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Because certain concepts have been repeated so often they've become elements of faith (e.g., "taxes are too high", "government is filled with fraud and waste",

Because certain concepts have been repeated so often they've become elements of faith (e.g., "taxes are too high", "government is filled with fraud and waste", "taxing the 1% will solve our country's financial problems"), careful conversation about the complexities of the modern world is difficult to have. I think that complex solutions CAN be grasped by the large majority of voters, but their time and attention are so captured by sloganeers that they aren't exposed to the explanations.

crubier 2y ago
Ok, but taxes are too high though, for real
- JackYoustra 2y ago
  Too high for what? Too high for desired services level? Too high for most of the people or few? Too high for value? Too high for your personal preference? It's really important to be specific, and what I've written is still impossibly vague to be even close to actionable
  - Henchman21 2y ago
    In the US they’re too high for what we get: essentially nothing. So if I am taxed, things need to be done with those taxes. Not just line the pockets of whomever get it. I sure don’t.
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      In the US, you get social security, medicare/medicaid, the world's most powerful military, transportation infrastructure, education, fire departments, VA benefits, and hundreds of other things. You might not value any of it, but that's the parent's point: You aren't getting nothing, you're getting a lot of expensive things you don't value for your taxes. It's a completely different type of discussion to have and one that's much more amenable to productive discussion.
      - Ygg2 2y ago
        > transportation infrastructure, education, fire departments, Didn't recent events like LA fires demonstrate just how neglected those services are. Having a better military in a war is great, but having overtly fat military industrial complex isn't that great.
        daveguy 2y ago
        Apparently you fell for the narrative that LA ran out of water because they preferred to save the environment. Just so you know, it didn't matter how much water was in any reservoirs. There was plenty of water. The two failures that happened were -- 100 MPH wind after drought conditions, and the fact that if you try to get water out of every fire hydrant in a large area you will run out of water pressure. The solution to water pressure is increasing the number of reservoirs so that each one services a smaller area. That is done with infrastructure improvements that require a government willing to fund them, and residents willing to accept them. 100 MPH winds + drought conditions + fire over a large area is not addressable without massive over-provisioning. You may want to reconsider where you get your news from, because it seems you are being misinformed.
        pclmulqdq 2y ago
        The local reservoir that serviced the palisades was out of service for months due to a tear in its roof which had yet to be fixed. The repair, per a competent repair person, would have taken a week if they had done it. That's why the water pressure locally was so low. They had already done what you wanted, and increased the number of reservoirs, but the relevant one had been out of service for months. It can both be true that Trump is a bloviating liar and the LA government is incompetent.
        daveguy 2y ago
        It may be a bit more complicated than what a nameless "competent repair person" thought it should have been. Do you worship your news sources too? https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/reservoir-pacific-palisades-was-commission-fire-started-rcna187217 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/reservoir-pacific-palis...
    - lwansbrough 2y ago
      "Americans get nothing for their taxes" is... certainly an opinion.
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        An opinion that can only seriously emerge atop the safest, most prosperous empire to ever exist.
        yard2010 2y ago
        For some people, living hell for the poor.
      - throw16180339 2y ago
        It's someone who was born on third base complaining that they have to run to home plate.
    - orf 2y ago
      > In the US they’re too high for what we get: essentially nothing He wrote, using his 5g phone connection and the internet from the safety of his home. Outside, a car sits silently in the driveway.
      - Henchman21 2y ago
        Yes, I am very safe in my little cage where I take my antibiotics and still kiss with saliva. A cage is still a cage.
        orf 2y ago
        And it’s an entirely different point to the initial one.
        Henchman21 2y ago
        Are you speaking to me or everyone BUT me? Because I’ll be both direct and honest: this is the type of bullshit that causes me to withdraw from interacting with the bulk of humanity. Mock me all you like.
        JackYoustra 2y ago
        the point is that all the things that commenter listed are enabled by the taxes we pay - it's the price we pay for living in a civilized society. Saying that they don't directly pay it misses the forest for the trees: we decide to pay taxes for things in a system that overall produces these outcomes, treating them separately is to split parts of a coevolved system
        Henchman21 2y ago
