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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

This is a disaster happening all over the country. The EPA estimates we will need $385 billion by 2030 to modernize water infrastructure.

Putting municipalities in charge of utilities is basically a failed model. Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones. Even major cities like Chicago are poisoning their kids (to a lesser degree) due to inability to properly maintain infrastructure.

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They overstate this stuff, all of the time.

My wife was a finance director at a municipal water utility in an old city. Water supply infrastructure wasn't a ticking timebomb -- many pipes last literally centuries, and utilities can proactively use sensors and robots to find weak pipes to repair without digging up half the city. They had a capital program that worked, lines were replaced based on risk and there was a reserve for breaks or other failures.

The higher risk area from a cost point of view is sewers. They don't age as well and as we pave move stuff, many older sewers and combined storm/sanitary systems are unsafe and vulnerable.

The Flint issue isn't about old pipes. It's about incompetent engineers who should be criminally charged for incompetence.

It's more abouy failed leadership than failed engineering. It has to do with how Flint spread responsibility over their water source so thin that no one was to blame and no one had the full picture. Laziness gave way to corruption. I'm sure there were protests from the engineering team.

You do realize that Flint's local government was usurped by an emergency economic manager, right?

Defund or mismanage (due to incompetence, malice, or a mix) government until you cause a disaster, point at the disaster, and blame it on the government...classic Red Team strategy in action.

Red team is going very hard right now

I sure do and I realize this was largely the State's fault. I didn't mean to say "Flint spread the responsibility so thin" so much as "The responsibility was spread thin between Flint and the State"

They already are being charged and sentenced. They will pay for the crime if you count probation for those in charge;<(

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/michigan/flint-water-c...

The people in charge will never pay.

The investigation says that the crime goes right to the bottom - random people in the MDEQ who did their jobs and didn't rock the boat.

The punishment is that if he poisons another set of kids within a year, she gets a higher sentence. Also her job search will be complicated for a year.

Yeah. That'll show them.

The only solution is to make monitoring the responsibility of people who are impacted. Distribute water quality testing kits that, first, clearly and easily show their results, and can then be mailed to a federal agency. Good luck avoiding those results.

One could argue the Coca Cola company pushed bottled water on US residents in the 1990's. Alternatively, one could argue government standards did not keep up with filtration technology. Unfortunately, US government innovation since the 1960's has failed the test of time. Statistically speaking, the majority of quality of life improvements in the last half century, was seeded by American startups and small business.

Do you have sources/data for any of those claims?

Agreed. This is some tin foil hat stuff.

The biggest ones are all from the government:

computing and electronics/chip manufacturing GPS/inertial positioning internet new drugs and treatments

its government r&d work

But that's only a problem with the AMERICAN government. Lots of other governments around the world are doing amazing things, despite corruption being a constant stress on the system.

> Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones.

I don't understand the first point. Do water systems have some great economies of scale beyond the municipal level? The cost of the water system and the ability to take on debt are both directly proportional to the population size. If you have twice as many people in a unit then you can borrow twice as much money but have to pay twice as much to cover them.

And as to the second point, it's not clear that the cities in such dire straits that they can't even pay for their own infrastructure are worth saving. Concentrated poverty is poisonous in general. It may make more sense to relocate the people in failed cities to other places than to spend billions of dollars bailing them out every year until the end of time.

> If you have twice as many people in a unit then you can borrow twice as much money but have to pay twice as much to cover them.

Right, but you can spread out the repayment risk. Michigan as a whole is struggling, but as recently as 2000 it's per-capita GSP was at the national average, compared to places like Detroit and Flint where the bottom dropped out decades ago.

Buoyed by Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Lansing, and Bloomfield Hills.

As with every state - the urban areas by and large provide the tax revenue.

With Michigan, the Detroit City Center is mostly a trainwreck. There are still strong metro areas, and in particular there is a buttload of money flowing into the U of M area from overseas.

> Right, but you can spread out the repayment risk.

The lenders can already do that. Instead of buying $1000 in Michigan State bonds they can buy $100 in bonds from each city, limiting the exposure to any one.

The effect you're really after is that at the state level the interest rates are lower because one city failing doesn't cause any of the state-level bonds to default. But that's just the second point again -- sustainable cities bail out the unsustainable ones. Instead of cities paying more interest they have to pay the same money to cover the bondholders against another city's default. If the bond market is efficient in evaluating risk and pricing it into interest rates then it's exactly the same average amount. But more of the money comes from the cities that already would have paid lower interest rates, to prop up the failing ones.

