5 ms·

It's actually incredible how quickly effective software has become an expected function of a proper government. States, cities, and counties are now handling ve

It's actually incredible how quickly effective software has become an expected function of a proper government. States, cities, and counties are now handling vehicle registration, education, utilities and more over the internet. The paperless future (at least in urban and suburban US) is truly here.

bombcar 6y ago
There’s a danger here - the edges and the unserved. Charities have sprung up to help people apply for jobs now that they’re all online - can’t apply online if you don’t even have a phone let alone internet access. Online processes and APIs are great but we have to have backups and failsafes.
- fastball 6y ago
  Not really though. Libraries have internet access and are free to use. The failsafe is "find ways to give everyone internet access", which I think we've already done. Libraries, public wifi APs, cheap 4G, dirt cheap internet capable devices, etc.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    Companies can get away with serving 90% of the market or less, but places like the DMV and other government divisions have to serve 100% of the people - including those who even when presented with a library computer are unable to utilize it effectively. Foisting support costs off to libraries is another example of the tragedy of the commons.
    - fastball 6y ago
      What about people who don't know how to read? Are they served by all government services? No idea how you think this is a tragedy of the commons situation. It is definitely better to digitize everything and serve the 0.1% (certainly not anywhere close to 10%) with additional support that helps them use the digital service, rather than having non-digital fallbacks for significantly more expense.
      - kfarr 6y ago
        Yeah I agree libraries are actually the perfect solution for this, not a tragedy. I'm impressed recently with the relevance of libraries doing things exactly like this -- helping the masses access knowledge -- despite the shift away from print.
        jfk13 6y ago
        Does every remote rural hamlet have a library? How far is it reasonable to expect someone to travel in order to access this solution?
        fastball 6y ago
        If you're so rural you can't access a library, how were you using a pre-internet service in the first place? Internet services becomes more of a win if you're remote, not less so, espescially with things like Starlink coming online.
        kevingadd 6y ago
        Mail service and telephone service are effectively universal, so a job application via the mail or the phone is within reach of basically everyone. Having a handset and a phone line is also much cheaper than owning even a second-hand smartphone (at least a decent cellular plan with data isn't very expensive anymore). A deaf person could handle applying by phone via a relay service (though these days they probably can't because relay services are abused by malicious parties and everyone hangs up on them). Paper applications were probably very tough for blind people though, I'm not sure what the solution was... the internet is likely better there, if you're lucky and the job application website is actually accessible. I lived in a very rural area for about 50% of my childhood - we had no fire department, we relied on a well for water, our town's official population was in the hundreds, etc. If we wanted to get on the internet we had to do it at around 38400 and random packets would get corrupted because the lines were old and low-quality (I wrote my own parity tool in VB6 so that I could download a file 3-4 times and produce a not-corrupted version). Despite that, if I wanted to call someone up on the phone to speak with them or send a letter, that was just as easy and effective as it was when I lived in the suburbs. When we eventually managed to get slow DSL years later it was INCREDIBLY expensive because in rural areas if you're lucky enough to have service at all the monopolist who offers it knows they can charge as much as they want.
  - aimor 6y ago
    As a part of the pandemic libraries in my area are closed. This failsafe has also failed. I think you’re right that there should be a variety of redundant options to better cover people.
    - hedora 6y ago
      Around here, libraries lend out 4g access points and chrome books, fwiw.
- hansvm 6y ago
  > if you don’t even have a phone If you don't have a sufficiently expensive phone. In an effort to prevent easily creating cheap fake accounts (presumably -- I don't actually know), phone numbers associated with low-end android devices are routinely banned from social media platforms, online banks, and any number of other organizations.
  - easton 6y ago
    How can a phone number be associated with a certain type of device? AT&T doesn’t seem to know what kind of phone I have.
    - bombcar 6y ago
      I know that republic wireless’s “voip” number can’t be texted by some services.
    - hansvm 6y ago
      I doubt it's directly associated with a certain type of device but rather a certain carrier or block of numbers associated with cheap devices (e.g., tracfones). Regardless of the mechanism, the effect is real.
