12 ms·

I like this attitude: "I let him know I'm here as a resource, I'm not an activist, I'm not trying to be a pain in his ass," Petersen added. "I think it's a feat

by reidjs 5y ago

I like this attitude: "I let him know I'm here as a resource, I'm not an activist, I'm not trying to be a pain in his ass," Petersen added. "I think it's a feature that government moves slowly; you don't want them to do rash things with taxpayer money. But it's a problem in the middle of a crisis." Most people see potholes on their street and publicly complain that the government is terrible and works too slowly, instead of helping their local government become less terrible by working with them.

mistrial9 5y ago
> Most people see potholes on their street and publicly complain that the government is terrible yet the 320,000 person city next door here has a TWO YEAR backlog of street fixes, I was told. Property taxes are as high as any place in the USA. There is no shortage of money, retirement 401k and medical care for city workers. Of course they also play the sub-contractor game a bit, not as bad as corporate on that one.
- ohples 5y ago
  One of the reasons might be because a lot cities in america are going bankrupt just trying to maintain all the car centric infrastructure that has been built: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6...
- mperham 5y ago
  We can't afford it. Roads are a massive treadmill of maintenance. To step back, why do we have so many square feet of road space? Why do we keep expanding highways when it is proven that it does not help? The automobile and its inefficient infrastructure is bankrupting this country. We keep building more roads rather than investing in transportation infrastructure which is far cheaper in the long run. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
  - criddell 5y ago
    > why do we have so many square feet of road space? Because that's what voters want. If true self-driving cars ever become a reality, there's going to be a big demand spike for more and bigger roads.
    - winkeltripel 5y ago
      > If true self-driving cars ever become a reality, there's going to be a big demand spike for more and bigger roads Why would there be a need for more roads? It seems like the opposite would be true: self-driving cars don't need safe following distance to each other. They could form a massive train (the more you look at self driving cars, the more they look like trains), with 1 inch of space between each vehicle. Highway lanes are so wide, that small self-driving vehicles could sit 2-across, with an inch of space between them. On-demand self-driving-cars could cut the total number of cars on the road by a big factor. Self-driving cars might never crash, so they won't need all those tons of safety equipment that each car lugs about, saving a pile of net energy.
      - ryukafalz 5y ago
        > They could form a massive train ... with 1 inch of space between each vehicle. Okay, now a deer or a moose runs onto that road during a short gap in traffic. What happens next? > the more you look at self driving cars, the more they look like trains Sure, really big trains, with a tiny fraction of the carrying capacity.
      - criddell 5y ago
        Self driving cars will eventually be significantly less expensive than current vehicles. They will be small and electric inexpensive to operate and trips will be very cheap. When the cost of a trip drops, more trips will be made. If self-driving succeeds to the point where I can send my car to pick up my dry cleaning or food without needing to be in the car, then expect the number of vehicles on the road to go up a lot. We might be able to pack two times as many cars on the road and make intersections way more efficient, but that won't be enough.
      - 5y ago
- bingohbangoh 5y ago
  California has roving black-outs [0], New Jersey can't have clean water [1], New York subways are disgusting. [2] But I'm told over and over again: "you get what you pay for." I just don't believe it anymore. Per your bit about roads, many have tried to decipher why the US has such expensive road construction and its not at all clear. We're a very bizarre outlier. It's more than just being affluent. [3,4] I'm venting a bit but its tragic that such a rich nation can't properly build anything anymore. Heck, Flint Michigan got hundreds of millions of dollars _and still doesn't have clean water_. [5] Most bizarre to me is that nobody seems that interested in where the money goes. NYC spent $1.25 billion on a mental health outreach program that has had no publicly visible effects or milestones. [6] It was made permanent this year. [7] I'm told over and over again that the problem is "not enough money" but where the hell is it going to in the first place? Why does nobody care to answer this question? [0]: https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/18/california-has-first-rolling-blackouts-in-19-years-and-everyone-faces-blame-1309757 https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/18/... [1]: https://patch.com/new-jersey/newbrunswick/high-pfoa-levels-middlesex-co-water-get-full-story https://patch.com/new-jersey/newbrunswick/high-pfoa-levels-m... [2]: https://www.amny.com/transit/nyc-subway-stations-garbage-dumps-fail-to-meet-cleaning-standards-according-to-audit-1.10437148/ https://www.amny.com/transit/nyc-subway-stations-garbage-dum... [3]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/08/why-didnt-the-2009-recovery-act-improve-the-nations-highways-and-bridges.