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by potato3732842 240 days ago
>If the public spends less on material they can afford to build additional bridges

Except what happens is that now that we can build them cheaply they waste the same amount of money by turning what could have been simple I beams into a mirror finish exercise in "art" nobody asks for and was bike-shed into oblivion until the whole budget and more was used up. So the public doesn't actually reap any benefit. It just makes work for more parties on the dole. We don't actually get more bridges. We get a bigger racket.

1 comments

Its not the fault of the engineers, they just did a job. The parasites come from elsewhere. I read that in order to build a reactor in the UK they spent 350 pages in the plan discussing how jobs would be given to various minority groups. Everything government touches is a racket now.
Thankfully (maybe) LLMs.ate great at generating text,which is believe will help streamline some of the more paperwork-generating processes.
Source? A section about how it benefits minorities seems plausible but 350 pages does not.
Who even reads all of that? Is it just all in there so someone who says "I really care about <extremely rare ethnic minority>, so I want to make sure they're represented", or is someone actually sitting down and reading 350 pages of job allocations??? I can't imagine a worse punishment, honestly.
Some poor fucking secretary has to read all that shit so that their boss can be advised whether the application is compliant. It won't actually be analyzed unless those sections are sub-par at which point bickering over them becomes a lever the government can pull to extract more flesh. The applicant is forced to go back and say "well we'll hire a minority" or whatever to shore up that section.
On a society level I think everyone realizes the ship is sinking and just looting everything they can before running for the lifeboats.

Bureaucracies became a spoils system. In the 60s the civil rights movement would boycott companies and then demand favors. Minority groups realized the moral weakness of western society and are just in it to loot whatever they can. For them the 350 pages of spoils are very important.