Double Blind

The recent headlines that have made the news in Canada are dealing with the release of the Auditor General of Canada’s report for 2003. It is too long to summarize here, but the major component of this report (Chapter 4) involves an unraveling of an existing plot whereby government bureaucrats award large contracts to companies for contributions to the Liberal party of Canada as a reward. Normally there are processes to avoid such events from occurring, but these were circumvented by masking the awards through intra-governmental actions.

As a result, everybody is calling for the head of Paul Martin, the prime minister. Oddly enough, this could not solve the issue at all, since this is a problem with the bureaucracy – changing the prime minister would do very little. What needs to be done is that charges need to be laid against the following groups:

• Key members of the bureaucracy that made this possible;
• Officers and directors of the companies that took the contracts;
• Senior officials of the Liberal party of Canada that made this happen.

Basically, people need to be thrown in jail and there needs to be a clear message sent that such activity is not to be tolerated with the use of public funds.

This of course has no chance of occurring. If people in this country were not so docile, we would probably be hanging politicians by the neck in our stadiums. British Columbia traditionally has hanged their politicians in the elections – no premier here has survived to see a second term elected in office since Bill Bennett got re-elected in the early 80′s. The rest of them resigned in scandalous conditions.

Canada has always been a country where supporters of the Liberal party (all based in Ontario and Quebec) will receive the kickbacks and economic proceeds of Canadians around the country. This is a systemic problem that has its problems in the roots of confederation. The system is broken. The country is broken – most of the power is centered around Ontario and Quebec and thus the western provinces are nothing but tax dollars to Ottawa that get siphoned to supporters of the Liberal party in schemes exactly like what the Auditor General wrote about. Am I surprised? No.

Because our federal political system is so biased towards appeasing the inhabitants of Ontario and Quebec and the Liberal party of Canada, and because there is no solution that will be implemented in the country, I am a British Columbian first and a Canadian second.

Article: Nasa says ‘no’ to Hubble reprieve – NASA claims that it is “too risky” to perform missions to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Despite the fact that the telescope has been the single greatest positive mission in terms of public relations for NASA, they have deemed that the risk of maintaining the telescope outweighs its potential benefit. I won’t claim to know the internal politics behind such a decision as there was most certainly budget allocation expenses involved, but the official stance of NASA is of course garbage. If everybody knows that there was a 1-in-80 chance of failure involving death for a shuttle mission, why would such a mission today be unacceptable (too risky) compared to missions performed years ago?

The answer is risk – there is too much public pressure for them to be flawless and thus taking a 1-in-80 chance is no longer acceptable to them. Now shuttle missions must have a ‘backup’ just in case if there was a rescue mission to be performed in orbit. This has the effect of raising mission costs in orbit as well, as if the shuttle wasn’t expensive enough already at a payload cost of $10,000 per pound.

A culture that was more accepting of risk-taking would have thought nothing of taking a 1-in-80 shot of servicing Hubble, as long as the people on board volunteered knew of this. There would be a lineup of competent scientists and pilots that would love to take their shot. But yet, public pressure somehow forces a veto on this risk-taking activity since after all, they do know how to manage our lives more than the individuals themselves do. Such mentality will stagnate society, which I suspect is their ultimate objective.

I frequently like to think about changes in society and how we have advanced and recessed over the past 50 years. Even though I have only lived half of it, you can easily see prevailing trends in people’s attitudes towards certain things. After World War 2, you had two generation of people: the adults that had to suffer during the Great Depression era (1929-1934) and the generation that were subsequently born after World War 2, the baby boomers. The people born in the depression era were conservative and restrained – they lived through a very difficult era and thus could not afford to take risks because of necessity – survival was their objective. This did not carry over to the next generation, where we had the baby boomers take over America with their fresh perception of the three symbols of youth, of course being sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. All of this was miraculously achieved in conjunction with taking other sorts of risks necessary to perform greatest feats of western civilization has yet seen. The list of things performed between 1954 to 2004 are too numerous to mention, but the crowning achievement, albeit having no real value other than saying “we did it”, was in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