        Civilized society doesn’t require a layer of working poor at the bottom to function. That is what I am a part of: the great mass of unfulfilled workers with no choices, no chance for advancement. I’m a blue collar worker right on the edge of high end white collar work. I see on a daily basis that which I can never possess. The system produces these outcomes because that is the desired design goal of the system. If this is “civilization” I want no part of it. But then, we don’t get that choice anymore do we? Where could I go on Earth to escape my fate? Because all I see is my own death is the only escape
  - Swizec 2y ago
    As a non-american paying american taxes: I would like more of my money to go into welfare and social transfers to make the country more liveable to all, and less into million dollar bombs thrown at thousand dollar homes. Or, like, at least fix all the potholes maybe?
    - JackYoustra 2y ago
      STILL too vague - _most_ of the federal budget goes to SS and medicare / medicaid. Potholes are almost exclusively a local-level thing, so calling them "american" taxes is a bit off, you'd be thinking more about state and municipal taxes at that point. The impediment that sucks up ~40% of CPI is housing, and that is overwhelmingly constrained by really crappy zoning and building regulation at the local level. Not much the federal government can do against that without going full constitutional crisis or amendment.
      - Swizec 2y ago
        > _most_ of the federal budget goes to SS and medicare / medicaid Okay but social security isn’t the government’s money, it’s ours. The program is profitable afaik (gets more than it pays out). Govt is just holding/managing the money and needs to track it as debt when they use that money for anything other than giving to people.
        JackYoustra 2y ago
        All of the government's money is our money? Not sure what this means.
      - majormajor 2y ago
        > The impediment that sucks up ~40% of CPI is housing, and that is overwhelmingly constrained by really crappy zoning and building regulation at the local level. Not much the federal government can do against that without going full constitutional crisis or amendment. Housing cost in popular areas/major cities is not solely an American problem. So a lot of the American-specific stories about why it's high - "zoning", "parking requirements", "NIMBY's" aren't fully satisfying. Few places have solved it. Big successful cities often keep growing around the world which means constantly increasing demand which means an affordability trend that rarely goes in the right direction. In a classically-efficient market, where those with the $$$ to do major development projects often substantially overlap with those who have major $$$ stake in prices staying high, few things are more necessary than housing so why wouldn't we expect the price to approach the max that individuals could bear? Removing regulation isn't enough, IMO, since nobody with the money to make major investments in housing wants to rock the price boat too quickly or suddenly. You need proactive regulation on both pricing and public development efforts to undercut the current market.
  - scarmig 2y ago
    The level of taxation is not the most relevant thing, even though it attracts the most attention. There are countless socially valuable things that they can be spent on. The core issue is that Americans don't get back much for their level of taxation. The USA is a fundamentally dog-eat-dog place. Given that, working Americans pay an absurd amount of taxes. I pay over 40% of my income in local, state, and federal taxes. Despite that, it's not hard to imagine being thrown onto the streets to die after experiencing a single issue. Where is it going? Not to me, and not to any services I'll be able to access in times of difficulty.
- ericjmorey 2y ago
  No
- tomtomtom777 2y ago
  I don't no which country you are from but in the western world, if you compare countries by their tax rates, countries with high taxes [1] tend to score quite well on quality-of-life comparisons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_tax_revenue_to_GDP_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ta...
  - yard2010 2y ago
    I would cross check it with corruption levels, sometimes high taxes are just organized crime with extra steps.
- winwang 2y ago
  And you know this to be true (indubitably), based on what, exactly? (I'm not even sure which country you're referencing either).
AnotherGoodName 2y ago
It reminds me of all the naive engineers that look at a complex codebase, don't fully grok it, and say "this is a mess, it needs a rewrite!". They then find out that every complex rule had a reason for existing. The rewrite takes time and resources to reimplement. As they go they hit snag after snag and add a specific business rule for that only to find out that they are just recreating the original "too complex and inefficient" codebase with a whole lot of effort and money wasted.
- lwansbrough 2y ago
  We're basically paying the government per line of code written currently. Ask Microsoft how that turned out.
  - daveguy 2y ago
    What do you mean by that? Is that how doge is working? No one in the government has previously been paid per line of code. Am I missing something here?
    - lwansbrough 2y ago
      It's a metaphor for how we pay for the evolving and deepening complexity of government, without any effort being put into processes that might help eliminate complexity -- because there's no real accountability for spending. I think "DOGE" is conceptually a good idea, and if it were executed by a competent administration could lead to great outcomes, as was the case with the USDS.
      - aqueueaqueue 2y ago
        Trump could have put someone good on it, but he prefers loyalty over competence.
