Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

imagenotfound.writeas.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 148 posts

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

#91

Post by mxuribe »

scrumper wrote: post #3

Alright, it's worth a try. I'll do it at night in a balaclava though, because I live in the USA and no matter whether it's local, state, or federal government they'd rather spend $100k prosecuting this than $1k fixing the hole.

Sadly, @scrumper is 100% correct! In many, many areas and gov-levels of the U.S., the incentives have become so perverse that a municipality will spend 10x or 100x to prosecute people instead of spending 1x to fix things in the first place.

Some areas are even worse, because they'll use the event (e.g. "we have rampant crime now that criminals are spray-painting and ruining our potholes!")...as an excuse to then drastically increase funding for law enforcement agencies! Its bonkers and sad all around!

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

#92

Post by mxuribe »

kylemaxwell wrote: post #40

In Texas, you could probably paint a rainbow around it in the morning and the governor would have somebody on it that afternoon. /s

What you stated is so sad but true, because i could see that happening, and not just in Texas. :-(

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

#93

Post by JKCalhoun »

lenerdenator wrote: post #14
JKCalhoun wrote: post #13

I still want an iPhone app that uses the accelerometers to "geotag" bumps in the road. You'd think a low-pass filter of a collective database of this data would quickly draw attention to the legit "bumps in the road"… And you would think a city municipality could use this data (within a geofence, sorted by "popularity" and Newtons) to determine which potholes to tackle.

That's a good idea. Seriously. I think with a decent LLM tool you could get a POC going pretty quickly, and Code for America [0] is a pretty good resource for interfacing with governments on projects like that. [0] https://codeforamerica.org/

I could knock it out—it's adoption that is the issue. It's only useful at scale.

As someone else pointed out, Waymo (or Waze, or Google Maps, or Apple Maps) ought to adopt this as an opt-in feature. You would get rich pot-hole data fast.

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

#94

Post by orwin »

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…

> 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?

Not gp, but if the investment is made in either a non-productive asset, or in the secondary market toi buy share in a company that is downsizing/stabilizing their investments (share buyback is very often a good tell), then the wealth does not benefit society in general but either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class.

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

#95

Post by pixl97 »

fwipsy wrote: post #52
functionmouse wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What makes you think that?

I'm sure it depends on the city. I reported several large potholes in my city via an online form, and was disappointed to see them unrepaired for several months. Then one day I came and found that they'd repaved the whole street for 50m.

Yep, this kind of stuff can be extremely complicated because there are a lot of layers.

Potholes have different causes. For example if there is a slow water leak that's compromised the road sub base that needs to get fixed first or you're just throwing money in a hole.

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

#96

Post by kjs3 »

atmavatar wrote: post #86
kjs3 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed.

In less...anatomical...inspiration, there's a guy in Chicago who took this idea straight to the fine art phase:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/11/11/pothole-...

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

#97

Post by dwb »

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…

False dichotomy. We should tax the lot of them until they are not wealthy any more.

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

#98

Post by amavect »

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…

Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment and venture capital, so the rich can grow their wealth faster than the poor, while creating a job market. Compare that to spending wealth on luxuries, a money sink that also creates a job market and grows the economy (people have to make the luxuries). The former creates more liquid assets (stock) with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. The latter creates more solid assets with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people.

I vaguely remember Adam Smith talking about directing the vanity of the rich towards spending great amounts of money on proper objects in exchange for recognition. 4:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejJRhn53X2M

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

#99

Post by pikrzyszto »

It's interesting to see lack of tolerance towards potholes - the government has a lot of other issues to work on (healthcare, education, pollution) yet potholes, being a problem we are affected by daily seem more important to people than the "remote" problems caused by underfunding in other areas.

Even if this trick works, would it be ethical, knowing it draws money away from other areas? What would be the road SLO we would agree be acceptable?

Post reply on HN