7 ms·

I would like to understand why this is a problem? Objectively, they ran the lottery, distributed the permits, and charged a fee to do so. What is your objection

I would like to understand why this is a problem? Objectively, they ran the lottery, distributed the permits, and charged a fee to do so. What is your objection specifically? I don't intend to passively inject an opinion — just trying to understand your position.

natpalmer1776 3y ago
The item of value being offered by the lottery is taxpayer funded, whereas most lotteries fund prizes via the proceeds of the lottery tickets. In this way, it can be considered exploitative since the proceeds don’t go back into “the pot” to any degree.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  The value being provided here is the website, which received no taxpayer funding other than the lottery proceeds.
  - natpalmer1776 3y ago
    Ah, I stand corrected, looking at Booz’s website I see that the agreement from the start was no upfront cost to taxpayers.
    - singleshot_ 3y ago
      Therein lies the rub: the people we selected to represent us turned us into a cash flow which they then sold to a government contractor. Instead of buying us a website, they sold us.
    - StillBored 3y ago
      But an endless cost on the backend... Sounds like a great deal. At least for one political party who's entire theory of government is starving the beast. Labeling a fee based rental agreement as not being a tax is more important than what the actual final use cost actually is. Even if the users actually paying the fee end up spending orders of magnitude more in the long run. Its a fantastic way to hide immense sums of corruption, it just needs to be done one dollar at a time.
    - asdff 3y ago
      The state and federal governments trains hundreds of thousands of computer science engineers a year. Engineering students are also in dire need of internships to appear employable. Seems like another way to run a website at little cost to taxpayers would be an internship program using a portion of the massive engineering workforce government is already paying to train, although that would mean a consultants hands are removed from the honeyjar. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if booze allens own college summer interns are doing the bulk of the work on this website.
  - StillBored 3y ago
    The _POINT_ of computers and websites is to lower the individual transactional costs of things like applying for a lottery. Rather than having to pick up the phone and speak to a person, or drive to the local office and fill out paperwork. Yet somehow, the person in the toll booth option has regularly been the cheaper option than paying these immense fee's to obviously corrupt government contractors. How many web site designers and colocated machines does it take to run a freaking reservation system that probably gets a couple million reservations a day. Plus, if done correctly a large initial investment and then a trivial amount of work to keep it running, where the vast majority of the work is the local parks/etc changing the state of campground availability/etc. Put another way, everyone wants to be the credit card companies that have successfully gotten massively rich on a system where they are taking a percentage of the total transactional value rather than a trivial flat per transaction fee. And this model doesn't belong anywhere near public systems because those public lands exist for the "public", the majority of which can barely afford the gas to get to the park, much less funneling more of their meager resources to a fat cat government contractor. $6 is close to an hours work for someone making minimum wage.
    - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
      > How many web site designers and colocated machines does it take to run a freaking reservation system that probably gets a couple million reservations a day. The cool thing about the US is that it's a democracy. If you feel so strongly about this, make this case to the government. There's precedent and it's bad, it's called healthcare.gov. I don't mean this in a pithy way btw, I'm a transit activist and I go to protests, phone up lawmakers, and attend public meetings. There are a wide array of small reasons that all sum up to the government being really bad at certain things. But again, this can change with you and me. Don't be emotional on HN, be emotional to your state reps! > The _POINT_ of computers and websites is to lower the individual transactional costs of things like applying for a lottery. Rather than having to pick up the phone and speak to a person, or drive to the local office and fill out paperwork. You're forgetting the huge growth our National Parks have seen. The days of the toll booth worked when the US had a fraction of its people, a fraction of the motor vehicle traffic, before the virality of social media, and with a more ingrained belief that a national park was a rugged place and not a place to take the family in an air conditioned, controlled experience. The old system of phone calls would have just made the parks out of reach for all of these new folks interested in them.
post-it 3y ago
The objection is that this is a government monopoly funnelling money to a private company beyond what GP (and myself) consider to be a reasonable profit margin.
- vel0city 3y ago
  What has BAH's total profits been on this project? What did they spend to make it, what have their operating costs amounted to, how much have they made?
csharpminor 3y ago
As someone who participates in these lotteries, the lack of transparency is the biggest issue. If there's a way to view estimated odds I have not seen it. Additionally, these lotteries usually have a second level of rules that impact your odds. For example, day of week or starting trailhead. I would gladly shift dates / routes and apply for different lotteries, but I have little basis to make those decisions on.
- pc86 3y ago
  If there are only 330 permits don't the odds depend entirely on how many people sign up?
  - anthlax 3y ago
    Perhaps the above comment means that the secondary factors affect the denominator - i.e more people go hiking on Saturday, so entering the Saturday lottery is worse than entering the Wednesday one
    - csharpminor 3y ago
      Exactly, and it impacts the denominator by a great margin. The value of the lottery ticket to me is a function of the cost, odds, timing and interest I have in the destination. If the odds of one trailhead are 1000x lower than another one that is comparable across the other variables then I'm needlessly overpaying, and Booze Allen pockets that inefficiency.
  - csharpminor 3y ago
    Sure, but they could display odds from past lotteries or provide current odds at time of purchase. You really have no clue what you're getting when you give them your $6-$15.
tonymet 3y ago
It doesn't abide by the law (the plaintiffs case). It's not free enterprise: the govt is granting them a monopoly on ticket sales for those events. It's economically inefficient. The operators are making insane profit margins (likely 75%+ ) with no competition. These are public resources funded by tax payers. The operator is making illegal and unreasonable profit on the taxpayers property
gcanyon 3y ago
I would happily code and run a lottery system for $0.99 per entry. Someone else would likely do it for cheaper than that. It just seems egregiously expensive.
- solardev 3y ago
  If you have the means, how about starting a better-run company or cooperative or nonprofit to compete against the likes of Booz? I'd love to join and/or support such an effort.
  - gcanyon 3y ago
    I’ll see what I can figure out. Feel free to email me (address in my profile).
  - havnagiggle 3y ago
    Honestly a wave of non-profit software companies would be a fantastic boon for the world. However my current work arrangement is tough to top so for fairly selfish reasons I probably wouldn't consider it for a few more years.

