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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

Not only are the bills coming due, but bureaucratic complacency has put people in charge who will not be honest about the state of the dams. See https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oroville-tallest-dam-biggest-... for a good analysis.

The problem is fundamental to human organizations. People like hearing what they want to hear. And any organization without disasters for long enough will lose barriers to having sycophants who say that rise to positions of power. The necessary result is a growing disconnect with reality.

As Feynman warned, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." People and organizations tend to remember this after absorbing the lessons from a disaster.

But a generation or two of no disaster returns sycophants to power. Guaranteeing that the next preventable disaster will some day come.

That day may come very soon indeed.

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I'm biased, as I work in civil service.

Frankly, the reality is often coming from the bureaucracy. We all chuckle about government absurdity, but many of the true experts in these areas are in these bureaucracies, and get silenced when their work conflicts with the narrative the political administration wants. As costs have grown in healthcare, public safety and other areas, other functions get starved of attention.

I will guarantee you that in all of these cases, people who know what they were talking about were advising about these issues or unable to do their jobs due to de-funding... especially when republicans have had their fingers in things.

We lost a lot when the postwar and 1960s generation aged out of the workforce. The folks in charge of government agencies in the 1960-2000 timeframe were better educated and more competent. The politicians, even the machine people, had a better fundamental respect for what government did and does.

I'll tell you from an anecdotal perspective that the people in my state who inspect dams and bridges give a shit about their jobs and are not complacent. I know a few people in each category. They have a frustrating job, but do it well.

For an example of what you're saying: a friend of mine has a father who use to work in my state (Victoria, Aus) Surveyor General's office. The surveyor general's office knew what the land was like all over the state, what good farmland was, or what was best for other kinds of development... including what land was worth at market rates. Then a 'business friendly' government came along and abolished them, because "developers know better than these guys, who just provide red-tape obstacles".

Fast-forward 20 years, and there's no pattern to developments, meaning things are built without concern to infrastructure or services, plus lots of prime farmland has been lost (so much for the 'economic forward-thinking' of that 'business-friendly' government). It turns out that the government actually needs that knowledge, because the state government is now hiring back whatever surveyors they can find again from the old days, and at grossly inflated private contractor rates. They lost the expertise, the professionalism, and their value for money, all for short-term business thinking.

Not all government positions are filled with 'jobsworth' drones - there's a lot of vital stuff out there in ye olde bureaucracy.

Reason #1,234,567 why I don't like governments: there's no bankruptcy penalty.

> Not all government positions are filled with 'jobsworth' drones - there's a lot of vital stuff out there in ye olde bureaucracy.

I've thought for a while that the US suffers from not having a popular-media equivalent to Yes Minister. It's a great cultural touchstone for the idea of bureaucratic knowledge, and the danger of being politically or morally correct but unable to actually do things well.

The question isn't whether the bureaucracy has lots of good, competent people who want to do the job right.

It is whether the people who rise to the top and represent the bureaucracy to decision makers are reporting reality accurately, or telling decision makers what they want to hear.

An engineer will say a bridge will fail, or a foundation they designed 20 years ago will give way under 4x the load it was designed for, but the politicians and businessmen at the top will overrule them, people may die, and the only person blamed will be the engineer, despite the paper they wrote and published years before saying to tear the 60 year old bridge with spalding concrete and rusted girders down.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink it. The same goes for accepting reality, hence why many choose to live in an alternative reality.

Im always amazed and in fear of bridges in terms of engineering. The Ben Franklin Bridge was built in 1923, before mass transportation, cars, etc. and routinely handles full traffic jams every day. The engineer could not have had that in mind when it was built, and yet it stands.

That's because those engineers did take their safety margins and unforeseen uses serious and engineered in enough redundancy to make this work.

Obviously there are limits, chances are those limits are fairly well described and if they are ever exceeded it will be ugly.

> and the only person blamed will be the engineer, despite the paper they wrote and published years before

If that's really the case, it's a pretty fucked-up situation. The expected outcome for a politician ignoring technical advice and people dying as a consequence is for the politician to be always blamed. Even when the technical advice was nonsense, what leads to a lot of different problems (including politicians working hard to silence technicians).

