Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: Repiking the pike and magical thinking
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 08:01:13 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: "John S. Quarterman" <jsq () quarterman org> Date: December 5, 2008 6:33:03 AM EST To: dave () farber net Cc: "John S. Quarterman" <jsq () quarterman org>, "ip" <ip () v2 listbox com> Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Repiking the pike and magical thinking
From: Tom Van Vleck <thvv-post () multicians org> Date: December 4, 2008 8:14:40 PM EST To: dave () farber net Subject: Re: [IP] Repiking the pike and magical thinking Bob Frankston wrote:People tell me that we have to have private companies operating our infrastructure because government can't do anything right.
I've recently discovered one reason a local government I deal with has such a hard time doing some things right is the same problem we're discussing with the medical profession: lack of communication. No checks on staff's work. No feedback loops with citizens requesting information. Combined this can mean things like lists of citizens pro or con a road issue that are pure fiction because they don't count anybody who recently inherited property because staff only saw the owner name was different than the petition signature name and didn't bother to check further and didn't ask the originator of the petition.
But that's clearly magical thinking -- why do we assume that companiesare founts of wisdom?
Well, in such a local government case often because builders and developers have the time and money to feed local government information and to pester them for answers. So the most vested interests get what they want this way. Ordinary people don't, because they're too busy with children's soccer games, working two jobs, or whatever. And even more they just don't care if an issue doesn't affect them directly, which means that every time something does, they have to come up to speed on the whole process from scratch. That sounds a lot like how most people deal with the medical system. For governments, lack of communcation means the developers usually win, because they already know how things work. More roads for access to new areas where they can then say people wanted more subdivisions because there are more roads, all this generating more taxes for the government, which then has an excuse to consider it all good.
There is a difference in that governments don't have effective competition.
The only longterm solution seems to be to develop more community activism
to watch what governments are up to and to also use that to elect better governments. No wonder entrenched powers that be hate community organizers.... -jsq ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Current thread:
- Re: Repiking the pike and magical thinking David Farber (Dec 04)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Repiking the pike and magical thinking David Farber (Dec 05)