I've lived on the westside of LA for ~20 years, so one secret I like to let people in on: there's no water shortage. There's a literal ocean of it. I can see it right out my window.
And all that it takes to turn seawater into potable freshwater is energy.
We don't have a water problem. We have an energy problem.
For all of LA County, it would take 500–750 MW each year to use seawater for all our freshwater needs.
Or put another, with a single nuclear power plant, we would solve all LA's freshwater needs -- forever.
You don't have an energy problem, you have a political problem. Fresh water is wasted on thirsty plants destined for agriculture (like alfalfa), by rich farmers who inherited water rights put into law ages ago. It's very simple to solve water usage in California, it just requires a governor that has a tiny amount of grit and cuts into their water rights.
It's crazy how to some, building a whole nuclear reactor and dozens of desalination plants seems like a simpler solution than making a couple of very wealthy farmers a bit angry for a while. Capital really is all-powerful in the States, it even holds power in the very minds of its citizens.
Your comment is a great example of the sort of zero sum ignorance that gets us where we are.
Yeah, you can always use state violence to take from one group and give to another but that's less than zero sum because it costs you use of state violence which isn't cheap and must be expensively maintained.
You might make things fairer doing that but you won't make them better overall. At some point for things to actually get better overall, for the pie to get bigger, you must actually build something for someone. If not a nuclear powered desalination plant then it will be something else.
> You might make things fairer doing that but you won't make them better overall.
Huh, yes it will? You don't need state violence to reduce wealthy farmers' water rights from 10B gallons per year to 8B, which will instantly free up water for others, more important uses. Their quality of life won't decrease if they have to switch a few plots from alfalfa to wheat, if that's what you're afraid of.
> for the pie to get bigger, you must actually build something for someone
I dislike how you just assumed that because I prefer a simple political solution over an over-engineered decades-long project on this one issue, I must be opposed to all new infrastructure. In this case, there's plenty of water to go around.
> state violence which isn't cheap and must be expensively maintained.
1, you don't need much (or any) state violence to keep a few rich families from stealing water, and 2, how is that more expensive that a fucking nuclear plant??? And what about the ecological cost? Nuclear is cleaner that most energies, but it's not free. And nuclear capacity could be put to much better use than offsetting inefficient use of the commons.
> Yeah, you can always use state violence to take from one group and give to another
Yeah, that's exactly what those problematic water rights are achieving: they take most of the available fresh water and give it to a tiny minority that benefits immensely from it. I'm suggesting we improve on that.
> Your comment is a great example of the sort of zero sum ignorance that gets us where we are.
I just can't get over how arrogant and mean this line is. The pie is continually growing, the only thing preventing people from getting a slice is that capital owners keep it all to themselves. We didn't get to this situation because the people is too greedy and impairing oligarchs from building stuff. It's quite the opposite.
We have bloated contractors receiving billions for very little in exchange, and in this situation, people like you are suggesting we don't solve this very simple resource allocation problem and instead shovel a few more billions of public money to the private sector for completely superfluous infrastructure we won't catch a glimpse of before 2048.
>Huh, yes it will? You don't need state violence to reduce wealthy farmers' water rights from 10B gallons per year to 8B, which will instantly free up water for others, more important uses. Their quality of life won't decrease if they have to switch a few plots from alfalfa to wheat, if that's what you're afraid of.
Why develop local gas fields and solar when we can just invade nations with oil?
The only way to win sustainably is to make the resource, whatever it is, more accessible or less needed, somehow.
A few billion on this or that is pocket change compared to the economic and political cost of political policy with very obvious and well defined classes of losers. Taking things isn't free even if done domestically.
>1, you don't need much (or any) state violence to keep a few rich families from stealing water
Yes, you do. It will just be spent on schools to tell the kids how to think and carrot/stick grant programs to financially incentivize compliance among the municipalities and subsidies with strings attached and inspectors to verify these things and studies and surveys and all manner of other stuff like that rather than bombs and missiles but you absolutely need to spend untold sums of money to enforce policy that is "bad" for whoever you're enforcing it upon.
