12 ms·

Speed is affected by process, and process evolves in reaction to abuse. In the beginning, it's quick to do everything, but as people take advantage - routing c

Speed is affected by process, and process evolves in reaction to abuse. In the beginning, it's quick to do everything, but as people take advantage - routing contracts to friends, taking safety shortcuts - rules get put into place and those rules affect the time to complete. For New York specifically there's another factor that it's strange the article omitted: Robert Moses. Prior to the mid-1960s, it was fairly simple: if Robert Moses wanted something built, it was built. If he wanted it blocked, it was blocked. This made the process of getting approvals a known factor. Moses chaired a wide variety of authorities including NYC Planning Commission, the Parks Department, and more. He was the sole authority to negotiate with the Federal government for NYC projects. This kind of central oversight allows certain projects to be completed much faster than it would be in other setups, but it also allows for a number of bad outcomes - corruption, ignoring the public good, environmental destruction, and more. As such, over time more process gets added. It's easy to criticize process, but many of the rules were written in blood with the best of intentions.

chitowneats 4y ago
This is a simplistic take. European and East Asian democracies build infrastructure far faster and cheaper than the U.S. Often with even more stringent safety regulations and higher standards of quality. The question we are tasked with answering is: why?
- soperj 4y ago
  corruption.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    On which side? The faster side, I'm guessing?
    - sixo 4y ago
      both. corruption favors the powerful. in established cities the powerful own land and don't want it changed, in new ones it's the developers and govt.
      - eru 4y ago
        Europe's cities are arguably more established than American ones, aren't they? Tokyo has also been around for ages.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  Obviously (or I guess not so obvious since I am writing this) that is because of a different density of workers, architects, general contractors, engineers for vastly different biomes in the United States than in Europe. Europe has way more people (more than twice as dense) in a similar geographic area (far less diverse features) so the data and practices honed by one are more efficient and have greater economy of scale despite all of the red tape we share. Nothing really that interesting. Or you can just go with the simple stupid answer of corruption as if Europe isn't its own cesspool.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    I don’t know that biome relevance is particularly relevant given that major US cities are not usually where major weather extremes happen. We are not talking about skyscrapers in Death Valley or Nome.
  - AbrahamParangi 4y ago
    I don’t think this is obvious or even necessarily true. Europe has many things going against it as well, language barriers, split markets, generally being quite a bit poorer than the US. Moreover it doesn’t explain the performance of East Asian countries at all.
    - birdyrooster 4y ago
      It would greatly explain the performance of East Asian countries. They share the same environmental challenges whereas in the US the challenges are vastly different depending on which coast you are near. Of course China had less red tape (no pun intended) in some regards for development than the other East Asian countries so it executes even faster than its peers. I think its more of a slam dunk than comparing Europe with the US in these terms, which is commensurate with their ability to churn out infrastructure.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - 4y ago
- esperent 4y ago
  > European and East Asian You just basically named two continents and said they build faster than the US and you're accusing someone else of simplistic takes? Which European country builds infrastructure faster than the US?
  - etblg 4y ago
    Berlin made great progress on the Brandenburg Airport, a shining example of German efficiency and construction prowess /s
    - MengerSponge 4y ago
      People who'd like to understand the /s should check out "How to F#€k up an Airport" from Radio Spaetkauf: https://www.radiospaetkauf.com/ber/ https://www.radiospaetkauf.com/ber/
  - klooney 4y ago
    Spain is the outlier for fast/cheap/good, but I hear that even Italy has gotten its act together, and the recent Rome subway was done quickly and cheaply. The Nordic countries also have a good reputation. England is pretty bad/comparable to the US in speed and cost. https://pedestrianobservations.com/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/ and the less feisty https://transitcosts.com/ https://transitcosts.com/ are the canonical sources on comparative infrastructure costs.
    - throwaway2037 4y ago
