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Comment by mguerville | Hacker News Reader

The thing that made America successul almost exactly 100 years ago is now the thing that will hurt its competitiveness on the global scale for the next few decades. Mostly because elections cycles and attention spans now move too fast for infrastructure builders to get rewarded, so instead they get punished.

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As a European subjectively the bigger problem within the US is one of culture and education. Where in the past one had the feeling people in the US where at least interested in a better future, it now feels one third wants to actively burn it down (as long as it triggers their enemies) while another third isn't interested into anything that helps anybody except themselves.

On top of that the societal contract in the US has been broken. It is no longer enough to get a good education to find a job that will secure your future. There is too much skimmed of the top for that to be possible. The big corps are so oversized and monopolized that any young entrepeneueship is crushed right there and then unless it is in tech — and even there your end goal is usually getting bought by the big ones.

Where I live the minimum wage is double to that in the US and we have universal healthcare and a working social system and decent infrastructure. You just have to tax the big earners instead of stuffing them with the tax money from the small fishes.

It seems the builders themselves (the ones that care to tackle these) can manage it: they just charge for the insanity and do what the nice man asked for. Even if that's insane.

The problem is the users (who might see the results decades after other countries), and the taxpayers who have to pay crazy amounts for any tiny project, and then pay for it again and again because it was poorly done, and the population which wonders what happened.

The problem isn't the users. It's usually the management. Since these public infrastructure problems always become political weapons those managing try to appease the largest amount of people possible from the start instead of scaling back scope to a workable base that can be expanded on later. They're terrified of any backlash or criticism because the actual project works on a much longer timescale than the news cycle. People will hear about one setback, rabble rabble at whoever's been set up to be in charge in the public eye, and then that person has a stigma about them for the rest of their career while the wider public forgets about what the issue even was within three to five years. If it's an elected position that could cost them said position. If it's an appointed positing whoever leads the appointments will not choose them out of fear regarding negativity by proxy.

I have seen so many good projects that would benefit a ton of people get added onto until they die before they're even out of the planning stages. And then the projects that do get greenlit are the easiest and fastest way which will cause a ton of damage both short term and long term. Like adding more lanes via narrowing the sidewalks and removing the buffer zone between the lane and the curb instead of fixing an intersection because it would mean negotiating with property owners. Or an activity park that changed prospective location so many times that sponsors abandoned it before it was even built, had so many additions and removals during planning that at one point it was closer to being a convention hall and business park, and once it was built it ended up in such a remote location that nobody goes there and they're thinking of closing it because of lack of funding.

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