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[wombat]

From today's Washington Post:

Montgomery County's emergency e-mail notification system failed to send alerts about Sunday night's major water main break and the risk for unhealthy drinking water to tens of thousands of residents because the two employees who know how to operate the system were out of town, the county's top homeland security official said yesterday.
When those two employees couldn't be reached, a third employee who was supposed to know how to run it said that he had never been trained, said Gordon Aoyagi, the homeland security director. A fourth employee who was found eight hours later knew how to operate it but failed to send out any alerts. Residents and businesses learned of the water problem primarily through the media.

This is only the latest of this sort of infrastructure debacle around here - the list of problems on Metro is too long to go into - and in every case, the people in charge don't seem to know what to do in an emergency.

Didn't we used to know how to do this sort of thing, or am I longing for some golden age that never existed?  Fortunately, we're just outside the area that still can't drink their water today. But a lot of people around here must feel like they're living in a Third World country - they just got their power back from the last storms and now they don't have safe water. What's next?

I want to move to Japan. I want to live in a country where the trains run on time?  Oh, wait, one where there actually are trains, even. They wouldn't put up with this shit. At least if they did screw up this bad, they'd be mortified and commit harakiri. Is that too much to ask?

[Carlos del Vaca]

I read James Howard Kunstler's "Clusterfuck Nation" blog, and while I periodically want to tell him "Oh LIGHTEN UP," there's just enough to his "We're doomed!  DOOMED!" scenarios that it makes me worry.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/

A big factor in our decaying infrastructure is the "Taxes are BAD!  EVIL BEYOND MEASURE!" mania that's ruled our populace and our elected representatives for the past, I dunno, 40 years or whatever.  Taxes pay for public transportation and water mains and non-glamorous shit like that.  Need to boil the water, but hey, I saved eight hundred bucks on my property taxes last year!  WHOOO!

[Doc]

Maybe it's due to an overreliance on these sorts of systems and tendency when the primary system doesn't work people just shrug and wait for someone to come and fix it rather than finding an alternative.
I mean, we didn't have mass emergency e-mails even 10 years ago, seems these people could have taken the initiative to get the message out another way.  

I mean you're never going to know all the flaws in a system until it fails completely but having the only two people who can fix something be unavailable and just assuming it's not going to screw up over that time period seems a pretty obvious and easily correctable flaw.

[Arachno-capitalist]

Having an email notification system fail seems kind of trivial... and really the technology (so far as I can tell here) didn't fail, a manager failed to have his department adequately trained and staffed. And in private industry, she should be reprimanded. But when youre the only game in town, why improve?

[wombat]

But when youre the only game in town, why improve?

A-Cap makes the expected point that competition would improve the situation. It's hard to see how there could be competition in providing water. But more to the point, in some places - harping on the Japan example again - people are expected to perform to a high standard even if they work for a monopoly. General societal pressure, or some internalized version of general societal pressure, is enough to do the job.

Why don't we have that? Why do we just put up with shit? It's like we've given up. We have no hope for anything but a clusterfuck. Didn't we used to be the greatest nation on Earth, or something?

[littlefallsmets]

Yeah, carlos for the win.

Everything went to hell because snake oil (and regular oil) salesmen have slowly gone in and gutted the public sphere with their promises that "private industry can do better!" that... for some God unknown reason, the rubes bought... and now all the infrastructure that needs to be shared for a short and long term stable society is crumbling.

Basically since FDR, telling the lie that government can't do anything right and then cynically making it a self-fulfilling prophesy, the conmen themselves escaping with a golden parachute that takes their great-great grandchildren into The Inheritance Class... the new landed gentry.

A nation of greedy lazy half-blind fools, chasing the crumbs on their own instead of taking and sharing the pie that they themselves baked and... here we are.

Nothing works except Wal-Mart because The Wal-Mart people took two and a half generations to make it that way.

One hopes that if we get through what's happening and what will happen soon, the cunning intellect of collective desperation will cut through the ignorant malase of get-rich-quick schemes and Bible thumping, once again, as it did in the thirties.

It's that or Western Civilization as we know it going bye-bye.

The rich always forget that there need to be strong middle classes and a non-starving poor for social stability after a generation or three or largesse.

The problem with people is that we're fuck*ng mayflies and we willfully forget this shit all every forty years or so with a new group of greedy amoral shitburgers.

[wombat]

but things used to be simpler, both in infrastructure systems and in the quantity of populations that system supports.

Sometimes I wonder if this is part of it but then I remember the Japanese again... they manage to run the bullet train on time, and that's not a simpler infrastructure than it used to be, you know?

[Arachno-capitalist]

In case you missed it, this was a failure of a government owned and operated public service, not Wal-Mart.

Privately supplied water could work in a couple different ways. Making the customers shareholders who can vote on management is one way.

[pmcd9]

Thanks Ash for making that post so I didn't have to.  You basically took the words out of my mouth.  Only you probably said it better than I.

