Maybe they can redirect all this wonderful behavioral science to train the politicians to actually care about ordinary lower-income citizens so they can fix the fucking pipes instead of placing the responsibility on tax-payers by teaching them songs and dances about when to change their filters or devising clever tricks on how their can regain their "trust".
Spending money collected from people with a higher income/net worth sensibly on people disadvantaged by a system that disadvantaged the lower income/net worth people by its very existence....that sounds a lot like Socialism.
Also yes I agree, safe potable water in the worlds richest country should not be an issue in 2017.
I also think that natural monopolies should be heavily state governed if not state owned.
Yep and that's a problem, I think the solution there is harsher penalties actually enforced, if you need to increase the salary to make people take that job then so be it.
Other countries do infrastructure better and have water that is demonstrably better than in a lot of places in the US.
Please keep in mind that the US water supply naturally has higher concentrations of pollutants than many other countries. We also have a higher population drinking straight from the water table pump.
It makes it hard to do a direct comparison since other countries don't have to do as much.
I generally agree with gp, but if this had happened and a private company was to blame, you'd bet there would be criminal and civil suits being brought by the government.
Perhaps the issue here isn't accountability but ability to do the change properly.
Yeah god forbid everyone invests their fair share in building a fairer and better society.
Crony capitalism is like a flesh eating disease. It encourages everyone to look solely after their own individual interests. Then once a portion of society is exploited and impoverished by the greedier part of society to the point of becoming a burden on them, the rich want to "cut them off" or let them rot away. The cycle then repeats, until very few are left at the top extremely wealthy and powerful, but with no middle class left to exploit.
That seems to be the pattern yes, it's not like any of this is new either, political theory and treatises from centuries ago show this recurring cycle of the concentration of power (whether that's direct power, soft power or power via wealth) followed by gross abuses of that power and then systemic change (ranging from chopping the head off the nearest king through to the fall of the soviet union).
Not sure what the solution is or that there is any single solution, wealth inequality seems to beget greater wealth inequality.
Another paragraph that reeks of moderate-liberal propaganda:
"A young man said, “I think the concern is that because we’re a Hispanic community we’re not going to have the same help.” His parents had brought him to Michigan from Mexico, at the age of ten. More than a decade later, in 2012, he’d become a beneficiary of Obama’s program for undocumented immigrants who had come to the country as children; it protected him from deportation, if only temporarily. Now, he said, besides the hazardous water, he feared immigration raids. “They already have all my information,” he explained. “I don’t have any criminal record. . . . I don’t have any tickets, no drinking and driving.” But he was concerned about his children, who, after they saw Trump on TV talking about mass deportations, asked him, “What’s going to happen to us?”
Really, it protected him from deportation? How wonderful. I guess it didn't protect the other 2.5 million people who were deported which, by the way, is the largest number of deportations under any president. The other part of that paragraph is probably correct - things definitely aren't going to get any better under Trump, but you can blame that on the Democrats and their dishonest approach with governing. They'd rather invest in white-washing their legacy than make an honest attempt at fulfilling their "progressive" platform promises. And I suspect this is the reason behind much of this article as well.
This "most deportations under any president" thing is a result of them starting to count instances of turning people away at the border as a "deportation".
So why did people act shocked when Trump said he was gonna deport all of them? If we can deport 2.5 million without anyone really noticing, surely deporting eleven million is only five times harder and thus perfectly achievable?
They act shocked because they don't genuinely care about people being deported, families being ripped apart, providing support for displaced people, or just in general not displacing people in the first place with wars and disastrous economic manipulations half way across the world.
They are only paid to care about it or even be aware of it if it suits the needs of their designated group of oligarchs.
FYI, on the campaign trail, Trump cited the 30million+ number of illegal immigrants (a number advocated by Ann Coulter). Official US government numbers settled somewhere near 11 million (largely based on census numbers, so likely underreported).
This was something he let go of because it wasn't popular. I've watched many of his rallies and don't recall hearing this line. A few of his lines were so unpopular he let them go.
Looked into it some more. Mexican adults who are turned away at the border are not counted. Adults and children from other countries are put through removal proceedings, and that counts. Sometimes those proceedings take a few days to weeks, but it still counts. The point is that the policy of what counts and what doesn't had changed under Obama.
