I have no problem with paying taxes. I would pay more if it went to things that actually mattered instead of to corporate pockets. Universal healthcare, better schooling and teacher wages, public transportation, a power grid that doesn’t go out when it’s needed most, actual road maintenance instead of just cones blocking off most of the lanes with no workers.
Edit: Also have the super wealthy pay their share as well.
I would pay more if it went to things that actually mattered
The really fun part of this is that if we all banded together and negotiated as one nation of almost 400 million people almost everything would be cheaper than if we all negotiate separately. Everything could be better and cheaper, but the “freedom” of the US is the freedom of every antelope to negotiate on its own with the local pride of lions. It’s the freedom to get forced into bad deals with the threat of homelessness, it’s the freedom to starve, it’s the freedom to work and scrimp and save your whole life and then have all that wiped out by medical bills after an accident that’s someone else’s fault.
Mother of fuck if all the local governments teamed up on infrastructure it would be the worse nightmare I could imagine. I would quit in a second.
The only way at all public infrastructure moves forward (I do a lot of work in that sector) is in smaller governments that don’t have the leverage to sabotage their own projects. I wish I was lying. The bigger the local government the more of a cost disease obsolete crap they get. I don’t drink the water in Toronto for a reason. I know the shysters who built their stuff.
Smaller governments are willing to update their specs, they are open to ideas that make their equipment last longer, they have an incentive to having working systems instead of backcharges.
Also fun fact I have openly threaten one of those government contract cockroaches to tattle on him to every anti-government media source I could find unless he fixed the specs of a system.
As someone who works in the industry, do you have a theory as to why virtually all of our peer democracies are so much better and more cost efficient at building big public infrastructure?
Nothing obviously jumps out at me, but I am middle management and probably don’t have the bird’s eye view you’d want to make sense of it.
For those who don’t know, it’s been an objective fact for several decades now that virtually all of our peer democracies build big public infrastructure better, faster and cheaper than we do in the US.
And it wasn’t always this way. We used to be able to get shit done, but something happened in the last few decades.
And before anyone says anything, I am not taking political sides here. I don’t know what the answer is, I’m just making an objective and well-documented observation.
As someone who works in the industry, do you have a theory as to why virtually all of our peer democracies are so much better and more cost efficient at building big public infrastructure?
You are assuming that they are. From what I see for every airport that is so glorious it is an affront to the gods there is raw sewage being poured on the ground an hour drive away. Countries are good at peices of infrastructure, sometimes. Japan is famous for this but only because no one is mentioning their powerlines or snail mail system or their M2M over fax nonsense. The Israelis got water management down pat but best not to talk about East Jerusalem. Generally speaking the US has better sewage systems than say the UK but rail not so much.
And it wasn’t always this way. We used to be able to get shit done, but something happened in the last few decades.
Yes, as a whole humanity is getting worse at infrastructure. There is plenty of blame to go around. I imagine it is a variation on cost disease. We only have so many technical people and if they are all working on Faceboot and Twatter they aren’t optimizing the traffic lights.
In particular what would make my job easier and give the taxpayers a break:
Allow long term maintenance calculations to be used in bidding. If company A is bidding say 100k and company B is bidding 90K but company A can prove that their solution will cost less in the long run, factor that in by some equation. There are dozens of ways I know how to lower my upfront cost and increase taxpayer long term cost. I would rather not do any of them.
No more incentives to use local businesses. I know it sounds all cute and green on paper but in practice it creates monopolies and corruption. If the best water pumping system I can find for your town is in the another country please let me buy it.
Backcharges are now banned. If you are unhappy with what was delivered give the company a chance to make it right or blackball them for a decade. There are better things to do with our time than waste it with lawyers trying to remember what was said casually in a meeting three years ago.
No more requiring a PE unless someone can prove that a PE is required and at the same time do not let PE boards decide licensing. PEs are scarce, thus cost more. Because they are scare they can’t train new ones. Additionally since they cost so much and improvements can’t be made because no one is willing to pay for specs to be upgraded. That is why you have specs calling for components that haven’t been made in decades and why innovations don’t move around the sector.
Solve the problem, not the secondary effects. For example right now we have crap electricity at a site and I am struggling with all motors overheating. Upgrade the electrical feeding the site instead of demanding that I deal with impact. “Can’t you solve it in software?”. No Johnathan, I can’t software a solution to a motor melting for being demanded to give constant torque with 3rd world grade electricity.