natpalmer1776 3y ago

The item of value being offered by the lottery is taxpayer funded, whereas most lotteries fund prizes via the proceeds of the lottery tickets. In this way, it can be considered exploitative since the proceeds don’t go back into “the pot” to any degree.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
The value being provided here is the website, which received no taxpayer funding other than the lottery proceeds.
- natpalmer1776 3y ago
  Ah, I stand corrected, looking at Booz’s website I see that the agreement from the start was no upfront cost to taxpayers.
  - singleshot_ 3y ago
    Therein lies the rub: the people we selected to represent us turned us into a cash flow which they then sold to a government contractor. Instead of buying us a website, they sold us.
  - StillBored 3y ago
    But an endless cost on the backend... Sounds like a great deal. At least for one political party who's entire theory of government is starving the beast. Labeling a fee based rental agreement as not being a tax is more important than what the actual final use cost actually is. Even if the users actually paying the fee end up spending orders of magnitude more in the long run. Its a fantastic way to hide immense sums of corruption, it just needs to be done one dollar at a time.
  - asdff 3y ago
    The state and federal governments trains hundreds of thousands of computer science engineers a year. Engineering students are also in dire need of internships to appear employable. Seems like another way to run a website at little cost to taxpayers would be an internship program using a portion of the massive engineering workforce government is already paying to train, although that would mean a consultants hands are removed from the honeyjar. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if booze allens own college summer interns are doing the bulk of the work on this website.
- StillBored 3y ago
  The _POINT_ of computers and websites is to lower the individual transactional costs of things like applying for a lottery. Rather than having to pick up the phone and speak to a person, or drive to the local office and fill out paperwork. Yet somehow, the person in the toll booth option has regularly been the cheaper option than paying these immense fee's to obviously corrupt government contractors. How many web site designers and colocated machines does it take to run a freaking reservation system that probably gets a couple million reservations a day. Plus, if done correctly a large initial investment and then a trivial amount of work to keep it running, where the vast majority of the work is the local parks/etc changing the state of campground availability/etc. Put another way, everyone wants to be the credit card companies that have successfully gotten massively rich on a system where they are taking a percentage of the total transactional value rather than a trivial flat per transaction fee. And this model doesn't belong anywhere near public systems because those public lands exist for the "public", the majority of which can barely afford the gas to get to the park, much less funneling more of their meager resources to a fat cat government contractor. $6 is close to an hours work for someone making minimum wage.
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    > How many web site designers and colocated machines does it take to run a freaking reservation system that probably gets a couple million reservations a day. The cool thing about the US is that it's a democracy. If you feel so strongly about this, make this case to the government. There's precedent and it's bad, it's called healthcare.gov. I don't mean this in a pithy way btw, I'm a transit activist and I go to protests, phone up lawmakers, and attend public meetings. There are a wide array of small reasons that all sum up to the government being really bad at certain things. But again, this can change with you and me. Don't be emotional on HN, be emotional to your state reps! > The _POINT_ of computers and websites is to lower the individual transactional costs of things like applying for a lottery. Rather than having to pick up the phone and speak to a person, or drive to the local office and fill out paperwork. You're forgetting the huge growth our National Parks have seen. The days of the toll booth worked when the US had a fraction of its people, a fraction of the motor vehicle traffic, before the virality of social media, and with a more ingrained belief that a national park was a rugged place and not a place to take the family in an air conditioned, controlled experience. The old system of phone calls would have just made the parks out of reach for all of these new folks interested in them.

