|
|
|
|
|
|
by hire_charts
2747 days ago
|
|
|
Infrastructure requires a continual investment, which means that at any given time you can always point at something that is, quite literally, crumbling away. That's just the nature of the modern era - that we rely on such projects for far longer than the original engineers could've imagined speaks to both their and our ingenuity. Is there truth in the idea that repairs take longer? Sure. Sometimes it's due to incompetence and lack of funding. Other times it's for the same reason that software takes a lot more effort to maintain/refactor than it took to write in the first place. There's a lot of momentum you have to undo if you want to make an old thing new again. |
|
|
I don't really see your point. It is easy to point to something that is crumbling in e.g. California because many of the investments were made in past decades. In Northern Europe e.g. overhead power lines are increasingly rare in urban settings. It isn't really investment in maintenance, but in upgrades.
Science has progressed rapidly in the last couple of decades. These days we are to a large extent limited by other factors, like organizing. For instance if you had a barrier separated self-driving lane on certain highways you could already have self-driving. Of course self-driving already exists in things like trains, there just isn't a lot of incentive to implement that. Having self-driving train carriages departing every minute is entirely possible with today's technology.
So to address the top comment I do think people are wasting their time, even those working on more qualified problems. Because without the larger support and investments it is like trying to bake a cake without eggs.
(I guess trying to bake cakes without eggs on a large scale could actually have a lot of merit, but you get the idea).