>I just can't get over how arrogant and mean this line is.
I'm jaded beyond caring about such things at this point.
>The pie is continually growing, the only thing preventing people from getting a slice is that capital owners keep it all to themselves.
>We have bloated contractors receiving billions for very little in exchange, and in this situation, people like you are suggesting we don't solve this very simple resource allocation problem and instead shovel a few more billions of public money to the private sector for completely superfluous infrastructure we won't catch a glimpse of before 2048.
I want you to do the math on what the capital owners actually make. Sure, they're filthy rich and putting their thumb on the scale in various bad ways but the rent they take is peanuts compared to the money just pissed away on goods and services that are far outside of whatever the critical path is.
For every dollar the CEO or board members or other large shareholder of some megacorp are paid the megacorp pays tens or hundreds to the "bloat" which you rightly identify as a problem in a lot of these project.
To use a metaphor, paying the football coach and the chancellor less isn't gonna fix the price of a college that has a non-teaching non-researching administrator for every two students.
Would putting the bloat into the public sector somehow make it less wasteful? Of course not.
At the end of the day we need to find a way to reduce the bloat and waste because the bloat and waste are not only why the nuclear desalination plant (or whatever) looks expensive and unattractive, it's also why the farmers care to hold onto the water. If pivoting was cheaper/easier/more reliable than perpetually fighting they would.
The past 50yr of regulation has been the kind of quasi centrally planned financial tomfoolery to incentivize the "right thing" (for who's definition?) and it's worked so poorly here we are in these comments discussing how LA has stagnated to the financial detriment of most there. No, I don't think "just one more centrally planned tweak" is gonna fix it whether we're tweaking water or something else.
> Why develop local gas fields and solar when we can just invade nations with oil?
Non sequitur. Better analogy: why dig new wells when you waste half of your oil anyway? Because that's what alfalfa is: wasted water. But it's slightly more profitable to the water rights holder, so that's what they grow. Could this fresh water be used in more productive ways? Doesn't matter to them.
> The only way to win sustainably is to make the resource, whatever it is, more accessible or less needed, somehow.
Yes, by cultivating more water efficient crops in regions under hydric stress, like California. Why do you refuse to engage with my argument in good faith?
> Yes, you do. It will just be spent on schools to tell the kids how to think and carrot/stick grant programs to financially incentivize compliance among the municipalities and subsidies with strings attached and inspectors to verify these things and studies and surveys and all manner of other stuff like that rather than bombs and missiles but you absolutely need to spend untold sums of money to enforce policy that is "bad" for whoever you're enforcing it upon.
Utter nonsense. You pretend to despise "centrally planned financial tomfoolery" so why do you spend so much energy to support the current water rights holder?
On your last paragraphs: again, why are you misrepresenting my arguments?
"Capital owners" doesn't mean CEOs and rich people, it's all stakes in the financial markets. So when you say "paying the football coach and the chancellor less isn't gonna fix the price of a college that has a non-teaching non-researching administrator for every two students", it's true, but that's not what I meant, at all. And I think you know it.
What I meant, is that for-profit schools and PE-owned football clubs are responsible for jacking up prices, to feed useless middlemen that weren't there before. That's the bloat. The actual economy is growing very slowly while financial markets have 4% annual growth. Do the math.
That's why a single missile costs 15M and 3 years of labor, and involves dozens of private contractors, when the US was able to build multiple planes a day during WWII under Roosevelt for pennies. So when you ask "Would putting the bloat into the public sector somehow make it less wasteful?", the answer is yes. The proof is the New Deal, how Roosevelt was able to wrestle the country back from the jaws of Capital and build public infrastructure using public workers, efficiently.
You only believe in private over public because of decades of propaganda, when the reality is the government has never subcontracted more of its work and we can't get anything fucking done! California abandoned its high speed rail project after feeding billions to various companies for literally nothing in return.
> If pivoting was cheaper/easier/more reliable than perpetually fighting they would.
