A Country Run by Dopes

In my career in tech, I worked on a couple of corporate proposals that I thought were implausible and stupid ideas made up by money men or sales people. 

The first one was to broadcast video from a satellite some company managed to launch, but never use. It was just floating around in space collecting space dust and running out its lifespan as a viable piece of tech junk.

I was puzzled how a company could put together all the resources needed to build and launch a satellite on spec. Back then it was probably many billions of dollars to build and launch a satellite. The company's concept was to broadcast a few channels of videos to cars to keep little kids entertained. Already around 2010 (I think that's roughly when that happened) mobile networks capable of delivering video were rolling out very quickly. Plus you could just install some cheap DVD player in a car to keep kids entertained, so who would subscribe to a service to watch a few broadcast channels of cartoons? Anyway, the satellite lacked sufficient power to transmit such data to mobile terminals with compact antennas, so that project just died.

More recently, I worked on a project to move the control system of a factory to a data center. The entire time I was discussing the project, I thought "why?" Some dummies came up with this model and managed to sell it to a bunch of other dummies that will just do it, even if it makes no sense or isn't viable. To many corporate people "AI" is any computer program or any computerized function. They now think to run any computer program you need an "AI" data center, because it's all AI.

I come back, time and time again to the concept of "elite overproduction" as a way of understanding the current situation in the US. I think a useful associated concept is the "cargo cult". The mass of people running companies and other institutions really don't know what they're doing, so they ritualistically imitate what they think they should be doing.