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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

#111

Post by AnthonyMouse »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #104
bmelton wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I hear you saying that in Nevada, clean water is [economically] sustainable because of [gambling]. But I'm talking about ecological, biological sustainability, insofar as human life is concerned. So yeah, I'm dodging your financial model of sustainability altogether, intentionally, because in this case my entire ideological basis is irreconcilable with your model. water is not a product in my religion, as it is in yo…

You're asking the wrong question. It isn't a question of whether the people of Flint should have clean water. The question is whether people should continue to live in Flint. And if the answer is no, spending a hundred million dollars to install pipes there makes no sense.

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

#112

Post by stephen_g »

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.

that's a common idea, but really there's no inherent quality of Governments that make that the case - I think it's more to do with how various Governments are set up. Interestingly enough, I think that regulatory frameworks set up by people who have the idea that Governments are inherently inefficient can actually make it a self-fullfilling prophesy.

It's what I've seen, for example, in the Australian telecommunications and electricity markets. The parts that have been privitised are now run 'more efficiently' by underinvesting on maintenance, upgrades etc., all the time with rising cost to the consumer and rising profits, and now when Government intervention is required (you may have heard about the SA blackouts after Elon Musk offered to build them a 100MW grid scale battery within 100 days recently), the Governments can't really do everything they need because they are limited by law of interfering with the 'efficient' markets.

Of course, the idea that you could have a competitive power generation market when the cost of entry is so high is ridiculous.

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

#113

Post by [deleted] »

bpodgursky wrote: post #42
blurbleblurble wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relocated like cattle to another pasture? I can't for the life of me understand this philosophy that financial economy under-girds life.

Uh... how about, give them money to relocate so the children in the failing schools can grow up somewhere that doesn't have the highest crime rate in the country, can drink water that isn't poisoned, and get a job that still exists? They are real people who are fucked because they were born in a dying city which relied on a dying industry. They aren't plaything for your anti-financial philosophy.

[deleted]

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

#114

Post by CountSessine »

ubernostrum wrote: post #91
orangecat wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder how often this really happens though?

Often boards will appoint CEOs to dismantle or sell off hopeless companies (disappearing market, obstreperous union, product is turning into a commodity) in a last ditch effort to recover some shareholder value. We can't call those CEOs failures if they manage to get shareholders something as opposed to the nearly nothing they would get if the company went bust.

I think a lot of the criticism of Marissa Mayer misses the point that she was appointed CEO of Yahoo, home-page website for people who don't know how to change their home page. The fact that she managed to arrange an exit for Yahoo that wasn't a complete bankruptcy or shutdown is just epsilon-short-of-miraculous.

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

#115

Post by CalChris »

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 think nindalf was being sarcastic.

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

#116

Post by CalChris »

douche wrote: post #59
clumsysmurf wrote: post #17

Flint is one of thousands of places in the US with poisonous levels of lead. I wonder how this administration plans on dealing with it: http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead-...

I would imagine one of those places is my apartment. Lead is bad, but it's not that bad... Removing lead from gasoline is probably 100x times more important than other hand wringing

Lead is that bad and we didn't remove lead from just gas (except for avgas). We also removed it from paint.

The EPA's action level is 15 ppb.

https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/tips/water.htm

For a few homes in Flint, lead levels reached 4,000 ppb to nearly 12,000 ppb.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/03/16/what-le...

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

#117

Post by rayiner »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #102
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…

> 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. I don't understand the first point. Do water systems have some great economies of scale beyond the municipal level? The cost of the water system and the ability to take on debt are both directly proportional to the pop…

> If you have twice as many people in a unit then you can borrow twice as much money but have to pay twice as much to cover them.

Right, but you can spread out the repayment risk. Michigan as a whole is struggling, but as recently as 2000 it's per-capita GSP was at the national average, compared to places like Detroit and Flint where the bottom dropped out decades ago.

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

#118

Post by yummyfajitas »

wavefunction wrote: post #68
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…

All that I know is we were able to afford the infrastructure originally under a higher tax regime. That suggests to me that we can afford to solve this problem, even if it means that the wealthy are contributing back to the country that provided the business and social environment to do so.

In this country we've lost the ability to build things at a reasonable cost (or at all). A single mile of track in NYC costs about half as much as the entire Delhi metro system, or a typical Spanish rail line (not just a small track extension), etc.

The problem is costs, not revenue. Charging more money will merely divert funds from productive and valuable investments (e.g. self driving cars) into less valuables ones (e.g. tiny extensions to NYC subways). If you want to fix infrastructure, fix the cost problem.

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

#119

Post by CountSessine »

dbg31415 wrote: post #103

Relevant: * The Real Reason Your City Has No Money — Strong Towns || https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason... * Why Many Cities Have No Money | Hacker News || https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13370310

Strong towns makes a compelling argument that the reason we've invested so poorly in infrastructure that we can't possibly hope to maintain is that we don't conduct government business using accrual accounting. I wonder - do local governments anywhere use accrual accounting? It would be so much harder for government to spend money we don't have with good accounting practices in place, which leads me to believe that this is uncommon.

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

#120

Post by bsder »

wavefunction wrote: post #68
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…

All that I know is we were able to afford the infrastructure originally under a higher tax regime. That suggests to me that we can afford to solve this problem, even if it means that the wealthy are contributing back to the country that provided the business and social environment to do so.

> All that I know is we were able to afford the infrastructure originally under a higher tax regime.

Actually, we couldn't.

Cities can actually afford their infrastructure--they're dense enough.

The problem is that we built a whole bunch of suburbs that people moved into. Suburbs can't afford their infrastructure once they quit growing. And, if they drain the critical mass out of the city, they also make the city not able to afford its infrastructure.

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