The farmers aren't fighting, because there's no one in office to even fight them. Capital completely owns the government, to the point that a simple law such as "farmers have to use slightly less water in the middle of a fucking desert" feels so impossibly hard to pass that we can seriously entertain building a nuclear power plant and dozens of desalination plants to produce fresh water when we already have enough for everyone!
You're focusing on a single micro level issue, namely water and farming in the arid west, and missing the big picture.
Say we do a better job growing crops. That just kicks the can. LA grows and then we're right back here. Something needs to be done to provide for LA's growth and scale with it without teeing up future political fights.
>Utter nonsense. You pretend to despise "centrally planned financial tomfoolery" so why do you spend so much energy to support the current water rights holder?
I don't give a shit about either party to that particular dispute. I give a shit that we approach these disputes in a way that doesn't just kick the can.
>That's why a single missile costs 15M and 3 years of labor, and involves dozens of private contractors, when the US was able to build multiple planes a day during WWII under Roosevelt for pennies. So when you ask "Would putting the bloat into the public sector somehow make it less wasteful?", the answer is yes. The proof is the New Deal, how Roosevelt was able to wrestle the country back from the jaws of Capital and build public infrastructure using public workers, efficiently.
They bought the B29 straight from the blue prints. You, and everyone who thinks like you needs to stop and spend some time thinking about what roadblocks would arise, what lawsuits would fly, what waste would the system compel to occur, if a procurement short circuit like that were to be done today.
Public and private industry alike are hobbled by the same bloat (which I'll get back around to at the end of this comment) when back then neither was hobbled to anywhere near the same degree.
>What I meant, is that for-profit schools and PE-owned football clubs are responsible for jacking up prices, to feed useless middlemen that weren't there before. That's the bloat. The actual economy is growing very slowly while financial markets have 4% annual growth. Do the math.
You're getting close. What causes the demand for these middlemen that the well capitalized financial interests (for profit schools and the like) seek to make buck creating?
Say I get a borderline bullshit degree as a civil engineer from one of these degree mills. That qualifies me for an entry level job double checking beam calcs or drafting cookie cutter site plans. Where does demand for such services arise?
>You only believe in private over public because of decades of propaganda, when the reality is the government has never subcontracted more of its work and we can't get anything fucking done!
Lol. Tell me what I believe.
I've seen how this sausage is made. I've worked in defense. Government contracts this stuff because as bad as the defense industry is government is worse.
Say it costs $100 for the government to build something or provide some service. The private sector might be able to do it for $95. Looks like a $5 cost savings, right? Sure. It is. But the real problem is that the numbers would be $61 and $60.55 if both sides were not saddled with god knows how much non-productive bloat.
And the private sector will never tell you that because they make money on the spread. Nevermind the fact that we'd all be richer if we could get more of the good or service we want in the first place. You can't eat dollars.
It's tempting to complain about regulation and red tape, but IMO those are a reflection of culture, norms and values. This is a values problem.
I am focusing on that LA water issue because that's what the discussion was initially about. I don't think fixing inefficient resource allocation is "kicking the can down the road". You should read up on just how much water is wasted every year in that region.
When you see a leaky pipe, you don't think to build a second one coming from a different faucet (with more expensive water) before fixing the first pipe. It really is that simple. But anyway, unto the larger picture.
> You're getting close. What causes the demand for these middlemen that the well capitalized financial interests (for profit schools and the like) seek to make buck creating?
> Say I get a borderline bullshit degree as a civil engineer from one of these degree mills. That qualifies me for an entry level job double checking beam calcs or drafting cookie cutter site plans. Where does demand for such services arise?
What? No, that's not the source of the bloat. Much more income is generated via capital gains than though salaries, today. Shareholders are the "middlemen" I was referring to, not the workers trying to put food on their table. Everything is inefficient because everything is designed to provide 4% growth yoy to shareholders, when this is completely impossible to achieve in a sustainable way!
Teachers in for-profit schools are severely underpaid, where do the ludicrous tuitions go? In buybacks and dividends, and other fluff like sport teams and stadiums to attract investors.