I can't imagine what kinds of problems make politicians able to shift the blame onto people that say the structure is not secure, but I'd start searching for corruption at the judiciary branch.

NYC is an example of a place that has it's shit together with respect to bridges. See:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/dot_bridgereport15...

Not perfect, but they know what their problems are and have plans to fix. That means having people with a clue, listening to them, and funding remediation. Fortunately, they can fund it now. When I was growing up there in the 80's, things were falling apart.

I'm not sure the evidence supports the evidence. They blacked out the entire NorthEast, lost multiple bridges with people on them, and lost three dams over the period of a year starting in 1963.

Considering that they were busy killing people through poor design and lack of maintenance, I'd be interested in evidence of their superior competence.

Personally, I think they did a great job with the inferior engineering and safety science of the time but the results are better today.

I'm a contractor for civil service, and I can attest this is true.

Having bought a house in New Orleans 5 weeks before Katrina and watched the sycophants of the levee board move back in like nothing ever happened, this haunts my life.

The replacement, Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority, at least on the face of it, doesn't suck as bad: of 9 members, 5 must be engineers, 1 must be a civil engineer, and 1 must be a geologist. I'll take a technocrat over a bureaucrat any day.

I say that as someone in US Federal government. I see a lot of both. A bureaucrat can literally be some secretary who was around to apply for a job that "had to be filled", and there are only so many people in these cities to fill the jobs. Oh yes. Let that sink in. By comparison, technocrats are generally experts in their field, often sought after by the agency because they're forced to by a mandate, and to person, for whatever insane reason, was willing to take a massive pay cut to render some public service.

If it makes you feel any better, I just watched half of the Ninth Ward yell themselves hoarse at the Army Corps of Engineers at a community meeting over the planned expansion of the Industrial Canal (for MR-GO traffic (rolls eyes))

> If it makes you feel any better

Not sure. Wouldn't a bump in canal traffic be good for the city?

What is the Ninth Ward going to see out of it? Didn't they say that with MR-GO, which turned out to be a complete boondoggle (and worse during Katrina)?

Just as a bureaucrat can be be some secretary who was around to apply for a job that "had to be filled", what you call a "technocrat" (actually, a bureaucrat in a position with a mandatory certification) can be someone who has that mandatory certification and is too incompetent to get any job that pays better than the vastly below-market public-sector payscale.

> mandatory certification and is too incompetent

I suppose, government IT might be a good example of that...

No, government IT mostly doesn't have "required certifications"; it actually has far less credentialism, IME, than private industry.

Competence is something of a mixed bag; I'd say the biggest problems aren't with technical competence of line staff but with government IT management and organization and policies imposed from outside of IT in government that constrain IT practices.

Depending on the agency, government IT may have to deal with security issues you don't find in the private sector.

When you look at total comp (vacation, hours worked, benefits, job security), the federal government is competitive except against top tier tech companies.

100% true if you are a career employee.

My sister and I are at similar career paths. She works as a principal engineer at a big software company. I work for a state .gov. She makes more, but my costs are well defined... no $10k health deductible, etc.

The present value of my pension is the equivalent to her performance stock grants, except they are near zero risk.

> can be someone who has that mandatory certification and is too incompetent to get any job that pays better than the vastly below-market public-sector payscale.

Incompetence is hardly limited to the public sector. I don't know anyone who works at a business who hasn't seen gross incompetence or waste/fraud (the local F500 companies near me have a horrible reputation for their IT departments and friends who have worked for them have many stories about "working lunches" that are expensed visits to a strip club etc). I've also seen plenty of consultants come into government agencies that have no clue what they are doing and are charging 3x the hourly rate of a FTE but the agency is forced to use them because of some arbitrary cap on headcount due to political reasons.

> The problem is fundamental to human organizations

I can't help but think about all the other countries who actually invest in their infrastructure and in public needs and have far better outcomes and social cohesion than the US. There's something wrong with this countries system of governance I feel.

It does seem like the US ends up with extra poor outcomes with their government.

