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Pick me! I’ll deny it!
I have zero reason to believe capability has gotten worse by any reasonable metric. Maybe—just maybe—that’s propped up by technology even as competency has tanked? But if so, I think there should be better evidence than black swans.
Compare complaints about the land boats of old. Why can’t we buy sweet Caddys anymore? I dunno, because they were death traps in an accident.
I’m still trying to find that Onion skit about accidentally invading the wrong Middle Eastern country.
I agree that our competence probably hasn’t declined that much. But our systems are much more integrated with a lot more single points of failure. I doubt that bad updates were ever that unusual. But it wasn’t quite the same as it would have been in 1990 when there were dozens of different OS and virus software combinations and so on. One company doing one update would have only affected the few companies that had the wrong combination of systems that got a bad update. Now the combination of cloudflare and Windows is common enough that one bad update takes out thousands of computers in thousands of companies.
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Well, I think it has more to do with fuel efficiency standards. They were also death traps, or not as perfectly safe as possible, but rounding off all the edges for aerodynamic efficiency gives all calls a sameness that's striking when compared to older designs.
You can build a land boat that's as safe as you like, but it's not going to meet fuel efficiency standards unless it's classified as a truck somehow. This also relates to the rise of SUVs: they're not-sedans, and so they don't have the same standards.
I remember a video about the old standard of round headlights. Super convenient for everything except aerodynamics. There was an awkward transition where companies tried to put the aero shell around their legally-mandated headlights, but that was unnecessary after the regulation got removed. Wish I could find it again.
Was it this?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=c2J91UG6Fn8?feature=shared
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