"There’s an old tweet I wrote over a decade ago defending a lowball projection of high-speed rail construction costs on this kind of means-ends grounds."
I'm glad Matt owns up to this because this is a perfect example of how dangerous this phenomenon is. The California voters were told they could have $50 high speed rail from LA to San Francisco in less than 3 hours for $9.95 billion (matched by federal funds to total $19.9 billion). The entire thing was a lie. The project is already up to $100 billion, the first segment (which almost nobody will ride and which will not cost $50 to ride) on flat land between Bakersfield and Merced is many years away from completion, and the project's designers have not demonstrated that it is even possible at reasonable cost to go from Bakersfield to Los Angeles (a long story that I tell on my own Substack).
The point is, this is more than a folly-- this was fraud and theft. Sponsors of a project that is likely impossible to actually complete convinced California voters to authorize billions of dollars of spending that could have been directed to solving other problems in our state. Heck, we could have subsidized clean air zero-carbon bus trips for everyone who wants to travel by land between Los Angeles and San Francisco with that money and THAT would have even been a better use of it.
And yes, it was fraud. The project organizers chose $9.95 billion for the same reason that your local supermarket marks apples at 99 cents instead of a dollar-- to make the price tag look as low as possible. They HAD to know that it would cost a lot more-- the arguments against the ballot initiative in the ballot pamphlet rationally predicted a $90 billion cost. Even the opponents estimated too low!
This is not the way to do liberalism or government. You tell the public the truth. If the public votes against you, it's OK. You told them the truth and that's democracy.
The plot in True Detective season 2 was about people trying to get a slice of the high speed rail boondoggle, which was spending a lot of money and not building much.
A big problem with that season is that Nick Pizzolatto had no idea at all how the politics of high speed rail works so the whole season is based on a bunch of absurd things happening.
My strong impression from reading even positive reviews of "True Detective" is that "the whole season is based on a bunch of absurd things happening" could be used to summarize each season of the show.
Season 1 is really good though in terms of characters and ideas and a the big story of Russ and Marty's relationship over 15 years. Season 2 doesn't really have that.
The most annoying thing is that they could have built the whole thing for $50 bn. But they'd have had to change California real estate law in some fundamental ways - include in the initiative the power for CAHSR to seize any non-federal land in the state at a price to be determined by CAHSR, with short notice period (one month would suffice), and that the only power that any former landowner would have would be the right to sue to dispute the valuation, in which case CAHSR would be liable to pay the difference in valuation (without any interest or penalty). Rely on Kelo as the constitutional justification
They'd also have had to get a competent organisation (ie not an American one) to do the construction - French, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, any would do.
The absence of any penalty - let alone any *interest,* sounds like a bridge too far to me. Slight systematic overvaluation of eminent domain seems like a massively better problem to have than any kind of systematic undervaluation.
Totally agree. Allow for interest and reasonable attorneys fees (eg 33% of the undervaluation) and there is less incentive to shaft property owners. You might also limit valuations to 125% of assessed value to reign in run away finders of fact.
I'm mostly trying to avoid a situation where CAHSR has to hold an enormous contingency budget against the risk of losing legal actions and getting rinsed by former property owners who can convince a judge to approve an enormously inflated valuation.
If there is a reasonable limit to the losses, then they can take some land, pay $1million for it, stick $250K in a contingency fund and then the only part of the organisation that has to care is group legal. That's probably the practical version of what I propose. But Kelo should mean that blocking eminent domain rather than arguing over valuations is impossible, yet CAHSR was prepared to sit and argue over a valuation rather than just picking their own valuation, seizing the land, and then arguing about the valuation later in court. I don't know if that was lack of legal authority or lack of political will, but it was a massively expensive problem.
They'd also need some variances on various regulations (particularly environmental), but those would be mostly because the way that too many US regulations are enforced is that people sue and then get injunctions to stop construction - give CAHSR a variance that if they had a reasonable compliance plan then you can't get an injunction unless you can demonstrate that that compliance plan was not reasonable (ie, just because it doesn't comply, you can't stop them building, you have to show they weren't even trying to comply).
Dilan Esper's point (in the article he linked) that the *first* part of the line to build is the line through the Tehachapis is well-taken, though. I suspect that if you got a Japanese or a Taiwanese engineer to design your railroad, you'd get told exactly how to route it so it was earthquake-safe, but neither I nor Dilan are railroad tunnel engineering experts.
Also @Dilan, one of the nice things about high-speed rail is that it's, uh, fast. That means that if you do have to go a relatively long way around (e.g. going up the coast to Oxnard or Santa Barbara before crossing the mountains), then you can do that - you can add a lot of miles in diversions at 200mph before you really start affecting the travel time. AIUI, from talking to some of the engineers who worked on the UK's HS1 and HS2 routes, you work out where you can cross a mountain chain and then you work backwards from there to identify the routes to get to the crossing. This is why the Lyon-Turin line under construction takes such an odd route on approach to the Alps - because they picked the tunnel route first and then worked out how to connect it to the rest of the system.
So the problem with going up the coast is there are tons of curves. I am not saying it is totally impossible to do but you can't use the existing SP coast route- and in addition to increasing travel time slowing down for the curves there are all the practical problems of the coastal act, rich landowners who don't want the train, etc.
Neither of us knows enough about seismic protection and tunnelling to say where the mountain crossing should be. And neither do the "Lines on Map" people. And nor does CAHSR. Honestly, I doubt anyone in the USA (or the UK) does. You want a Japanese or a Taiwanese engineering firm to do a survey, and identify where to do the crossing, and then you start designing the rest of CAHSR from there: if you cross the mountains in X place, then you have to get the track from X to LA Union Station, so you design a route from X to LAUS. Then you have to go up the Central Valley from X, so that determines which Valley cities can be reached.
Similarly in the Bay Area, you start with the mountain crossing between the Caltrain line and the Central Valley, and then you work out how far the track comes up the Valley.
Zillow estimates are slight overvaluations. Just take a Zillow screenshot and pay that. Allow people to sue if they’ve made significant property improvements not reflected in Zillow.
I've always wondered if the southeastern US would have been a better choice for HSR.
Atlanta/Orlando is one of the busiest domestic flights in the US, there are no mountains on this route, and the distance is only a bit longer than LA/SF. My impression is that labor and land are both much cheaper in the southeast than in California.
I do wonder if swamps and crossing state lines would be huge hassles for getting HSR done though. And I suspect that a lot of the Atlanta/Orlando flights are tourists connecting via Atlanta on a theme park visit to Orlando, so connecting HSR to the airport in Atlanta would probably be a necessity.
This is correct, but... historically, a lot of the large infrastructure projects in this country were built on fraud and misinformation. The financing structure for 19th century railroads certainly wasn't anywhere close to sound (and directly lead to repeated panics and recessions). But we still had the railroads, which people could use and provided a great deal of benefits.
I guess I struggle with where you draw the line between "outright lies to voters to build something useful and long lasting" (where California HSR mostly falls) to "boring technical discussions of how this will go which is over the public's head and will be subject to its own misinformation campaign" (e.g., Obamacare). At some point, people have to accept the fact that we want government to get shit done and it ain't gonna be perfect (and if my own experience with big business is any indication, it's not much different in the private sector). So we try to mitigate the bad as much as we can and push for the good.
There’s a big difference between a terrible, criminally irresponsible process that builds something useful and one that doesn’t, especially as time passes
You are right that it is a difficult line. But nonetheless lowballing government programs is incredibly risky. The Crédit Mobilier scandal could have easily killed the whole project. They were playing with fire and got very lucky.
This was a central part of the Robert Moses strategy, correct? Dupe the state legislature into a significantly smaller cost, and then once construction has already commenced, reveal the grand plan. Although, I guess the difference between that and the LA/San Fran line was that Moses actually built things.
"Dupe the state legislature into a significantly smaller cost, and then once construction has already commenced" this is more or less basically how every weapon system the Pentagon wants gets made as well. We call this system democracy.
The HBO TV Movie The Pentagon Wars is great on this as well and pretty much sums up the process we see with transit and affordable housing as well (and anyone who's worked in software design would be familiar with this dynamic too) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA
Basically any infrastructure project too. It had the pernicious effect of incentivizing the public sector to gut in-house capacity to engineer and build infra projects, because the private sector could always underbid the in-house cost projections and then hold the project hostage for more money later.
Also why people don't much like this anymore! Moses built things without much regard for whether it was a good idea. The backlash has been with us for over 50 years now.
It's ironic that I'm listening to the "Big Dig" podcast right now* (I grew in MA when this project was ongoing so of particular personal interest to me) because it's clearly a companion piece to your post about CA HSR.
I'm only halfway through, but it lays out in pretty painstaking detail the delays in getting the project started, the cost overruns and yes what appears to be outright lying from Bechtel corporation about timelines to complete. Specifically, it seems like Bechtel corporation basically lied about the timeline it would take to complete a tunnel across the Fort Point Channel.
In other words, you're post has some interesting familiarity to it. And yet, I think the consensus now is that it was "worth it". From a quick google search, the following benefits are noted:
- Housing: The project led to the development of 7,700 new housing units, including 1,000 affordable units
- Office and retail space: The project added 10 million square feet of office and retail space
Hotel rooms: The project added 2,600 hotel rooms
- Traffic flow: The project improved traffic flow by 62% compared to pre-project levels
- Travel time and vehicle operating costs: The project saved travelers an estimated $167 million per year on travel time and vehicle operating costs
- Urban design: The project led to new residential development near parks and open spaces
Now this is a quick google search with AI driven response, so feel free to nitpick some of this. But I think the basic contours is correct. And I think this underplays the impact. That housing, hotel and office space is located in some of the valuable real estate in all of the country. Furthermore, the beautification effects of not having an elevated highway surely has led to knock on urban development of restaurants and shops that otherwise wouldn't have exited as proximity of the highway would have meant going to certain neighborhoods that are now trendy an uninviting proposition. Lastly, I wouldn't discount the impact of the Zakim Bridge. There's a reason it was heavily featured in the movie "The Departed" as it's become a pretty iconic (and beloved) part of the modern Boston skyline.
The point being, I think there is a very strong case to be made that the "Big Dig" was worth it despite the cost overruns, extreme amount of time it took to complete and what appears to be outright fraud involved.
Which comes back to kind of the tragedy of HSR. The concept I actually think is sound. If this project was built by the Spanish I'm guessing it would be done years ago. So in theory this is actually a good project that would probably have been "worth it" with Big Dig style cost overruns. But at this point, the complete lack of progress means it probably should be junked. Someone involved in this project needs to read up again on "Sunk Costs".
* Great podcast and worth your time. Feel like it's catnip for Matt and his audience. One thing the first few episodes did was make me more sympathetic to NIMBY or I should say sympathetic to the historical reasons why NIMBY became so strong starting in the 70s (which the podcast gets into). Because listening to the show, it really hit home to me how much of this impulse is about highway building. Matt bemoans (Rightly) how much the building of highways through the middle of cities was absolutely devestating. But I feel like listening to this podcast that people put highway building in the same mental bucket as building apartments; big government + rich people building stuff to enrich themselves without any care of how it impacts the little guy. And the fight in the 60s about a highway through East Boston really hits home to me that the impulse to stop construction just generally comes from a pretty understandable place.
It's fine to say that where you have already completed something, it is worth it.
But even in the best case scenario, which the Big Dig or the transcontinental railroad is, there's some massive negatives:
1. If you fail, you end up with a white elephant that reminds the public of the folly of big government. Those exist- there are unused subway tunnels around the country, bridges to nowhere, ghost ramps and highways to nowhere, etc. And each one tells a story of how government wasted taxpayer money.
2. Even if you succeed, developing the reputation (as people are arguing here) that all projects run over is not good for the cause of big government. Remember when the Pentagon had those $600 toilet seats? I bet supporters of increased defense spending loved hearing that one brought up over and over again over the next decade plus when they asked for appropriations!
3. The public will think we are a bunch of liars and that every spending program explodes. This is a big reason, by the way, that there's a lot of green eyeshade budgeting and honest scoring of Democratic initiatives in Congress. Obama did not want the story of Obamacare to be how he promised this program would pay for itself with some minor tweaks to the tax code and modest Medicare cuts and then it blew up the budget deficit! Had that happened, maybe the Republicans get that last vote they needed to repeal it! Plus the next time we propose something, we'd get "remember Obamacare? You can't trust them".
Plus, I realize there isn't a lot of morality in politics, but this really is immoral. You don't have to be an anti-tax crusader to say that when you ask the voters for pay for something you think will be good for them, you tell them up front and reasonably accurately what you think the price tag will be. You owe them that in a democracy.
I always wanted the Pyramid arena in Memphis (which was a boondoggle that stayed empty for at least a decade) to become a Museum of Boondoggles and Government Waste. It could be really cool!
I agree. The 99 tunnel project in Seattle was a good idea and worth it despite its cost overruns which is why I would have supported it with more accurate costs estimates up front but when when everything ends up costing twice what they say it will then when folks are honest people mentally double it and then vote down good ideas.
In my business, I am required by the court to charge by the hour rather than offer a flat rate for many cases. I usually will give clients a non-binding estimate of the total costs. I always make that about 50% more than I think it will likely cost. It gives me some buffer if things go wrong. Since clients are buying a thing that they have basically no idea what it "ought" to cost, 99% of the time they agree because I have good reviews and/or I came highly recommended by a friend. When the case almost always ends up costing less than they expected they are very happy about. I've even had a few of them feel bad and try to "tip" me the difference which I always decline. I've gotten flowers sent in response to my final bill or cookies dropped off at the office for the staff from happy customers.
But many attorneys do the opposite and give a low ball estimate and then run up bills that shock the clients. (They are frankly also sometime just generally shocking and reflect a lot of unnecessary work.) They have a hard time getting paid and generate negative goodwill from clients. In my experience they often low ball because they are pretty desperate for work and think it makes it more likely they will get the job. But since I have a 99% hire rate for my practice in terms of initial consultations signing up to be clients, I think the idea that those low ball estimates are getting more people to say yes aren't necessarily as true as micro economics would lead you to believe since attorney pricing is so lacking in transparency that client usually can't really compare prices effectively when making choices. In fact, their desperation for work in a space where many of the rest of us have months long wait lists for appointments is probably reflective of the fact that they don't have good reviews or get many referrals from prior clients.
