The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure • Hacker News Board

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#531

Post by bzbarsky » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 4:34 PM UTC

pikzen wrote: post #529

bzbarsky wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I create a video and post it on my private youtube channel, as a private individual? Can I spend $10 million creating the youtube video, if I have that much money as a private individual? Can I organize a group of 10 friends to each spend $1 million on the youtube video? Can I organize 1 million people to spend $10 each on said video? Note that under McCain-Feingold (which is the law that was at issue in Citizens…

>Can I create a video and post it on my private youtube channel, as a private individual? Yes. >Can I spend $10 million creating the youtube video, if I have that much money as a private individual? Yes. However, if it turns out that those ten million were gathered from other friends, explicitly in the goal to make this video without disclosing your donors or ignoring the caps, you should be fined and be made unelect…

This was apparently not clear: in all those questions the "I" posting the video is not the person running. That's the context of the Citizens United decision.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#532

Post by jimmyk » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 4:36 PM UTC

pikzen wrote: post #530

bzbarsky wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple in this case, because for my first question the answer really needs to be "yes" as a clear First Amendment matter: individual political speech is clearly protected, and video is a common "speech" medium nowadays. So that's a "loophole" that is pretty much required by the Constitution. It's really not clear to me how one can draw a sane line between the first and second question, for this case, un…

>corporations shouldn't be able to engage in political speech Corporations should be able to engage in political speech, as long it is done through their CEO or anyone that represents them officially, who then would be nothing more than just another citizen who happens to own a company, defending its interests. By all means, have an interesting debate, explain your point of view, reason as to why you'd like X or Y. M…

>you are throwing away the very foundation of democracy and equality amongst citizens when it comes to being represented.

There is no such foundation. You're lying to yourself. At the very least, the owners of media outlets have far more influence than other citizens due to their ability to set the conversation. There is literally nothing you can do to achieve your ridiculous ideal of equality, or to even come anywhere close to it. All you can do is change what rich people have to do to get what they want, and maybe make it more expensive. And by the way, making it more expensive just means the richest get even more of a say.

>money can fuck right off.

So I can't pay someone to build a website that (directly or indirectly) promotes a candidate?

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#533

Post by orthecreedence » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 4:39 PM UTC

joshuaheard wrote: post #205

imgabe wrote: post #80

I don't know the answers, but as someone who works in the industry (on the design side). I think a big unmentioned factor is probably liability and the prospect of litigation. If you look at old blueprints for projects in the past, they are a LOT less detailed. They had to be, because it was physically more difficult to produce them since they had to be drawn by hand. A lot was left to the contractor to figure out in…

There is two problems with this theory. The first is that governments have immunity from litigation. They can only be sued where they consent to the lawsuit. The second is that in most states, employee-related injury claims must proceed through a worker's compensation system outside the normal litigation channel where the costs are much less. I always say there are not too many lawsuits, but too many laws. Legislatur…

> But, for every rule, regulation, or law, you have an opportunity for a lawsuit

What? Two women suing McDonalds because they got fat from eating too many cheeseburgers is not a regulatory issue. A canoe company being sued for not having lifeguards posted every mile of the river they serve is not a regulatory issue. Parents suing a city because their idiot kid fell off a slide is not a regulatory issue.

America is lawsuit-crazy. Anybody can sue anybody for anything, regardless of whether regulation surrounds the issue or not. If anything, regulation acts as a legal protection against lawsuits, and many regulations are enacted in response to frivolous lawsuits from assholes who think the world owes them something because they can't take personal responsibility.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#534

Post by akshatpradhan » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 4:43 PM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #339

akshatpradhan wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This means every time there's a question, it has to be submitted through a formal process, tracked, answered, documented. I don't know why you think proper change control is a bad thing. In both software and systems engineering you submit change requests that are tracked, reviewed, assessed for risk, approved and documented. You do this to create an audit trail to identify "how we got here". Any concerns? It's docum…

I'm not saying changes shouldn't be documented. I'm saying the people on the ground doing the work should be more empowered to use their judgement. They can do that and still document what gets changed. As it stands now, some unforeseen circumstance in the field will necessitate a minor modification to the design. The contractor knows perfectly well what needs to be done, but instead of simply doing it, they will ask…

>As it stands now, some unforeseen circumstance in the field will necessitate a minor modification to the design. The contractor knows perfectly well what needs to be done, but instead of simply doing it, they will ask the designers to tell them to do it, so they aren't the ones responsible for it.

You always want peer review, even for a minor modifications. We have a similar process called code review.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#535

Post by rrauenza » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 4:47 PM UTC

everybodyknows wrote: post #486

rrauenza wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your question reminded me of the resistance of PEX adoption in California, even though it has been widely accepted in Canada. http://www.remodeling.hw.net/products/house-systems/californ... I was surprised the article didn't address regulation much nor the fear of litigation (when I googled for canada pex legal, I found class action suits...)

