Gee! Our brand-new bridge that cost a billion dollars turned out to be too steep to drive in icy weather. Coulda knocked us over with a feather!
In these days of intoxicating talk of spending trillions of dollars on “infrastructure”–a word meaning “anything”–we can wonder how many of these projects will turn out to be a total waste of time and money. You know–bridges that you can’t cross if there’s winter weather going on, that sort of thing.
Didn’t Obama or someone promise there’d be no more winter if we gave the government all our money?
Promises, promises, yeah promises. The only promises I stand on are the Promises of God. Men’s promises? Never. No human can guarantee they can keep their promises.
And some never intended to try.
I think that this is a perfect example of how someone can have knowledge without understanding, which seems to be a common weakness of our current educational system. They may have had all the theory required to build a bridge, but they apparently had no hands-on experience which would have allowed them to foresee the possibility of ice being a problem for their design. There’s probably some blue collar worker somewhere that would have seen it coming from a mile away.
Our glorious political class doesn’t seem to care whether their various projects are successful or not. It’s like they know something we don’t know, about them being in power forever no matter how badly they screw up.
One of my uncles, an engineer, started to teach engineering at a university but stopped because he said the slapdash approach to the work by some of his students made him too nervous about the future. He used to repeat to them, over and over, “In the real world, 95% isn’t an ‘A.’ In the real world, 95% is a collapsed bridge.” I used to quote him to my own students.
I remember that story from the first time you told it, some years ago, and I’ve told it myself sometimes.
My cousin was an engineer–he somehow managed to become one without finishing college–and the thing that drove him nuts was the frequent plaintive cry of young engineering grads who worked under him: “But the computer says it will work!”
The Marxist plan to overtake a country is to ruin its economy through massive debt – does that ring a bell?