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Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does

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Re: Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does

#71

Post by dacops »

warumdarum wrote: post #61
robomartin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Potholes, park maintenance, housing shortages, pollution. As long as we're have unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done. I also see unemployment. Stop voting for the people who have consistently allowed this to happen. We give them a tremendous amount of money. They misallocate it, waste it and allow fraud to happen to the tune of billions. This has nothing to do with this communist/socialist view of the world t…

But socialist culture leads to corruption repeatetly in all socities where the experiment is run ?

Same with capitalist governments?

I don't think corruption is a left/right axis like that.

And I don't know, maybe it's early days, but Mamdani seems less corrupt than his predecessors.

Re: Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does

#72

Post by dacops »

card_zero wrote: post #49
dacops wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I don't disagree with you. But potholes are a stand in for infrastructure repair. I bike everywhere, my bike lanes and paths have holes. Water systems still dump lead, electricity and broadband networks aren't resilient. Potholes are just visible failures we can just to analogize. Don't get too locked in on the specific.

Profit isn't exactly the problem here. We could pay people to fix various kinds of infrastructure, they could make big profits, that would be great - if only they existed and had figured out their business plans.

If they have profit, we should be splitting that money towards addressing other needs. Maybe some profit is fine for ensuring sustainability or whatever, but like, potholes aren't the only need.

Re: Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does

#73

Post by forshaper »

pc86 wrote: post #69
cousin_it wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't done the math, but my guess is that a pothole might do hundreds of dollars worth of damage over its lifetime, maybe thousands. If society was willing to pay 1/10th of that sum per pothole to anyone willing to fill it, there'd be a lot more applicants. (Though it might lead to people making potholes on purpose, so the payment needs to depend on road health over time, not number of potholes filled.)

Well your last sentence shows exactly why it wouldn't work and so you're not really talking about "1/10th of that sum per pothole" you're talking about, I don't even know - paying random people random sums of money at arbitrary times based on overall road health?

A map, posted on the municipal or county website. You, a private citizen, bid to fill a hole. The city accepts. You upload a geostamped 'Before' picture. You are given a time window to fill the hole (often at night). You fill the hole. Upload 'After' pictures. Get paid in the next cycle.

Re: Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does

#74

Post by tmoertel »

mmooss wrote: post #58
radialstub wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's more efficient to prioritize capital than care. How though. Roads are a public good and fixing them should come from the governments pocket. How can you say the problem is private industry, when the government is doing such a good job collecting our tax money. You should be asking where is that money going. And then you will see its because of mismanagemen…

The tax rates in the US are low; that's why there is so much debt and so few services. Anti-tax groups have long followed the 'Starve the Beast' strategy (and their opponents are completely incompetent and fall for it every time): 1) Cut taxes 2) Point out the resulting deficit, say we're spending too much, and cut services 3) Repeat Now we're at point 2. It's not spending, it's lack of revenue. Some large corporatio…

> The wealthiest people pay a much lower tax rate because their typical form of income (capital gains) is taxed at a much lower rate than other people's (salary)...

A different way to think about this would be to say that a lower tax rate for capital gains is a trick (incentive) to get the wealthiest people to invest their wealth in the market, which provides capital for people trying to grow the economy and provide jobs, rather than spend their wealth on luxuries for themselves. In this way, we have an economy focused more on the needs and wants of regular people, and less on producing what wealthy people want.

Can you spot a flaw in that line of reasoning?

Re: Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does

#75

Post by dacops »

robomartin wrote: post #55
dacops wrote: post #20

I look around and see work that needs doing all the time. Potholes, park maintenance, housing shortages, pollution. As long as we're have unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done. I also see unemployment. What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs... it's a world where work is not focused on satisfying our needs but rather focused on maximizing profit. As long as we're choosing to make work about m…

> Potholes, park maintenance, housing shortages, pollution. As long as we're have unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done. I also see unemployment. Stop voting for the people who have consistently allowed this to happen. We give them a tremendous amount of money. They misallocate it, waste it and allow fraud to happen to the tune of billions. This has nothing to do with this communist/socialist view of the world t…

I have stopped. I get chastised constantly for it. Leftist candidates are rare, most mainline dems are center right. I catch so much flak from vote blue no matter who types (who then go out and don't vote for Mamdani).

If candidates want my vote, they can offer literally anything as a concession. I'm not holding some purity standard.

> You are not going to take a 57 year old bank teller who was let go and put her to work fixing potholes on the highway.

