I wonder if our whole culture's commitment to taking care of infrastructure has been eroded by the computer industry. We can just shut off the power on our old racks of servers, hand over their carcasses to the steel-recycling guys, and move their workload to AWS or someplace, for a net savings.
It doesn't work that way with bridges or railroads. It doesn't seem to work that way with air traffic control systems. Those things have to last at least a century, and have to be repaired in place, while still in use.
But when pols propose asking us to pay for that stuff, we refuse and vote them out of office. There's always some perfectly good excuse to say no: government waste, crooked contractors, expensive labor, you name it. Bottom line: we behave like the economic version of Moore's Law applies to highways. It doesn't.
I wonder if our whole culture's commitment to taking care of infrastructure has been eroded by the computer industry. We can just shut off the power on our old racks of servers, hand over their carcasses to the steel-recycling guys, and move their workload to AWS or someplace, for a net savings.
It doesn't work that way with bridges or railroads. It doesn't seem to work that way with air traffic control systems. Those things have to last at least a century, and have to be repaired in place, while still in use.
But when pols propose asking us to pay for that stuff, we refuse and vote them out of office. There's always some perfectly good excuse to say no: government waste, crooked contractors, expensive labor, you name it. Bottom line: we behave like the economic version of Moore's Law applies to highways. It doesn't.