My sense is that with most infrastructure projects the public wants something and they have no idea what that thing would cost and whatever that thing would cost is going to a large number well beyond people's day to day financial understanding and approaching the range where humans only abstractly understand. If policy makers gave a slightly inflated cost estimate, built it with inhouse management and limited subcontracting and mostly came in "under budget and ahead of schedule" with only a few projects that hit unexpected snags hitting or going over the estimates, I think people would view that as a great success even if they would have viewed that same cost as a bungogle if they had lowballed it and run over cost and time as almost all projects seem to do.
I think particularly in Blue areas where progressive ideas and projects have generally support we would be having more popular figures to put up for national elections if we were honest with a bit of padding for what things will cost, actually actively managed projects with competent people and delivered a bit more than expected.
Oh I'm actually not sure I disagree with you at all. I think my point is big infrastructure projects (often) carry huge long term benefits above and beyond initial projections.
I'm not finished with the podcast but the host has alluded to the "tragedy" of the Big Dig and I think for reasons you're getting at. The cost overruns and the giant extended timeline to finish has put a huge headwind against getting infrastructure projects proposed and funded. For the exact reasons you lay out in bullet point two.
I'm living it now. I now commute to work via the LIRR to Grand Central station. I can now walk to the office as opposed to needing to take a crosstown subway journey. Considering how many people had to make that same journey previously, the impact on shorter commute times should be enormous. But there was an apparently lack of forethought as to how new train schedules would effect service to Atlantic Terminal and whether new trains needed to be ordered. So schedules are messed up the primary effect has been to increase transfer times at Jamaica station from 2-3 minutes to upwards of 10-15 minutes. For all trains, which means not only are you not saving on travel time by going to Grand Central (it should be about a 10-15 minute reduction in travel time going right to Grand Central), you've now increased travel times to Penn Station! Like..ugh!
And yet! And yet. If Albany and the city can actually get their heads straight and get transfer times at Jamaica back down to where they were, the actual impact on commutes should huge give the number of LIRR commuters. And if Long Island can actually get it together and not be the worst NIMBYs in the country this side of San Francisco, the economic benefits of the new access could be absolutely enormous.
But because this screw up happened, a lot of long islanders and New Yorkers are understandably not in a mood to throw money to the MTA and commuter rail. Which by the way, if you don't think this is a factor in Kathy Hochul's terrible U-turn on congestion pricing I have a bridge to sell you two miles south of me.
"And yet, I think the consensus now is that it was 'worth it'."
Andrew Odlyzko has a very interesting manuscript, entitled "Collective hallucinations and inefficient markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s", in which he argues that a lot of financial bubbles form from precisely this phenomenon: investments that absolutely are worth it *in the long term*, but is unclear if their benefits will arise soon enough for the project to be a worthwhile investment at current interest rates.
Yes! But in the case of the Seattle Big Dig there actually hit a legit, unexpected problem. There were apparently some large iron structures that were included in the fill area where they dumped the dirt from the Denny regrade that were not in any city records and the drill hit on and broke. That obviously let to cost overruns and delays. I think Seattle took it well in part because everyone was expecting the Seattle Big Dig to turn in absolute money pit based on the experience in Boston so people's expectations were so low that it more led to an "I told you so" than a revolt. But the tunnel is lovely to use and the increased land for surface development, reconnection of the waterfront to the rest of the city and massive improvements in the views for much of the City made its actual cost totally worthwhile in a way I think few people deny. (Plus it won't come crashing down on large parts of the city in an earthquake like the old viaduct was set to do so that is a plus.) Ironically the toll they set on it to help cover the costs and cost overruns is actually one of the closest things to congestion pricing I have seen in the West. Granted it isn't a charge to go into town but a charge to be able to get through downtown from the north of the city to the south of the city actually probably cover more daily commutes in our weirdly shaped and decentralized city than a downtown congestion price would do.
That's a problem but it is not the problem. The problem is that it was impossible to do at the cost that was promised (and it indeed is impossible to do the most important segment, Bakersfield-LA at any reasonable cost) and they lied to voters by lowballing the cost to get it passed and now we've sunked a ton of money that could have helped deal with our state's many problems into a boondoggle.
Are you saying that it was never achievable from a materials cost perspective? Engineering challenges? Labor? I admit it's not clear to me why it would be difficult to build that segment.
The right way to build it is, as you said, build LA-Bakersfield first, or at least the first step should have been launching the TBMs.
I'm not as convinced as you are that it's impossible to cross the mountains anywhere that is earthquake-proof (note that modern TBMs mean you're not restricted to the passes; you can tunnel right under the peaks as well, see Mont d'Ambin in the Alps), but the right approach would be to pick a tunnel route and then work out how to connect it to LA and what the right route up the Central Valley should be, rather than picking a route first and then working out how to cross the mountains, as CAHSR actually did.
Either way, neither of us are tunnelling engineers or seismologists, so I don't think there's any serious prospect of us debating the question - neither of us has the knowledge to make a serious assessment of the risks.
But, yes, CAHSR, the project as conceived, is a deceitful money-sink; I expect the eventual "solution" to be that they build a slow route (probably Grapevine) from LA to Bakersfield and then run actually fast from Bakersfield to SF, and claim that it's high-speed because the average train speed between LA and SF is still going to be 100mph or more.
You can't go up the Grapevine without massive tunneling which gets you the earthquake issue. Grapevine Canyon is a series of switchbacks with 6 percent grade.
Don’t they already have the ROW land acquired and through CEQA, and it does that weird loop above the grapevine and avoids that pathway so that politician in north LA county can be happy?
A major cause of cost overruns in infrastructure projects in the US is the start stop start stop nature of construction caused by litigation and permitting. There are huge fixed costs to infrastructure construction and it seems that we pay those costs for every project because of the time gaps between completed and new projects.
Curious to know about some of the govt boondoggles you’ve seen in Florida - we hear so much about this in California, and somewhat Texas, but I feel there must be a lot in Florida too
Boy, I so want liberal government to succeed. And then I see the California HSR and the Kathy Hochul pratfall in New York and it pushes me toward despair. Do better, our team!
You are only allowed to wallow in liberal despair for 10 minutes a day maximum. Hope is a moral obligation. Despair is the enemy of justice because the struggle for justice requires courage, persistence, and faith and all of these spring from a reservoir of hope. But, I also would really fucking like to see our team doing better.
As a licensed professional engineer I'll tell you that very large and complicated infrastructure projects almost ALWAYS go over budget and over schedule. Humans have trouble estimating ands sensing the unknown unknowns.
Whenever I had a research project due in a year, I was always confident I could meet the deadline fairly easily. The source of my confidence was that, while my schedule was currently packed which made immediate progress very difficult, that schedule would surely ease up in a few months and then I'd have plenty of time to finish the work. You won't be surprised to learn that this kind of future discounting typically led to tears down the road when said schedule was just as packed as it was at the earlier moment.
I don't know if this kind of budgeting is cynical or a form of blackmailing or just part of human cussedness to be hopelessly optimistic about future states.
I mean, I understand- they want the bid- but there's a point behind my admittedly rhetorical question. If it was just an ordinary process of "guess the costs in good faith", shouldn't, with all the experience people have, some of the guesses come in too high instead of too low?
So what does that say about what is really going on-- good faith estimates that just missed the mark, or deliberately lowballing the costs for contracting and/or political reasons to hook the public in so they are forced to pay the real price?
So, the bid is the thing, right? There is a related phenomenon in government work (work done by government organizations on a reimbursable basis for other government organizations) constrained by budgets but without a real bidding process. It turns out that it is common to significantly overestimate the initial costs of a project and then as more information becomes available and the schedule firms up the initial estimate usually (not always) comes down. Some of the pressure to reduce the estimate admittedly comes from the "customer" who does have an appropriated budget limit. The high initial estimate is how the service providers hedge against the risk of the "unknown unknowns."
I imagine at this point it would be counterproductive to accurately estimate the time and cost involved; people are by now used to undershoots so they'd assume your project would be more costly than it is if you correctly announced its cost.
i'm sure you're right that the price presented was unrealistic, but i think it is always important to point out that a great deal of the increase in estimated total project cost is just a function of the increase in real estate values. if they are to ever build the socal portions of the project they'll need to aquire a lot of privately owned real estate and the price they'd pay is much higher now than it was 15 years ago.
most of the land "in the middle of nowhere" has already been purchased, so those costs aren't going up. but the southern california segments have not been purchased, and the value of that real estate has sky rocketed.
The initiative put a $9.95 billion price tag on the whole thing!
In fact they NEEDED to start there first because LA-Bakersfield was the most important need. We have plenty of passenger rail in central California but none between LA and Bakersfield. So you start there first.
Again, the plan was always to lowball the cost and then try to blackmail the public to put up whatever obscene sum would actually be needed to get over the Tehachapis.
It's not fraud when a politician says "elect me and there will never be a cloudy day" because we all know he is lying.
But it is fraud when advocates- including many subject matter experts- say "approve this taxpayer funded program because it will only cost $9.95 billion and will yield $50 a trip less than 3 hour train trips between LA and San Francisco" knowing that isn't close to true.
But this just shows why California's system of "government by referenda" is pretty bad in my view. It's not "rule of the people" it's rule of the interest groups and campaign professionals who specialize in running ballot initiative campaigns. Personally I'd just change the system rather than trying to enforce rules that the Don Drapers of the political world have to be honest about everything all the time because of course they aren't going to do that, no more than Don Draper is going to admit that buying lipstick isn't going to make you happy.
California's system of government by referenda is how we got marijuana legalization. The politicians were NEVER going to touch this because they are so afraid of looking soft on drugs. It was only because there was an option to bring this to voters that we got the ball rolling.
It's a good system. If it requires that sponsors of projects be more honest about them, that's a good thing too.
In any event, even in a purely representative democracy, this sort of activity can still discredit advocates of government. Eventually, the voters may get sick of being lied to, and some projects will turn into white elephants such as freeway stubs that constantly remind voters that the folks who promised progress just stole their money instead.
It did. But parts of three strikes were later repealed. We also reformed our auto insurance system by initiative.
I am highly protective of our system. It's great. We allow our voters to make choices. Some of those choices are bad, but we also are able to do things to circumvent politicians when politicians are acting anti-democratically. This is how things should work.
You can argue we need a higher signature requirement. That is true. But the general notion that the voters should be able to overrule politicians is sound. It's more democratic than the alternative. And if you don't like it, don't live here.
We need a new business model for public works projects. Contractors must agree to a fixed price and not get paid until the job is completed, with penalties for delays.
Yes, the bids will be much higher in order to cover all the risks, but at least we'll know the cost up front and can make a decision if that new bridge or rail line is really worth it.
No. That contracting model is only acceptable for turnkey projects, wherein the contractor both designs and builds the new infrastructure. Otherwise, either the contract sets the minute details of the project in such stone that neither the contractor nor public officials can adapt unforeseen technical challenges; or the public officials will have the freedom to insert scope creep to the project until the contractor is guaranteed a loss. The only solution is to take the majority of the work in-house.
How will bringing the work in-house improve performance? Who will have skin in the game and suffer the consequences for cost and schedule overruns? Perhaps large, complex projects can be broken into baby steps, with a fixed price for each step, and a chance to negotiate adjustments (as well as consider new bidders) for subsequent steps.
I think you believe that public works officials are not penalized for cost overruns. I disagree with that premise; I think they lack the tools to appropriately prevent contractors from developing cost overruns through incompetence. Consequently I don't think the problem is a lack of "skin in the game"; the problem is insufficient in-house technical knowledge to break down the "large complex projects…into baby steps".
The conflation of externalities with direct subsidies is egregious and one of those things that exemplifies how journalists often are unconcerned with truth or knowing. They just want to sell a salient story. I lost of lot of respect when speaking with journalists on research I did, because of the questions they asked and the responses they were apparently seeking to elicit.
There is a reason why the public has lost trust in experts and journalists over the years and that is because actors in these positions of authority often abuse the trust of the public.
I think this is true, but also beside the point. I don’t think most journalists care if what they write is literally correct. They start with a “vibe,” do enough research to “confirm” the vibe, and then view their job as writing an interesting, possibly inflammatory story that persuades people of the vibe. Their failures come primarily from indifference for objective facts rather than mere negligence. In the legal world, we’d say they have “scienter,” something worse than negligence, though not always “intent.”
As a former journalist I’d say this is not only untrue but unfair.
You’re criticizing journalists for being one-sided and promoting an agenda, while many others criticize journalists for “both sidesing” every story. Which is it? Because it’s hard to see how it’s both.
I also think journalists get held to an impossibly high standard. Most people in most companies aren’t particularly good at their jobs, don’t know how to interpret data or think critically, and propose solutions to problems that benefit them personally. Should we really be surprised that the same applies sometimes to some journalists?
In general - almost all of my colleagues tried to treat their stories and their subjects fairly and tried to relay the facts accurately. Did they always succeed? No. But as I compare it to other industries, the failure rate was pretty low.
As someone who is held to standards of accuracy in writing, I can tell you that it is in fact not difficult to avoid the pitfalls that most journalists fall into. It is, however, hard to do that while also generating clicks. Objective facts rarely are interesting to a wide audience.
The failure rate is exceedingly high. I’d say 60-70% of articles I read on a subject of which I am an expert contain significant false premises on which the article relies and any objective researcher could identify. But these errors are not random-they invariably point towards making a story more interesting or compelling. That is the fundamental bias of the press.
The people criticizing both sidesing typically just want a propaganda piece that confirms their priors. 90+% of the time they shouldn't be taken seriously
My general critique of both-sides journalism is that it’s lazy and uninformative. Often it’s just summarizing the opposing press releases. But that isn’t the issue I’m referring to here. What I find funny is that multiple posters here have chosen to view the issue purely from a political/partisan lens. My problem, and I think Matt’s, runs much deeper.
