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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> This is what you get when ideologies of hyperindividualism are presumed as natural law. It sounds like something out of some 80s lampooning cyberpunk movie

It... what? How do you get from the six sentence linked article to that?[1].

Can't it just be a silly boondoggle? I mean: how does public funding of transportation infrastructure (however silly) even remotely follow from "hyperindividualism"?

[1] I mean, I know how you got there. It's got nothing to do with tunnels and everything to do with how fun it is to hate the nutjob that runs the tunnel company.

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No it's got nothing to do with Elon Musk or Tesla. There's efficient systems that already exist to solve these problems but there's ideologies that act as blinders and keep the better solutions shelved as impractical or facing erected roadblocks like "where's the money"

When Tesla decides they don't care about it any more, then the tax payer becomes responsible. This is the classic "public-private partnership" where the responsibilities and liabilities are on the tax payer while the profits and power are privatized.

It's a raw deal. The most famous example of how this works is Conrail, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrail

It was initially private until it couldn't be profitable and then it became public until it was profitable because the public stewardship was trying to do a service and not simply milk the consumer, then they privatized it again when it was profitable.

So when it loses money it's our responsibility when it makes money it's their benefit and we don't see any of it.

It's totally insane but we have ideologies that demand it to be this way so that's what we get

Ideologies like the gov't must compensate private property owners when utilizing eminent domain? Environmental protection? Need to use union labor? What are the philosophical blockers to public infrastructure projects? Cause as far as I can tell the primary blocker is their massive costs.

the major blockers to public transportation is spending government money to benefit people that aren’t necessarily you. The rest is mostly smoke and mirrors.

The long term ROI may be huge economically and environmentally, but that’s far to abstract to motivate most people.

You're blinded by your ideology so that certain types of projects you categorize one way and other types you categorize another.

For example when LAX, which is government controlled by the city of Los Angeles, was expanding in the 1950s on up to today, all of the costs of expanding the airport were not controversial up to where it's now servicing 100,000 people daily.

You know what was controversial? Public transit there. Building an airport that can fly in and out 100,000 people was not expensive, was not complicated, was not some huge cost for the taxpayer.

Those adjectives were not assigned to that project.

However the idea of putting a train there, that is complicated, that is expensive and that is a huge cost to taxpayer because people have decided to use those adjectives there.

And that's the only reason.

Here's another example. Cincinnati built a 400 million dollar sports stadium on the tax dollars dime.

When it wasn't profitable they ended up having to sell off hospitals and raid their savings. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ohio-county-stadium-debts-cin...

The stadium didn't get assigned the adjectives that say a 400 million park or housing project would have gotten, regardless of the fact that a 400 million dollar housing project would have far more predictable revenue and wouldn't lead to the city being forced to sell off hospitals.

No that would have gotten the adjectives complicated difficult expensive and all those other negative modifiers because of the underlying ideologies. Those adjectives are assigned to reflect the ideological commitments

I wrote a related article about this 6 years ago

https://kristopolous.medium.com/public-private-partnerships-...

I still have no idea what you're talking about re: ideology personally. I think Retric nailed it really:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37048877

This is not about principles or ideology, just self-interest re: how to deploy political/actual capital imo in all directions. Public infrastructure projects are expensive and the benefits of them are not evenly distributed and that's why the fights over them are so intense these years, now that the country is more mature and billions of dollars of wealth are potentially in the balance every time one comes up.

But that logic simply does not hold.

Lots of subsidies and bailouts go swiftly to very specialized interests without such public grumblings. It's happened multiple times in the past 15 years on the scale of trillions

Parks, community college and library funding, which is public and ostensibly for everyone, are under far more scrutiny than say, the billions in subsidies to Amazon, which you probably didn't realize existed.

Under your hypothesized system, free healthcare, preschool, generous maternity leave, free college, these would all be easy victories.

They are not because of an ideology of hyperindividualism and a dogmatic commitment to an amorphous ideology called "the free market" which is seen as so sacrosanct and holy that some people get wobbly knees and raise an accusatory finger if someone has the gall to dare to question whether the current cowboy capitalism peddled under the label "free market" is actually a good idea.

The insanity of fundamentalism has invisibly inserted itself into our daily life by Tartuffian free marketeers who suckle the public teet.

The analysis of reality fails your proposed tests. The ones I've suggested map to reality more faithfully without any rationalizing or circuitous logic required.

You can believe whatever you want. Some beliefs, however, are more accurate than others

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