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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

The right assumes the government is incompetent, and then crafts policy to kneecap government at every opportunity.

The left assumes the government could be competent, but only if everyone tries to make it so, and they know what the right is doing (all of this policy is completely aboveboard and public).

Net result, everyone can safely assume the government is incompetent. It is much easier to prevent it from working than to make it work. We'd have to have bipartisan interest in making it work effectively, and we do not have that.

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To add to this - in general a conservative agenda is easier to implement since it requires maintaining status quo versus engaging in radical change.

I live an extremely democratic leaning city and they basically suck at everything. Yard waste has sat on my curb for 2 months now because I guess they just don't feel like picking it up any more. Equipment has been broken in my local playground for nearly a year now. The only one that actually picks up trash in my local park in an organized fashion is the Libertarian Party of all people. And I could go on.

There's no right crafting policy to kneecap the city's ability to function as a city.

Cities have different problems from the federal government, usually funding being the big one. Even a Democratic city that overall favors good government will have problems being effective without sufficient funds to pull it off.

I do wonder why your city government is in charge of yard waste, though? I've lived a lot of places, mostly very liberal, and it's always been a private company hauling away trash/recycle/yard debris.

>Cities have different problems from the federal government, usually funding being the big one. Even a Democratic city that overall favors good government will have problems being effective without sufficient funds to pull it off.

We've got 25 million to build a bridge to a sports stadium. Think we could find $100 a week to pay someone to pick up trash for 4 hours.

>I do wonder why your city government is in charge of yard waste, though? I've lived a lot of places, mostly very liberal, and it's always been a private company hauling away trash/recycle/yard debris.

Because my city is not good at being a city.

> We've got 25 million to build a bridge to a sports stadium

Sports stadiums are massive sources of revenue for cities.

> Think we could find $100 a week to pay someone to pick up trash for 4 hours.

It takes more than one person working four hours a week to collect garbage for an entire city.

>Sports stadiums are massive sources of revenue for cities.

That's not true. They're almost always a net loss and either way I'm not talking about the money that went to the stadium. I'm talking about the money spent on building a single pedestrian bridge to that stadium.

>It takes more than one person working four hours a week to collect garbage for an entire city.

Obviously I meant 4 hours a week picking up trash in a single park.

I think your problems must stem from astounding levels of corruption.

I’m up in a small town in British Columbia, population circa 40K. Our compost is collected weekly; our recycling and garbage biweekly (garbage used to be weekly but they’ve supplied us with humongous wheeled bins now); our landfill separates trash by kind, sells what can be recycled, and keeps track of where it buried the rest; we have a massive composting facility that sells its end product; our sewer treatment plant sends its output to ranchland spray irrigation and golf courses. In the spring and fall, a chipping truck comes along and mulches any tree trimmings.

We maintain our infrastructure. Old underground services are regularly upgraded on schedule. Roads are resurfaced when they’re worn. Our downtown core was beautified a few years ago, with new trees, brickwork, etc. Down at the beaches, cottonwood trees are removed when they become hazardous; new trees are planted. Our parks are clean, despite the homeless living in them. Heck, we built several apartment buildings for those homeless that have their life together enough to qualify for residency (though provincial funding assisted on this.)

Over the past twenty or thirty years we’ve build a new swimming pool/rec centre; a multi-sheet ice rink; a truly excellent performing arts centre; acres of new park; a new track-and-field venue; removed a decrepit and failing arena; and are in the process of building out a new arena/outdoor sports centre. The only thing we’ve completely failed to implement is a new art gallery.

We do have a homeless problem (our weather is very nice) and there is a heck of a drugs problem (a lot of weed was grown around here back in the day, and there’s an undercurrent of gang activity involving the hard drugs). But on the whole, it’s a very laidback, safe, well-run community of caring people.

It’s sad that your town is a failure. It must be corruption, because surely you have people who can administer with competency comparable to my town.

> It must be corruption, because surely you have people who can administer with competency comparable to my town.

They probably do have people who can administer with comparable competency, but I think the competency required to manage a town of 40k is very different from the kind of competency you need to get those results in a much larger town.

At small city scale, administrative layers can be thin and infrequent because of the smaller scale. Changing collections to be every other week could probably be a meeting with a few dozen workers. In a major city, that could be hundreds or thousands of workers, requiring administrative layers to handle rescheduling, handling concerns, etc, etc.