> Government contracts this stuff because as bad as the defense industry is government is worse.
I don't believe that, and I don't think you should either. For a single example, 18F was doing great work before DOGE cut them, so TurboTax could keep profiteering. Speaking of, with all the ruckus DOGE made, they just couldn't find much "waste, fraud and abuse" in public services, and just ended up slashing cheap programs on political grounds, to save face with their supporters.
> It's tempting to complain about regulation and red tape, but IMO those are a reflection of culture, norms and values. This is a values problem.
Look, ultimately, I'm a historical materialist, I believe material conditions are the source of our societal structure, and "values" as you say. Culture doesn't grow in a vacuum, these issues don't just spontaneously arise. They are consequences of how our societies were structured yesterday, and our societies let capital concentrate more and more in fewer and fewer hands, with zero checks and balances.
Our current world is one of all-powerful capital, that has grown to wield tremendous power, and has permeated every facet of our governance, media and way of thinking. It's not a coincidence that all those regulations and red tape end up benefitting private contractors, who charge more and more for less and less in return. The purpose of a system is what it does, and what our system does is transferring our public money into private hands.
It's why you end up with suicide nets on the Golden Gate billed at half the price of the damn bridge (adjusted to inflation), or single-use missiles at 15M a piece.
It's how we're unable to get a single politician willing to stand up to water rights holders in California, to correct an obviously inefficient allocation of natural resources. Everything is done to keep any threats to the interests of capital away. See how much vitriol someone like Mamdani receives from both sides, simply for not being 100% at the heels of capital.
It's not only energy though. Desalination takes space, and you have to do something with the salt. Last I saw, to have enough DeSal capacity for all of California, you'd have to replace every beach with DeSal plants to have enough capacity, and then you'd still have a salt problem.
You could put the salt on boats and dump it back much further out in the ocean, but that too takes energy.
> In the US at least, we've been brainwashed to think that government, by definition, must be bloated, corrupt and inefficient.
I don't know that I've been brainwashed, but living most of my life in Chicago & Los Angeles, I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency.
Many of friends lost their homes in the Palisades & Altadena fires. If it weren't tragic, it would be laughable the challenges they've faced in rebuilding. Several have kids about to enter high school. A dilemma they face is should they both building a house for their teenage children or assume they'll be off to college -- knowing it could be 3+ years until they're have a permanent home again.
In Chicago, I watched the mayor sell of all the parking meters for a fraction of their value. In Los Angeles, I'm watching them struggle to complete the people mover at LAX, a project years later & billions over budget.
This doesn't make me anti-government.
I see the need for it & I want it work well.
But comments like this make me frustrated that people would rather close their eyes & try to gaslight people, rather than acknowledge the problems & talk about how we fix them.
I feel our country is split between one side that doesn't want the government to do anything, even when it works, and another side that wants the government to do everything, even when it fails.
It's not clear to me where someone in the middle goes.
> I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency [in government].
To what extent is this due to the public nature of the organisations and to what extent is it just the size of them? Are private organisations of similar sizes free from such bloat, corruption and inefficiency?
I feel like people often give "businesses" a pass on this. Government projects that are over budget, especially IT-related ones are widely and publicly bemoaned, but this isn't that much different from such projects in private enterprises (although the moaning remains more within the company itself).
It's easy to give businesses a pass on internal inefficiency because you don't typically need to do business with any particular company in order to live your life and businesses don't tax you in order to pay for that inefficiency like governments do. If a business is inefficient and has projects that go over budget, that's not my problem in the same way it is if the city government where I live does.
It's more about making a fair assessment of whether servicing a market via private or public enterprises is more or less efficient. What you mention is a comparison between different markets, not a fair comparison of the same market run either publicly or privately. Health care insurance companies definitely "tax" you for their inefficiencies (through higher costs) and they are definitely something you "need to do business with".
The classic "government can't do anything right"-trope is quite strong and influences voting and policy making. My hypothesis is that the reality is closer to "cooperating with many many people in big organisations is very very hard to do efficiently".
