[IP] Re: Repiking the pike and magical thinking

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

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  
> > companies
> > are 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




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