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Comment by RK | Hacker News Reader

I'm not that familiar with military aircraft development timelines, but this stuck out as my favorite part:

A hypersonic plane does not have to be an expensive, distant possibility. In fact, an SR-72 could be operational by 2030.

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By comparison, the SR-71 was first proposed around 1960 and operational by 1966. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR-71_Blackbird

Progress!

This is one of the most perplexing things about our modern world - the seemingly exponential increase in the length of time it takes to get anything done, especially large, technically complex projects. This is true for the Saturn V, for the World Trade Center, dams, highways, high speed rail, etc. It makes me wonder where these "productivity improvements" really are, especially the ones that computers presumably give us. Perhaps AutoCAD and MS Word and email make us feel more productive, but are actually slowing us down. Or perhaps all of it just increases the velocity of money through the economy, which particularly helps those whose income is proportional to transaction rate (banks, brokers, and governments).

That's a good question, I think, thought I'm not sure, the answer is people are now far more expensive, adding more people means less money is made. Let's use your dams example. They built a bunch of big dams in the 50s and 60s and each one had more than 10,000 people working on it. They were mostly publicly financed, so more or less not built to make money. They didn't worry about adding a few more (or a few hundred more) people to the job because they were cheap. Now, the people that do this work are really expensive, and adding a few more means the people in charge make less money. Another big thing is probably rules and regulations and laws, far fewer back then. Good? Bad? I dunno.

I don't think it's the cost of people. Technology has done a pretty good job of reducing the cost of simple labor. But technology hasn't done a great job of managing complexity. See, for example, the above jab at the "millions of lines of software code" managing the SR-72. That stands in stark contrast to the "keep it simple stupid" motto attributed to Kelly Johnson, the SR-71's designer.

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