State capacity and eight parking spaces

And he doesn't do it because he thinks the experience would be so miserable compared to working in tech

I've worked for the US federal government, big tech and another big corp. I would say my experience with the government (and the non tech big corp) was more positive than big tech, as my team was more focused on working/growing together rather than trying to individually outshine everyone else. I feel like we were working towards practical goals that has clear benefits for our customers rather than trying to hit seemingly arbitrary kpi's.

Working for the government I also feel like my work/life balance was most respected as well. YMMV though. Admittedly, N=1 here.

I read all the articles. I didn't see any mentioning red tape, or regulations.* All that talk of 'regulations' and 'red tape' is a guess.

This stink of a "Low priority project use as a place-holder, but as soon as even a mouse-sneeze comes up, the resources are put to a better used, and it is kicked down the road"

But (as you say) we are all pre-trained to assume 'red tape / regulations' so we back-fill that explanation, even with no evidence.

*(I Wouldn't mind a second reader, read them fast and searched, may have missed something.)

>It's not that each individual, well-intentioned regulation is bad (though some are), it's that many regulations intersect and create edge cases.

We would never excuse such ignorance of 2nd through Nth order consequences in any other context. Can you imagine "the catholic church wasn't trying to provide cover for abusers, that was just an accidental side effect of protecting their own image"? That'd be laughable.

So why does government get the pass?

As someone working in a German university in a technical role: I notice new technical contractors absolutely go into this with the mindset that they can extract money for a half-assed job here. I tend to very quickly and meticulously shatter those dreams by being more prepared than the private sector in my requirements.

I have to admit this essay struck me as sort of strange. On the one hand, the EV charging station seems like something fairly straightforward, that should be approved and built fairly quickly. On the other hand, it's just an EV charging station, and without knowing anything more about it, I am just as inclined to believe that this is some small pet project of interest to the author, who no one else really cares about, and he's invoking some grand criticism of government writ large as a way of bringing urgency and grandeur his idiosyncratic interest that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

EV sales are in the middle of a nationwide decline, especially for one of the major manufacturers. I doubt it has anything to do with the 8-space parking lot in Seattle in particular. Add to this stories about charging station compatibility, and I'm not surprised there isn't a greater sense of urgency from the city.

I have my pet projects I'd like to see finished as well, but I don't blame my municipality for not prioritizing them. They have a lot on their plate. It has nothing to do with capture or overregulation, but priorities with constrained staff, budget, and time. People change their minds and city priorities change with popular sentiment.

In some ways, this is a good example of why some prudence is warranted, and maybe you should get the other side of the story. The essay neglects to mention that four of the eight charging stations would be owned by Tesla for example — something that if you're not opposed to, you might at least admit is reasonable for the city to reevaluate — and there is apparently contaminated soil at least nearby the site.

I'm generally in favor of reregulation or deregulation, but I generally feel like land use, environmental, and public space or resources are something where there should be a lot of scrutiny and layers of approval. Once it's gone, it's hard to reclaim and expensive to clean up. I also feel like many examples of complaints in this area and mention of things like Abundance are just like this — someone complains their personal project of interest isn't done fast enough, criticizing the government for being cumbersome and overwrought, while neglecting to mention all the reasons why people might not prioritize their pet project, or why their pet project might reasonably be seen as requiring safeguards or approval processes. The reason why the government is slow with your pet project is because not everyone agrees with you, and there is a commons issue involved.

Meanwhile, discussion about deregulation of things that actually involve personal choice, with little or no public commons issues involved, like medical care, go by the wayside and are never mentioned, or are even hyperregulated.

>In the article the author says we should use "pre-approved vendor lists" or "streamlined approvals" and that sounds great in principle, but could also easily be exploited.

As patio11 would say, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero". Fraud is bad, but if fighting fraud involves so much red tape that it costs more than whatever petty corruption could ever cost, it's bad.

[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

> "pre-approved vendor lists" or "streamlined approvals" and that sounds great in principle, but could also easily be exploited.

Nearly any kind of public spending can be exploited, including auctions. There are countless cases where the cheapest vendor that satisfies the written criteria is chosen, only to end up with delays, cost overruns that far outweigh the initial savings, or equipment that malfunctions and breaks.

I know somebody who was in charge of writing these auctions for their government department. They picked a vendor, and then worked backwards to write the requirements so that only that vendor would satisfy them. Not because of corruption, but because they knew that vendor's equipment was quality.

There was another case, in a different department, where this was not done - the auction was written naively (and honestly), and the cheapest vendor chosen. The equipment failed within months, putting people at risk, and a different vendor had to be quickly chosen.

It's better to just put some conflict-of-interest guards in place, and then trust the judgment of whoever needs those goods, than to try to eliminate corruption through bureaucratic procedures. Because it can't be eliminated with bureaucracy - but efficiency can, and will be.