      - daveguy 2y ago
        Well yeah, government efficiency is obviously a "great idea", but that is ridiculously simplistic. No one is paid for "great ideas" without any clue how to execute. Poorly implemented good ideas screw things up just as bad as bad ideas. Maybe worse. If it's a good idea, implemented poorly, you have a lot of cheerleaders worshipping the idea. But if it's a bad idea, at least you have people offering alternative ideas.
istjohn 2y ago
Not to nitpick, but "taxing the 1% will solve our country's financial problems" comes off as a bit of a strawman. "Tax the rich" is a common sentiment, but I don't often hear people saying the rest of it. There are plenty of plausible reasons one may want to tax the rich even if you don't believe it is a total solution. For one, you may be concerned about the power imbalance created when a handful of people have more wealth than half the country combined [0]. Recent developments have brought that concern into even sharper focus for many. 0. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/top-50-richest-people-in-the-us-are-worth-as-much-as-poorest-165-million https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/top-50-ri...
- silotis 2y ago
  It's usually not stated so explicitly, but often implied by people who advocate for expansive entitlement programs. When pressed on how to pay for such programs, "tax the rich" is often their only answer.
  - LPisGood 2y ago
    I think you’re misusing the word “entitlement” as it is used with respect to US government spending. Can you elaborate what you think the connection is?
  - neilwilson 2y ago
    When the real answer is, you pay for it by spending the money. Because money is a circuit, tax is a percentage and money doesn’t stop at its first use.
    - willturman 2y ago
      The technical term for the number of times a dollar is spent in a given time period is the velocity of money [1]. The velocity of money in the United States has dropped sharply over the past 30 years [2] as inflation on inelastic goods like housing, education, healthcare, and food have far outstripped the consumer price index and people opt to spend their money buying things from large corporations instead of small businesses in their communities. The velocity of money is about as good a high-level measure of where the balance between “Wall Street and Main Street” lies as you’ll find - and there’s not much juice left to wring out from your typical American when a typical dollar is spent 1.2 times before it winds up accumulating interest in a billionaire’s bank account all over again (and that’s with the Federal government spending at unforeseen levels running an all time high and increasing deficit). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V
csours 2y ago
One that really gets me is "Big Government" - we are the government. What you mean is "Big Unaccountable Organization" - which can just as easily be Big Business or in some cases Big NGO/Nonprofit/Religion/etc. I know that my comments do not address the original meaning of "Big Government", but over time "Big Government" has come to encompass anything the government does. Apparently including things that I depend on, but don't know about because they just silently work. Until someone turns them off. Also, remember (or learn) that it was Carter, not Reagan that the bulk of the deregulation. See Dan Davies - Unaccountability Machine --- The version of the narrative that we fight about is the stupidest version of that subject. Gamer's Gate taught me this. From the outside, everyone looked like stupid assholes. I definitely have more empathy for one side vs the other, but each side's narrative is forced into the minimal version that carries the most moral weight. The great tragedy is that we use the moral narrative that appeals to US, not to THEM or even to BYSTANDERS. See Jonathon Haidt - Righteous Mind And Amanda Ripley - High Conflict --- I think the greatest qualities of humanity are curiosity, humility, patience and empathy. To me, nonviolence is not about naivety or tolerance of evil or being unprepared, it's about maintaining the ability to learn about the world and the people in it. Historically nonviolence has been one component of a diversity of strategies - nonviolence itself implies the possibility of violence. The emotion of anger makes people feel right and righteous in themselves - no matter if they are helping or hurting overall. A person's anger does not know what side they are on. Anger makes the world much, much simpler. Our current political environment does not allow for complex problems or complex understanding of other people's needs. You have to fit in my simple worldview. You have to be exactly as angry as I am at all the people I'm angry at. No matter who you feel started this or who you blame, this is all happening inside each of us. We are all being exploited and treated like broken toys. The fight is making us all act and speak very, very stupidly. So if you feel like you have to fight, and you already know who to fight and how to fight them - I am not trying to change that. I am NOT saying that "the other side" has a valid point of view or that the other side has some good people. I am saying that the other side is made of flawed people each with their own history. I am asking you to find some time for curiosity, humility, patience, and empathy for the humans in the world. The tragedy of all anti-war movies is that they show us the horror and terror and destruction of war ... but 'this' is the fight we need to fight, this fight is needed, this fight is good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42261315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42261315