The top down pyramid model has been proven to be the most wasteful and slow to innovate. It only exists because it is easy. Stop using it to build infrastructure. Just because a kid knows a bit about cement doesn’t mean they are experts on welding.
Stop farming work out. Deal with one company. That company buys it from a catalog or they build it themselves.
Almost all the problems you listed are just symptoms of going with the lowest bidder for everything. It’s similar to why so many start ups turn into ponzie schemes when VC money is involved. If you set achievable goals on a realistic timelime no one will invest in your company because there are 10 other people willing to lie to get the money. This is how most medical start ups went broke while Theranos was worth 9 billion.
Same with infatructure projects. Some town official who doesn’t even know which end of a screw driver goes in the electical outlet listens to (at best) a few proposals and chooses one. None of those proposals are going to give an honest cost by cost assesment compared to the other options. It comes down to the person making the decisions choosing who to trust. If one guy says it will need 10k a year in maintenance and the other says 100k who do you believe?
The only way to know for sure is to have your own people who you trust to verify information. But paying a knowlegeable staff like that is expensive; and people who don’t understand how complex this stuff can get will be angry at “double spended”. As in, why pay anyone in house when they aren’t actually “doing” anything like the private companies creating the proposals.
Why wouldn’t I give an honest answer? A dishonest answer is going to make me miserable. Most of the processes my company makes we make so much that we can give good estimates on total yearly cost. It would be easier for me to just hand over that data vs making up new fraudulent data that could survive a court challenge. As Mark Twain mentioned, if you tell the truth you don’t have to remember a damn thing. Besides they would easily be able to point to the numbers going over budget and demand free parts or free service.
Your idea about having your own people is why I yelled in my other comment. Those people are the worst. The more my customer understands the more problems their system will have. I know one horse towns in deliverance country using systems that smash the recommended operating lifespan and I know places that have all this local talent who are down monthly.
Doctors make the worse patients, lawyers make the worse plaintiffs, and inhouse engineers make the worse clients. The more the design is tampered with the less likely it will work right. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and open up your chest cavity and start poking around, maybe try to get your kidneys to work faster. That is what it is like dealing with the local engineering “talent”. They are overconfident, weight in on stuff that they don’t understand, follow ancient specs, and pretty much every other sin of engineering you can list.
Put another way. If me and my coworkers are working on process X all day every working day with hundreds of sites do you think we may know more than a person who deals with a single instance of the process? Phoenix Arizona is another great example. They have the most bottom of the barrel catty in-house engineering team of any city in the US. Kinda people who measure the paint thickness on a motor with calibers, demand a repainting if it is off by a milimeter, then leave it in direct sun, and are shocked when the motor overheats.
Ironically, your country could raise taxes a whole lot for the rich, making them somewhat uncomfortable. The next step for them would be: put all of the wealth in another financial paradise. There’s plenty of those.
But let’s say every country coordinates to control cash flows, that would be quite pretty ngl
I’m not denying we do live in a special corrupt time, but government is inherently inefficient due to its scope and wage pressure from private industry 1
Changes in real world wage movements across sectors account for about a third of the rise in the cost of U.S. government services between 1959 and 1989, while relatively slower productivity in the public sector acccounts for the remaining two-thirds. Even though it is slower, however, the productivity record still is positive even in the labor intensive government sector. Consequently Baumol argues that the public’s likely future objection to necessary increases in the share of expenditures over the next 50 years will betray a fiscal illusion unless policymakers take pains to dissolve it.
the reason private industry doesn’t have the reputation for inefficiency that government has is nothing to do with private industry’s actual efficiency. It’s a combination of the fact that most of the decisions private companies make are behind closed doors whereas government stuff is public and something I call selective collectivism, which is to say that when government fucks up that’s a reflection on government as a whole but when private industry fucks up we only fault that individual company and not private industry as a whole.
It’s why so many people underestimate the deaths attributable to capitalism. We all know where the buck stopped under Stalin. In the contemporary US, who is responsible when people die in underregulated workplaces or the equivalent? Is it the state? The company? The industry? We can’t decide, but we don’t blame capitalism, even if that structure drives the suffering.
hell, if we’re gonna be historical about it why is the USSR and communism as a whole responsible for the Ukraine famine but capitalism isn’s responsible for the Irish or Bengali famines? About 5 million dead between the two of them, all due to decisions by capitalist-democratic-imperialist governments. But that just doesn’t count because we don’t talk about it.
