But "send s* into LEO" was always stupid. IAMNA-NasaHistorian, but wasn't the Shuttle was built because NASA and its contractors had a massive infrastructure that none wanted to shrink? "We have to stay in space" had political plausibility, and the absence of a compelling science agenda wasn't noticeable to the Congressmen who _wanted_ a compelling agenda to justify maintenance of infrastructure in their districts.
I think Stephenson's dead right about the effects of risk aversion, but I don't understand sentences like "In a world where decision-makers are so close to being omniscient, it’s easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past." The Lehman Crisis is only the latest evidence of Omniscient Collapse. The safety record of the Shuttle is another.
My current guess is that part of the problem is excess compartmentalization and excess complexity. These seem related to large-scale corporate organization. Believing that risk is a real if weird economic cost, I have to wonder if these enormous corporations really deliver their promised bargains of scale economy. It's certainly plausible to imagine their capital has to include a government backstop, and that maybe our institutions would be somewhat less enormous and stupid if we would just let their risks come to the fore.
But that would lead to more chaos that our corporate leaders and politicians would like. We've got a leadership class more interested in managing than accomplishing, and it's showing up in all sorts of places.
I think Stephenson's dead right about the effects of risk aversion, but I don't understand sentences like "In a world where decision-makers are so close to being omniscient, it’s easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past." The Lehman Crisis is only the latest evidence of Omniscient Collapse. The safety record of the Shuttle is another.
My current guess is that part of the problem is excess compartmentalization and excess complexity. These seem related to large-scale corporate organization. Believing that risk is a real if weird economic cost, I have to wonder if these enormous corporations really deliver their promised bargains of scale economy. It's certainly plausible to imagine their capital has to include a government backstop, and that maybe our institutions would be somewhat less enormous and stupid if we would just let their risks come to the fore.
But that would lead to more chaos that our corporate leaders and politicians would like. We've got a leadership class more interested in managing than accomplishing, and it's showing up in all sorts of places.