So I just recently finished finished the episode of the Weekly Show with John Stewart and guested by Ezra Klein where they went into why the Rural Broadband fiasco was such a colossal fuck up and… dear god… I could feel the frustration from John Stewart with the insanity of the steps needed to build ANYTHING for the proposed rural broadband proposal. For context:
https://youtu.be/NcZxaFfxloo?si=wYN76Cx8QBaq_u5E
And this reminded me of my experience living in Upstate NY(Saratoga Springs) and in Seattle. In order for ANYTHING to get done there you have to go through an insane gauntlet of bureaucracy and red tape. Like in NYC just to try and get a few mile ADDITION to an existing subway… is going to cost over $4B PER MILE to build:
For perspective:
https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-cant-new-york-control-its-infrastructure-costs
And here in the US:
And I’ve heard horror stories of trying to get ANYTHING built in CA because of the wall of red tape and bureaucracy involved. So I gotta ask, do you think the Democratic Party has an issue with having too much Bureaucracy and that stopping them from getting ANYTHING ever done?
Comments
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
So I just recently finished finished the episode of the Weekly Show with John Stewart and guested by Ezra Klein where they went into why the Rural Broadband fiasco was such a colossal fuck up and… dear god… I could feel the frustration from John Stewart with the insanity of the steps needed to build ANYTHING for the proposed rural broadband proposal. For context:
https://youtu.be/NcZxaFfxloo?si=wYN76Cx8QBaq_u5E
And this reminded me of my experience living in Upstate NY(Saratoga Springs) and in Seattle. In order for ANYTHING to get done there you have to go through an insane gauntlet of bureaucracy and red tape. Like in NYC just to try and get a few mile ADDITION to an existing subway… is going to cost over $4B PER MILE to build:
https://nypost.com/2025/03/26/us-news/mta-greenlights-250m-for-consultants-to-expand-second-avenue-subway-which-they-claim-will-cost-4-3b-per-mile-to-build/
For perspective:
https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-cant-new-york-control-its-infrastructure-costs
And here in the US:
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/5bn-high-speed-railway-between-miami-and-orlando-opens-after-four-year-construction-22-09-2023/
And I’ve heard horror stories of trying to get ANYTHING built in CA because of the wall of red tape and bureaucracy involved. So I gotta ask, do you think the Democratic Party has an issue with having too much Bureaucracy and that stopping them from getting ANYTHING ever done?
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
probably. I think some of it is intentional – in a democracy if you don’t give everyone the chance to provide input then it’s not really a democracy and the more people there are the longer that process is going to take.
But some of it is unintentional based on using outdated tools and whatnot. I’m afraid there isn’t an easy solution.
See California’s high speed rail initiative.
Yes. And it’s killing growth and hurting the working class
Another problem is the weird contracting requirements (often to unions). Abundance talks about this too. There’s also general economic pseudoscience like AOC capping interest card rates
Personally, I am much harder on the union issue. They end up voting for Trump because of brown people or something anyway so we might as well throw unions under the bus. We know that they’re really bad economically and they don’t help us politically either. Look at UAW liking tariffs or the longshorers avoiding automation. There’s also plumbing unions who lobby against building better urinals because they won’t be able to work on them.
Do corporate interests have too much influence on Democrats? Yes.
Also, check this out from Ryan Grim about how that interview was misleading.