Back in the day when NASA was more like a university than a business, there were lectures about aeronautical and other subjects us lazy good for nothing drones could attend. One that sticks in the peabrain was a talk by a group that wanted to build a STOL port in the East River. they foolishly tried to gain community support by holding meetings with the impacted community. The response, of course, was NFW!!! In discussions with the residents, they found that there was nothing anyone could say that would gain their permission to do anything. They had been F'd over so many times, think Robert Moses, that they did not believe anything anyone said.
I put a link to the Cirrus East River crash below:
My thoughts:
1. Maybe we need to work on trust before scale.
2. The people of NY might not actually be crazy about how many aircraft can safely fly in that busy airspace around Manhattan.
Look at what just happened over the Potomac in DC...
Leaving aside the, um...planes crashing into the World Trade Center...and the Miracle on the Hudson landing in the river...here are some bad things that happened in NYC:
NY has some of the busiest airspace in the world. Like Manhattan, it is not getting any bigger. Maybe infinite growth is just not possible here.
Wealthy New Yorkers like to fly helicopters to get to their weekend places on Long Island. You can expect demand for electric drones on that route in the near future.
They may have to go without. The "little people" live there too.
(BTW my late brother worked for Island Helicopters, flying celebrities and executives in a charter Learjet out of nearby Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, the place Sully realized he could not glide to.)
I have watched a number of videos of small planes fling the Hudson River corridor. When I have flown with my wife in her 172 I and watching her landings at Auburn CA, I noticed that there are a lot of planes without ADS-b.
I once (with my instructor: I was still a student) flew a glider being towed by a SuperCub in the VFR corridor down the Hudson on the first leg of a ferry trip to Florida. Had to stay below 1,100 feet. View of the sun coming up behind Manhattan was spectacular. Same route Sully took. Luckily the rope didn't break. We got chased by a radio-station helicopter doing traffic!
I used to fly gliders in Connecticut, off a grass strip. Single-seater didn't even have a radio, never mind a transponder. Had a stick, rudder pedals, spoilers...airspeed, altimeter, variometer, and a compass. Weighed 400 pounds. Kinda primitive. Done aerial photography out 172s.
Speaking of gliders: My older brother rebuilt a Aeronca TG-5 3-place glider as a Aeronca L-3B/O-58 65 hp. liaison version back in the early 1950's. He was an aircraft mechanic in England and the continent in WW2. His bio tells of flying it using glider techniques. He used a dust devil to soar to 14,000ft and power off soaring for an additional 45 minutes. Those were the days when flying was less regulated.
I like this kind of flying. It is why I wanted to fly gliders in the first place. I wanted to be immersed in the atmosphere, not just blasting through it. And frankly, I wanted something more environmentally responsible than powered flight. An aerotow just takes about one gallon. Now we have self-launching electric gliders, the wave of the future.
Flying used to be a thing to love. Now it's a thing to tolerate to get somewhere else where they also have a McDonalds.
This is what modern society has lost.
We had a beautiful thing, and we lost it. We lost something important. No wonder we are in trouble.
This is it!
The cybernetics is an attempt to figure our way out of this mess. But it will be irrelevant if the house burns down first. Time to pull the fire alarm.
Joni: "We paved Paradise, and put up a parking lot."
Elon: "What Paradise, we are off to Mars."
My relatives living in Stockholm have so far avoided the American fate. They think we have lost our minds, and I agree. They didn't fall for the "luxury" trap the USA did, so things are simpler and more affordable. They kept their balance better. We take everything to extremes here. A bug in our software. And we came a long way from "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," didn't we?
London's City Airport is like this, with the aircraft flying over the R. Thames (I think that was the route). I am not aware that locals were antagonistic to its development which primarily benefitted the wealthy business traveler.
When I played Sim City (way back when) it was clear that the larger the city, the more maintenance and bad events happening increased faster than growth generated income. The same happens with GAAP accounts where businesses need higher profitability to grow to overcome cash flow demands on costs.
Some things scale well - factory production, farms acquiring more land. Infrastructure doesn't, even "easy things" like computer and phone networks as they become more complex.
AI and software can reduce the complexity for human managers. However, as we see with such systems, the algorithms become opaque and difficult to subject to analysis, especially when bad outcomes result. [As your book indicates]. My sense is that control needs to be pushed down as far as possible, and ideally, most managers should be more like "One Minute Managers" relinquishing management decisions to as low a level as possible.