      Spain's high speed rail is criminally underrated. It is an amazing achievement.
      - dazc 4y ago
        Is laying rail across a desert that hard?
        4y ago
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  Japan (Tokyo, at least), is crazy fast. I remember staying at the Shinagawa Prince, three years in a row, and it overlooks that big-ass office park, on the other side of the station. One year, I look out, and there’s a huge empty lot. The next year, there’s a steel frame, for several buildings. The next year, the lights are on, and the buildings are obviously occupied. Also, their standards are very high. They weather massive earthquakes, quite well.
  - drchickensalad 4y ago
    Tokyo standards for residential are legendarily low. People demolish and rebuild when they buy a home because nothing is built to last even a moderate amount of time.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      I have heard that. I didn't spend much time in homes. I was in offices and factories, and they were robust as hell. My company's original factory was built after WWI, and may have just been knocked down, a few years ago (it may still be standing -they sold it).
- bradDonniger 4y ago
  What do we actually need to build? We have plenty of buildings to shelter people, but use them roleplay career professionals. More than enough roads and highways. Plenty of farmland. Maybe could use some hospitals. A real need to rebuild post-world wars seems to have become some mind virus we have to constantly crank out mega projects. Can we get over the ridiculous hallucination we need to “drill baby drill” and grind through all the resources to goto Mars? You and I will be dead before that’s tenable let alone implemented… can we let the future sort itself out a bit? Why do we still buy into the story of post-war shell shocked paranoids who spent decades huffing leased gas fumes, expropriating the world from everyone else dropping democracy bombs. Decades of television as a carefully curated propaganda pipeline has messed the last generation up.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Population is expanding in many US cities faster than they are building houses. With houses we need to build schools, stores, parks, offices, and a long list of other things that an expanding population will use more of. Old infrastructure wears out, and often it fails to meet modern standards and should be replaced (ex old houses often cannot be insulated to modern standards, old bridges we now realize were not built strong enough). Many have for various reasons concluded that some of what we have built in the past was a mistake and so we should tear some things down to replace with something else. (ex replace highways with mass transit) While we don't need to build or rebuild everything we did in the past, there is still a lot of things that if we would build our life would be better.
- cpursley 4y ago
  Hell, just look at the new metro ring line that was opened in Moscow. It’s 45 miles long and the stations are absolutely gorgeous and unique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-txmGH11sh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-txmGH11sh0 https://www.rbth.com/travel/335939-moscow-metro-big-circle-line https://www.rbth.com/travel/335939-moscow-metro-big-circle-l... And this is all under massive sanctions and a less democratic and more corrupt system.
  - hoseja 4y ago
    That's just a totalitarian vanity project. People live in squalor and die by the thousands on the warfront meanwhile.
    - cpursley 4y ago
      Vanity? Have you visited Russia within the past 10 years? If you didn't know, Moscow traffic is horrendous. And many Muscovites do in fact, depend on the metro to get to work, school, etc.
    - MagnumOpus 4y ago
      The Moscow metro is not just for vanity - the nomenklatura don't take the metro, the people in squalor do... Besides it is irrelevant for the topic - say you are right, then you are still admitting that even a corrupt country that constructs public transport only for vanity can do it at 10x the speed and 0.1x the costs as we can...
      - EntrePrescott 4y ago
        > The Moscow metro is not just for vanity - the nomenklatura don't take the metro, the people in squalor do... That's like saying the vanity construction projects of Roman emperors weren't for vanity because they were used more by the plebs than by the nomenklatura. Which group uses it most has absolutely nothing to do with what makes a vanity project. Quite to the contrary, the criterion for a vanity project is that a core motivation for its construction was to embellish the image/popularity/glory of the powerful person who ordered the construction. So yes, it is quite common for vanity projects to be precisely those used more by the plebs than the nomenklatura.
kneebonian 4y ago
