> I count £20b in failed IT projects over the last decade alone. It's hard to grasp the sheer scale of government. This article does a good job of juxtapositio

> I count £20b in failed IT projects over the last decade alone. It's hard to grasp the sheer scale of government. This article does a good job of juxtaposition in the case of the magnitude of engineering failures, but I want to add on that $20 billion is chump change when it comes to waste. The military sector alone plowed through $700 billion last year to accomplish the task of robo-killing brown people. The entire federal budget was $2 trillion. Stop and think about those numbers for a bit. There are 2.8 million civil servants in the US, and 2 million military personnel. $2T divided by 4.7 million means every single government official is responsible for roughly $425,000 of your tax dollars. This includes postmen and every boot camp trainee. Obviously only a fraction of these people are making decisions. So you can add zeroes to that number when you want to consider how much power the actual decision makers have. These decision makers are human, and humans are wont to see themselves as kings of their domain, and what is a king's job but to squander money squabbling over fiefdoms. The sheer, mind-boggling scale of systems of government, all of them, from your homeowner's association to your neighborhood council to your city government to your state government to the national government to international governmental organizations like NATO and the UN, isn't even the most interesting aspect to consider here. A more amazing thing to think about is how they manage to get anything done at all. But that's not even the biggest thing. The biggest thing is that there is nothing new about this state of affairs. Civilization was built like this, thousands of years ago. It's an admirable goal to want to get rid of waste in government. But that's an untamable firehose. You won't even get laughed at for a proposal to save $20b of tax money. They will look at you, decide whether you're going to look good on TV, maybe put you up in front of a camera if you're really really really really lucky, and everything you spent your whole life learning to finally try to do will get swept into a political capital generating exercise for a local politician. Thanks, try again next life. Governmental cruelty knows no bounds.