If it did change, I don't think that minor point disputes the deportation trend under Obama. What percentage of overseas immigrants take this risky (and expensive) route of arriving at a US border without a visa or some other immigration arrangements? Probably not a huge percentage. Vast majority of immigrants to US are still from Mexico so I doubt the numbers would be skewed significantly enough for it not to be comparable to previous presidents.
Certainly much of this is due to better tracking (dimishing of the unknown category), tighter enforcement, and more efficiency, but none of those arguments dispute the trend of higher deportations under Obama simply because it doesn't fit the overall narrative of Obama as a "compassionate" president.
You're assuming that Maya and her team had the power to do so in the first place. And even if they did, they wouldn't be able to revert a situation that had already been happening for years and years.
There's a lot more complexity to the issue than you make it seem.
Her work is pretty fascinating tbh. I'd recommend a deeper look.
No, clearly she's not a waterworks engineer. Not critiquing her work specifically, but if she has no power to reverse a situation why do a 10,000 word article on her work. I am criticizing the role of media in the service of preserving status quo, which has an interest in selling the story of the benevolent behavioural scientist that can "ease the suffering" on a budget, rather than doing a deep-dive in the root causes of the problem and how to prevent it in the future, or what can be done to truly solve it now (lots and lots of money).
You can accuse me of "reading too much into it" or "being overly selective in order to reinforce my worldview", but I'm not the one who decided to publish an article titled "CAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE HELP IN FLINT?"
> actually care about ordinary lower-income citizens
You're making this a class-war thing, but it's not like politicians care about any other kind of citizens either. They sure as shit don't give a fuck about ordinary middle-income or ordinary high-income citizens either, not unless they've arranged themselves into politically powerful groups.
In general terms you are right, but at its lowest level there exists at least a division between the owners of the means of production, and the workers. I believe the workers themselves are further divided into two classes - those favoured by the owners and those who are seen as disposable.
The owners invest in any means that will reassert the legitimacy of their dominance. That includes purchasing political influence sometimes by paying directly into the political apparatus and other times by manipulating the workers into giving consent to the policies they prefer.
This is one of the worst "articles" I have experienced reading since joining Hacker News.
TL;DR This is all personal opinion: My main issue is with the journalism here. To me this article was disrespectful to readers, scientists and the people of Flint. Without making any accusations, I would be curious to know how this article was researched and in what capacity the journalist and the scientist this article is about knew each other before the article was written? Were they friends or classmates? (I don't have a problem if a journalist wants to write about one of their friends per se, especially if that person is part of an interesting story worth telling, but from an ethics and respect for readers standpoint I think that should be disclosed).
I like The New Yorker and read it regularly but after reading this long, long piece something felt very off. There was a noticeable lack of substance and accuracy, along with flowery misleading writing when it came to the science/behavioral science stuff suggesting the article was under-researched. But then the tenor of the writing about the scientist was a completely incongruity to the rest of the article (the language often felt like a letter of recommendation to a grad school on behalf of a friend).
Honestly, I have no idea if there was conflict of interest and I don't really care. The writing just made it feel like something fishy is going on. I think most importantly, behavioral science is interesting and has potential to do good work in many areas and all. But the people of Flint have fucking lead in their water...So a fluff piece connecting behavioral science to the Flint water issue is misleading at best and potentially harmful. It's misleading about what behavioral science can and can't accomplish; Flint was a government fuck-up in a place with serious systemic issues that need to be addressed. Plus 99% of what the article connects to behavioral science is really just people paying attention and helping other people in person. No behavioral science magic involved. Also the fucking "write a song" part of the article was a joke, that's an idea any Joanne Shmoe can come up with, that part of the story was not real behavioral science and pretty disrespectful to everyone.
Also New Yorker: I get your readers might not be interested in detailed science articles and they might prefer people stories. But I am very confident they want accurate stories whatever the topic. If you waste their time overly long articles of bullshit you will lose more readers. Come on.
26 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 70.5 ms ] threadAlso yes I agree, safe potable water in the worlds richest country should not be an issue in 2017.
I also think that natural monopolies should be heavily state governed if not state owned.
Other countries do infrastructure better and have water that is demonstrably better than in a lot of places in the US.
It makes it hard to do a direct comparison since other countries don't have to do as much.
https://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/trace/pubs/gw_v38n4/
Perhaps the issue here isn't accountability but ability to do the change properly.
