hard” development is so 20th century. They are easier to be seen by naked eyes. But without the "soft" parts, the hardware is there as a “mosquito house” (please refer to news about many empty “culture centers” as mosquito houses). For example, the glasses and needles that are there in the beach still stop tourists from going even if the highway is built. Soft development has to follow before we do anything more with hardware. And again, long-term hardware benefit is yet to be seen and damages are for sure. People are smart and dynamic. When the infrastructure is there, innovations from personal and industrial levels will flourish. Hence, there comes the money. Trust me. Even more so, trust the Taiwanese people. 

So it all went back to around 7 years ago, when I first visited this world-famous 17-miles drive in Sunny California, from the snowy gray depressing steel city Pittsburgh. Some said it's the most beautiful beach in California. Within the drive by the scenic coast, there stands the famous Cypress tree, Pebble Beach Golf course, tens of millions+ gated mansions. One can have a glimpse of Pebble Beach from a quote of Jack Nicklaus (golfer):

If I had only one more round to play
I would choose to play it at Pebble Beach
I've loved this course from the first time I saw it
It's possibly the best in the world

Having this super high expectation, I almost burst into laugh when I entered the gated community of 17-Miles drive (first and second pictures below). Did I enter a worm hole by chance and back to Hualien (third and fourth pictures below), where I was from? Dear readers, please judge by your own eyes. Do they look similar or what? Exactly, I was all in a sudden in the coast of Hualien, even the air smelled similar. Only... only that Hualien offers more. Some Hualien coast got cliffs; some has sand (7-star sand beach); it has whales near coast; it has Taroko National park (yet another crazy natural wonder) nearby; it has aboriginal cultures; it's where Tzuchi charity (think of Mother Teresa) comes from. If you can't remember all the beauties, simply remember the friendly smiles of people and genuine beauty of the mountains and water. It's funny that I work all the way to the prettiest beach only to find it's from my homeland.

When I was a kid, every time there was visitors, parents would took them to Taroko National Park, again and again and again. The groove, the "one-string sky", etc. all seemed so normal/boring to me. Similarly, the air was always pure, the sky was always blue, I could always see the green and blue mountains everyday. No biggie you know? No biggie I said. Till one day when I visited Hualien from my college out of town, I was shocked to see half of the mountain near Taroko National Park was dug out by a cement company!!! I asked Mom, why was this happening. "Because it was right outside the boundary of the Park, and people needed cement to develop", Mom said. Yes, development... in the name of development, the real opportunity was lost. The opportunity that emphasizes the real beauty of that place was lost, forever lost. I can't imagine how much more damages it will do if the highway is built.

I never label myself an environmentalist. I support truth, not label. Hualien is world-class pretty. It just needs good organization/packaging/advertisement/etc. Actually, I was too kind. Hualien is like a nature beauty with terrible make-up, or no make-up and dresses badly. What it needs is not a highway that dents its natural beauty. Instead, it needs good dresser and styler, and it needs promotion. You can type 17-miles or Hawaii or Phuket and find tons of tourist information at Google/Yahoo. Can you find nearly as much information for Hualien? We all know the answer. What needs to be done? Highway is definitely not the answer. Given the terrain, even if the highway is built, the time it takes to drive from Taipei to Haulien won't be too much different from taking a train or taking an plane (door-to-door time, while air time is only 25 mins). While the time isn't saved, you skip all the coastal beauty and go directly to the city of Hualien which is... not much the essence of Hualien. This discussion does not even mention the impact of the weekend traffic, parking, air pollution and such. Since I am not a specialist, I cannot tell you how many natural habitats will be destroyed. But I am freaking out already having the half-dug mountain picture in my head...

Government shall make things easier for individuals, schools, and industry to innovate, at least not to make it harder ;) People are all smart and dynamic. If for example, train/air tickets and road signs are all labeled consistently with multi-lingual (notice that the key here is "consistency". A translation of "K" shall always be "K" not "K" in one place and "G" in some other place), people from all over the place can tour without confusion. Government shall regulate hotels and travel agencies. There are many many more things government can do to enable the individuals and industries, other than spending money on the highway, where the benefit is to be judged and the demages are almost for certain.  And deep in mind I hope Taiwanese government promote Hualien as well as other places in Taiwan like Dubai :) Dubai is amazing. Let me end my mumbling by:

If I had only one more round to dance
I would choose to dance at 7-Star Beach

References:
[1] Photos of 17-Miles drive are from Flickr's link1 and link2.
[2] Photos of Hualien coast are from here.
[3] Link to a forum about 蘇花高 is here.
[4] Link to 連署向蘇花高說：不！

The two new SNL shows inevitably got lots of presidential nomination materials. During the past weekend, SNL ran a parody of a debate between Hillary and Obama. Amy Poehler as Hillary was asked about serious questions as health care and the likes while Obama was asked whether he was comfortable (it's a parody). Amy Poehler went:

"All right, energy policy. The big oil companies are quite happy with the status quo. They're earning record profits and pretty speeches are not going to make them give up power. It's going to take a fighter, not a talker. Someone who is aggressive enough, and relentless enough, and demanding enough to take them on. Someone so annoying, so pushy, so grating, so bossy and shrill, with a personality so unpleasant, that at the end of the day the special interests will have to go, 'Enough! We give up! Life is too short to deal with this awful woman! Just give her what she wants so she'll shut up and leave us in peace!' And I think the American people will agree, that someone is me."

Tell me what your reaction is after reading Amy Poehler (or you have watched the show). I couldn't help but roll myself in the ground LOL. And Tina Fey at the weekend before, not as cracking, but clever:

"And maybe what bothers me the most is that people say that Hillary is a bitch. And let me say something about that: yeah, she is, and so am I. And so is this one (pointing at Amy Poehler). And you know what, bitches get stuff done. That’s why Catholic schools use nuns as teachers and not priests. Those nuns are mean old clams, and they sleep on cots and are allowed to hit you. And at the end of the school year, you hated those bitches, but you knew the capital of Vermont. So, I’m saying it’s not too late Texas and Ohio. Get on board. Bitch is the new black! ...

And finally, in probably the most important women's news item there is, we have our first serious, female presidential candidate in Hillary Clinton. And yet, women have come so far as feminists that they don't feel obligated to vote for a candidate just because she's a woman. Women today feel perfectly free to make whatever choice Oprah tells them to."

Rock on.