energy123 2y ago
One small culprit is the human tendency to think categorically and, as a consequence, to think metaphorically. Abstractions and conceptual thinking can simplify reasoning if used responsibly, but more often this cognitive shortcut is abused to reach emotionally convenient conclusions. Reasoning that contains the string "this is like" is usually suspect. This is a red flag that the individual has categorized the subject of analysis into an overly broad abstraction, and is now attempting to draw a spurious relation to some causally unrelated thing that allegedly belongs to the same category. The difficulty is that this way of thinking is evolved and natural to us. This low-energy, cheap heuristic served us well in our simpler ancestral environments. It's maladaptive in the modern environment. - https://hbr.org/2019/09/the-dangers-of-categorical-thinking https://hbr.org/2019/09/the-dangers-of-categorical-thinking - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9343778-word-thinking-is-a-term-i-invented-to-describe-a-situation https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9343778-word-thinking-is-a-... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LQKk02pgmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LQKk02pgmY
- XorNot 2y ago
  Anthropomorphization is another problem. As soon as people give things names, they start to treat them like they're individual people even if they're anything but. How many times have you heard someone say "China will..." or "The US thinks..." or "Europe's opinion..." Now these are all potentially useful, context-dependent shorthands...but they're absolutely ripe for misunderstanding. Something I find myself doing a lot these days is asking people to explain what exactly they think is happening on an individual, human level when they declare anything greater then that is "doing" something...because of course, no large organization ever does anything - they're all composed of individuals taking action, potentially under direction but still as individuals.
  - xg15 2y ago
    I think the other extreme - to think about people only as isolated individuals without group identity or power relations - is also too simplifying. (It's also a useful thought exercise to deconstruct sentences like "the US decided to do X" and understand who or what really is meant with "the US" in that sentence. The US government? The political class? Some mainstream opinion in the general population?) But in general I agree with you, especially in the recent years. I find the level of anthropomorphization of countries lately honestly scary, and believe this is a strong sign of how much the political discourse already has shifted back into a "war" vocabulary. The intensity with which people argue this stuff also makes me wonder if they're still understanding it as a metaphor at all. Emotional attachment to flags, nations, peoples, shapes on a map, etc is real and is also a central component of war propaganda.
jebarker 2y ago
> I think that complex solutions CAN be grasped by the large majority of voters Not sure I agree. Not because the large majority aren't intellectually capable, but because there isn't the interest/attention span in most people to understand the nuances of the complex problem that is demanding the complex solution. I feel this in myself increasingly and opt to just not have an opinion on proposed solutions when I believe the problem is much more complex and multifaceted than I'm even aware.
SilasX 2y ago
I have a saying: 1) Welfare-enhancing 2) Politically-popular 3) Simple Pick any two. There are policies that meet all three ... but they've already been implemented, and no one debates them.
xg15 2y ago
What annoys me is that the assertion "there are no easy solutions" has become a slogan itself, often with the practical meaning that you shouldn't even attempt to understand the problem (let alone think about solutions) and instead let the people in power handle it. In the same sense, "its a complex issue" becomes a weird sort of chiffe for "it's so intractably complex that it's impossible for any mortal human to understand, so you shouldn't even try". Another implication is also that there is no way at all to solve any of those problems, the best we could hope for is to manage them and mitigate the effects. I think this line of thinking is ultimately authoritarian and paradoxically increases "simple solution" thinking or avoidance to think about political topics at all - because that would be all that's left to think about. I like the approach of the OP much more, who argues that we should embrace the complexity of our currently world and try to understand it, instead of shying away from it. That's what I'd understand as "thinking for yourself". I believe, the "simple solutions" can even have a useful role in this - as starting points. E.g. "why can't we just get more water from the Pacific to put out the fires?", "why can't the people in Gaza just go somewhere else?", "why can't we just build more housing?" etc. could be interesting questions to start tackling that complexity.
- SirHumphrey 2y ago
  When controversial problem remains unsolved, "there is a simple solution" means that you think that people in power could have solved this already but they haven't because they are evil or stupid or both, and "there are no easy solutions" means that you don't really want to do anything and would like to be not blamed for the outcomes. It's the same as when people talk about politicization, free speech, etc.

