I've lost the link to the blogger who first posted this, but it needs repeating.
There's a thin veneer of hyper-competent professionals who keep the lights on and the water drinkable. Replace them with the incompetent and the water turns brown and the lights go out.
Trouble comes when people who are not arrogate the mantle for themselves and insist that we kow-tow to them.
My dad used to say “everybody wants to be an expert, but nobody wants to put the time into it”.
I see what is going on in the world today characterized as less a death of expertise, than a death of competency. (I regard “competency” as being significantly broader than “expertise”)
I am seeing things fail that I have never seen in my life before, at many levels. And it is a failure of competency. Ranging from having the trash picked up at your house, to running the water filtration plants, to coding software.
It concerns me. But it is clearly an offshoot of valuing people’s feelings and sensitivies more than their competence at things.
Something I heard last night that boiled it down to brass tacks for me:
Say “yes” to God and “no” to everything else.
Opinion monitors at FR are stingy with hall passes. Things are getting “confining” from a free speech perspective. As in, less free.
I just read an article about what Karl Rove thinks...What a coincidence!
I believe it was Mark Twain who defined an expert as, “some guy from out of town, with a briefcase.”
I can’t help thinking this applies to EVs.
Keep hearing that the ICE is dead and EVs are the future. We’re going to ban fossil fuel vehicles by the end of this decade.
Yet I don’t see new power plants being built. I don’t see new transmission lines being installed or upgraded. I don’t see transformer factories coming online. Vast swaths of the country have no public charging infrastructure.
2030 is 7 years away.
Add to that banning NG stoves, forcing people to cook with electric - that alone would seem to require a capacity increase that pales in comparison to that which EVs will need.
I don’t know if they’re unserious, woefully incompetent, or just hellbent on crashing our society. I think it may be a combination.
Yet go just about anywhere on social media and there are legions of minions parroting this “wisdom”.
Been saying this for years. Should put it on a bumper sticker, or a billboard.
Legendary Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman defined “science” as “the belief in the ignorance of experts.” IOW if it doesn’t sound right somehow, the scientific method gives you a way to go and check it out for yourself.