Honestly this kind of reminds me how a large application grows. You get a polished application out and discover a bug, but you can't rewrite the whole app so you put a patch in. Then another bug is found, so another patch gets pushed out. Over time legitimate bugs and requirements at the time fall by the wayside but the code remains. I don't know how we fix that problem when it comes to legal code though.
- yellow_lead 4y ago
  I think there's been some writing on this - where others have suggested we need to regularly "refactor" the legal code. I mostly agree, and you could think of courts/case law in this way. However, there isn't much incentive for it. A law getting struck down has no negative effect on Congress or state legislatures. That's a problem IMO
  - tastyfreeze 4y ago
    I like the idea of expiration dates on laws. Another good idea is requiring Congress to remove old laws in order to pass new laws. But, the second idea is much easier to game.
Hikikomori 4y ago
Behind the bastards has an episode about Robert Moses. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-man-who-ruined-99056594/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
- jonstewart 4y ago
  Much better is Robert Caro's masterful _The Power Broker_.
  - Arrath 4y ago
    Oh definitely checking this out. Thanks for the recommendation!
    - smelendez 4y ago
      Also known for his extraordinarily well researched, multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson. He’s sort of the Don Knuth of US political biography.
      - culturestate 4y ago
        > He’s sort of the Don Knuth of US political biography. Who's Chernow in this scenario? Maybe Ron Rivest?
  - supernova87a 4y ago
    Reading that book takes even longer than getting a renovation permit in NYC.
    - specialist 4y ago
      Audiobook version is great. Read by Caro.
      - cbetz 4y ago
CPLX 4y ago
There’s another very important factor about Moses that people overlook. They did things in-house. There’s an anecdote in the book about how they had a building on Randall’s Island with 100 draftsmen on call at any time. The minute the federal government announced more money was released they’d whip up designs for highways or bridges before anyone else and have the proposal in. There’s a lot of stories like that. Moses and his organization actually built shit, they designed and project managed their own stuff. We don’t do that any more. It’s not just that we hire construction companies, we hire companies to manage the construction companies and then another company to manage the managers. None of those people have an incentive structure that rewards building fast and on budget. This problem is endemic to every government function at this point. I am convinced we could solve half the problem with public works by just like building a government department to actually deliver the government services themselves instead of what we do now. Which, of course, is how governments mostly used to function before neoliberalism and general corporate dominance took over.
- skybrian 4y ago
  More about this and how it’s different in Europe: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/12/the-issue-of-curiosity/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/12/the-issue-of-c...
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > It’s not just that we hire construction companies, we hire companies to manage the construction companies and then another company to manage the managers. None of those people have an incentive structure that rewards building fast and on budget. this is a giant issue in the angloshere And noone own the outcome for quality of the result. When an issue arises, before anything is foxed there are 15 years of lawsuits between these companies to figure out who's fault it is In Britain, we had 100's of highroses built non-cpmpliant with fire safety, apparently the builder, the owner, the fire inspector and the local government are not responsible for compliance. The leaseholder of the individual apar5ment has tonpay for fixing it. Some people bought partial ownership, i.e. 25% of the apartment, the rest is owned by investors. Well, theybare responsible for 100% of the maintenance (this is a government scheme) So some people have bought an asset for £40k and now much pay 100k to fix it. And they cant say no
nicbou 4y ago
This reminds me of what Dan Carlin called "rolling the monarchy dice" in his Hardcore History podcast. If you get a good dictator, things get done with little friction, because the power rests on a single person's shoulders. But if you get a bad one, you're stuck with it. Democracy might be slower and less inefficient, but it's reliably slower and less efficient.
- machina_ex_deus 4y ago
