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

These past few days I've been experimenting with something new that I want to use by myself.

Interestingly, this thread below has been written by that.

Let me show you how it looks like. 👇🏻


When you see localhost up there, you should know that it's truly an experiment! 😀


It's a dead-simple thread writer that will post a series of tweets a.k.a tweetstorm. ⚡️

I've been personally wanting it myself since few months ago, but neglected it intentionally to make sure it's something that I genuinely need.

So why is that important for me? 🙂

I've been a believer of a story. I tell stories all the time, whether it's in the real world or online like this. Our society has moved by that.

If you're interested by stories that move us, read Sapiens!

One of the stories that I've told was from the launch of Poster.

It's been launched multiple times this year, and Twitter has been my go-to place to tell the world about that.

Here comes my frustration.. 😤

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x