LFM, I fuck*ng KNEW Wal Mart was behind this.

[Carlos del Vaca]

Government in this country is the crack-whore sister you have to cut off. She may die. She may have an ugly ugly period of detox before the mind clears enough to resort and reprioritize the way things work in her life. But you gotta take that step because if you keep slipping her a hundo at need she's certainly going to choke to death on her own vomit under a bridge somewhere.

Hasn't this become a self-fulfilling prophecy, though?  We've been told "Government sucks," and then they cut funding to infrastructure, oversight, etc., and then when there's a salmonella outbreak we hear "See, this is because government sucks so much!"

Are there instances where government is not the solution, and where individuals are corrupt and as a result the public trust suffers?  Of course.  On the other hand, the fox has been running the hen house for a while now.  Look at the lead-based paint in toys--did we fail to catch that because government inherently sucks, or because someone with an overly-pro-business agenda decided the CPSC shouldn't have any money for inspectors?

[Carlos del Vaca]

Look, here's more:
USDA food inspector told to "drop the matter" when bring up violations.
Private industry regulates itself well, except when the rest of the industry doesn't want you to, and the revolving-door government counterparts forbid it, as with this beef producer who wanted to test for mad cow.
Remember that Minnesota bridge collapse?  Earlier that year the Minnesota governor vetoed a transportation bill that would have put money towards road work, solely because he'd pledged "no new taxes."

There's plenty more examples to be found.  Do these examples show that government is inherently bad, or that government, as it's been run for the past decade, is acting counter to the greater public interest?

[Arachno-capitalist]

I believe it can be reduced to rationally myopic decisions coming from policy makers. Implementing policy that works well for the next election cycle and fails in the long term is preferred over policy that is painful in the short run and beneficial in the long run. Private firms gain from doing just the opposite, investing in the long term viability of its projects in order to see the greatest return. Govt programs benefit most by leveraging the future for immediate gain. See: Social Security and deficit spending - The next generation, which is conveniently too young to vote or be taken seriously, is shouldered with compounding debts so previous generations can reap immediate benefit.
The generation to first receive social security essentially won the lottery without even buying a ticket. Money came to people who never had to pay forward into or pay back into social security. Following this logic, the president should just one day announce that he is mailing checks  to every American... oh wait.

[wombat]

Implementing policy that works well for the next election cycle and fails in the long term is preferred over policy that is painful in the short run and beneficial in the long run. Private firms gain from doing just the opposite, investing in the long term viability of its projects in order to see the greatest return.

I'll bet that's a big part of it but I disagree with your distinction between public and private here. My understanding of the problems in a lot of industries, like newspapers and publishing, is that they're due to being pushed to show huge profits RIGHT NOW, even if they achieve that by doing things that are detrimental in the long run. Getting rid of all your most experienced - and therefore highest paid - staff looks great for the bottom line in the short run, but is not so good for the product you're turning out in the long run, for example.

A-Cap, the pure capitalism you always envision in your posts sounds like a wonderful thing. The problem is that I don't see it working that way in real life.

[wombat]

Do the citizens have the metaphorical balls to call the liars out and accept the burden of responsibility?

My immediate reaction to this was to wail "No, and that's the problem!"

But then I remembered a bright spot which I will relate to make up for starting this depressing thread: My district has had the same congressman for longer than I have lived here. He never did anything good that I could tell, but because this district wouldn't elect a Republican even if he promised eternal life and free ice cream, the guy kept getting re-elected.

Well, two primaries ago, someone almost beat him in the Democratic primary. This time around, she did beat him.

He immediately proved what an asshole he was, and how much he'd deserved to be booted out, by actually resigning before his term was up. Yesterday we had to have a special election - I don't want to think about how much money that wasted - to fill his seat till the next election.

But, how satisfying. We booted a bum out. We did it. He even proved what a bum he was after we did it. It feels good.

[Arachno-capitalist]

I'll bet that's a big part of it but I disagree with your distinction between public and private here. My understanding of the problems in a lot of industries, like newspapers and publishing, is that they're due to being pushed to show huge profits RIGHT NOW, even if they achieve that by doing things that are detrimental in the long run. Getting rid of all your most experienced - and therefore highest paid - staff looks great for the bottom line in the short run, but is not so good for the product you're turning out in the long run, for example.

A-Cap, the pure capitalism you always envision in your posts sounds like a wonderful thing. The problem is that I don't see it working that way in real life.

I'm not arguing for a pure capitalist state here. I'm just pointing to well founded flaws of government policy known to political scientists and economists alike. Theres a difference between my philosophy dream, and my argument for policy evolution.

True, firing highly paid senior staff may show an immediate gain in profit. However, you'll find that investors are not that dumb and can in fact differentiate between a desperate short term move and policy that shows long term growth potential. Not only can they differentiate these maneuvers, they reward the latter much greater than the first. Speculators may attempt to capture gains from such short term decisions, but they are actually a leaf in the wind of the greater picture.