I don't think "state funded" is the important part to take away from the piece, it's a shortage of infrastructure in general, both state and private, in part due to incredibly restrictive rules. These days you can easily trap a planned piece of infrastructure in court cases for years for largely spurious reasons.
Having recently visited the US, the infrastructure there (at least in the parts of California I visited) is noticeably worse than in Europe (including the UK). So I don't think it can just be about infrastructure.
It’s not so much restrictive rules, as it is a planning system that prioritises local concerns, regardless of how minor, or incorrect, over any kind of national priority.
Our planning system is literally designed to maximally empower NIMBYism. There are no well defined planning rules, or zoning, or planning process. Every council develops their own planning policy, and broadly has the power to block any project. The result is building anything requires millions of pounds, and years of effort, to work through a councils arbitrary, and ever changing planning rules, with no guarantee of any kind of success.
Most of the rest of the world operates some kind of permitted development zoning policy, where planning policy tends to provide clear rules around what can always be built in a specific area. So it possible to start a development process knowing that certain aspects of your project must be approved, as long as you follow the rules. Unlike the UK where you project might be approved if you managed to somehow follow all the undocumented, arbitrary, and changing local rules.
Consequences are quite simple, only projects that are absolutely guaranteed to return large profits if successful are built. And for those projects there’s very little incentive for high quality building, because there’s no competition in the area, and costs of getting permission are so high, that a developers unique selling point is their ability to get permission, not their ability to actually build well.
With regards to Grenfell, that’s the consequence of have shambolic building regulations (I.e. regulations on the quantity and safety of buildings), and a construction industry that can only make money by cutting corners, because the supply of actual work is so low.
While not denying in any way that this sort of thing is a real problem, I think you're overstating differences between the UK and "the rest of the world".
Although zoning in the USA does work to a degree as you say ("must be approved if you ..."), in reality lots of projects that seem as if they ought to be a sure thing for approval face years of process-based objections from local groups, leading to them never being built at all, or having to be significantly revised due to changes demanded or created by circumstances shifting.
The UKs planning system is pretty much unique. Almost no other country in the world operates a planning system where every local authority basically gets to make up their own rules around planning, and where it’s practically impossible for national government to enforce simple things like minimum house building quotas.
If you want to understand why building infrastructure in the UK is so difficult, then you need to look no further than our planning system. It has uniquely managed to completely strangle infrastructure building. Sure NIBYism exists in the U.S., and there’s lots of planning red tape, and plenty of very poorly considered planning rules (such as single use zoning, and a strange obsession with single family homes). But in comparison to the UK, it’s practically pleasant to work with.
Of course it helps that the U.S. has a crap ton of spare land just handing around. Much easier to build a new shopping mall, highway or suburb on a completely empty plot with no neighbours in sight. But in the UK you, you can’t swing a cat without hitting an existing building, or actively worked farm.
The thames tunnel costing as much in planning as Norway spent actually building the longest tunnel in the world. Construction projects are so fraught with regulatory burden that most of these costs are going to legal fees. It's not that they're not spending money. It's that public infrastructure is a money pit of legal fees
Building a tunnel through a stable and self supporting granite mountain is a bit different from building one under a river that is on top of a slab of clay and sand so I don't think the two projects are directly comparable.
And the regulations are really not that different here in Norway. What is different is that there is a less adversarial society. We are a little more inclined to thrash out the problems in discussion rather than litigation.
But there are plenty of infrastructure projects here that take longer and cause more disruption than they should. For instance the upgrade to the E18 between Oslo and Drammen on which 17 billion kroner (1.7 billion USD) has already been spent without getting halfway and the southern half of the project has been scrapped because of the cost of buying out the people who live in the way of the new route.
Environental impact assessments now run to millions of pages. Every big infra planning application tries to anticipate any possible complaint, and the whole cost balloons.
This doesn't really seem relevant since no one is disputing whether the UK as a whole has enough space for more houses. The relevant comparisons are Paris vs London and then the various 2nd tier cities in the countries. Paris has a MUCH HIGHER population density than London, in part due to the housing mix, e.g. Parisian mansion blocks.
Prosperity comes from cities where densification is allowed (far too much of inner London is only 2-storeys) and being able to affordably put in supporting infrastructure.
Transport projects seem to be particularly expensive these days in Anglo countries compared to European countries. For instance, we currently have a planned short tunnel in the UK (under the Thames but not in London itself) where the actual planning process has so far cost $400m.
Stronger property rights tend to backfire in the 2020s as NIMBYs have emerged everywhere and do their best to block anything around them, usually by weaponizing environmental laws.
The remedy will probably consist of a combination of legal changes and a change in attitude; YIMBY must become a thing. People respond to social pressures.