The Fallacy of Trust occurs when a person who is an expert on foreign policy picks up a newspaper, flips to the foreign policy section, and cries out “balderdash!”
This isn’t the problem. The problem is that the same person will often read the rest of the newspaper without complaint, quietly updating their opinions bit by bit.
Meanwhile, the expert on local politics will cry out “balderdash!” in the local-politics section, but read about foreign policy without complaint.
If we assume that the newspaper is mostly wrong on both topics, then neither expert is gathering information very effectively.
Ha fair! I’ll just say that since I moved out of journalism and into business I see people misunderstanding, misusing or just plain not having data all time. I can’t even count the number of faulty models I’ve had to correct, or the businesses cases that rest on totally shoddy assumptions.
To be honest when I was in journalism and didn’t know much about business I kind of most assumed companies were well run - now I realize they’re basically in business in spite of themselves.
"You’re criticizing journalists for being one-sided and promoting an agenda, while many others criticize journalists for “both sidesing” every story. Which is it? Because it’s hard to see how it’s both."
That's fair, I would say that the two criticisms are basically in opposition to each other. I share a lot of the same complaints as the person you are responding to, but I would never complain about a journalist "both sidesing" an issue, I wish they would do more of that.
At a larger level, I see this sort of phenomenon online a lot, everyone has an opinion of either "more X" or "less X" and it is really hard to tell that the demands aren't usually incoherent or contradictory, they are issued by 2 separate and opposed groups with the demandees (in this case journalists) as the rope in a tug-of-war.
Ehhh, I feel like there are always 2 groups on both sides criticizing everything. Also I feel like in this case there are really 3 sides. There are plenty of people on both the left and right that love to "work the refs" by accusing media of being too much in favor of the other side, plus a third side that wants journalists to go back to just dry, factual reporting without trying to insert "context" into things.
And are they also illiterate? Their reporting on *all* topics is bad , not just heavily number-y ones. It’s either loose ethics or stupidity (or both).
There are of course exceptions, but it seems to me most media doesn’t reward it.
That’s fair. In a more charitable mood I’d have acknowledged that. But what Dan Quail is describing goes beyond honest mistakes due to haste. It’s being tendentious is one’s approach to prioritize one’s agenda over attempting an honest understanding. I concede the business model of journalism is much to blame but the problem can also be seen in public media
One of my exes is a fairly successful journalist. In general, she was intelligent, intellectually curious, and committed to truth-seeking, but while we were going out, I noticed that she was often willing to make allowances for other journalists-- and especially for personal friends-- when they did things that violated normal common-sense morality. For example, she defended a friend who wrote a fairly cruel Gawker piece about her horror at finding out that her okCupid date, John Finkel, was a Magic the Gathering champion, even though even by the author's own account, he was pleasant, polite, and didn't do anything objectionable during the date. My ex argued that this sort of piece was fair game even though normal people would find publicly humiliating a date who hadn't done anything wrong pretty reprehensible.
One of the factors that probably informed my ex's response was that the piece's author experienced a pretty intense backlash, at least some of which was disproportionate and/or misogynistically flavored (death threats, people saying that the author should be raped). I get the sense that journalists in the current era have a strong siege/bunker mentality. Thanks to Meta/Google/etc, their industry's historical revenue model is broken and individual journalists' jobs are extremely precarious. And thanks to social media, any given piece of reporting on a remotely controversial topic will draw a big, hostile response, much of which will be in bad faith and come from obviously terrible people *even in cases where the reporting in question is actually bad*.
In this sort of context, it's pretty understandable/human normal that journalists are inclined to both circle the wagons and defend behavior that they wouldn't normally endorse. Unfortunately, this becomes a significant problem for the rest of us because we often have to rely on them for information. I don't see the problem getting better until journalism finds a more stable economic model again.
It is crazy that you mention that specific incident (I was a semi-professional MTG player at the time). It was so weird to me, because the existence of the piece, and the reaction to it, were obviously done for terribly short-sighted reasons. As you point out, humiliating a date because of their slightly weird hobby is not a nice thing to do, but it has layers of additional context which pick at people's identities (and thus make them defensive).
The thing is, this wasn't just any Magic the Gathering player, but the "GOAT," who is also a successful hedge fund manager, and everyone who talks to him acknowledges he is super-smart and kind. So, you had this perfect storm of "incel"-adjacent subcultures arguing this "proves" women only want to date "Chads," MTG players saying this just shows how stupid and shallow non-gamers are, and feminists saying just because you don't agree with this woman's preferences, doesn't mean they are invalid. (There was also a ton of abuse heaped on the journalist for her own appearance, by aggrieved MtG players who felt she wasn't "hot enough" to even be criticizing their champion).
I remember thinking at the time, while obviously this *particular journalist* is rejecting someone for shallow and stupid reasons, but people do things for shallow and stupid reasons all the time, so this particular couple would never have worked out anyway. The actual "problem," if you want to call it that, is the idea that journalists should use their specific personal feelings and interactions as emblematic of wider society, and that they need to give themselves social license for why this specific thing they don't like is a Problem. If you need to invent "red flags" to explain why you didn't click with someone, then you'll probably just setting yourself up to be lonely, but if you write an article about it trying to go viral, you're probably setting up lots of impressionable people to be lonely along with you!
Your example reminds me of how irritating it is that journalists write about their bad dates instead of writing about Sudan, or really any actual news. In the last twenty years, language arts teachers have assigned a lot of essays about how the students feel about various things. Go back to assigning essays about John C. Fremont or the motif of yellow in Crime and Punishment! I don't care about your damn feelings unless I know you personally.
Unfortunately, your preferences are in the minority, writing about bad dates gets lots of clicks (especially if it's inflammatory or controversial), and its economics are much better than those of reporting on the civil war in Sudan. I get the sense that most journalists would themselves prefer to spend more time on substantive stories; but the market is not friendly to that desire. (Business journalism tends to be a bit more substantive precisely because it has an audience that's both eager and able to actually pay for substantive reporting.)
These examples are specific deductions, in contrast to a carbon tax, which is a separate new tax. It required action to create the MID. The lack of a carbon tax is inaction.
"Federal income tax falls on income left over after certain expenses" is no different from "social security and medicare taxes fall on wage income" or "capital gains tax falls on investment income minus investment losses" or "property tax falls on the value of owned real estate."
All taxes have a defined scope that leaves certain potentially taxable stocks or flows on the table.
Hey wouldn't you know it. Just yesterday the Surgeon General spread a pile of misinformation about gun violence. Stuff like counting 19 year olds in shootings of children, switching back and forth between wildly different definitions of "mass shootings", implying "assault weapons" get used in a significant amount of crime, cherry picking the timing to avoid the new data that shows violent crime dropping, etc etc.
If there's any one set of people that need to recover some credibility after absolutely lighting it on fire during COVID it's the public health officials. Acting like the Surgeon General has anything whatever meaningful to say about gun policy as a "public health crisis" is simply pouring gasoline on the ashes.
I can’t litigate the veracity of the SG’s claims. But I’ll say this- even if everything he said was 100% correct it was still a bad idea. Guns are one of the most polarizing issues in the country, and it is really tendentious to lump them in under “public health”. With so many other actual public health issues that he could be addressing, this just burns credibility for no apparent gain.
Brings back memories of the early 80s when Physicians for Social Responsibility warned us that nuclear war was a public health issue on which they were experts.
Apparently, as I recall their saying, a nuclear war would be deleterious for people's health.
I guess they're still around peddling this stuff but the air went out of the balloon when the Berlin Wall fell, thankfully.
Yeah that made me want to scream. A good example of how the liberal staffer class is not acting like there is a contentious election coming up that depends on much more moderate swing voters.
"this just burns credibility for no apparent gain"
Yes, I'm barely kidding when I suggest someone should check the Surgeon General's financial records for large monetary transfers from anonymous Cypriot bank accounts because it's very hard to explain what the Hell he was thinking otherwise.
Guns and cars are the leading reasons that people who would otherwise live long healthy lives instead die young. And it’s not particularly close! Obviously they remain that way because they are popular, or they would have been fixed already.
Successful public health interventions usually intersect culture, and people are usually attached to culture. How we deal with human waste, how we cook food and manage kitchens, how we manage animals, how we send off the dead, how we welcome children into the world, etc. Possibly the biggest coup ever for public health was the introduction of a quasi-religious ritual, handwashing, into our daily lives - multiple times a day!
Congress. The Surgeon General doesn't have regulatory authority over guns and cars. In fact, you say they run the public health system, but what regulatory authority do they actually have?
Let me paste here a random NYT reader's response (not my own):
"This sounds like a great extension of the authority of doctors and public health scientists. I'd like to offer a few more areas for input from the Surgeon General.
1. Foreign policy - clearly large numbers of people die in wars, so why isn't the Surgeon General in charge of our foreign policy?
2. Vehicular accidents killed nearly 40,000 Americans last year. Why isn't the Surgeon General consulted on automobile design?
3. 13,000 people died in fires last year. When will the Surgeon General weigh in on Fire Codes for residential buildings
4. Almost 20,000 died from falls in 2022. The Surgeon General needs to speak up on the design of stairwells.
Really all of politics can be placed under the rubric of Public Health. There's no need for political parties or elections at all."
I am not very exercised about gun rights myself (don’t own any, seems like an obviously legitimate thing for a government to regulate, odd to me how hot other libertarian minded people get over it) but I AM exercised over mission creep in regulatory agencies. This was a crazy move. True believer? Misguided political calculation? Red meat for the base? I am not sure but another in a VERY long line of examples of Biden agency pick being completely off the rails. A lot of the stuff Biden personally does I think is reasonable but his administration is taking crazy pills from the SEC, DOJ, FTC etc etc. too bad he is running against Clown College Republicans so there is no sane alternative.
Definitely true believer. If you listen to his loneliness interviews, he believes he can use his position to put a spotlight on tough problems facing American society so that we can try to find solutions together. For loneliness, this was a thoughtful message. Unfortunately, for gun violence, putting things in the spotlight never seems to help us make progress.
I think it's very weird to act like car safety seat regulation and shaken baby videos make sense but talking about gun deaths in children is totally out of bounds, given the number of deaths associated annually with each modality.
By the way, the pendulum has swung on car seat stuff, too -- we now require car seats way out in places where there is little good data to suggest that we're averting any meaningful number of deaths.
Pretty sure there are not single issue car seat owners who will now disregard the opinions of the surgeon general out of (in this instance, justified) mistrust!
Also guns are deliberately made to kill people on purpose. You don’t need a medical expert to tell you they are dangerous to kids!
But I also think it doesn’t make sense to selectively issue warnings about some things that kill 30,000 people a year and not other things that kill 30,000 people a year, just because some of them have partisans and are supposed to be “obviously dangerous”. It makes sense to just classify them on the basis of the actual harms caused here and leave it to the economists and politicians to figure out the costs of mitigating these harms, and the cultural values involved.
The significant distinction is when the deaths are the item in question functioning as intended. Government issued guidance related to accidents, externalities, defects and malfunctions are one thing. Guns functioning as intended killing people when those killings are unlawful is a criminal justice issue, not a public health or consumer safety issue. Gun accident and malfunction deaths are on a tiny scale compared to car accidents or lung cancer from cigarettes. They're something like half that of swimming pools.
I literally don’t understand what you’re saying. How does being a criminal justice issue make something not a public health issue? Does violence cease being relevant to health once there’s a law against it? Should we be tracking legal pollution deaths separately from illegal pollution deaths?
Also, aren’t suicides the big public health concern from guns, even more than anything illegal or accidental?
Anyway, I agree that the surgeon general should have a series of warnings about automobiles and cigarettes. I don’t think anyone is denying that, other than maybe North Carolina politicians who still think its politically problematic to engage in culture war issues like talking about deaths caused by legal products.
I wouldn’t mind putting Smith & Wesson in a position where they had to say under oath that their products are intended to help people commit suicide, perform robberies, etc.
That’s true, but surely can also parse the difference between “hey you might not know this but activity X Y Z is actually quite dangerous to your health—like having a fireplace” and “we asserting regulatory authority under public health laws after failing to win the political fight with direct legislation to curb something that everyone knows is, and is in fact specifically designed to be, dangerous”.
That second thing burns trust that serves an important social role for the first fireplace thing. Now people will think you don’t like fireplaces because of some climate agenda or whatever, not because they are in fact a surprisingly large health hazard.
The surgeon general isn’t asserting regulatory authority, is he? Does the surgeon general actually have any regulatory authority? I thought the warnings on cigarettes were ordered by a lawsuit settlement or by Congress, even though they quote the surgeon general in order to get some respect for the claim.
I think it's definitely elite misinformation when they don't bring up that fact. But I think the public health agencies are actually quite good about always talking about guns both in the context of suicides and homicides, unlike other public actors talking about guns.
I think politics is inseparably part of any political appointee’s job. If the Surgeon General’s statements on guns will have bad effects, that’s all the reason he needs not to make them.
The "have large gatherings all you want if it's a BLM protest; the rest of you, no effing way" thing was (rightfully) probably the single biggest destroyer of trust & credibility in the public health establishment in many a year.
One key difference about them (in most cases) is that car safety seats and not shaking your baby are steps _you_ take to keep _your_ kids alive. And getting that information out to parents is useful (like SIDS information etc). This is consistent with "smoking kills (you)"
Gun regulation is different.
Exception: Maybe if you want to talk about gun safes or keeping ammo separate, or trigger locks. But does the SG talk about Smoke Detectors? (A quick google search isn't find anything - and I'd lump those together)
We definitely got smoke detector stuff in the home safety portion of our pre-discharge teaching. Also electrical outlet covers, locking away poisons, braces on bookcases to keep them from falling over...
We got handouts. We saw videos. Every product you buy has instructions with pictures and big warning labels. And that includes a lot of products not even meant for children! Seriously, look at the plastic packaging in your Amazon box sometime.
I'm not sure how much of that you can trace to the surgeon general, personally, but going through all the new parent classes at the hospital and starting to "see" all those labels and stuff really opened my eyes to just how weird we treat guns in comparison to everything else that might kill kids, proportionately speaking.