Health insurance is so regulated and so intertwined with public policy aims, that ostensibly private health care companies are themselves essentially an arm of the government. Indeed, the fact that I "have to do business with" them is itself a consequence of particularly-complicated government regulation. The American health insurance system is one of the most unpleasant (sets of) bureaucracies I personally have to deal with, especially because I have changed jobs a lot recently which entails losing and then regaining employer-benefit insurance (which itself really annoys me - I wish I could just pay for ordinary health care in a way completely unrelated to my job and that my job had nothing to do with). I don't have a grand theory of how best to reform the entire American health insurance system, but I'm in favor of doing so; and I suspect that a better system would look a lot more like removing the insurance component of it in more contexts, and having more medical procedures paid for out of pocket at point of use by ordinary people - which is something I try to do right now anyway when I can.
> I have changed jobs a lot recently which entails losing and then regaining employer-benefit insurance
COBRA is always an option when you leave a job and don't have another one lined up that will give you another insurance plan without a gap.
Yes, it's annoying to have to make the switch in general to a new employer's plan, since your existing slate of doctors might not be covered by your new plan, deductibles reset, and you have to navigate a new-to-you bureaucracy.
> I wish I could just pay for ordinary health care in a way completely unrelated to my job and that my job had nothing to do with
You can, you just aren't going to like the price tag. ACA marketplace plans are open to everyone, even if your employer offers health insurance. You can always decline the latter and sign up for your own plan. Depending on where you live, you might be able to get a barebones plan for as low as $350/mo, but in some markets your cheapest option could be hundreds of dollars more. And that's going to be a HMO-type plan with a high deductible, so you'll be paying out of pocket to the tune of thousands of dollars for anything other than preventative care, and your choice of providers will be limited. If you want something similar to what an established tech company offers (for example), you'll be paying north of $1k/mo in most situations.
(Source: our COBRA just ran out a couple months ago, we don't have jobs that offer health insurance, and I went down this rabbit hole and spent hours researching options.)
> I don't have a grand theory of how best to reform the entire American health insurance system, but I'm in favor of doing so
I'm with you there. What we have sucks. We (or our employers, which we end up paying for indirectly) pay much more for care than people in other developed nations with socialized medicine, and our outcomes are not meaningfully better, or at least not anywhere near better enough to justify the added cost.
> more medical procedures paid for out of pocket at point of use by ordinary people - which is something I try to do right now anyway when I can
That's good that you're able to, but in the absence of an insurance system, and no state-supported subsidy, healthcare would be something only a relatively privileged few would be able to afford in the US.
While our private insurance system does cause inefficiencies that raise the price of care, eliminating it won't solve enough of the cost problem to matter.
I don't think there are better options than some sort of single-payer, government-subsidized healthcare system. Those systems do of course have their flaws (some of them quite significant), but they tend to provide care to everyone more or less equally, with generally good outcomes, and completely avoid the problem of people facing a choice between foregoing needed care and bankruptcy.
> Indeed, the fact that I "have to do business with" them is itself a consequence of particularly-complicated government regulation.
No, it isn't. Life without health insurance (in some form) is awful.
> I suspect that a better system would look a lot more like removing the insurance component of it in more contexts, and having more medical procedures paid for out of pocket at point of use by ordinary people - which is something I try to do right now anyway when I can.
Getting cancer is like winning the shit lottery and you're effectively saying that people should just "save for if that happens or die of they don't". The fucked up health insurance system in the US makes medical bankruptcies a thing. Your idea here turbocharges that.
More importantly, you ignored the main point in my reply. Please respond to this:
"It's more about making a fair assessment of whether servicing a market via private or public enterprises is more or less efficient. What you mention is a comparison between different markets, not a fair comparison of the same market run either publicly or privately.
[...]
The classic "government can't do anything right"-trope is quite strong and influences voting and policy making. My hypothesis is that the reality is closer to "cooperating with many many people in big organisations is very very hard to do efficiently"."
> If a business is inefficient and has projects that go over budget, that's not my problem in the same way it is if the city government where I live does.
