Boats and ships are female because they are beautiful, lovable, expensive—and unpredictable. - Robert A. Heinlein

“Georges, I don’t know much about California politics—”
“My dear, no one knows much about California politics, including California politicians.”

Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.

Learning isn’t a means to an end; it is an end in itself.