poipoipoi-2016:

We had a person faint on the subway today and you could see every single person in the train car going:

“Well, if we don’t stop the train, she might die.  But if we stop the train, we’re going to be an hour late to work.  Don’t stop the train it is!”

this is a really good example of how public budgets, technical debt, time, civic sensibility, etc. are tradeable against each other (& all fungible with money) so that the flow of history is experienced as broad eras of decline and uplift