Here in Japan, the government is surely also corrupt, with "bridges to nowhere" and construction contracts assigned on a buddy-buddy basis. But at least here that corruption still nets us well-maintained roads and top-notch train infrastructure... just arguably too much of it and at a high cost. In the US they end up with the high costs but none of the good infrastructure...

Is Japan really the poster child for ethical corporate/government relationships given the TEPCO debacle around Fukushima?

I think the Japanese get more out of what they spend/sacrifice for their government than the US. That's not to imply anything approaching perfection either.

Much of that is just that they're depending, at least in part, on US taxpayers for their security.

That is certainly a factor, although if Abe and his type get their way, that may change.

Yes, well, Japan has just about reached the limits of the "construction state". When you've built rail lines that hardly anybody uses, and when you're finished with cisterns under Tokyo that will handle thousand year floods, you need to start building aircraft carriers or you'll run out of ways to create jobs.

Absolutely it's not a poster child, I admitted as much that the Japanese government is corrupt as well.

I grew up in a small village in Switzerland (Chancy, near Geneva) which also had a bad construction scandal in the (early) 70s: the village had outgrown it's "let's run the elementary school from the church in two rooms" stage, but vastly overbuilt a large school to pad some builder's pockets.

Sounds bad but the outcome is more or less as follows, if my rather vague memory (I was in said school when it opened ;), and finding summaries of local events from the 70s on the internet is not straightforward) is accurate:

* some combination of the village's mayor and/or builder went to jail

* the village residents had to pay extra taxes to cover the overbuilt school's costs

* growing up, I had a really nice school (nice play yard, lots of classroom space, dedicated gym, swimming pool with adjustable depth so regular swimming lessons, etc)

* eventually, the population of the village increased enough that the school was actually a useful size (it's more than quadrupled, from the mid 300s to ~1600, since the 70s)

It feels like somehow the failures modes of "bad government" are less bad than they could be ("at least we got something for our corruption!").

> It feels like somehow the failures modes of "bad government" are less bad than they could be

eh compare to italy where instead of overbuilding they either cheat on the materials used or skip controls and evaluations...

again http://www.leggo.it/photos/HIGH/61/62/1726162_studente.jpg

and again https://bl24-bitrecallsrl.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/...

and again http://www.meteoweb.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/terremoto-...

every time a quake strikes some public building goes down and almost every time nobody does a day of jail, unless it's small fishes.

so well there are bad failure modes as well.

The classic joke:

Some years ago a small rural town in Spain twinned with a similar town in Greece. The mayor of the Greek town visited the Spanish town. When he saw the palatial mansion belonging to the Spanish mayor, he wondered aloud how on earth he could afford such a house.

The Spaniard replied: ‘You see that bridge over there? The EU gave us a grant to construct a two-lane bridge, but by building a single lane bridge with traffic lights at either end, I could build this place.’

The following year the Spaniard visited the Greek town. He was simply amazed at the Greek mayor's house: gold taps, marble floors, diamond doorknobs, it was marvellous.

When he asked how he’d raised the money to build this incredible house, the Greek mayor said: ‘You see that bridge over there?’

The Spaniard replied: ‘No.’

It's funny because it's almost true :)

But it always saddens my heart that we insist on these stereotypes and hardly mention how other countries are "legally" siphoning taxpayer's money out to corporations by becoming tax havens and they're supposed to be a good example on how to handle taxpayer's money. The thing is, they're actually just better at stealing for their friends :)

Netherlands, I'm looking at you.

"this countries system"

Maybe it's the education system? If it can't teach people how to spell, what hope if there for it to teach people how to govern?

hyperbole aside, the US does invest in its infrastructure. People exaggerate the numbers considerably, example is the bridge scares because that is pushed by construction and union concerns and they know how to scare you, if not them then the teams they hire yet they don't tell you how much those numbers have fallen since the early 90s.

plus not all infrastructure items are under the domain of the federal government so those dollars cannot be applied to some needs.

the only thing wrong with this countries government is that it is incredibly large for what it delivers and if you add in state, city, and local, governments it becomes even more absurd.

