[kergonath]

> Sadly the incentives government officials face also often favor short time horizons.

Thanks in some part to the fundamentally misguided idea that governments should be run like businesses.

> Therefore I favor any marginal increased investment for 100-year floods from any part of society

Definitely agree. We are bad at dealing with this kind of risk profile, and we need to be more aware of this.

[_3u10]

Government can’t even let private sector build houses for 1 year demand. I don’t forsee them being able to manage anything on 100 year timescales.

Just look at the climate change stupidity, any city in the world could build a 6 foot sea wall and give the middle finger to climate change in a year with minimal cost but instead we have all manner of stupid at an international level.

I used to live in a city that was in a rainforest and would run out of water like clockwork during the two months of the year it wasn’t bucketing down rain. It even had mountains with snowpack as a backup but they could never figure out how to build a dam an extra 6 feet higher so we wouldn’t run out of water. We had enough money to buy people heroin but couldn’t figure out how to not run out of water. There was never a heroin shortage, always plenty of that, they’d just buy more but if you wanted to water your lawn, get rekt bud, we don’t have any water.

To be fair regarding the heroin, it did cost about $500,000 per person to obtain enough heroin.

[nradov]

See walls don't work for every city in the world. Miami, for example, sits on a porous karst substrate so building a sea wall wouldn't do much to prevent flooding.

[jjk166]

The short time horizons for governments is due to election cycles. Projects that win votes in the next election are prioritized over things that will benefit future administrations. This often leads to wildly inefficient uses of resources, such as projects being regularly cancelled and restarted, and ignorance of maintenance costs.

Running the government "like a business" is meaningless rhetoric and no one can agree on what that actually means, but typically those in favor of the idea want to privatize government services and generally reduce governmental 'bloat' where whatever policies they don't like or utilize are defined to be inefficient. Timescales are typically irrelevant to that discussion.

[kergonath]

Sure, because bloat becomes revenue when it goes from government-run to a company.