crubier 2y ago

Ok, but taxes are too high though, for real

JackYoustra 2y ago
Too high for what? Too high for desired services level? Too high for most of the people or few? Too high for value? Too high for your personal preference? It's really important to be specific, and what I've written is still impossibly vague to be even close to actionable
- Henchman21 2y ago
  In the US they’re too high for what we get: essentially nothing. So if I am taxed, things need to be done with those taxes. Not just line the pockets of whomever get it. I sure don’t.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    In the US, you get social security, medicare/medicaid, the world's most powerful military, transportation infrastructure, education, fire departments, VA benefits, and hundreds of other things. You might not value any of it, but that's the parent's point: You aren't getting nothing, you're getting a lot of expensive things you don't value for your taxes. It's a completely different type of discussion to have and one that's much more amenable to productive discussion.
    - Ygg2 2y ago
      > transportation infrastructure, education, fire departments, Didn't recent events like LA fires demonstrate just how neglected those services are. Having a better military in a war is great, but having overtly fat military industrial complex isn't that great.
      - daveguy 2y ago
        Apparently you fell for the narrative that LA ran out of water because they preferred to save the environment. Just so you know, it didn't matter how much water was in any reservoirs. There was plenty of water. The two failures that happened were -- 100 MPH wind after drought conditions, and the fact that if you try to get water out of every fire hydrant in a large area you will run out of water pressure. The solution to water pressure is increasing the number of reservoirs so that each one services a smaller area. That is done with infrastructure improvements that require a government willing to fund them, and residents willing to accept them. 100 MPH winds + drought conditions + fire over a large area is not addressable without massive over-provisioning. You may want to reconsider where you get your news from, because it seems you are being misinformed.
        pclmulqdq 2y ago
        The local reservoir that serviced the palisades was out of service for months due to a tear in its roof which had yet to be fixed. The repair, per a competent repair person, would have taken a week if they had done it. That's why the water pressure locally was so low. They had already done what you wanted, and increased the number of reservoirs, but the relevant one had been out of service for months. It can both be true that Trump is a bloviating liar and the LA government is incompetent.
        daveguy 2y ago
        It may be a bit more complicated than what a nameless "competent repair person" thought it should have been. Do you worship your news sources too? https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/reservoir-pacific-palisades-was-commission-fire-started-rcna187217 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/reservoir-pacific-palis...
  - lwansbrough 2y ago
    "Americans get nothing for their taxes" is... certainly an opinion.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      An opinion that can only seriously emerge atop the safest, most prosperous empire to ever exist.
      - yard2010 2y ago
        For some people, living hell for the poor.
    - throw16180339 2y ago
      It's someone who was born on third base complaining that they have to run to home plate.
  - orf 2y ago
    > In the US they’re too high for what we get: essentially nothing He wrote, using his 5g phone connection and the internet from the safety of his home. Outside, a car sits silently in the driveway.
    - Henchman21 2y ago
      Yes, I am very safe in my little cage where I take my antibiotics and still kiss with saliva. A cage is still a cage.
      - orf 2y ago
        And it’s an entirely different point to the initial one.
        Henchman21 2y ago
        Are you speaking to me or everyone BUT me? Because I’ll be both direct and honest: this is the type of bullshit that causes me to withdraw from interacting with the bulk of humanity. Mock me all you like.
        JackYoustra 2y ago
        the point is that all the things that commenter listed are enabled by the taxes we pay - it's the price we pay for living in a civilized society. Saying that they don't directly pay it misses the forest for the trees: we decide to pay taxes for things in a system that overall produces these outcomes, treating them separately is to split parts of a coevolved system
        Henchman21 2y ago
        Civilized society doesn’t require a layer of working poor at the bottom to function. That is what I am a part of: the great mass of unfulfilled workers with no choices, no chance for advancement. I’m a blue collar worker right on the edge of high end white collar work. I see on a daily basis that which I can never possess. The system produces these outcomes because that is the desired design goal of the system. If this is “civilization” I want no part of it. But then, we don’t get that choice anymore do we? Where could I go on Earth to escape my fate? Because all I see is my own death is the only escape
- Swizec 2y ago
  As a non-american paying american taxes: I would like more of my money to go into welfare and social transfers to make the country more liveable to all, and less into million dollar bombs thrown at thousand dollar homes. Or, like, at least fix all the potholes maybe?
  - JackYoustra 2y ago
    STILL too vague - _most_ of the federal budget goes to SS and medicare / medicaid. Potholes are almost exclusively a local-level thing, so calling them "american" taxes is a bit off, you'd be thinking more about state and municipal taxes at that point. The impediment that sucks up ~40% of CPI is housing, and that is overwhelmingly constrained by really crappy zoning and building regulation at the local level. Not much the federal government can do against that without going full constitutional crisis or amendment.
    - Swizec 2y ago
      > _most_ of the federal budget goes to SS and medicare / medicaid Okay but social security isn’t the government’s money, it’s ours. The program is profitable afaik (gets more than it pays out). Govt is just holding/managing the money and needs to track it as debt when they use that money for anything other than giving to people.
      - JackYoustra 2y ago
        All of the government's money is our money? Not sure what this means.
    - majormajor 2y ago
      > The impediment that sucks up ~40% of CPI is housing, and that is overwhelmingly constrained by really crappy zoning and building regulation at the local level. Not much the federal government can do against that without going full constitutional crisis or amendment. Housing cost in popular areas/major cities is not solely an American problem. So a lot of the American-specific stories about why it's high - "zoning", "parking requirements", "NIMBY's" aren't fully satisfying. Few places have solved it. Big successful cities often keep growing around the world which means constantly increasing demand which means an affordability trend that rarely goes in the right direction. In a classically-efficient market, where those with the $$$ to do major development projects often substantially overlap with those who have major $$$ stake in prices staying high, few things are more necessary than housing so why wouldn't we expect the price to approach the max that individuals could bear? Removing regulation isn't enough, IMO, since nobody with the money to make major investments in housing wants to rock the price boat too quickly or suddenly. You need proactive regulation on both pricing and public development efforts to undercut the current market.
- scarmig 2y ago
  The level of taxation is not the most relevant thing, even though it attracts the most attention. There are countless socially valuable things that they can be spent on. The core issue is that Americans don't get back much for their level of taxation. The USA is a fundamentally dog-eat-dog place. Given that, working Americans pay an absurd amount of taxes. I pay over 40% of my income in local, state, and federal taxes. Despite that, it's not hard to imagine being thrown onto the streets to die after experiencing a single issue. Where is it going? Not to me, and not to any services I'll be able to access in times of difficulty.
ericjmorey 2y ago
No
tomtomtom777 2y ago
I don't no which country you are from but in the western world, if you compare countries by their tax rates, countries with high taxes [1] tend to score quite well on quality-of-life comparisons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_tax_revenue_to_GDP_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ta...
- yard2010 2y ago
  I would cross check it with corruption levels, sometimes high taxes are just organized crime with extra steps.
winwang 2y ago
And you know this to be true (indubitably), based on what, exactly? (I'm not even sure which country you're referencing either).