> example is the bridge scares because that is pushed by construction and union concerns and they know how to scare you

The I-35 bridge collapse was a couple of miles from my apartment at the time and occurred during a significant public debate in Minnesota about infrastructure spending. There was no "scare" about bridges - just a decade of underinvesting in infrastructure despite the warnings of the DOT and engineers about the increasingly poor condition of nearly every bridge in the State and complaints about how reduced budgets meant less time inspecting infrastructure.

Our Governor at the time (Pawlenty) was a notable opponent of government spending and had made significant cutbacks due to a "no new taxes" pledge and tax cuts (he had ambitions for higher office and unsuccessfully ran for President in 2012). Obviously Pawlenty wasn't directly responsible for the bridge collapse but our current Governor (Dayton) was elected partly due to promises to repair aging infrastructure (it was a major election issue).

Which he has yet to follow through on.

In the east metro the majority of overpass bridges have been replaced over the last 5 years - particularly along 35E north between 94 and 694, and 94 between St Paul and 280. The LRT line between St Paul and Minneapolis was also completed and the new Stillwater/36 bridge is nearly complete. That said, there are still claims of underinvestment (http://www.startribune.com/minnesota-s-bridges-are-still-out...) and now the bonding bill has become a contentious issue again with Republicans who are unhappy about proposed spending on public transportation and are looking to fund tax cuts.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-minnesota-bonds-idUSKBN14O... "Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton unveiled a plan on Wednesday to fund a variety of infrastructure projects "vital" to the state's future with $1.5 billion of general obligation bonds. The proposal is slightly bigger than the $1.4 billion bonding plan he proposed a year ago to the Democrat-controlled Senate and Republican-controlled House. A deal failed to materialize, leaving Minnesota without annual infrastructure funding. The Democratic governor could face a tougher battle this year as Republicans control both legislative chambers after winning a one-seat majority in the Senate in the Nov. 8 election."

I believe he is leaving office soon - it'll be interesting to see if infrastructure spending continues to be influential in the election. I'm surprised no one tried to tie the recently passed Sunday liquor sales with infrastructure spending! ;)

You have to separate new infrastructure from maintenance.

New infrastructure provides politicians with press and opportunities to pay off friends. It also provides an ongoing maintenance expense.

Maintenance is boring and expensive. Better to force yet another stadium through and leave the mess for the next pol.

...What are people going to use for a boogeyman once unions are finally extinguished?

I think it's important to keep things in perspective. The US _does_ invest in infrastructure, but because the US is so large you may not see it going on. New bridges and road improvements have been going on around my town for at least the last 10 years nearly non-stop. There is a huge loop around town they are trying to finish, but residents are fighting the last leg because they do not want the growth. All these items are paid for with a mix of federal, state, and local tax money.

The problem is really short term vs. long term thinking. Roads and bridges give immediate photo ops and help re-election chances. Fixing the damn does very little as long as it doesn't collapse while someone is in office.

>residents are fighting the last leg because they do not want the growth

So much harm has been done in the name of somebody not wanting small changes to happen. It's another form of short term vs. long term thinking. My city has done this for the past 50 years, and now the same people who fight any development tooth-and-nail are the ones who blame the city for abandoning them over the past 50 years in terms of putting in proper infrastructure.

The result of not growing infrastructure is that growth happens (people are having children!), but without proper infrastructure.

I agree with this, but last-leg spending is actually a huge problem in the US. Not in NIMBY terms, but because there's more money available for building new roads and infrastructure than for maintaining them.

Even infrastructure bills like the one currently being proposed tend to worsen the maintenance deficit instead of improving it.

Anybody who's ever been associated with the military is familiar with this problem. The Operations and Maintenance budget is the first thing to get cut when money's tight because the effect isn't immediately obvious. You end up not being able to trust anything you haven't inspected.

I'll never forget the explanation of why the M16 was so terrible on release: it was billed as self-cleaning, which meant literally nothing except "you don't get the cleaning gear you'll need". Add in the switch to cheaper, dirtier ammo, and everyone knows how good the results were.

It's not quite the same as cutting maintenance budgets later, but it's a painful story of money going in up front without any respect for ongoing costs.

