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Yeah. Outsourced or not, I just can't remember our government having done anything well in my lifetime, except maybe winning traditional military battles agains
by technobabbler 5y ago
Yeah. Outsourced or not, I just can't remember our government having done anything well in my lifetime, except maybe winning traditional military battles against third world countries, which we also outsourced (then subsequently we lose the peace and create even more hostility, ripe for more outsourcing). The whole setup is just utterly incompetent, all the way up to the congress and president and supreme court... I don't know how it got this bad. Probably inevitable given the capture by for-profit entities and ideologues hell-bent on zero sum individualism.
The system is so incompetent and corrupt it lacks even the rudimentary feedback loops that might've otherwise allowed it to break the cycle. Seems like the only way for it to get any better is to completely collapse under its own incompetence. Egads.
- wongarsu 5y agoI think NASA is a quite interesting microcosm of outsourcing in the US government. Just looking at the last couple of years you can see clear success stories (e.g. commercial resupply), but also cases where lobbyists and lawyers are heavily involved and try to influence the decision towards the worse and out-of-budget choice (e.g. lunar lander), and projects that are too big to fail and are continued mostly due to political reasons and lobbying (e.g. SLS). With NASA all of this is fairly obvious because there's a big hobbyist community that's invested in the outcome, I have little doubt it's worse in other agencies where people pay less attention.