I was going to say... for a city with a population almost that of the entire state of California, this is hardly anything. To put that in perspective, California spends 200-300 billion each year.
Many people seem to struggle with the difference between absolute and proportional values.
Something similar in my country (Nigeria). Many people keep pointing out that Lagos, our most crowded and number one commercial city, has an annual budget of roughly $1 billion, meaning there should be world-class infrastructure.
Until I point out that $1 billion is roughly $50 annually per person. Even accounting for labor and cost of living differences, you need at least 20x that before you start expecting world-class infrastructure.
Sure, labor is cheaper, but power plants, buses, and trains are mostly imported and cost a damn lot. No way you’re getting first-world infrastructure with third-world budget and taxes.
Possibly, but things like roads and waterways are much fewer/smaller/shorter, as Mumbai is geographically an extremely small city for its population. It becomes even more obvious statistically once you remove the national park in the north from land area calculations.
In any case, there are lots of factors, but I think most Mumbaikars would agree that the city could be run much better with similar/the same resources.
How do you figured that? Average salary in california is around 10 times that of mumbai and population of greater mumbai is slightly more than half california. That adjusts the comparison to roughly 140 billion mumvai vs 200 billion california. So mumbai is marginally more efficient than one of the worst run us states by roughetrics. I suspect it should be considered worse because corruption at 8k a year average income cuts a lot worse than equivalent percentage corruption at 80k income
PPP doesn't really translate to municipal budgets, and it's also painfully clear from the grandparent that the huge budget doesn't translate to much, even after PPP comparisons.
I'd argue that this is how libraries get into this mess. Instead of specializing, they adopt a scattershot approach to services, many of which aren't even related to taking care of library materials. Flashy pet projects get prioritized while less interesting things like books or computer systems languish.
Agree with you. It's a truly sad state that libraries have become the de-facto "last option" for so many people, ranging from Internet access for those too poor to afford a basic phone data plan over food [1] and showers [2] to first aid for drug users [3].
Out of all of that, only the first should be provided by a library - the rest should be a core function of any civilized government to provide in dedicated, actually properly equipped facilities. Librarians are not social workers, and they shouldn't have to be forced into that role that they've never been adequately trained nor equipped for. And libraries shouldn't be places where those in need of their actual services are afraid to go to, because they don't want to get harassed by homeless and drug users.
And yet, I shudder even thinking about how the situation would look like if the many librarians and other adjacent staff would not have stepped up to the multiple crises of completely dysfunctional local governments and widespread poverty.
Does your team use Slack (or something similar). Don't you get random pings, mentions or calls for help/input. Is there an expectation around for you to respond within a short period. I have been 100% WFH since last 5 years and I am only productive after 5 pm.
My team does use Slack, but I just have it muted for most channels and check it in predefined intervals. I don't have DM's muted but we also don't have a culture of DM'ing people, calls for help are posted in designated channels.
In my opinion and experience there are very few issues that require you to actually respond immediately, I just find many teams don't understand this. Everyone thinks their specific issue is the highest priority thing going on, and I'd say product teams are especially bad about this. Asking for status updates all too often and interrupting developers days just for small things that could've been done at a scheduled time or just been an email.
Obviously this can somewhat depend on your role since your role may be something that tends to require immediate intervention. But I check Slack once every 30 min to an 1 hour or so and have no issues with my response times.
You can ignore those random pings of all kinds until you at a good place to stop what you are doing and help out. If you are responding to all of those the second they come in, you are encouraging the problem by building a culture of over-responsiveness.
I've been on teams where we explicitly defined expected response times. 2 hours was the typical answer on teams where I've worked.
I've also been on teams that didn't define the expectation, but nobody I work with expects Slack to be real-time. The only time we respond quickly is when we have first asked, "Hey, let me know when you have a couple minutes to chat." And then I either stick around until they have time and quickly have the chat/huddle... or if they don't respond and I need to step away, I delete my message.
It sounds counter-intuitive but you can often build a better remote culture by being a little less responsive.
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