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/08/wh... [4]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/why-we-cant-figure-out-why-infrastructure-is-so-expensive.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/why-we-cant-figure-o... [5]: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/25/717104335/5-years-after-flints-crisis-began-is-the-water-safe https://www.npr.org/2019/04/25/717104335/5-years-after-flint... [6]: https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/too-much-money-chirlane-mccrays-hands-thrivenyc https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/too-much-money-chir... [7]: https://nypost.com/2021/05/06/de-blasio-rebrands-wifes-1b-thrivenyc-makes-program-permanent/ https://nypost.com/2021/05/06/de-blasio-rebrands-wifes-1b-th...
  - Hermitian909 5y ago
    I'm having trouble tracking it down, but a few years ago congress set up an investigation into why costs are high. The investigation, which basically consisted of calling up various experts, asking them to talk for free, and compiling what they said, reported that the issue was so complicated it needed a better funded study. To my knowledge, that better funded study has not occurred. At a very broad I recall some of the items identified were: - Illegal collusion between contractors capable of expensive jobs - Illegal collusion between contractors and consultants hired by cities to help pick winning bids - No expertise in government due to cutbacks, so no ability to vet a proposal or understand the progress made (see above) - No accountability in government - No accountability for contractors in in contracts - Poorly thought out legislated process on choosing bidders - Inefficiencies in mandated working conditions (think multiple people sitting around watching a hole) - Government/private enterprise corruption These are all over simplified high level points. The dynamics here get quite complex. For example, local government often signs a contract with a local contractor wherein they are able to put in stop work orders as desired without owing payment for the time. This is very expensive for the contractors, they must pay to move heavy machinery to another job or wait while paying their workers. Delays can add millions in cost/lost revenue for the contractor. The contractor thus has to drastically increase prices to hedge against these delays. These issue touch every level of government: city, county, state, and federal. Sadly we no longer have a functional body politic capable of addressing issues of that scale.
- gamblor956 5y ago
  Fixing a pothole is significantly more work than most people think it is. Process for fixing a pothole so that it stays fixed until the next time the road is resurfaced: 1) Identify the size and depth of the pothole; if it's more than just replacing asphalt (i.e., the subsurface is damaged) than it's a significantly more involved job, otherwise... 2) Identify the appropriate asphalt mixture for the road's wear and tear, since a busy road will need a different type of asphalt from a less-traveled road. 3) Get the crew out to the pothole. 4) Clean the pothole and surrounding road so that the new asphalt patch can stick to the existing asphalt. 5a) Apply the tack coat, which will help the asphalt stick to the existing asphalt and to the subsurface. 5) Lay in and roll the asphalt. To create a seamless patch with the existing road, it will be necessary to "creep up" on the proper amount of asphalt, so this step will be repeated a number of times. 7) Block out the patch for at least 24 hours so that the asphalt can properly cure. (More expensive asphalt mixtures can be driven on within a day) 8) Send a work crew back the next day to take down the traffic cones blocking out the patch.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > There is no shortage of money, retirement 401k and medical care for city workers. Because this is a common anti-labor narrative which often turns out to be false, I should ask: Do you have any good sources or that? > Property taxes are as high as any place in the USA. There is no shortage of money Property taxes are just one form of revenue, and may not be nearly sufficient.