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Right. You can imagine a conversation something like:

"Ok, how long is this project going to take?"

"Well, it's still being defined..."

"What do you mean you refuse to tell me how long this project is going to take?"

The analogy is so ridiculous that the person making it clearly doesn't even comprehend the domain he's discussing.

Aircraft, hospitals, hotels — a million complex bespoke things are built every day. Cost and time projections are inevitable.

> Cost and time projections are inevitable.

As inevitable as blowing through the projections.

He compared to jeans because they're an extremely trivial purchase that someone would give little thought to, but still demand to know what they cost. The point is that in all cases you need that information, with a major software project you simply need it far more.

> you need

And that's the core of the problem (which, ironically in the context of the article, agile methodologies were supposed to address): wanting or needing something to be true/exist doesn't make it so.