Posted by Leonard Steinberg on January 14th, 2012

Two things happened to-day that make me think we have taken two steps forward and three steps back….

Friday the 13th came and went without much major drama, although Europeans may disagree with their S+P downgrades. Today was certainly more scary with the cruise-ship Costa Concordia going down almost Titanic-style in Italy: well, not exactly, although the timing is pretty eery almost 3 months away from the 100 year anniversary of the doomed maiden voyage of the Titanic…..I can almost hear Celine Dion screeching. I was looking at a few of these monstrous cruise ships docked in St. Thomas just a few days ago and wondered just how dreadful it must be to be stuck on one of them for days or weeks at a time….my friends and I wondered if there were enough life boats….what would it be like if something that huge ran into trouble, yes even 100 years after the Titanic disaster: what had we learned and now with these ships so bloated would profit trumped safety? I also wondered about those seemingly glamorous apartments being sold on cruise ships……it makes one thankful for some solid, dry land. Then again, the solid dry land our New York real estate sits on is prone to hurricanes and flooding, water surges, terrorist attacks, fires,not to mention that pesky little fault line….. Are the super-sized buildings of our city fully equipped to handle these disasters? And are the personel employed to manage these disasters properly trained? Do super-sized structures by their very nature breed greater risk? Staring down at the mammoth replacement to the Twin Towers I wonder if humans ever learn from their past?

To-day at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, visiting chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, stated something even more scary: “If you shut off the Internet, virtually nothing on the CES floor would work.” Yes, the internet has become so big, huge and all-encompassing, that it literally runs our lives, not to mention our living rooms. The show revealed a need to make all these components able to work in unison…..this is a good thing. This scares me a bit (maybe I am getting older?). I experience the growing reliance on the web daily: when it stalls or stops working, my ability to conduct daily tasks virtually halts. Is this too big too? Is bigger really better? It is better when it works, but when it fails, its negative impact is also that much larger. Imagine our world to-day if the web stopped working for 48 hours…..

So yes, while to-day is the day after Friday the 13th, I am a bit more scared than I was yesterday.