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Notes -
Can we build a Golden Gate Bridge today? Can we still go to the Moon?
We have the money. We have the technology. In theory, we still have the know-how.
But we don't have the will. It's graft all the way down.
I think about Robert Moses sometimes (never miss an opportunity to boost Robert Caro). Motherfucker was a petty, vengeful, tyrannical and (in his own way) corrupt bastard. Anti-democratic and considered public monies his to spend and control. But he got shit done. Arguably in terrible ways sometimes. Lots of people have opinions about how New York could have been done better. But he got it done.
No one can get shit done today. After all the bluster and owning the wokes, do you think Trump is actually going to get anything done? Make America Great Again?
I think sometimes about movies like Independence Day or Armageddon. You've got a literal world -ending threat, so surely under those circumstances, we'd all get our shit together and act like competent adults... at least for a little while, right?
I don't believe that anymore. We'd be so cooked, as the kids say.
We probably are anyway.
For sure cost disease and other considerations are problem, but on a positive note - when I-95 got shut down a few years ago near Philly it did get fixed real fucking fast.
I suspect if the need is there we can fix stuff quite ably, we just don't bother to or need to most of the time.
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laughs nervously in covid
Yeah I'm with you. I'm not saying that was anything close to world ending (it obviously wasn't, as we are here), but it strongly indicated how such a threat would go down. We would bicker and squabble about what was the right thing to do until it was too late.
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