Comments on: Fall of the Machines

By: Outlaw13

Outlaw13 — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:18:07 +0000

Maybe they should consult an engineer or two before making decisions about laws concerning the design of something that actually has to do something…now that would be revolutionary.

Fricking Idiots.

By: Lars Walker

Lars Walker — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:45:29 +0000

A particularly brilliant (or nasty) element of decimation was that the loser’s buddies were given clubs and required to beat him to death themselves. Concentrates the mind wonderfully, I imagine.

By: Floyd

Floyd — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 04:04:13 +0000

unless you’re French and it’s World War I.

By: David Marcoe

David Marcoe — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 03:28:52 +0000

There is some wisdom in the Roman practice of decimation, where if I a military unit would mutiny, they would select soldiers by lot and execute every tenth man. A similar system would be bound to get results.

By: Republibot 3.0

Republibot 3.0 — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 03:05:22 +0000

Back during the Apollo Program, the stress of the whole thing was unbelievable. You’re looking at 40,000 people employed by hundreds of companies suppling parts and contstruction to built a 360-foot-tall rocket, and everyone knows that a rocket is just a bomb with a whole in one end. There were literally *hundreds* of ways the thing could have gone wrong. People were paralyzed with stress. Ultimately, the contractors got together and started a program to re-assure the workers, keep them focused, and roll back the stress levels some, thereby increasing the overall odds of success. Their slogan was,

“It won’t fail because of me.”

It worked surprisingly well. “Yeah, there may be 40,000 people working on this thing, and it may explode and kill the hell out of everyone, but when they sift through the wreckage and trace the problem back to it’s source, it WILL NOT be anything I did.” They got all the workers in all the companies, contractors, and agencies to focus on doing their one job to perfection, and it worked.

Just sayin’ is all….

By: fritz8945

fritz8945 — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:54:29 +0000

Very true about the way solder acts/reacts. If indeed the solder was “lead free” there could be a direct correlation to the failure of the system.

Along the same lines, although perhaps more for monetary reasons rather than environmental, there was a time in the 1970s when homes in America were constructed with aluminum wiring instead of the tried and true copper. This was done because the price of copper was soaring to astronomical levels.

On the railroad I worked for, it was nothing for the system of railroad company communications to go down completely in the middle of the night. It was found that Joe Bob, the good old boy local redneck and his friends were going out in the country at night in their pickup truck with a long handled tree trimmer and cutting long stretches of copper communications wire from the railroad’s comm. lines. They would then, in turn, take the rolled up copper down to the local salvage yard and sell it for whatever they could get.

This in turn led to homebuilders cutting costs and using cheaper, more plentiful aluminum wiring in home construction. I owned one of those homes in Texas for three years. On very regular occasions, I would turn on a light and it would not come on, or a lighting circuit would trip a breaker. After many tries at tightening the connectors in the switches and circuit breakers, it still continued to happen. The aluminum had a tendancy to corrode. Not fast, but over a long period of time, during which it would build up a white powdery residue, which would eventually break the circuit. There were a lot of house fires because of the aluminum wiring and the practice of using it was replaced with copper wiring. A lot of this was corrected as a result of the change in building codes. This in turn reduced the hazard, but increased the initial cost. In most cases I don’t believe a retrofit to copper wiring was mandated for existing construction.

As I recall, did not the Pope tell Pres. BHO this week while he was in Europe, that to protect the environment at the cost of human need was a wrong tack to take? Government regulation has, and will continue to cost humankind as long as it continues unabated. Sometimes people are just plain more important than CO2 or money or what have you.