When ever we hear someone call attention to a "double standard" we all know that is just a courteous way to call someone a lier. Check out this one. Obama does not want to resume drilling in the Gulf until "we" can be sure that a spill will never happen again. Now exactly what is the meaning of "never"? It means that the chances of another oil spill has be "zero". That would be nice, and it is similar to on of my recent Blogs about "Is is worth it?" Why don't the news people stress "is it worth it?" more in dealing with Obama? Are the talking heads in the media all mental midgets? They must be or they would try to expose the "double standards" being used by the Obama administration.
When talking about the oil spill, why is it that we demand a "zero" tolerance? Check out Econ 101. Some egg head professor over a 100 years ago came up with a theory that government spending created jobs. The fact that the theory has never been double blind tested yet it is accepted as 100% correct while the standard on oil spills are held to a totally different standard. How much economic loss has resulted from the fact that all deep water Gulf oil wells have been shut down? Isn't it strand that no one every sets the decision up between the cost of some thing and its value. I think that I mentioned this before, but we have cars and highways that are not 100% safe yet we accept this. Why don't we take the food from our kids mouths and spend that money on highway bridges? I only know of one two bridges that failed and killed anyone. One was in Minneapolis and the other one in California on I-5. The one in Minneapolis failed because piles of sand had been loaded on just one side of the bridge while it was being worked on. The reason that it failed was because the off center load put too much weight on just one side. If that sand had not been placed on the bridge, that bridge would still be there today and would work just fine for many more years. During those years and the annual inspections, the defective welds would have been found and easily corrected. You did not know that did you? You thought that the cause was a bad bridge that could only be cured by building a new bridge. You were wrong and so was the media. What I can't figure out is why no one with an ounce of technical knowledge never came forward. The reason is that the bridge was under the control of the government and no one in the government has no incentive to come forward with the truth. It happens all the time.
Got a little off the track, but the problem is still the same. People just don't seem to understand simple probability. If they did, they would understand that to drive the chances of failure of anything to "zero" is prohibitively expensive. We seem to be follow this kinds of bankrupting logic in almost every area where government is involved. You can die from injuries from playing football, yet you and I still play football and allow our kids to play football. Are we stupid? Why don't we require that high school football be made 100% safe. It is the standard that is being used for drilling in the Gulf. I hope you are seeing the stupidity of our government. You know the old saying that, "you get the kind of government that you deserve". The reason that we have such a stupid government is that we are mostly stupid voters. I think the cure has to be figuring out how to make us voters smarter. Remember my Blog on drawing to an inside straight? I don't think that 90% of our voters could figure out that one even though they have heard it a thousand times. Try it on you school teacher friends sometime so that you can confirm what I am saying. The average school teacher is dumber in math than most kids around the world and they are the ones we have assigned to help our own kids. Maybe, we are the dumb ones.