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    a quick look at the "sunlight" document on city salaries, shows about 12,000 employees of the city overall construction coordinator: starting $76k per year, grades $80k to $98k per year construction & maintenance supervisor II: starting $98k per year, grades $100k to $120k per year construction field inspector: starting $81k per year, grades $81k to $100k per year pavement management supervisor: starting $77k per year, grades $80k to $94k per year every listed position has 401k retirement and health care benefits. why waste time proving this when urban decay is a constant, documented situation? certainly some cities have failed budgets from the 2008 era, thats true, but not in this case. this is the same city that was voted "worst unfixed potholes in the continental US" recently in some media outlet
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      Thank you. I'm not sure what the data means to you. Those look like reasonable salaries to me, though I don't work in those fields. > why waste time proving this when urban decay is a constant, documented situation? Urban decay is a meme, like urban crime. Crime is, generally speaking, at generational lows (shootings and murders are up, but that's nationwide, not urban, and those are only a fraction of crimes), but some people imagine cities infested with it. There are certainly urban problems with infrastructure, but using memes doesn't tell me what we're talking about. IME the common narrative is that lots of people, especially these days, want to cut taxes and then complain about reduced services.
      - mistrial9 5y ago
        the city mentioned in consistantly "top 10 most dangerous cities to live in the US"; there are gunshots in neighborhoods multiple times per week, with corresponding fatalities .. sometimes those not involved at all are shot, too.. similar environment to parts of Chicago I hear
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > There is no shortage of money, retirement 401k and medical care for city workers. Fixing roads (the proper way, but also slapping a bucket of asphalt in the hole and flattening it) is a physically demanding job. You need to go out there and work no matter if it's cold, raining or snowing, so the applicant pool for such a job is extremely small to begin with. The ever-growing "academization" of society (aka Boomer parents and media telling their children that only having a college degree will lead to a good life) eliminates even more of the applicant pool for all trade jobs... and the result of that is that even with some trades offering high five to sometimes six figures worth of wages, many openings go unfilled for years.
frgtpsswrdlame 5y ago
>Most people see potholes on their street and publicly complain that the government is terrible and works too slowly, instead of helping their local government become less terrible by working with them. The story here is that a CEO with 80k followers on social media tweeted about a problem, got it echoed by other prominent people with large followings and the government called him to talk about how to fix it. I'm a normal guy with an average job and wage w/ no real social media following. There is essentially nothing I can do to get local government to repair the potholes on my street - so I complain.
BurningFrog 5y ago
Oakland has a crew of Pothole Vigilantes that fix potholes, Batman style: https://www.potholevigilantes.com/ https://www.potholevigilantes.com/ Motto: "IT WOULD BE GREAT IF THE GOVERNMENT DID ITS JOB. UNTIL THEN, WE ARE HERE TO FIX OAKLAND’S STREETS" What "helping their local government become less terrible" might mean in this case I have no idea.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  ... and gun shots regularly in many neighborhoods, too.. while the city workers, managers and managers-of-managers are being paid top salary , retirement package and medical benefits for themselves and their family .. how can you think this is cool?? dystopian
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    Your complaint is that people working on difficult problems receive a decent salary and medical coverage? That seems... misplaced.
    - mistrial9 5y ago
      no actually, many people do work on "difficult problems" and do their work, while the City described, has an army of workers who are well paid, yet do not keep up with basic tasks. It seems that fixing roads is one of the oldest jobs in the civilized world, and that the city workers have found a way to get paid, and also do less and less. Their pay is quite good compared to other forms of work, while "gig work" and other abuses increase. Medical coverage is a massive shortcoming in the current US system and very much in California, so the medical benefits paid to the very same workers are an obvious sore point. What part of that is not clear?
