Bridges are a perfect example of engineering.

The purpose of Engineering is Deskilling.

If you can build a bridge you can eliminate the skilled workers required to operate the ferries to get people across the river.

1/n

@JugglingJelly By eliminating the skilled ferries it means that the cost of crossing rivers is lowered, making it accessible to more people.

2/n
@JugglingJelly More accessibility is good for the economy because it means that more people can do business by crossing that bridge.

3/n
@JugglingJelly The single market was a economic engineering. It removed requirements by aligning and agreeing standards. It deskilled the customs industry by removing the requirement for expensive customs "ferrymen".

4/n
@JugglingJelly Brexit has had the effect that it has burned the economic bridge that we had with the single market meaning we're having to rapidly increase the skills of the customs agents in an unrealistic timeframe.

5/n
@JugglingJelly Imagine having to train a whole bunch of ferrymen how to navigate a boat (which they'd never sailed before) across a river ... you'd end up with an irregular, poorly managed service with sinkings and crashes at ports.

6/n
@JugglingJelly Sound familiar? That's essentially where we are with haulage now.

7/n
@JugglingJelly The thing about bridges is that they're expensive to build, they cost money to maintain and they _have_ to be maintained otherwise you end up with them collapsing with disastrous consequences.

(I'm sure I can torture this analogy even further?)

8/n
@JugglingJelly Successive UK governments have failed to maintain the bridge that the Single Market provided.

Some of them have actively sabotaged the bridge with dangerous rhetoric about how we don't need bridges across rivers and that the currents will be easy to navigate.

9/n
@JugglingJelly I don't see our government acknowledging (for at least a political generation) the negative impact that this has had on our society and committing to the cost that it'll take to rebuild that bridge once again.

10/10

More from Tech

Ok, I’ve told this story a few times, but maybe never here. Here we go. 🧵👇


I was about 6. I was in the car with my mother. We were driving a few hours from home to go to Orlando. My parents were letting me audition for a tv show. It would end up being my first job. I was very excited. But, in the meantime we drove and listened to Rush’s show.

There was some sort of trivia question they posed to the audience. I don’t remember what the riddle was, but I remember I knew the answer right away. It was phrased in this way that was somehow just simpler to see from a kid’s perspective. The answer was CAROUSEL. I was elated.

My mother was THRILLED. She insisted that we call Into the show using her “for emergencies only” giant cell phone. It was this phone:


I called in. The phone rang for a while, but someone answered. It was an impatient-sounding dude. The screener. I said I had the trivia answer. He wasn’t charmed, I could hear him rolling his eyes. He asked me what it was. I told him. “Please hold.”

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