NASA
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fixing (thing) that you’ve been half assed fixing for ages
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having the right tools for the job
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Works at my work. Something broken? Throw money at someone and it’s either fixed or replaced.
They stopped throwing money so now when a fridge dies it’s just no fridge for a week.
I mean that’s how governments always solve problems.
Never, because when the appropriate amount of money is used they don’t call it ‘throwing money at the problem’. It is a phrase that means something along the same lines as wasting money on a thing instead of doing what is really needed.
No.
“Throwing money” implies that the solution was indeed 75% useless. It’s why this expression exists.
It’s like asking “When is failure a success?” It’s literally not possible for a failure to be successful, that’s why we call it “failure”.
Throwing money at the problem works when it’s a money problem. It doesn’t work when it’s a social problem.
The issue is that people think money can fix social problems, it can’t. It can sometimes help, but social problems need social solutions.
The issue is most people can’t distinguish between money and social problems. Corruption, is not a money problem. Homelessness/drugs, is not a money problem, etc. etc.
I was redoing the roof on my house, and I had some family over helping me do that.
For context, I live in a geodesic dome home, and so it’s not as simple as scrape off old roof, slap on new roof, you also have to account for the angles of the hundreds of triangles that comprise the roof.
Further, instead of using a cedar shake, which was what was already on there, I decided to use an aluminum shake. The main reason was cost. Cedar shake was going to cost about $10 a square foot, whereas aluminum shake only cost me about $1 a square foot.
Even though my home is 2600 square foot and in a normal flat roof house that would mean you would have somewhere between 2600 and 3000 square foot to cover, because it’s a dome, it curves, you have a lot more wastage and so I was looking at buying about 4000 square foot of shake.
Going aluminum extended the lifespan of the roof from a 25 year to a 50 year, which is nice, and also cut $30,000 out of the cost.
However…
Once we got the old roof off, my family members decided that they didn’t want to do this anymore, and they left.
So I had to, all of a sudden, call around and find someone else to help me install the roof.
You remember that $30,000 I saved buying aluminum shake instead of cedar shake?
That’s what it cost for me to get the aluminum shake installed after the old roof had been peeled off, not counting what I paid my family members for the help that they did provide in the interim.
Nuclear bombs, landing on the moon, for two.
On a large scale, when has it not worked? All examples I can think of it not working tend to be things like a guy trying to fix a problem in his home, by himself, but has no idea how to do things and keeps spending money on better equipment and parts, but still has a problem because he has no ability to use any of them properly.
You put more money into roads, the roads get better.
You put more money into education, children get taught better.
You put more money into war machines, you get shit that can obliterate all the people in a city without destroying the infrastructure.
Corruption is probably the biggest thing that keeps it from working. Developed countries don’t have the slightest idea what corruption even is. We hear that word in the US and we think “oh dear, bribes!” But in many parts of the world the entire economy is basically spent on greasing every palm, high and low, to keep some regime in power. Whole generations of entire countries have basically gone up in smoke this way. It makes the army’s $400 hammer sound like an absolute bargain.
I’m of the mind that if corrupt people are misappropriating funds, then the money isn’t even reaching the problem it is being thrown at. Money could resolve the original problem, but money likely won’t resolve the new problem of corrupt people stealing the money.
You can impose that technicality if you want, but when corruption is perhaps the world’s top obstacle to funding solutions for things, I see little point except the joy of splitting hairs.
Education is a issue on which if fails repeatedly.
Flooding a school system with money does jack shit if that school is in a poor community where the students and parents don’t value education. There are tons of examples of districts with massive per pupil spending that get horrible result compared to schools with less spending per pupil. Or if the district is full of corruption.
poor community
So the problem is still poverty.
you don’t fix poverty by giving poor people money.
you fix it by providing them upward mobility.
UBI pilot programs give a lot of evidence to the contrary
No, they don’t.
Ok great. So give them upward mobility. That’s going to cost money.
No it doesn’t. It requires work ethic and community that rewards it. Those things can’t be built with money.
One reason these polices fail is because clueless white rich people think you can just give people money and boom problem over. Poverty is a inter-generational series of behaviors, it takes generations to get out of. The biggest factor is not money, it’s behaviour.
I grew up in a community with poverty. Some people made it out, most didn’t. Money had nothing to do with it. I had friends who had more money than me who ended up in prison, and friends with less than me who also got out. And many who got out and came back and ended up back where they were. The difference was their attitude towards life, if they were living for the moment, or living for tomorrow.
And frankly as someone how go it out, the people who got left behind are intense bitter, nasty, and greedy towards you when you do. And they start yelling at you how ‘if only they had what you had’… because they just refuse to take responsibility for themselves. The entire culture is a lot of bitterness, resentment, and trying to get rich quick and/or blowing money you do have on pointless luxuries. It is not a healthy culture that values education and financial responsibility, and often if you do take that path, as I did, your friends/family just HATE you for not being like them, for not wanting to blow your paycheck on booze and drugs every weekend like they do.
I feel like Tesla and SpaceX are examples. An idiot with a lot of money at the helm that buys top talent and can afford constant failures until success comes through. Tesla is back on the way down now but was a success story for this for a while.
Throw enough money and THE expert comes to fix the problem.
Like, my fridge is broken – so I hired the entire engineering research and development department at [company] to solve the issue.
When the problem is bills.
It works when money can purchase what is actually needed in detail, and the people on the receiving end are competent.
I’m currently in the midst of throwing money at a problem - car’s brakes corroded after I didn’t drive for three months due to Reasons. I’m desperate to get back behind the wheel - a backlog of car-centric jobs has piled up.
