3 ms·

The only faith I have in government is their ability to mess up things in the stupidest way possible.

• mjburgess 6y ago
  Despite, of course, almost everything working almost all of the time. And, of course, of almost everyone involved acting in good faith. We have elevated tiny mistakes to headlines, and politician's character flaws to some systematic issue with the whole of government. This has profound issues for governments actually being able to, eg., manage a pandemic. If no one trusts, you cannot coordinate. And trust is often warrented and needed.
  • save_ferris 6y ago
    We also have no interest reading about when government performs a task ahead of schedule or under-budget, and almost nobody takes the time to actually look through government reports, budgets, etc. to see what’s going on, even though almost all of it is public.
  • Anka33 6y ago
    These things does not work due to the government but despite the government.
  • cortexio 6y ago
    Most things do not work because of the government, it's because you have long standing organizations within the government that is being run by people that do not want to lose their job. These people keep our countries working. But politicians... they sell their power and in general work for their own interests. This where people lose their trust. It's not mobile internet that declines government trust, it's just the internet. Because on the internet, you can have discussions and truth wins.
  • luckylion 6y ago
    > Despite, of course, almost everything working almost all of the time. And, of course, of almost everyone involved acting in good faith. That depends on the definition of "working", I think. I don't doubt the good faith of those involved, but "some form of train service between two locations" is a very low hurdle for "working" if that train is late, slower then advertised, only half the size it was announced to be, or running it costs three times as much as trains elsewhere. If you consider quality and price, not just binary functionality, "working" becomes a lot fuzzier. It's hard to compare public services and government actions because we don't have competing government in the same locations, but "something happens" isn't necessarily "everything working almost all of the time".
    • mjburgess 6y ago
      The trains run. Given human history, and every other undeveloped country, this is working. It is incredibly difficult for a society to function as smoothly as any western country does. It is miraculous to people in many nations that there can be such things as timetables at all.
      • luckylion 6y ago
        > The trains run. Given human history, and every other undeveloped country, this is working. Sure, and in the context of any single country it might not be working. Is a train running at 3mph "working" because there were no trains on earth during all those years of human history before the invention of trains? I don't think that's a useful definition of "working". I do absolutely agree that advanced societies are miraculous, though I wouldn't call them functioning smoothly (there's a lot of overhead). Still, there's plenty of things that aren't working at all or aren't working as well as they should (a thousand dollar burger should taste crazy delicious), and government (or more general: a large bureaucracy, of which government is the largest) is often involved.
        • mjburgess 6y ago
          your definition of "work" is a moral/aesethic one, rather than a functional one there is no sense in which a $1k dollar burger weighs on whether a society is functioning your moral distaste at the marginal value of $1k to different people, doesnt strike me, as very relevant to the issue indeed, that, people have different marginal values for $1k is precisely a symptom of how profoundly well rich societies function
          • luckylion 6y ago
            > your definition of "work" is a moral/aesethic one, rather than a functional one Do you think that a power plant that produces energy at $10000/kwh "works" next to one that produces energy at $0.1/kwh? I don't see "works" as a binary, I consider it relative to expectations and possibilities. I hoped the burger example would illustrate that, but maybe it was too close to reality since it probably exists. Let me try another way: it's great to have clean water, but if you spend all X on providing clean water while others create the same with X/1000, whatever you're doing to produce clean water is not working. But of course it "working" as in "okay, there's clean water", but it's not working in a societal sense, we cannot sustain doing that, we must look for another option.
• chasd00 6y ago
  I hear you, I think of asking government to solve a problem (outside of killing people) as the very last, bottom of the barrel, resort.