I have no problem with paying taxes. I would pay more if it went to things that actually mattered instead of to corporate pockets. Universal healthcare, better schooling and teacher wages, public transportation, a power grid that doesn’t go out when it’s needed most, actual road maintenance instead of just cones blocking off most of the lanes with no workers.
Edit: Also have the super wealthy pay their share as well.
The really fun part of this is that if we all banded together and negotiated as one nation of almost 400 million people almost everything would be cheaper than if we all negotiate separately. Everything could be better and cheaper, but the “freedom” of the US is the freedom of every antelope to negotiate on its own with the local pride of lions. It’s the freedom to get forced into bad deals with the threat of homelessness, it’s the freedom to starve, it’s the freedom to work and scrimp and save your whole life and then have all that wiped out by medical bills after an accident that’s someone else’s fault.
Mother of fuck if all the local governments teamed up on infrastructure it would be the worse nightmare I could imagine. I would quit in a second.
The only way at all public infrastructure moves forward (I do a lot of work in that sector) is in smaller governments that don’t have the leverage to sabotage their own projects. I wish I was lying. The bigger the local government the more of a cost disease obsolete crap they get. I don’t drink the water in Toronto for a reason. I know the shysters who built their stuff.
Smaller governments are willing to update their specs, they are open to ideas that make their equipment last longer, they have an incentive to having working systems instead of backcharges.
Also fun fact I have openly threaten one of those government contract cockroaches to tattle on him to every anti-government media source I could find unless he fixed the specs of a system.
As someone who works in the industry, do you have a theory as to why virtually all of our peer democracies are so much better and more cost efficient at building big public infrastructure?
Nothing obviously jumps out at me, but I am middle management and probably don’t have the bird’s eye view you’d want to make sense of it.
For those who don’t know, it’s been an objective fact for several decades now that virtually all of our peer democracies build big public infrastructure better, faster and cheaper than we do in the US.
And it wasn’t always this way. We used to be able to get shit done, but something happened in the last few decades.
And before anyone says anything, I am not taking political sides here. I don’t know what the answer is, I’m just making an objective and well-documented observation.
You are assuming that they are. From what I see for every airport that is so glorious it is an affront to the gods there is raw sewage being poured on the ground an hour drive away. Countries are good at peices of infrastructure, sometimes. Japan is famous for this but only because no one is mentioning their powerlines or snail mail system or their M2M over fax nonsense. The Israelis got water management down pat but best not to talk about East Jerusalem. Generally speaking the US has better sewage systems than say the UK but rail not so much.
Yes, as a whole humanity is getting worse at infrastructure. There is plenty of blame to go around. I imagine it is a variation on cost disease. We only have so many technical people and if they are all working on Faceboot and Twatter they aren’t optimizing the traffic lights.
In particular what would make my job easier and give the taxpayers a break:
Allow long term maintenance calculations to be used in bidding. If company A is bidding say 100k and company B is bidding 90K but company A can prove that their solution will cost less in the long run, factor that in by some equation. There are dozens of ways I know how to lower my upfront cost and increase taxpayer long term cost. I would rather not do any of them.
No more incentives to use local businesses. I know it sounds all cute and green on paper but in practice it creates monopolies and corruption. If the best water pumping system I can find for your town is in the another country please let me buy it.
Backcharges are now banned. If you are unhappy with what was delivered give the company a chance to make it right or blackball them for a decade. There are better things to do with our time than waste it with lawyers trying to remember what was said casually in a meeting three years ago.
No more requiring a PE unless someone can prove that a PE is required and at the same time do not let PE boards decide licensing. PEs are scarce, thus cost more. Because they are scare they can’t train new ones. Additionally since they cost so much and improvements can’t be made because no one is willing to pay for specs to be upgraded. That is why you have specs calling for components that haven’t been made in decades and why innovations don’t move around the sector.
Solve the problem, not the secondary effects. For example right now we have crap electricity at a site and I am struggling with all motors overheating. Upgrade the electrical feeding the site instead of demanding that I deal with impact. “Can’t you solve it in software?”. No Johnathan, I can’t software a solution to a motor melting for being demanded to give constant torque with 3rd world grade electricity.
