This is very true and applies for everything in life.

Two counter-examples:

- Arnold bought a fleet of mobile hospitals that would have been perfect for covid response, but the next governor didn’t want to pay 1% the fleet cost per year to maintain it, so he scrapped it.

- Under Obama, SARS v1 was stopped by US health workers that Trump fired because it was a “bad deal”. In the absence of that team, we got SARS v2, which was renamed to COVID 19.

There’s also the related category of “never blamed for fixing problems poorly, creating even bigger problems”.

Thanks to 9/11, plane cockpits can now be locked from the inside. Now, we have examples of commercial passenger airline pilots locking the doors and committing mass-murder-suicide by plane crash.

For some reason, these stories don’t make the news.

Chernobyl instantly comes to mind. The giant problem with that particular RBMK design was known to a few people, but nobody fixed it, and if they had... we wouldn't even know, since it would be lost to history.

The best hackers are the ones who never get caught.

Its called doing your job.

Boring is Better

We know that the squeaky wheel is the one that gets oiled, and we don't want the wheels to come off, so we need the wheel to squeak loud enough to be heard ;)

But the same person can get paid for it. So there is an incentive to create, or at least pretend problems.

The jokes around Y2K being a nothing burger always annoy me. Nothing happened because a lot of talented people worked their asses off fixing it.

sounds like my day to day job experience.