Whenever I see comparisons to European countries, I remind myself that Los Angeles to Boston is a longer drive than Lisbon to Moscow. The amount of infrastructure spending which gets poured into largely empty spaces that connect other places is shocking, and not really comparable to most other countries.

The long term v short term problem is still very real and unresolved though.

But the rich ruling class is richer and more powerful in the US. Thus, the US way is more successful (for the aristocracy.)

> bureaucratic complacency

It also could be a problem of elected officials and public complacency. Not to be partisan, but one political party has staunchly opposed almost all government spending and has single-mindedly reduced taxpayer investment in everything they could.

That same party (maybe not the parent), as part of the campaign to reduce government activity, says government is unavoidably incompetent and blames that for all problems. Part of that is blaming "bureaucrats" (a bad word, apparently). Perhaps the problem is those elected officials.

In this case I don't know, but a LinkedIn post by someone I don't know, filled with hyperbole, is not credible evidence either way.

> staunchly opposed almost all government spending

That's their public position but they actually did the opposite. Steering the money away from what's needed to special interests.

> they actually did the opposite

There have been massive cuts in large numbers of federal programs, and also at the state-level where the GOP has control.

Ah yes the ol' "blame the electorate".

If you vote for the party that promises to defund your public services, don't be surprised when your public services are defunded.

If you vote for the party that doesn't promise that, then they lose and a bridge falls on you, that's not surprising either. A case like this is an argument against democracy as much as a criticism of voters. We can't assert majority rule and then say that bad outcomes are just karmic.

"The burned hand teaches best. After that advice about fire goes to the heart."

A whole generation is going to learn a bunch of lessons that have been forgotten, among them that infrastructure doesn't maintain itself. It's sad, because even in the best possible scenarios, a lot of the most helpless and disadvantaged are bound to suffer. At least with infrastructure failure at the level of dams, the destruction and death will be fairly democratic.

> A whole generation is going to learn a bunch of lessons that have been forgotten, among them that infrastructure doesn't maintain itself.

This is a really strange framing. A lot of my friends went into either environmental/civil engineering or local politics. They spend their days fighting tooth and nail for money and support to fix infrastructure that they know is crumbling, and they don't get it. There's nothing ignorant or generational about what they're doing.

If I were going to do the generation-warfare thing, my argument would be that younger people are more attuned to this problem because they're going to be around for every single collapse and catastrophe that's building up. They're just not in control of the money it would take to fix they problem, and had no chance to prevent it in the first place.

More broadly, though, this is better framed as a left/right struggle, or a bureaucrats/technicians struggle, or a politicians/citizens struggle, or virtually anything except a generational issue.

I wasn't thinking about young people... they're not the only generation on the planet, and not the one who've been making the bad calls re: infrastructure either.

I apologize, I read an implication in that wasn't warranted.

I think what led me to that was the idea that older generations have already seen infrastructure crises, so only younger ones would be learning something new. But I guess that's not really the case, is it? Has there been a major infrastructure crisis in the last ~100 years?

No need to apologize, it was a reasonable assumption. As you say though, I don't think living memory (at least not much) extends to that kind of crisis. Most living memory no longer recalls a lot of important lessons that we culturally believe we've learned "forever".

We haven't. People never learn lessons forever.

Reminds me of New Orleans. They told you the levies were gonna break. They are now telling you the dams are gonna collapse. It's gonna happen and then we'll deal with the problem after the catastrophe.

I remember reading "New Orleans is going to flood" annually for 20+ years. Then it did.

That's a good 20 years of someone getting their christmas bonus because they didn't waste budget on repairs

And then they lost their homes. So there's that.

Think the folks who made out on the deal lived below sea level when they could afford not to?

Remember the Susquehanna floods of 2011 following Tropical Storm Lee? FEMA had been sounding the alarm about the expected height of the 100-year flood for years and was going to redraw the flood maps, with much expanded flood plains. The plans found much popular resistance, because homeowners would have to pay mandatory flood insurance, and home values would be lower in a designated flood plain. Senator Chuckie Schumer put himself in front of the mob and successfully prevented the new floodplain designations from coming into force.

