Of course I should have said that “government as an institution isn’t to blame”.

The current government and its policies are to blame, sure. But government as a system isn’t the issue, surely it can’t be if elected officials in other nations find ways to publicly fund and oversee massive metro systems.

The goal now becomes to reform our governments policies to make it work better and cut out middle men.

Part of that process is having internal staff, based on the article. That will mean attracting talent to work for government agencies themselves, which means having competitive salaries for them.

So what’s the solution then? Because what will happen is that without attracting top talent, government will just be completely unable to do anything. Roads will be terrible, subways will be terrible, and we will all complain about it. Yet we don’t want to fund programs to fix it.

You’ve effectively implemented societal purgatory.

Really? Because E4s are only entry level if they enlist with a degree. E2 is typically after high school. And nearly half of the E4s I had in my units had families with children. It’s just a reality man.

Not at all.

Things cost money. That’s a fact. We can expect something like a massive subway system to cost a lot of money.

What’s frustrating is that in other relatively comparable cities, governments have implemented transit systems that cost less money. Clearly then, government is capable of doing this.

A main issue is that with our reliance on contractors and not funding internal agency staff properly, projects become bloated and costly and we say “what are we paying the MTA so much for!” That’s a fair question, but doesn’t mean that government itself is to blame, especially if private contractors are running up cost. The blame lies at how the government is staffed and how it goes about it’s business.

Again, as seen elsewhere, governments are able to make this work.

Well you wouldn’t now because apple can attract more workers with better salaries. If we funded government agencies to pay employees competitively then perhaps that would change. Again - self fulfilling.

Yea definitely dude they all buy dodge chargers. It’s not because base pay for a E4 is terrible.

Agreed. I think much of that comes from folks who want to limit large government and public “bloat”, unfortunately.

There’s certainly bureaucracy in the government. But solving the problems the article laid out definitely won’t come from making working in the public sector undesirable. Those jobs need good wages and benefits. Taxpayers pay for those jobs, yet too many people are hung up on the idea that government is too big/ not good at its job and decide to vote against tax increases to fund public jobs. So when the bare bones government staff then eventually can’t perform well, those same folks are proved right in some way.

This is a good article and highlights how many who preach “small government” actually use self fulfilling prophecy to enforce their opinions.

Cut government jobs —> hire contractors who then charge boatloads of money and are inefficient —> blame the government. Rinse, wash, repeat.

I saw this a lot in the Army. The DOD budget is obviously massive. Yet unbeknownst to many, there’s a solid chunk of service members on food stamps. Much of the bloat of DOD budgets come from reliance on contractors, everything from weapon’s manufacturing to logistics (KBR was a familiar one). It’s a cycle of basically getting swindled. Sure they have insights and should be used appropriately, but reliance on them just ruins it for everyone and further erodes trust in government unfortunately.

Feds?

Ok. It’s not normal. Meanwhile it’s snowing endlessly in Utah. What do I do with that information

Imagine taking Reddit seriously

What

Were there aggressive panhandlers on the Qatari metro or no? Any lessons learned from that?

Oh man you’ve never been to Vancouver have you.

Roosevelt Island has sunk!

Did we do it? Did we stop funding climate stuff?

This person is almost certainly schizophrenic.

“Nice”. Used to be. Now it’s the Wild West.

Sure. But in Denver, say, as the trash truck comes to my waste bins at the front of the drive way, I’m sure they could specifically count my personal trash use. Im unsure of how that would work in NYC. Plus much of the waste we see piled on the streets comes from businesses where certain amounts of trash are inevitable.

The real solution would be to demolish existing NYC streets and make some alleys. Since that will never happen, a Barcelona giant container system seems feasible. This seems like an intermediate step.

How does one force someone to toss less garbage?