I think the metric system is a big part of the problem for Americans.
Scientists use it. And the only other people who use the metric system are foreigners and terrorists, neither of whom can be trusted.

And some projects should not be done Agiley/
Management consultant Bob Lewis pointed out that Obamacare would not have been fixed by an agile development path (one of the myriad suggestions). In fact, it was a prime candidate for straight up waterfall methodology. The requirements were right there in The Affordable Care Act passed by Congress.

correction: You hire the engineer who read Jules Verne as a child.

You mean like American Marines being unable to fire a weapon because the software upgrade didn't work?
Or the license expired?
Or the IT dept forgot to register the serial numbers?

That could never happen.

Is being all male (assumption) a truth or completeness problem for Encyclopedia Britannica? Seems like we're conflating two different thangs.

imo, the "problem" is that people who complain about the issue only look at a small subset of the problem.
If it is a social issue, then look at all of society, or at least see if you can find any counter-examples.
If you look at prisons, men are severely over-represented. If you look at _all_ the school classrooms, you quickly realize that both the top-end AP classes AND the bottom-end remedial classes are mostly male.

I think men as a group have a wider range of behaviors than women as a group (which makes sense if you just look at the sizes of the X and Y chromosomes).
What that means, if true, is that a completely gender-neutral society will probably still end up with 67% male and 33% females in any of the "outlier" skills which seems to include advanced mathematics and crime. i.e., men will tend to dominate in both the "smartest" and "dumbest" ends of the Bell curve.

So Encyclopedia Britannica is a "real" encyclopedia because it is edited by equal parts women and men (something I doubt is true).
I don't follow the "logic."

I suspect wikipedia isn't that attractive to normal men either. Perhaps someone needs to do an analysis on the differences between the average editor on wikipedia and the average male who uses the internet. The way the editing process works reminds me more of folks fighting each other in a first-person shooter game than it reminds me of folks trying to arrange information into a useful site.

When looking into video game consoles, I was stunned to realize that Xbox and PS3/4 are _not_ even close to being the most popular video game consoles in the world. The top three are all Chinese consoles you've never heard of. Population-wise, the US is to China as VietNam is to the US and I suspect the Chinese worry about Americans about as much as we Americans worry about the Vietnamese.

Our economic might blinds us to the realities of the actual world and that perhaps is the most dangerous flaw in American culture. Remember the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Greeks (both civilizations), the Romans, the Ottomans? (There is a similar litany for homegrown emperors in China, also, but no one talks about it.)

Seems to me the obvious name would be GoogleScript.
That worked for Javascript, creating an immense amount of confusion. F.U.D. is Micro$oft's DNA.

1. How often do you pick up hitchhikers?
2. Car-jacking took off last century only after anti-theft devices made it too hard to steal unattended vehicles. I'm thinking now it's pretty goddamn easy to steal a smartphone, then use that to rent a Hummer or Mercedes off Uber and now you have a nice car to drive around in all by yourself (along with the driver's smartphone and whatever cash s/he was carrying). New ways of business always provide new ways of crime. Human nature.

Before you decide government is a complete waste of resources, perhaps you should live someplace without government such as Yemen or Somalia. It's probably as hard for us to put a value on the government and society we grew up in as it is for fish to understand the value of the water they cannot see.

Over regulation is bad, just as bad as under-regulation.
One problem is that complete anarchy means no protection for anybody which is one reason pure Libertarianism failed (buy insurance from Joe's Pizza Palace) and is why all those classic Western towns you see in John Wayne movies hired sheriffs and were trying to become more civilized.
Over-regulation happens mostly because of regulatory "capture." After the initial public wave of disgust forces a new bureaucracy in place, it becomes beholden to the industry it regulates because no one else really cares to put in the work defining terms and setting up precise rules (precision is another problem in and of itself).

It's a conundrum-type problem, trying to find the sweet spot. You basically need to decide if the over-burden of regulation is going to cost more than what you are preventing. And that's if you're a corporation. If you're a government trying to please the public, you have a mess of moralists who don't care about economics and demand 100% perfection which requires a lot of rules and almost always costs more than accepting 5% graft.

In the taxi market, one trade-off is between having standard prices or having a boatload of vehicles charging different prices all the time. I remember reading about soda pop machines wired to change prices depending on the outside temperature. Seems like slashdotters hated that but I can't see why it's any different from Uber.

If you want a steady price or a steady supply, you need different kinds of regulations than if you want perfect supply for every demand.

It already has mutated to become less deadly. This newest version only kills 60% of the time, down from 90% of the older versions.

Yup, CDC knows how to handle this sort of shit.
It's not like they lose track of pathogens or accidentally expose workers to smallpox, no sirree bob.
They know what they're doing ;-)