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You really think that there is no savings potential for the German government? I think there is lots and lots. And BER is costing money every day. It might be

You really think that there is no savings potential for the German government? I think there is lots and lots. And BER is costing money every day. It might be cheaper to tear it down and start again from scratch. I think there is publication by the "society of tax payers" listing all the wasted tax payer money. Too few people read it though. https://www.schwarzbuch.de/ https://www.schwarzbuch.de/ - I see it is even free. And I have never read it, either. Will order a copy now :-) I think as long as people are reasonably pampered (enough money left after taxes), they don't care enough. In my opinion it is also the way the system is set up: taxes for employees are deducted before people even receive their money. So they have less feel for how much is being deducted. Self employed people see it differently. I had an employed person deny this recently, but I am not convinced.

ben_w 7y ago
Effectively, but not literally. With perfect information I might expect 3% savings from optimal changes. As perfect information is NP-hard, I expect the the reality to be that attempting to cut the waste will result in mistaking useful things for waste, and cutting those useless-seeming-useful-things will cost at least as much as is saved from cutting the actually-useless-things. This reply ran away from me a bit, for which I apologise. I don’t see how to improve it though.
- bubblewrap 7y ago
  Governments are not free markets. That is the problem. What you describe is exactly what governments do. They try to do better than free markets (human hubris, I guess), and therefore they produce waste. Few, if any, political parties try to reduce government.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Free markets are not magic, and furthermore they have been shown to only be efficient if P = NP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2895474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2895474 This problem is equally present in the private sector. If it wasn’t, we’d never — for example — have had the financial crisis. I would go so far as to say that the waste in the private sector is the main signal for improvement in your own argument, so eliminating it becomes asymptotically difficult in the same was as error reduction while training an AI. To put it another way, how many businesses use free markets internally? It’s not none worldwide, but it is none of the places I worked.

ben_w 7y ago

Effectively, but not literally. With perfect information I might expect 3% savings from optimal changes. As perfect information is NP-hard, I expect the the reality to be that attempting to cut the waste will result in mistaking useful things for waste, and cutting those useless-seeming-useful-things will cost at least as much as is saved from cutting the actually-useless-things. This reply ran away from me a bit, for which I apologise. I don’t see how to improve it though.

bubblewrap 7y ago
Governments are not free markets. That is the problem. What you describe is exactly what governments do. They try to do better than free markets (human hubris, I guess), and therefore they produce waste. Few, if any, political parties try to reduce government.
- ben_w 7y ago
  Free markets are not magic, and furthermore they have been shown to only be efficient if P = NP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2895474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2895474 This problem is equally present in the private sector. If it wasn’t, we’d never — for example — have had the financial crisis. I would go so far as to say that the waste in the private sector is the main signal for improvement in your own argument, so eliminating it becomes asymptotically difficult in the same was as error reduction while training an AI. To put it another way, how many businesses use free markets internally? It’s not none worldwide, but it is none of the places I worked.