Reply #85: To compare emergency engineering from another era

[90-percent]

I always like to think of what people can do collectively when mounting a "wartime effort". WW2 has many examples of resourceful people coming up with magnificent machines and solutions quickly.

The Manhattan Project for one. The resources that sucked up were staggering. They built a whole city in Tennessee in Oak Ridge just to produce nuclear material for the Manhattan Project. They were designing Oak Ridge as it was being built and they had to have the foresight to get it right the first time.

The example that resonates with me the most is the story of the development of the P-51 Mustang, which went from concept to flying prototype in 90 days!

Before PC's, before CNC, before high tech. You would have a hard time achieving anything like that even today, even with all the rapid prototype and lasers and CADCAM and production capabilities currently commonplace in manufacturing these days.

In contrast, there just doesn't seem to be much sense of urgency for cleaning up this spill. It seems just plain half assed. We are in the middle of a scandal we will be studying for years - to determine how the response could have been so poor. Kinda like the half assed post mortem for 9-11. We will be reading for years how the government or BP or others closely connected to this disaster were simply not up to the task. Probably because those that control the money did not see fit to use that much to come up with a solution. The responsible companies/contractors and our government seem to be the only people we should reasonably expect to bankroll such an effort. It would be nice if Donald Trump or Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or T. Boone decided to underwrite it, but that's highly unlikely.

I think it's a question of will. There just aren't enough people in responsible positions to rally a oil spill task force to fight this problem.

We Americans can achieve real greatness when our heart is in it. I think this lack of will to attack this thing with the collective effort it deserves simply is not to be found.

To put it another way, I would bet that if Richard Branson or Roger Penske were faced with fixing this problem, they could do it quickly and effectively with the power of the corporations they have at their disposal.

In WW2 the car companies ceased auto production and built planes and tanks and other war material. All our currently idle manufacturing and engineering talent and facilities could solve this spill, if they were so marshaled. Just unleash all the corporate drones on making something excellent with a important purpose for a change, instead of being called to gyp customers by making products built to fail instead of last as long as they should. Get the "can do spirit" that helped us win WW2 instead of this corporate dithering as they figure out a way to make the most money from this disaster, which may or may not have anything to do with actually fixing it. I would not be surprised if some corporate sociopath has already determined that exacerbating this disaster will actually make them more profits! Yes! Yes! The time when this problem is solved will coincide with the time needed to maximize profits and extract as much money from probably the American taxpayer as possible.

Boy, I sure am cynical when it comes to corporate behavior, aren't I?

-90% Jimmy