It's basically the state acting as an insurance company for the bondholders against the risk of default, without reinsurance. So the government suffers unexpected large one-time expenses rather than predictable small expenses over time, and if too many municipalities get into trouble at once it could take down the whole state. Look at what Greece nearly did to the EU at an even higher level.

> The cost of the water system ... [is] proportional to the population size...

Absolutely not - unless you assume every municipal area has equal population density.

You figure water pipe installation costs per mile. There are a lot more miles to get to people's houses in Podunk Nebraska. Overall - trivially disprovable.

> The ... ability to take on debt [is] directly proportional to the population size.

Absolutely not. Trivially disprovable. Compare tax revenue per-capita between Podunk Nebraska and New York City and see what you come up with. And then figure that out over the actual cost to deploy services to that population. Density of tax revenue per square mile is orders of magnitude lower.

Pro tip here: Podunk Nebraska doesn't have water service. They don't have sewer service. They have a well and a septic field, buddy. Because there isn't revenue to provide real services.

I lived in that growing up - and you don't have an accurate picture of what rural life is like at all. We had well water and septic, just like anyone who lived within 5 miles of us.

Podunk, Nebraska isn't supposed to have city water and sewer. It isn't a city. You only need those things in areas where there is too much population density for wells and septic fields.

And then you're just arguing that sustainable cities should pay for unsustainable ones again.

All that I know is we were able to afford the infrastructure originally under a higher tax regime. That suggests to me that we can afford to solve this problem, even if it means that the wealthy are contributing back to the country that provided the business and social environment to do so.

> That suggests to me that we can afford to solve this problem

I don't think that follows. It's certainly not true in software.... it's cheap to add things in the beginning of the design process, but gets exponentially harder as you add more complexity. And in general in homebuilding remodels are at least a factor of two more expensive than new construction.

Putting down a water main while you're building a street and before you've built any houses seems substantially easier than replacing a water main while dealing with traffic and a block full of customers who need continuous water supply. Not to mention more stringent building codes and such.

I think it should be done regardless, because it's generally impossible for people to run their own water lines, so the State has a moral imperative to do it. But I can easily see it being much more expensive than the original build.

Most of the infrastructure was built on taking out debt based on optimistic projections of future growth. Flint and Detroit are poster children for this.

Isn't the current trump administration plan exactly the same regarding infrastructure, with wildly unrealistic growth numbers being used to support the spending?

In this country we've lost the ability to build things at a reasonable cost (or at all). A single mile of track in NYC costs about half as much as the entire Delhi metro system, or a typical Spanish rail line (not just a small track extension), etc.

The problem is costs, not revenue. Charging more money will merely divert funds from productive and valuable investments (e.g. self driving cars) into less valuables ones (e.g. tiny extensions to NYC subways). If you want to fix infrastructure, fix the cost problem.

There was an article shared on HN a couple years ago arguing these that sorts of cost spikes and overruns are pretty much endemic to countries with common-law legal systems, and almost non-existent outside them.

I'm having a hard time digging it up, though. Sorry.

That sounds very credible.

On a bus in Cambodia, I watched a man fixing potholes in the road. He had nothing but a spade, and each time a vehicle came past he leapt out if it's way, clinging to a dirt bank.

When I got home after that holiday, I saw someone repairing the motorway near my home. The whole lane was shut down just for him, and there was a large truck with a crew of two and huge flashing arrows on it in front of him just to keep him safe.

It would be literally hundreds of times cheaper building anything in an environment where lives were considered expendable.

I'm pretty sure the GP was taking about common law as opposed to roman-style civil law (or other ways of building a legal system)

Yes, that's correct. Thanks for clarifying.

You've misdiagnosed the cost problem. We have suburbs who have never, and continue not to be, amortizing -- they don't pay their costs in taxes. That can be papered over by fees from growth when they are growing, but when they stop expanding, wait 50 years for infrastructure to wear out, and you have a disaster.

Lots of suburbs and rural America are built far too sparsely to be affordable (to the denizens; Woodside will continue to be just fine).

If infrastructure cost the same as it costs in Spain, Korea, China or India, thos suburbs would be paying their costs.

Delhi built a metro system for the cost of 2 miles of 2nd Ave Subway track in NYC.

We spend too much. That's the problem.

The price/cost overruns of building the 2nd ave subway (and the large stations, which is were most of the costs went) is unrelated to the price of building roads and sewer in suburban America.