The other problem with "abundance" is that our accounting rarely deals with externality costs. We can easily increase the production of plastic containers, but the costs of pollution from production and [lack of] disposal are not fully costed. While I do not support "degrowth", I do think we need to reduce the consumption of non-recyclable items as far as possible to emulate biology as much as possible. Will AI be able to help with this?
Hi Mike: I grew up in a conservative family, grew up hero-worshipping W. F. Buckley. Outgrew that. I didn't know anything then, I am not to blame, I swear. I grew up reading the Wall St. Journal, I didn't know other ideas existed! Turns out, they do.
I have seen both sides now.
Conservatives and the GOP are PLENTY good at saying NO. They just say different nos. Sample:
"Oh, you employees want to have a union? NO, plus you're fired!"
People who have position and power like to keep them. Don't get me started.
BTW One of my life rules is never fly with a low-time pilot. I know what it is like to be one. I like BIG airplanes flown by people with lots of hours, and BIG airports. Sorry, Midway.
After that CJR wingtip scrape at LGA the other day, with a young female pilot at the controls, I was actually wondering how accident records of male and female pilots compared, so I went to Dr. DuckDuckGo. Turns out this has been studied, probably by a part of the government that the chainsaw guy would eliminate.
They are about the same. Females are more cautious than males, so get into fewer bad situations, but males are better at operating the controls. Overall, about a wash.
If DOGE actually wanted to know about flight safety, they could start by calling Dr. John Hansman, professor of aeronautics at MIT, who used to be a member of the soaring club I was in. An actual expert, not just a guy playing one on TV. They should do so before jumping to conclusions.
BTW, techies do not always make good pilots, I have observed some in action. I have known my share of techies. Emotionally immature. And good at means; bad at ends.
Also: doctors are bad pilots. We know that. The only pilot my airport ever told could never fly there again was a male child psychologist. This was after a crash he wouldn't take responsibility for.
That just reminded me of another guy, a male airline pilot, who had a landing "incident," and tried to hush it up so the airline wouldn't find out.
The cherry on top was an owner of the airport, another male airline pilot, who claimed a landing accident was not a flying accident...because it happened on the ground!
He probably blamed his wife...
What's with these males? they have bad judgement.
At least I stopped flying before I hurt myself...LOL
“modern liberalism became too obsessed with saying no”.
Presumably 'liberalism' is an unhelpful <insert suitable Greek term here> for liberal *state*.
If so, appealing to a metaphorical 'obsession' seems unnecessary as well as unhelpful.
Because actually, if all the 'modern' (=neo?) liberal state seems to do is say 'no', isn't that likely to be because: (1) it's not allowed to initiate anything, only respond to what 'the market' does; (2) saying 'yes' = doing nothing, thus entirely unremarkable & unmemorable?
The Tech Bros want to dismantle the "regulatory state", but when in power they want to regulate a lot of stuff. I read in this morning's F'nNYT that the dept of transportation says it will deny funds to NYC's transit unless it solves it's crime problem.
I certainly sit smack in the middle of the Venn Diagram of SimCity fans and The Unaccountability Machine fans so let me point out that the book "Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine" by Chaim Gingold delves into it and its influences like System Dynamics.
Civilizations V and VII (but not VI) arbitrarily caps the number of cities one can have on these grounds, with technological and social changes modifying the cap (and overall happiness/wealth also allowing ways around it). But it’s not modeled as an emergent property of the system.
The simplest answer to the question "why can't we do what we used to do" is to look at the pictures of the builders operating without supports with black soot covering the city and realize: "because we care about human rights and the environment now".
So yes, things are more "complex" now relative to then. Then, there was no minimum wage. Then, there was no OSHA. Then, there was no FICA system, no HR. The workers were largely desperate immigrants willing to accept any wage (the Empire State buildings were largely "old" Irish Republicans seeking refuge). In earlier eras they were simply enslaved.
That would obviously be unacceptable today in many places, but not everywhere. Many things are still built in places where human rights are less protected. I hear the World Cup venues in Qatar were very impressive-looking.
i think there is more than enough planning capacity in the system, it's just that the system 5 (the political houses) try to do too much system 1 and 2 work through legislation and budgeting etc. more scope for more distal organs imo.
As a regular visitor to Santa Fe you might be familiar with Geoffrey West and his book on Scale https://www.amazon.nl/-/en/Geoffrey-West/dp/1594205582 ? After your podcast on the FT the term "Information Malthusianism" popped into my mind, that's what West's book is about though it's not his term.
