Saturday, August 03, 2013
American Jackass
Take a close look at "Big Bertha"—the world's largest tunnel boring machine—in the photo below. At the top you'll see that some American jackass has hung an American flag. This flag-waving expression of nationalism is ridiculous and out of place. You see, Big Bertha is being used to dig a tunnel in Seattle but the machine was built in Japan by Hitachi Zosen and the main contractor for the project is Seattle Tunnel Partners, whose majority stakeholder is Dragados USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Spanish conglomerate Actividades de Construcción y Servicios, S.A. The tunnel project is also a not-fully-funded $4.25 billion (if, miraculously, there are no costs overruns) publicly financed, pro-car Big Labor/Big Construction boondoggle. On second thought, maybe Old Glory does belong up there.
Labels: capitalism, government, labor, patriotism, Seattle, technology