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Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

This is not new. I just watched a video a few days ago talking about Levittown, built in the post-WWII boom, where the house lots were just big enough to build septic systems for each, given the current state of the ground/drainage. So as the soil compacted/absorbed the output of the houses, and as people installed washing machines, and and as people converted their attics to additional bedrooms (which they were originally told was fine to do) and occupancy/water use went up, hundreds (thousands?) of backyards became soft, smelly swamps. Eventually the whole neighborhood had to switch to sewers, at enormous expense.

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> This is not new.

Nothing under the sun is new, but we do currently live in a time with unprecedented levels of open corruption where nobody seems to feel the slightest amount of guilt for clearly immoral behavior as long as they get away with it.

And even in cases where what you do is explicitly illegal legal enforcement is largely contingent on whether or not whatever corrupt thing you did made you rich enough to pay the Get Out of Jail tax.

I suspect it is higher than it was 20 years ago and significantly lower than it was 100 years ago.

> unprecedented levels of open corruption where nobody seems to feel the slightest amount of guilt as long as they get away with it.

Historically speaking, current levels of corruption in most of the world are either low, or completely precedented.

In the US specifically, corruption may be higher the last decade than in the couple of decades precloud, but certainly is not as high as 120 years ago.

I'm sorry, at what point in the late 1800s was the President of the US actively enriching himself at the taxpayers' expense, openly taking bribes from foreign countries, and threatening the families of members of Congress who he felt were not sufficiently supportive of his agenda?

Offhand, Ulysses S. Grant had a scandal ridden presidency (1869 - 1877) with multiple large scale corruption examples all headed by his closest associates.

There was some goings on related to foreign territories and annexation that I don't well recall, but to this day Grant's degree of involvement is debated - he tolerated much corruption from his personal secretary, defended him, and steered corruption investigations away until eventually removing Babcock(?) from his post.

Much pressure was exerted during this period, I hazard some of that pressure was via threats to persons, their assets, and perhaps their families.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandals_of_the_Grant_administ...

Grant was already mentioned, but Warren Harding most certainly deserves to be alongside Grant and Trump on any list of "most corrupt presidents".

The general amount of corruption in local politics was also greater pre-depression than now.

For additional context; Levittown(s) were named by William Levitt the guy that is considered the creator/initiator of the archetypal suburb concept that would become one of the biggest destructive forces and cause of endless misery in American society.

They were the very basis of the subject fraud too, the incremental, cascading slide and destruction of quality through fraud, even if it took time for the incremental, “salami slicing” to get to this point where contacted, foreign national, fly by night operations underlying all the corporate builders are throwing together what in some cases are literal paper houses where even OSB sheathing has been replaced by what can only be called fancy cardboard.

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