Right, but if someone’s point is that bloated government should be replaced by lean, efficient companies, then it does matter whether they are actually lean and efficient.
One issue with private, for-profit organizations is their major focus is “creating shareholder value”, which is apparently the modern way of saying “making money”. That, along with competition (if applicable, see below), drives them towards minimizing costs, increasing efficiency, and innovating.
Government has the major focus of taking money, and largely spending it arbitrarily. It’s inarguable that the US Federal Government is bloated, corrupt, and vastly inefficient. Despite taking in $trillions in revenue every year, the US has $40 trillion in debt. That’s utterly inexcusable, and heads should roll.
Getting back to the discussion about private enterprise, would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly? I would not, though I’ll admit I have no data on the corruption aspect…
Often "minimizing costs" for a for-profit organization means providing worse services to their customers, though.
> would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly?
It's funny you should bring this up in the context of healthcare. Amazon acquired One Medical a few years ago. Within no more a year, One Medical got so much worse. Harder to book appointments, wait times increasing, and care team not responding to in-app messages as quickly. (And sometimes being significantly less helpful than they used to be; e.g. "you don't need a recommendation or a referral for a general surgeon since you're on a PPO; just look through UCSF Health's directory and pick one". And this, after I specifically asked for a recommendation, twice. Not to mention most of UCSF's departments will turn you away without a referral, regardless of what kind of insurance you have.)
So I don't know if Amazon is bloated, corrupt, or inefficient, but Amazon acquiring what used to be a genuinely useful medical group made it much, much worse, and I assume that was all in the name of "minimizing costs".
Amazon also owns whole foods and it seems to be doing just fine. Maybe not the exact same as when it launched, but in many places it is one of the best places around to buy groceries.
One Medical, I had before/after Amazon and was never that impressed. They had nice offices and a good booking system, but the GPs were a couple notches above webmd IMO.
> That, along with competition (if applicable, see below), drives them towards minimizing costs, increasing efficiency, and innovating.
Highly debatable. Not making a profit on paper (or moving it to low tax-environments) is a great way to dodge paying taxes. Innovation is a side effect of competition, not of profit-seeking. Plenty of examples of oligopolies and monopolies where innovation ground to a halt in favor of siloization, buying up competitors, dark patterns, regulatory capture, etc.
The right way too look at this is that the organisation of private industry creates a selection pressure on "making money" (not profit!), with the minimum being "able to cover costs" and thus stimulates evolution of strategies to do so. Like in biological evolution, there are many, many pathological situations that can occur.
> Government has the major focus of taking money, and largely spending it arbitrarily.
This is false. The US is a bad example because it has an incredibly corrupt political system, especially since Citizens United. In general in most modern developed democracies spending by the government is supported democratically to a very large extent. That is not to say that 80% of citizens support each bit of spending, but for 95% of the things where money is spent by the government, a majority agrees that money needs to be spent there. The word "arbitrarily" is definitely not warranted.
> would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly?
Don't know, yes, and don't know.
For corruption, I think it is necessary to determine how it would even look like for Amazon. Corruption in government is often "favoring entities friendly to the people making the decisions over objectively better options". I'd argue that that is wholly accepted in private enterprises and even encouraged. A "quid pro quo" in private enterprise is just "a business deal" or "customer relations". "Nepotism" is just "helping your friends out". Etc.
I would assume that things like that are very, very common within Amazon.
With regard to bloated/inefficient: This is incredibly hard to make definitive statements on without having worked there and having a lot of intimate knowledge, so I'll refrain from doing so. I think it is, but I don't know.
Also, whether an organization (private or public) is bloated and inefficient is often only a reference to what you think the goal of the organization is.
If the goal of the USPS was to turn a profit, then serving rural addresses is inefficient and the jobs and infrastructure to do so is bloat. Luckily that’s not the goal of the USPS.
I hesitate to mention Mamdani in this forum but it seems like he has done a lot to make NYC’s government “more efficient” in many ways. But also many people disagree on who that government should primarily serve.