      - gamblor956 5y ago
        Wait until you hear what people think about programmers. Bunch of lazy entitled #$#@$ADF getting paid 6 figures to make yet another social media website or regulatory arbitrage play. And they get health care, free food, and unlimited vacation on top of that, even though their app is buggy most of the time! The nerve of those guys, who do they think they are!? Fixing roads isn't as easy as you think it is. Oakland's roads are heavily used, which means that a pothole fix isn't just a matter of pouring some asphalt into the pothole. That's a temporary fix that will only last a few weeks before the patch fails. You need to clean the pothole and surrounding surface, lay in tack, lay in and roll the asphalt to make a clean patch, and you need to keep the asphalt blocked off for a day for it to cure. Oh, and you need to use the proper type of asphalt to handle the level of road traffic, and you can't get this type of asphalt at Lowes or Home Depot.
donarb 5y ago
Seattle has a phone app called "Find it, Fix it" as well as a dedicated phone number for reporting potholes and other problems. You take a picture of a pothole, maybe a description and send it off. The city promises most potholes get fixed within 3 days of receiving a report. They even have a website map showing all requests and the potholes that have been filled within the last 90 days. https://seattlecitygis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=5e2cdf9d8735428cb6405db64de6ce8e https://seattlecitygis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/ind...
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  Lots of cities have apps like that, and before they existed there were "mayor's hotlines." Boston has one, run by the mayor's hotline staff. They are exceptionally good at closing your issue without the issue being fixed. Apparently they file another ticket in the job system of the relevant city department (each department has their own completely unique system), say "done!" and close your ticket, even though the relevant department might never do anything and you have no idea of the status of that ticket, nor any way to find out. There is no way to report that the issue still exists or comment or anything. By design. They want something that looks good. Issue reported, city addressed it, done. Multiple times I have had an issue with something broken or non-functional, filed a ticket, had it closed as "fixed", sometimes it even says something like "fixed by a crew on blah blah", and I go back, take another picture, open a yet another ticket. I mention that it's the second or third or fourth time I've reported the same issue. Doesn't matter. Nobody cares. Down in NYC if you fill out a noise complaint on the city's hotline, the cops show up 30 minutes later. Boston is a city "run" by people who got the job through patronage, and are chair-warming assholes waiting for their pensions to kick in. It has something like three times the number of employees per capita compared to most other cities, and yet nothing gets done unless you know the right someone.
- i_am_proteus 5y ago
  Meanwhile, in nearby Portland, the people are (were, this is from 2017, I don't live there any more) fixing potholes that the government would not. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-15/portland-anarchist-road-care-fixes-potholes-anonymously https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-15/portland-...
freshhawk 5y ago
> I like this attitude: "I let him know I'm here as a resource, I'm not an activist, I'm not trying to be a pain in his ass," You like it? That's just a smart, well spoken way to show subservience. "I'm not an activist" ... what does that even mean? Considering what he did, the only thing that could mean in this context is "I don't consider it my place to ask for anything, all my suggestions are just ideas, not demands or anything like that". It's bowing and scraping to power at it's most plain. It was the right thing to do in this context, necessary to talk to the people he was talking to. But you like it? It just made me sad.
wolverine876 5y ago
> "I let him know I'm here as a resource, I'm not an activist, I'm not trying to be a pain in his ass," > helping their local government become less terrible by working with them Activists act, that's all it means - lots of different people doing lots of different things - they setup soup kitchens, they find housing, they run for office, they help their local government, they push it. They do exactly what Petersen is doing. Lots of different people doing different things, some effective, some not. Petersen seems so lost in a political narrative that Peterson is poisoning a relationship with and denying all the energy and good things for our community. Petersen is, in fact, an activist.

