Nevermind the MCAS, the doors flying off of airplanes shows that it's not just software, and that no quality disaster is really big enough by itself to create some renaissance of interest in engineering excellence. Clearly Google was absolutely never going to fix declining search quality until finally ChatGPT came along and pushed them towards doing it and despite that Anthropic may very well still win the AI race.
It's easy to look at this type of thing and moan that the MBAs finally won, or start talking about antitrust enforcement and too-big-to-fail. There's some truth to that but it fundamentally seems like a bigger shift where the social contract is broken almost everywhere and cooperation itself is just on the decline. Things are increasingly adversarial between corporations and labor, corporations and consumers, governments and citizens, governments and corporations, and the list goes on.
There's so much we can learn from history, but that takes time and we're a very apathetic and comfortable civilization now.
I think it's important and worthwhile, though. It will give you an edge over everyone else if you "know" what is going to happen- history repeats itself, in part because so few bother to learn it and learn from it.
It was only this month that I finally learned that the American Civil War was about BOTH states' rights and slavery. To some reading this (this is a particularly-learned forum after all), you may think "duh - it was about states' rights to own slaves"- but that wasn't how it was taught to me in my public, Florida high school. We weren't taught that the North was just as racist as the South, and that the ONLY reason they didn't have slaves in the North was that their economy was better-off without it. We weren't taught that Lincoln's main problem with the South seceding was simply that it was illegal- literally not allowed by the Constitution. It only became a fight over "slavery" when the Union Army was getting its ass kicked and Lincoln was forced to "free all slaves" so that some would join the Union Army to fight (this was also to gain support on the global stage and make it less likely for other countries to trade with and otherwise support the Confederacy).
The Confederacy decided to secede because they believed that slavery was going to become illegal at the federal level "at some point"- there was not a formal plan to do so at the federal level at the time.
This segue came about because I was seeing memes on Facebook about the Union beating the Confederates "a second time" if the current political trend continues. These people think they're on the right side of history by identifying with the Union but that's not really the case. I mean heck the Civil Rights Movement wasn't for another 100 years following Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.
All that to say- history implies there's another revolution on the horizon where, once again, we have to put the 1% in their place.
It's easy to look at this type of thing and moan that the MBAs finally won, or start talking about antitrust enforcement and too-big-to-fail. There's some truth to that but it fundamentally seems like a bigger shift where the social contract is broken almost everywhere and cooperation itself is just on the decline. Things are increasingly adversarial between corporations and labor, corporations and consumers, governments and citizens, governments and corporations, and the list goes on.