The head of Maui’s Emergency Management Agency asserted on Wednesday that he has no regrets about failing to activate warning sirens as the apocalyptic wildfires swept through the island: "We would not have saved those people."[1] It's as if he's saying "We did nothing. It's all you could ask of us."

The problem is that a lot of (mostly progressive?) people seem to treat jobs not as an instrumental thing - a position for getting serious work done - but instead as a kind of reward or perk. Jobs are things to be handed out. And if you don't like someone they should lose it, etc.

So many people I know don't really take their job seriously. In municipal gov especially. I think to people in the civil service jobs in the early 1900s, something like the show Parks and Rec would be more horror than comedy. This warps people's perception of work in several ways, which is too long to get into here, I just want to reflect on how strange it is that we got here.

For example, I think in most of history if something like this[2] happened (guys bipping cars all over SF’s Fisherman’s Wharf, one by one, without caring that they were seen), aside from vigilantes, both the mayor and maybe the police chief would resign in disgrace. Or the chief wouldn't stop a public warpath until the mayor resigned. Instead it will go unmentioned.

It feels like almost everyone in every position has this vague fog of do-nothing about them. This is in every part of society. Almost every post. I just find it baffling. The amount of getting things done is very low.

For instance England's (late) queen: She could have done, or at least said, all kinds of things during 2008 or brexit, aimed at least some kind of patriotic unity, but just sat there. When a country needed a figurehead the most in decades nothing of note came from the family.

I don't know if its an inability to do anything or a lack of imagination about what is to be done, or what. It's not like there's no work to be done.

Imagine being a top scientific journal president and knowing that a number of papers in your journal are essentially fake or bad science. Wouldn't you be embarrassed? Wouldn't you do something about it?

There's this film of careless inertia covering the whole world.

[1]https://nypost.com/2023/08/16/maui-chief-doesnt-regret-not-activating-sirens-during-wildfire/

[2]https://twitter.com/henrykleeKTVU/status/1691936290315624500