by reidjs 5y ago

mistrial9 5y ago

> Most people see potholes on their street and publicly complain that the government is terrible yet the 320,000 person city next door here has a TWO YEAR backlog of street fixes, I was told. Property taxes are as high as any place in the USA. There is no shortage of money, retirement 401k and medical care for city workers. Of course they also play the sub-contractor game a bit, not as bad as corporate on that one.

ohples 5y ago
One of the reasons might be because a lot cities in america are going bankrupt just trying to maintain all the car centric infrastructure that has been built: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6...
mperham 5y ago
We can't afford it. Roads are a massive treadmill of maintenance. To step back, why do we have so many square feet of road space? Why do we keep expanding highways when it is proven that it does not help? The automobile and its inefficient infrastructure is bankrupting this country. We keep building more roads rather than investing in transportation infrastructure which is far cheaper in the long run. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
- criddell 5y ago
  > why do we have so many square feet of road space? Because that's what voters want. If true self-driving cars ever become a reality, there's going to be a big demand spike for more and bigger roads.
  - winkeltripel 5y ago
    > If true self-driving cars ever become a reality, there's going to be a big demand spike for more and bigger roads Why would there be a need for more roads? It seems like the opposite would be true: self-driving cars don't need safe following distance to each other. They could form a massive train (the more you look at self driving cars, the more they look like trains), with 1 inch of space between each vehicle. Highway lanes are so wide, that small self-driving vehicles could sit 2-across, with an inch of space between them. On-demand self-driving-cars could cut the total number of cars on the road by a big factor. Self-driving cars might never crash, so they won't need all those tons of safety equipment that each car lugs about, saving a pile of net energy.
    - ryukafalz 5y ago
      > They could form a massive train ... with 1 inch of space between each vehicle. Okay, now a deer or a moose runs onto that road during a short gap in traffic. What happens next? > the more you look at self driving cars, the more they look like trains Sure, really big trains, with a tiny fraction of the carrying capacity.
    - criddell 5y ago
      Self driving cars will eventually be significantly less expensive than current vehicles. They will be small and electric inexpensive to operate and trips will be very cheap. When the cost of a trip drops, more trips will be made. If self-driving succeeds to the point where I can send my car to pick up my dry cleaning or food without needing to be in the car, then expect the number of vehicles on the road to go up a lot. We might be able to pack two times as many cars on the road and make intersections way more efficient, but that won't be enough.
    - 5y ago
bingohbangoh 5y ago
California has roving black-outs [0], New Jersey can't have clean water [1], New York subways are disgusting. [2] But I'm told over and over again: "you get what you pay for." I just don't believe it anymore. Per your bit about roads, many have tried to decipher why the US has such expensive road construction and its not at all clear. We're a very bizarre outlier. It's more than just being affluent. [3,4] I'm venting a bit but its tragic that such a rich nation can't properly build anything anymore. Heck, Flint Michigan got hundreds of millions of dollars _and still doesn't have clean water_. [5] Most bizarre to me is that nobody seems that interested in where the money goes. NYC spent $1.25 billion on a mental health outreach program that has had no publicly visible effects or milestones. [6] It was made permanent this year. [7] I'm told over and over again that the problem is "not enough money" but where the hell is it going to in the first place? Why does nobody care to answer this question? [0]: https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/18/california-has-first-rolling-blackouts-in-19-years-and-everyone-faces-blame-1309757 https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/18/... [1]: https://patch.com/new-jersey/newbrunswick/high-pfoa-levels-middlesex-co-water-get-full-story https://patch.com/new-jersey/newbrunswick/high-pfoa-levels-m... [2]: https://www.amny.com/transit/nyc-subway-stations-garbage-dumps-fail-to-meet-cleaning-standards-according-to-audit-1.10437148/ https://www.amny.com/transit/nyc-subway-stations-garbage-dum... [3]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/08/why-didnt-the-2009-recovery-act-improve-the-nations-highways-and-bridges.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/08/wh... [4]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/why-we-cant-figure-out-why-infrastructure-is-so-expensive.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/why-we-cant-figure-o... [5]: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/25/717104335/5-years-after-flints-crisis-began-is-the-water-safe https://www.npr.org/2019/04/25/717104335/5-years-after-flint... [6]: https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/too-much-money-chirlane-mccrays-hands-thrivenyc https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/too-much-money-chir... [7]: https://nypost.com/2021/05/06/de-blasio-rebrands-wifes-1b-thrivenyc-makes-program-permanent/ https://nypost.com/2021/05/06/de-blasio-rebrands-wifes-1b-th...
- Hermitian909 5y ago