Crony capitalism is like a flesh eating disease. It encourages everyone to look solely after their own individual interests. Then once a portion of society is exploited and impoverished by the greedier part of society to the point of becoming a burden on them, the rich want to "cut them off" or let them rot away. The cycle then repeats, until very few are left at the top extremely wealthy and powerful, but with no middle class left to exploit.
Not sure what the solution is or that there is any single solution, wealth inequality seems to beget greater wealth inequality.
"A young man said, “I think the concern is that because we’re a Hispanic community we’re not going to have the same help.” His parents had brought him to Michigan from Mexico, at the age of ten. More than a decade later, in 2012, he’d become a beneficiary of Obama’s program for undocumented immigrants who had come to the country as children; it protected him from deportation, if only temporarily. Now, he said, besides the hazardous water, he feared immigration raids. “They already have all my information,” he explained. “I don’t have any criminal record. . . . I don’t have any tickets, no drinking and driving.” But he was concerned about his children, who, after they saw Trump on TV talking about mass deportations, asked him, “What’s going to happen to us?”
Really, it protected him from deportation? How wonderful. I guess it didn't protect the other 2.5 million people who were deported which, by the way, is the largest number of deportations under any president. The other part of that paragraph is probably correct - things definitely aren't going to get any better under Trump, but you can blame that on the Democrats and their dishonest approach with governing. They'd rather invest in white-washing their legacy than make an honest attempt at fulfilling their "progressive" platform promises. And I suspect this is the reason behind much of this article as well.
They are only paid to care about it or even be aware of it if it suits the needs of their designated group of oligarchs.
Coulter citation:
https://twitter.com/AnnCoulter/status/771162318994563072
Here are some number showing ONLY interior removals: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/wp-content/uplo...
But yes border removals also jumped as well.. Maybe there is already a wall there? Here is a breakdown of deportations by three categories (border, interior and unknown) https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/wp-content/uplo...
Certainly much of this is due to better tracking (dimishing of the unknown category), tighter enforcement, and more efficiency, but none of those arguments dispute the trend of higher deportations under Obama simply because it doesn't fit the overall narrative of Obama as a "compassionate" president.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-deportations-20140...
You can accuse me of "reading too much into it" or "being overly selective in order to reinforce my worldview", but I'm not the one who decided to publish an article titled "CAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE HELP IN FLINT?"
You're making this a class-war thing, but it's not like politicians care about any other kind of citizens either. They sure as shit don't give a fuck about ordinary middle-income or ordinary high-income citizens either, not unless they've arranged themselves into politically powerful groups.
The owners invest in any means that will reassert the legitimacy of their dominance. That includes purchasing political influence sometimes by paying directly into the political apparatus and other times by manipulating the workers into giving consent to the policies they prefer.
TL;DR This is all personal opinion: My main issue is with the journalism here. To me this article was disrespectful to readers, scientists and the people of Flint. Without making any accusations, I would be curious to know how this article was researched and in what capacity the journalist and the scientist this article is about knew each other before the article was written? Were they friends or classmates? (I don't have a problem if a journalist wants to write about one of their friends per se, especially if that person is part of an interesting story worth telling, but from an ethics and respect for readers standpoint I think that should be disclosed).
I like The New Yorker and read it regularly but after reading this long, long piece something felt very off. There was a noticeable lack of substance and accuracy, along with flowery misleading writing when it came to the science/behavioral science stuff suggesting the article was under-researched. But then the tenor of the writing about the scientist was a completely incongruity to the rest of the article (the language often felt like a letter of recommendation to a grad school on behalf of a friend).
Honestly, I have no idea if there was conflict of interest and I don't really care. The writing just made it feel like something fishy is going on. I think most importantly, behavioral science is interesting and has potential to do good work in many areas and all. But the people of Flint have fucking lead in their water...So a fluff piece connecting behavioral science to the Flint water issue is misleading at best and potentially harmful. It's misleading about what behavioral science can and can't accomplish; Flint was a government fuck-up in a place with serious systemic issues that need to be addressed. Plus 99% of what the article connects to behavioral science is really just people paying attention and helping other people in person. No behavioral science magic involved. Also the fucking "write a song" part of the article was a joke, that's an idea any Joanne Shmoe can come up with, that part of the story was not real behavioral science and pretty disrespectful to everyone.
Also New Yorker: I get your readers might not be interested in detailed science articles and they might prefer people stories. But I am very confident they want accurate stories whatever the topic. If you waste their time overly long articles of bullshit you will lose more readers. Come on.