  The key is having an accountable "dictator". There are two interpretations to democracy: you can emphasize "representation", and parliamentary system, or you can emphasize "accountability" and singular leaders. The idea being, if you rolled the dictatorship dice badly, you minimize damage and reroll it. The U.S. was clearly designed with the second interpretation in mind. The revolution was a result of taxation by the British Parliament, and their anger at the British crown was that the king did not stop the parliament. The president / executive branch is a single person, and it represented their view of preferring an accountable monarch over distributed accountability dispersing Parliament. They also designed the house seats with very lower upper bounds on the number of people represented by a single person, and the design of voting districts reflects a view of accountability over representation. However, the prevailing meta game of politics is using the representation interpretation. And the design of the U.S constitution is quite bad when that is the understanding. It's just not designed for it. And the pubic has been trained, in almost pavlovian way, to interpret the "accountability" interpretation as "populism" with negative connotation.
  - eru 4y ago
    > The revolution was a result of taxation by the British Parliament, [...] It's a bit more complicated. Colonials paid lower taxes than people back in England, too. See also https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/bruce_bueno_de.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/bruce_bueno_de.html > His stories about George Washington, none of which I knew, are even more fascinating. Bueno de Mesquita claims, quite plausibly, that a huge part of George Washington’s motive for fighting the Revolutionary War was to protect his substantial, and critically placed, landholdings in the Ohio Valley. I’m not saying that I agree with him, but his story made me realize that a large part of my belief in GW is romantic: because I learned about him so early in life, that romantic view is harder to shake and I’ve been less willing to put GW under the public choice microscope than with any current or recent president. > An excerpt about GW’s wealth: >> His last position, just before becoming President, was President of the Patowmack Canal Company–the Potomac Canal, as we know it, from the Potomac River. What that canal did was bring, make it possible to bring produce from the Shenandoah Valley–which George owned–up to the port in Alexandria, which had been built by Lawrence, by the Ohio Valley Company, in which George had a direct interest, and shipped goods out. So it was a very profitable undertaking–or so he thought it would be, in the long run, for him. And that’s what motivated him. Most people think of Washington as–besides a great hero, which he certainly was–as kind of a gentleman farmer. Economists have estimated the worth in real dollars adjusted for inflation, not appreciated, of George Washington’s estate, in contemporary terms; and it’s about $20 billion dollars. He is by far the wealthiest President. He is the 59th wealthiest person in American history. Three of the American founding fathers are in the list of the top 100 wealthiest Americans in all of history: Hancock, who was wealthier than Washington–made his money smuggling; and Ben Franklin, who was not quite as wealthy, who made his money because he had a monopoly on the printing press. These are the folks who led the Revolution. These were not the downtrodden. These were not the oppressed. These were people who stood to lose huge amounts of wealth because of the King’s policies. And so they fought a Revolution. Which was, by the way, not very popular. Sixty percent of the colonists either were neutral or opposed to the Revolution.
moduspol 4y ago
> It's easy to criticize process, but many of the rules were written in blood with the best of intentions. Respectfully, we already know this part. It's at the top of every single thread like this. The more important questions are: * Are all of these rules still necessary? * Are any of these rules more obstructive than beneficial? * Could any of these rules be refactored for a better benefit to obstruction ratio? The problem will not be solved as long as every time it's discussed, it becomes a "should we have any rules or no rules at all" discussion. We know the vast majority were put in place because something prompted them. What's less discussed is how to fix it, or at least stop making it worse.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  > What's less discussed is how to fix it, or at least stop making it worse. Isn't the point of the U.S. checks and balance system that it's basically impossible to 'fix' 'bad rules' that are viewed as beneficial by at least a quarter of the population? Regardless of how 'bad' it's considered by the majority?
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  The problem is that the pro-process people usually have some concrete reason, no matter how bad, outdated or obviously irrelevant for their process. The anti-process people don't have anything because there is no identical control group without the dumb rule.
MountainHoliday 4y ago
Large government is just another form of monopoly control corruption