(Also as a new Substack user I learned there is a "More" option when writing that allows back-and-forth clickable footnotes.)
Typically 4x games model population as exponential to a high degree, with diminishing return to scale (going from 1 to 2 population is much cheaper than going from 21 to 22 population.) Infrastructure bonuses tend to be linear ("+1 industry per forest tile worked" or "+1 science per scientist.) And then usually you gradually accumulate multiplicative bonuses making it more impactful to get the flat bonus high (getting "+10% science" regularly throughout the game.)
The main way you might see increasing returns to scale is "adjacency bonuses". If a Research Quarter wants to border Research Quarters, the first one doesn't benefit anything, the second one gives two adjacency bonuses (each quarter touching the other), the third gives four (the new quarter touching the two previous, and the two previous touching the new), etc, constrained by the number of possible adjacencies, typically a hex grid. And you'll sometimes get Matthew Effect stuff like "bonus science per technology researched". But aside from that, I'd say the default Civilization case is that most individual subsystems have diminishing returns of scale, but bigger cities accumulate more total systems so you get the snowballing returns by combing flat bonuses from different sources and then getting a multiplier.
One of the main ways games like Civ model the increasing complexity that comes with growth is in the increasing amount of time it takes to complete a turn. the more stuff you have, the more decisions you have to make and the more things you have to click on. As the game is turn based (with no turn timer) this isn't technically an issue, it is just tedious and dull. So you end up with a trade-off between the amount of tedium you're prepared to endure and the minimum level of "optimised play" that you're prepared to accept. (Players are notorious with game designers for optimising the fun out of games).
Obviously the real world isn't turn based.
(as an aside, during the Civ late-game, when you have the most stuff, most of the decisions you need to make are pretty inconsequential. It doesn't matter what most cities are producing or what most units are doing because the game is going to end in say 20 turns and they will have no impact on whether you win. Hopefully not the frame of mind our glorious leaders have in the real world)
Our unique skill set in the USA in our declining years is illustrated by our relying on a piece of rubber to keep a rocket from blowing up in cold weather, while simultaneously keeping the bosses happy, and also televising the whole spectacle.
Those bosses, luckily, didn't have to remain conscious for two terrifying minutes while the shuttle fell into the ocean.
How you say: no skin in the game? Not even fake skin?
Meanwhile, six levels down...my friend the Raytheon engineer had predicted to me that NASA would be lucky to launch a couple dozen shuttles before they lost one.
Challenger was number 25.
We used to be able to make things, but we lost the plot. We can fly the planes up, but they are gonna come back down to earth. Only questions is, in how many pieces?
Oh, good: a rocket boy, who never rode a rocket, is taking command, of government.
They used to make the mechanic ride with the pilot while he tested the plane the mechanic worked on. That was highly motivating.
But progress: we no longer say "major malfunction," we now say "rapid unscheduled disassembly," comrade.
All better!
In sum:
The canaries can sing their hearts out in the bottom of the mine shaft, but the bosses work aboveground, and hate the union.
Read: "The Canary: Michael Lewis on Chris Mark of the Department of Labor" from The Washington Post. Would have linked it, but it is behind a paywall.
This is fun!!!
Back in the day when NASA was more like a university than a business, there were lectures about aeronautical and other subjects us lazy good for nothing drones could attend. One that sticks in the peabrain was a talk by a group that wanted to build a STOL port in the East River. they foolishly tried to gain community support by holding meetings with the impacted community. The response, of course, was NFW!!! In discussions with the residents, they found that there was nothing anyone could say that would gain their permission to do anything. They had been F'd over so many times, think Robert Moses, that they did not believe anything anyone said.
Didn't know about that STOL proposal. Fixed-wing aircraft flying low over the East River? Sounds absolutely crazy. But technically possible:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cdq0WjPO_0w
I put a link to the Cirrus East River crash below:
My thoughts:
1. Maybe we need to work on trust before scale.
2. The people of NY might not actually be crazy about how many aircraft can safely fly in that busy airspace around Manhattan.
Look at what just happened over the Potomac in DC...
