Word: rubes
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...first extensive test two weeks ago, the system performed more like a Rube Goldberg nightmare. Carts crashed into one another, bending rails and disgorging clothes from suitcases. Others were knocked off the rails, jammed or mysteriously failed to appear when summoned. A Continental official, taking in the spectacle, pronounced it "sad." Glitches in the software seemed to be the culprit, but the larger challenge was the immensity of fully automating an entire airport's baggage system, something never attempted on such a scale. "There's no question that it works. We just need more testing time," insisted Gene Di Fonso...
...most celebrated operators were Samuel Insull and Ivar Krueger, a.k.a. the Swedish "Match King," both of whose faces appeared on the cover of this very magazine. Insull erected a Rube Goldberg-like structure of 65 companies that operated utilities in 32 states, and by 1932 it had completely collapsed in a $750 million loss for investors. Krueger's ventures came to a similar end, and the Match King snuffed himself...
...benefits and the employers deduct the insurance premiums from their taxable profits, an arrangement that is thought to cost the government $75 billion a year. But Clinton determined early that nothing labeled as a large tax increase would fly politically. So his planners were driven to a Rube Goldberg scheme of mechanisms designed to hold down costs of extending care to the uninsured; one lobbyist describes it as "an elaborate way of getting around having to tax people...
While Harvard's own Al Gore '69 claims to be re-inventing government, Harvard itself seems to have enlisted the service of an equally renowned thinker to design its bureaucratic structure: Rube Goldberg...
...elders gathered to pick their presidential candidates. That role having long since been forfeited to the primaries, the parties have turned the convention into a made-for-TV show. Perot understands that this new contraption -- parties manipulating media to send out the parties' message under cover of "news" -- is Rube Goldberg inefficiency. Why not let one man go on Larry King and send the message out himself, directly...