> concerns about decades old technologies. Remember [...] Things have really changed in the last 50 years A cautionary tale about this flavor of argument. I s

> concerns about decades old technologies. Remember [...] Things have really changed in the last 50 years A cautionary tale about this flavor of argument. I saw a panel of Boston city planners. They complained about still getting grief for the "original sin" (their phrase) of some really bad decision making (like Boston City Hall) in the 1960's and 70's. It was half a century ago they said. We're not like that anymore they said. They seemed quite miffed about it. Then they later mentioned Boston's recent Big Dig, and some of its impacts. And the description was surprisingly distorted. Not even a defensive "none of the failure was our fault!", though that was implicit. But more, almost an obliviousness towards causality. And certainly no recognition that their brief description of their field's "no longer relevant" 1960's flaws, seemed to overlap quite a bit with failure postmortems of the Big Dig. This combination of arguments was remarkably effective in trashing their perceived credibility.