Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does

> Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's more efficient to prioritize capital than care.

How though. Roads are a public good and fixing them should come from the governments pocket. How can you say the problem is private industry, when the government is doing such a good job collecting our tax money. You should be asking where is that money going. And then you will see its because of mismanagement by the government. Trillions in debt, for what?

Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's better to vote for people who vibe with you, than people who can provide essential services.

How many of those unemployed people want to get a job filling potholes, or mowing the lawn at the park? How many are qualified to do anything about pollution in whatever specific sense you mean? What job does your average unemployed person get to "fight housing shortages" or whatever you're trying to say?

> What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs

Any system that isn't designed from the outside? Any system that's goal is not simply maximizing employment? Surely you can imagine a scenario with two civilizations, one has 99% employment, one has 80% employment, but the people in the 99% employed society are, on average, worse off?

> As long as we're choosing to make work about making someone else wealthy rather than satisfying all our needs

Most people would not say the number of potholes they encounter or the level of park maintenance is so poor that their needs aren't being met.

Because governments and councils waste money on paying private contractors do do stupid bullshit like installing statues or gardens or other vanity crap meanwhile grass areas are overgrown and the roads are filled with potholes.

The general populace aka the voters are too apathetic and absorbed in their little consumer lives and tribally motivated political quibbles to know or care that so much tax money is wasted.

> What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs

A system where citizens complain about potholes but don't want to chip in to pay people to fix them - that is, they won't pay the taxes necessary. I've seen some very clean, well-financed, high-tax places in the world.

That's just one part of this issue but it's a necesssary one. And before you say, 'government just wastes money', I say, 'that's just an meaningless talking point against chipping in.' First, everyone and every organization wastes money; larger organizations have both much more power to do things but more inefficiencies, unavoidably - that applies to large software companies too. Government inefficiency can be dealt with if we want to do it; if you don't pay attention and don't vote, others will be very happy to do without you.

> Potholes, park maintenance, housing shortages, pollution. As long as we're have unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done. I also see unemployment.

Stop voting for the people who have consistently allowed this to happen. We give them a tremendous amount of money. They misallocate it, waste it and allow fraud to happen to the tune of billions.

This has nothing to do with this communist/socialist view of the world that I see emanate from your comment. This is plain and simple: Government incompetence, fraud and theft.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with private industry.

This also has nothing whatsoever to do with unemployment rate. You are not going to take a 57 year old bank teller who was let go and put her to work fixing potholes on the highway.

And the connection to maximizing profits is even funnier. Do you realize that a company that maximizes profits pays more taxes? Do you realize that a person who maximizes profits through higher salaries or investments pays more taxes? Which means that the government has more money to allocate towards fixing the problems you noted?

Or we’ve invested far too much money in building a road network and the economic value from it either isn’t captured to sustain it OR it’s insufficient to cover costs and it’s being subsidized. Potholes being a “need” to be fixed is an interesting take when we had cobble streets and people survived fine. Pretending like capitalism is the thing that creates economic tradeoffs is incorrect and it’s just scapegoating capitalism - of course every economic system will have problems, but potholes are not uniquely a capitalism problem but more a problem of maintenance after huge capital investments for building infrastructure - maintenance is always harder and a debt that previous generations saddled us by building said infrastructure and that’s true whatever economic model you follow. China will have a similar problem in ~100-200 years as the cost to maintain all the roads, power plants, and buildings start to become a reality.

If we're making stuff up with no basis, I'll go with it distorts the process by bringing attention to and prioritising the potholes that bother people enough to make the effort of painting them. But really I think most municipalities are not as good at planning as you give them credit for.

Although if a big pothole remains for several years amid many complaints, it's reasonable to think there's no such list. Or there is a list, but it's so long that it might as well not exist.

> Most road maintenance crews probably aren't sitting around

Assuming that's true, the most likely explanation is that they are working on Big Projects. Pothole maintenance is (probably) behind these projects, even though it can be done without affecting their timeline.

> My model of municipal maintenance is that a city's road maintenance workers have a long list of known potholes to fix which is triaged with some formula and dealt with day-by-day.

What makes you think that?

I agree about the distortion, and it omits what is typically the greatest distortion: Wealth and power. I've been on bumpy, deteriorating roads in poor neighborhoods that suddenly turned into smooth, paved roads in wealthy neighborhoods.

Also, the person of a certain class, ethnicity and age who spraypaints is called an 'artivist'. For someone else it would be called graffiti and they might be arrested for vandalism.

I don’t imagine all government work has been perfectly prioritized on a well calibrated sliding scale.

Citizens should have a say in how municipalities order work. If they're not given that say through less-disruptive means, then they can choose to harmlessly tag places where maintenance is failing.

Why are we excusing civic inaction because it might cause an unexpected schedule change for road crews? Why am I supposed to be so full of concern for the ease of their schedule that I'm ok with broken streets?

In short, c'mon, man.

There's also a gent in Horsham who's recently been planting flowers in potholes to draw attention to them.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mgjklmzwvo

This was exactly what I thought of when I read the headline. Very amusing at the time, and it somewhat unsurprisingly was effective.

I lack your laudable sense of decorum, so I'll post the link...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/street-artist-wanksy-spray-...

There have been copycats...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/guy-paint-penis-potholes-new...

Sadly, @scrumper is 100% correct! In many, many areas and gov-levels of the U.S., the incentives have become so perverse that a municipality will spend 10x or 100x to prosecute people instead of spending 1x to fix things in the first place.

Some areas are even worse, because they'll use the event (e.g. "we have rampant crime now that criminals are spray-painting and ruining our potholes!")...as an excuse to then drastically increase funding for law enforcement agencies! Its bonkers and sad all around!

Ah, we did it in plan sight, but I guess in the US is different. I head about people arrested while truing to fix the pothole themselves, but not for painting it, yet.

if you can send some pictures later, on the page there is a anonymous way to send us stuff

Waymo would be smart to offer this service to municipalities, especially those with supposed concerns about "safety".

my bmw already does this somehow, always gives me a "rough road ahead" warning. I wonder if they use accelerometers

That's a good idea. Seriously. I think with a decent LLM tool you could get a POC going pretty quickly, and Code for America [0] is a pretty good resource for interfacing with governments on projects like that.

[0] https://codeforamerica.org/

[delayed]