“There are no lies, except by the Satanic forces of Emmanuel Goldberg! There is no truth, except that which serves the State! Dear Leader will tell you what the truth is, ungrateful serfs!”–Baghdad Jim
If what is broadly known as “health care” in Europe and Great Britain can be regarded as the Concorde, a technological triumph and an engineering marvel, a commercial failure in that “if we knew we were only going to build 16 of them, we wouldn’t have embarked on this project”, yet a source of national pride, can the ACA be regarded as the rival Tu-144, the “if the Germans, French, and British can build one of those things, I am going to have to get me one”, totally politically motivated and badly engineered from the wheels up, and rushed into production and service for propaganda reasons?
It is not that the Tu-144 “Concordski” crashed at its debut appearance at the Paris Air Show, and some blame that on the pilot dodging a French Mirage jet that was shadowing it from the clouds as an exercise in industrial espionage, maybe to steal back from the Russians what they had stolen from France?
It is that the Tu-144 was Cargo Cult aerospace engineering, going through the motions without putting the proper effort into it, just as the ACA appears to be a Cargo Cult implementation of a major public welfare initiative. Of the people behind it are sincere and pure of heart, this thing is going to work, no?
Check out the Wikipedia article on the Tu-144 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144. It seems that on an inaugural commercial flight, the number of system failures triggered a warning siren that could be heard throughout the aircraft, the crew couldn’t shut it off, so they stuffed a pillow into the siren so it wouldn’t disquiet the passengers. There has to be an analogy in there somewhere.
“There are no lies, except by the Satanic forces of Emmanuel Goldberg! There is no truth, except that which serves the State! Dear Leader will tell you what the truth is, ungrateful serfs!”–Baghdad Jim
If what is broadly known as “health care” in Europe and Great Britain can be regarded as the Concorde, a technological triumph and an engineering marvel, a commercial failure in that “if we knew we were only going to build 16 of them, we wouldn’t have embarked on this project”, yet a source of national pride, can the ACA be regarded as the rival Tu-144, the “if the Germans, French, and British can build one of those things, I am going to have to get me one”, totally politically motivated and badly engineered from the wheels up, and rushed into production and service for propaganda reasons?
It is not that the Tu-144 “Concordski” crashed at its debut appearance at the Paris Air Show, and some blame that on the pilot dodging a French Mirage jet that was shadowing it from the clouds as an exercise in industrial espionage, maybe to steal back from the Russians what they had stolen from France?
It is that the Tu-144 was Cargo Cult aerospace engineering, going through the motions without putting the proper effort into it, just as the ACA appears to be a Cargo Cult implementation of a major public welfare initiative. Of the people behind it are sincere and pure of heart, this thing is going to work, no?
Check out the Wikipedia article on the Tu-144 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144. It seems that on an inaugural commercial flight, the number of system failures triggered a warning siren that could be heard throughout the aircraft, the crew couldn’t shut it off, so they stuffed a pillow into the siren so it wouldn’t disquiet the passengers. There has to be an analogy in there somewhere.