>But now you have a special class of employees whose incentives are wrong in the opposite direction. They make decisions that are overly conservative, because they lose their license if the bridge collapses but by design no one can overrule them if they unnecessarily make the bridge cost four times as much.
This is not a bug. Having fewer bridges that don't collapse is better than having one fall over every day which is what's happening with data leaks now.
We now have < 10 megabanks in the US, any of which can bring down the entire US economy.
Instead , we could have 1000s of smaller banks. Tons of smaller banks is the natural state of things, like restaurants. This was true before the banking cartel, TARP, ZIRP, most recently, PPP (genius backdoor to bail out wall st.). In such system, any 1 collapsing bank wont bring the entire system down.
Having fewer bridges means that inevitable when they collapse, there will be far more victims and the event will be catastrophic.
Tech is one of the few bright spots in our moribund economy. Don't introduce a cartel that will blow up eventually.
It isn't safer to make building new bridges prohibitively expensive, because the result is that new bridges don't get built and then existing bridges are overused and extended beyond their design lifetime. And they're carrying several times more traffic when they ultimately fail.
It's the same for all the rest of it. You're not helping people to nominally make something better unless the better thing is actually available to them.
No, because making bridges prohibitively expensive means you are mono-culturing engineering.
You are only succeeding at keeping 1 engineering firm alive, who can afford to bid and build mega-expensive projects.
Eventually, the megafirm will adopt poor practices. And now, those practices will literally spread out across every single bridge built in the world. You now have a mono-culture of engineering that includes cancer as part of its DNA. Congratulations - you have granted a monopoly to a firm that sells ticking time bombs to your own citizens
This is, in essence, NASA, banking, Fannie/Freddie.
Errors are a part of nature. They must happen. We are humans and fallible. The question, when errors do happen, how big and hurtful will they be? Small or big ?
You can't buy your way out of human error and hubris. This is the fatal conceit.
This is the excuse used to justify the regulatory capture. There is a mile of difference between simply having fire exits vs. minimum parking requirements, de jure or de facto minimum unit sizes and density constraints. You need something that can distinguish these things, not something that provides the trash choice between none of them or all of them together.
Using regulatory capture as an excuse why we can't stop babies from eating lead is the most brain dead take from the American left since they replaced class with race.
This is not a bug. Having fewer bridges that don't collapse is better than having one fall over every day which is what's happening with data leaks now.