The top down pyramid model has been proven to be the most wasteful and slow to innovate. It only exists because it is easy. Stop using it to build infrastructure. Just because a kid knows a bit about cement doesn’t mean they are experts on welding.
Stop farming work out. Deal with one company. That company buys it from a catalog or they build it themselves.
Almost all the problems you listed are just symptoms of going with the lowest bidder for everything. It’s similar to why so many start ups turn into ponzie schemes when VC money is involved. If you set achievable goals on a realistic timelime no one will invest in your company because there are 10 other people willing to lie to get the money. This is how most medical start ups went broke while Theranos was worth 9 billion.
Same with infatructure projects. Some town official who doesn’t even know which end of a screw driver goes in the electical outlet listens to (at best) a few proposals and chooses one. None of those proposals are going to give an honest cost by cost assesment compared to the other options. It comes down to the person making the decisions choosing who to trust. If one guy says it will need 10k a year in maintenance and the other says 100k who do you believe?
The only way to know for sure is to have your own people who you trust to verify information. But paying a knowlegeable staff like that is expensive; and people who don’t understand how complex this stuff can get will be angry at “double spended”. As in, why pay anyone in house when they aren’t actually “doing” anything like the private companies creating the proposals.
Why wouldn’t I give an honest answer? A dishonest answer is going to make me miserable. Most of the processes my company makes we make so much that we can give good estimates on total yearly cost. It would be easier for me to just hand over that data vs making up new fraudulent data that could survive a court challenge. As Mark Twain mentioned, if you tell the truth you don’t have to remember a damn thing. Besides they would easily be able to point to the numbers going over budget and demand free parts or free service.
Your idea about having your own people is why I yelled in my other comment. Those people are the worst. The more my customer understands the more problems their system will have. I know one horse towns in deliverance country using systems that smash the recommended operating lifespan and I know places that have all this local talent who are down monthly.
Doctors make the worse patients, lawyers make the worse plaintiffs, and inhouse engineers make the worse clients. The more the design is tampered with the less likely it will work right. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and open up your chest cavity and start poking around, maybe try to get your kidneys to work faster. That is what it is like dealing with the local engineering “talent”. They are overconfident, weight in on stuff that they don’t understand, follow ancient specs, and pretty much every other sin of engineering you can list.
Put another way. If me and my coworkers are working on process X all day every working day with hundreds of sites do you think we may know more than a person who deals with a single instance of the process? Phoenix Arizona is another great example. They have the most bottom of the barrel catty in-house engineering team of any city in the US. Kinda people who measure the paint thickness on a motor with calibers, demand a repainting if it is off by a milimeter, then leave it in direct sun, and are shocked when the motor overheats.
Ironically, your country could raise taxes a whole lot for the rich, making them somewhat uncomfortable. The next step for them would be: put all of the wealth in another financial paradise. There’s plenty of those.
But let’s say every country coordinates to control cash flows, that would be quite pretty ngl
I’m not denying we do live in a special corrupt time, but government is inherently inefficient due to its scope and wage pressure from private industry 1
Private industry is also super inefficient, and then cuts massive corners on everything.
the reason private industry doesn’t have the reputation for inefficiency that government has is nothing to do with private industry’s actual efficiency. It’s a combination of the fact that most of the decisions private companies make are behind closed doors whereas government stuff is public and something I call selective collectivism, which is to say that when government fucks up that’s a reflection on government as a whole but when private industry fucks up we only fault that individual company and not private industry as a whole.
It’s a magic feature of capitalism, the ability to convince people that any failure is limited to a single entity.
It’s why so many people underestimate the deaths attributable to capitalism. We all know where the buck stopped under Stalin. In the contemporary US, who is responsible when people die in underregulated workplaces or the equivalent? Is it the state? The company? The industry? We can’t decide, but we don’t blame capitalism, even if that structure drives the suffering.
hell, if we’re gonna be historical about it why is the USSR and communism as a whole responsible for the Ukraine famine but capitalism isn’s responsible for the Irish or Bengali famines? About 5 million dead between the two of them, all due to decisions by capitalist-democratic-imperialist governments. But that just doesn’t count because we don’t talk about it.
100%
average health care company: proceeds to spend mammoth quantity of resources on advertising, especially for drugs