AnotherGoodName 2y ago

It reminds me of all the naive engineers that look at a complex codebase, don't fully grok it, and say "this is a mess, it needs a rewrite!". They then find out that every complex rule had a reason for existing. The rewrite takes time and resources to reimplement. As they go they hit snag after snag and add a specific business rule for that only to find out that they are just recreating the original "too complex and inefficient" codebase with a whole lot of effort and money wasted.

lwansbrough 2y ago
We're basically paying the government per line of code written currently. Ask Microsoft how that turned out.
- daveguy 2y ago
  What do you mean by that? Is that how doge is working? No one in the government has previously been paid per line of code. Am I missing something here?
  - lwansbrough 2y ago
    It's a metaphor for how we pay for the evolving and deepening complexity of government, without any effort being put into processes that might help eliminate complexity -- because there's no real accountability for spending. I think "DOGE" is conceptually a good idea, and if it were executed by a competent administration could lead to great outcomes, as was the case with the USDS.
    - aqueueaqueue 2y ago
      Trump could have put someone good on it, but he prefers loyalty over competence.
    - daveguy 2y ago
      Well yeah, government efficiency is obviously a "great idea", but that is ridiculously simplistic. No one is paid for "great ideas" without any clue how to execute. Poorly implemented good ideas screw things up just as bad as bad ideas. Maybe worse. If it's a good idea, implemented poorly, you have a lot of cheerleaders worshipping the idea. But if it's a bad idea, at least you have people offering alternative ideas.

