shazbotter

I don't think you know many leftists, to be frank.

I'm an American, in my circles "liberal" is almost a curse word. It's what we tend to call people who support corporate power, profit motivation, and social progress as long as it doesn't inconvenience them personally.

We broadly use "leftist" to refer to ourselves, whether that's democratic socialists, anarchists, communists, syndicalists, unionists, etc. Philosophically, these folks are fundamentally pushing for wellbeing of all, social motivation, and social progress even if it inconveniences me personally.

I don't think it's helpful to refer to these differences in ideology as bubbles, though. I think there's a very real philosophical difference between liberals and leftists, and has been for generations. 60 years ago Phil Ochs sang "Love me I'm a liberal", and it wasn't a new idea back then. Liberals and leftists hold incompatible worldviews. Just like liberals and conservatives do. I think deploying the term "bubble" for such broad groups is probably more reductive than helpful.

I'm a lefty, but off the anarchist stripe, if you start calling for communist revolution I'll be there to oppose you. ;)

But more seriously, I think we could do a lot more with local governments and our capacity to build things. Part of that is regulatory, but a I think a majority of the problem is we focus too much on getting a thing built and not enough on continuing to run it. Whether it's housing, transportation, bridges, whatever, everyone is excited for opening day then we immediately start paring back funding and support for it. Which results in loss of quality, which makes people go "why are we even paying for this", which leads to loss of funding.

The article highlights a failure, which is good, but gives a very surface level review of what failed here. Some gestures are made at environmental review but it's not clear that the root cause here was regulation. If the project needed three redesigns, why? Maybe electrical capacity for 8 high capacity outlets on that site was tricky. Maybe the transformers and their cooling was louder than that site could accommodate. Maybe this was a low priority project and other things kept stealing time from it.

I can think of many reasons why a project like this stalls. And too be clear, regulation could absolutely be one of them. The article just doesn't support that as a root cause beyond conjecture.