It's like you said: there are really basic innovations, like trigger locks, that are cheap, easy to use, and would take up thirty seconds of the videos I watched, right after outlet covers and before car seat installation. And we don't do that. It's empirically odd, even if you know it is driven by political realities.
My quick googling of trigger locks suggests they aren't so widely accepted as effective. They break easily, there are many other easy to implement alternatives, and many guns already come with conceptually similar safety measures that are more effective.
But in terms of what's weird I don't that guns are such an outlier. There must be 50 different poisonous chemicals in my house right now from household cleaners to paints to roach poisons. There are also several species of very poisonous berries growing in my yard, a couple of swimming pools, a pond and a stream that floods in walking distance, And in this age of harm reduction for overdoses, a million americans are walking around with lethal doses of fentanyl.
Unintentional gun deaths age 14 and under totaled 84 in 2022, compared to 202 accidental poison deaths and 500 drownings. There was 175 gun suicides in the 10-14 age group and 42 poison suicides. These numbers don't look very different, but there's few regs on what legal medicines or household cleaners I keep in my house
As an aside, didn't it turn out that "shaken baby syndrome" was mostly a moral panic sort of thing that got made up in a couple over-sensationalized trials of like babysitters?
Sort of. I think "shaken baby syndrome" in particular was kind of overblown as a specific thing, but the general category of "trauma" really is one of the major causes of infant death, and people really do abuse infants for infant-specific reasons that go beyond the abuse visited on children more generally (i.e. stuff like the pronounced lack of sleep in new parents and the way that a colicky baby crying really does make some people kind of crazy past a certain point). The videos we watched in the hospital specifically dealing with shaken baby were really more about managing anger or depression when around infants, so clearly someone got the message.
Eh, shaking a baby is in fact more dangerous to them than you might expect in a sleep deprived and angry moment with a screaming infant, and those moments come at you faster than you might expect too. I have not researched it but I suspect it has had some impact and its plausibly useful training for new parents. Don’t shake the baby ever no matter what! Don’t give the baby water (it’s bad for them)! Get the vitamin K shot! Be alert for post partum depressed on and psychosis!
I certainly don't doubt that you can do great harm shaking an infant. As I recall though the "shaken baby syndrome" thing was about a medical "expert witness" claiming they could, like, look at an autopsy and based on certain bruising or whatever claim someone had to have shaken this baby beyond a reasonable doubt. Maybe there was also some thing about, "the babysitter could shake your kid and they'd seem fine when you get home then randomly collapse and die later." It was entirely prosecutorial pseudoscience nonsense.
We looked heavily into this and (this was 9 years ago so things may have been updated) but yeah:
Loose blankets - I think it caused C02 to pool up around the infant's mouth and nose and they don't have all the normal reflexes/ability to move/wakeup for better air.
We were told under no uncertain terms to keep those things out of our crib - and definitely used "sleep sacks" which couldn't get loose.
It's like the Secret Congress. People will listen to experts on the first two issues because they're not polarizing. The latter is, so "expertise" isn't an issue and your words will simply feed the culture war. So why do it?
Granted this is not a nuanced interpretation, there is definitely some value in trying to understand the gun violence problem through a public health framework, but making the question of gun possession a public health issue leads people to think you are claiming that owning a gun is akin to having a disease.
I mostly agree with this analysis, in the sense that I think "public health" as a concept gets way, way, way overstretched by people who want to use it for all kinds of stuff--climate change immediately comes to mind--and I genuinely think that is a bad thing that devalues the field. Something that is used to mean everything eventually comes to mean nothing, and I think "public health" is really in danger of falling into that space, if it hasn't already. And I say that having taught undergrad public health classes for years; I'm lamenting what is, in my mind, a very bad thing.
My sense is that going for "public health" arguments is, in the minds of people who do it, One Weird Trick for sneaking around certain elements of politics that they find frustratingly intractable and/or distasteful. I am squarely in the camp of people who think that One Weird Trick never, ever works and that usually One Weird Trick thinking actually makes your problems worse.
But.
Two things I also think are true:
1) This is part of why I have repeatedly gone with the car seat parallel throughout this discussion. No one thinks that driving cars is a disease, but we lecture parents about it literally at the hospital, and it is treated explicitly with a public health framing, and it's fine. There are actually other parallels that I think are useful, such as the fact that car deaths can be, like gun deaths, the result of all kinds of actors with all kinds of motivations, and we don't have to argue about "reckless driving deaths" versus "accident deaths" versus "malfunction deaths"--no one cares. We just (correctly, IMO) treat car seats as a single-point technological response to a set of things that used to kill kids on the regular and we don't sweat it, because that approach works. I think we should be that way about guns.
2) A point I have tried to stick to throughout this thread is that I think the discourse around this issue is genuinely odd in a way that is very revealing, not of bad faith, precisely, but of the way in which our discussion of guns is really about all kinds of other stuff--emotional stuff, like how cool people think guns are and how they figure into self-identity--that we are not willing to say or acknowledge or maybe don't even notice in the rush to rehash some specific set of talking points or pre-baked opinions that comport with our feelings.
It's the same reason why I replied to the original post about assault weapons and was like, "there is literally no mention of assault weapons in the ten tweets you linked." And I think this inability to even recognize that we are not having the discussion, much less have an actual discussion, is a huge blind spot and a huge problem for some big-ticket issues like guns. It is why I keep using words like "odd" and comparing gun discussion and harm reduction measures to other things (again: car seats, shaken babies) that cut a different way, emotionally and politically. People think--truly believe--that they are being hyper rationale and folks on the other side are irrational in a way that is just fundamentally untrue. I recognize that in part because I saw it so clearly (and maybe wrote about it less clearly) in my prior research. But that's my intervention: I have tried to avoid stating particular policy preferences because I think that reckoning with the incongruence is more likely to achieve something useful than for us to all rehash policy territory that has already been over-tilled.
To add to your point, Kaiser routinely asks us, as parents, if we have a gun in the house, along with questions about smoke detectors, gated pools, etc.
I had in mind antitrust enforcement where they have gone bananas, but they have been maximally aggressive in a couple of other areas I have happened to come across (like opioid litigation) as well. I know I know, cry me a river for the poor Sacklers but it leads me to suspect they are also being unreasonable and political in areas I don't have a view on too.
They also seem to be botching the case against Trump, which strikes me as a real "you come at the king best not miss" situation, but I have been deliberately avoiding details on the many legal actions against Trump so perhaps they are doing a better job that it seems like from down here buried in the sand.
Judge Aileen Cannon has gone rogue, is the problem there. She’s like some kind of … some sort of unsecured bit of armament, the right idiom isn’t coming to me.
After actually experiencing a actual, serious public health crisis just four years ago, you'd think that it would teach people to stop using that phrase for every thing out there they deem to be bad, but alas...
Meh. I read over the ten tweets published in your link, and I think you can quibble with some of the details--I really wish people would start disaggregating the degree to which suicide is more the real problem than murder with guns--but there isn't even a mention of mass shootings or assault weapons in those ten tweets, and I didn't hear him mention it in the little video.
If you acknowledge that bullets causing trauma by their passage through human tissue are a major cause of child death in this country, that seems like a public health problem, in the sense that those deaths are highly preventable. I guess you could argue about whether it constitutes a "crisis" or not, but nobody gets mad when you want to deal with, say, lead poisoning, and that doesn't even kill kids. I had to watch a movie about shaken baby syndrome to even leave the hospital. I had to watch a demonstration of how to correctly install a car seat.
I am a gun owner, licensed to hunt in the state of Texas, and no one said anything about it.
Harm prevention is this constant thing you are being messaged on when you are a parent, especially in the early years--here's how to do child seat safely, here's how to lay your kid to sleep, here's which products are safe or non-safe, etc. So honestly the brackets around doing policy on guns and kids in our society always seems really odd, by comparison. I understand the politics that lead to that outcome, but as "elite misinformation," I think this one is pretty weak sauce.
I'm not saying that you can't find some real elite misinformation whoppers about guns out there. But this particular tweet thread doesn't look like it to me.
But the "public health" message if often "we should pass legislation", not "be more safe with your guns". The latter seems like something the SG should talk about, but not the former
I'm pretty sure that the car seats have labels on them because someone passed a law. I know for a fact that the shaken baby video thing is done by law, because I'm a registered nurse and got that in my training (even though, to be clear, I'm critical care rather than L&D).
Whether you want to talk speed limits and licensure and street lights or alcohol and marijuana usage or air pollution, laws are how we do public safety and health in this country. If you aren't talking about legislating, you are kind of just blowing smoke.
It might not be politically smart for the SG to talk about legislation that will irritate people (like you, I guess), but it's pretty nonsensical on its face to say, "man, officials charged with public health matters shouldn't talk about legislation, since that is the main way we do public health in this country."
I don’t think that’s nonsensical. Legislation isn’t their department. I don’t want Trump’s SG talking about how we need to build the wall to prevent disease from spreading inside the US.
I think the SG should talk about the number of injuries and their causes, but not necessarily about what particular interventions are best. To know which interventions are best takes expertise beyond health and medicine, since interventions have implications outside of health or medicine.
Sure - fwiw, if the OP is representing the SG's communication accurately, it sounds like in this case a big part of the problem is not that they were staying in those bounds, but cherry-picking and using the data in misrepresentative ways. There's no reason (beyond I guess politics) to imply that assault weapons kill more people than pistols, or to say violent gun crime is increasing right at the moment (as opposed to higher than it was 5 years ago), etc...
Yeah, I've avoided clicking through to the statements myself, but those implications, if actually there in the statements and not just the reconstructions being tossed around to make the surgeon general sound bad, do sound bad.
Also, suicide is specifically the reason I do not myself own any firearms. I don’t think I am suicidal guy myself but the data shows being confident about that is pretty dangerous. I get sad! Sometimes I am drunk! Apparently people kill themselves impulsively! Not worth the risk.
The fall would be terrifying. If you shoot yourself in the head, you don’t even have time to hear the report. Your brain has been destroyed before it has time to process the sound
I guess I like interposing “willing to tolerate a scary fall” between myself and suicide in the absence of an informed consent paradigm. But you places your bet and takes you chances!
You can just shoot yourself in the head on the way down and save half of that terrifying-ness. And, if you change your mind half way, oh wait...never mind.
"If you acknowledge that bullets causing trauma by their passage through human tissue are a major cause of child death in this country, that seems like a public health problem, in the sense that those deaths are highly preventable."
"I am a gun owner, licensed to hunt in the state of Texas, and no one said anything about it."
This confuses me. Are you saying that we need the Surgeon General to encourage warning labels be added to ammunition saying that bullets cause trauma by their passage through human tissue because people who use guns might not know that?
"There’s an old tweet I wrote over a decade ago defending a lowball projection of high-speed rail construction costs on this kind of means-ends grounds."
I'm glad Matt owns up to this because this is a perfect example of how dangerous this phenomenon is. The California voters were told they could have $50 high speed rail from LA to San Francisco in less than 3 hours for $9.95 billion (matched by federal funds to total $19.9 billion). The entire thing was a lie. The project is already up to $100 billion, the first segment (which almost nobody will ride and which will not cost $50 to ride) on flat land between Bakersfield and Merced is many years away from completion, and the project's designers have not demonstrated that it is even possible at reasonable cost to go from Bakersfield to Los Angeles (a long story that I tell on my own Substack).
The point is, this is more than a folly-- this was fraud and theft. Sponsors of a project that is likely impossible to actually complete convinced California voters to authorize billions of dollars of spending that could have been directed to solving other problems in our state. Heck, we could have subsidized clean air zero-carbon bus trips for everyone who wants to travel by land between Los Angeles and San Francisco with that money and THAT would have even been a better use of it.
And yes, it was fraud. The project organizers chose $9.95 billion for the same reason that your local supermarket marks apples at 99 cents instead of a dollar-- to make the price tag look as low as possible. They HAD to know that it would cost a lot more-- the arguments against the ballot initiative in the ballot pamphlet rationally predicted a $90 billion cost. Even the opponents estimated too low!
This is not the way to do liberalism or government. You tell the public the truth. If the public votes against you, it's OK. You told them the truth and that's democracy.
The plot in True Detective season 2 was about people trying to get a slice of the high speed rail boondoggle, which was spending a lot of money and not building much.
That season came out almost a decade ago.
I thought it was an underrated season, and Vince Vaughn deserved some praise for his performance, which of course is the opposite of what happened.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=taJ4MFCxiuo&t=155s&pp=ygURbW9ub3JhaWwgc2ltcHNvbnM%3D
Is there a chance the track could bend?
Not on your life my Hindu friend!
This is the correct answer, and I even get sniped on this due to continual experiencing of Westernness.
A big problem with that season is that Nick Pizzolatto had no idea at all how the politics of high speed rail works so the whole season is based on a bunch of absurd things happening.
My strong impression from reading even positive reviews of "True Detective" is that "the whole season is based on a bunch of absurd things happening" could be used to summarize each season of the show.
Season 1 is really good though in terms of characters and ideas and a the big story of Russ and Marty's relationship over 15 years. Season 2 doesn't really have that.
The most annoying thing is that they could have built the whole thing for $50 bn. But they'd have had to change California real estate law in some fundamental ways - include in the initiative the power for CAHSR to seize any non-federal land in the state at a price to be determined by CAHSR, with short notice period (one month would suffice), and that the only power that any former landowner would have would be the right to sue to dispute the valuation, in which case CAHSR would be liable to pay the difference in valuation (without any interest or penalty). Rely on Kelo as the constitutional justification
They'd also have had to get a competent organisation (ie not an American one) to do the construction - French, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, any would do.
The absence of any penalty - let alone any *interest,* sounds like a bridge too far to me. Slight systematic overvaluation of eminent domain seems like a massively better problem to have than any kind of systematic undervaluation.
Totally agree. Allow for interest and reasonable attorneys fees (eg 33% of the undervaluation) and there is less incentive to shaft property owners. You might also limit valuations to 125% of assessed value to reign in run away finders of fact.
