Controversial opinion: Governments are inherently bad at managing anything that stretches beyond the next election.
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.
Because Freedom Markets[tm], booyah!
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.
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.
For example, in some countries people are dissatisfied with immigration policy, but they're probably happy with the roads and water supply.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only when it happens to the "right people".
;) ;) wink wink ;) ;)
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.
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.
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.
This should solve this.