  - bellyfullofbac 6y ago
    Or sufficiently new. Your phone from 5 years ago only has Android 5? "This banking app needs Android 6 as a minimum". Flash a "homebrew" Android 6 ROM? "This device does not meet the security requirements.". Frakk off!
  - kspacewalk2 6y ago
    >phone numbers associated with low-end android devices are routinely banned from social media platforms, online banks, and any number of other organizations. Any references where I can read more about this?
    - hansvm 6y ago
      Mostly just personal experience. I think the common denominator is actually pre-paid vs post-paid plans, but it winds up having a similar effect because cheaper phones usually come with a pre-paid SIM and because pre-paid plans are usually much cheaper for spartan usage. Here are a few anecdotes from around the web. - https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Settings/Tracfone-users-excluded-from-using-Paypal/td-p/1364866 https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Settings/Tracfone-... - https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Settings/Paypal-doesn-t-recognize-my-phone-number/td-p/1159932 https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Settings/Paypal-do... - https://www.reddit.com/r/TracFone/comments/g42vl9/phone_number_registration_in_my_name/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TracFone/comments/g42vl9/phone_numb... - https://help.id.me/hc/en-us/articles/360017839774-Why-can-t-my-phone-number-be-verified- https://help.id.me/hc/en-us/articles/360017839774-Why-can-t-...
- steelframe 6y ago
  > Online processes and APIs are great but we have to have backups and failsafes. At my company everyone has gone API-crazy. There's one activity in a team I used to be on that used to require a human review of a configuration change. It's something that developers on the team do just a few times a year. Someone got the idea that this should be fully automated, because I guess it would look good on their performance review if they built a new service? What we had at the start was a description of what you were trying to do and how you could do it, but it included a manual review of a change request. It was simple, understandable, and required very little human attention. What we ended up with was an API for a microservice with its methods half-documented and no "big picture" description of what API calls you were supposed to make in which sequence to get the job done. API calls would fail with obscure misspelled error messages, and you'd have to guess what you did wrong in the JSON file you were submitting. And then of course it ended up not working half the time, and you'd have to open support tickets or ping the entire dev team in chat to ask why you weren't getting the results you expected when using the API. Of course the initial response tended to be, "Did you read the documentation?" And the user would have to respond, "Yes. Here is what I did after trying to decipher the so-called documentation, and here's why. Here are the results I need. I'm not getting them. How can I figure out why?" At which point two or three very annoyed developers would ask for details on exactly which API calls were made with which parameters, and they'd poke into logs and whatever, before they figured out yet another untested corner case and manually fix the database entries while saying, "Well don't do that next time." Sure, if you've got to scale to thousands of requests a week or something, building an API with a microservice might make sense. But there's a point of diminishing returns in trying to automate absolutely everything behind APIs. Some very low QPS things really should have a human in the loop by default.
EamonnMR 6y ago
What scares me is the obsession with supporting old desktop browsers and ignoring the majority of people who are using phones and might not have access to a desktop.
- 127 6y ago
  Some inertia is probably good considering how much Google tries to turn the Internet into the Googlenet.
- young_unixer 6y ago
  I'm scared about the opposite: governments releasing only Android and iOS apps and no web version for their services. At least the web is an open standard.
  - jfk13 6y ago
    It's not just governments: one of the (major) banks I deal with supports many types of account -- such as mortgages -- only via their apps, not on the web. I think that's appalling.
    - Master_Odin 6y ago
      Similar thing happened to me with Itau in Brazil in that their website was barely functional (with the last month I was a customer I couldn't even login in) and had to do everything over the cellphone app. Super annoying as I wasn't a native speaker of the language and desperately wanted to use my computer for ease of use with translation software.
postalrat 6y ago
Shitty cheeseburgers also kill people.
IshKebab 6y ago
Is it? I remember wishing in the early 00s that you could do more government tasks online but it was still all "send this form through the post". It took a long time for the UK government to digitise things. Mercifully when they finally did they did a good job.