I'm mostly trying to avoid a situation where CAHSR has to hold an enormous contingency budget against the risk of losing legal actions and getting rinsed by former property owners who can convince a judge to approve an enormously inflated valuation.
If there is a reasonable limit to the losses, then they can take some land, pay $1million for it, stick $250K in a contingency fund and then the only part of the organisation that has to care is group legal. That's probably the practical version of what I propose. But Kelo should mean that blocking eminent domain rather than arguing over valuations is impossible, yet CAHSR was prepared to sit and argue over a valuation rather than just picking their own valuation, seizing the land, and then arguing about the valuation later in court. I don't know if that was lack of legal authority or lack of political will, but it was a massively expensive problem.
They'd also need some variances on various regulations (particularly environmental), but those would be mostly because the way that too many US regulations are enforced is that people sue and then get injunctions to stop construction - give CAHSR a variance that if they had a reasonable compliance plan then you can't get an injunction unless you can demonstrate that that compliance plan was not reasonable (ie, just because it doesn't comply, you can't stop them building, you have to show they weren't even trying to comply).
Dilan Esper's point (in the article he linked) that the *first* part of the line to build is the line through the Tehachapis is well-taken, though. I suspect that if you got a Japanese or a Taiwanese engineer to design your railroad, you'd get told exactly how to route it so it was earthquake-safe, but neither I nor Dilan are railroad tunnel engineering experts.
Also @Dilan, one of the nice things about high-speed rail is that it's, uh, fast. That means that if you do have to go a relatively long way around (e.g. going up the coast to Oxnard or Santa Barbara before crossing the mountains), then you can do that - you can add a lot of miles in diversions at 200mph before you really start affecting the travel time. AIUI, from talking to some of the engineers who worked on the UK's HS1 and HS2 routes, you work out where you can cross a mountain chain and then you work backwards from there to identify the routes to get to the crossing. This is why the Lyon-Turin line under construction takes such an odd route on approach to the Alps - because they picked the tunnel route first and then worked out how to connect it to the rest of the system.
So the problem with going up the coast is there are tons of curves. I am not saying it is totally impossible to do but you can't use the existing SP coast route- and in addition to increasing travel time slowing down for the curves there are all the practical problems of the coastal act, rich landowners who don't want the train, etc.
Neither of us knows enough about seismic protection and tunnelling to say where the mountain crossing should be. And neither do the "Lines on Map" people. And nor does CAHSR. Honestly, I doubt anyone in the USA (or the UK) does. You want a Japanese or a Taiwanese engineering firm to do a survey, and identify where to do the crossing, and then you start designing the rest of CAHSR from there: if you cross the mountains in X place, then you have to get the track from X to LA Union Station, so you design a route from X to LAUS. Then you have to go up the Central Valley from X, so that determines which Valley cities can be reached.
Similarly in the Bay Area, you start with the mountain crossing between the Caltrain line and the Central Valley, and then you work out how far the track comes up the Valley.
Zillow estimates are slight overvaluations. Just take a Zillow screenshot and pay that. Allow people to sue if they’ve made significant property improvements not reflected in Zillow.
Although this actually is the type of project that imminent domain is supposed to be used for (roads, railways etc).
Kelo was about taking property so it could be redeveloped by private property owners.
Reanimate the corpse of Robert Moses, in other words.
That is not dead which can eternal lie;
And with strange eons even the Cross Manhattan Expressway may touch the sky.
"What is dead may never die" -- Theon Greyjoy.
GRRM knew what he was doing. The Iron Islanders are basically meant to be "Vikings who worship Cthulhu."
Maturity is recognizing Jacobs' philosophy does more harm than Moses.
Been saying this for years
They could not have built over the Tehachapis for $50 billion. The terrain challenges are far too massive.
I've always wondered if the southeastern US would have been a better choice for HSR.
Atlanta/Orlando is one of the busiest domestic flights in the US, there are no mountains on this route, and the distance is only a bit longer than LA/SF. My impression is that labor and land are both much cheaper in the southeast than in California.
I do wonder if swamps and crossing state lines would be huge hassles for getting HSR done though. And I suspect that a lot of the Atlanta/Orlando flights are tourists connecting via Atlanta on a theme park visit to Orlando, so connecting HSR to the airport in Atlanta would probably be a necessity.
It isn't clear that they can build the thing at all for any price. No one currently has a solution for building through the Tehachapis.
What is so hard in tunneling thorough mountains?
it's not just tunneling through mountains
Also tunneling through mountains isn't easy.
This is correct, but... historically, a lot of the large infrastructure projects in this country were built on fraud and misinformation. The financing structure for 19th century railroads certainly wasn't anywhere close to sound (and directly lead to repeated panics and recessions). But we still had the railroads, which people could use and provided a great deal of benefits.
I guess I struggle with where you draw the line between "outright lies to voters to build something useful and long lasting" (where California HSR mostly falls) to "boring technical discussions of how this will go which is over the public's head and will be subject to its own misinformation campaign" (e.g., Obamacare). At some point, people have to accept the fact that we want government to get shit done and it ain't gonna be perfect (and if my own experience with big business is any indication, it's not much different in the private sector). So we try to mitigate the bad as much as we can and push for the good.
There’s a big difference between a terrible, criminally irresponsible process that builds something useful and one that doesn’t, especially as time passes
You are right that it is a difficult line. But nonetheless lowballing government programs is incredibly risky. The Crédit Mobilier scandal could have easily killed the whole project. They were playing with fire and got very lucky.
This was a central part of the Robert Moses strategy, correct? Dupe the state legislature into a significantly smaller cost, and then once construction has already commenced, reveal the grand plan. Although, I guess the difference between that and the LA/San Fran line was that Moses actually built things.
"Dupe the state legislature into a significantly smaller cost, and then once construction has already commenced" this is more or less basically how every weapon system the Pentagon wants gets made as well. We call this system democracy.
The F-35 is a great example of this. https://www.defensenews.com/air/2022/09/01/lockheed-pentagon-claim-theyre-reining-in-f-35-sustainment-costs/
The HBO TV Movie The Pentagon Wars is great on this as well and pretty much sums up the process we see with transit and affordable housing as well (and anyone who's worked in software design would be familiar with this dynamic too) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA
Basically any infrastructure project too. It had the pernicious effect of incentivizing the public sector to gut in-house capacity to engineer and build infra projects, because the private sector could always underbid the in-house cost projections and then hold the project hostage for more money later.
Also why people don't much like this anymore! Moses built things without much regard for whether it was a good idea. The backlash has been with us for over 50 years now.
Had Moses been for trains and not cars it would’ve been awesome
Yes, but they actually got built. Moreover, historically the cost overruns were not 10x
Interstate highways were pitched as vital to beating the Ruskies in World War III!
It's ironic that I'm listening to the "Big Dig" podcast right now* (I grew in MA when this project was ongoing so of particular personal interest to me) because it's clearly a companion piece to your post about CA HSR.
I'm only halfway through, but it lays out in pretty painstaking detail the delays in getting the project started, the cost overruns and yes what appears to be outright lying from Bechtel corporation about timelines to complete. Specifically, it seems like Bechtel corporation basically lied about the timeline it would take to complete a tunnel across the Fort Point Channel.
In other words, you're post has some interesting familiarity to it. And yet, I think the consensus now is that it was "worth it". From a quick google search, the following benefits are noted:
- Housing: The project led to the development of 7,700 new housing units, including 1,000 affordable units
- Office and retail space: The project added 10 million square feet of office and retail space
Hotel rooms: The project added 2,600 hotel rooms
- Traffic flow: The project improved traffic flow by 62% compared to pre-project levels
- Travel time and vehicle operating costs: The project saved travelers an estimated $167 million per year on travel time and vehicle operating costs
- Urban design: The project led to new residential development near parks and open spaces
Now this is a quick google search with AI driven response, so feel free to nitpick some of this. But I think the basic contours is correct. And I think this underplays the impact. That housing, hotel and office space is located in some of the valuable real estate in all of the country. Furthermore, the beautification effects of not having an elevated highway surely has led to knock on urban development of restaurants and shops that otherwise wouldn't have exited as proximity of the highway would have meant going to certain neighborhoods that are now trendy an uninviting proposition. Lastly, I wouldn't discount the impact of the Zakim Bridge. There's a reason it was heavily featured in the movie "The Departed" as it's become a pretty iconic (and beloved) part of the modern Boston skyline.
The point being, I think there is a very strong case to be made that the "Big Dig" was worth it despite the cost overruns, extreme amount of time it took to complete and what appears to be outright fraud involved.
Which comes back to kind of the tragedy of HSR. The concept I actually think is sound. If this project was built by the Spanish I'm guessing it would be done years ago. So in theory this is actually a good project that would probably have been "worth it" with Big Dig style cost overruns. But at this point, the complete lack of progress means it probably should be junked. Someone involved in this project needs to read up again on "Sunk Costs".
* Great podcast and worth your time. Feel like it's catnip for Matt and his audience. One thing the first few episodes did was make me more sympathetic to NIMBY or I should say sympathetic to the historical reasons why NIMBY became so strong starting in the 70s (which the podcast gets into). Because listening to the show, it really hit home to me how much of this impulse is about highway building. Matt bemoans (Rightly) how much the building of highways through the middle of cities was absolutely devestating. But I feel like listening to this podcast that people put highway building in the same mental bucket as building apartments; big government + rich people building stuff to enrich themselves without any care of how it impacts the little guy. And the fight in the 60s about a highway through East Boston really hits home to me that the impulse to stop construction just generally comes from a pretty understandable place.
It's fine to say that where you have already completed something, it is worth it.
But even in the best case scenario, which the Big Dig or the transcontinental railroad is, there's some massive negatives:
1. If you fail, you end up with a white elephant that reminds the public of the folly of big government. Those exist- there are unused subway tunnels around the country, bridges to nowhere, ghost ramps and highways to nowhere, etc. And each one tells a story of how government wasted taxpayer money.
2. Even if you succeed, developing the reputation (as people are arguing here) that all projects run over is not good for the cause of big government. Remember when the Pentagon had those $600 toilet seats? I bet supporters of increased defense spending loved hearing that one brought up over and over again over the next decade plus when they asked for appropriations!
3. The public will think we are a bunch of liars and that every spending program explodes. This is a big reason, by the way, that there's a lot of green eyeshade budgeting and honest scoring of Democratic initiatives in Congress. Obama did not want the story of Obamacare to be how he promised this program would pay for itself with some minor tweaks to the tax code and modest Medicare cuts and then it blew up the budget deficit! Had that happened, maybe the Republicans get that last vote they needed to repeal it! Plus the next time we propose something, we'd get "remember Obamacare? You can't trust them".
Plus, I realize there isn't a lot of morality in politics, but this really is immoral. You don't have to be an anti-tax crusader to say that when you ask the voters for pay for something you think will be good for them, you tell them up front and reasonably accurately what you think the price tag will be. You owe them that in a democracy.
I always wanted the Pyramid arena in Memphis (which was a boondoggle that stayed empty for at least a decade) to become a Museum of Boondoggles and Government Waste. It could be really cool!
Someone in my city is trying to start a Museum of Political Corruption. I'll let people know here if it comes to fruition.
If there's a good kickback in it, it will get built.
I agree. The 99 tunnel project in Seattle was a good idea and worth it despite its cost overruns which is why I would have supported it with more accurate costs estimates up front but when when everything ends up costing twice what they say it will then when folks are honest people mentally double it and then vote down good ideas.
In my business, I am required by the court to charge by the hour rather than offer a flat rate for many cases. I usually will give clients a non-binding estimate of the total costs. I always make that about 50% more than I think it will likely cost. It gives me some buffer if things go wrong. Since clients are buying a thing that they have basically no idea what it "ought" to cost, 99% of the time they agree because I have good reviews and/or I came highly recommended by a friend. When the case almost always ends up costing less than they expected they are very happy about. I've even had a few of them feel bad and try to "tip" me the difference which I always decline. I've gotten flowers sent in response to my final bill or cookies dropped off at the office for the staff from happy customers.
But many attorneys do the opposite and give a low ball estimate and then run up bills that shock the clients. (They are frankly also sometime just generally shocking and reflect a lot of unnecessary work.) They have a hard time getting paid and generate negative goodwill from clients. In my experience they often low ball because they are pretty desperate for work and think it makes it more likely they will get the job. But since I have a 99% hire rate for my practice in terms of initial consultations signing up to be clients, I think the idea that those low ball estimates are getting more people to say yes aren't necessarily as true as micro economics would lead you to believe since attorney pricing is so lacking in transparency that client usually can't really compare prices effectively when making choices. In fact, their desperation for work in a space where many of the rest of us have months long wait lists for appointments is probably reflective of the fact that they don't have good reviews or get many referrals from prior clients.
My sense is that with most infrastructure projects the public wants something and they have no idea what that thing would cost and whatever that thing would cost is going to a large number well beyond people's day to day financial understanding and approaching the range where humans only abstractly understand. If policy makers gave a slightly inflated cost estimate, built it with inhouse management and limited subcontracting and mostly came in "under budget and ahead of schedule" with only a few projects that hit unexpected snags hitting or going over the estimates, I think people would view that as a great success even if they would have viewed that same cost as a bungogle if they had lowballed it and run over cost and time as almost all projects seem to do.
I think particularly in Blue areas where progressive ideas and projects have generally support we would be having more popular figures to put up for national elections if we were honest with a bit of padding for what things will cost, actually actively managed projects with competent people and delivered a bit more than expected.
Oh I'm actually not sure I disagree with you at all. I think my point is big infrastructure projects (often) carry huge long term benefits above and beyond initial projections.
I'm not finished with the podcast but the host has alluded to the "tragedy" of the Big Dig and I think for reasons you're getting at. The cost overruns and the giant extended timeline to finish has put a huge headwind against getting infrastructure projects proposed and funded. For the exact reasons you lay out in bullet point two.
