So, what's the point here, exactly? "Only licensed engineers as codified by (local!) law are allowed to do projects?" Nah, can't be it, their track record still has too many failures, sometimes even spectacularly explosive and/or implosive ones.

"Any public project should only follow Best Practices"? Sure... "And only make The People feel good"... Incoherent!

Ehhm, so, yeah, maybe things are just complicated, and we should focus more on the amount of effort we're prepared to put in, the competency (c.q. pay grade) of the staff we're willing to assign, and exactly how long we're willing to wait prior to conceding defeat?

Calvin and Hobbes was a major part of my childhood - I loved it. For something casually consumed on the daily at the breakfast table, it was so earnestly, so obviously, smarter than the median cultural offering. Smarter also then the local nightly news broadcasts. Smarter also than the median educational intervention I experienced through elementary and middle school. It had finished by the time I was in high school.

I still love it, but my feelings now are mixed as well.

Calvin wasn't exactly a pro-social role model for me. He was the hero of the smartest media I was acquainted with - the sharpest mouthpiece for what was going on around me and how to be alive. It was vitally important for me to live up to his disdain for schooling, his aloofness, his contrarianism. Nothing horrified eight or ten or fifteen or twenty-two year old me so much as conforming (gross) to a Susie Perkins mode of existence - smart, but seemingly oblivious or indifferent to life's contradictions and hypocrisies.

Some thirty years later I understand that a person can move pragmatically, without self-harm or self-righteousness, through life's contradictions and hypocrisies without being oblivious or indifferent. Who knew?

Factors such as ethnicity or religion are never the reason for these conflicts. Those are simply the excuse. It’s what’s used to fuel the fire.

The heart of this conflict is Sudan’s gold that’s laundered via Dubai then Switzerland.

The culpability of Western powers including the US cannot be ignored either. The RSF is supplied with diverted arms shipments from the West to the UAE.

Just like in Gaza the US could stop this at any time with a phone call.

I think you are mistaking your point of view, which is probably that of an individual business owner, for the point of view of someone looking at the actuarial statistics or whatever and seeing tens of thousands of preventable ladder injuries a year. Just because an event is rare from your point of view doesn't mean that the event costs nothing or that it should be ignored.

I can't believe how common this attitude of "if its too small for me to notice it doesn't matter" is.