The “social safety net” was started by conservative politicians to maintain the stability of their countries, not because they were nice people. You can’t raise and army if all of the workers are on the edge of starvation, but you can have riots in the streets.

The “teabaggers” may not have identified the source of their problems, but they know there is a problem, and they are scared.

One thing I’ve repeatedly noted on my own blog is that the lack of a social safety net in this country is what has rendered the current downturn so severe here. It wasn’t this severe in Germany, or in France, or in Japan, or any other 1st world country. Just here. The biggest reason for the collapse in consumption here in the USA (but not anywhere else) has been that people are stashing money away as fast as they can in case their own job is next on the chopping block, thereby making it a self-fulfilling prophecy since collapsed demand means fewer people employed. They wouldn’t be doing that if the U.S. had a real unemployment compensation system that provided medical care, house payments, and car payments for the unemployed as they looked for a job. But people are scared that if they lose their job, they’ll lose everything — and are doing what is rational when there is no social safety net to back them up, which is exactly the wrong thing to do if we’re trying to keep people employed.

– Badtux the Economics Penguin

The system sucks.

It’s such an equitable system. 🙂 And people there are outrages, OUT-RAGED I tell you, over the sweatshops in China and Africa! The irony is just hilarious! 😆

Of course, screaming about everyone else’s problems means they don’t have to think about their own. 🙂 It seems many people in the USA own a telescope and crystal ball, but not a mirror. A shame really… they might see some truth. 😉

PS. For anyone wondering… I was speaking… metaphorically. 😉 Just in case… one can’t be too careful with language. 😆

I have always felt that the fact that upper executives demand that their contracts have specific provisions for the event of their firing, was a warning sign of their incompetence. They go in to the jobs so sure they will screw up that they want the penalties written out before hiring. I wouldn’t hire anyone who even asked about it.

Oh, I know what you mean, like trying to explain to a client why spending 2% more for subsystem that is warranted for twice as long as the cheap choice and actually has a mean time between failure that is 2½ times the competition is more cost effective. When the people in charge won’t look beyond the next quarter, and don’t care what happens after their contract runs out, you end up with a lot of cheap crap.

Politicians eliminate preventive maintenance and regular inspections because they don’t expect to be around when the bridge collapses, and they can win re-election by looking like they are cutting costs.

I wasn’t talking about *major* failures. The USA has that down pat. And that’s due in part to the fear of *micro* failures. I’ve been told by friends in the USA that they are afraid to be seen to fail in any way at any level. So they either avoid things that may fail, or cover up the failures. *shrug*

I was there when Challenger disintegrated. And I can say that almost all the engineers who were in the room with me knew that launching at that time was a really bad idea. Nobody knew for certain the o-rings would fail, but the risk was too high to take the chance. And BTW, it wasn’t just the failure of the o-rings on the SRB’s they were worried about. there were other potential problems, that was simply one of them. Perhaps if they had been allowed to do more testing of the system to the point of failure, they would have *known* what would happen. Certainly, you can’t test for every single possibility, but you can test for high-possibilities, and that was one of them. But, that would have cost money. *shrug* this is where you have narrow-minded narrow-visioned bean counters calculating things like ROI. They look at the straight cost equations, not at the potential cost for the loss of the shuttle, the lives, and the cost to NASA in the long term. They have no imaginations. If you factor in all those costs, suddenly the ROI doesn’t look so good when the system fails. I know about this stuff, it was my job. We designed industrial machinery that could easily kill people or destroy building if the system failed. We tested to destruction and knew exactly what would happen, then designed them so it wouldn’t happen. I believe that not a single system I (or teams I managed) designed over 20 years ago has ever had a catastrophic failure. The systems were designed to shutdown at the hint of a problem. We had to design a cutting system for the Navy (and the US Navy used our machines BTW, because none of the US machines could come close) to cut 4″ RHA armor plates. We designed a plasma cutting system using 800V DC @ 800A switching at 1KHz. Imagine what would happen if that went wrong? We didn’t have to imagine, we knew. 🙂 We designed a water-jet cutter that pumped pure ware through a 0.6mm nozzle at 72K psi! And we discovered that if ANY impurity got into the system, the pump would explode and punch a hole through 2′ of solid steel-reinforced concrete! And still, the ROI on our machines were higher than anyone else’s in the industry, even though they were also the most expensive. We won two Queens awards because of it. So, I know for a fact it can be done. But not when the bean counters are running everything and all they care about is their short-term personal ROI. I’ve spent the past 30 years working on *Risk* in several forms. Both those shuttle disasters were risks that should never have been taken. Many people knew those two launches were very risky. But nobody had the guts to stand up and say *NO!* It was more than their job was worth, after all. And that’s the bottom line.

Well, the vendors do own some powerful Congresscritters, so it’s to be expected.