I feel that a lot of government spending on roads is inefficient and would be better spent on transit systems. Many people disagree with my values tho.
Stop voting for politicians who keep starting pointless unwinnable wars and you can cut the military budget in half. Boom, 10% of the expenses gone, and $500B less of a budget deficit. Tax some billionaires and it'll be net-positive in no time.
No kidding. Eliminating the federal deficit isn't particularly difficult in mathematical terms; the political will just isn't there, and both Democrats and Republicans can blame the other party when they're in power for out of control spending.
(At least the Democrats seem to be more open to actually taxing to make up for shortfalls, unlike Republicans.)
Your government clearly is dysfunctional (at least the part that is supposed to serve the ordinary citizens). But look around the world and you can see that it doesn't have to be that way.
Also, in the US, there are a lot of forces who see the government straight-up as the enemy and want to have it as dysfunctional as possible. It's where "starve the beast" and DOGE comes from.
2. You have been brainwashed into thinking that government is bloated, corrupt and inefficient.
If I believe that government is dysfunctional... then surely that belief is informed by the observation that my government is bloated, corrupt and inefficient, not due to brainwashing?
I never said government should be in charge of everything or claimed our current government to be perfect. I’m pointing out the prevailing ideology (especially among HN and the rich) that government is incapable of being efficient so we don’t even try. Then we hand over critical services to private enterprise with no checks and balances.
Our current ideology is so skewed toward “gov bad” that the first step toward moderation is acknowledging that it’s possible for government to do things well in the first place.
I really like this comment. Yes, it's the worst of both worlds: the right says that government is inefficient, I told you so; the left says it's the only solution to solve many social issues. Unfortunately they're both right and wrong.
I'm very familiar with New York politics, and I watch in slow motion while enormous amounts of money disappear into government salaries and pensions, programs that go nowhere, and corruption where no one is held accountable. I can give examples of any of these but the school system is one - it's the highest per-pupil cost almost anywhere in the U.S. but has some of the lowest standardized scores. The last two mayors were corrupt, one with his wife who received almost 2B on a program that went unaccounted for (look up ThriveNYC), had a friend in the ferry system that he funneled money to; the mayor after that was a borderline banana republic leader in terms of corruption.
On the other hand, look at construction costs. We know that despite the supposed high costs of doing business in Europe, and the high costs of places like Japan, that building subway/metro infrastructure costs 3-4 times in New York what it costs in Tokyo, London or Paris. Why is that?
So I have two theories to explain what's overall going on here:
1. Local government. I think local government was a great idea in 17th century philosophy; in practice look at how efficient countries like Japan and France are at providing healthcare and excellent infrastructure. And how much cheaper they do it. Those are strong, central governments without layers to worry about. In the U.S., you have NIMBY community councils, cities, counties, states and the federal government, all with a say in it. Then you have lawsuits, organizations that span states, etc. And those people are elected officials who have no interest in what happens to US in 10 or 20 years. They care about their election cycle and terms. In my opinion, local government is evil as a result of what I see here compared to overseas.
2. Others have said it - the influence of big business. What is illegal in those other countries as bribery or undue influence in electoral process, is legal, a 1st Amendment right and called "lobbying" in the U.S. This is why the Democrats will talk a big talk about identity politics to get elected, but they can't talk about a Medicare for All to get elected, because their sponsors block it (unless you're a fringe politician like what just happened in Michigan).
> building subway/metro infrastructure costs 3-4 times in New York what it costs in Tokyo, London or Paris. Why is that
The NYC subway is one of the few (the only one?) to run 24/7, and it is one of the largest in the world. Construction is expensive because the operators choose to make it expensive. Digging giant new tunnels under existing skyscrapers also isn't exactly easy.
Yeah there's corruption and waste, but not to the order-of-magnitude level.
The 24/7 thing on the NYC subway costing so much has always been the tagline... I don't buy it.
The costs of running the NYC subway are no more unique than any other large city, some argue shutting down/starting up would be just as expensive.
