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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34440 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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mean, the argument here was that in US, everything (emphasized in the original) has to be best

Are you making that big of a deal out of what I figured, when I watched the video, was clearly an exaggeration?

I am pointing out that the example provided to support the argument is clearly false and does not support it in any way. Not sure what you are getting at here.

I think it's clearly true in that there clearly are wide, straight, paved roads through very sparse parts of the country, and we never really think about to what extent the cost is justified. The existence of much smaller rural roads disproves the literal interpretation of (my summary of, not even the original, which is in the video) a rhetorical flourish.

Sorry, but who is “we”? I certainly don’t really spend much time thinking whether the cost of some particular rural road is justified, but so what? Someone does. I really lost the plot here in this discussion: what’s the argument here? That, uh, infrastructure costs are high because random Joe doesn’t think a lot about costs of random rural roads somewhere?

Someone does.

...do they? I mean, engineers estimate what maintenance costs and write down a number, but who pushes back and says it's too expensive? Or asks if the road needs to be that wide? Who is actually responsible for determining what sort of expense is justified? Who pushes back when the cost of a project is high and the benefits unclear? Maybe you know, and if so, I would like to know who does it.

Typically, the relevant public works department has X projects it would like to do, Y dollars of annual budget, and Y is way, way too short to cover all of projects in X. The decision is made by relevant government officers which projects are actually going to be built, and the cost most definitely plays a role in the considerations.

Now, of course, government decision making about projects and spending has multitude of problems. The point is, however, that the suggestion that nobody thinks or cares about the cost is ludicrous. They do care. Typically they don’t care enough, or don’t care properly, I’ll give you that, but these sort of projects don’t just randomly pop up as work orders for the construction crews, there definitely is a lot of planning and analysis involved beforehand. Often in fact too much, or of the wrong kind, but total lack of consideration is definitely not an issue here.

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