Engineering for Dummies anyone?

 Interesting article in the Gazette this morning related to Montreal's crumbling infrastructure. Most Montrealers are nervous about driving on  a bridge and even more so in underpasses and tunnels, especially after pieces of concrete have fallen off.  The thing is that those in the government seem to think that we're all idiots and so they don't make available the report on Montreal's infrastructure. Right now they are saying they are simplifying the report to make it more accessible to people, that people aren't all engineers. 

While it is true that people are not all engineers, I happen to know that Quebec does have a high number of engineers. According to another Gazette article there's 60,540 engineers in Quebec alone and 390,000 Canada wide.  I personally think there's enough of the population with engineering backgrounds to be able to understand such "complicated" reports.  I personally think they aren't releasing the reports to the public because we will realize that many more of our roads, bridges, underpasses and tunnels are disasters waiting to happen. That our municipal and provincial governments have been neglecting infrastructures for years and they want to hide their incompetence.

Completely unrelated to Montreal's infrastructure, I blog a lot about Syria and I'm sure some of my friends wonder what is so different about Syria. I've even read comments on various of the stories coming out of Syria and people say "Wait till the next elections and choose someone else". Kind of hard to chose someone else when Syria has Russian style elections, where only 1 person presents himself on the ballot.  I found an interesting blog here that explains more the politics of Syria and what Bashar Al-Assad has done since coming to power in Syria in 2000, after his father's death. Funny that they could change the constitution in a heart beat to allow the then too young Bashar to become the leader of his country, but any change to the constitution demanded by the people would take months and years to accomplish.