I'm living it now. I now commute to work via the LIRR to Grand Central station. I can now walk to the office as opposed to needing to take a crosstown subway journey. Considering how many people had to make that same journey previously, the impact on shorter commute times should be enormous. But there was an apparently lack of forethought as to how new train schedules would effect service to Atlantic Terminal and whether new trains needed to be ordered. So schedules are messed up the primary effect has been to increase transfer times at Jamaica station from 2-3 minutes to upwards of 10-15 minutes. For all trains, which means not only are you not saving on travel time by going to Grand Central (it should be about a 10-15 minute reduction in travel time going right to Grand Central), you've now increased travel times to Penn Station! Like..ugh!
And yet! And yet. If Albany and the city can actually get their heads straight and get transfer times at Jamaica back down to where they were, the actual impact on commutes should huge give the number of LIRR commuters. And if Long Island can actually get it together and not be the worst NIMBYs in the country this side of San Francisco, the economic benefits of the new access could be absolutely enormous.
But because this screw up happened, a lot of long islanders and New Yorkers are understandably not in a mood to throw money to the MTA and commuter rail. Which by the way, if you don't think this is a factor in Kathy Hochul's terrible U-turn on congestion pricing I have a bridge to sell you two miles south of me.
"And yet, I think the consensus now is that it was 'worth it'."
Andrew Odlyzko has a very interesting manuscript, entitled "Collective hallucinations and inefficient markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s", in which he argues that a lot of financial bubbles form from precisely this phenomenon: investments that absolutely are worth it *in the long term*, but is unclear if their benefits will arise soon enough for the project to be a worthwhile investment at current interest rates.
For a little relief on this topic, here's Genesis' criminally underrated song about the building of the British railroads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG9-7WmeSdc
highway construction should take a lot more precedence that residential or commercial construction.
Eminent domain is a thing exactly to make sure highways, railways etc can get built
Yeah, I think Seattle’s Big Dig was widely considered to be a boondoggle at the time, but it sure is nice now!
Yes! But in the case of the Seattle Big Dig there actually hit a legit, unexpected problem. There were apparently some large iron structures that were included in the fill area where they dumped the dirt from the Denny regrade that were not in any city records and the drill hit on and broke. That obviously let to cost overruns and delays. I think Seattle took it well in part because everyone was expecting the Seattle Big Dig to turn in absolute money pit based on the experience in Boston so people's expectations were so low that it more led to an "I told you so" than a revolt. But the tunnel is lovely to use and the increased land for surface development, reconnection of the waterfront to the rest of the city and massive improvements in the views for much of the City made its actual cost totally worthwhile in a way I think few people deny. (Plus it won't come crashing down on large parts of the city in an earthquake like the old viaduct was set to do so that is a plus.) Ironically the toll they set on it to help cover the costs and cost overruns is actually one of the closest things to congestion pricing I have seen in the West. Granted it isn't a charge to go into town but a charge to be able to get through downtown from the north of the city to the south of the city actually probably cover more daily commutes in our weirdly shaped and decentralized city than a downtown congestion price would do.
The problem is the legislature didn't write exemptions to the various types of lawsuits NIMBY's would obviously throw in the way of rail construction.
That's a problem but it is not the problem. The problem is that it was impossible to do at the cost that was promised (and it indeed is impossible to do the most important segment, Bakersfield-LA at any reasonable cost) and they lied to voters by lowballing the cost to get it passed and now we've sunked a ton of money that could have helped deal with our state's many problems into a boondoggle.
Are you saying that it was never achievable from a materials cost perspective? Engineering challenges? Labor? I admit it's not clear to me why it would be difficult to build that segment.
Fundamentally engineering, geology, and terrain challenges. I tell the whole sorry story here. https://dilanesper.substack.com/p/people-who-draw-lines-on-maps-are
The right way to build it is, as you said, build LA-Bakersfield first, or at least the first step should have been launching the TBMs.
I'm not as convinced as you are that it's impossible to cross the mountains anywhere that is earthquake-proof (note that modern TBMs mean you're not restricted to the passes; you can tunnel right under the peaks as well, see Mont d'Ambin in the Alps), but the right approach would be to pick a tunnel route and then work out how to connect it to LA and what the right route up the Central Valley should be, rather than picking a route first and then working out how to cross the mountains, as CAHSR actually did.
Either way, neither of us are tunnelling engineers or seismologists, so I don't think there's any serious prospect of us debating the question - neither of us has the knowledge to make a serious assessment of the risks.
But, yes, CAHSR, the project as conceived, is a deceitful money-sink; I expect the eventual "solution" to be that they build a slow route (probably Grapevine) from LA to Bakersfield and then run actually fast from Bakersfield to SF, and claim that it's high-speed because the average train speed between LA and SF is still going to be 100mph or more.
You can't go up the Grapevine without massive tunneling which gets you the earthquake issue. Grapevine Canyon is a series of switchbacks with 6 percent grade.
Don’t they already have the ROW land acquired and through CEQA, and it does that weird loop above the grapevine and avoids that pathway so that politician in north LA county can be happy?
That is a problem. But it is a small, small part of the problem with California's HSR debacle.
A major cause of cost overruns in infrastructure projects in the US is the start stop start stop nature of construction caused by litigation and permitting. There are huge fixed costs to infrastructure construction and it seems that we pay those costs for every project because of the time gaps between completed and new projects.
Curious to know about some of the govt boondoggles you’ve seen in Florida - we hear so much about this in California, and somewhat Texas, but I feel there must be a lot in Florida too
Lawyers are the ones who write laws most of the time and it shows
Boy, I so want liberal government to succeed. And then I see the California HSR and the Kathy Hochul pratfall in New York and it pushes me toward despair. Do better, our team!
You are only allowed to wallow in liberal despair for 10 minutes a day maximum. Hope is a moral obligation. Despair is the enemy of justice because the struggle for justice requires courage, persistence, and faith and all of these spring from a reservoir of hope. But, I also would really fucking like to see our team doing better.
As a licensed professional engineer I'll tell you that very large and complicated infrastructure projects almost ALWAYS go over budget and over schedule. Humans have trouble estimating ands sensing the unknown unknowns.
true, But those cost overruns shouldn't be 10x
If they had actually built the thing for say 2x we wouldn't be complaining about it now
Whenever I had a research project due in a year, I was always confident I could meet the deadline fairly easily. The source of my confidence was that, while my schedule was currently packed which made immediate progress very difficult, that schedule would surely ease up in a few months and then I'd have plenty of time to finish the work. You won't be surprised to learn that this kind of future discounting typically led to tears down the road when said schedule was just as packed as it was at the earlier moment.
I don't know if this kind of budgeting is cynical or a form of blackmailing or just part of human cussedness to be hopelessly optimistic about future states.
Why not overestimate the budget then?
I mean, I understand- they want the bid- but there's a point behind my admittedly rhetorical question. If it was just an ordinary process of "guess the costs in good faith", shouldn't, with all the experience people have, some of the guesses come in too high instead of too low?
So what does that say about what is really going on-- good faith estimates that just missed the mark, or deliberately lowballing the costs for contracting and/or political reasons to hook the public in so they are forced to pay the real price?
So, the bid is the thing, right? There is a related phenomenon in government work (work done by government organizations on a reimbursable basis for other government organizations) constrained by budgets but without a real bidding process. It turns out that it is common to significantly overestimate the initial costs of a project and then as more information becomes available and the schedule firms up the initial estimate usually (not always) comes down. Some of the pressure to reduce the estimate admittedly comes from the "customer" who does have an appropriated budget limit. The high initial estimate is how the service providers hedge against the risk of the "unknown unknowns."
I imagine at this point it would be counterproductive to accurately estimate the time and cost involved; people are by now used to undershoots so they'd assume your project would be more costly than it is if you correctly announced its cost.
i'm sure you're right that the price presented was unrealistic, but i think it is always important to point out that a great deal of the increase in estimated total project cost is just a function of the increase in real estate values. if they are to ever build the socal portions of the project they'll need to aquire a lot of privately owned real estate and the price they'd pay is much higher now than it was 15 years ago.
The opponents predicted $90 billion in costs. And much of the land is in the middle of nowhere and not part of the boom. So no that isn't it.
most of the land "in the middle of nowhere" has already been purchased, so those costs aren't going up. but the southern california segments have not been purchased, and the value of that real estate has sky rocketed.
Right but the main reason for that non-purchase is terrain/engineering/geology issues known for over 100 years.
The plan was always build in central California and then blackmail the state for money so that it wouldn't be a white elephant!
i think the main reason they haven't been purchased is because no one has given them money to start work in those areas.
The initiative put a $9.95 billion price tag on the whole thing!
In fact they NEEDED to start there first because LA-Bakersfield was the most important need. We have plenty of passenger rail in central California but none between LA and Bakersfield. So you start there first.
Again, the plan was always to lowball the cost and then try to blackmail the public to put up whatever obscene sum would actually be needed to get over the Tehachapis.
***
sorry, so cal = southern california, not social.
Sorry no it's not "fraud" to spin things in your direction when engaged in a political campaign, for better or worse it's just how the game is played.
It's not fraud when a politician says "elect me and there will never be a cloudy day" because we all know he is lying.
But it is fraud when advocates- including many subject matter experts- say "approve this taxpayer funded program because it will only cost $9.95 billion and will yield $50 a trip less than 3 hour train trips between LA and San Francisco" knowing that isn't close to true.
But this just shows why California's system of "government by referenda" is pretty bad in my view. It's not "rule of the people" it's rule of the interest groups and campaign professionals who specialize in running ballot initiative campaigns. Personally I'd just change the system rather than trying to enforce rules that the Don Drapers of the political world have to be honest about everything all the time because of course they aren't going to do that, no more than Don Draper is going to admit that buying lipstick isn't going to make you happy.
California's system of government by referenda is how we got marijuana legalization. The politicians were NEVER going to touch this because they are so afraid of looking soft on drugs. It was only because there was an option to bring this to voters that we got the ball rolling.
It's a good system. If it requires that sponsors of projects be more honest about them, that's a good thing too.
In any event, even in a purely representative democracy, this sort of activity can still discredit advocates of government. Eventually, the voters may get sick of being lied to, and some projects will turn into white elephants such as freeway stubs that constantly remind voters that the folks who promised progress just stole their money instead.
It also got you three strikes and Prop 13 which are big parts of mass incarceration and why middle class families increasingly can't afford to live there anymore. Let's just say we disagree on this (full argument here https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-07/california-is-cradle-of-reckless-referendums?embedded-checkout=true)
It did. But parts of three strikes were later repealed. We also reformed our auto insurance system by initiative.
I am highly protective of our system. It's great. We allow our voters to make choices. Some of those choices are bad, but we also are able to do things to circumvent politicians when politicians are acting anti-democratically. This is how things should work.
You can argue we need a higher signature requirement. That is true. But the general notion that the voters should be able to overrule politicians is sound. It's more democratic than the alternative. And if you don't like it, don't live here.
Nah it has made the state completely unaffordable for anyone who isn't upper class. My city has a 1% homelessness rate to propositions.
And if you're going to have government by proposition you're going to have dishonest referenda. Policy advocates are much more dishonest than parties.
And if that means weed never got legalized so be it. The harm of Prop 13 far, far outweighs anything positive that has come out of it.
We need a new business model for public works projects. Contractors must agree to a fixed price and not get paid until the job is completed, with penalties for delays.
Yes, the bids will be much higher in order to cover all the risks, but at least we'll know the cost up front and can make a decision if that new bridge or rail line is really worth it.
"Contractors must agree to a fixed price"
No. That contracting model is only acceptable for turnkey projects, wherein the contractor both designs and builds the new infrastructure. Otherwise, either the contract sets the minute details of the project in such stone that neither the contractor nor public officials can adapt unforeseen technical challenges; or the public officials will have the freedom to insert scope creep to the project until the contractor is guaranteed a loss. The only solution is to take the majority of the work in-house.
How will bringing the work in-house improve performance? Who will have skin in the game and suffer the consequences for cost and schedule overruns? Perhaps large, complex projects can be broken into baby steps, with a fixed price for each step, and a chance to negotiate adjustments (as well as consider new bidders) for subsequent steps.
I think you believe that public works officials are not penalized for cost overruns. I disagree with that premise; I think they lack the tools to appropriately prevent contractors from developing cost overruns through incompetence. Consequently I don't think the problem is a lack of "skin in the game"; the problem is insufficient in-house technical knowledge to break down the "large complex projects…into baby steps".
If public officials were effectively held accountable, we wouldn’t be having this discussion about why we can’t build anything.
Which is why in all cases the state should be the contractor
Was it definitely a lie? Construction projects are notorious for being massively more expensive and slower to build than expected.
The conflation of externalities with direct subsidies is egregious and one of those things that exemplifies how journalists often are unconcerned with truth or knowing. They just want to sell a salient story. I lost of lot of respect when speaking with journalists on research I did, because of the questions they asked and the responses they were apparently seeking to elicit.
There is a reason why the public has lost trust in experts and journalists over the years and that is because actors in these positions of authority often abuse the trust of the public.
Don’t ascribe malice rather than incompetence - most journalists are just incredibly innumerate.
Hopefully AI makes all journalists more scientifically and economically literate. I know I’ve certainly used it to explain some things!
I think this is true, but also beside the point. I don’t think most journalists care if what they write is literally correct. They start with a “vibe,” do enough research to “confirm” the vibe, and then view their job as writing an interesting, possibly inflammatory story that persuades people of the vibe. Their failures come primarily from indifference for objective facts rather than mere negligence. In the legal world, we’d say they have “scienter,” something worse than negligence, though not always “intent.”
As a former journalist I’d say this is not only untrue but unfair.
You’re criticizing journalists for being one-sided and promoting an agenda, while many others criticize journalists for “both sidesing” every story. Which is it? Because it’s hard to see how it’s both.
I also think journalists get held to an impossibly high standard. Most people in most companies aren’t particularly good at their jobs, don’t know how to interpret data or think critically, and propose solutions to problems that benefit them personally. Should we really be surprised that the same applies sometimes to some journalists?
In general - almost all of my colleagues tried to treat their stories and their subjects fairly and tried to relay the facts accurately. Did they always succeed? No. But as I compare it to other industries, the failure rate was pretty low.
