acotrel said:
and most people only buy on price
<big snip>
They are not an answer to anything.
It has oft been quoted that the BIG problems with combining democracy and capitalism is that politicians never look beyond the next election, and capitalism never looks beyond the lowest price or best return.
So LONG TERM and BEST solutions get shoved down the drainpipe.
Its going to take a supervisionary of a politician (or a revolution ?) to ever change that culture,
and looking backwards to past glories is certainly not going to advance mankind much ??
There is an exception to this however, as bleak as this picture might be.
Somewhere in NASA's history, someone quipped that
"its not very comforting to know that everything in this thing (space capsule)
has been done by the lowest bidder".
Then there was the flash fire that killed 3 on a test/simulation, and NASA completely overhauled its safety mantra, with duplicate systems and quality taken to the max.
A different bunch re-learned these lessons the hard way with the shuttle program, but thats the never ending cycle of life....
I'd also comment that if you look into the history of railways (and practically every other form of transportation and technology) a century or 2 back, the English were struggling with the metallurgy of their rail tracks and rail wheels, and bridge metal quality too - look at all the rail failures and wheel failures and bridge collapses that taught the English about the required metallurgy. Japan had a reputation for dodgy quality at the beginning of their industrial revolution, and look at them now, Taiwan too. So it will be with the chinese and indians etc etc in a few more years also (?).
Empires have risen and fallen with regular monotony over the millenia and centuries and even decades of recent ages, so its going to be fascinating to see if Mr Trump can inspire a real revival, or just be another politician with the gift of the gab....