chitowneats 4y ago

This is a simplistic take. European and East Asian democracies build infrastructure far faster and cheaper than the U.S. Often with even more stringent safety regulations and higher standards of quality. The question we are tasked with answering is: why?

soperj 4y ago
corruption.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  On which side? The faster side, I'm guessing?
  - sixo 4y ago
    both. corruption favors the powerful. in established cities the powerful own land and don't want it changed, in new ones it's the developers and govt.
    - eru 4y ago
      Europe's cities are arguably more established than American ones, aren't they? Tokyo has also been around for ages.
birdyrooster 4y ago
Obviously (or I guess not so obvious since I am writing this) that is because of a different density of workers, architects, general contractors, engineers for vastly different biomes in the United States than in Europe. Europe has way more people (more than twice as dense) in a similar geographic area (far less diverse features) so the data and practices honed by one are more efficient and have greater economy of scale despite all of the red tape we share. Nothing really that interesting. Or you can just go with the simple stupid answer of corruption as if Europe isn't its own cesspool.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  I don’t know that biome relevance is particularly relevant given that major US cities are not usually where major weather extremes happen. We are not talking about skyscrapers in Death Valley or Nome.
- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  I don’t think this is obvious or even necessarily true. Europe has many things going against it as well, language barriers, split markets, generally being quite a bit poorer than the US. Moreover it doesn’t explain the performance of East Asian countries at all.
  - birdyrooster 4y ago
    It would greatly explain the performance of East Asian countries. They share the same environmental challenges whereas in the US the challenges are vastly different depending on which coast you are near. Of course China had less red tape (no pun intended) in some regards for development than the other East Asian countries so it executes even faster than its peers. I think its more of a slam dunk than comparing Europe with the US in these terms, which is commensurate with their ability to churn out infrastructure.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - 4y ago
esperent 4y ago
> European and East Asian You just basically named two continents and said they build faster than the US and you're accusing someone else of simplistic takes? Which European country builds infrastructure faster than the US?
- etblg 4y ago
  Berlin made great progress on the Brandenburg Airport, a shining example of German efficiency and construction prowess /s
  - MengerSponge 4y ago
    People who'd like to understand the /s should check out "How to F#€k up an Airport" from Radio Spaetkauf: https://www.radiospaetkauf.com/ber/ https://www.radiospaetkauf.com/ber/
- klooney 4y ago
  Spain is the outlier for fast/cheap/good, but I hear that even Italy has gotten its act together, and the recent Rome subway was done quickly and cheaply. The Nordic countries also have a good reputation. England is pretty bad/comparable to the US in speed and cost. https://pedestrianobservations.com/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/ and the less feisty https://transitcosts.com/ https://transitcosts.com/ are the canonical sources on comparative infrastructure costs.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    Spain's high speed rail is criminally underrated. It is an amazing achievement.
    - dazc 4y ago
      Is laying rail across a desert that hard?
      - 4y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
Japan (Tokyo, at least), is crazy fast. I remember staying at the Shinagawa Prince, three years in a row, and it overlooks that big-ass office park, on the other side of the station. One year, I look out, and there’s a huge empty lot. The next year, there’s a steel frame, for several buildings. The next year, the lights are on, and the buildings are obviously occupied. Also, their standards are very high. They weather massive earthquakes, quite well.
- drchickensalad 4y ago
  Tokyo standards for residential are legendarily low. People demolish and rebuild when they buy a home because nothing is built to last even a moderate amount of time.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I have heard that. I didn't spend much time in homes. I was in offices and factories, and they were robust as hell. My company's original factory was built after WWI, and may have just been knocked down, a few years ago (it may still be standing -they sold it).
bradDonniger 4y ago
What do we actually need to build? We have plenty of buildings to shelter people, but use them roleplay career professionals. More than enough roads and highways. Plenty of farmland. Maybe could use some hospitals. A real need to rebuild post-world wars seems to have become some mind virus we have to constantly crank out mega projects. Can we get over the ridiculous hallucination we need to “drill baby drill” and grind through all the resources to goto Mars? You and I will be dead before that’s tenable let alone implemented… can we let the future sort itself out a bit? Why do we still buy into the story of post-war shell shocked paranoids who spent decades huffing leased gas fumes, expropriating the world from everyone else dropping democracy bombs. Decades of television as a carefully curated propaganda pipeline has messed the last generation up.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Population is expanding in many US cities faster than they are building houses. With houses we need to build schools, stores, parks, offices, and a long list of other things that an expanding population will use more of. Old infrastructure wears out, and often it fails to meet modern standards and should be replaced (ex old houses often cannot be insulated to modern standards, old bridges we now realize were not built strong enough). Many have for various reasons concluded that some of what we have built in the past was a mistake and so we should tear some things down to replace with something else. (ex replace highways with mass transit) While we don't need to build or rebuild everything we did in the past, there is still a lot of things that if we would build our life would be better.
cpursley 4y ago
Hell, just look at the new metro ring line that was opened in Moscow. It’s 45 miles long and the stations are absolutely gorgeous and unique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-txmGH11sh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-txmGH11sh0 https://www.rbth.com/travel/335939-moscow-metro-big-circle-line https://www.rbth.com/travel/335939-moscow-metro-big-circle-l... And this is all under massive sanctions and a less democratic and more corrupt system.
- hoseja 4y ago
  That's just a totalitarian vanity project. People live in squalor and die by the thousands on the warfront meanwhile.
  - cpursley 4y ago
    Vanity? Have you visited Russia within the past 10 years? If you didn't know, Moscow traffic is horrendous. And many Muscovites do in fact, depend on the metro to get to work, school, etc.
  - MagnumOpus 4y ago
    The Moscow metro is not just for vanity - the nomenklatura don't take the metro, the people in squalor do... Besides it is irrelevant for the topic - say you are right, then you are still admitting that even a corrupt country that constructs public transport only for vanity can do it at 10x the speed and 0.1x the costs as we can...
    - EntrePrescott 4y ago
      > The Moscow metro is not just for vanity - the nomenklatura don't take the metro, the people in squalor do... That's like saying the vanity construction projects of Roman emperors weren't for vanity because they were used more by the plebs than by the nomenklatura. Which group uses it most has absolutely nothing to do with what makes a vanity project. Quite to the contrary, the criterion for a vanity project is that a core motivation for its construction was to embellish the image/popularity/glory of the powerful person who ordered the construction. So yes, it is quite common for vanity projects to be precisely those used more by the plebs than the nomenklatura.

