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EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

detroitnews.com

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Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#91

Post by ubernostrum »

orangecat wrote: post #88
electricEmu wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that simplistic logic, public corporations are inherently​ bad at managing anything that stretches beyond the next quarter.

Short sellers exist. As do elections, but voters have far less incentive to gather and analyze relevant information.

How do short sellers punish the executives of the company? Even if they lose their jobs, they'll get millions of dollars in "performance" bonuses and millions more in severance in return for running the company into the ground.

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#92

Post by dragonwriter »

overcast wrote: post #30
dragonwriter wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"matching funds" can (and very often do) have matching ratios other than 1:1; it's the general term for a required proportional cobtribution.

Then I would have clarified that sentence, by saying matching funds UP TO $20 million. If my employer says they are matching my 401k contribution, I'd expect that is 1:1, not a hidden, oh we really only meant 20%. I'm just being pedantic.

"Matching funds" is an established term of art in government (and some other) finance for contribution with some proportionality factor required by the granting agency to be spent toward the same goal by some other agency (often the recipient themselves) as a condition of the granted funds.

The term was used correctly in the sentence, and since the exact funding split was specified, there was nothing to be clarified.

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#93

Post by pje »

BurningFrog wrote: post #74
rayiner wrote: post #66

This is a disaster happening all over the country. The EPA estimates we will need $385 billion by 2030 to modernize water infrastructure. Putting municipalities in charge of utilities is basically a failed model. Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones. Even ma…

Controversial opinion: Governments are inherently bad at managing anything that stretches beyond the next election.

Whereas startups are inherently good at long-term sustainability.

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#96

Post by overcast »

neuronexmachina wrote: post #36
overcast wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then I would have clarified that sentence, by saying matching funds UP TO $20 million. If my employer says they are matching my 401k contribution, I'd expect that is 1:1, not a hidden, oh we really only meant 20%. I'm just being pedantic.

You'd be assuming poorly, then. The most common 401k(k) matching is actually 50%.

So you would just go into a 401k plan assuming 50%? My company has ZERO matching for 401k. You'd be assuming poorly, then.

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#97

Post by bmelton »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #89
bmelton wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing a lot here. The city isn't failing for lack of jobs, but for lack of jobs that produce value. A job rebuilding the infrastructure of an area is only valuable if there are other jobs from which you can tax to justify that. If I spend $100 million to fund a trench that does nothing, it's a money sink. I've effectively thrown that money away. However, I have achieved however much employment that $…

The only things I'm missing are the points from the downvotes I keep getting in this thread. See, the thing here is that you and I are operating with completely different definitions of the word "value". I'm insisting to you that clean water is intrinsically valuable. Yet you impose a restriction on the supposedly free market, claiming that: "a job rebuilding the infrastructure of an area is only valuable if there ar…

Clean water is only valuable if someone can get for it greater than what it costs to extract. The aspect you're missing isn't a definition of value, but a model of sustainability.

If there's industry enough in an area that there is some other way to pay for water extraction, production, cleaning (see Nevada) -- then water can be sold at a loss because it supports something else, and is sustainable so long as there a mechanism to keep it being so.

The problem in Michigan is that the other way to pay for it isn't working, and the government doesn't have the revenues or a profit model to keep it going otherwise.

Again, this would be true whether the government were capitalist, socialist, socially democratic, totalitarian or anything else.

Economics are true whether or not your ideology agrees, but it shouldn't be controversial to assert that trying to sell luxury goods to Liberia (the poorest area in the world, last I checked) is fruitless, it should be easy enough to replace "luxury goods" with "water", or any other product and still be true.

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#98

Post by gloverkcn »

socialist_coder wrote: post #57
nindalf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This expenditure was approved by the previous administration. As for the current administration... I'm sure the free market will figure out ways to improve water quality. High taxes are the only thing preventing that from happening.

> I'm sure the free market will figure out ways to improve water quality. OK, I'll bite. So how would the free market possibly improve the water quality in Flint?

I don't think there's real belief that the free market would fix it.

It's a reference to the general republican stance that if government stays out of the way then the free market will fix everything i.e. health care, banking regulations, environmental protection, et cetera.

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#99

Post by badsock »

BurningFrog wrote: post #74
rayiner wrote: post #66

This is a disaster happening all over the country. The EPA estimates we will need $385 billion by 2030 to modernize water infrastructure. Putting municipalities in charge of utilities is basically a failed model. Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones. Even ma…

Controversial opinion: Governments are inherently bad at managing anything that stretches beyond the next election.

...in America. There's lots of developed countries where municipal governments are generally well run as a rule, and while there's always grumbling things never get this out of hand. Lead is posion, for pete's sake. Where else in the developed world would poisoned drinking water be allowed for so long?

In Canada we had what we consider a big disaster 17 years ago:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/inside-walkerton-canada-s-wors...

The Premier (equivalent of a governor), was investigated by judicial inquiry, his offices searched, people went to jail, there were payouts for damages - and this is something that only affected a town of 5,000 people. More importantly, it was fixed as fast as possible.

My point being: it's not that there aren't screw-ups elsewhere, it's just that they're so rare that they cause a huge scandal and everyone runs around trying to fix things. In America everyone just seems to just get angry at each other and then do nothing.

So don't tar governments. They work well elsewhere. America's just doing it wrong.

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#100

Post by Arizhel »

badsock wrote: post #99
BurningFrog wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controversial opinion: Governments are inherently bad at managing anything that stretches beyond the next election.

...in America. There's lots of developed countries where municipal governments are generally well run as a rule, and while there's always grumbling things never get this out of hand. Lead is posion, for pete's sake. Where else in the developed world would poisoned drinking water be allowed for so long? In Canada we had what we consider a big disaster 17 years ago: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/inside-walkerton-canada…

Exactly. The question now is: why is American government so broken, and the corollary is: what can we do to fix it? Is American culture simply broken, so that only utterly sociopathic people go into government? Is America just completely filled with people who have been trained from birth to be sociopathic, as evidenced by the way they vote?
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