Small cities also generally have to develop smaller portions of their budget to dynamically adjusting to shifts in the city. How often do you have to build new roads and expand existing ones to handle shifts in traffic? What's the worst case scenario for traffic in a city of 40k, vs a city with millions of people? The major cities I've lived in are constantly having to build new roads and expand existing ones, and they're barely making a dent in the traffic problem.

Stuff like taking down trees and cleaning parks is pretty easy when the town is small enough to have a half dozen people do it. You need a whole administration layer when you can't have 6 people that just wander around parks fixing things that need to be fixed.

Like many things, I think complexity and cost of those services tends to scale exponentially with population rather than linearly.

>I think your problems must stem from astounding levels of corruption.

Yes, it's a pretty astoundingly corrupt city. But stamping out corruption is one of the fundamental components of good governance.

> We've got 25 million to build a bridge to a sports stadium. Think we could find $100 a week to pay someone to pick up trash for 4 hours.

TBF this one isn't government specific. It's often easier to fund a debt instrument for a big initiative than to find a revenue stream for a small obvious win. This happens in large companies, too, btw. You argue for years to consistently invest a small amount in something, the investment is never made, and then the company ends up acquiring to save itself from that exact underinvestemnt.

> I do wonder why your city government is in charge of yard waste, though? I've lived a lot of places, mostly very liberal, and it's always been a private company hauling away trash/recycle/yard debris.

City run trash collection is totally a thing in some areas, and it actually makes sense if done well. I once lived in a conservative city that had it (and did it well).

Where I live now, we have private trash collection. That meant we had dozens of garbage trucks from different companies driving through the neighborhood on every trash day, until one of my neighbors organized everyone to switch to one single company.

In my experience, you’ll typically find the most inefficiency when private companies have been contracted to do this kind of work. Theoretically, they should be incentivized to be more efficient, otherwise they might lose their contract. However, because the contracting process offers so many opportunities for people to trade favors, in reality once a company has the contract they’re effectively locked in. At that point, their incentive is to do the bare minimum possible to keep their own costs down and their profits high.

Interestingly, my neighborhood was mostly on a single company, due to several HOAs banding together and negotiating a group deal. But the company has now announced that it will no longer be honoring the group discount, so it's probably going to fracture again.

I would push back on the idea that there’s no right crafting policy to kneecap the city’s ability to function as a city. I don’t think they have to, because a lot of the techniques they might use to do so have already been fully absorbed by even the left leaning politicians in this country. For example, a lot of cities sub-contract all kinds of things they could be doing directly with city employees in the name of efficiency. However, in doing so, they often end up creating additional management layers that end up slowing down the work, all in the service of a marginally lower cost. This is neoliberal thinking, and it is pervasive across just about every level of government across the United States.

I too live in an extremely democratic leaning city and the only time my waste has not been picked up was when I forgot to push it out to the curb.

Even the brightest among the HN crowd can fall into the trap that "The other side is incompetent." There are geniuses and idiots on both sides. If your city is poorly run, its not because your city is run by one party over the other. It's because the people running your city is competent at running a campaign and incompetent at running a city. There's not much more to it than that.

BTW, the people picking up trash in our neighborhood are bleeding heart liberals.

Or another way to put it, it actually requires effort to make it work, but it requires no effort to not make it work. Its about like saying "hey that kid is drowning! I could swim and go save him, but instead I am going to go get a Slurpee."

No, in my estimate, its more like, you have to be willing to piss some people off to make stuff go. Perhaps better wording would be that you can't accomplish things without sacrifice. We aren't willing to do that. You can't have CA's environmental review process and timely/cost effective construction. You can't have SF's discretionary review process and ... any construction, really. You can't solve the housing crisis without building housing, but to do that, you'd actually have to build housing. The cost of that housing is multiples of the public sectors budget, so you'd need to first of all, admit that, and then allow the private sector to do it. The private sector only does stuff that makes a profit... so we'd just rather not build housing than change regulations. Now, we get to say we like affordable housing and protecting the environment when our policies don't result in affordable housing and we push people out of environmentally efficient cities into the suburbs/exurbs/wilderness. Fundamentally, if you want to be able to build stuff in CA, you have to get rid of all of the universal, asymmetric vetoes that allow any person to spend $200 to cause millions in costs via review processes.

I the US that inaction is called "thoughts & prayers". Somehow that absolves politicians etc from actually having to do anything constructive.

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