  I'm having trouble tracking it down, but a few years ago congress set up an investigation into why costs are high. The investigation, which basically consisted of calling up various experts, asking them to talk for free, and compiling what they said, reported that the issue was so complicated it needed a better funded study. To my knowledge, that better funded study has not occurred. At a very broad I recall some of the items identified were: - Illegal collusion between contractors capable of expensive jobs - Illegal collusion between contractors and consultants hired by cities to help pick winning bids - No expertise in government due to cutbacks, so no ability to vet a proposal or understand the progress made (see above) - No accountability in government - No accountability for contractors in in contracts - Poorly thought out legislated process on choosing bidders - Inefficiencies in mandated working conditions (think multiple people sitting around watching a hole) - Government/private enterprise corruption These are all over simplified high level points. The dynamics here get quite complex. For example, local government often signs a contract with a local contractor wherein they are able to put in stop work orders as desired without owing payment for the time. This is very expensive for the contractors, they must pay to move heavy machinery to another job or wait while paying their workers. Delays can add millions in cost/lost revenue for the contractor. The contractor thus has to drastically increase prices to hedge against these delays. These issue touch every level of government: city, county, state, and federal. Sadly we no longer have a functional body politic capable of addressing issues of that scale.
gamblor956 5y ago
Fixing a pothole is significantly more work than most people think it is. Process for fixing a pothole so that it stays fixed until the next time the road is resurfaced: 1) Identify the size and depth of the pothole; if it's more than just replacing asphalt (i.e., the subsurface is damaged) than it's a significantly more involved job, otherwise... 2) Identify the appropriate asphalt mixture for the road's wear and tear, since a busy road will need a different type of asphalt from a less-traveled road. 3) Get the crew out to the pothole. 4) Clean the pothole and surrounding road so that the new asphalt patch can stick to the existing asphalt. 5a) Apply the tack coat, which will help the asphalt stick to the existing asphalt and to the subsurface. 5) Lay in and roll the asphalt. To create a seamless patch with the existing road, it will be necessary to "creep up" on the proper amount of asphalt, so this step will be repeated a number of times. 7) Block out the patch for at least 24 hours so that the asphalt can properly cure. (More expensive asphalt mixtures can be driven on within a day) 8) Send a work crew back the next day to take down the traffic cones blocking out the patch.
wolverine876 5y ago
> There is no shortage of money, retirement 401k and medical care for city workers. Because this is a common anti-labor narrative which often turns out to be false, I should ask: Do you have any good sources or that? > Property taxes are as high as any place in the USA. There is no shortage of money Property taxes are just one form of revenue, and may not be nearly sufficient.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  a quick look at the "sunlight" document on city salaries, shows about 12,000 employees of the city overall construction coordinator: starting $76k per year, grades $80k to $98k per year construction & maintenance supervisor II: starting $98k per year, grades $100k to $120k per year construction field inspector: starting $81k per year, grades $81k to $100k per year pavement management supervisor: starting $77k per year, grades $80k to $94k per year every listed position has 401k retirement and health care benefits. why waste time proving this when urban decay is a constant, documented situation? certainly some cities have failed budgets from the 2008 era, thats true, but not in this case. this is the same city that was voted "worst unfixed potholes in the continental US" recently in some media outlet
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Thank you. I'm not sure what the data means to you. Those look like reasonable salaries to me, though I don't work in those fields. > why waste time proving this when urban decay is a constant, documented situation? Urban decay is a meme, like urban crime. Crime is, generally speaking, at generational lows (shootings and murders are up, but that's nationwide, not urban, and those are only a fraction of crimes), but some people imagine cities infested with it. There are certainly urban problems with infrastructure, but using memes doesn't tell me what we're talking about. IME the common narrative is that lots of people, especially these days, want to cut taxes and then complain about reduced services.
    - mistrial9 5y ago
      the city mentioned in consistantly "top 10 most dangerous cities to live in the US"; there are gunshots in neighborhoods multiple times per week, with corresponding fatalities .. sometimes those not involved at all are shot, too.. similar environment to parts of Chicago I hear
mschuster91 5y ago
> There is no shortage of money, retirement 401k and medical care for city workers. Fixing roads (the proper way, but also slapping a bucket of asphalt in the hole and flattening it) is a physically demanding job. You need to go out there and work no matter if it's cold, raining or snowing, so the applicant pool for such a job is extremely small to begin with. The ever-growing "academization" of society (aka Boomer parents and media telling their children that only having a college degree will lead to a good life) eliminates even more of the applicant pool for all trade jobs... and the result of that is that even with some trades offering high five to sometimes six figures worth of wages, many openings go unfilled for years.

