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EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

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

#131

Post by CountSessine »

rl3 wrote: post #125
CountSessine wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Another way to look at it is that she had an entire large tech company at her disposal and managed to do pretty much nothing with it, then pawned it off and jumped out with a golden parachute.

Not an equally legitimate way of looking at it in my opinion.

This was Yahoo we're talking about. A buyout was the best possible scenario for shareholders. She's been rewarded for rescuing some shareholder value from a burning car wreck.

Here's a question you can ask yourself: do you think Verizon got a good deal? I'd be upset if I held Verizon stock because I believe based on everything I know about Yahoo that Verizon shouldn't have purchased them and that it was a bad deal for them.

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

#132

Post by seanp2k2 »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #105
kakarot wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more abouy failed leadership than failed engineering. It has to do with how Flint spread responsibility over their water source so thin that no one was to blame and no one had the full picture. Laziness gave way to corruption. I'm sure there were protests from the engineering team.

You do realize that Flint's local government was usurped by an emergency economic manager, right?

Defund or mismanage (due to incompetence, malice, or a mix) government until you cause a disaster, point at the disaster, and blame it on the government...classic Red Team strategy in action.

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

#133

Post by SapphireSun »

Arizhel wrote: post #126
specialist wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Empowering (electing) people who cannot govern, and are in fact utterly opposed to anyone governing, is having the expected outcome. Because Freedom Markets[tm], booyah!

Yes, but that doesn't explain why our voters consistently elect such people, while voters in other industrialized nations don't (nearly as much).

America is the richest country in the world and as such attracts the best propagandists on the free market.

American culture has a long individualist streak that distrusts authorities, combined with our many entrenched sins regarding e.g. racism, leaves a significant fraction of the population vulnerable to many effective forms of propaganda... and that's just the right. Except for a few states like MA and VT, the left consistently fails to field candidates that will fight for ordinary people against monied interests because that's where their election funds come from. In the past, leftists were associated with official enemies of the state (e.g. communists, socialists) by major media organizations and trusted authorities. Now most people here distrust their gut instincts about fairness, inequality, the golden rule, and mutual caring.

Many forms of leftist organization were broken down and destroyed after the upheavals of the 60s, with especially aggressive pushes by Regan, but this has continued by both parties up to the present day with Republicans taking mainly larger digs at the integrity of the public trust. This story continues with rather emphasized savagery into the present day starting in 2017.

However, this is an interesting moment where it seems there is a big fight brewing between truly breathtakingly rapacious greed and a significant fraction of the public. It will be interesting to see who wins in the coming decades - it may determine the fate of the planet's suitability for human life.

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

#134

Post by beachy »

rosser wrote: post #123
yummyfajitas wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There was an article shared on HN a couple years ago arguing these that sorts of cost spikes and overruns are pretty much endemic to countries with common-law legal systems, and almost non-existent outside them. I'm having a hard time digging it up, though. Sorry.

That sounds very credible.

On a bus in Cambodia, I watched a man fixing potholes in the road. He had nothing but a spade, and each time a vehicle came past he leapt out if it's way, clinging to a dirt bank.

When I got home after that holiday, I saw someone repairing the motorway near my home. The whole lane was shut down just for him, and there was a large truck with a crew of two and huge flashing arrows on it in front of him just to keep him safe.

It would be literally hundreds of times cheaper building anything in an environment where lives were considered expendable.

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

#135

Post by vertex-four »

Arizhel wrote: post #100
badsock wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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?

It's the adversarial system - people vs Government. In pretty much every country that's doing well, the Government is considered a representative of the people, and is expected to act as one or suffer political consequences - but in the case of the US, it's expected that the Government as a whole is not a functional part of society, so it has no reason to behave as one.

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

#136

Post by pdpi »

beachy wrote: post #134
rosser wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an article shared on HN a couple years ago arguing these that sorts of cost spikes and overruns are pretty much endemic to countries with common-law legal systems, and almost non-existent outside them. I'm having a hard time digging it up, though. Sorry.