> for the most part regulations and due process emerged to protect public interests from private capture.

In truth I think it's a mix of this, and the opposite--where private interests have already captured the public good.

> In the article the author says we should use "pre-approved vendor lists" or "streamlined approvals" and that sounds great in principle, but could also easily be exploited.

Every kind of regulation can be exploited and is currently being exploited. GDPR led to law firms squeezing money out of neighborhood bars with cease and desists. Government grants spawn companies doing the exact minimum to keep getting grants without building real businesses.

I totally agree that lobbyism is a massive problem (and often the reason we get such complex regulation—they shut out the little players). But any proposed solution will have to be some type of risk.

Regulations and process are just scar tissue from mistakes of the past. Excessive process indicates abundant past mistakes.

If we want to go back to taking risks and making mistakes, by all means, let's cut red tape and get rid of process. But, we should do it knowing the tradeoff we're making. I think some people here just think "regulation/process = bad" and "getting rid of regulation/process = good" but it's more complex than that.

Has our system done a good job at preventing private capture? Are we better at preventing private capture than countries which build things more easily?

“ that for the most part regulations and due process emerged to protect public interests from private capture”

I just flat out don’t buy this. The majority of regulations I see “abundance” type people arguing against were never aimed at curtailing private capture. They are aimed at keeping neihborhoods unchanged for generations, making sure everyone up-and-down society gets veto power over any project regardless of type or upside of it, and making sure arbitrary unrelated “goods” are enforced with as much bureaucracy as possible during development (the best example of this is trying to get solar panels built and having to fight many years of “environmental” review for something so desperately needed for our environment).

Biggest problems with "Abundance" are:

1) Somehow he decided euclidean zoning was a leftist project. Most leftists and environmentalists I've ever known hate euclidean zoning and this includes many urban planners. Euclidean zoning exists pretty much because property owners want to be able to exclude nearby land uses. It's fundamentally conservative, especially when the goal is to enforce limited housing density.

2) Setting up euclidean zoning as the main whipping boy and then saying "and also air quality regulations are basically the same thing" is a form of straw-manning the stuff he's arguing against.

3) He sets up a dichotomy between California and Texas ignoring that a lot of California's problems are conservative (downzoning, prop 13) and also ignoring the weaknesses in the Texas model including corporations running roughshod over locals (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7_WDzPyoqU) a fragile power grid, huge flooding problems etc. It's possible to look at quality of life metrics and see that Texas is doing quite badly. Also, you had the whole tech moving to Austin thing that already fizzled out.

4) He set up developers as the heroes in the story and apparently got a lot of his info from private equity ride-alongs. He ignores that developers are also often land speculators and are in favor of blocking competitors projects and downzoning areas to keep land value high. (https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/abundance-hudson-yards-west?u...)

Basically Abundance is a way for Ezra Klein and his fellow travelers to repackage Clinton-era triangulation and Obama-era neoliberalism as something completely new, so the party can carry on with its pro-donor agenda and ignore why they keep losing. That's also the reason why it was astroturfed into every left media space with a massive marketing budget.

I think most people have an opinion similar to NIMBYism. Everyone agrees there are too many regulations but no one agrees which ones are the extra. Every rule is someone's highest concern.

That's why part of the argument in Abundance is that current processes give too many people too much veto power. When every issue is someone's pet issue nothing can ever get done.

Regulations are like code of a program. It's the business logic of how we want the world to be.

Like all code, it can be buggy, bloated and slow, or it can be well-written and efficiently achieve ambitious things.

If you have crappy unmaintainable code that doesn't work, then deleting it is an obvious improvement.

Like in programming, it takes a lot of skill to write code that achieves its goals in a way that is as simple as possible, but also isn't oversimplified to the point of failing to handle important cases.

The pro-regulation argument isn't for naively piling up more code and more bloat, but for improving and optimizing it.

That just seems to be some sort of common construction scam. I've seen it more than once with private construction.

There is a private dental office down the street from me that's has an expansion which somehow took years. Same story. Ton of construction for a month or two, and then nothing happened.

There was a union protest about using non-union labor for a bit. It felt like they were protesting the wrong issue, as no labor was occurring.

Spot on. I read the article wondering when they were going to describe what specifically failed or got stuck. Instead it's just a vague implication that such redesigns must have been unnecessary, but never saying exactly why such redesigns were being done. What/who is the project currently waiting on? It's never specified.

In light of that, maybe a better description of the problem is more the absence of responsibility/accountability (for both the proponent and the reviewers, although it's not indicated which is dropping the ball here) rather than the processes/regulations themselves.

Living in a less dense place where the municipal electric has set up EV chargers in public parking lots and it all seems sensible, this hadn't occurred to me. But it's another astute point, and ties right into how this article doesn't analyze the actual hangups. Maybe the city has delayed this project of creating a new 8-space parking lot in favor of building multi-story or underground parking garages (which can also have EV charging spots).