frgtpsswrdlame 5y ago

>Most people see potholes on their street and publicly complain that the government is terrible and works too slowly, instead of helping their local government become less terrible by working with them. The story here is that a CEO with 80k followers on social media tweeted about a problem, got it echoed by other prominent people with large followings and the government called him to talk about how to fix it. I'm a normal guy with an average job and wage w/ no real social media following. There is essentially nothing I can do to get local government to repair the potholes on my street - so I complain.

BurningFrog 5y ago

Oakland has a crew of Pothole Vigilantes that fix potholes, Batman style: https://www.potholevigilantes.com/ https://www.potholevigilantes.com/ Motto: "IT WOULD BE GREAT IF THE GOVERNMENT DID ITS JOB. UNTIL THEN, WE ARE HERE TO FIX OAKLAND’S STREETS" What "helping their local government become less terrible" might mean in this case I have no idea.

mistrial9 5y ago
... and gun shots regularly in many neighborhoods, too.. while the city workers, managers and managers-of-managers are being paid top salary , retirement package and medical benefits for themselves and their family .. how can you think this is cool?? dystopian
- edmundsauto 5y ago
  Your complaint is that people working on difficult problems receive a decent salary and medical coverage? That seems... misplaced.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    no actually, many people do work on "difficult problems" and do their work, while the City described, has an army of workers who are well paid, yet do not keep up with basic tasks. It seems that fixing roads is one of the oldest jobs in the civilized world, and that the city workers have found a way to get paid, and also do less and less. Their pay is quite good compared to other forms of work, while "gig work" and other abuses increase. Medical coverage is a massive shortcoming in the current US system and very much in California, so the medical benefits paid to the very same workers are an obvious sore point. What part of that is not clear?
    - gamblor956 5y ago
      Wait until you hear what people think about programmers. Bunch of lazy entitled #$#@$ADF getting paid 6 figures to make yet another social media website or regulatory arbitrage play. And they get health care, free food, and unlimited vacation on top of that, even though their app is buggy most of the time! The nerve of those guys, who do they think they are!? Fixing roads isn't as easy as you think it is. Oakland's roads are heavily used, which means that a pothole fix isn't just a matter of pouring some asphalt into the pothole. That's a temporary fix that will only last a few weeks before the patch fails. You need to clean the pothole and surrounding surface, lay in tack, lay in and roll the asphalt to make a clean patch, and you need to keep the asphalt blocked off for a day for it to cure. Oh, and you need to use the proper type of asphalt to handle the level of road traffic, and you can't get this type of asphalt at Lowes or Home Depot.

donarb 5y ago

Seattle has a phone app called "Find it, Fix it" as well as a dedicated phone number for reporting potholes and other problems. You take a picture of a pothole, maybe a description and send it off. The city promises most potholes get fixed within 3 days of receiving a report. They even have a website map showing all requests and the potholes that have been filled within the last 90 days. https://seattlecitygis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=5e2cdf9d8735428cb6405db64de6ce8e https://seattlecitygis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/ind...

KennyBlanken 5y ago
Lots of cities have apps like that, and before they existed there were "mayor's hotlines." Boston has one, run by the mayor's hotline staff. They are exceptionally good at closing your issue without the issue being fixed. Apparently they file another ticket in the job system of the relevant city department (each department has their own completely unique system), say "done!" and close your ticket, even though the relevant department might never do anything and you have no idea of the status of that ticket, nor any way to find out. There is no way to report that the issue still exists or comment or anything. By design. They want something that looks good. Issue reported, city addressed it, done. Multiple times I have had an issue with something broken or non-functional, filed a ticket, had it closed as "fixed", sometimes it even says something like "fixed by a crew on blah blah", and I go back, take another picture, open a yet another ticket. I mention that it's the second or third or fourth time I've reported the same issue. Doesn't matter. Nobody cares. Down in NYC if you fill out a noise complaint on the city's hotline, the cops show up 30 minutes later. Boston is a city "run" by people who got the job through patronage, and are chair-warming assholes waiting for their pensions to kick in. It has something like three times the number of employees per capita compared to most other cities, and yet nothing gets done unless you know the right someone.
i_am_proteus 5y ago
Meanwhile, in nearby Portland, the people are (were, this is from 2017, I don't live there any more) fixing potholes that the government would not. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-15/portland-anarchist-road-care-fixes-potholes-anonymously https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-15/portland-...

freshhawk 5y ago

> I like this attitude: "I let him know I'm here as a resource, I'm not an activist, I'm not trying to be a pain in his ass," You like it? That's just a smart, well spoken way to show subservience. "I'm not an activist" ... what does that even mean? Considering what he did, the only thing that could mean in this context is "I don't consider it my place to ask for anything, all my suggestions are just ideas, not demands or anything like that". It's bowing and scraping to power at it's most plain. It was the right thing to do in this context, necessary to talk to the people he was talking to. But you like it? It just made me sad.

wolverine876 5y ago

> "I let him know I'm here as a resource, I'm not an activist, I'm not trying to be a pain in his ass," > helping their local government become less terrible by working with them Activists act, that's all it means - lots of different people doing lots of different things - they setup soup kitchens, they find housing, they run for office, they help their local government, they push it. They do exactly what Petersen is doing. Lots of different people doing different things, some effective, some not. Petersen seems so lost in a political narrative that Peterson is poisoning a relationship with and denying all the energy and good things for our community. Petersen is, in fact, an activist.