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Two things this makes me think of. 1. The US has a large NIH attitude and is unwilling to adopt overseas experience or standards. 2. Somehow we have to move a

• Ididntdothis 7y ago
  “The US has a large NIH attitude and is unwilling to adopt overseas experience or standards.” This indeed seems to be a problem. The US always wants to lead and if something works better somewhere else there is always the excuse “we are too big/spread out/not socialists” or something else. Or it just gets ignored. See healthcare or internet availability.
  • bin0 7y ago
    > internet availability Remind me again, which nation has produced companies with a realistic chance of delivering satellite internet to every one?
    • Ididntdothis 7y ago
      There are plenty of countries that have cheaper and better internet right now.
      • bin0 7y ago
        Most of them are much smaller, meaning there is significantly less distance to cover. Of course you can get fiber to the home every where when you have a small nation. Let's look at larger nations: Canada has worse broadband but better mobile [0][1]. I'd attribute this to population density: most of their population is fairly close to our border because the rest is a frozen wasteland. Russia has worse speeds by far, and the certain things simply are not accessible due to being blocked. No, we're not South Korea, but S. Korea is small with most people living in a very concentrated area. Again, no other nation has companies with excellent chances of setting up satellite network infrastructure, which is a good solution for a nation as big and spread-out as America. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinmurnane/2016/09/15/comparing-internet-access-speeds-in-canada-mexico-and-the-united-states/#31a949661039 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinmurnane/2016/09/15/compari... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds#Average_connection_speeds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...
        • Ididntdothis 7y ago
          I live in LA which as far as I can tell is pretty densely populated. I have one provider to choose from (Spectrum) at $70 for 100mbps. That's it. Why is there no competition in this area?
          • bin0 7y ago
            The feds make ISPs spend money on rural areas which aren't really profitable; that's likely a part of it. But there's no competition because there are a limited number of lines available; they can't tear up the street for every one that wants to.
  • rayiner 7y ago
    The US has about the same number of broadband subscriptions per household as Sweden. US wired broadband speeds are also in the top 10 in Akamai’s ranking.
    • Ididntdothis 7y ago
      And the cost in Sweden is around half of the US.
      • rayiner 7y ago
        It looks like Bahnhhof is $43/month for gigabit, compared to $70-80 in the US for Verizon or AT&T. But income is 50% higher in the US, so in terms of affordability the difference isn’t as big. (Remember, fiber service isn’t a product mass-manufactured in China. Everyone from the guy laying fiber to the guy doing tech support is getting paid much higher US salaries, not lower Swedish salaries.)
        • Ididntdothis 7y ago
          Sweden median income is 37000 per person ca 45000 in the US. But let’s close this. I am sure you will find a justification for US health care costs too.
• smhinsey 7y ago
  Roundabouts seem to bypass American NIH and get straight to our native anti-intellectualism. Probably the most common comment I hear from people encountering them for the first time is that they are too hard to figure out. To be fair, signage can be very poor, but still.
  • LanceH 7y ago
    We just got one in my area. It's obviously the first time many people have seen one. And as you said, they are too hard for some people to figure out on the first time. I've seen people stopping in the traffic circle in places that don't even make sense to stop, under any circumstances. There is too much signage, if anything, and the left lane sign indicates it is for a left turn (not a sickle shaped, 270 degree left turn). Thankfully I haven't seen anyone making a left. One problem with traffic circles is they require a wider carve out in what would be the corners of a 4-way stop. This involves eminent domain or prior government ownership; either making retrofitting difficult.
    • kiliantics 7y ago
      Compared with most European countries, the bar for being granted a driver's licence in the US is extremely low. It makes sense that it would be this way, given how difficult life is without a car in most places here, but I am often shocked at the standard of driving. In particular, the level of disregard for users of the road who are not in cars. But then, that also makes sense, since many people do not have much experience with using the road without a car.
      • bin0 7y ago
        Not exactly. In America, distances are too long for bikes to effectively cover in most places that are not the east and west coasts. However, this also means that when inconsiderate bicyclists max out at 20-25mph on a 55mph road, they slow every one else down too (even those in cars). When you fail to drive the speed of traffic and slow every one else down, you have no business on the road and are a hazard. Bicyclists ought to stay off roads faster than they can ride.
• zach_garwood 7y ago
  > Nobody likes state run agencies and everyone loves defunding them. I think you've hit the nail on the head. Ever since Saint Reagan said, "Government isn't the solution to our problem; government is the problem," people believe that any sort of dedicated government oversight is "bad." But the reality is, unless you carve out an agency/committee/trust to manage long-term projects, the oversight for it falls to the whims of whoever happens to be in office at the time.
