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"The burned hand teaches best. After that advice about fire goes to the heart." A whole generation is going to learn a bunch of lessons that have been forgotte

by M_Grey 10y ago

"The burned hand teaches best. After that advice about fire goes to the heart." A whole generation is going to learn a bunch of lessons that have been forgotten, among them that infrastructure doesn't maintain itself. It's sad, because even in the best possible scenarios, a lot of the most helpless and disadvantaged are bound to suffer. At least with infrastructure failure at the level of dams, the destruction and death will be fairly democratic.

Bartweiss 10y ago
> A whole generation is going to learn a bunch of lessons that have been forgotten, among them that infrastructure doesn't maintain itself. This is a really strange framing. A lot of my friends went into either environmental/civil engineering or local politics. They spend their days fighting tooth and nail for money and support to fix infrastructure that they know is crumbling, and they don't get it. There's nothing ignorant or generational about what they're doing. If I were going to do the generation-warfare thing, my argument would be that younger people are more attuned to this problem because they're going to be around for every single collapse and catastrophe that's building up. They're just not in control of the money it would take to fix they problem, and had no chance to prevent it in the first place. More broadly, though, this is better framed as a left/right struggle, or a bureaucrats/technicians struggle, or a politicians/citizens struggle, or virtually anything except a generational issue.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  I wasn't thinking about young people... they're not the only generation on the planet, and not the one who've been making the bad calls re: infrastructure either.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I apologize, I read an implication in that wasn't warranted. I think what led me to that was the idea that older generations have already seen infrastructure crises, so only younger ones would be learning something new. But I guess that's not really the case, is it? Has there been a major infrastructure crisis in the last ~100 years?
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      No need to apologize, it was a reasonable assumption. As you say though, I don't think living memory (at least not much) extends to that kind of crisis. Most living memory no longer recalls a lot of important lessons that we culturally believe we've learned "forever". We haven't. People never learn lessons forever.

by M_Grey 10y ago

Bartweiss 10y ago

> A whole generation is going to learn a bunch of lessons that have been forgotten, among them that infrastructure doesn't maintain itself. This is a really strange framing. A lot of my friends went into either environmental/civil engineering or local politics. They spend their days fighting tooth and nail for money and support to fix infrastructure that they know is crumbling, and they don't get it. There's nothing ignorant or generational about what they're doing. If I were going to do the generation-warfare thing, my argument would be that younger people are more attuned to this problem because they're going to be around for every single collapse and catastrophe that's building up. They're just not in control of the money it would take to fix they problem, and had no chance to prevent it in the first place. More broadly, though, this is better framed as a left/right struggle, or a bureaucrats/technicians struggle, or a politicians/citizens struggle, or virtually anything except a generational issue.

M_Grey 10y ago
I wasn't thinking about young people... they're not the only generation on the planet, and not the one who've been making the bad calls re: infrastructure either.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I apologize, I read an implication in that wasn't warranted. I think what led me to that was the idea that older generations have already seen infrastructure crises, so only younger ones would be learning something new. But I guess that's not really the case, is it? Has there been a major infrastructure crisis in the last ~100 years?
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    No need to apologize, it was a reasonable assumption. As you say though, I don't think living memory (at least not much) extends to that kind of crisis. Most living memory no longer recalls a lot of important lessons that we culturally believe we've learned "forever". We haven't. People never learn lessons forever.