post-it 3y ago

The objection is that this is a government monopoly funnelling money to a private company beyond what GP (and myself) consider to be a reasonable profit margin.

vel0city 3y ago
What has BAH's total profits been on this project? What did they spend to make it, what have their operating costs amounted to, how much have they made?

csharpminor 3y ago

As someone who participates in these lotteries, the lack of transparency is the biggest issue. If there's a way to view estimated odds I have not seen it. Additionally, these lotteries usually have a second level of rules that impact your odds. For example, day of week or starting trailhead. I would gladly shift dates / routes and apply for different lotteries, but I have little basis to make those decisions on.

pc86 3y ago
If there are only 330 permits don't the odds depend entirely on how many people sign up?
- anthlax 3y ago
  Perhaps the above comment means that the secondary factors affect the denominator - i.e more people go hiking on Saturday, so entering the Saturday lottery is worse than entering the Wednesday one
  - csharpminor 3y ago
    Exactly, and it impacts the denominator by a great margin. The value of the lottery ticket to me is a function of the cost, odds, timing and interest I have in the destination. If the odds of one trailhead are 1000x lower than another one that is comparable across the other variables then I'm needlessly overpaying, and Booze Allen pockets that inefficiency.
- csharpminor 3y ago
  Sure, but they could display odds from past lotteries or provide current odds at time of purchase. You really have no clue what you're getting when you give them your $6-$15.

tonymet 3y ago

It doesn't abide by the law (the plaintiffs case). It's not free enterprise: the govt is granting them a monopoly on ticket sales for those events. It's economically inefficient. The operators are making insane profit margins (likely 75%+ ) with no competition. These are public resources funded by tax payers. The operator is making illegal and unreasonable profit on the taxpayers property

gcanyon 3y ago

I would happily code and run a lottery system for $0.99 per entry. Someone else would likely do it for cheaper than that. It just seems egregiously expensive.

solardev 3y ago
If you have the means, how about starting a better-run company or cooperative or nonprofit to compete against the likes of Booz? I'd love to join and/or support such an effort.
- gcanyon 3y ago
  I’ll see what I can figure out. Feel free to email me (address in my profile).
- havnagiggle 3y ago
  Honestly a wave of non-profit software companies would be a fantastic boon for the world. However my current work arrangement is tough to top so for fairly selfish reasons I probably wouldn't consider it for a few more years.