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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

It honestly feels like short term thinking is dominating not only businesses, but government officials too. It boggles my mind, frankly, because of the exact things you mentioned: losing citizens, economic damage, and so forth.

Perhaps the incentives just aren’t there to think long term, for either business leaders or politicians.

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It's not surprising. Elected officials care more about getting reelected in the next election than long term effects of their decisions. So they are incentivized to care more about the short term.

In my new world order we'll vote to fire people in charge, not to hire them

We have a system like that with judges in some states. Examples of judges failing to be retained are sparse https://ballotpedia.org/Retention_election

Politics is business. Business is about making money. From those foundational facts, it's fair to infer that if state Republican politicians are working to ban cities from providing basic services, the politicians are doing this because they think they can make money doing it.

It's wrong. But then, politics, in its current incarnation, is business.

And more importantly, make money for themselves and not for the city/state etc.

The only reason people hate graft more than they hate boondoggles is because in the former case it's nearly impossible to bury your head in the sand and pretend like the money was smartly allocated.

No matter how you cut it at the end of the day the tax dollars are being squandered on lining pockets they shouldn't be.

Extra points for using 'boondoggles' in a sentence :)

Could it have something to do with which party supporters are gonna lose more if internet is slow? Can internet be linked in some way to poll results?

Almost certainly not. When you make things marginally worse across the board on an infrastructure matter (in this case by reducing competition) rural areas almost always lose more.

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