As someone who is held to standards of accuracy in writing, I can tell you that it is in fact not difficult to avoid the pitfalls that most journalists fall into. It is, however, hard to do that while also generating clicks. Objective facts rarely are interesting to a wide audience.
The failure rate is exceedingly high. I’d say 60-70% of articles I read on a subject of which I am an expert contain significant false premises on which the article relies and any objective researcher could identify. But these errors are not random-they invariably point towards making a story more interesting or compelling. That is the fundamental bias of the press.
The people criticizing both sidesing typically just want a propaganda piece that confirms their priors. 90+% of the time they shouldn't be taken seriously
My general critique of both-sides journalism is that it’s lazy and uninformative. Often it’s just summarizing the opposing press releases. But that isn’t the issue I’m referring to here. What I find funny is that multiple posters here have chosen to view the issue purely from a political/partisan lens. My problem, and I think Matt’s, runs much deeper.
Haha the good old fallacy of trust:
https://aarongertler.net/nameless-fallacy/
The Fallacy of Trust
The Fallacy of Trust occurs when a person who is an expert on foreign policy picks up a newspaper, flips to the foreign policy section, and cries out “balderdash!”
This isn’t the problem. The problem is that the same person will often read the rest of the newspaper without complaint, quietly updating their opinions bit by bit.
Meanwhile, the expert on local politics will cry out “balderdash!” in the local-politics section, but read about foreign policy without complaint.
If we assume that the newspaper is mostly wrong on both topics, then neither expert is gathering information very effectively.
I would love to see your data showing that the failure rate in journalism is lower than other industries!
Ha fair! I’ll just say that since I moved out of journalism and into business I see people misunderstanding, misusing or just plain not having data all time. I can’t even count the number of faulty models I’ve had to correct, or the businesses cases that rest on totally shoddy assumptions.
To be honest when I was in journalism and didn’t know much about business I kind of most assumed companies were well run - now I realize they’re basically in business in spite of themselves.
"Gell-Mann Amnesia" is absolutely a thing, and for good reason.
"You’re criticizing journalists for being one-sided and promoting an agenda, while many others criticize journalists for “both sidesing” every story. Which is it? Because it’s hard to see how it’s both."
That's fair, I would say that the two criticisms are basically in opposition to each other. I share a lot of the same complaints as the person you are responding to, but I would never complain about a journalist "both sidesing" an issue, I wish they would do more of that.
At a larger level, I see this sort of phenomenon online a lot, everyone has an opinion of either "more X" or "less X" and it is really hard to tell that the demands aren't usually incoherent or contradictory, they are issued by 2 separate and opposed groups with the demandees (in this case journalists) as the rope in a tug-of-war.
I totally agree - but my sense is also that if two opposing groups are both criticizing you, then you’re actually doing things the right way.
Ehhh, I feel like there are always 2 groups on both sides criticizing everything. Also I feel like in this case there are really 3 sides. There are plenty of people on both the left and right that love to "work the refs" by accusing media of being too much in favor of the other side, plus a third side that wants journalists to go back to just dry, factual reporting without trying to insert "context" into things.
And are they also illiterate? Their reporting on *all* topics is bad , not just heavily number-y ones. It’s either loose ethics or stupidity (or both).
There are of course exceptions, but it seems to me most media doesn’t reward it.
Well, also deadlines (both official and unofficial).
That’s fair. In a more charitable mood I’d have acknowledged that. But what Dan Quail is describing goes beyond honest mistakes due to haste. It’s being tendentious is one’s approach to prioritize one’s agenda over attempting an honest understanding. I concede the business model of journalism is much to blame but the problem can also be seen in public media
One of my exes is a fairly successful journalist. In general, she was intelligent, intellectually curious, and committed to truth-seeking, but while we were going out, I noticed that she was often willing to make allowances for other journalists-- and especially for personal friends-- when they did things that violated normal common-sense morality. For example, she defended a friend who wrote a fairly cruel Gawker piece about her horror at finding out that her okCupid date, John Finkel, was a Magic the Gathering champion, even though even by the author's own account, he was pleasant, polite, and didn't do anything objectionable during the date. My ex argued that this sort of piece was fair game even though normal people would find publicly humiliating a date who hadn't done anything wrong pretty reprehensible.
One of the factors that probably informed my ex's response was that the piece's author experienced a pretty intense backlash, at least some of which was disproportionate and/or misogynistically flavored (death threats, people saying that the author should be raped). I get the sense that journalists in the current era have a strong siege/bunker mentality. Thanks to Meta/Google/etc, their industry's historical revenue model is broken and individual journalists' jobs are extremely precarious. And thanks to social media, any given piece of reporting on a remotely controversial topic will draw a big, hostile response, much of which will be in bad faith and come from obviously terrible people *even in cases where the reporting in question is actually bad*.
In this sort of context, it's pretty understandable/human normal that journalists are inclined to both circle the wagons and defend behavior that they wouldn't normally endorse. Unfortunately, this becomes a significant problem for the rest of us because we often have to rely on them for information. I don't see the problem getting better until journalism finds a more stable economic model again.
It is crazy that you mention that specific incident (I was a semi-professional MTG player at the time). It was so weird to me, because the existence of the piece, and the reaction to it, were obviously done for terribly short-sighted reasons. As you point out, humiliating a date because of their slightly weird hobby is not a nice thing to do, but it has layers of additional context which pick at people's identities (and thus make them defensive).
The thing is, this wasn't just any Magic the Gathering player, but the "GOAT," who is also a successful hedge fund manager, and everyone who talks to him acknowledges he is super-smart and kind. So, you had this perfect storm of "incel"-adjacent subcultures arguing this "proves" women only want to date "Chads," MTG players saying this just shows how stupid and shallow non-gamers are, and feminists saying just because you don't agree with this woman's preferences, doesn't mean they are invalid. (There was also a ton of abuse heaped on the journalist for her own appearance, by aggrieved MtG players who felt she wasn't "hot enough" to even be criticizing their champion).
I remember thinking at the time, while obviously this *particular journalist* is rejecting someone for shallow and stupid reasons, but people do things for shallow and stupid reasons all the time, so this particular couple would never have worked out anyway. The actual "problem," if you want to call it that, is the idea that journalists should use their specific personal feelings and interactions as emblematic of wider society, and that they need to give themselves social license for why this specific thing they don't like is a Problem. If you need to invent "red flags" to explain why you didn't click with someone, then you'll probably just setting yourself up to be lonely, but if you write an article about it trying to go viral, you're probably setting up lots of impressionable people to be lonely along with you!
Your example reminds me of how irritating it is that journalists write about their bad dates instead of writing about Sudan, or really any actual news. In the last twenty years, language arts teachers have assigned a lot of essays about how the students feel about various things. Go back to assigning essays about John C. Fremont or the motif of yellow in Crime and Punishment! I don't care about your damn feelings unless I know you personally.
Unfortunately, your preferences are in the minority, writing about bad dates gets lots of clicks (especially if it's inflammatory or controversial), and its economics are much better than those of reporting on the civil war in Sudan. I get the sense that most journalists would themselves prefer to spend more time on substantive stories; but the market is not friendly to that desire. (Business journalism tends to be a bit more substantive precisely because it has an audience that's both eager and able to actually pay for substantive reporting.)
Most journalists would prefer to focus on whatever is easiest to write.
(that's not because their journalists, but because they're people)
I too am lazy. Just like the dog.
This comment section clearly has conviction that failure to tax what could be taxed is a subsidy: see SALT, MID, etc.
I assume Dan Quail used the phrase "*direct* subsidies" to establish precisely that distinction.
These examples are specific deductions, in contrast to a carbon tax, which is a separate new tax. It required action to create the MID. The lack of a carbon tax is inaction.
"Federal income tax falls on income left over after certain expenses" is no different from "social security and medicare taxes fall on wage income" or "capital gains tax falls on investment income minus investment losses" or "property tax falls on the value of owned real estate."
All taxes have a defined scope that leaves certain potentially taxable stocks or flows on the table.
Yeah that one is really bad
Hey wouldn't you know it. Just yesterday the Surgeon General spread a pile of misinformation about gun violence. Stuff like counting 19 year olds in shootings of children, switching back and forth between wildly different definitions of "mass shootings", implying "assault weapons" get used in a significant amount of crime, cherry picking the timing to avoid the new data that shows violent crime dropping, etc etc.
If there's any one set of people that need to recover some credibility after absolutely lighting it on fire during COVID it's the public health officials. Acting like the Surgeon General has anything whatever meaningful to say about gun policy as a "public health crisis" is simply pouring gasoline on the ashes.
I can’t litigate the veracity of the SG’s claims. But I’ll say this- even if everything he said was 100% correct it was still a bad idea. Guns are one of the most polarizing issues in the country, and it is really tendentious to lump them in under “public health”. With so many other actual public health issues that he could be addressing, this just burns credibility for no apparent gain.
Brings back memories of the early 80s when Physicians for Social Responsibility warned us that nuclear war was a public health issue on which they were experts.
Apparently, as I recall their saying, a nuclear war would be deleterious for people's health.
I guess they're still around peddling this stuff but the air went out of the balloon when the Berlin Wall fell, thankfully.
Yeah that made me want to scream. A good example of how the liberal staffer class is not acting like there is a contentious election coming up that depends on much more moderate swing voters.
"this just burns credibility for no apparent gain"
Yes, I'm barely kidding when I suggest someone should check the Surgeon General's financial records for large monetary transfers from anonymous Cypriot bank accounts because it's very hard to explain what the Hell he was thinking otherwise.
Because he's not actually trying to move public policy, but just get kudo's from liked minded people at the cocktail parties
Guns and cars are the leading reasons that people who would otherwise live long healthy lives instead die young. And it’s not particularly close! Obviously they remain that way because they are popular, or they would have been fixed already.
Successful public health interventions usually intersect culture, and people are usually attached to culture. How we deal with human waste, how we cook food and manage kitchens, how we manage animals, how we send off the dead, how we welcome children into the world, etc. Possibly the biggest coup ever for public health was the introduction of a quasi-religious ritual, handwashing, into our daily lives - multiple times a day!
I think it’s fine to say that guns and cars are public health concerns, but why is a doctor the right person to diagnose that or prescribe a solution?
The surgeon general runs the public health system. Who else would do it?
Congress. The Surgeon General doesn't have regulatory authority over guns and cars. In fact, you say they run the public health system, but what regulatory authority do they actually have?
Agreed. I could care less about litigating the veracity; it's still political malpractice.
As someone who has worked in a trauma ward, gun violence falls into public health AND other categories. That being said, there’s no need to lie.
Let me paste here a random NYT reader's response (not my own):
"This sounds like a great extension of the authority of doctors and public health scientists. I'd like to offer a few more areas for input from the Surgeon General.
1. Foreign policy - clearly large numbers of people die in wars, so why isn't the Surgeon General in charge of our foreign policy?
2. Vehicular accidents killed nearly 40,000 Americans last year. Why isn't the Surgeon General consulted on automobile design?
3. 13,000 people died in fires last year. When will the Surgeon General weigh in on Fire Codes for residential buildings
4. Almost 20,000 died from falls in 2022. The Surgeon General needs to speak up on the design of stairwells.
Really all of politics can be placed under the rubric of Public Health. There's no need for political parties or elections at all."
I am not very exercised about gun rights myself (don’t own any, seems like an obviously legitimate thing for a government to regulate, odd to me how hot other libertarian minded people get over it) but I AM exercised over mission creep in regulatory agencies. This was a crazy move. True believer? Misguided political calculation? Red meat for the base? I am not sure but another in a VERY long line of examples of Biden agency pick being completely off the rails. A lot of the stuff Biden personally does I think is reasonable but his administration is taking crazy pills from the SEC, DOJ, FTC etc etc. too bad he is running against Clown College Republicans so there is no sane alternative.
Definitely true believer. If you listen to his loneliness interviews, he believes he can use his position to put a spotlight on tough problems facing American society so that we can try to find solutions together. For loneliness, this was a thoughtful message. Unfortunately, for gun violence, putting things in the spotlight never seems to help us make progress.
I think it's very weird to act like car safety seat regulation and shaken baby videos make sense but talking about gun deaths in children is totally out of bounds, given the number of deaths associated annually with each modality.
By the way, the pendulum has swung on car seat stuff, too -- we now require car seats way out in places where there is little good data to suggest that we're averting any meaningful number of deaths.
Pretty sure there are not single issue car seat owners who will now disregard the opinions of the surgeon general out of (in this instance, justified) mistrust!
Also guns are deliberately made to kill people on purpose. You don’t need a medical expert to tell you they are dangerous to kids!
But I also think it doesn’t make sense to selectively issue warnings about some things that kill 30,000 people a year and not other things that kill 30,000 people a year, just because some of them have partisans and are supposed to be “obviously dangerous”. It makes sense to just classify them on the basis of the actual harms caused here and leave it to the economists and politicians to figure out the costs of mitigating these harms, and the cultural values involved.
The significant distinction is when the deaths are the item in question functioning as intended. Government issued guidance related to accidents, externalities, defects and malfunctions are one thing. Guns functioning as intended killing people when those killings are unlawful is a criminal justice issue, not a public health or consumer safety issue. Gun accident and malfunction deaths are on a tiny scale compared to car accidents or lung cancer from cigarettes. They're something like half that of swimming pools.
I literally don’t understand what you’re saying. How does being a criminal justice issue make something not a public health issue? Does violence cease being relevant to health once there’s a law against it? Should we be tracking legal pollution deaths separately from illegal pollution deaths?
Also, aren’t suicides the big public health concern from guns, even more than anything illegal or accidental?
Anyway, I agree that the surgeon general should have a series of warnings about automobiles and cigarettes. I don’t think anyone is denying that, other than maybe North Carolina politicians who still think its politically problematic to engage in culture war issues like talking about deaths caused by legal products.
I wouldn’t mind putting Smith & Wesson in a position where they had to say under oath that their products are intended to help people commit suicide, perform robberies, etc.