Leaving aside the, um...planes crashing into the World Trade Center...and the Miracle on the Hudson landing in the river...here are some bad things that happened in NYC:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_New_York_City_Cirrus_SR20_crash
https://www.wired.com/story/ntsb-flynyon-nyc-crash-investigation-report/
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1986/10/23/Traffic-reporters-last-words-Hit-the-water/9422530424000/
https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/16-may-1977/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_New_York_mid-air_collision
There is a toxic brew of traffic in this river + city + airports + heliports environment.
A floatplane hit a boat in Vancouver harbor while taking off:
https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/vancouver-coal-harbour-seaplane-crash-boat-rare
NY has some of the busiest airspace in the world. Like Manhattan, it is not getting any bigger. Maybe infinite growth is just not possible here.
Wealthy New Yorkers like to fly helicopters to get to their weekend places on Long Island. You can expect demand for electric drones on that route in the near future.
They may have to go without. The "little people" live there too.
(BTW my late brother worked for Island Helicopters, flying celebrities and executives in a charter Learjet out of nearby Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, the place Sully realized he could not glide to.)
I have watched a number of videos of small planes fling the Hudson River corridor. When I have flown with my wife in her 172 I and watching her landings at Auburn CA, I noticed that there are a lot of planes without ADS-b.
I once (with my instructor: I was still a student) flew a glider being towed by a SuperCub in the VFR corridor down the Hudson on the first leg of a ferry trip to Florida. Had to stay below 1,100 feet. View of the sun coming up behind Manhattan was spectacular. Same route Sully took. Luckily the rope didn't break. We got chased by a radio-station helicopter doing traffic!
I used to fly gliders in Connecticut, off a grass strip. Single-seater didn't even have a radio, never mind a transponder. Had a stick, rudder pedals, spoilers...airspeed, altimeter, variometer, and a compass. Weighed 400 pounds. Kinda primitive. Done aerial photography out 172s.
We can both talk the talk!
NY: nice place to visit.
Speaking of gliders: My older brother rebuilt a Aeronca TG-5 3-place glider as a Aeronca L-3B/O-58 65 hp. liaison version back in the early 1950's. He was an aircraft mechanic in England and the continent in WW2. His bio tells of flying it using glider techniques. He used a dust devil to soar to 14,000ft and power off soaring for an additional 45 minutes. Those were the days when flying was less regulated.
Wow! 14,000 feet in a dust devil, in an Aeronca?
I like this kind of flying. It is why I wanted to fly gliders in the first place. I wanted to be immersed in the atmosphere, not just blasting through it. And frankly, I wanted something more environmentally responsible than powered flight. An aerotow just takes about one gallon. Now we have self-launching electric gliders, the wave of the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAVF9dAQZgs
So beautiful, and love that music too...
Back to basics! You can still smell the grass on the runway. You can't even see the thermals, you have to find them. It's you and the sky.
Have a look at this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii7IftronyM
Flying used to be a thing to love. Now it's a thing to tolerate to get somewhere else where they also have a McDonalds.
This is what modern society has lost.
We had a beautiful thing, and we lost it. We lost something important. No wonder we are in trouble.
This is it!
The cybernetics is an attempt to figure our way out of this mess. But it will be irrelevant if the house burns down first. Time to pull the fire alarm.
Joni: "We paved Paradise, and put up a parking lot."
Elon: "What Paradise, we are off to Mars."
My relatives living in Stockholm have so far avoided the American fate. They think we have lost our minds, and I agree. They didn't fall for the "luxury" trap the USA did, so things are simpler and more affordable. They kept their balance better. We take everything to extremes here. A bug in our software. And we came a long way from "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," didn't we?
We got hubris.
Cry, the beloved country.
You might enjoy these stories about my brother Roland:
https://www.loc.gov/item/afc2001001.28395/#item-service_history
and this:
https://link.shutterfly.com/2iO8VYWRZGb
Sorry the pages are out of order.
Roland wanted to fly the Aeronca into the Sierra Lee Wave and see how high he could get.
London's City Airport is like this, with the aircraft flying over the R. Thames (I think that was the route). I am not aware that locals were antagonistic to its development which primarily benefitted the wealthy business traveler.
When I played Sim City (way back when) it was clear that the larger the city, the more maintenance and bad events happening increased faster than growth generated income. The same happens with GAAP accounts where businesses need higher profitability to grow to overcome cash flow demands on costs.
Some things scale well - factory production, farms acquiring more land. Infrastructure doesn't, even "easy things" like computer and phone networks as they become more complex.