Then the river flooded. If you were in the floodplain it was epic, if you were not it was nothing. The way I see it now is that developers will do what they can get away with and politicians will do whatever helps them stay in office. People really need to take responsibility for not being in the way of failing infrastructure, it's the only thing that works in our political system.

Government employees typically don't get bonuses for such actions.

We've known about these risks for a very long time. In 1889, the South Fork Dam failed, after repeated concerns about its integrity, killing 2,209 people. I'm not sure about the economics, but I suspect that analysis would show that dealing with the outcome of failure is cheaper than trying to prevent it.

A generation or two without disaster? The US has seen many disasterous infrastructure failing in recent years. New orleans levies. That bridge in texas. The new york hurricane. The gas leak in LA. Train derailments (also in canada a couple years ago). I cannot see another disaster, even a failed dam, making all that much difference.

That bridge in one of those northern midwest states that starts with an M or a W.

I-90 sinking in Seattle.

Although, thankfully, nobody was hurt.

Yeah, well, that was ... special. The bridge was built as a bunch of concrete cells without watertight doors between them. The contractor was installing watertight doors, which meant sawing holes in the concrete. They couldn't let the cut water into the lake due to environmental reasons. So it was stored in the cells, reducing the freeboard.

Then with most of the doors installed and open, a big storm blows up. Bridge is riding lower in the water due to the cut water. Water comes in and floods from cell to cell, and soon you've got a bunch of tugboats holding the surviving bridge from busting off its remaining anchor lines.

That wasn't a case of decaying infrastructure (other than it was a retrofit), that was a case of construction mishap, along with a side of "If you had meant to sink a bridge, I don't suppose you could do anything more to hurry it along other than drilling a hole in the bottom(1)".

(1) Which I've done/supervised, without the subsequent sinking of the bridge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge...

In a place the size of the US and without wanting to sound callous to those injured or killed, that really doesn't sound too bad. Presumably there have been a lot of other less headline worthy incidents?

I think the New York thingie is unfair, because there was no real infrastructure failure there. It's simply not possible to protect Manhattan at a reasonable cost, it's naturally exposed. It's more of a city planning issue.

But I agree that the US should take some of its military budget and use it to protect its citizens by fixing its infrastructure, fixing its road safety (100 people dying every day, are you kidding me?), and getting basic health care for everyone. And you could even twist that kind of political change in "America first".

> (100 people dying every day, are you kidding me?)

Out of 300+ million. 100 people dying is one car accident per state per day, effectively. That seems like a very low, very tolerable rate.

It's the biggest danger to healthy adults AIUI. Maybe you think we're safe enough and shouldn't be worrying about safety at all, but to the extent that we're worrying about literally any other safety issue - food inspections, building inspections, terrorism, police shootings, gun laws - we should be worrying more about road safety.

Young me took a very different lesson from Feynman's investigation of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

The fundamental human problem is governance in the face of entropy and information overload.

Also known as the The Politics of Attention.

I'm still trying to understand the width and breadth of failure. Starting with Drucker's Managing in Turbulent Times thru Norman's Design of Everyday Things up to now's study of Why Smart People Do Stupid Things.

Sadly, I have no idea how to mitigate it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report

Yes you do, everyone does, we just don't want to accept it. The problem with humanity is humans, and human nature. The solution is that we're going to stop being that kind of human, either because we're going to die, or change ourselves in fundamental ways. Humanity as humanity, has no future.

Indeed,

It may require a series of truly extreme disasters.

The US has become unimaginably prosperous and that power can be wielded to mislead and misguide and protect those who would siphon off its wealth for their purposes. And even to allow those the disasters which have occurred to benefit this same group - the "lesson" of the September 11th attacks was that we needed an even larger military-industrial complex and so-forth ad-infinitum. Fear so far has only kept one group in power and not even made that group itself fearful of the actual disasters looming but only fearful of losing that power.

Bureaucracy and honesty does not go hand in hand! I am more worried that when a disaster strikes it will not only destroys lives but then the government resolve to increase taxes and regulation fighting windmills will destroy even more lives. Just like how 9/11 has put America into a perpetual mega expensive war with no objectives.

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