Saturday, May 15, 2010

Spectacles, Ridiculous

President Obama referred to the "ridiculous spectacle" of oil company execs playing "who's got the blame?" in hearings before Congress; he complained "...The system failed."

"System?" "Spectacle?" I gotcher silly pantomine, bub: a bunch of lawyers -- and not very good ones, or they'd be busy chasing ambulances, gettin' crooks out of jail and contesting wills -- haulin' a bunch of MBAs and other lawyers on the carpet to look into an engineering problem, both sides pretending they actually understand the physical problem and the possible fixes. Yeah. Good luck with that, boys. And I'd like to know what "system" of law and regulation the President thinks will keep things from occasionally just breaking, or from being broken when some ijit's asleep at the switch.

The only good news is, since the corner-office lads are busy hobnobbing with Congress, they're not so much hobbling the real efforts of actual, aha!, engineers and techs to do something useful. Bad news, Congress will surely attempt to "fix" things: "Ooo! Let's regulate it even harder!"

Hey, Senator, shouldn't you be makin' laws about the minimum permissible size of toilet bowls, the maximum number of toothpicks a diner gets for free, or somethin' equally pressing?

3 comments:

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

These people can't hang from Capitol Hill lampposts soon enough.

CGHill said...

Well, they did decide that banks were making too much money on debit-card transactions, which presumably qualifies as "equally pressing."

(Source.)

Dr.D said...

I am much afraid they will try to actually spec a fix. Then we will really be in trouble!