AI and software can reduce the complexity for human managers. However, as we see with such systems, the algorithms become opaque and difficult to subject to analysis, especially when bad outcomes result. [As your book indicates]. My sense is that control needs to be pushed down as far as possible, and ideally, most managers should be more like "One Minute Managers" relinquishing management decisions to as low a level as possible.
The other problem with "abundance" is that our accounting rarely deals with externality costs. We can easily increase the production of plastic containers, but the costs of pollution from production and [lack of] disposal are not fully costed. While I do not support "degrowth", I do think we need to reduce the consumption of non-recyclable items as far as possible to emulate biology as much as possible. Will AI be able to help with this?
Re: “modern liberalism became too obsessed with saying no”
My peabrain thought: Maybe liberalism became obsessed with other people saying you aren't in the decision loop.
Hi Mike: I grew up in a conservative family, grew up hero-worshipping W. F. Buckley. Outgrew that. I didn't know anything then, I am not to blame, I swear. I grew up reading the Wall St. Journal, I didn't know other ideas existed! Turns out, they do.
I have seen both sides now.
Conservatives and the GOP are PLENTY good at saying NO. They just say different nos. Sample:
"Oh, you employees want to have a union? NO, plus you're fired!"
People who have position and power like to keep them. Don't get me started.
BTW One of my life rules is never fly with a low-time pilot. I know what it is like to be one. I like BIG airplanes flown by people with lots of hours, and BIG airports. Sorry, Midway.
After that CJR wingtip scrape at LGA the other day, with a young female pilot at the controls, I was actually wondering how accident records of male and female pilots compared, so I went to Dr. DuckDuckGo. Turns out this has been studied, probably by a part of the government that the chainsaw guy would eliminate.
They are about the same. Females are more cautious than males, so get into fewer bad situations, but males are better at operating the controls. Overall, about a wash.
If DOGE actually wanted to know about flight safety, they could start by calling Dr. John Hansman, professor of aeronautics at MIT, who used to be a member of the soaring club I was in. An actual expert, not just a guy playing one on TV. They should do so before jumping to conclusions.
https://aeroastro.mit.edu/people/r-john-hansman/
BTW, techies do not always make good pilots, I have observed some in action. I have known my share of techies. Emotionally immature. And good at means; bad at ends.
Also: doctors are bad pilots. We know that. The only pilot my airport ever told could never fly there again was a male child psychologist. This was after a crash he wouldn't take responsibility for.
That just reminded me of another guy, a male airline pilot, who had a landing "incident," and tried to hush it up so the airline wouldn't find out.
The cherry on top was an owner of the airport, another male airline pilot, who claimed a landing accident was not a flying accident...because it happened on the ground!
He probably blamed his wife...
What's with these males? they have bad judgement.
At least I stopped flying before I hurt myself...LOL
“modern liberalism became too obsessed with saying no”.
Presumably 'liberalism' is an unhelpful <insert suitable Greek term here> for liberal *state*.
If so, appealing to a metaphorical 'obsession' seems unnecessary as well as unhelpful.
Because actually, if all the 'modern' (=neo?) liberal state seems to do is say 'no', isn't that likely to be because: (1) it's not allowed to initiate anything, only respond to what 'the market' does; (2) saying 'yes' = doing nothing, thus entirely unremarkable & unmemorable?
The Tech Bros want to dismantle the "regulatory state", but when in power they want to regulate a lot of stuff. I read in this morning's F'nNYT that the dept of transportation says it will deny funds to NYC's transit unless it solves it's crime problem.
Typical of the men from Mars.
Talk? Meet: Walk.
It's always the other guy.
Maybe the White House should solve its own crime problem?
I certainly sit smack in the middle of the Venn Diagram of SimCity fans and The Unaccountability Machine fans so let me point out that the book "Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine" by Chaim Gingold delves into it and its influences like System Dynamics.
Civilizations V and VII (but not VI) arbitrarily caps the number of cities one can have on these grounds, with technological and social changes modifying the cap (and overall happiness/wealth also allowing ways around it). But it’s not modeled as an emergent property of the system.
The simplest answer to the question "why can't we do what we used to do" is to look at the pictures of the builders operating without supports with black soot covering the city and realize: "because we care about human rights and the environment now".
So yes, things are more "complex" now relative to then. Then, there was no minimum wage. Then, there was no OSHA. Then, there was no FICA system, no HR. The workers were largely desperate immigrants willing to accept any wage (the Empire State buildings were largely "old" Irish Republicans seeking refuge). In earlier eras they were simply enslaved.
