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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

#81

Post by adampunk »

kjs3 wrote: post #44
adampunk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is just a dressed up way of saying "I don't care how the road crews work or who else they might be helping, I want them working on the problem I care about". You don't know if the crews are working on bigger problems (or bigger potholes), or they're working in a neighborhood you don't drive through and thus don't care about...if they aren't patching up your annoyance right now , then screw 'em, they suck at thei…

Just so we’re clear, “screw them” in this case means spray painting holes in the road. Just so we’re agreed that that is what is objectionable here.

I find it very hard to fault that person coming to the meeting wanting their street fixed early. What real sin are they committing except noticing that there’s a piece of infrastructure that they depend on that’s messed up? The city does not get a pass just because it claims to be busy elsewhere.

If I believed that the city schedule was optimal in every way, I could be convinced that nothing should change as a result of that person‘s complaints, but I don’t believe that. And even if I did, that person is providing a valuable service in the case that the city made a mistake somewhere. They do not know that the schedule is optimal (if it even is). They know their street is messed up.

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

#82

Post by inglor_cz »

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…

Looking at the stats, the US public spending is about 40 per cent of the American GDP, which, though lower than most of the EU, is not really "low". 40 per cent of something as huge as the American economy is huge as well. Given that the US economy is a quarter of the global economy, US public spending is one tenth of the economic output of the entire mankind. That is not low.

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/general-government-s...

BTW Swiss public spending is lower (32 per cent), and Swiss sidewalks and roads are uniformly nice. At the same time, Germany is at 48 per cent and it has a big problem with aging infrastructure, railways, bridges etc. Swiss rail authority regularly refuses delayed German trains at the border in order not to cause chaos in the reliable Swiss railway network. Given the 32 vs. 48 per cent of public spending, you would expect it to be the other way round, but it isn't. The mapping between the volume of public spending and quality of public services is not that simple.

Maybe the problem in the US is that too much money gets siphoned away by various legal or illegal means. Famously, whenever places like California or NYC try to build something like a new subway line or a new high-speed rail, their project budgets balloon into absolutely insane volumes, much higher than comparable projects in France, Italy or Japan, and the main reason is that various special interests need to be satisfied, from the construction unions to various NIMBYs.

With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste.

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

#83

Post by pc86 »

forshaper wrote: post #73
pc86 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You take a sledge hammer to the street a block over. Repeat. Profit.

You do a bad job filling the hole. Some hits it and their car breaks. They sue you and the city. The city attorneys successfully push the blame onto you since you're a contractor. You have no liability insurance because you're not a professional because that's the whole point of this thing, right? You're on the hook for the car, a few grand for a medical check-up, and a spurious mental anguish claim. You declare bankruptcy and on the way back from your last visit with your attorney, you hit another pothole and your car breaks. Full circle.

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

#84

Post by card_zero »

dacops wrote: post #72
card_zero wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If money was duct tape, that would follow. I think of it as like gratitude (when paid) and influence (when gained). So we'd be grateful to the road-menders, or broadband-stabilizers, and they could accrue a big pile of influence. What will they do with it? Perhaps they want something stupid and pointless, like building a pyramid.

If we're not going to allow that, there's no need for money at all. We'd vote on what needs doing, and it would always be something like mending roads, and we'd all have to knuckle down and do it, through a conscription-like system, on pain of pain. It would never be fixing the broadband, though, because broadband is a crazy imaginative project, like building a pyramid, so there wouldn't be any.

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

#85

Post by BuildTheRobots »

cjs_ac wrote: post #12

Someone in the UK did this years ago, but they painted rather cruder designs around the potholes. Naturally, the media dubbed them 'Wanksy'.

There's also a gent in Horsham who's recently been planting flowers in potholes to draw attention to them.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mgjklmzwvo

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

#86

Post by atmavatar »

kjs3 wrote: post #47
cjs_ac wrote: post #12

Someone in the UK did this years ago, but they painted rather cruder designs around the potholes. Naturally, the media dubbed them 'Wanksy'.

This was exactly what I thought of when I read the headline. Very amusing at the time, and it somewhat unsurprisingly was effective. I lack your laudable sense of decorum, so I'll post the link... https://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/street-artist-wanksy-spray-... There have been copycats... https://www.vice.com/en/article/guy-paint-penis-potholes-new...

That seems like a huge missed opportunity to draw the goatse guy.

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

#87

Post by tmoertel »

mmooss wrote: post #78
tmoertel wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Okay, but you didn't refute the line of reasoning. You called it "the same old talking point" and then jumped to the conclusion that "the only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy." But you didn't show that your claim was true. Or that the claim you were responding to was false.

Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth instead of spending it on themselves is a policy that benefits only the wealthy and makes life worse for everyone else?

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

#88

Post by kjs3 »

adampunk wrote: post #81
kjs3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a dressed up way of saying "I don't care how the road crews work or who else they might be helping, I want them working on the problem I care about". You don't know if the crews are working on bigger problems (or bigger potholes), or they're working in a neighborhood you don't drive through and thus don't care about...if they aren't patching up your annoyance right now , then screw 'em, they suck at thei…

Just so we’re clear, “screw them” in this case means spray painting holes in the road. Just so we’re agreed that that is what is objectionable here. I find it very hard to fault that person coming to the meeting wanting their street fixed early. What real sin are they committing except noticing that there’s a piece of infrastructure that they depend on that’s messed up? The city does not get a pass just because it cl…

Just so we’re agreed that that is what is objectionable here.

I never said a single word about painting the pothole; I think it's a clever hack. I should have tried that when we were negotiating with the city about scheduling our much needed street repaving. But since you clearly assume whatever your opinion is is sacrosanct, I suppose it's not surprising you would assume I agree you are unquestioningly correct.

The city does not get a pass just because it claims to be busy elsewhere.

Yes, it does, particularly if it is. At least for the adults in the room. Resources are finite. They have to be allocated. They have to be paid for. No, that's never "optimal" for everyone, especially for people for whom 'optimal == 'what I want, done immediately, even at the expense of other citizens'.

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

#89

Post by smallmancontrov »

pc86 wrote: post #64
smallmancontrov wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how the "hard choices" fingerwagging never comes out to scold the parts of the economy where rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are, and it's such a dogmatic article of faith that the gross excess over there couldn't possibly have anything to do with the deprivation over here .

I'm not sure what your point is, are you complaining about... compound interest?

No, I'm complaining about r>g.

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

#90

Post by ranger_danger »

tmoertel wrote: post #87
mmooss wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Okay, but you didn't refute the line of reasoning. You called it "the same old talking point" and then jumped to the conclusion that "the only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy." But you didn't show that your claim was true. Or that the claim you were responding to was false. Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth inste…

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