istjohn 2y ago

Not to nitpick, but "taxing the 1% will solve our country's financial problems" comes off as a bit of a strawman. "Tax the rich" is a common sentiment, but I don't often hear people saying the rest of it. There are plenty of plausible reasons one may want to tax the rich even if you don't believe it is a total solution. For one, you may be concerned about the power imbalance created when a handful of people have more wealth than half the country combined [0]. Recent developments have brought that concern into even sharper focus for many. 0. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/top-50-richest-people-in-the-us-are-worth-as-much-as-poorest-165-million https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/top-50-ri...

silotis 2y ago
It's usually not stated so explicitly, but often implied by people who advocate for expansive entitlement programs. When pressed on how to pay for such programs, "tax the rich" is often their only answer.
- LPisGood 2y ago
  I think you’re misusing the word “entitlement” as it is used with respect to US government spending. Can you elaborate what you think the connection is?
- neilwilson 2y ago
  When the real answer is, you pay for it by spending the money. Because money is a circuit, tax is a percentage and money doesn’t stop at its first use.
  - willturman 2y ago
    The technical term for the number of times a dollar is spent in a given time period is the velocity of money [1]. The velocity of money in the United States has dropped sharply over the past 30 years [2] as inflation on inelastic goods like housing, education, healthcare, and food have far outstripped the consumer price index and people opt to spend their money buying things from large corporations instead of small businesses in their communities. The velocity of money is about as good a high-level measure of where the balance between “Wall Street and Main Street” lies as you’ll find - and there’s not much juice left to wring out from your typical American when a typical dollar is spent 1.2 times before it winds up accumulating interest in a billionaire’s bank account all over again (and that’s with the Federal government spending at unforeseen levels running an all time high and increasing deficit). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V

csours 2y ago

One that really gets me is "Big Government" - we are the government. What you mean is "Big Unaccountable Organization" - which can just as easily be Big Business or in some cases Big NGO/Nonprofit/Religion/etc. I know that my comments do not address the original meaning of "Big Government", but over time "Big Government" has come to encompass anything the government does. Apparently including things that I depend on, but don't know about because they just silently work. Until someone turns them off. Also, remember (or learn) that it was Carter, not Reagan that the bulk of the deregulation. See Dan Davies - Unaccountability Machine --- The version of the narrative that we fight about is the stupidest version of that subject. Gamer's Gate taught me this. From the outside, everyone looked like stupid assholes. I definitely have more empathy for one side vs the other, but each side's narrative is forced into the minimal version that carries the most moral weight. The great tragedy is that we use the moral narrative that appeals to US, not to THEM or even to BYSTANDERS. See Jonathon Haidt - Righteous Mind And Amanda Ripley - High Conflict --- I think the greatest qualities of humanity are curiosity, humility, patience and empathy. To me, nonviolence is not about naivety or tolerance of evil or being unprepared, it's about maintaining the ability to learn about the world and the people in it. Historically nonviolence has been one component of a diversity of strategies - nonviolence itself implies the possibility of violence. The emotion of anger makes people feel right and righteous in themselves - no matter if they are helping or hurting overall. A person's anger does not know what side they are on. Anger makes the world much, much simpler. Our current political environment does not allow for complex problems or complex understanding of other people's needs. You have to fit in my simple worldview. You have to be exactly as angry as I am at all the people I'm angry at. No matter who you feel started this or who you blame, this is all happening inside each of us. We are all being exploited and treated like broken toys. The fight is making us all act and speak very, very stupidly. So if you feel like you have to fight, and you already know who to fight and how to fight them - I am not trying to change that. I am NOT saying that "the other side" has a valid point of view or that the other side has some good people. I am saying that the other side is made of flawed people each with their own history. I am asking you to find some time for curiosity, humility, patience, and empathy for the humans in the world. The tragedy of all anti-war movies is that they show us the horror and terror and destruction of war ... but 'this' is the fight we need to fight, this fight is needed, this fight is good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42261315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42261315

