[refurb]

Yes, organize. You’d be surprised how effective it is.

My professor wanted a new law passed to support entrepreneurship. He went to “DC Days” to meet his Senator. Senator said “bring me a proposal”.

Working with a local entrepreneurship org, he wrote up the law and the Senator brought it to the floor for a vote. It almost passed.

Politicians listen to organized voters, not Hacker News posts.

[underlipton]

> It almost passed.

This is an actual joke.

Meanwhile, Flint's water crisis is past the 10-year mark and still not completely settled, despite massive, national pressure. Organizing isn't even effective at the state level, in many circumstances. The reason being that many of our institutions, and especially our courts, are nigh-hopelessly corrupt. No one went to jail for poisoning an entire city. And the entire thing would have been avoided if experts had had the leeway to tell miserly politicians and craven judges to f*ck off until they'd assessed the effects of the switch to Flint River water.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/10-years-flints-lead-wa...

[AnthonyMouse]

> The reason being that many of our institutions, and especially our courts, are nigh-hopelessly corrupt.

The reason being that Flint's water crisis was caused by the government not adding corrosion inhibitors to the water when they switched to another water source, which stripped the lining from the lead pipes, causing them to permanently leach lead into the water. They basically ruined the city's entire water grid all at once and caused hundreds of millions in damage because all of the pipes had to be inspected and replaced. Which takes a long time to do.

More to the point, it was the executive branch that did this! You can hardly blame the courts for the actions of the Governor and his underlings.

[underlipton]

The mistakes that lead to the corrosion were caused by a careless political wrangling overseen by a series of appointed managers and boards, essentially judges in all but name. Even if you don't see it that way, the point is that the protests of concerned citizens did little to stay the hands of the people empowered to make stupid mistakes quickly. Further, they dragged their heels on pipe-replacement, maintaining for years that it would be unnecessary. The actual, physical replacement could have been done much faster.

Fixing these problems in a timely manner would require more fundamental changes to how they're handled, not simply better organization and awareness within the current paradigm.

[krapp]

But why didn't anyone simply go to Congress and use their persuasion and words?

[AnthonyMouse]

Congress did actually approve a buttload of money, not long after it happened. It just takes a long time to dig up that many pipes.

[refurb]

> This is an actual joke.

No, it’s an actual example of a normal citizen getting a vote on the floor of a bill they wrote.

The Flint water crisis is a crisis in name only. Blood lead levels were lower during the crisis than years before it happened.

So color me shocked it’s not “fully resolved”.

“ The study, which appears in the Journal of Pediatrics, found a decrease in Flint childhood blood lead levels, from 2.33 micrograms per deciliter in 2006 to 1.15 micrograms per deciliter in 2016 — a historic low for the city.”

https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/study-examines-b...