It's not the size, it's the scale. Back then things were built with future in mind. These days it's about solving today's problem and screw tomorrow because we don't want to be seen spending more than we need.

Famously the Sydney harbour bridge in the 30s was built with 8 lanes, 2 trains, and a dedicated cycle track and pedestrian track. These days we solve congestion problems by spending millions to widen a road by one lane, only to have to start the project again when we're finished because in the 5 years it took to widen the road the traffic has increased yet again.

Name a bacterium that infects both jellyfish and corn and has a habit of swapping genes with it's host.

There are actually a few differences that can have real consequences. For example, simple cross breeding is a fairly slow and limited process that gives us time to see if a problem is developing. It is further limited by the need to stick with plants that can cross-breed in the first place.

Another factor is that not all genetic modification techniques lead to the plants breeding true. The next few generations may be substantially different from the original.

If the work was being done in a verifiable cautious manner, it might be OK, but there is a history of modifications that "can't escape to the wild" being spotted in the wild. It's somewhat amusing the number of weeds that gained roundup resistance from roundup ready canola. Also amusingly, in spite of Monsanto's claim that only their transgenic techniques could have produced roundup ready crops, traditional breeding has managed it in a few cases including in coca.

The CEO being new doesn't narrow things down much in this case.

Maybe the new CEO is getting rid of the bottom performing 20%.
Maybe the new CEO is reducing headcount by 20%.

Either case is common for new management, but both cases are handled very VERY differently from all sorts of legal perspectives.

"in my opinion this guy is like Jenny McCarthy"

When Jenny McCarthy found out that what she was saying was wrong and harmful, she largely retracted her entire position. Oz knows what he's saying is wrong and harmful, but he keeps doing it, for the money.

Agreed, but it might not be smart to eat plants that manufacture an unaccustomed pesticide or an unusually large amount of it.

Genuine curiosity, what is he advocating that actually endangers his patients (or anyone else's) health?

"and not micromanage it". That's the rub. The micromanaging, the reporting and compliance costs, can be over 50% of the cost for some federal contracts, but most of the time that's required by thousands upon thousands of pages of federal law. When you have a comoany that knows how to do a certain thing , aka one of those evil corporations, getting hired by the federal government, some people want to do a lot of paperwork and stuff to keep track of what's going on, and other people go crazy with it. The organization I work for used to do a lot of federal contracts. We quit and now just do state contracts for states that are reasonable.

    Still other people added a bunch of requirements for federal contracting that aren't really relevant to the project. For example, how many black women work for each of your major suppliers? How much do your interns make? Are all of the web pages and documentation you've ever made fully accessible to people who are both blind and deaf?

We quit dealing with the feds and certain states because it's just not worth it. It would cost SPACEX five times as much to build a federally-contracted rocket than it costs to build their own.

I'm pretty sure that letting the contractors bilk NASA is the point of the exercise at this stage. The SLS isn't referred to as the Senate Launch System for nothing.

The article does not mention where the cost of this error is going to fall. This seems like an important detail. On a sufficently complex project, one of the bevy of subcontractors fucking something up isn't a huge surprise; but I would be very, very, disappointed if NASA wasn't able to contract sufficiently vigorously to make the vendor eat the cost of delivering the goods as specified, rather than paying them for their effort no matter how well or badly they do.

You can't fire a faculty member because outside the scope of his duties he expresses an opinion you don't like -- even if it's a clearly crackpot opinion. If you could, Stanford would have kicked Linus Pauling out when he became a Vitamin C crackpot.

The difference, though, is that Pauling was a sincere crackpot -- brilliant people are often susceptible to crackpottery because they're so used to being more right than their neighbors. Dr. Oz is a snake-oil salesman; when he's faced with people who are educated -- not necessarily scientists but critical thinkers -- in a forum he doesn't control, he speaks in a much more equivocal fashion. That shows he knows the language he uses on his show and in his magazine is irresponsible.

So selling snake-oil isn't crackpottery, it's misconduct. But somebody's got to find, chapter and verse, the specific institutional rules of conduct Dr. Oz's misconduct violates. There will have to be due process, particularly if he's a tenured professor, which will probably require lesser disciplinary measures than dismissal be tried first.

When you don't know all the facts, you go with the probabilities. When you can't call everyone in for an interview, you call in the more promising candidates. This is going to screw some people over, and that's not fair. It's going to happen, and somebody who tries to judge job applicants by a limited number of things is going to do slightly worse than somebody who intelligently uses all available data.

Nor am I talking about automatically hiring a woman. I'm talking about reasoning that, statistically speaking, a woman may be a better hire than a man of equal qualifications. Obviously, if you think an applicant might be disruptive, you don't hire that person, regardless of sex, species, or planet of origin.

Please, then, point me at an explanation of General Relativity that can be understood by somebody with the math ability of my sister-in-law. We'll assume that, if she worked hard enough, she'd be reasonably competent in algebra, which is a bit of a stretch. I can explain Special Relativity using only that level of math, but not General Relativity.

OS matters. Lots of enterprise software comes on one OS, take it or leave it, and paying them to change anything would counteract any savings from buying less expensive hardware. Custom software can be appallingly expensive to develop.

Moreover, iPads are not particularly expensive for what you get. Getting quality Android tablets wouldn't cost all that much less, if any.