That’s true, but surely can also parse the difference between “hey you might not know this but activity X Y Z is actually quite dangerous to your health—like having a fireplace” and “we asserting regulatory authority under public health laws after failing to win the political fight with direct legislation to curb something that everyone knows is, and is in fact specifically designed to be, dangerous”.
That second thing burns trust that serves an important social role for the first fireplace thing. Now people will think you don’t like fireplaces because of some climate agenda or whatever, not because they are in fact a surprisingly large health hazard.
The surgeon general isn’t asserting regulatory authority, is he? Does the surgeon general actually have any regulatory authority? I thought the warnings on cigarettes were ordered by a lawsuit settlement or by Congress, even though they quote the surgeon general in order to get some respect for the claim.
Most of those gun deaths are actually suicides not murders. And it's a great example of elite misinformation.
The ratio is about 3:2 suicide to homicide, with accidental coming in at 1% (and another 1-2% undetermined)
I think it's definitely elite misinformation when they don't bring up that fact. But I think the public health agencies are actually quite good about always talking about guns both in the context of suicides and homicides, unlike other public actors talking about guns.
I think politics is inseparably part of any political appointee’s job. If the Surgeon General’s statements on guns will have bad effects, that’s all the reason he needs not to make them.
The "have large gatherings all you want if it's a BLM protest; the rest of you, no effing way" thing was (rightfully) probably the single biggest destroyer of trust & credibility in the public health establishment in many a year.
One key difference about them (in most cases) is that car safety seats and not shaking your baby are steps _you_ take to keep _your_ kids alive. And getting that information out to parents is useful (like SIDS information etc). This is consistent with "smoking kills (you)"
Gun regulation is different.
Exception: Maybe if you want to talk about gun safes or keeping ammo separate, or trigger locks. But does the SG talk about Smoke Detectors? (A quick google search isn't find anything - and I'd lump those together)
We definitely got smoke detector stuff in the home safety portion of our pre-discharge teaching. Also electrical outlet covers, locking away poisons, braces on bookcases to keep them from falling over...
We got handouts. We saw videos. Every product you buy has instructions with pictures and big warning labels. And that includes a lot of products not even meant for children! Seriously, look at the plastic packaging in your Amazon box sometime.
I'm not sure how much of that you can trace to the surgeon general, personally, but going through all the new parent classes at the hospital and starting to "see" all those labels and stuff really opened my eyes to just how weird we treat guns in comparison to everything else that might kill kids, proportionately speaking.
It's like you said: there are really basic innovations, like trigger locks, that are cheap, easy to use, and would take up thirty seconds of the videos I watched, right after outlet covers and before car seat installation. And we don't do that. It's empirically odd, even if you know it is driven by political realities.
My quick googling of trigger locks suggests they aren't so widely accepted as effective. They break easily, there are many other easy to implement alternatives, and many guns already come with conceptually similar safety measures that are more effective.
But in terms of what's weird I don't that guns are such an outlier. There must be 50 different poisonous chemicals in my house right now from household cleaners to paints to roach poisons. There are also several species of very poisonous berries growing in my yard, a couple of swimming pools, a pond and a stream that floods in walking distance, And in this age of harm reduction for overdoses, a million americans are walking around with lethal doses of fentanyl.
Unintentional gun deaths age 14 and under totaled 84 in 2022, compared to 202 accidental poison deaths and 500 drownings. There was 175 gun suicides in the 10-14 age group and 42 poison suicides. These numbers don't look very different, but there's few regs on what legal medicines or household cleaners I keep in my house
My PCP asked me if I had smoke detectors in my home just a couple of months ago during a physical.
As an aside, didn't it turn out that "shaken baby syndrome" was mostly a moral panic sort of thing that got made up in a couple over-sensationalized trials of like babysitters?
Sort of. I think "shaken baby syndrome" in particular was kind of overblown as a specific thing, but the general category of "trauma" really is one of the major causes of infant death, and people really do abuse infants for infant-specific reasons that go beyond the abuse visited on children more generally (i.e. stuff like the pronounced lack of sleep in new parents and the way that a colicky baby crying really does make some people kind of crazy past a certain point). The videos we watched in the hospital specifically dealing with shaken baby were really more about managing anger or depression when around infants, so clearly someone got the message.
That sounds right, but the "shaken baby" framing does seem awfully of a kind with other instances of elite public health misinformation to me.
I don't think it's a good idea to shake your baby.
Eh, shaking a baby is in fact more dangerous to them than you might expect in a sleep deprived and angry moment with a screaming infant, and those moments come at you faster than you might expect too. I have not researched it but I suspect it has had some impact and its plausibly useful training for new parents. Don’t shake the baby ever no matter what! Don’t give the baby water (it’s bad for them)! Get the vitamin K shot! Be alert for post partum depressed on and psychosis!
I certainly don't doubt that you can do great harm shaking an infant. As I recall though the "shaken baby syndrome" thing was about a medical "expert witness" claiming they could, like, look at an autopsy and based on certain bruising or whatever claim someone had to have shaken this baby beyond a reasonable doubt. Maybe there was also some thing about, "the babysitter could shake your kid and they'd seem fine when you get home then randomly collapse and die later." It was entirely prosecutorial pseudoscience nonsense.
It’s the opposite with SIDS which is mostly infanticide by mothers.
I've been told they figured out SIDS mostly has to do with blankets and that's why they recommend these zip up sack things instead now.
We looked heavily into this and (this was 9 years ago so things may have been updated) but yeah:
Loose blankets - I think it caused C02 to pool up around the infant's mouth and nose and they don't have all the normal reflexes/ability to move/wakeup for better air.
We were told under no uncertain terms to keep those things out of our crib - and definitely used "sleep sacks" which couldn't get loose.
How would you know that?
Everyone knows this now
It's like the Secret Congress. People will listen to experts on the first two issues because they're not polarizing. The latter is, so "expertise" isn't an issue and your words will simply feed the culture war. So why do it?
Granted this is not a nuanced interpretation, there is definitely some value in trying to understand the gun violence problem through a public health framework, but making the question of gun possession a public health issue leads people to think you are claiming that owning a gun is akin to having a disease.
I mostly agree with this analysis, in the sense that I think "public health" as a concept gets way, way, way overstretched by people who want to use it for all kinds of stuff--climate change immediately comes to mind--and I genuinely think that is a bad thing that devalues the field. Something that is used to mean everything eventually comes to mean nothing, and I think "public health" is really in danger of falling into that space, if it hasn't already. And I say that having taught undergrad public health classes for years; I'm lamenting what is, in my mind, a very bad thing.
My sense is that going for "public health" arguments is, in the minds of people who do it, One Weird Trick for sneaking around certain elements of politics that they find frustratingly intractable and/or distasteful. I am squarely in the camp of people who think that One Weird Trick never, ever works and that usually One Weird Trick thinking actually makes your problems worse.
But.
Two things I also think are true:
1) This is part of why I have repeatedly gone with the car seat parallel throughout this discussion. No one thinks that driving cars is a disease, but we lecture parents about it literally at the hospital, and it is treated explicitly with a public health framing, and it's fine. There are actually other parallels that I think are useful, such as the fact that car deaths can be, like gun deaths, the result of all kinds of actors with all kinds of motivations, and we don't have to argue about "reckless driving deaths" versus "accident deaths" versus "malfunction deaths"--no one cares. We just (correctly, IMO) treat car seats as a single-point technological response to a set of things that used to kill kids on the regular and we don't sweat it, because that approach works. I think we should be that way about guns.
2) A point I have tried to stick to throughout this thread is that I think the discourse around this issue is genuinely odd in a way that is very revealing, not of bad faith, precisely, but of the way in which our discussion of guns is really about all kinds of other stuff--emotional stuff, like how cool people think guns are and how they figure into self-identity--that we are not willing to say or acknowledge or maybe don't even notice in the rush to rehash some specific set of talking points or pre-baked opinions that comport with our feelings.
It's the same reason why I replied to the original post about assault weapons and was like, "there is literally no mention of assault weapons in the ten tweets you linked." And I think this inability to even recognize that we are not having the discussion, much less have an actual discussion, is a huge blind spot and a huge problem for some big-ticket issues like guns. It is why I keep using words like "odd" and comparing gun discussion and harm reduction measures to other things (again: car seats, shaken babies) that cut a different way, emotionally and politically. People think--truly believe--that they are being hyper rationale and folks on the other side are irrational in a way that is just fundamentally untrue. I recognize that in part because I saw it so clearly (and maybe wrote about it less clearly) in my prior research. But that's my intervention: I have tried to avoid stating particular policy preferences because I think that reckoning with the incongruence is more likely to achieve something useful than for us to all rehash policy territory that has already been over-tilled.
To add to your point, Kaiser routinely asks us, as parents, if we have a gun in the house, along with questions about smoke detectors, gated pools, etc.
What do you think the DOJ has done wrong?
I had in mind antitrust enforcement where they have gone bananas, but they have been maximally aggressive in a couple of other areas I have happened to come across (like opioid litigation) as well. I know I know, cry me a river for the poor Sacklers but it leads me to suspect they are also being unreasonable and political in areas I don't have a view on too.
They also seem to be botching the case against Trump, which strikes me as a real "you come at the king best not miss" situation, but I have been deliberately avoiding details on the many legal actions against Trump so perhaps they are doing a better job that it seems like from down here buried in the sand.
Judge Aileen Cannon has gone rogue, is the problem there. She’s like some kind of … some sort of unsecured bit of armament, the right idiom isn’t coming to me.
An armament that slides freely across the deck as the waves rock the boat?
Yeah like a unmoored howitzer, kind of.
Omar Little springs to mind *every* single time I read about Trump's legal troubles.
It's funny because that line isn't original to him! Emerson or somebody said it first.
Can you lay out a list of your favorite examples?
After actually experiencing a actual, serious public health crisis just four years ago, you'd think that it would teach people to stop using that phrase for every thing out there they deem to be bad, but alas...
Meh. I read over the ten tweets published in your link, and I think you can quibble with some of the details--I really wish people would start disaggregating the degree to which suicide is more the real problem than murder with guns--but there isn't even a mention of mass shootings or assault weapons in those ten tweets, and I didn't hear him mention it in the little video.
If you acknowledge that bullets causing trauma by their passage through human tissue are a major cause of child death in this country, that seems like a public health problem, in the sense that those deaths are highly preventable. I guess you could argue about whether it constitutes a "crisis" or not, but nobody gets mad when you want to deal with, say, lead poisoning, and that doesn't even kill kids. I had to watch a movie about shaken baby syndrome to even leave the hospital. I had to watch a demonstration of how to correctly install a car seat.
I am a gun owner, licensed to hunt in the state of Texas, and no one said anything about it.
Harm prevention is this constant thing you are being messaged on when you are a parent, especially in the early years--here's how to do child seat safely, here's how to lay your kid to sleep, here's which products are safe or non-safe, etc. So honestly the brackets around doing policy on guns and kids in our society always seems really odd, by comparison. I understand the politics that lead to that outcome, but as "elite misinformation," I think this one is pretty weak sauce.
I'm not saying that you can't find some real elite misinformation whoppers about guns out there. But this particular tweet thread doesn't look like it to me.
But the "public health" message if often "we should pass legislation", not "be more safe with your guns". The latter seems like something the SG should talk about, but not the former
I'm pretty sure that the car seats have labels on them because someone passed a law. I know for a fact that the shaken baby video thing is done by law, because I'm a registered nurse and got that in my training (even though, to be clear, I'm critical care rather than L&D).
Whether you want to talk speed limits and licensure and street lights or alcohol and marijuana usage or air pollution, laws are how we do public safety and health in this country. If you aren't talking about legislating, you are kind of just blowing smoke.
It might not be politically smart for the SG to talk about legislation that will irritate people (like you, I guess), but it's pretty nonsensical on its face to say, "man, officials charged with public health matters shouldn't talk about legislation, since that is the main way we do public health in this country."
I don’t think that’s nonsensical. Legislation isn’t their department. I don’t want Trump’s SG talking about how we need to build the wall to prevent disease from spreading inside the US.
What if the wall was made of mosquito netting?
I think the SG should talk about the number of injuries and their causes, but not necessarily about what particular interventions are best. To know which interventions are best takes expertise beyond health and medicine, since interventions have implications outside of health or medicine.
Sure - fwiw, if the OP is representing the SG's communication accurately, it sounds like in this case a big part of the problem is not that they were staying in those bounds, but cherry-picking and using the data in misrepresentative ways. There's no reason (beyond I guess politics) to imply that assault weapons kill more people than pistols, or to say violent gun crime is increasing right at the moment (as opposed to higher than it was 5 years ago), etc...
Yeah, I've avoided clicking through to the statements myself, but those implications, if actually there in the statements and not just the reconstructions being tossed around to make the surgeon general sound bad, do sound bad.
Also, suicide is specifically the reason I do not myself own any firearms. I don’t think I am suicidal guy myself but the data shows being confident about that is pretty dangerous. I get sad! Sometimes I am drunk! Apparently people kill themselves impulsively! Not worth the risk.
Having the option to kill myself without the connivance of the medical establishment is why I own a pistol.
Lmfao
No tall buildings where you live? I guess hard to climb if you get really sick.
I think that risks hurting other people physically, and almost certainly making some people see something horrific.
The fall would be terrifying. If you shoot yourself in the head, you don’t even have time to hear the report. Your brain has been destroyed before it has time to process the sound
I guess I like interposing “willing to tolerate a scary fall” between myself and suicide in the absence of an informed consent paradigm. But you places your bet and takes you chances!
If you do it right. You there are a fair number of people who attempt it and remain alive with serve brain damage.
You can just shoot yourself in the head on the way down and save half of that terrifying-ness. And, if you change your mind half way, oh wait...never mind.
Evil Camus agrees - you never know what a man with a gun might do.
"If you acknowledge that bullets causing trauma by their passage through human tissue are a major cause of child death in this country, that seems like a public health problem, in the sense that those deaths are highly preventable."
"I am a gun owner, licensed to hunt in the state of Texas, and no one said anything about it."
This confuses me. Are you saying that we need the Surgeon General to encourage warning labels be added to ammunition saying that bullets cause trauma by their passage through human tissue because people who use guns might not know that?