Does the UK have stronger property rights than, for instance, Norway that was mentioned by another contributor here as being so much more efficient? Yet Norway has abandoned, for now at least, the south western half of the Oslo to Drammen E18 road upgrade because buying out the owners of expensive houses on the route would be too expensive.
Are you claiming that other comparable democracies have such weak property rights that this significantly affects infrastructure projects? Which ones?
> Well, it sounds like you could come up with a set of useful heuristics, like living next door to the property.
This is a political problem, so it recurses quite a lot. Whatever set of heuristics you come up with, someone will object to them because they will be losers if we use those heuristics. Then someone will object to the composition of the committee that generated the heuristics. Then someone will object to the system that system that came up with the committee....
Of course, we should try to figure out solutions. But these are "wicked problem" [1]. Solutions are not easy to come by, and there will always be objectors. You can't turn this into a well-defined technical problem with a well-formed solution.
It seems useful to identify the right problem. It's better to know you just need the right compiler than the think the issue is something else as you can then work on building the right compiler.
Obviously democracy should be limited to the relevant franchise. We don't let children vote, we don't let people who don't live (and are not from) an area vote. The entire point is to identify the right set of people who should vote, based on those who suffer from the related externalities.
It seems unfair to say the article just moves the problem elsewhere, it touches on proposed solutions such as street-level development votes.
> It's better to know you just need the right compiler than the think the issue is something else as you can then work on building the right compiler.
You completely misunderstand the sufficiently smart compiler objection. It is about dodging real problems by proposing magic solutions.
You can't make C/C++ a safe language "just" by writing a sufficiently smart compiler. It requires a new approach and perhaps even a new language like Rust.
> It touches on proposed solutions such as street-level development votes.
That is not a generic solution to the vetocracy problem. That is a specific identification of a group of people that the author of the article believes should be endowed with making a particular decision. There is no general framework proposed for selecting such a group of people in the general case.
Let's consider some possible general mechanisms. The "simple" problem that we "just" have to solve to make the authors otherwise perfect solution work.
We could endow that responsibility on a single individual, such as the author himself. He feels he made a good decision in the street-level case, maybe he can do the same for other cases, like mining rights or cross-country oil pipelines. So whenever the question comes up as to who is affected by such a thing we go to the author of the article and ask him to tell us. Kind of like a dictator or even a King.
Or we put together a committee and they decide between them who is impacted. Kind of like an oligarchy. Or maybe we all get a vote on who is impacted. A democracy to decide who is impacted and who gets the right to vote. It's recursive! Or divide and conquer!
It's starting to sound like picking the mechanism to determine who is impacted by a particular change is a very similar kind of activity to existing political mechanisms. That is suspicious. Maybe it isn't an easy problem to solve after all.
The UK is one of the Western democracies without the protections you're talking about (no written constitution, no ability to bind future parliaments, law passed by a simple majority of parliamentarians, first-past-the-post and strong third-parties leading to parliamentary majorities with ~35% of the vote) but has one of the longest and proudest histories when it comes to freedom and liberty.
Mob rule is always a risk but it's often better than rule by an out-of-touch elite.
Why does the elite automatically have to be out of touch? They are the most invested in it all and are incentivized to have a functional state. Democratically elected representatives have no such incentive. Their only incentive is to convince enough people to grant them power.
An aristocratic monarchy is preferable to an oligarchical “democracy” like we have today.
Huh? The impoverished residents of the estate voted to have it "destroyed" (from which they would personally gain) but it was rich elites that blocked it because it's a vote winner in the wider community to be viewed as anti-development
It's an odd situation, but I can see where the sentiment comes from. Poorer communities are usually the target of redevelopment, frequently with promises on how things will improve, only to discover that the promises were hollow down the road. In a case like this, where there is supposed to be an incredibly large change in the demographic of the community, I can understand how some would interpret the small increase in social housing as being a hollow promise.
The benefit of this proposal is that it pits property owners against each other. It might be in the interests of property owners as a class to not build in order to see values increase but the greed of individual owners will lead to some cracking and building in order to maximise their individual wealth.
Given there are enough property owners, this is expected. But in the presence of a few property owners, the opportunity for collusion is higher because the opportunity cost of defecting is higher than the opportunity cost of not defecting. This centralization of property into a few owners is something that is happening all over the Anglosphere.
In the time you've spent arguing about Vercel on here you could have actually tried it out and then you'd actually have your own opinion based on genuine experience.
I've used AWS Lambda professionally for years, Vercel is a totally different beast. I recently span-up a hobby project recently on Vercel rather than AWS Lambda (using Serverless Framework) to try out next.js and it took about 10 minutes to get it working whereas AWS Lambda would have taken a lot longer.
As an executive I need to carefully assess an offering by thinking of everything. Your reasoning is "shut up and use it". This is not how you convince c-suites.
If you've been really using Lambda on AWS and still struggling with IAM/VPC I would have to chalk this up as not amazon's fault
