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You are right. Countries scale up linearly just like websites do. How stupid of us to think otherwise.
by danielrhodes 14y ago
You are right. Countries scale up linearly just like websites do. How stupid of us to think otherwise.
- grecy 14y agoI did not use the word linear. Obviously scaling is hard, but I would expect that's one of the things a well functioning, well funded government should take care of, much like how Facebook and Google manage to scale well.
- wpietri 14y agoYour mistake is in thinking that Americans want a well-functioning, well-funded government. Some do, but a substantial swathe of America is currently, for one reason or another, opposed to that.
- grecy 14y agoRight. So it has nothing to do with the size of the population, and everything to do with people not wanting to pay tax. So to summarize, it's hilarious when Americans use the large population excuse for having sub-par services.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mrb 14y agoIf Canada and the US merged, would it be twice as hard to vote? Of course not. Voting is the most trivial govt activity to scale up! It is the equivalent of an embarrassingly parallel pb. The "300M citizens" excuse is even less valid in the context of presidential elections, because each state plans it independently from the others. So it is more like 52 tiny countries voting together!
- danielrhodes 14y agoIt is parallel, but not all jobs are run on the same hardware/software and you can't re-run jobs which error out. In fact, some jobs don't error out but should be invalid and if discovered as such might cast doubt on the authenticity of other jobs, etc. etc. So it's really not as trivial as you make it out to be, and neither is anything else which involves coordinating 100M+ people doing a particular task.