The subway daddy[1] was my last straw at having any hope that it would be fixed in my lifetime, it is clear the people running it do not want any part of NYC subway "fixed".
But then they do maintenance on weekends. No one works or uses the trains on the weekends, right? It's at 3 am weekdays that it should be running. Nevermind at that those hours it's infrequent and essentially a homeless shelter.
The problems the UAE has are not based on Iran attacking the UAE but Iran closing the Strait - which is a direct and foreseeable result of Israel attacking Iran.
Finding myself in the awkward position of defending Saudi Arabia here, but this is not at all a consensus of the political analysis community.
Relying on statements by the Trump administration as proof of this makes it even more spurious.
That said, MBS has done worse and it's not impossible, but alignment with UAE is faltering more and more so it's possible even if they once favored that action by the US they no longer hold the same view.
I am not claiming Saudis want what's best for the region, only that, even if they wanted war with Iran, they likely now no longer do, or at least would like the conflict to wrap up due to the heavy costs its inflicted on the region.
UAE will see the the whole region burn if it means MBZ can keep his seat.
Sure, but the Saudi Crown prince comments seem reasonable, and don’t seem to have been denied by the Saudi’s
Regardless, my point was that people have a political axe to grind and call this “Israel’s war”.
They intentionally ignore the political realities that the Iranians have pissed off almost everyone in the region and the longstanding tension of the IRGC and the US and our new “Cold War” with China.
> The fact that this question needs asking tells a lot about how other countries see the current administration.
Not really. You just weren't paying attention before. To wit, countries (including Germany!) have been questioning the safety of storing gold in the United State long before the Trump administration.
1. extremely price sensitive; zoho is regarded as expensive
2. 121 major languages in active/business use, with 22 formally recognised by government. These people may understand limited english.
3. 28 unique states plus 8 unique territories.
so in many ways its like expanding across the US, except there are 22 languages as well as 36 state law regimes, plus federal law, and then indian city law, transfer pricing regimes, currency settlement issues... etc.
China is also possible, but still price sensitive and strongly culturally prefers local solutions
- Business law is in its infancy and local courts excessively favour the Indian side. In the event of a dispute, enforcing the terms of the contract can be very complicated or even illusory.
- Banking and insurance services are complicated, slow and expensive.
- There is not one but many different sets of legislation per province. There
are gaps in the legislation and it is necessary to go through a long compliance process based on the manufacturer's or supplier's legislation, involving translation, negotiation, etc.
- Each time there is a change in decision-makers, at least part of the process must be repeated.
I work for an energy company and we have a team that has been working on an Indian project for almost ten years, without the project really seeming to have progressed.
The Indian market is a bottomless pit if you don't have a very high-ranking political sponsor in the Indian government.
When Google first launched it's homepage, its emptiness (just a logo & search box) was a stark contrast to the portal pages popular, which were loaded with content.
Some thought the Google homepage "sucked" whereas other liked it. (I was in the latter.)
Likewise, the interface for Gmail. Or the interface for Google Maps. Or the interface for Chrome.
I remember when Google appeared and literally can't recall anyone who thought it sucked. There statistically have to be some people who hated it. But everyone I knew was either on dial-up or low bitrate leased line and it was impossible to dislike that design.
But not everyone was on dial-up. A lot were in dorms w/ (for the time) high speed connections or workplaces with it.
Remember at the time it wasn't clear that search was going to be the dominate pattern for how people found information on the web. It seems crazy now, but in the early days of the web, the space was small enough that a directory-style approach worked pretty well. It was Yahoo's directory that made it initially popular, not its search.
And so there was a fair bit of debate on which was better -- something like a directory + search (a la Yahoo!) vs just search.
It took a bit of time before search proved if it was done really well, you didn't need a directory.
And all that it takes to turn seawater into potable freshwater is energy.
We don't have a water problem. We have an energy problem.
For all of LA County, it would take 500–750 MW each year to use seawater for all our freshwater needs.
Or put another, with a single nuclear power plant, we would solve all LA's freshwater needs -- forever.
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