If you consider that NASA did not even exist in 1957 and there was no operational knowledge of what it took to get people up in space, let alone the moon, it was a miracle they ever managed to land on the moon in just 12 years. Marshall Brain has a good summary of the US space program. It was risky. It also so happened to be politically motivated, but beating the Soviets was more of a priority than the risk of people getting injured. Indeed, when it is considered that the only direct causalities of the Apollo program was in a module stationed on the ground, it was very successful project. I can just imagine what would happen today if we embarked on such a crusade – all the naysayers would come out and denounce the project as being too risky and a waste of money since that project funding could have went to saving lives in healthcare. Indeed, that’s what happened when the space shuttle Columbia blew up – there was this cry to scrap the shuttle program because it endangered the people that fly on it.

My general impression is that society is shifting towards a risk-adverse stance. My demographic reason is that the baby boomers, now approaching their retirement ages, are trying to educate their children and grand-children that they shouldn’t be doing the sex, drugs and rock-n-roll like they did because it’s “bad” for them. The conclusion is that our children must be insulated from all pressures in society, which include bullies and violence, because of course such things don’t exist in the real world. Because the baby boomers took stupid risks with their lives – although they got away with it and achieved great achievements – they still thought they could have performed their achievements without the risk. Hence, they conclude that risk is something that must be avoided at all costs, and teach the younger generation to become risk-adverse by choice, not by necessity.

You see the results of these actions in many places – the environmental lobby has forced regulations that have made nuclear power plants (the cleanest form of energy available) economically unfeasible because such laws demand risks of events happening on average in the billion year scale. Parents suddenly are deciding not to vaccinate their children because of the small (but non-zero) risk that the vaccination could do serious harm to their children. Schools are removing activities from classrooms because they are deemed to be risky activities – for example, dodge ball is no longer permitted because of the risk that somebody might get hit on the head and get a concussion.

The high degree of litigation in our culture, especially concerning incidents involving the statistically unlikely injury of children, has forced institutions to “idiot-proof” everything. Any corporation that does not have a 100% safety record on any issue can be sued and dragged in an endless legal morass that will cost millions. As a result, our society has transformed into a stagnant hell because we no longer have the ability to take the risks needed in order to advance. Originally, you could escape into business and perform your risk taking in the arena, but as society expects corporations to behave as socially responsible citizens, they are pulled into the molasses of the risk-adverse.

I suspect there is a growing number of people have this increasingly idealistic side of them that makes them believe that they can shelter themselves from all the risk and experience all of the benefits of taking the risk. This belief also includes the snapping of fingers and the expectation that when something is promised, it is executed with perfection and with a 100% safety record with no error margin at all despite any evidence to the contrary. Anything else would of course be a failure and if the culprits can be sued, send in the lawyers.

The last man to land on the moon, Eugene Cernan had this to say about risks:

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“You know, it’s kind of sad that in addition to all the other problems we’d have in going back to the Moon – like it’s going to take twice as long as it did the first time (15 to 20 years versus 8) – I don’t know that we have the mentality today to build upon what we did on Apollo. And it’s sort of sad. Because if we went back again next week or next year or in another decade – which we probably won’t, unfortunately, because it’s going to be another generation – I don’t know if we would have the mentality (I don’t want to say “guts”) to take the kind of risks we did when we did it the first time. Landing on the Moon was a risk. And I believe our inability to take risk today wouldn’t allow us to do what we did when we did it. And that’s a sad commentary; and I really feel strongly about that.

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Sadly, I find a lot of evidence when I look around myself that we have transformed from a society of risk-takers into a society of risk-adverse people. The result will not be immediate; it will be over a prolonged period of time until collectively we turn into a sociological version of a geriatric ward, just like what is happening in Western Europe today.

It takes great leadership to turn a society around; unfortunately, I do not see strong leadership in our country to perform such a monumental feat. Individually, however, I would suggest avoiding the alternative life that Capt. Picard would have had to endure had he not taken the risks that he did early in his lifetime. Try not to make the same mistake and keep taking those risks.