That sounds very credible. On a bus in Cambodia, I watched a man fixing potholes in the road. He had nothing but a spade, and each time a vehicle came past he leapt out if it's way, clinging to a dirt bank. When I got home after that holiday, I saw someone repairing the motorway near my home. The whole lane was shut down just for him, and there was a large truck with a crew of two and huge flashing arrows on it in fr…

I'm pretty sure the GP was taking about common law as opposed to roman-style civil law (or other ways of building a legal system)

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

#137

Post by new299 »

vertex-four wrote: post #135
Arizhel wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's the adversarial system - people vs Government. In pretty much every country that's doing well, the Government is considered a representative of the people, and is expected to act as one or suffer political consequences - but in the case of the US, it's expected that the Government as a whole is not a functional part of society, so it has no reason to behave as one.

Can you give some examples of those countries? Which countries are doing well and have governments that their people are generally happy with and consider representative of the people?

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

#138

Post by Applejinx »

malandrew wrote: post #37
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.

So you're proposing we throw good money after bad? The city failed. It it's not financially feasible to fix it so it is self-sustainable at a level of investment that can be paid back in a reasonable amount of time, relocating is a perfectly acceptable proposal. People have every right to stay there if they can afford to do so, but if they are going to ask others for financial help bailing them out, it's not in the l…

What is this 'good money' of which you speak?

Money is nothing but abstracted power and there's no such thing as 'good money', only the ability to wield power. As such you're effectively saying that it's morally wrong to use power to keep people in a wrecked city that they did not wreck, because while it's their home they are not themselves powerful enough to merit having one.

The whole 'good money' thing is a neat exploit on Western civilization as it began with the Magna Carta (admittedly a bit of an out-of-date concept now!). It's the idea that if power is abstracted into money, all of a sudden it can't be questioned again. By contrast, being able to set societal expectations for ultimate power turned out to be, by definition, civilized.

Translating your statement gives us 'if people without power dare to ask others with all the power for help, it's not the least bit unreasonable for those with the power to have total control over how those people live and what they do. What's not acceptable is to help people who will always lack power, because that's just wrong'.

And while this has been tried over and over in history, again: Magna Carta. This touching idea that everything has to ultimately serve money, has got to go. Anyway it's only an abstraction papering over the simple reality that if you accumulate enough abstracted power, your whims are more unquestioned than those of Kings… because 'good money'.

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

#139

Post by 8note »

billions wrote: post #129
Spooky23 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They overstate this stuff, all of the time. My wife was a finance director at a municipal water utility in an old city. Water supply infrastructure wasn't a ticking timebomb -- many pipes last literally centuries, and utilities can proactively use sensors and robots to find weak pipes to repair without digging up half the city. They had a capital program that worked, lines were replaced based on risk and there was a…

One could argue the Coca Cola company pushed bottled water on US residents in the 1990's. Alternatively, one could argue government standards did not keep up with filtration technology. Unfortunately, US government innovation since the 1960's has failed the test of time. Statistically speaking, the majority of quality of life improvements in the last half century, was seeded by American startups and small business.

The biggest ones are all from the government:

computing and electronics/chip manufacturing GPS/inertial positioning internet new drugs and treatments

its government r&d work

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

#140

Post by Applejinx »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #111
blurbleblurble wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A related question is: should every single place to live be subject to the same conditions that produced Flint?

I see a fundamental viewpoint conflict between the concept

'what created Flint was a persistent course of governance action stretching way back to the 60s and only exacerbated by municipal choices to destroy the infrastructure, and this is basically criminal behavior'

and

'Flint is what it is because when subjected to natural law with all other things being equal, it was a big loser and never justified its existence. It atrophied rather than growing and thriving, and all such places should pretty much be disbanded, if possible before they deteriorate to such an extent.'

Depend on it, if places to live have to operate on the basis of 'outcompeting OTHER places to live' just to exist at all, everywhere will be Flint except for a few places that are San Jose and San Francisco, with comparable rents (that being the primary metric showing you how much they won!). As soon as you sentence locations to economic death for losing that game, that's the inevitable result.

This is because suffering or injured people, OR places, by definition are at a competitive disadvantage to places and people with no injury. It's redefining civilization as mercy killing, and this is a choice (and a choice that doesn't automatically have to be made in only one way).

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