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During World War II, one of the U.S.'s great technical marvels was the Norden bombsight. Production, by GM, needed to be ramped up: but labor in Detroit was exc
by MaysonL 13y ago
During World War II, one of the U.S.'s great technical marvels was the Norden bombsight. Production, by GM, needed to be ramped up: but labor in Detroit was exceedingly tight. The only sufficiently large group available, who were hired, trained, and succeeded in production, were "superannuated Negro prostitutes." The reason the Germans didn't produce their own bombsight in equal numbers is that they believed that such a device could only be produced by highly trained, laboriously apprenticed technicians.
IMO, the idea that there are worthless people, in any significant number, is a pernicious and evil meme.
- 3pt14159 13y agoThat is a nice story, but maybe we should face the replacement of human labor head on instead of lying to ourselves.
- brownbat 13y agoSide note, the Norden bombsight was pretty useless in actual combat. The German solutions weren't much better. But precision bombing was the fundamental engineering challenge of WWII. And the US did solve it, twice. Sort of. BF Skinner's pigeon guided missiles were the first way, they were crazy effective. They were just too weird for everyone. Giant irradiating bombs that don't need any precision struck everyone as a much more sensible approach, so we went with that instead. I think the last 70 years or so would have been better if we'd gone the pigeon route.