4 ms·

Maybe they can redirect all this wonderful behavioral science to train the politicians to actually care about ordinary lower-income citizens so they can fix the

Maybe they can redirect all this wonderful behavioral science to train the politicians to actually care about ordinary lower-income citizens so they can fix the fucking pipes instead of placing the responsibility on tax-payers by teaching them songs and dances about when to change their filters or devising clever tricks on how their can regain their "trust".

noir_lord 10y ago
Spending money collected from people with a higher income/net worth sensibly on people disadvantaged by a system that disadvantaged the lower income/net worth people by its very existence....that sounds a lot like Socialism. Also yes I agree, safe potable water in the worlds richest country should not be an issue in 2017. I also think that natural monopolies should be heavily state governed if not state owned.
- sp332 10y ago
  The water supply was state-governed. The Flint City Council voted to approve switching water sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis#Switching_to_a_new_water_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis#Switching_t...
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    Yep and that's a problem, I think the solution there is harsher penalties actually enforced, if you need to increase the salary to make people take that job then so be it. Other countries do infrastructure better and have water that is demonstrably better than in a lot of places in the US.
    - virmundi 10y ago
      Please keep in mind that the US water supply naturally has higher concentrations of pollutants than many other countries. We also have a higher population drinking straight from the water table pump. It makes it hard to do a direct comparison since other countries don't have to do as much. https://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/trace/pubs/gw_v38n4/ https://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/trace/pubs/gw_v38n4/
  - mattnewton 10y ago
    I generally agree with gp, but if this had happened and a private company was to blame, you'd bet there would be criminal and civil suits being brought by the government. Perhaps the issue here isn't accountability but ability to do the change properly.
- mladenkovacevic 10y ago
  Yeah god forbid everyone invests their fair share in building a fairer and better society. Crony capitalism is like a flesh eating disease. It encourages everyone to look solely after their own individual interests. Then once a portion of society is exploited and impoverished by the greedier part of society to the point of becoming a burden on them, the rich want to "cut them off" or let them rot away. The cycle then repeats, until very few are left at the top extremely wealthy and powerful, but with no middle class left to exploit.
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    That seems to be the pattern yes, it's not like any of this is new either, political theory and treatises from centuries ago show this recurring cycle of the concentration of power (whether that's direct power, soft power or power via wealth) followed by gross abuses of that power and then systemic change (ranging from chopping the head off the nearest king through to the fall of the soviet union). Not sure what the solution is or that there is any single solution, wealth inequality seems to beget greater wealth inequality.
mladenkovacevic 10y ago
Another paragraph that reeks of moderate-liberal propaganda: "A young man said, “I think the concern is that because we’re a Hispanic community we’re not going to have the same help.” His parents had brought him to Michigan from Mexico, at the age of ten. More than a decade later, in 2012, he’d become a beneficiary of Obama’s program for undocumented immigrants who had come to the country as children; it protected him from deportation, if only temporarily. Now, he said, besides the hazardous water, he feared immigration raids. “They already have all my information,” he explained. “I don’t have any criminal record. . . . I don’t have any tickets, no drinking and driving.” But he was concerned about his children, who, after they saw Trump on TV talking about mass deportations, asked him, “What’s going to happen to us?” Really, it protected him from deportation? How wonderful. I guess it didn't protect the other 2.5 million people who were deported which, by the way, is the largest number of deportations under any president. The other part of that paragraph is probably correct - things definitely aren't going to get any better under Trump, but you can blame that on the Democrats and their dishonest approach with governing. They'd rather invest in white-washing their legacy than make an honest attempt at fulfilling their "progressive" platform promises. And I suspect this is the reason behind much of this article as well.
- rashkov 10y ago
  This "most deportations under any president" thing is a result of them starting to count instances of turning people away at the border as a "deportation".
  - mladenkovacevic 10y ago
    No actually the 2.5 million doesn't include turn-aways or self-deportation which both add to the final number.
    - loafa 10y ago
      So why did people act shocked when Trump said he was gonna deport all of them? If we can deport 2.5 million without anyone really noticing, surely deporting eleven million is only five times harder and thus perfectly achievable?
gbelford 10y ago
You're assuming that Maya and her team had the power to do so in the first place. And even if they did, they wouldn't be able to revert a situation that had already been happening for years and years. There's a lot more complexity to the issue than you make it seem. Her work is pretty fascinating tbh. I'd recommend a deeper look.
- mladenkovacevic 10y ago
  No, clearly she's not a waterworks engineer. Not critiquing her work specifically, but if she has no power to reverse a situation why do a 10,000 word article on her work. I am criticizing the role of media in the service of preserving status quo, which has an interest in selling the story of the benevolent behavioural scientist that can "ease the suffering" on a budget, rather than doing a deep-dive in the root causes of the problem and how to prevent it in the future, or what can be done to truly solve it now (lots and lots of money). You can accuse me of "reading too much into it" or "being overly selective in order to reinforce my worldview", but I'm not the one who decided to publish an article titled "CAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE HELP IN FLINT?"
loafa 10y ago
> actually care about ordinary lower-income citizens You're making this a class-war thing, but it's not like politicians care about any other kind of citizens either. They sure as shit don't give a fuck about ordinary middle-income or ordinary high-income citizens either, not unless they've arranged themselves into politically powerful groups.
- mladenkovacevic 10y ago
  In general terms you are right, but at its lowest level there exists at least a division between the owners of the means of production, and the workers. I believe the workers themselves are further divided into two classes - those favoured by the owners and those who are seen as disposable. The owners invest in any means that will reassert the legitimacy of their dominance. That includes purchasing political influence sometimes by paying directly into the political apparatus and other times by manipulating the workers into giving consent to the policies they prefer.

