The article has a pull quote: “Bulldozers were as important to the Allied victory as the jet engine, the radar or the atomic bomb.”<p>That's a strange statement since the jet engine had approximately zero impact on the Allied victory; the P-80 Shooting Star was produced too late to be useful.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jet_aircraft_of_World_War_II" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jet_aircraft_of_World_...</a>
Bulldozers can be used to grade surfaces prior to buildings being constructed... Buildings in which crimes are committed, from financial fraud to <i>outright murder</i>.
Relevant to the part about the brown tree snake on Guam, the inspectors for Hawai’i just had their building lease canceled by GSA/DOGE and barely kept their jobs:<p><a href="https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/local-news/2025-03-10/brown-tree-snake-employees-on-guam-forced-out-of-their-facilities" rel="nofollow">https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/local-news/2025-03-10/brow...</a><p>I was stationed on Guam for a bit, on the aviation side. We had to do quite a few inspections for those snakes, and worked with the people in the article I linked. In three years we found 7 on birds I inspected (a few hundred I imagine), all just before deployment overseas. Those snakes got into the oddest places.
What kind of safeguards are we imagining the bulldozer should have? Should we attach an AI camera to the engine to prevent bulldozing the wrong things?
As someone who lives now in Louisiana and with someone born here, we did not know that the term was used to describe mostly white Democrats attacking black Republican male voters.<p>I wonder if there's any historical markers to that effect.<p>Also interesting is that "bullpup" to describe a type of firearm comes from this usage of bulldozer.
It usually really bothers me (not joking) when people use “sinister” when they actually mean “nefarious” or “odious” or whatever, because it perpetuates old superstition about left-handed people being evil even if does so unknowingly.<p>> “bulldozer” […] popped up in […] an Illinois court case to describe a manufacturing machine that had ripped off a worker’s left arm.<p>…but this time I guess I have to give it a pass :) Hug a lefty today!
Eh. This all seems very backwards to me.<p>It seems to be a human tendency to want to oversimplify problems. It seems very wrong-headed to me to concentrate on one particular machine than for instance on that one influential guy had no appreciation for the jungle, plus whatever politics surrounded that, plus the desires/needs/etc of the surrounding communities, investors, etc.<p>Because yeah, the right machine sure helps get wrong things done faster, but it's not like we've ever lacked means to be inventive when we really want to, or just sheer pigheadedness to do it even if it was hard. If it's not a bulldozer it might be flamethrowers, defoliants, repurposed tanks, chainsaws, etc.<p>If enough people (or a few rich enough people) want a jungle gone, then they'll probably get that done sooner or later with whatever means they can. It's this bigger and more complex issue we should be looking into solving.
> The bulldozer we know today took shape in the first quarter of the 20th century. In 1917, the Russell Grader Manufacturing Company advertised a bulldozer in their catalog: a huge metal blade pulled by mules that could cut into the earth and flatten the land.<p>Isn't that just a "plow"?<p>We had horse-drawn plows well before the 20th century.
Every time the Machines Become Self-Aware and Murderous a dozer is going to show up eventually.<p>It just takes a while since they top out around 8 mph.<p>Case in point: <i>Shake Hands with Danger</i><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v26fTGBEi9E" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v26fTGBEi9E</a>
Marvin Heemyer may be relevant in some way to readers as well:<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer</a><p>The documentary “Tread” is something I recommend if available.
This means I have to start calling my lucky bulldozer charm, something else, oh well, it's not like it didn't cause befudlement and awkward moments, I missed the sinister bulldozer thing somehow.