General infrastructure planning tends to be decided on long term efficiency as its not a day to day political issue.
What planet do you live on?
I'm remembering why we avoid political discussions. Questioning my credibility is not a counter argument.
At its most simple organisations with a set of goals they have to achieve and which know their budget in the future will tend to minimise the cost at which they achieve those goals, so they can either save that money for the future or spend it on secondary goals. Additionally goals can be set on the basis of improvements in efficiency etc.
At its most simple organisations with a set of goals they have to achieve and which know their budget in the future will tend to minimise the cost at which they achieve those goals, so they can either save that money for the future or spend it on secondary goals.
Unfortunately, the goals of the organization do not necessarily align with the goals of the people running the organization, and the larger the organization, the worse this problem becomes.
Or as Jerry Pournelle put it in his iron law of buerocracy
...in any bureaucratic organization there will be
In line with the results of the poll here, a thread for discussing politics. Incidentally, folks, I think downvoting the option you disagree with in a poll is generally considered poor form.
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
4.) In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.
If anybody thinks the rules should be dropped here, now that we're no longer conducting a test - I already dropped the upvoting/downvoting limits I tried, unsuccessfully, to put in - let me know. The first rule is the only one I think is strictly necessary.
Debiasing attempt: If you haven't yet read Politics is the Mindkiller, you should.