You doing think there are other needs people have? Social needs, where years of customer service experience would be desirable? Or financial advice? Potholes are a stand in. Think bigger.

Re: Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does

#76

Post by [deleted] »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #67
dacops wrote: post #20

I look around and see work that needs doing all the time. Potholes, park maintenance, housing shortages, pollution. As long as we're have unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done. I also see unemployment. What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs... it's a world where work is not focused on satisfying our needs but rather focused on maximizing profit. As long as we're choosing to make work about m…

Because governments and councils waste money on paying private contractors do do stupid bullshit like installing statues or gardens or other vanity crap meanwhile grass areas are overgrown and the roads are filled with potholes. The general populace aka the voters are too apathetic and absorbed in their little consumer lives and tribally motivated political quibbles to know or care that so much tax money is wasted.

[deleted]

Re: Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does

#77

Post by warumdarum »

ikesau wrote: post #15

My model of municipal maintenance is that a city's road maintenance workers have a long list of known potholes to fix which is triaged with some formula and dealt with day-by-day. Spraypainting the pothole distorts the triage process and makes a pothole jump the queue, putting it ahead of more severe or older issues than it otherwise would have been. It might not be zero sum, if it causes the agency to act with more…

[dead]

Re: Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does

#78

Post by mmooss »

tmoertel wrote: post #74
mmooss wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tax rates in the US are low; that's why there is so much debt and so few services. Anti-tax groups have long followed the 'Starve the Beast' strategy (and their opponents are completely incompetent and fall for it every time): 1) Cut taxes 2) Point out the resulting deficit, say we're spending too much, and cut services 3) Repeat Now we're at point 2. It's not spending, it's lack of revenue. Some large corporatio…

> The wealthiest people pay a much lower tax rate because their typical form of income (capital gains) is taxed at a much lower rate than other people's (salary)... A different way to think about this would be to say that a lower tax rate for capital gains is a trick (incentive) to get the wealthiest people to invest their wealth in the market, which provides capital for people trying to grow the economy and provide…

I'm not taking a test (feel free to answer yourself) but my view is that it's the same old talking point: Help the wealthy, and the Nth order effects will benefit others. The only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy.

(I think that's a good way to analyse any policy - the 1st order effects are the ones you can count on; the Nth order effects are just BS that magically costs nothing, but gets others to go along - 'the people will pay for this stadium for my privately owned franchise (1st order) and it will bring business to the community (2nd order).' That's repeated over and over, and the 2nd order effect is well known to not happen, but it sometimes gets enough votes from those uneducated in the issue.)

I think in the 1980s the Reagan administration called it 'trickle-down economics', such an incredibly revealing name!

Re: Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does

#79

Post by tmoertel »

pc86 wrote: post #63
warumdarum wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But socialist culture leads to corruption repeatetly in all socities where the experiment is run ?

It's almost as if government corruption is not a byproduct of the system of government, but a byproduct of the fact that it's filled with people, and when people accrue power they will, by and large, abuse it.

> It's almost as if government corruption is not a byproduct of the system of government, but a byproduct of the fact that it's filled with people, and when people accrue power they will, by and large, abuse it.

If only there were a system to align incentives toward a common good under the assumption that everyone is corrupt and will therefore seek to maximize their own interests....

Re: Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does

#80

Post by ikesau »

adampunk wrote: post #22
ikesau wrote: post #15

My model of municipal maintenance is that a city's road maintenance workers have a long list of known potholes to fix which is triaged with some formula and dealt with day-by-day. Spraypainting the pothole distorts the triage process and makes a pothole jump the queue, putting it ahead of more severe or older issues than it otherwise would have been. It might not be zero sum, if it causes the agency to act with more…

Citizens should have a say in how municipalities order work. If they're not given that say through less-disruptive means, then they can choose to harmlessly tag places where maintenance is failing. Why are we excusing civic inaction because it might cause an unexpected schedule change for road crews? Why am I supposed to be so full of concern for the ease of their schedule that I'm ok with broken streets? In short, c…

I appreciate the pushback, but I wasn't actually saying people shouldn't do this. If a neighbourhood is being neglected because of some incentive structure they're powerless to affect, then yeah, take some action.

I'm just compulsive in pointing out trade-offs, and this blog post (understandably) doesn't have an interview with the civil servant on the other side presenting their perspective, so I wanted to raise the question here in case someone knew how it worked.

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