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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

I read things like this and other failed infrastructure stories (high speed rail) and just get so depressed.

Growing up in India, we used to read and see stories about the West (Europe and the US) and were just amazed at what can be done with infrastructure if the people and government had the will to do so.

Now, I've lived in the US for 23 years, and I look longingly elsewhere at Europe and Asia to see what can be done with infrastructure if the people and government had the will to do so. From broadband, to high speed rail, to public transportation, to food safety, to medical care.

The problem is, as a population, we still haven't come to terms that we're slipping behind badly. We just say "but, but, silicon valley!" or "but we innovate!" and move on.

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I find it's generally a "grass is greener" thing - we envy other countries for infrastructure but ignore the serious problems in those places like high unemployment, etc.

But you're right; the US got overrun by nationalism post-9/11 which led to a feeling that because we were already the best, greatest, freest nation given to man by god -- and the rest of the world surpassed us in many ways.

"we were already the best, greatest, freest nation given to man by god"

The US is hardly the first nation to think that at the peak of its power and almost certainly won't be the last.

To some extent, it might be a grass is greener. But the thing is, the grass here WAS often legitimately greener compared to many places.

It's just that the large infrastructure projects that can only be undertaken by government have gotten so paralyzed by special interests, that the stories just sound like anything you'd hear from developing nations with woefully corrupt governments. That billions of dollars were spent, there is literally NOTHING to show for it, AND nobody was punished either.

I say this living in an area (DC Metro) that now has gigabit fiber from the local telco. But I know our situation is rare.

DC is one of the only places that has competitive FTTH in the country - the same place all the regulators are saying there isn't a problem. Surely no coincidence?

I miss my FiOS - I don't miss the weather :-)

Yeah I don't think it's a fluke that the DC area has decent broadband competition. That's where all the regulators live.

It's not a fluke, it's the result of sound municipal policy. D.C. is dysfunctional in many ways, but it's not anti-development like most U.S. cities. Right now, entire neighborhoods are being razed and replaced with gleaming 12-14 story mid-rise buildings. The city is also permissive with telecom deployment. Comcast, RCN, and Verizon have all been permitted to deploy in different parts of the city without being compelled to service the whole city at once.

It's not just D.C. though. The whole surrounding area is pretty lax about development. The Chesapeake Bay area in Maryland is pretty rural, but also has fiber internet because ISPs are permitted to build where it's profitable to build.

The D.C. Suburbs also have some of the highest-income households in the country. Low-income households buy less home Internet by FAR (low income people use cell phones and mobile data). That absolutely factors in.

It's not just rich suburbs. Here is a completely random building in Anacostia: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.8595932,-76.9871194,3a,75y,1.... If you punch in the address to various providers, apparently it can get fiber through Verizon or Comcast, or gigabit cable through Comcast or RCN.

We let fear destroy us. Since 2001, we have spent $4.79 trillion on war in the Middle East... averaging out to $319,000,000,000 ($319B) per year.

For perspective, Clinton's campaign national infrastructure bill proposed spending $240B over 10 years, and a national high-speed rail network might cost around $500B. Those are huge expenditures, but they are investments in the American public.

War in the Middle East? Our money just goes up in smoke...

[1] Summary of Costs of the US Wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan and Homeland Security: http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/201...

The U.S. is going through a greedy oligarch phase. The silent generation was the one that built all that infrastructure and had the proper tax incentives to make both public and private infrastructure projects happen. Massive ones.

And then the baby boomers came along. And they have just cash cowed that infrastructure, not doing a good job maintaining it, not advancing it, letting it rot, while they pocket the benefit, stuffing it into the stock, bond, and real estate markets, benefiting really no one but themselves. They are a hoarding generation. And they seem fairly OK with a re-emergence of aristocracy as a result: I've got mine, you go get your own. Everything is a product. Rich people get more. Cooperation is socialism. Etc.

So it'll be up to gen X and millenials to decide what comes next.

Well put. I can think of no better way of explaining our situation than this.

You mean you can't do better than name calling?

Actually I kind of forgot the baby boomers line. I got hung up on the "oligarch phase" which is totally apt.

I don't know if we can just blame baby boomers, unless somehow they were responsible for voting all the current politicians in.

> And then the baby boomers came along.

To be fair to Boomers and contrary to the popular current Boomers.v. Millenials (with Gen X occasionally acknowledged) narrative, the effects you describe began under the social, economic, and political dominance of the “Greatest” Generation, not the boomers.

Further, it's not really a generational thing, it's about shifting distribution of power among economic classes over time; which generation is ascendant at the time isn't the controlling factor, and generation v. generation narrative obstructs the kind of coalition building that could work to reverse the problem.

I feel like our economy still hasn't fully recovered. Sure you've got an overall increase in market cap, but the common worker isn't nearly as well off as before the crash.

The scary part is when I read about the roaring 20s. It reminds me of many of my experiences in silicon valley.

I often wonder, if the market crashes again will we be in another great depression that leads us to ww3.

> The scary part is when I read about the roaring 20s. It reminds me of many of my experiences in silicon valley.

Could you elaborate a bit on that?

>I often wonder, if the market crashes again will we be in another great depression that leads us to ww3.

It's still unclear that we would need another one. Going by the WWII timeline, the invasion of Poland would be roughly in the next year.

I thought US has one of the highest food safety standards in the world?

Also, broadband and high speed rail are infinitely easier when the landmass is over 15-40x smaller and population density 2-10x greater than the US.

Our medical care system sucks though - service is excellent, costs are not.

> service is excellent

Lower life expectancy suggests the service isn't that excellent.

I know nothing about the specifics, but the quality of produce at the supermarkets is light years better in the EU than in the USA, in my personal experience.

Which European countries are you thinking of?

My favorite thing to do when I visit a different country is tour the grocery store. I compare the price of milk, bread, eggs, cheese, and beef.

In Italy and London I have found that similar quality products are much more expensive usually. However the stores caring more high quality local foods, and less of the cheap processed foods that we American's love.

Yeah we've made this density argument a thousand times. But it falls flat in a second, because broadband in US cities (which are very dense) still mostly sucks. No excuse for that. I can understand if our city broadband was amazing and rural internet was no good. But that's just not the case.

No, the US has MUCH worse food safety standards than the EU for example. I am tired of reading articles about all kinds of toxins and carcinogens that are byproducts of mass production, that are allowed by the FDA in "small quantities" but are completely banned in the EU. Same goes for food labeling.

Update: Regarding high speed rail and density, it should actually be the opposite. The hard part of building something like HSR is getting the correct permits and buying land, not just the construction. With the US being so spread out, there's fewer parties to negotiate land purchases from.

> But it falls flat in a second, because broadband in US cities (which are very dense) still mostly sucks. No excuse for that.

The U.S. is unusual in making telecom construction and licensing a largely municipal issue, which subjects it to local NIMBY-ism. Philadelphia, D.C., New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Austin, etc., have broadband that's quite competitive with Europe. They also tend to be places that are laissez faire in general about development in general. The Bay Area, in contrast, is anti-development about everything, apparently including broadband. There's a reason Google chose to build fiber in Atlanta, but not in its own back yard.

The USA could do better, but Europe / Asia are also very different beasts from the USA in terms of geography.

Yes, both are larger than the US.

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