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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The money spent on the Apollo program wasn’t all packed into a suitcase and taken to the moon, it was spent and reinjected into the economy. In particular, some of it went to the wages of some of the most highly-skilled, best-paying jobs that women and black people could get in the fifties and sixties, and that did a lot of good directly, before we even get onto indirect effects like inspiring generations of people to pursue a career in STEM subjects or developing technologies that would be used elsewhere.











  • The perfect, good, mediocre, and just barely tolerable are all enemies. Sometimes bad is better as it doesn’t erode the motivation to solve the problem and means you’re more likely to end up with a good solution later. Often, when people accuse others of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, the option was neither perfect nor good, just mediocre or barely tolerable. The exception is when one solution can go on to evolve into a better one, but it can still be better to wait until it does before deploying it.

    I’m not convinced this is exactly applicable to the story in the OP, though. The compromise would have eroded the motivation to vote for the original legislation in that election, but probably made it more likely that it could have happened in the next one, and made the consequences of putting it off that long slightly less bad.