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> how the US government can constantly solves very tricky real world problems that impact our lives What are some recent examples? Especially dealing with tech

> how the US government can constantly solves very tricky real world problems that impact our lives What are some recent examples? Especially dealing with technology? I can think of a bunch of counter-examples where the government did not do a good job of regulating: * Rural broadband failed * Net neutrality failed * Healthcare.gov was a fiasco * Wireless spectrum auction never got us municipal/rural long-range wireless * NASA's duties have largely been outsourced to private actors * State DMVs are a shitshow * Election integrity failed * They can't figure out what to do about online disinformation * Warrantless wiretapping: both unconstitutional yet ineffective, as in 9/11 and the lack of data sharing between agencies * Foreign military misadventures, our traditional forte: Afghanistan, Iraq, both abysmal failures * Healthcare: a joke compared to every other developed country * Education: pathetic and getting worse * Social programs: Welfare, what welfare? inequality and homelessness getting worse every year * Infrastructure: crumbling * Clean water: only for rich white people * Immigration: heh * Covid: lol * Renewables: haha * Nuclear: let's pretend it's not there On every major policy front, the US government has been a disaster for decades. I'm no libertarian by any stretch, but our government is a complete shitshow compared to any other developed democracy. We have neither the leadership competence (decisionmakers and legislators) nor the engineering talent (career civil servants) who can tackle something as diverse as nuanced as IoT security, or arguably, digital security in general. Give them 20 years and they might be able to catch up to 1990s netsec, and by then the manufacturers will be two decades ahead and foreign intelligence services even further beyond that. Our government is doomed, and taking us down with it.

Retric 5y ago
Almost everything the government does is extremely complicated. How about the modern coast guard search and rescue process, weather forecasting, air traffic control, making counterfeit resistant money, etc etc. Of course it’s all stuff the government does directly like GPS that generally works even if theirs issues with version 1. Go to Healthcare.gov today and it works fine, but wow 8 years ago there where issues. People still get mileage talking about that launch presumably because it’s that unusual. Bringing up the FTC there’s keeping the wireless spectrum clean. You can blame the Government for not solving all shorts of issues, but people complain while at the same time they largely don’t want state or federal government internet. Healthcare is the same issue, we apparently don’t want even a public option, yet somehow the government is still on the hook. People are always going to talk up government boondoggles because that’s what’s memorable. Clean water in all 155,693 public water systems in the United States isn’t easy it’s a monumentally difficult task that works 99.9% of the time across a huge range of public and private organizations managed by a huge range of different locations from tiny towns to vast cities. Of course if people actually trusted their water then bottled water would be less popular…
- technobabbler 5y ago
  Almost anything any government does is extremely complicated, and yet most of the developed ones succeed in ways our fails at. Why are we unique? Countries poorer than us, less dense than us, smaller than us, still manage to provide many basic services, rights, protections, and guarantees that ours does not. This is American exceptionalism gone awry. Those things you mentioned aren't recent developments. Yes, there was a time when our government was capable of producing good output. What happened? Why are we still judging today's government by its successes of decades past...? Most of what you mentioned is literally last-century tech. The world has moved on; our government has not. > You can blame the Government for not solving all shorts of issues, but people complain while at the same time they largely don’t want state or federal government internet. Maybe there's one class of issues that government can't deliver on because the public mandate isn't quite there yet, like single-payer healthcare. But there's another class of issues that the public DOES want, the government already wrote the laws and allocated the budget for, and then did absolutely nothing about (like rural broadband grants basically going to corrupt telcos, with zero real enforcement). That has nothing to do with the lack of public will, just sheer incompetence and corruption. Then there's the outright unconstitutional things, like warrantless wiretapping or drone assassinations of US citizens... to say nothing of recent developments, like Roe v Wade. It's not that our boondoggles our more visible, it's that we fail at providing basic services for a huge portion of the population -- things that most other developed democracies can provide without much issue or controversy. By that measure, we fall far short.
  - Retric 5y ago
    It’s generally possible to find individual governments that do just about any specific thing better than the US gov, but that’s not to say each of those countries is better in every way. The best healthcare isn’t in the country with the lowest crime, least corruption, down a list where the 2nd country is then second on every criteria. Further only looking at US failures ignores how other counties fail in different ways. The UK’s land situation is seriously messed up and yet we rarely consider that when comparing governments. I am not going to say the US is #1, but it’s a long way from abject failure. Also when you excluded say Nigeria and in fact most counties then every remaining country is going to seem worse simply because you just arbitrarily raised the standards. It’s not US exceptionalism to simply say few countries or groups of countries have landed anything on Mars which is freaking difficult. Sure, providing great healthcare is more important, but it’s also something very few counties have done well. In the detracting from success by looking at unrelated failures misses my argument, at best it speeks to the likelihood of success not the possibility.

