Furloughs offer opportunities

I feel for the state workers who must go on furlough, but instead of complaining, they should do something useful.

On their furlough days they could work part-time, do side jobs, go fishing or hunting for food, or go to the swap meet to sell. I'm pretty sure most of the state workers has some talent or skill in their respective field.

When I was working - I'm retired now - when the economy got bad, I got a cut in pay. The bad part about this is I had to go to work every day.

Consider other train systems

Your editorial for elevated rail (”;Proceed, albeit with caution, on elevated rail,”; Star-Bulletin, June 26) reinforces why the city should have pursued an open competition among all qualified suppliers.

The current plan does not cover extensions to UH-Manoa and to Waikiki. If the HSST urban magnetic levitation system had been allowed to compete, the construction savings ($570 million) on its elevated guideway would have been more than enough to cover those extensions within the current 20-mile budget.

From an initial response by 10 suppliers of four technologies to the city's request for information, we now seem to have only three steel wheel, steel rail suppliers interested enough to send representatives to the transit symposium.

The likely result will be that the fewer the bidders, the higher the cost.

Keep choices open for taxes

Todd Shelly (Letters, Star-Bulletin, June 25) regurgitated the government brainwashing inflicted upon virtually all of us in government-run schools when he said, “;Calling taxes theft is incendiary but empty rhetoric that ignores the plain fact that taxes are laws made by a representative government.”;

The plain fact is this: It is an initiation of force—theft—for someone, elected or not, to take your money without your consent, in “;exchange”; for “;services”; you didn't ask to have provided and which you may find useless or even deleterious to your self-interest.

A rational and moral form of government not based on this theft is possible: the government can offer each of us a list of services we can voluntarily choose to subscribe to or decline, depending on whether we think the price is right and the quality is acceptable, and allow private competitors to offer to provide us with those services if we think the government is offering a poor deal or bad services.

Not all pets should be petted

I ride a bike where I travel along with my dog, who sits in a basket on the handlebars.

People constantly pet my dog without permission. If they ask, I say, “;no.”;

My dog is being trained as a service dog. They need to focus entirely on their master's needs. The dog may be cute but we are not a portable petting zoo.

You would not want strangers coming up and putting their hands all over your child. The same holds true for pets.

Please be respectful of people's pets, and ask permission before handling them.