bombcar 6y ago

There’s a danger here - the edges and the unserved. Charities have sprung up to help people apply for jobs now that they’re all online - can’t apply online if you don’t even have a phone let alone internet access. Online processes and APIs are great but we have to have backups and failsafes.

fastball 6y ago
Not really though. Libraries have internet access and are free to use. The failsafe is "find ways to give everyone internet access", which I think we've already done. Libraries, public wifi APs, cheap 4G, dirt cheap internet capable devices, etc.
- bombcar 6y ago
  Companies can get away with serving 90% of the market or less, but places like the DMV and other government divisions have to serve 100% of the people - including those who even when presented with a library computer are unable to utilize it effectively. Foisting support costs off to libraries is another example of the tragedy of the commons.
  - fastball 6y ago
    What about people who don't know how to read? Are they served by all government services? No idea how you think this is a tragedy of the commons situation. It is definitely better to digitize everything and serve the 0.1% (certainly not anywhere close to 10%) with additional support that helps them use the digital service, rather than having non-digital fallbacks for significantly more expense.
    - kfarr 6y ago
      Yeah I agree libraries are actually the perfect solution for this, not a tragedy. I'm impressed recently with the relevance of libraries doing things exactly like this -- helping the masses access knowledge -- despite the shift away from print.
      - jfk13 6y ago
        Does every remote rural hamlet have a library? How far is it reasonable to expect someone to travel in order to access this solution?
        fastball 6y ago
        If you're so rural you can't access a library, how were you using a pre-internet service in the first place? Internet services becomes more of a win if you're remote, not less so, espescially with things like Starlink coming online.
        kevingadd 6y ago
        Mail service and telephone service are effectively universal, so a job application via the mail or the phone is within reach of basically everyone. Having a handset and a phone line is also much cheaper than owning even a second-hand smartphone (at least a decent cellular plan with data isn't very expensive anymore). A deaf person could handle applying by phone via a relay service (though these days they probably can't because relay services are abused by malicious parties and everyone hangs up on them). Paper applications were probably very tough for blind people though, I'm not sure what the solution was... the internet is likely better there, if you're lucky and the job application website is actually accessible. I lived in a very rural area for about 50% of my childhood - we had no fire department, we relied on a well for water, our town's official population was in the hundreds, etc. If we wanted to get on the internet we had to do it at around 38400 and random packets would get corrupted because the lines were old and low-quality (I wrote my own parity tool in VB6 so that I could download a file 3-4 times and produce a not-corrupted version). Despite that, if I wanted to call someone up on the phone to speak with them or send a letter, that was just as easy and effective as it was when I lived in the suburbs. When we eventually managed to get slow DSL years later it was INCREDIBLY expensive because in rural areas if you're lucky enough to have service at all the monopolist who offers it knows they can charge as much as they want.
- aimor 6y ago
  As a part of the pandemic libraries in my area are closed. This failsafe has also failed. I think you’re right that there should be a variety of redundant options to better cover people.
  - hedora 6y ago
    Around here, libraries lend out 4g access points and chrome books, fwiw.
hansvm 6y ago
> if you don’t even have a phone If you don't have a sufficiently expensive phone. In an effort to prevent easily creating cheap fake accounts (presumably -- I don't actually know), phone numbers associated with low-end android devices are routinely banned from social media platforms, online banks, and any number of other organizations.
- easton 6y ago
  How can a phone number be associated with a certain type of device? AT&T doesn’t seem to know what kind of phone I have.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    I know that republic wireless’s “voip” number can’t be texted by some services.
  - hansvm 6y ago
    I doubt it's directly associated with a certain type of device but rather a certain carrier or block of numbers associated with cheap devices (e.g., tracfones). Regardless of the mechanism, the effect is real.
- bellyfullofbac 6y ago
  Or sufficiently new. Your phone from 5 years ago only has Android 5? "This banking app needs Android 6 as a minimum". Flash a "homebrew" Android 6 ROM? "This device does not meet the security requirements.". Frakk off!
