What makes you think a President will lose pension, office budget, speaking fees etc? Nixon did not.

Presidents are hardly immune from political donations and all the problems that arise from them. Modern example, Bill Clinton. Various questionable donations from middlemen covertly washing money from overseas donors. Donors lined up to support the upcoming Clinton Foundation once he retires from the Presidency. Pardons for financial criminals while on the way out the door.

Influence comes in many many forms.

You also compare 1 President vs 1 Congressperson. I compare 1 President to 535 Congresspersons, or at least a majority of those. That is something very different.

That statement is as flawed as the original. The 99% get to pick the candidates in presidential primary elections too for example. You might notice a wide range of people running who are not the choices of the 1%. Whether they have a chance is up to the 99% not the 1%.

Its easier to buy one President than 535 members of Congress.

And for some truly ill-advised and unpopular ideas its more practical to wait for a President of a suitable ideological bent than wait for a Congressional majority.

Hence the founding fathers wisely distributing powers amongst branches. Ie the executive negotiating a treaty, the legislature making it law, and the supreme court deciding if the law is constitutional.

You don't seem to know what the Court said in Citizens United. What you read in the popular press and hear on TV is largely political spin mischaracterizing the decision. For example the "corporations are people" meme was a brilliant piece of spin by the losing side's PR team. What the Court actually said is:
(1) Groups of people have the same speech rights as individual persons.
(2) It does not matter what the nature of that group is; Trade union, corporation, activist organization, etc. They all have the same rights.
(3) Media corporations have no special privileges nor status. Every corporation has the same rights as a corporation that owns a TV station or newspaper.

Actually most people forfeit offering an opinion by being loyal to a particular political party. When one is loyal to one party then both parties may ignore you. One already has your vote, the other cannot attain your vote.

Being a member of a party to promote an issue or message is fine. But do not vote for a party, vote for a candidate regardless of their party. That is the only way to make candidates care about your opinion.

Remember the true currency of politics is votes not money. As long as its one person one vote the 99% actually have the power, they just fail to use it. Party loyalty is one of various examples of how the 99% fails itself.

Both cooperation and gridlock are preferable to a lone individual making US trade policy. Some national policies must have a national consensus of some sort.

A pi was my first thought too. :-)

While you are probably correct that there is a bit of profit in that quote, its seems everyone is only looking at one half of the equation. What about the other side, increased efficiency and the cost savings that would result?

It is plausible that over another 30 year timespan the cost of the new system could be outweighed by the savings it generates. I'm not saying this is surely the case, just part of the equation that is being overlooked so we don't really have enough information to judge the project.

That said, pi's and clocks and temperature sensors and etc are fairly inexpensive. A modernized more comprehensive student built system could be an awesome project. The school could have a computer engineering club that maintains and enhances the system. The education benefit may easily outweigh any additional benefit a high tech commercial installation might offer. This education benefit would include something terribly lacking in traditional CS/CE programs, an appreciation for maintaining existing software.

EPROMS are no more immune to bad data than flash memory.

Besides, being well into the era of malware I'm surprised that files aren't delivered as a complete image. Complete with a manifest of files and version numbers and each file being digitally signed.

Or maybe some developer did have such a manifest, his/her code detected the error, reported the error, but the error/exception was handled in a way that didn't rise to the pilot's attention nor prevent engine startup.

Yes, but how many of those regulations and checks trace back to accidents versus an engineer's foresight? I'd expect that most items in a pilot's pre-flight checklist do trace back to accidents. And it seems the computer's pre-flight checklist will too.

I once heard that the expression "Navy regulations are written in blood" was used to explain to new sailors why so many tasks are to be performed exactly the way the regs say and in no other manner. The phrase was then elaborated on explaining to the sailors that when things were done otherwise sailors sometimes died, for small things like failing to properly secure a hatch (door).

Admittedly this was in major cities but not necessarily near the tourist hotels and such. Now in Paris I was spending time near a university so perhaps that helped. However I think it may also be a generational thing. I've been told that the most recent generation or two of Europeans generally speak English to each other when traveling within Europe. Perhaps more so in some countries than others. For example perhaps more English speaking in Prague.

Also I'm not necessarily referring to fluency. Just enough English for the clerk, waiter, etc to get the job done.

It seems pointless. I had a few years of Spanish in high school. While driving through Mexico we were on a desert highway, hundreds of miles south of the border, hadn't seen anything for many miles. A lone gas station becomes visible and we decide to stop. The driver had taken French in high school so I talk to the attendant and ask for a fill of unleaded gas. He repeats my request in perfect English to confirm. Seriously, the gas station attendant hundreds of miles from the border in the middle of nowhere spoke better English than people who grew up around me in California.