California plumber's union officials are busy folks -- their other pissing match: https://www.wired.com/2010/06/ff_waterless_urinal/

Where I work they swapped from waterless back to flushing. I'm sure they were glad the water supply had been plumbed.

But... I think they were replaced with autoflushers that don't flush at every visit, but perhaps have a delay so that it flushes more than one usage.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#536

Post by jimmyk » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 4:53 PM UTC

deong wrote: post #520

jimmyk wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your alternative to the Citizens United ruling?

I wasn't suggesting I had one. I'm just pointing out that SuperPACs get around pretty much any meaningful prior attempts at regulating campaign contributions. I don't think there is an alternative. What is needed in order to solve the problem is a complete overhaul of how campaigns are financed, including making quite a lot of currently protected speech illegal. And that cure may be worse than the disease. Without it…

What can possibly be done about media outlets, whose owners choose what news gets reported and what slant it takes on so on? The more you restrict the ability of people to pay for advertisements, the more control the media has over what people see.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#537

Post by cowsandmilk » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 4:56 PM UTC

gozur88 wrote: post #390

L_Rahman wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already changing in statistically significant ways: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-d...

>It turns out that Millennial behavior during the recession—living in the basement rather than driving to work, and biking and sharing rides elsewhere—did not reflect a preferred lifestyle so much as an accommodation to the longest recession and slowest recovery in modern U.S. history. >By year-end 2016 road travel had hit an all-time high, north of 3.2 trillion vehicle-miles. Gasoline demand has followed apace, also…

shows clear bias by declaring an all time high and not accounting for population; vehicle miles per capita is still down when measured using fred (the same source as their data).

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=dWoW

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#538

Post by orthecreedence » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 5:05 PM UTC

clarkmoody wrote: post #342

michaelt wrote: post #12

That suggests that U.S. costs are high due to general inefficiency [...] Americans have simply ponied up more and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that they were getting less and less for their money. There's a general effect in political systems, that if a law takes $20 from 1,000,000 people and gives $100,000 to 200 people, the people who lose money won't have enough incentive to put up a big fight;…

This is a feature of democracy. The solution is not campaign finance reform, it is reform of democracy itself. Place additional separation between the people/corporations and the purse-strings of the treasury, and you will reduce this problem. Alternatively, you can take power & responsibility away from the government so that market forces come to bear upon the issue. Democracy is, after all, a system in which a dete…

> The areas of the economy with the most government involvement and regulation are where we find costs ballooning out of control: healthcare, prisons, infrastructure, student loans

Come on. Really? Healthcare is heavily regulated, yes, but a lot of that comes from regulating a fucked up mix between public and private institutions along with insurance companies thrown in the mix. Single-payer would absolutely lower these costs substantially. That's the opposite of less regulation.

And prisons? We have private prisons...as in, corporations that have a financial incentive to put more people in prison. Not just that, they lobby the government to create more laws or have stricter penalties to keep more people in prison. You can't seriously tell me that's too much regulation.

Infrastructure? Absolutely needs to be government run. Private companies have no incentive here, unless heavily subsidized by the government, in which case they would just balloon costs as much as possible in order to squeeze as much blood from the stone as they could.

Student loans...if a dog put on a pair of glasses it could get a student loan. That's a lack of regulation. The only real regulation making it balloon out of control is that bankruptcy doesn't absolve your loan debt (whether it should or shouldn't, that's another issue).

Military, I agree with you on! Less military spending! We can use the money for (public) schools and make sure our country isn't made up of complete imbeciles in 20 years.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#539

Post by bzbarsky » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 5:09 PM UTC

pikzen wrote: post #530

bzbarsky wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple in this case, because for my first question the answer really needs to be "yes" as a clear First Amendment matter: individual political speech is clearly protected, and video is a common "speech" medium nowadays. So that's a "loophole" that is pretty much required by the Constitution. It's really not clear to me how one can draw a sane line between the first and second question, for this case, un…

>corporations shouldn't be able to engage in political speech Corporations should be able to engage in political speech, as long it is done through their CEO or anyone that represents them officially, who then would be nothing more than just another citizen who happens to own a company, defending its interests. By all means, have an interesting debate, explain your point of view, reason as to why you'd like X or Y. M…

I think you just ignored my questions about how the specifics of this work. Again, say the CEO decides to create a video to explain his point of view. Is that a problem? Is it a problem if he pays for production of that video? Is it a problem if he gets several people together to pay for the production of that video? Where do you, personally, draw the line?

Making yourself heard on television commonly takes the form of TV advertising, which is all about money, unfortunately.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#540

Post by Mz » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 5:12 PM UTC

mason240 wrote: post #510

grillvogel wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well by choosing to drive yourself to work every day in a wasteful petroleum burning vehicle you are forcing the rest of us to live with your pollution

And that's why electric cars will the death of anti-car sentiment.

The lead batteries make them less "clean" than many people imagine. Lead is a hazardous waste, batteries do not last forever and car batteries are quite large.