Also, doing stuff in America costs more than in China or India. News at 10.

>Also, doing stuff in America costs more than in China or India. News at 10.

Which is his whole point. Also, the suburb cashflow you are super concerned about would be fixed with cheaper building/maintenance costs.

Then the point is stupid.

Complaining (as I think?) that it's relatively more expensive is reasonable, though I doubt Americans would tolerate the widespread death rates involved in large infra projects in some countries.

As I pointed out, nothing he mentioned is relevant to infra costs of your suburbs that aren't building giant gorgeous mezzanines or stupid pretty bridges like sf.

Yes, doing stuff in America costs more than in every other country in the world, including wealthy ones like Spain and Korea.

That's the whole point. If you want better infrastructure, fix that.

> All that I know is we were able to afford the infrastructure originally under a higher tax regime.

Actually, we couldn't.

Cities can actually afford their infrastructure--they're dense enough.

The problem is that we built a whole bunch of suburbs that people moved into. Suburbs can't afford their infrastructure once they quit growing. And, if they drain the critical mass out of the city, they also make the city not able to afford its infrastructure.

It can't be overstated. All metro areas need their actual residencies checked, because the lead service lines are everywhere.

There's been a lot more checking (under the Obama administration - goodbye EPA) and there are many million+ resident municipalities with very bad lead levels because of lead service lines.

Controversial opinion: Governments are inherently bad at managing anything that stretches beyond the next election.

With that simplistic logic, public corporations are inherently bad at managing anything that stretches beyond the next quarter.

Which is why there are so many large capital private equity groups.

Short sellers exist. As do elections, but voters have far less incentive to gather and analyze relevant information.

How do short sellers punish the executives of the company? Even if they lose their jobs, they'll get millions of dollars in "performance" bonuses and millions more in severance in return for running the company into the ground.

I wonder how often this really happens though?

Often boards will appoint CEOs to dismantle or sell off hopeless companies (disappearing market, obstreperous union, product is turning into a commodity) in a last ditch effort to recover some shareholder value. We can't call those CEOs failures if they manage to get shareholders something as opposed to the nearly nothing they would get if the company went bust.

I think a lot of the criticism of Marissa Mayer misses the point that she was appointed CEO of Yahoo, home-page website for people who don't know how to change their home page. The fact that she managed to arrange an exit for Yahoo that wasn't a complete bankruptcy or shutdown is just epsilon-short-of-miraculous.

Another way to look at it is that she had an entire large tech company at her disposal and managed to do pretty much nothing with it, then pawned it off and jumped out with a golden parachute.

Not an equally legitimate way of looking at it in my opinion.

This was Yahoo we're talking about. A buyout was the best possible scenario for shareholders. She's been rewarded for rescuing some shareholder value from a burning car wreck.

Here's a question you can ask yourself: do you think Verizon got a good deal? I'd be upset if I held Verizon stock because I believe based on everything I know about Yahoo that Verizon shouldn't have purchased them and that it was a bad deal for them.

"I wonder how often this really happens though?"

Only when it happens to the "right people".

;) ;) wink wink ;) ;)

Then create an independent organisation handling things with a fixed budget based on % of federal revenue.

This should solve this.

I think solving the problem would require getting humans out of the process... since we are always our own worst problem. (IMO)

So people say.

Yet in my city, for all its warts, clean water has come out of the tap since the mid 19th century, and the poop and rainwater flows away.

Whereas startups are inherently good at long-term sustainability.

...in America. There's lots of developed countries where municipal governments are generally well run as a rule, and while there's always grumbling things never get this out of hand. Lead is posion, for pete's sake. Where else in the developed world would poisoned drinking water be allowed for so long?

In Canada we had what we consider a big disaster 17 years ago:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/inside-walkerton-canada-s-wors...

The Premier (equivalent of a governor), was investigated by judicial inquiry, his offices searched, people went to jail, there were payouts for damages - and this is something that only affected a town of 5,000 people. More importantly, it was fixed as fast as possible.

My point being: it's not that there aren't screw-ups elsewhere, it's just that they're so rare that they cause a huge scandal and everyone runs around trying to fix things. In America everyone just seems to just get angry at each other and then do nothing.

So don't tar governments. They work well elsewhere. America's just doing it wrong.

Exactly. The question now is: why is American government so broken, and the corollary is: what can we do to fix it? Is American culture simply broken, so that only utterly sociopathic people go into government? Is America just completely filled with people who have been trained from birth to be sociopathic, as evidenced by the way they vote?