noir_lord 10y ago

Spending money collected from people with a higher income/net worth sensibly on people disadvantaged by a system that disadvantaged the lower income/net worth people by its very existence....that sounds a lot like Socialism. Also yes I agree, safe potable water in the worlds richest country should not be an issue in 2017. I also think that natural monopolies should be heavily state governed if not state owned.

sp332 10y ago
The water supply was state-governed. The Flint City Council voted to approve switching water sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis#Switching_to_a_new_water_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis#Switching_t...
- noir_lord 10y ago
  Yep and that's a problem, I think the solution there is harsher penalties actually enforced, if you need to increase the salary to make people take that job then so be it. Other countries do infrastructure better and have water that is demonstrably better than in a lot of places in the US.
  - virmundi 10y ago
    Please keep in mind that the US water supply naturally has higher concentrations of pollutants than many other countries. We also have a higher population drinking straight from the water table pump. It makes it hard to do a direct comparison since other countries don't have to do as much. https://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/trace/pubs/gw_v38n4/ https://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/trace/pubs/gw_v38n4/
- mattnewton 10y ago
  I generally agree with gp, but if this had happened and a private company was to blame, you'd bet there would be criminal and civil suits being brought by the government. Perhaps the issue here isn't accountability but ability to do the change properly.
mladenkovacevic 10y ago
Yeah god forbid everyone invests their fair share in building a fairer and better society. Crony capitalism is like a flesh eating disease. It encourages everyone to look solely after their own individual interests. Then once a portion of society is exploited and impoverished by the greedier part of society to the point of becoming a burden on them, the rich want to "cut them off" or let them rot away. The cycle then repeats, until very few are left at the top extremely wealthy and powerful, but with no middle class left to exploit.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  That seems to be the pattern yes, it's not like any of this is new either, political theory and treatises from centuries ago show this recurring cycle of the concentration of power (whether that's direct power, soft power or power via wealth) followed by gross abuses of that power and then systemic change (ranging from chopping the head off the nearest king through to the fall of the soviet union). Not sure what the solution is or that there is any single solution, wealth inequality seems to beget greater wealth inequality.

mladenkovacevic 10y ago

Another paragraph that reeks of moderate-liberal propaganda: "A young man said, “I think the concern is that because we’re a Hispanic community we’re not going to have the same help.” His parents had brought him to Michigan from Mexico, at the age of ten. More than a decade later, in 2012, he’d become a beneficiary of Obama’s program for undocumented immigrants who had come to the country as children; it protected him from deportation, if only temporarily. Now, he said, besides the hazardous water, he feared immigration raids. “They already have all my information,” he explained. “I don’t have any criminal record. . . . I don’t have any tickets, no drinking and driving.” But he was concerned about his children, who, after they saw Trump on TV talking about mass deportations, asked him, “What’s going to happen to us?” Really, it protected him from deportation? How wonderful. I guess it didn't protect the other 2.5 million people who were deported which, by the way, is the largest number of deportations under any president. The other part of that paragraph is probably correct - things definitely aren't going to get any better under Trump, but you can blame that on the Democrats and their dishonest approach with governing. They'd rather invest in white-washing their legacy than make an honest attempt at fulfilling their "progressive" platform promises. And I suspect this is the reason behind much of this article as well.

rashkov 10y ago
This "most deportations under any president" thing is a result of them starting to count instances of turning people away at the border as a "deportation".
- mladenkovacevic 10y ago
  No actually the 2.5 million doesn't include turn-aways or self-deportation which both add to the final number.
  - loafa 10y ago
    So why did people act shocked when Trump said he was gonna deport all of them? If we can deport 2.5 million without anyone really noticing, surely deporting eleven million is only five times harder and thus perfectly achievable?

gbelford 10y ago

You're assuming that Maya and her team had the power to do so in the first place. And even if they did, they wouldn't be able to revert a situation that had already been happening for years and years. There's a lot more complexity to the issue than you make it seem. Her work is pretty fascinating tbh. I'd recommend a deeper look.

mladenkovacevic 10y ago
No, clearly she's not a waterworks engineer. Not critiquing her work specifically, but if she has no power to reverse a situation why do a 10,000 word article on her work. I am criticizing the role of media in the service of preserving status quo, which has an interest in selling the story of the benevolent behavioural scientist that can "ease the suffering" on a budget, rather than doing a deep-dive in the root causes of the problem and how to prevent it in the future, or what can be done to truly solve it now (lots and lots of money). You can accuse me of "reading too much into it" or "being overly selective in order to reinforce my worldview", but I'm not the one who decided to publish an article titled "CAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE HELP IN FLINT?"

loafa 10y ago

> actually care about ordinary lower-income citizens You're making this a class-war thing, but it's not like politicians care about any other kind of citizens either. They sure as shit don't give a fuck about ordinary middle-income or ordinary high-income citizens either, not unless they've arranged themselves into politically powerful groups.

mladenkovacevic 10y ago
In general terms you are right, but at its lowest level there exists at least a division between the owners of the means of production, and the workers. I believe the workers themselves are further divided into two classes - those favoured by the owners and those who are seen as disposable. The owners invest in any means that will reassert the legitimacy of their dominance. That includes purchasing political influence sometimes by paying directly into the political apparatus and other times by manipulating the workers into giving consent to the policies they prefer.