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If software companies ran the government there would be no regulation of any kind. You would think with the complete loss of regulation the government would dra
by austincheney 5y ago
If software companies ran the government there would be no regulation of any kind. You would think with the complete loss of regulation the government would drastically shrink and become more cost efficient, but on the contrary it would remain just as large.
Perhaps that inefficiency would be partially due to biased hiring. There would be no uniform qualifier for any position or candidate. Everything is an ad hoc decision and literacy is optional. To make those ad hoc decisions feel more informed there could be entire departments devoted to solving this problem with trends and gimmicks.
Perhaps the inefficiency would be due to ineffective education providing candidates with dated skills who write slow bloated products. It doesn’t really matter because employees only need to be minimally efficient to barely qualify their exist and everything else can be contracted out.
When starting a new government initiative, such as building a bridge or defending a country, you don’t need to qualify the expense. Instead you only need to qualify the potential and continuously ask for more money. Hopefully that bridge gets built before the seed money runs out. I guess that’s not much different than the current government and Uber.
Sometimes data is considered when making important decisions, but most often it is ignored in favor of familiar legacy conventions until there is a lawsuit. Fortunately the government would be much better at shielding itself from any kinds of lawsuits or transparency using Section 203 and DMCA as shining examples.
- amelius 5y ago> If software companies ran the government there would be no regulation of any kind. Are you kidding? Just look at all the rules in the App Store.
- austincheney 5y agoOh yeah, you're right. If software companies ran the government all cash dispersions would become opaque micro-transactions tied to a vendor completely incompatible with other government services.
- monkeybutton 5y agoI'm sorry sir, you cannot pay municipal taxes using federal income tax credit tokens, they must be converted by an approved partner first.
- oopsyDoodl 5y agoThat sounds less like an issue with software companies and more like a privatization at scale problem in general. Gentlemens club contracts to behave as a middleman between the people and government, corporate bucks, rent being deducted from pay… all happened before. The software part of it is the only novel part to this story. If we’re going to continue to allow landlords, get used to it. Either you set aside specific time pay them in nation state bucks or they’ll garnish your wages. How this is seen as any different than forcing a religion on people, I don’t know. I don’t believe in Bill Gates’ wealth. I’ve never seen him work a day in my life. He’s afforded the social status of a Pope even after his business was convicted of market manipulation. Yep we’re basically living in the imaginations of others again.
- chasil 5y agoActually, I was thinking more of the GPL. I read the full wikis on Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger over the weekend, and it got me thinking. What if Richard Stallman ran the country? How would commercial, closed source software be punished? There is no doubt that it would be.
- amelius 5y agoReminds me of: https://openclipart.org/detail/143659/che-stallman https://openclipart.org/detail/143659/che-stallman
- quantified 5y agoThe GPL is absolutely regulation, it’s just in a different direction. Getting a software company that employs/backs GPL in the first place…
- Nasrudith 5y agoIf software companies ran te govenment they wouldn't be software companies any more. Operating under assumptions being the same would be like assuming that if Tsarist Russia never fell but Stalin was in line for the throne he would still be an avowed communist. There would be so many fundamental differences that the comparison fails to have meaning nor even how the configuration could come to be.