kneebonian 4y ago

Honestly this kind of reminds me how a large application grows. You get a polished application out and discover a bug, but you can't rewrite the whole app so you put a patch in. Then another bug is found, so another patch gets pushed out. Over time legitimate bugs and requirements at the time fall by the wayside but the code remains. I don't know how we fix that problem when it comes to legal code though.

yellow_lead 4y ago
I think there's been some writing on this - where others have suggested we need to regularly "refactor" the legal code. I mostly agree, and you could think of courts/case law in this way. However, there isn't much incentive for it. A law getting struck down has no negative effect on Congress or state legislatures. That's a problem IMO
- tastyfreeze 4y ago
  I like the idea of expiration dates on laws. Another good idea is requiring Congress to remove old laws in order to pass new laws. But, the second idea is much easier to game.

Hikikomori 4y ago

Behind the bastards has an episode about Robert Moses. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-man-who-ruined-99056594/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

jonstewart 4y ago
Much better is Robert Caro's masterful _The Power Broker_.
- Arrath 4y ago
  Oh definitely checking this out. Thanks for the recommendation!
  - smelendez 4y ago
    Also known for his extraordinarily well researched, multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson. He’s sort of the Don Knuth of US political biography.
    - culturestate 4y ago
      > He’s sort of the Don Knuth of US political biography. Who's Chernow in this scenario? Maybe Ron Rivest?
- supernova87a 4y ago
  Reading that book takes even longer than getting a renovation permit in NYC.
  - specialist 4y ago
    Audiobook version is great. Read by Caro.
    - cbetz 4y ago

CPLX 4y ago

There’s another very important factor about Moses that people overlook. They did things in-house. There’s an anecdote in the book about how they had a building on Randall’s Island with 100 draftsmen on call at any time. The minute the federal government announced more money was released they’d whip up designs for highways or bridges before anyone else and have the proposal in. There’s a lot of stories like that. Moses and his organization actually built shit, they designed and project managed their own stuff. We don’t do that any more. It’s not just that we hire construction companies, we hire companies to manage the construction companies and then another company to manage the managers. None of those people have an incentive structure that rewards building fast and on budget. This problem is endemic to every government function at this point. I am convinced we could solve half the problem with public works by just like building a government department to actually deliver the government services themselves instead of what we do now. Which, of course, is how governments mostly used to function before neoliberalism and general corporate dominance took over.

skybrian 4y ago
More about this and how it’s different in Europe: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/12/the-issue-of-curiosity/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/12/the-issue-of-c...
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> It’s not just that we hire construction companies, we hire companies to manage the construction companies and then another company to manage the managers. None of those people have an incentive structure that rewards building fast and on budget. this is a giant issue in the angloshere And noone own the outcome for quality of the result. When an issue arises, before anything is foxed there are 15 years of lawsuits between these companies to figure out who's fault it is In Britain, we had 100's of highroses built non-cpmpliant with fire safety, apparently the builder, the owner, the fire inspector and the local government are not responsible for compliance. The leaseholder of the individual apar5ment has tonpay for fixing it. Some people bought partial ownership, i.e. 25% of the apartment, the rest is owned by investors. Well, theybare responsible for 100% of the maintenance (this is a government scheme) So some people have bought an asset for £40k and now much pay 100k to fix it. And they cant say no

nicbou 4y ago

This reminds me of what Dan Carlin called "rolling the monarchy dice" in his Hardcore History podcast. If you get a good dictator, things get done with little friction, because the power rests on a single person's shoulders. But if you get a bad one, you're stuck with it. Democracy might be slower and less inefficient, but it's reliably slower and less efficient.

