...
I need to throw it in your face.
When you let corruption reign, this is the kind of thing you can rely on. I'm not even talking about mobsters and swindlers and creeps on the take. I'm talking about your basic, all-American petty officials. They draw their salaries. They go around with an aura of officialdom. They spend all day making sure all the boxes are ticked and reports filed. That's it. That's ALL they do. You NEVER expect their budgets to go toward fulfilling their function. That's salary and perks.
Fulfilling their function is beyond their ken, not their lookout. It's been this way for a long time, for most of my lifetime, and, guess what? All those years of screaming about how are we going to deal when the infrastructure breaks down around every single adult responsibility we have are just now starting to ring loud enough in the memories of the people who spent all those years with their fingers in their ears.
It's finally becoming vivid enough that even morons can't miss it.
Except morons can't extend that out in their minds to the thousands of other ways this kind of "performance" kills everybody. No, we'll get those one-by-one until the dominoes pick up momentum.
All those scientists with their dishes of stem cells and nano-particles will find themselves with contaminated materials and ceiling plaster dropping into their highly-sophisticated machinery. The support personnel will be too sick from their toilets spewing backwash from the sanitation districts to come in and clean or answer phones or keep the books. They'll go out to lunch to discuss this untenable state of affairs and be poisoned by it.
By the time they finish puking and get rehydrated enough to return to work, they won't be able to get back into their labs because no one with the keys to the buildings is well enough to remember about keys, and half of them are homeless now anyway. So our poor fancy scientists hire some thugs to break in for them, spend the day covering their sacred gizmos with plastic so they can advance science and medicine into our shining future.
The next day, they find the thugs came back and stole their shit. 911 is dialed several times until there finally is a response. The police come and mill around in their uniforms. One of them even takes notes about descriptions of the perps. The police leave.
The scientists need to alert the brass to this disaster, get some determination on how to go forward. They can't raise them. Turns out the brass took the entire balance of the grant money for these brilliant advancements full of the promise of fantastic profits and the uplift of mankind and flew off to an island paradise staffed by competent brown people.
always and any time....