Empowering (electing) people who cannot govern, and are in fact utterly opposed to anyone governing, is having the expected outcome.

Because Freedom Markets[tm], booyah!

Yes, but that doesn't explain why our voters consistently elect such people, while voters in other industrialized nations don't (nearly as much).

America is the richest country in the world and as such attracts the best propagandists on the free market.

American culture has a long individualist streak that distrusts authorities, combined with our many entrenched sins regarding e.g. racism, leaves a significant fraction of the population vulnerable to many effective forms of propaganda... and that's just the right. Except for a few states like MA and VT, the left consistently fails to field candidates that will fight for ordinary people against monied interests because that's where their election funds come from. In the past, leftists were associated with official enemies of the state (e.g. communists, socialists) by major media organizations and trusted authorities. Now most people here distrust their gut instincts about fairness, inequality, the golden rule, and mutual caring.

Many forms of leftist organization were broken down and destroyed after the upheavals of the 60s, with especially aggressive pushes by Regan, but this has continued by both parties up to the present day with Republicans taking mainly larger digs at the integrity of the public trust. This story continues with rather emphasized savagery into the present day starting in 2017.

However, this is an interesting moment where it seems there is a big fight brewing between truly breathtakingly rapacious greed and a significant fraction of the public. It will be interesting to see who wins in the coming decades - it may determine the fate of the planet's suitability for human life.

"Slavery". That sort of system requires a fair amount of legal and propaganda support. Our election system gives the old slave states a boost. And our more bigoted politicians are constantly rehashing and reusing the propaganda to justify their actions. So while slavery itself is gone, the weighted legal system and propaganda are still in place doing what they do. It's a safe bet that much of the Flint water crisis is due to the water system being for "those people".

It's the adversarial system - people vs Government. In pretty much every country that's doing well, the Government is considered a representative of the people, and is expected to act as one or suffer political consequences - but in the case of the US, it's expected that the Government as a whole is not a functional part of society, so it has no reason to behave as one.

Can you give some examples of those countries? Which countries are doing well and have governments that their people are generally happy with and consider representative of the people?

Most of Europe to at least some extent, with variations on different subjects.

For example, in some countries people are dissatisfied with immigration policy, but they're probably happy with the roads and water supply.

Not the UK: In which probably 50% of the population feel the government doesn't represent them. Not France I'd guess? Which seems to have issues and strong probability of a Frexit? Not Italy, whose politics as seemed somwwhat messy for some time?

Those are the countries in Europe that are "doing well" in terms of GDP at least. Aside from Germany that is.

So is Germany the role model? I'm really trying to ask an honest question. I'm wondering which are the countries currently doing well economically and treating their citizens well.

>Not the UK: In which probably 50% of the population feel the government doesn't represent them.

When you have a situation like that, it seems like it's time to break up the country into smaller units so that you don't have a half-and-half divide, because then you'll never get to a stable state where a large enough majority of the population accepts the government (because they're constantly fighting the other half in a tug-of-war and the majority keeps flipping back and forth).

According to the Brexit results, Scotland strongly favored "remain", and so did Northern Ireland. London did too. So obviously, Scotland should simply secede from the UK, and it can rejoin the EU as a separate nation. It's certainly large enough to be an independent nation on its own. Northern Ireland can too, or better yet it can rejoin regular Ireland which is already an EU member.

I do wonder, however, what would happen if they did another Brexit vote just to see if many people have changed their minds.

Yeah, I've only lived in two countries, but in both a lot of people are upset about how uniquely bad theirs is, and think things are much better in the "sane" world.

Sighs of "Only in X-Country..." abound.

This kinda mirrors the common misunderstanding that I or my family are the only ones with problems. Everyone else seem so happy and problem free.

There are many well functioning local governments in the United States.

The US is a big country both in terms of habitable land and population, with almost 325 million people (Canada technically has more land, but since most of it is uninhabitable, they don't have to worry about plumbing it). You've read about ONE city where the mismanagement was so severe that the water became poisonous. I'm sure it's not the only one, but I'm also sure this happens in countries that aren't America sometimes too.

I'm not a civil engineer but from what I hear, Flint's water problem is nearly impossible to resolve and would practically require a complete extraction and replacement of the city's infrastructure, which isn't really possible without destroying the city anyway, since there are buildings and roads and stuff on top of it. Of course, it's politically incorrect to admit that, and politicians and bureaucrats will probably keep pretending like they are going to do something to resolve it to try to keep public anger at bay, and just hope the city empties out before anyone notices that it's been 30 years.