- kspacewalk2 6y ago
  >phone numbers associated with low-end android devices are routinely banned from social media platforms, online banks, and any number of other organizations. Any references where I can read more about this?
  - hansvm 6y ago
    Mostly just personal experience. I think the common denominator is actually pre-paid vs post-paid plans, but it winds up having a similar effect because cheaper phones usually come with a pre-paid SIM and because pre-paid plans are usually much cheaper for spartan usage. Here are a few anecdotes from around the web. - https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Settings/Tracfone-users-excluded-from-using-Paypal/td-p/1364866 https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Settings/Tracfone-... - https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Settings/Paypal-doesn-t-recognize-my-phone-number/td-p/1159932 https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Settings/Paypal-do... - https://www.reddit.com/r/TracFone/comments/g42vl9/phone_number_registration_in_my_name/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TracFone/comments/g42vl9/phone_numb... - https://help.id.me/hc/en-us/articles/360017839774-Why-can-t-my-phone-number-be-verified- https://help.id.me/hc/en-us/articles/360017839774-Why-can-t-...
steelframe 6y ago
> Online processes and APIs are great but we have to have backups and failsafes. At my company everyone has gone API-crazy. There's one activity in a team I used to be on that used to require a human review of a configuration change. It's something that developers on the team do just a few times a year. Someone got the idea that this should be fully automated, because I guess it would look good on their performance review if they built a new service? What we had at the start was a description of what you were trying to do and how you could do it, but it included a manual review of a change request. It was simple, understandable, and required very little human attention. What we ended up with was an API for a microservice with its methods half-documented and no "big picture" description of what API calls you were supposed to make in which sequence to get the job done. API calls would fail with obscure misspelled error messages, and you'd have to guess what you did wrong in the JSON file you were submitting. And then of course it ended up not working half the time, and you'd have to open support tickets or ping the entire dev team in chat to ask why you weren't getting the results you expected when using the API. Of course the initial response tended to be, "Did you read the documentation?" And the user would have to respond, "Yes. Here is what I did after trying to decipher the so-called documentation, and here's why. Here are the results I need. I'm not getting them. How can I figure out why?" At which point two or three very annoyed developers would ask for details on exactly which API calls were made with which parameters, and they'd poke into logs and whatever, before they figured out yet another untested corner case and manually fix the database entries while saying, "Well don't do that next time." Sure, if you've got to scale to thousands of requests a week or something, building an API with a microservice might make sense. But there's a point of diminishing returns in trying to automate absolutely everything behind APIs. Some very low QPS things really should have a human in the loop by default.

EamonnMR 6y ago

What scares me is the obsession with supporting old desktop browsers and ignoring the majority of people who are using phones and might not have access to a desktop.

127 6y ago
Some inertia is probably good considering how much Google tries to turn the Internet into the Googlenet.
young_unixer 6y ago
I'm scared about the opposite: governments releasing only Android and iOS apps and no web version for their services. At least the web is an open standard.
- jfk13 6y ago
  It's not just governments: one of the (major) banks I deal with supports many types of account -- such as mortgages -- only via their apps, not on the web. I think that's appalling.
  - Master_Odin 6y ago
    Similar thing happened to me with Itau in Brazil in that their website was barely functional (with the last month I was a customer I couldn't even login in) and had to do everything over the cellphone app. Super annoying as I wasn't a native speaker of the language and desperately wanted to use my computer for ease of use with translation software.

postalrat 6y ago

Shitty cheeseburgers also kill people.

IshKebab 6y ago

Is it? I remember wishing in the early 00s that you could do more government tasks online but it was still all "send this form through the post". It took a long time for the UK government to digitise things. Mercifully when they finally did they did a good job.