[mayormcmatt]

"[I]n engineering, the “success” of a technology often has less to do with solving problems than rendering them opaque or distant from our imagination. Like an endless game of whack-a-mole, the problems never truly go away—they come back with a vengeance decades later and miles away in new forms, often made worse by the very infrastructure engineers created."

This article reminded me of Kim Stanley Robinson's novel "Aurora", about a generation ship's various engineering issues and how the inhabitants find various ways to rebalance the closed system, but never completely.