Maybe that evaluation of the engineering issue is incorrect, it's just what I've read; as above, I'm not a civil engineer so I don't actually know. But this is not just a simple matter of cleaning up a minor bacterial contamination. Minor contaminations of that type occur and get cleaned up all the time without anyone taking special notice (except the citizens affected by the boil order).

I understand it's fun to throw rocks at the big guy, but your comment is not representative of life in the US. If we had such a hard time providing basic services like water and our neighbor to the immediate north didn't, things would look a lot different.

isn't the problem in Flint that a set of politicians decided to switch the water source to a heavily polluted one in exchange for some financial compensation

now that the lead particulate has gotten into all the existing pipes, it's an insurmountable problem, but still entirely a result of American corruption, rather than an engineering issue.

They switched the water to the Flint River to try to save money (the city had been maintaining infrastructure and a treatment plant to pull water from the Flint river for many years previously but it was unused).

My understanding is the largest problem was not pulling water from the river - it was the decision of evironmental department officials and treatment plant managers to not add anti-corrosion chemicals to pH balance the acidic water. (They claimed to misinterpret federal regulations and believed 1 year of monitoring was necessary before adding the chemicals). The chemicals themselves were quite cheap and there hasn't been any "corruption" related reason for them not to have been added. Unless new evidence has come out since then, this was a case of incompetence.

For the record, I don't raise this because it's "fun to throw rocks at the big guy". Your country is saturated by propaganda, which I'm fine with, but unfortunately it's leaking. People in my country listen to your media take this anti-government stuff seriously, even though we don't have the same kinds of problems, and it has a real effect on the electorate.

It was obvious when the Obamacare debate first started and for a week or two the US paid attention to how healthcare worked in other countries. All the sudden these hit pieces started showing up about how bad healthcare is in Canada and the UK, with all this exaggerated garbage about wait lists etc. Or recently with Norway and the "Islamic plague". It's absolute propaganda, taking the tiniest grain of truth and turning it into a giant calamity for political purposes, even though the truth on the ground (which is obvious to anyone in those countries) isn't even remotely similar.

Like I said, if your country wants to do that, that's fine. But I feel obligated to point out that you can't just look at America's government and declare that all government is that wasteful and ineffective.

that's a common idea, but really there's no inherent quality of Governments that make that the case - I think it's more to do with how various Governments are set up. Interestingly enough, I think that regulatory frameworks set up by people who have the idea that Governments are inherently inefficient can actually make it a self-fullfilling prophesy.

It's what I've seen, for example, in the Australian telecommunications and electricity markets. The parts that have been privitised are now run 'more efficiently' by underinvesting on maintenance, upgrades etc., all the time with rising cost to the consumer and rising profits, and now when Government intervention is required (you may have heard about the SA blackouts after Elon Musk offered to build them a 100MW grid scale battery within 100 days recently), the Governments can't really do everything they need because they are limited by law of interfering with the 'efficient' markets.

Of course, the idea that you could have a competitive power generation market when the cost of entry is so high is ridiculous.

I think the "inherent quality of [democratic] Governments" is this:

If a government does something that causes short term pain with much bigger long term gains, it will tend to get voted out of office long before it gets to the "gains" part. The incentives for elected officials is to focus on winning the next election, or perish.

Private organizations also have short term pressures, but they're not nearly as short term and drastic. Board members and stock analysts will actually do serious in depth analysis of the long term prospects. The median voter does not.

Or maybe just privatize it? In France (one of the most socialist country on Earth) we've been privatizing more and more of our water infrastructure (we're around 30% private by now and it increases each year) and the quality of water is still one of the best.

And how much do you pay for it?

England's water system was privatized in the 1980s, and prices went up significantly. But that's also kind of the point. One of the reasons U.S. water infrastructure is so bad is that bureaucrats set the water/sewer rates too low to appropriately fund upgrades.[1] Regulators set rates way too low, because they'd rather poison children (who don't vote) with lead than raise water rates on grandmas (who do vote).

[1] https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-water-infrastructure/pricing...

I don't think that "too cheap" is an issue because the state can put subsidies in place. The core issue is lack of oversight and that can happen in public and private environments.

The subsidy isn't going to be from rich residents to poor ones. It's going to be from urban cores to the suburbs. Spread out a bunch of people over a large area, and there's much more pipe per capita.

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