  • dcolkitt 7y ago
    I think you need to understand this from the perspective of those of us who lean fiscally conservative. Large government projects like The Big Dig and Second Avenue Subway have a history in this country of being horribly mismanaged and wasting enormous amounts of money. And you're basically arguing that this augurs that we should be funding these projects more not less. Analogously imagine you have a relative who gets sloppy drunk and wreaks havoc every time he's around alcohol. Then he makes the argument that it's because he doesn't have enough alcohol. That maybe if he had a constant secure supply he wouldn't feel the need to binge every time he gets his hand on a bottle of vodka. I'm not saying that your argument is wrong. But poorly run government projects prima facie justify less government spending not more. If you want to make the case that it's the opposite, there's a pretty high burden of proof.
    • acollins1331 7y ago
      No, the idea is that you actually need to properly fund and train the people overseeing the projects. Fiscal conservatives have been understaffing executive offices for years and then point at them when they fail. The DMV wouldn't suck if they just gave a bit more money and hired more people, but it will suck forever because everyone thinks it just sucks because Lol government sucks.
      • enraged_camel 7y ago
        Exactly. Underfunding agencies and programs, then blaming them when they inevitably fail and using that failure as an argument to push for privatization has been the Republican modus operandi for several decades now.
• stellar678 7y ago
  Right on! Was just driving Oakland to Sacramento last week and lamenting the fact there isn’t a semi-high speed train tracking the freeways all the way out there. So much of our exurban sprawl puts people on 2 hour commutes along that route, seems like a perfect candidate for an incremental rail system.
  • AlotOfReading 7y ago
    There's already the ACE commuter train running Stockton to Santa Clara / SJ, but the hours are terrible.
  • mateo411 7y ago
    It does seem like a good idea. Happily, this already exists. https://www.capitolcorridor.org https://www.capitolcorridor.org
    • stellar678 7y ago
      Yeah, Capitol Corridor is great! I wonder what it would take to convert a bunch of those folks who jam up 80 and 680 every day into riders ... I suppose it’s more complicated than just moving the right-of-way and stations into the more populated areas.
      • hapless 7y ago
        Well, why didn’t you ride it? The central problem in traffic congestion is all those other drivers ;)
        • stellar678 7y ago
          Off peak travel time, and my destination was waaaay past Sacramento. For journeys like that, a two lane highway would be totally adequate. But the massive crush of traffic at commute time is another story... The observation was really about freeways being built on valuable land taken under eminent domain by the state while passenger rail is mostly relegated to being a second class citizen on freight routes laid out 150 years ago.
• buckminster 7y ago
  Yet there's no shortage of foreign talent. A friend works for a major engineering firm in the US. At one point his office had thirty engineers and technicians. They came from thirty different countries and none were American. The dysfunction seems to be at a higher level.
  • mncharity 7y ago
    > The dysfunction seems to be at a higher level. There was a recent thread, about a paid talk at blackhat, by a scam company, and the audience's pushback. It included a thought, something like, that there are communities of professionalism, and communities of "bs", and they are intertwined interestingly in companies and society. I fuzzily recall reading years ago, a comparison of subway construction management and cost in various countries. One city that worked well, had the professional expertise to manage the project within the government, able and willing to discipline contractors, and a city culture that this was an area for professionalism, not a playpen for political graft and grandstanding. Cultures have norms of "this you just don't do". A recurring example is espionage during the cold war. You might kill someone. You can certainly seduce their wife. But you don't otherwise mess with their kids. I've seen some pretty intense loathing of political subculture, from people in scientific subculture, based on conflicts in such norms (around climate change, and "this is useless research" stories). Boeing's root failure is said to have been an engineering-centered culture being displaced by another. So I'd like to see work on how subcultures negotiate and accept boundaries of influence. We frequently discuss examples: the sales team that sells software that doesn't exist, and looks to engineering to magically manifest it. And we name local phenomena, like moral hazard. But I've not seen a vocabulary and theory for discussing such at a larger scale, as instances of larger patterns. Which makes it harder to explore what boundaries might enable less dysfunctional execution of large projects. Perhaps that's one way to explore "dysfunction [...] at a higher level"?
    • selestify 7y ago
      Do you remember which talk that was?
• s1artibartfast 7y ago
  >Nobody likes state run agencies and everyone loves defunding them. I think there is a general sense of american exceptionalism when it comes to bureaucratic incompetence. It is hard for citizens to point to any well managed government agency. Sometimes this is a self fulfilling prophecy due to defunding, but more often I suspect it is due to lack of accountability and negligence. Take the CA DMV for example. No one is accountable for the horror show that is our backlogged paper based system .
• asdff 7y ago
  For #1 there were mayors literally obstructing the HSR project unless the agency chose a contractor from their town. Going back to your constituents and saying "I brought you the jobs I promised" guarantees reelection. The french offered to build the entire california hsr for a remarkably reasonable price but were turned down because local politicians wanted to score easy political points with their myopic base rather than provide infrastructure.