As I mentioned in another post, when traveling in Europe it seemed unnecessary to know anything beyond hello in a local language. When saying hello in the local language its as if the clerk, attendant, hostess, waiter, etc thinks "oh, its one of the polite Americans, I'll answer in English rather than pretend we have a language barrier". This really saps the motivation for learning anything beyond hello, please and thank you. :-)

For my travels in Europe, including Germany, I made sure to at least know how to say hello, thank you, please, water closet and beer (the essentials) in the local language. I never really needed any more than hello. Whenever I walked into a shop or restaurant and said hello in the local language the other person smiled and started speaking to me in English. Exceptions were rare, although admittedly I was generally in the larger cities. And for the exception, a very small clothing shop near my hotel in Paris where I needed a belt (forgot to pack one) hand gestures worked just fine.

My understanding is that many Europeans speak English to each other when traveling. And that there is a bit of a generational component to it, the "younger" generations being more likely to speak English to some practical degree. I suspect that an American traveling in Europe needs only to show the some courtesy to the locals -- ex saying hello, please and thank you in the local language -- and they will find plenty of English speaking employees willing to offer their products and services.

Personal observation: if a bar is not terribly busy the bartender may be a valuable resource in getting the pronunciation of key words and phrases correct. A bartender in Prague was of great help to me with Czech.

And business school teaches that a manager must be familiar with the product, familiar with the production line, familiar with the development process, etc ... in other words familiar with what they are managing. Do I really need to mention for a third time that 1/3 of my class were scientists and engineers? Working scientists and working engineers with many years of experience are getting MBAs too.

In business school you read lots of case studies. Case studies of successful companies and projects, and case studies of unsuccessful one. These generally include failed companies/projects that were simply managed by the wrong person. Sometimes a person without relevant experience, sometimes a person with relevant experience but who was too egotistical to listen to his team, sometimes a person with relevant experience who could not effectively communicate with others in the company or with customers, ...

As I said, what you were when you entered business school is what you leave as, a scientist, an engineer or in this case engineering manager (assuming I guessed your field correctly). Most tech people who finds themselves promoted into management will benefit from a modern business school program. Your evaluation of your manager may be incomplete. His improvements may have been more outward facing with respect to the team, better representing your team and its interests to others in the company, others without an engineering background. Also being a good manager before doesn't mean that inward facing skills had not improved. The improvements may have merely not been things you were aware of or noticed.

In 30+ years I've seen fools and outright crooks too. It fed my erroneous image of MBAs, I don't actually know how many of the later actually had MBAs. However early in my career I also knew a senior programmer and team leader who was going to business school at night. I assumed it was all bean counting stuff, I eventually learned I was wrong. I also had a CEO at a medium sized company who I knew had an MBA, he sometimes came by to talk to us lowly software engineers. Part of the conversations usually involved asking us if we were getting everything we needed to do our jobs right. His background was management but he understood the functionality offered by our products and could use them in an operational sense. He did not understand the details of hardware or software design, he hired lower level managers who did. And when it came time to hire a new manager for my team he had us lowly software engineers participate in the interview process to make sure our future boss in fact did have the required knowledge. Later I'm my career I've seen some pretty talented coworkers go to business school. In business school I met new people who were pretty capable scientists and engineers and tech people.

Actually I used CS as an example because that is my field. I have both Bachelors and Masters degrees in CS. I also ranked fairly high on the CS specific GRE to get into grad school. And for two decades or so I held the severely misinformed opinions you and the GP held. Then I went to business school and learned the truth.

You need to re-read the above more carefully. My comparison to CS was an attempt to frame the problem in a manner coders could understand, basically that both CS and MBA students are in fact taught to do things the correct way. However many fail to do so once they enter the field. Producing buggy unmaintainable crap on the CS side and mismanaging on the MBA side. Its the same failures in both camps, ego and overly optimistic. Both camps getting slammed by the inevitable unforeseen consequences of their shortcuts. That is the sense that CS and MBA are alike.

By the way. You are completely ignorant of the academic demands of some classes in an MBA program. In one elective marketing class I got to use some of my second year calculus from undergraduate days. Again, it was an elective. The mathematical bent of some classes was one of the pleasant surprises of business school, and I'm talking marketing and strategy not accounting nor finance. Areas where I never expected it.

I'll also repeat that 1/3 of my classmates had a scientific or engineering background. By that I meant they personally had scientific and engineering degrees.