Letters: Curbside food composting, lottery online, bike helmets, American jobs, federal forestlands, fast neutrinos, river cleanup costs, TriMet complaints, wolf recovery

Letters to the editor By Letters to the editor
on October 08, 2011 at 10:25 AM

Print publication: Sunday, Oct. 9
Curbside food composting
I think that Mayor Sam Adams should reimburse all of us "green" Portlanders who have bought composting bins from the city or Metro over the past 20 years. I use both of mine all the time. Now what?

After all, he should realize that it is just the price of doing business.

Southeast Portland 

Lottery goes online
Regarding the Oct. 5 story "Lottery going online to plug in younger players" with the subhead of "There is no gambling, but prizes are offered, causing concern that it's a step toward state-run Internet gambling": I personally cannot understand the mindset that goes with intentionally baiting or prepping young people for gambling.

Realistically, wouldn't this be like putting "near beer" dispensers on a college campus or selling kids candy cigarettes?

This kind of thing saddens me.

Southwest Portland 


I was outraged to read that the Oregon Lottery is planning a new online game site called ORcade. This is nothing more than gambling "training wheels" for children. Gambling in general rates right up there with some of the worst activities that mankind has ever conceived. Now those who want more and more money are going after the youngest of our generation.

What will follow this? Are lottery officials going to go after preschoolers and kindergartners? Will they introduce paper cutouts and toy blocks in the design of slot machines for them to play with? This is a new low for the Oregon Lottery.



The Oregon Lottery folks are concerned because they are not reaching the younger audience. Perhaps people growing up in the Internet age are so computer savvy that they find stuffing cash into a machine where the odds are stacked against them unexciting. I suspect that, as far as the lottery is concerned, that is a lost generation.

A better tactic would be to get ahead of the curve and start directing energies at those who have not yet been exposed to the joys of throwing away money. Maybe the lottery should start advertising on children's programs. Maybe they could sponsor "Sesame Street."

Northwest Portland 

Bike helmets

Were I to give in to cynicism, I'd say that wearing a bike helmet is a form of natural selection. However, it is more than that. For children and others whose thinking capacity may not be fully developed, the natural selection view is too draconian. My kids and I wear helmets because I insisted, and set the example. I do sometimes cycle around the block on a fine summer evening with the wind in my hair, and I'm taking the risk that nothing unexpected will happen.

Would I ride my bike downtown from the Hollywood area without a helmet? No. It's too dangerous and too selfish. Aside from the fact that I wish to avoid a lengthy hospital stay or early demise, if I were injured my family would be subjected to many hardships. But then, I'm exercising mature judgment.

Northeast Portland 

American jobs first

It has been 40 years since international trade was profitable for the United States. Repeated trade deficits have been in the papers and on the news for my entire life. America holds $16 trillion in consumer and governmental debt on a GDP of only $13.5 trillion. Suzanne Bonamici gets that; letter writer John Wilkins does not (Oct. 5).

Wilkins repeats David Ricardo's comparative advantage theory -- that while America could make everything we need right here in the United States, it's better to import cheaper goods from elsewhere. That mathematical model may be sound, but it has not matched reality in 40 years, and because of it we have a permanent 10 percent unemployment rate, invasive species ruining our waterways and farmland, and greater debt.

I would much rather have a Tesla Motors factory here and have Intel make my cellphone from the Atom chip up to the MeeGo operating system than continue to live with the problems of international trade.

Restrict trade down to just intellectual property, and stop wasting energy to ship matter internationally.


Federal forestlands

While the financial plight of Oregon's timber counties is lamentable, the solution does not lie in selling off federal forestlands, managing them as a "trust" or allowing the forest to be decimated under any other pretense, as editorials have suggested. Federal forestland belongs to all Americans, and like it or not, a majority of us are not going to stand by and allow ancient ecosystems to be sold off and destroyed for a few years of clean balance sheets and a temporary economic boost in a few small rural enclaves.

Instead of looking for ways to cash in on the few remaining intact forests in the Northwest, which happen to be on federal land, I would suggest fixing our broken property tax system, or perhaps breaking up the massive conglomerates that have so poorly managed the "private" forests and the economy they could have sustained. Breaking up federal forestland is simply not an option.

Southeast Portland 

Faster than light
In his Oct. 7 column, Charles Krauthammer declared that "everything we know about the universe is wrong." Physics, astronomy and cosmology have all been fully debunked by an experiment that measured neutrinos moving slightly faster than the speed of light -- which is supposedly impossible.

However, as the column acknowledged, the quantum world of muons and taus and leptons (oh, my!) is an extremely bizarre place where inexplicable randomness is common. That strangeness makes for one of those damnable gaps in science between Einstein's relativity (big stuff) and particle physics (tiny stuff). But it's those gaps, the stuff we don't yet understand, that drives all discovery. So please, don't burn all the science books just yet. Work is still in progress, one seemingly crazy experiment at a time.


Costly river cleanup

I could not fault your Oct. 4 editorial title "Charging for the cleanup" -- as far as it goes. I add the "as far as it goes" comment because of the lack of mention of the Coast Guard's part in this fiasco of the abandoned vessel Davy Crockett leaking into the Columbia River.

Reportedly, the Coast Guard received a letter well before any harm occurred warning of the potential problem. It would appear that swifter action on its part would have saved us all something like $15 million.


Kicked off TriMet
Regarding the Oct. 5 editorial "The bus ride to nowhere," and the Oct. 6 article, "Second mom says TriMet booted her": I take exception with the assertion that a wailing child on a public bus doesn't qualify as a clear impediment to public safety and that TriMet drivers must contend with "crying and boisterous children."

Driver distraction is a clear impediment to safety; consequently, the law prohibiting handheld cellphone use for all of us while driving. A wailing child can be just as distracting, at least it was for these TriMet bus drivers. The drivers realized that persistent wailing impaired their driving and did the right thing. They stopped their buses to correct the problem instead of putting others at risk.

Maneuvering a large, powerful, potentially lethal vehicle through public streets, often very close to pedestrians, bicyclists and other vehicles, demands a driver's full attention. In April 2010, driver inattention/distraction resulted in a TriMet bus collision with five pedestrians, killing two of them.

Southwest Portland 

Wolf recovery
I have been following the recovery of the wolf in Oregon with great interest. My wife and I are Oregonians living in Africa. For four years we were part owners of a livestock ranch in Kenya. We did not have wolves living on our property, but we had lions, leopards, cheetahs and other predators.

We learned how to live with these predators by using livestock management and protection techniques that are quite simple and effective. Yes, we lost a few animals, but we considered that a part of ranching there. So to me it is quite unbelievable that the ranchers in eastern Oregon cannot do the same. I know they don't want the wolves there, period, but they are there and ranchers must learn to live with them.

Cape Town, South Africa