Retric 5y ago

Almost everything the government does is extremely complicated. How about the modern coast guard search and rescue process, weather forecasting, air traffic control, making counterfeit resistant money, etc etc. Of course it’s all stuff the government does directly like GPS that generally works even if theirs issues with version 1. Go to Healthcare.gov today and it works fine, but wow 8 years ago there where issues. People still get mileage talking about that launch presumably because it’s that unusual. Bringing up the FTC there’s keeping the wireless spectrum clean. You can blame the Government for not solving all shorts of issues, but people complain while at the same time they largely don’t want state or federal government internet. Healthcare is the same issue, we apparently don’t want even a public option, yet somehow the government is still on the hook. People are always going to talk up government boondoggles because that’s what’s memorable. Clean water in all 155,693 public water systems in the United States isn’t easy it’s a monumentally difficult task that works 99.9% of the time across a huge range of public and private organizations managed by a huge range of different locations from tiny towns to vast cities. Of course if people actually trusted their water then bottled water would be less popular…

technobabbler 5y ago
Almost anything any government does is extremely complicated, and yet most of the developed ones succeed in ways our fails at. Why are we unique? Countries poorer than us, less dense than us, smaller than us, still manage to provide many basic services, rights, protections, and guarantees that ours does not. This is American exceptionalism gone awry. Those things you mentioned aren't recent developments. Yes, there was a time when our government was capable of producing good output. What happened? Why are we still judging today's government by its successes of decades past...? Most of what you mentioned is literally last-century tech. The world has moved on; our government has not. > You can blame the Government for not solving all shorts of issues, but people complain while at the same time they largely don’t want state or federal government internet. Maybe there's one class of issues that government can't deliver on because the public mandate isn't quite there yet, like single-payer healthcare. But there's another class of issues that the public DOES want, the government already wrote the laws and allocated the budget for, and then did absolutely nothing about (like rural broadband grants basically going to corrupt telcos, with zero real enforcement). That has nothing to do with the lack of public will, just sheer incompetence and corruption. Then there's the outright unconstitutional things, like warrantless wiretapping or drone assassinations of US citizens... to say nothing of recent developments, like Roe v Wade. It's not that our boondoggles our more visible, it's that we fail at providing basic services for a huge portion of the population -- things that most other developed democracies can provide without much issue or controversy. By that measure, we fall far short.
- Retric 5y ago
  It’s generally possible to find individual governments that do just about any specific thing better than the US gov, but that’s not to say each of those countries is better in every way. The best healthcare isn’t in the country with the lowest crime, least corruption, down a list where the 2nd country is then second on every criteria. Further only looking at US failures ignores how other counties fail in different ways. The UK’s land situation is seriously messed up and yet we rarely consider that when comparing governments. I am not going to say the US is #1, but it’s a long way from abject failure. Also when you excluded say Nigeria and in fact most counties then every remaining country is going to seem worse simply because you just arbitrarily raised the standards. It’s not US exceptionalism to simply say few countries or groups of countries have landed anything on Mars which is freaking difficult. Sure, providing great healthcare is more important, but it’s also something very few counties have done well. In the detracting from success by looking at unrelated failures misses my argument, at best it speeks to the likelihood of success not the possibility.