Children of Tomorrow

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Florida's Orange County Convention Center is big. Big enough to hold the Sears Tower, if you laid it on its side. So big you could walk 10 miles and never leave the cement behemoth. Its electric bill is $325,000 per month...

Click here: Targeting children: Industry's campaign to redefine environmental education http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Borowski022502/borowski022502.html

-- BC (katnip364@aol.com), March 23, 2002

Answers

Hello BC,

I have been to the Orange County Convention Center many times and believe me....it pays for itself in the number of conventions that it can hold all at the same time. It is needed in a city with the population that Orlando has (over 3 million people in Central Florida). It is completely air conditioned and I am sure that is why the electric bill is so high but, have you tried living in Central Florida without air condition? It is a beautifully designed and built building that attracts millions of people every year, there is nothing wrong with that!

Sincerely,

Ernest

-- http://communities.msn.com/livingoffthelandintheozarks (espresso42@hotmail.com), March 23, 2002.


Went to the website.

Looks like an anti-Bush/Business site to me. look at the cartoons and read some articles, you will get the drift of the site.

-- Bob in WI (bjwick@hotmail.com), March 23, 2002.


You're saying that air conditioning costs about $10,000 or $11,000 a day. Lets's say $11,000. If they can pull 11,000 people a day in, and get an additional $1 out of each of them because it's there and it's air-conditioned instead of being a big shed, then they've broken even. If you take the 3 million people mentioned above, and divide by 11,000 , you get people needing to go about every 275 days - not too different from once a year.

If you can get people coming more often, or from further afield, you'll do better. One of my brothers has been more than once, to a particular convention (I assume it's there - the Christian Bookseller's Convention - but if not the point still remains valid, even if the example isn't), and he's travelled almost exactly halfway around the world to get there - from the east of Australia. That does NOT address the collateral benefits to the local economy of visitors booking hotels, or getting mugged by local criminals, or dining at the Golden Arches Restaurant, or whatever.

All that is to address your diversion, however. The point is not that the centre is economocally justifiable: the point is that big money has hijacked and diverted the moral thrust of conservation. That's true, and it's clever of them. I have some severe reservations about some of the messages and methods used by the more radical "Greens", but the basic message deserves respect, and the radical idiots have so far lost moral impetus that they're surrendered moral ground to the "rape and pillage" exploiters.

Where do you go from there? I don't know. I've got my own battles to fight. About all I can do on this front is hold my ground. I wouldn't be taken in by what I see written about in that article; if I still had young children I wouldn't let them be; but I can't go out hunting too many great causes which I'm not directly involved in.

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), March 24, 2002.


Hi...I am not making ANY statement...the beginning of the post is a quote from the article (sorry I forgot the marks) so you knew which article I was posting.

Just thought it was useful to see what might be coming down the pike at your kids school.

-- BC (katnip364@aol.com), March 26, 2002.


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