5 people died building the Empire State Building. 50 died building the Brooklyn Bridge. There used to be a rule of thumb: one death per $1mn spent: https://www.npr.org/2012/05/27/153778083/75-years-later-building-the-golden-gate-bridge
That would obviously be unacceptable today in many places, but not everywhere. Many things are still built in places where human rights are less protected. I hear the World Cup venues in Qatar were very impressive-looking.
Link associated with "described" in opening graf is broken.
i think there is more than enough planning capacity in the system, it's just that the system 5 (the political houses) try to do too much system 1 and 2 work through legislation and budgeting etc. more scope for more distal organs imo.
i recommend the american Why Nothing Works as well!
As a regular visitor to Santa Fe you might be familiar with Geoffrey West and his book on Scale https://www.amazon.nl/-/en/Geoffrey-West/dp/1594205582 ? After your podcast on the FT the term "Information Malthusianism" popped into my mind, that's what West's book is about though it's not his term.
(Also as a new Substack user I learned there is a "More" option when writing that allows back-and-forth clickable footnotes.)
Typically 4x games model population as exponential to a high degree, with diminishing return to scale (going from 1 to 2 population is much cheaper than going from 21 to 22 population.) Infrastructure bonuses tend to be linear ("+1 industry per forest tile worked" or "+1 science per scientist.) And then usually you gradually accumulate multiplicative bonuses making it more impactful to get the flat bonus high (getting "+10% science" regularly throughout the game.)
The main way you might see increasing returns to scale is "adjacency bonuses". If a Research Quarter wants to border Research Quarters, the first one doesn't benefit anything, the second one gives two adjacency bonuses (each quarter touching the other), the third gives four (the new quarter touching the two previous, and the two previous touching the new), etc, constrained by the number of possible adjacencies, typically a hex grid. And you'll sometimes get Matthew Effect stuff like "bonus science per technology researched". But aside from that, I'd say the default Civilization case is that most individual subsystems have diminishing returns of scale, but bigger cities accumulate more total systems so you get the snowballing returns by combing flat bonuses from different sources and then getting a multiplier.
One of the main ways games like Civ model the increasing complexity that comes with growth is in the increasing amount of time it takes to complete a turn. the more stuff you have, the more decisions you have to make and the more things you have to click on. As the game is turn based (with no turn timer) this isn't technically an issue, it is just tedious and dull. So you end up with a trade-off between the amount of tedium you're prepared to endure and the minimum level of "optimised play" that you're prepared to accept. (Players are notorious with game designers for optimising the fun out of games).
Obviously the real world isn't turn based.
(as an aside, during the Civ late-game, when you have the most stuff, most of the decisions you need to make are pretty inconsequential. It doesn't matter what most cities are producing or what most units are doing because the game is going to end in say 20 turns and they will have no impact on whether you win. Hopefully not the frame of mind our glorious leaders have in the real world)
So, how come Europe can build subways, and New York can't?
Parliamentary systems with proportional representation require log-rolling to build coalitions. When you log-roll you can get things done.
But, also, they kinda can't. See the Draghi report.
Something, somewhere, must work, somehow.
At least, kinda sorta.
Our unique skill set in the USA in our declining years is illustrated by our relying on a piece of rubber to keep a rocket from blowing up in cold weather, while simultaneously keeping the bosses happy, and also televising the whole spectacle.
Those bosses, luckily, didn't have to remain conscious for two terrifying minutes while the shuttle fell into the ocean.
How you say: no skin in the game? Not even fake skin?
Meanwhile, six levels down...my friend the Raytheon engineer had predicted to me that NASA would be lucky to launch a couple dozen shuttles before they lost one.
Challenger was number 25.
We used to be able to make things, but we lost the plot. We can fly the planes up, but they are gonna come back down to earth. Only questions is, in how many pieces?
Oh, good: a rocket boy, who never rode a rocket, is taking command, of government.
They used to make the mechanic ride with the pilot while he tested the plane the mechanic worked on. That was highly motivating.
But progress: we no longer say "major malfunction," we now say "rapid unscheduled disassembly," comrade.
All better!
In sum:
The canaries can sing their hearts out in the bottom of the mine shaft, but the bosses work aboveground, and hate the union.
Read: "The Canary: Michael Lewis on Chris Mark of the Department of Labor" from The Washington Post. Would have linked it, but it is behind a paywall.
This guy may be one of the ones getting cut!