Hamilton Hoons and Five more die
Lewis Hamilton, the former automotive Formula One ‘number one’ had his car impounded on Friday night for alleged ‘hoon’ driving, having been spotted by police spinning his wheels at a busy intersection in St Kilda. Whilst many character witnesses have already jumped to his defence, with one interesting observation from Mark Webber suggesting we have a ‘nanny state’, there is of course another larger issue – five more people died on Victoria’s roads over the weekend with speed one of the many factors
The challenge of course is that it is likely that compared to most of us, Lewis Hamilton is a very skilled driver. He does after all, spend his life behind the wheel of a car designed to travel very, very fast. And that car is so much safer than anything else we drive on our roads. And herein lies the trouble – the Grand Prix is a circus – a huge technical and marketing development program designed to, in the end, sell more cars for the manufacturers.
If true, Hamilton’s actions were well out of line, despite whatever skill he has because as a member of the automotive elite, he IS a role model to others, and when the driving elite acts like hoons, others are likely to follow in his pedalsteps. And on Victoria’s roads the very weekend of the Grand Prix at Albert Park we lost another five lives with a dozen more seriously injured.
Webber misses the point – Victoria isn’t a nanny state because it takes away the vehicles of hoon drivers. It is a State trying to save the lives, costs and trauma of people connected to people who die. Unfortunately, the driving elite MUST be held to a higher standard of accountability,and on our streets, they must be held accountable to the SAME standard of accountability.
Lewis Hamilton is undoubtedly a good driver, he just failed to dsiplay good driving whilst on a public street – we expect better
The MP3 file below captures part two of our chat looking at the Future of Sex. Picking up on the theme of new technology that popped up towards the end of our first discussion in week one, here we move onto haptics and holographics and the extension of that technology from beyond the bedroom and…
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Read More >The Association of Professional Futures is holding its first Virtual Gathering, following the sun from Europe, across North America and finishing in the Australia pacific zone. It kicks off tomorrow and links to the program and registration (it’s only $45 for guests for a program featuring some of the worlds most prominent futurists) You…
Read More >I join Vicki Kerrigan on ABC Darwin radio where we continue our discussion about the future of sex. We consider three main areas in this session – smart phone applications; remote relationships and the combination of haptics and holographics as one the emerging means by which we’ll maintain physical contact. You can download the…
Read More >In this chat with Vicki Kerrigan on radio ABC Darwin we discuss the future of sex. This is the first of potentially three conversations where we look at the increasing reach of technology way beyond current online match making sites, the social pressures driving the use of technology as well as the use of technology…
Read More >There’s been a bit of discussion in recent months about a softening housing market around Australia but I wonder how much of it is more indicative of unrealistic expectations on behalf of sellers? In futures work we think in terms of Assumptions and Expectations and aim to test our understanding and so I offer this…
Read More >Unfortunately it looks like my main email address has been hijacked and has been used to send out a series of spam emails. I’d like to apologise to anyone who has received some junk email purporting to come from ‘desiredfutures’ with a series of html links asking you to go and have a look. You…
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Read More >Deciphering the hype from reality with regard to drug use can be a challenge for most of us. Professor David Nutt in the UK has given me permission to post a link to the paper he has co-authored with Ruth Weissenborn that looks at the reality of a comparison of harm caused by two common…
Read More >Vicki Kerrigan and I finished off our discussion about the Future of Clothing on ABC Darwin yesterday. We discussed invisibility style cloaks, singlets that monitor your heart rate and stress levels, runners that capture electricity to power your wearable electronics and a few philosophical questions regarding our ability to deal with stress. The file…
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