energy123 2y ago

One small culprit is the human tendency to think categorically and, as a consequence, to think metaphorically. Abstractions and conceptual thinking can simplify reasoning if used responsibly, but more often this cognitive shortcut is abused to reach emotionally convenient conclusions. Reasoning that contains the string "this is like" is usually suspect. This is a red flag that the individual has categorized the subject of analysis into an overly broad abstraction, and is now attempting to draw a spurious relation to some causally unrelated thing that allegedly belongs to the same category. The difficulty is that this way of thinking is evolved and natural to us. This low-energy, cheap heuristic served us well in our simpler ancestral environments. It's maladaptive in the modern environment. - https://hbr.org/2019/09/the-dangers-of-categorical-thinking https://hbr.org/2019/09/the-dangers-of-categorical-thinking - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9343778-word-thinking-is-a-term-i-invented-to-describe-a-situation https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9343778-word-thinking-is-a-... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LQKk02pgmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LQKk02pgmY

XorNot 2y ago
Anthropomorphization is another problem. As soon as people give things names, they start to treat them like they're individual people even if they're anything but. How many times have you heard someone say "China will..." or "The US thinks..." or "Europe's opinion..." Now these are all potentially useful, context-dependent shorthands...but they're absolutely ripe for misunderstanding. Something I find myself doing a lot these days is asking people to explain what exactly they think is happening on an individual, human level when they declare anything greater then that is "doing" something...because of course, no large organization ever does anything - they're all composed of individuals taking action, potentially under direction but still as individuals.
- xg15 2y ago
  I think the other extreme - to think about people only as isolated individuals without group identity or power relations - is also too simplifying. (It's also a useful thought exercise to deconstruct sentences like "the US decided to do X" and understand who or what really is meant with "the US" in that sentence. The US government? The political class? Some mainstream opinion in the general population?) But in general I agree with you, especially in the recent years. I find the level of anthropomorphization of countries lately honestly scary, and believe this is a strong sign of how much the political discourse already has shifted back into a "war" vocabulary. The intensity with which people argue this stuff also makes me wonder if they're still understanding it as a metaphor at all. Emotional attachment to flags, nations, peoples, shapes on a map, etc is real and is also a central component of war propaganda.

jebarker 2y ago

> I think that complex solutions CAN be grasped by the large majority of voters Not sure I agree. Not because the large majority aren't intellectually capable, but because there isn't the interest/attention span in most people to understand the nuances of the complex problem that is demanding the complex solution. I feel this in myself increasingly and opt to just not have an opinion on proposed solutions when I believe the problem is much more complex and multifaceted than I'm even aware.

SilasX 2y ago

I have a saying: 1) Welfare-enhancing 2) Politically-popular 3) Simple Pick any two. There are policies that meet all three ... but they've already been implemented, and no one debates them.

xg15 2y ago

What annoys me is that the assertion "there are no easy solutions" has become a slogan itself, often with the practical meaning that you shouldn't even attempt to understand the problem (let alone think about solutions) and instead let the people in power handle it. In the same sense, "its a complex issue" becomes a weird sort of chiffe for "it's so intractably complex that it's impossible for any mortal human to understand, so you shouldn't even try". Another implication is also that there is no way at all to solve any of those problems, the best we could hope for is to manage them and mitigate the effects. I think this line of thinking is ultimately authoritarian and paradoxically increases "simple solution" thinking or avoidance to think about political topics at all - because that would be all that's left to think about. I like the approach of the OP much more, who argues that we should embrace the complexity of our currently world and try to understand it, instead of shying away from it. That's what I'd understand as "thinking for yourself". I believe, the "simple solutions" can even have a useful role in this - as starting points. E.g. "why can't we just get more water from the Pacific to put out the fires?", "why can't the people in Gaza just go somewhere else?", "why can't we just build more housing?" etc. could be interesting questions to start tackling that complexity.

SirHumphrey 2y ago
When controversial problem remains unsolved, "there is a simple solution" means that you think that people in power could have solved this already but they haven't because they are evil or stupid or both, and "there are no easy solutions" means that you don't really want to do anything and would like to be not blamed for the outcomes. It's the same as when people talk about politicization, free speech, etc.