That was the most shocking thing to me when I visited the United States for the first time in my live last month, the road system is so incredibly poorly maintained and so incredibly poorly thought out. It all is incredibly expansive but not maintained.

That being said I only saw 3 (eastern) states, maybe it's different elsewhere.

It varies widely from State to State, and it is never more evident as when you cross a State border on one of the Interstate highways. The sudden change in road quality can be dramatic. There is also little correlation between road quality and the amount of money spent per kilometer on literally the same stretch of border-crossing highway -- the poor quality side of the border may be spending several times what is being spent on the good quality. Some States have very nice highways that are built and maintained at modest cost.

The high variance in road quality and cost is a very visible example of how varied the effectiveness and efficiency of individual State governments can be in the US.

It is indeed very different from state to state, depending on the state's tax base and priorities, and also within states from locale to locale, at times.

It all depends how many rich people live in the city. You can tell when you cross city/town borders because the roads become noticeably better or worse.

I think the road systems are pretty badly designed pretty much everywhere.

Cross walks that cross 3 lanes (each side)with traffic going 40mph and no signal.

Stop signs that doesn't tell you if the intersecting direction stops or not.

Half-assed painted gutters for bike lanes.

Places with 4 signs to indicate when you can park, each with different (sometimes overlapping) times and conditions.

the list goes on.

Compared to where though? The US is huge. Parts of it are shiny and new and parts of it are old and decrepit, just like Europe, Israel, Mexico, South America, etc.

Who wants to work on public infrastructure when you can be a software engineer making 6 figures after a single 3 month long bootcamp.

Which is society's fault because... It can't be mine, I'm a great software engineer creating great value through my innovation. My dog massage scheduling app is valued at 10 figures.

No, there are 1000's of cities in America with who have had uninterrupted functioning water systems for decades (hundreds of years?). Doomerism anecdotes lead to lots of clicks.

No, it's sample bias. You only notice when institutions fail. You don't notice the thousands of bureaucratic processes that work exactly how they're supposed to.

Institutions and infrastructure aren't supposed to fail at all in a functioning society. The fact that some of the institutions that are failing is still extremely alarming.

The water infrastructure of a single city failing doesn't say much about the whole city. Life seems to be chugging along everywhere else. Stay off the doomerism and appreciate what we have.

Every human endeavor is 100% guaranteed to fail at some point. By your definition there are zero function governments anywhere in the world.

Bureaucracy everywhere slows everything to a halt and pumps the costs of anything sky high. In developed West - through regulations and Kafkaesque process, in the rest of the world - through corruption. Pouring concrete and laying pipes is cheap and fast, it is everything else in the project that makes it costly and expensive.

No. This is doomerism rooted in nostalgia

It’s a shift in money and resources. The US is a collection of states. As some states grow others shrink.

There’s brain drains from some states to other states.

What we are seeing is shifting tides of a large country that makes it easy to move from coast to coast

Maybe remote work will reduce the brain drain. Many folks leaving coastal cities.

People have been saying this for the last 50 years.

They were right, but didn't realize how long momentum can last.

51 years ago was 1971.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com

So what happened?

Computers started becoming widespread.

Gold standard

As wealth inequality grows in our capitalist society, I worry the common people simply wont control enough wealth to have their concerns considered. The common people do have the ability to vote, but more and more votes are bought with money and divisive advertising.

The bottom 50% of American's control 2% of the nations wealth. Helping the plebs simply isn't going to be profitable. All that to say, yes, I worry about crumbling institutions.

I first thought about this while considering the rise of SaaS software. Software sold with a one-time cost, an honest transaction, is dying. Perhaps common people simply don't control enough wealth to make honest software worth while. Instead, companies want our data they can sell to other wealthy entities. "Common people are out there, they don't possess any wealth to speak of, but we can spy on them and sell the data to other wealthy people."

Along with the raiding of coffers, because everyone feels like "I need to get mine."

Overly generous tax breaks, bailouts, "cancelling debt," etc. etc.

Yep. I don't know that momentum is sustaining them so much as it is denial.

HN is the last place you should ask this question. It's full of tech bros who have never known adversity or alienation.