I think state capacity shouldn't be a left-right issue. Whether you want oil rigs or public parks to be built, everyone can agree that once the decision is made, it should be built swiftly and well.

And the public should be able to have an expectation that when the government says they'll do something, they're capable of doing so within a reasonable budget and timeframe.

In my neck of the woods, you’d be called a capitalist bootlicker for this point of view by many lefties. I get called that for basically any suggestion besides complete communist revolution.

I can always tell who on the left is ideologically poisoned by how vehemently they hate anything related to the idea that current government processes and regulations could improve or that government regulations can go (sometimes very) wrong. As if somehow that admission is the same as wanting anarcho-libertarianism.

Agreed, but it’s not just government. I just spent 2 days in a Kafka-like hell where a credit card I had for 22 years was closed by Citi. At every stage the many people I spoke with wanted to help but couldn’t, because the software had made the decision and it was final. No human was in the loop. And it wasn’t until many hours of phone calls that we even learned the reason for the closure. This army of humans employed by Citi are just slaves to a computer system.

The idea of US private efficiency is overblown. It doesn't take long working in a large US company to see massive delays, red tape, duplicate work, self-sabotage, or favoritism. Even when it is fast, that doesn't equate to efficient. It's not uncommon to see 8 figures put into throw-away work.

I’ve seen massive waste in private business. Incredible amounts of it. Somehow these companies don’t collapse.

Sometimes I think the only real difference is it’s easier to sell stuff to upper management than it is to a congresscritter. Easier for one person to waste a lot of money than it is for a committee to do it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality has been noted for a long time. Unfortunately much bigger projects are now affected in ways that perhaps they would not have been in the past.

His book also proceeds from the unquestioned assumption that people working on things like high-speed rail and affordable housing want it to come to fruition, much as you suspect that his critics do not want them to come to fruition. The alternative possibility that maybe needs a glance is that the projects' strongest backers have no intention of bringing those projects to pass, but rather desire to funnel the funds needed for the bureaucratic steps to their cronies. This is sometimes cited in criticism of California's high-speed rail: people working on the studies and processes necessary for bureaucracy are being paid, although the actual train will not be built. Maybe the train (or the Seattle parking spaces) are not actually what some part of the powers behind the project want, because they want really their friends to get paid for the bureaucratic work on the project.

Which leftist circles? The one US leftist circle I'm in (a random discord) was calling him "based" last week for writing an NYT article about the generational difference in attitudes towards Zionism within Jewish families, and seems to mostly hate NIMBYs and be bored by committees.

Examples might make this a lot less inflammatory by ensuring it's targeted at the people who deserve it.

Somewhat true, but needlessly partisan.

The reality is that a LOT of people have been radicalized by political dogmas that preach purity and sainthood. Every political is either the epitome of perfection of a literal baby-eating satanist. Every policy is either so vital that judicial and political norms must be brushed aside to advance it, or so vile that judicial and political norms must be ignored in order to block it.

I don’t at all think it’s limited to “the left”. It’s the zeitgeist and it sucks.

“Many on the left would choose” <preposterous thing>.

This is Hacker News, not Fox News or a Bret Stephens column. Let’s keep the unquantifiable unsubstantiated outrage rhetoric off of here.

> I can't wrap my head around this.

That is because you seem to have you view of reality be ultraprocessed for you. Stop letting (others misuse) a tiny minority represent a large proportion of the population.

I'm not acting as if every single conservative hates the federal government and would like to crucify gays either.

I feel that there's a strain of extreme neuroticism in certain leftist activist groups that would rather keep the problem in place (and themselves relevant in fretting about it) than take care of the problem and move on. The COVID emergency comes to mind: Biden kept the federal government in an emergency posture until mid-2023, which was a year after Democratic governors ended emergencies in their states, and two whole years after widespread availability of vaccines.

That's because many of these so-called 'leftists' have centred their entire identity around activism and agitation and as such realise that actually achieving their purported goals would rob them of their targets. You can compare them to the pharma industry which is far more interested in finding treatments for conditions than they are in finding cures for those conditions since the latter would cut off the market for the former.

I think that framing this as hopeless, and perpetuating the idea the government cannot operate efficiently, is a part of the problem. If a system is created to provide a service, it makes sense that said system would consider its existence instrumental to meeting that goal. This could be a positive motivator to provide the service efficiently and effectively. There are many reasons that it often does not work out that way, but one is public perception that government is supposed to be slow and inefficient.

The city runs a municipal electrical utility (Seattle City Light), so building and maintaining electrical infrastructure is absolutely something they both have experience with and should be doing.

Regardless of whether the City of Seattle should be in the EV charging station business, once they decide to, they damn well ought to be in the Getting Things Done™ business