[0xbadcafebee]

I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying we specifically fail to hold private industry accountable in the US. So we get things like poisonous runoff from agriculture and industrial production, insanely slow and outdated train lines, privately owned bridges that fail and cause injury, property damage and traffic jams, massive wildfires causing property damage and loss of life from unmaintained utility infrastructure, and worldwide banking crises, among other things.

Is it impossible for these things to stop happening? No, not at all. But it's probably not going to stop, in this country, because we let private industry get away with whatever they want. If this were the UK the story would be very different.

[ajb]

Fair. I can't claim to know how to make it work better in the US. We have also other private infrastructure in the UK that's not working so well (like the water companies, which are not providing enough sewage processing capacity and so allow the extra to overflow into rivers)

I mainly made that comment because it still blows my mind the the City Bridge Foundation has been going for 740 years