I don't think crumbling infrastructure has a lot to do with government waste. It's mostly poor prioritization; using funds that should be set aside for maintenance to build new things instead. New projects capture the imagination, maintenance is something that magical fairies do while everyone is sleeping, or something.
This is more of an intrinsic flaw of humanity than something that has an easy fix. Reality and the version in our minds don't align. Privatization isn't the answer: private companies let their infrastructure deteriorate to the point where it kills people all the time. We even rely on the government to prevent this, and get upset when they don't catch every case. Making the government go away, or underfunding it to the point where it's impotent, probably isn't the fix.
There isn't really an easy answer to society's problems. If there was, we'd have already implemented it. Now we have to deal with the hard problems, and we probably have to do that as a collective. The problem is too large for one benevolent visionary to magically solve.
Something that I think of one of HN's blindspots is the general inability to think past what one person can do alone. We sit in front of our computers and make stuff, then we go to work and make stuff that's almost the same, but it takes 10 people to do only 10% more. That's probably another intrinsic reality of the Universe -- to do a project twice as difficult takes maybe 10 times or 100 times as many resources. That's because communication scales poorly, like n! That's why every successful project management book tells you to cut scope; doing a harder project involves adding more resources, and adding more people to the project has dramatically diminishing returns. But the government can't cut scope, so they have to bear this communications cost. It looks like inefficiency, but it's more like an immutable law.
Keep this in mind while you pontificate about how having a society is akin to robbery.
This is more of an intrinsic flaw of humanity than something that has an easy fix. Reality and the version in our minds don't align. Privatization isn't the answer: private companies let their infrastructure deteriorate to the point where it kills people all the time. We even rely on the government to prevent this, and get upset when they don't catch every case. Making the government go away, or underfunding it to the point where it's impotent, probably isn't the fix.
There isn't really an easy answer to society's problems. If there was, we'd have already implemented it. Now we have to deal with the hard problems, and we probably have to do that as a collective. The problem is too large for one benevolent visionary to magically solve.
Something that I think of one of HN's blindspots is the general inability to think past what one person can do alone. We sit in front of our computers and make stuff, then we go to work and make stuff that's almost the same, but it takes 10 people to do only 10% more. That's probably another intrinsic reality of the Universe -- to do a project twice as difficult takes maybe 10 times or 100 times as many resources. That's because communication scales poorly, like n! That's why every successful project management book tells you to cut scope; doing a harder project involves adding more resources, and adding more people to the project has dramatically diminishing returns. But the government can't cut scope, so they have to bear this communications cost. It looks like inefficiency, but it's more like an immutable law.
Keep this in mind while you pontificate about how having a society is akin to robbery.