Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Engineering miracle, 1942 – “In March 1942, after striking a deal to build through Canadian territory, the U.S. Army broke ground. Just eight months later, the project (Alcan Highway) was complete.”
Engineering miracle, 2014 – “Bridge company president Dan Stamper said Thursday it was a “proud” moment for management and owners of the Ambassador Bridge after nearly eight years of working toward getting EA (environmental) approval in Canada for a new span.”
Big tip ‘o the hat to Jamie Mac. for this one.
This isn’t just government bureaucracy on display.
Humanity has morphed into a new sort of creature that takes pride in how obstructive and destructive they can be. The antithesis of everything that is Good.
glad to see how technology has sped things up in the “new” age
And what will they say about the Keystone Pipeline?
…and some people say public corps are ‘efficient’. Tis to laugh…whatever the excuse why they aren’t, they aren’t.
Public corps aided and abetted all these rules and regulations to drive out the smaller, more efficient, private companies
Having spent 5 years on the Hiway in the 50s there didnt seem to be much of a determent to the hiway or the environment. As a matter of fact it was one Hell of a benifit to all the areas it went through. All 1202 Miles of hiway from Dawson Creek BC to Scotty Creek Alaska, and on to Fairbanks as well
I can see the next big headline. “2025, first manned mission to Mars posponed pending an EPA study to determine possible human damage to Martian climate systems.
Every society generates a class of high priests and in our generation, these are the civil servants of the do gooder bureaucracies.
They become omnipotent, invoking rules, regulations and procedures that ensure they can maintain their self importance and most importantly, their liplock on the public teat.
They are mostly invincible, their one weakness is they do not control their own funding like politicians. But as long as they are useful to our political class, they will be allowed to continue sucking the life force out of society.
Exactly Fred.
What many don’t understand is that most of these people are apolitical. Perhaps leaning to the left as the left tends to spend more. These people have full time jobs with the main imperative of maintaining or better yet expanding their foot print.
IMHO the classic example in Canada was the development of oil in Alberta. Eastern Canadians did not finance this industry but when it gained traction in the ’70’s the so called elite in eastern Canada tried to get their cut. Led by PE Turdeau that effort has never stopped in 40 years. Any westerner who thinks his son is any different is either naïve or has been bought off.
Knowing a federal worker in Ottawa I was surprised in the late ’90’s to find huge support for the Reform candidate in Kanata/Ottawa. No, there was no philosophical Reform conversion. What was happening in Ottawa at the time was the movement of bi-lingual speakers into management in the federal civil service. Since most Anglos were not bi-lingual these positions were going to Quebecers. Once in management positions these Quebecers were then hiring more Quebecers and whole departments were affected. The Anglos were moving to Reform as a potential savior of their jobs and influence!
Now that taxpayers pay for Anglos to learn French that threat is been mitigated. As a result the civil service is sliding back (if it ever really moved) to supporting young Turdeau who promises all things to all people. Bottom line is they see more money and influence under Turdeau than they do under Harper.
Rob your post would be funny were it not for the very real chance that your prediction could come true!!
No one has stepped on the moon since 13 December 1972, over 41 years ago.
And I doubt there’ll ever be another Hoover Dam project.
Diminished expectations seems to be the leitmotiv of our age.
Very sad.
One of the things holding up a manned mission to Mars is worrying about bacterial contamination from Earth.
http://news.yahoo.com/concerns-bacterial-contamination-could-restrict-humans-mars-194100542.html
400 days is what it took to build the Empire State Building – I’d like to meet people from these ancient civilizations that built things…
“I’d like to meet people from these ancient civilizations that built things…”
Like this?
http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/360/cache/sacsayhuaman-peru_36097_600x450.jpg
Note the size of the human next to the blocks which fit so well you cant push a blade between them
This statement is blindingly stupid. EA’s apply to government and government agencies or where projects cross or impact public lands. This works to the competitive DISadvantage of crown corporations and has added enormously to their costs of operations ever since CEAA was passed.
And unlike private corporations they cannot lobby or protest against such because as public entities they are not allowed to lobby their own shareholder the government.
I remember laughing when Obama and others talked about “shovel-ready jobs” to do with stimulus money. There are no such things anymore, and the left has been responsible for our paralysis. The only projects that could be done with stimulus money were ones that had already gone through the required years or even decades of environmental impact studies, land acquisition processes, and lefty lawsuits. A few road re-surfacing projects could be started relatively quickly because the roads were already built, but it is impossible to do anything complicated quickly these days.
A few years back, we had a huge spring storm that damaged the nearby Beartooth Highway. The road is critical for letting tourists enter the Park from Red Lodge, Montana. The emergency nature of the situation led the government to bypass the usual bureaucratic bs and let contractors figure out how to fix the problems. Despite the rugged nature of the area, the project was completed in an amazingly short time.
Western Civilization teeters on the brink of self-destruction, will that too, have to wait for EPA approval?
China, Brazil, India have no need for economic espionage with our useless bureaucracies destroying whatever competitive edge we might have enjoyed.
“As a matter of fact it was one Hell of a benifit to all the areas it went through. ”
not everyone would agree:
Outsiders brought in diseases such as measles and meningitis which became epidemics in the small communities along the route, resulting in deaths in Teslin and Burwash. There were other serious social impacts as well, such as reports of theft by construction workers of objects from First Nation graveyards. The workers in the camps and in town brought alcohol to communities along the construction route, impacting the social behaviour of aboriginal people.
http://www.alaskahighwayarchives.ca/en/chap3/3yukonfirstnations.php
Recently on CBC2, right after the top of the hour news, I heard an odd public service announcement from a spokeswoman from Northern Gateway. She was all excited about the government approval and spoke earnestly about getting down to work to satisfy all 209 conditions.
Hi LAS!!!
What Larry and Jamie said.
The High Priests of government bureaucracy will destroy our civilization.
This works to the competitive DISadvantage of crown corporations and has added enormously to their costs of operations ever since CEAA was passed.
This statement is blindingly stupid. …because I didn’t say anything about crown corporations. Although, I doubt a crown corporation cares what anything costs since they just raid the taxpayer for more.
What I did say is that publicly traded corps aided and abetted all these rules and regulations to make doing business so expensive the smaller, more efficient, companies were driven out.
Stradivarious, you are spot on. It is known as Fascism. It destroys entrepreneurism and creativity, which in turn kills wealth creation.
part of the problem with CEAA was the “Lawlist triggers” basically attaching itself to other Acts and regulations to trigger the review. the selection of the triggers was very poorly done. Going to thresholds was a much better way of doing things, where those thesholds are set is up to debate.
As a regulatory, we often had to do CEAA screening reviews on projects that we didn’t want to, because of those “lawlist triggers”. Nor did it help that government agencies would give non-profit groups money to build things in january and then we had the unpleasant duty of telling them that the project triggered the CEAA review, which meant they could not start prior to April, which meant the money “vanished” if the project was not done by March 31st. I even went to bat to the funding agencies for some of the smaller groups asking that the money be set aside because we would approve as soon as the CEAA was done, but no the agencies would be punished by Treasury Board for doing the right thing, because that was Treasury board policies.
A unintended byproduct in the reduction of CEAA reviews 500>12 in BC, was that a lot of First Nation labour and other Consultants living in smaller communities lost a significant amount of work.
“Nor did it help that government agencies would give non-profit groups money to build things in january and then we had the unpleasant duty of telling them that the project triggered the CEAA review, which meant they could not start prior to April, which meant the money “vanished” if the project was not done by March 31st.”
Heh. Some unintended consequences are happy ones…
Yes, good to see the parasites caught up in their own net.