so I can spend my mental cycles on something more better...

Don't forget lobbying and consulting.

Loan sharking.

Underground gambling.

I'll give you a hyperlocal example from my neck of the woods west of Boston.

The Concord Rotary along MA Route 2 in Concord, MA. Massive traffic bottleneck. The state has slowly been upgrading the part of Rte 2 between 495 and 95 to a limited access expressway. But when they got to this particular place, all the people whose house values would drop by openning up an easier commute to Boston upstream of the traffic bottleneck (thereby increasing the pool of desirable housing and thus lowering values of currently desirable housing downstream of the bottleneck) sued to stop the project on environmental grounds. In this case, taking away rights would entail taking away the right to use the courts to buffer your home values from natural market forces happening away from your property lines. All for it.

Have you actually seen the kind of verbiage that makes it into real, on-the-books legislation?

If you had, you'd probably want to put some sarc tags around your sarc tags.

Bullshit hypotheticals have standing in court precisely because of vaguely worded legislation that delegates a lot of authority to determine what counts as negative impact onto regulatory agencies or the court system.

Clear and concise language to dilineate what does and does not count as harm and what level of evidence and confidence is required to show attribution is *precisely* what is lacking and what enables lawyers to spin bullshit stories to shopped-for juries or judges.

"Risk and concern" is a euphemism for too many busybodies with too much time on their hands having standing in court to challenge permits.

You can fix this in legislation by taking away people's standing to sue when they are not directly affected and explicitly define "directly affected" to exclude bullshit hypotheticals.

Of course this would solve the problem and thus take away opportunities for rentseeking and grandstanding. So we can't have that.

Again: if the market is inelastic and prices are rising, that's an incentive for new entrants into the market.

What is preventing new entrants from building power plants and connecting them to the grid?

If prices are rising, the return on investment to build out more generating capacity also rises.

Now let's ask: what added costs are discouraging that investment?

What prevents things like new power plants from being built?

Hint: it's closely related to the reason many power plants are actively being shut down.

It's good practice to have second sources.

For most suppliers, GM isn't their only customer.

Indicator bulbs: cover glass or plastic, different types of plastic for housing, perhaps some fasteners, adhesives, copper wire, insulation, electrical connectors, incandescent light bulb or semiconductor LED, either of which is like 5 suppliers or more for subcomponents and tooling.

Yeah your indicator light supply chain probably sprouts tentacles in 10 or 15 directions.

The fate of democracy...er I mean television...depends on it. Somehow.

I started working almost 20 years ago. Even back then, the rot had started. Whereas in the 80s and 90s my organization insisted on formal project reports to document the secret sauce and preserve tribal knowledge through staff turnover, by the time I started it was just powerpoints sans notes section about 90% of the time, and had been for nearly a decade.

Shyam Sankar of Palantir of all people hit the nail on the head for why: excessive consolidation in the 90s amplifying the monopsony among defense contractors (used to be defense was less than half their business) leading to severely reduced competition and incentive to rent-seek.

That would be relearning a forgotten lesson the easy way.

I am not convinced that learning anything viscerally, as opposed to intellectually, is possible the easy way.

The Pentagon won't change it's ways unless and until we get into war *not* of our own choosing and we start to lose.

Yes. And if you were sitting across the table from me, I'd be less inclined to try to snow you than if you were talking about 3d printed artillery shells.

The perception of competence matters. And regardless of any wishful thinking to the contrary, the only way to achieve the perception of competence is to demostrate actual competence.

sounding like you don't know what you're talking about.

Almost all metal parts used in aerospace, artillery, small arms, and the like require paper trails all the way from the foundry to ensure they meet spec and aren't cheap Chinese knockoffs that will fatigue if you look at them funny or blow up in a soldier's face.

Not stuff you 3d print in the field.

Considering the amount of business that gets conducted via text message, groups chats, and emoji interpretive dance right now, I don't think the inability to typeset a formal letter is a problem for tomorrow.