81–90 of 272 posts
Strange question, maybe? I'm an expat living in Romania and I always appreciate and marvel at the efficiency of Romania to have/enable providers to sell an unlimited 4G mobile service plan, that (for me) also works in the middle of nowhere here in RO for 5 euros per month. Thoughts? BTW, it makes buying a service plan in KS, USA that barely works in various areas feel a bit like a scam...
Because the US has an unlimited supply of the world's reserve currency, so there is no incentive to be economical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1. Red tape & public "input" > [...] and bureaucrats and all of that. On a recent episode of the Ezra Klein show, Jerusalem Demsas argued that part of the problem is that the bureaucrats in the US are too constrained in their powers, so e.g. when weighing an infrastructure project against wildlife protection laws, it's not a bureaucratic organisation making a final decision on how to proceed with minimal impact, bu…
I don't do podcasts, but I read that that was a really good one, and everything she writes about housing is fantastic. https://www.vox.com/authors/jerusalem-demsas
I was a management consultant ages ago and worked on large capital projects. In my experience (as the article mentions) it was a mix of: 1. Red tape & public "input" 2. Layers of contractors and subcontractors, each taking their slice 3. No real incentives for governments to be cost sensitive. Usually capital projects last well into the next administration. 4. Too many cooks in the kitchen and consultations
IMO #2 takes the cake (rest is all icing)
This misses a fundamental point - the goal of this is not to fund infrastructure - it's to fund people who vote for people who vote for infrastructure. There is zero incentive to run on time and on-budget, and every incentive to milk more government cash, so that people in power can get election contributions, that stay in power. If you also deny money to people who didn't vote for you, then all the better as well. S…
> Whereas Boston might only build one new transit line every few decades, Istanbul builds dozens.
Seems like building dozens of times as much would even more effectively "fund people who vote for people who vote for infrastructure." So why aren't we like Istanbul?
This misses a fundamental point - the goal of this is not to fund infrastructure - it's to fund people who vote for people who vote for infrastructure. There is zero incentive to run on time and on-budget, and every incentive to milk more government cash, so that people in power can get election contributions, that stay in power. If you also deny money to people who didn't vote for you, then all the better as well. S…
This misses a fundamental point - the goal of this is not to fund infrastructure - it's to fund people who vote for people who vote for infrastructure. There is zero incentive to run on time and on-budget, and every incentive to milk more government cash, so that people in power can get election contributions, that stay in power. If you also deny money to people who didn't vote for you, then all the better as well. S…
There is greed and corruption in the world, but that's not all there is. There are plenty of people who want to do a good job, who want to achieve things for society. More precisely, everyone has a little bit of all those things, and we have the free choice of what we pursue, the greed or the good.
The US ranks pretty well on the scale of corruption. It's a good way to get voted out of office (recent phenomena not withstanding), or go to jail.
I am of the opinion that continuing to build out all these long 'runs' of infrastructure to serve a even more spread out populace is a dead end. Where I live we spent tens of billions expanding highway infrastructure, and it has not improved the lives of anyone meaningfully, traffic is as bad as its ever been. We need to spend more money creating better metropolitan areas that people want to live in, rather than usin…
I suspect the current trend is in the opposite direction. If self-driving cars ever become a real thing, it's all over for team urbanization.
If there was unlimited money, how would you even start to fix cities? A big part of the attraction to living in the 'burbs or beyond is cheap space and very little noise pollution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how this is relevant to this discussion. NYC is plenty dense yet it has the same issues with cost.
NYC has much different issues with cost. You're paying for bad management that does long term projects as a series of short term projects and lets all the contractors go in between, for instance. You're paying the union for the right to use a tunnel boring machine, and you have an oiler watching your cranes because it's still 1910 and that's a full-time position. You're paying to move legacy infrastructure out of the…
I was a management consultant ages ago and worked on large capital projects. In my experience (as the article mentions) it was a mix of: 1. Red tape & public "input" 2. Layers of contractors and subcontractors, each taking their slice 3. No real incentives for governments to be cost sensitive. Usually capital projects last well into the next administration. 4. Too many cooks in the kitchen and consultations
I have seen some public transportation work up close in the USA -- "me first" and competition between different teams ate up quite a bit of the (expensive) time.. lots of very competent, skilled people and also quite cynical and profit-seeking management. The actions of management were sometimes directly contradictory to recommendations by hard-working staff. Worse, management that tried to get things done quickly we…
That's what (I think) Winston Churchill said about democracy (might be true there). But here, I think you can just say "we have the worst system". Period. The US has a variety of sectors (public works, health care, etc) which aren't just bad but fated to get worse and worse through both through the particular way US ruling interests deal with each other. Each solution introduces more pork interests since each solution follows the haphazard paradigm.
For example; I think Yimby ("yes in my back yard") proposals have aimed to facilitate development in at transit hubs, a worthy seeming cause. But since there's no California state transit plan, this approach has to define "transit hub" haphazardly - "there's currently a bus stop there". This allows those aiming to sink a development to do so by removing the bus stop. Or oppositely, allows someone to facilitate a development by adding an otherwise unneeded bus stop. I'm not sure if this approach was implemented but just proposal illustrates the inherent problem of trying to solve transfic/housing/development problems by tossing random legislation at them.