machina_ex_deus 4y ago
The key is having an accountable "dictator". There are two interpretations to democracy: you can emphasize "representation", and parliamentary system, or you can emphasize "accountability" and singular leaders. The idea being, if you rolled the dictatorship dice badly, you minimize damage and reroll it. The U.S. was clearly designed with the second interpretation in mind. The revolution was a result of taxation by the British Parliament, and their anger at the British crown was that the king did not stop the parliament. The president / executive branch is a single person, and it represented their view of preferring an accountable monarch over distributed accountability dispersing Parliament. They also designed the house seats with very lower upper bounds on the number of people represented by a single person, and the design of voting districts reflects a view of accountability over representation. However, the prevailing meta game of politics is using the representation interpretation. And the design of the U.S constitution is quite bad when that is the understanding. It's just not designed for it. And the pubic has been trained, in almost pavlovian way, to interpret the "accountability" interpretation as "populism" with negative connotation.
- eru 4y ago
  > The revolution was a result of taxation by the British Parliament, [...] It's a bit more complicated. Colonials paid lower taxes than people back in England, too. See also https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/bruce_bueno_de.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/bruce_bueno_de.html > His stories about George Washington, none of which I knew, are even more fascinating. Bueno de Mesquita claims, quite plausibly, that a huge part of George Washington’s motive for fighting the Revolutionary War was to protect his substantial, and critically placed, landholdings in the Ohio Valley. I’m not saying that I agree with him, but his story made me realize that a large part of my belief in GW is romantic: because I learned about him so early in life, that romantic view is harder to shake and I’ve been less willing to put GW under the public choice microscope than with any current or recent president. > An excerpt about GW’s wealth: >> His last position, just before becoming President, was President of the Patowmack Canal Company–the Potomac Canal, as we know it, from the Potomac River. What that canal did was bring, make it possible to bring produce from the Shenandoah Valley–which George owned–up to the port in Alexandria, which had been built by Lawrence, by the Ohio Valley Company, in which George had a direct interest, and shipped goods out. So it was a very profitable undertaking–or so he thought it would be, in the long run, for him. And that’s what motivated him. Most people think of Washington as–besides a great hero, which he certainly was–as kind of a gentleman farmer. Economists have estimated the worth in real dollars adjusted for inflation, not appreciated, of George Washington’s estate, in contemporary terms; and it’s about $20 billion dollars. He is by far the wealthiest President. He is the 59th wealthiest person in American history. Three of the American founding fathers are in the list of the top 100 wealthiest Americans in all of history: Hancock, who was wealthier than Washington–made his money smuggling; and Ben Franklin, who was not quite as wealthy, who made his money because he had a monopoly on the printing press. These are the folks who led the Revolution. These were not the downtrodden. These were not the oppressed. These were people who stood to lose huge amounts of wealth because of the King’s policies. And so they fought a Revolution. Which was, by the way, not very popular. Sixty percent of the colonists either were neutral or opposed to the Revolution.

moduspol 4y ago

> It's easy to criticize process, but many of the rules were written in blood with the best of intentions. Respectfully, we already know this part. It's at the top of every single thread like this. The more important questions are: * Are all of these rules still necessary? * Are any of these rules more obstructive than beneficial? * Could any of these rules be refactored for a better benefit to obstruction ratio? The problem will not be solved as long as every time it's discussed, it becomes a "should we have any rules or no rules at all" discussion. We know the vast majority were put in place because something prompted them. What's less discussed is how to fix it, or at least stop making it worse.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
> What's less discussed is how to fix it, or at least stop making it worse. Isn't the point of the U.S. checks and balance system that it's basically impossible to 'fix' 'bad rules' that are viewed as beneficial by at least a quarter of the population? Regardless of how 'bad' it's considered by the majority?
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
The problem is that the pro-process people usually have some concrete reason, no matter how bad, outdated or obviously irrelevant for their process. The anti-process people don't have anything because there is no identical control group without the dumb rule.

MountainHoliday 4y ago

Large government is just another form of monopoly control corruption