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Large scale disruption is impossible because the government and its employees are protected by guns and the force of law, permitting special interests, cronyism

by milhous 13y ago

Large scale disruption is impossible because the government and its employees are protected by guns and the force of law, permitting special interests, cronyism, and incompetence to flourish. We in the marketplace (minus Industrial Military Complex) have no such protections, and actually have to produce value to make a living in a fair exchange of goods and services. Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace, so it's in their interest to follow orders, at whatever cost, to keep their jobs. The best thing for young professionals is to fight the system intelligently for those that have the resources to do so, or avoid it entirely. Edit: As is with NYC's 911 boondoggle, a SF startup could've built out an amazing system at a fraction of the price. But that wouldn't be the government thing to do. It has nothing to do with building a quality product.

milhous 13y ago
>> Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace, so it's in their interest to follow orders, at whatever cost, to keep their jobs. Some good points were raised about this, and what I should've said instead is that it would be extremely difficult to suddenly absorb a lot of displaced government workers into private industry. But aside from the protections they receive of near-absolute job security in any market condition, I subscribe to the thesis that as government expands, rights are lost.
jowiar 13y ago
> Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace, so it's in their interest to follow orders, at whatever cost, to keep their jobs. Citation needed. If you actually have evidence, I'll bite, but my anecdotal evidence tends to indicate otherwise. Generally, issues are caused by good people being hamstrung by ridiculous rules, not by bad people.
wonderzombie 13y ago
> permitting special interests, cronyism, and incompetence to flourish. We in the marketplace (minus Industrial Military Complex) have no such protections, and actually have to produce value to make a living in a fair exchange of goods and services. Cronyism and incompetence may or may not be inversely correlated with success, but the market does not select against those traits, specifically. To abuse a metaphor: as a business, you don't have to outrun the bear. You don't even have to outrun the other guys. And businesses are, in the end, run by collections of irrational-in-aggregate human beings.
moocowduckquack 13y ago
"Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace" This statement is so blatantly false that I have a hard time believing that you are engaged in honest discussion when you state it.
lemmsjid 13y ago
Responding to your edit about "a SF startup could've built out an amazing system at a fraction of the price"-- I hear that kind of attitude a lot, I'm not so sure it holds to scrutiny. Tackling the problem of a system that must be 100% reliable, synchronous, with complete uptime from day 1 is very very difficult, and not many startup environments will prepare you for it. A lot of systems that are scaling decently now (twitter was used as an example early on) had extreme early growing pains. In fact, I think it is impossible to build such a system without significant upfront cost, because a lot of the cost should go into the testing phase. It's almost as though you'd want to create a testing call center that receives realistic calls and needs to route them correctly, and have it running for months while the software is iterated on. A lot of effort should go into making the testing center as realistic as possible, and a lot of time should go into teasing out the inevitable bugs.
- pcl 13y ago
  Sounds like it doesn't need to be 100% reliable, though -- they have a painful backup system in place. Also, replaying traffic from the old system into the new seems like a viable way to test out this sort of system. Or, they could have run both systems in parallel, and just sent a percentage of the traffic to the new system and slowly ramped up. I wonder why they chose to just cut over rather than doing a full and seemingly irreversible cutover. Not that many startups would have done things that way, since the nature of startups tends towards the green field. But plenty of more-established tech companies would have, I imagine.
greghinch 13y ago
> Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace, so it's in their interest to follow orders, at whatever cost, to keep their jobs. My anectodal observation is that this may be true for some individuals, this could be said of any large institution. I encountered many capable and intelligent individuals in my time contracting for the government. The problem I see more has to do with the legal mandates in place, and the labyrinth of regulation and processes. Unless you are quite savvy to how the machine works, it's nearly impossible to get a contract. And the steps to learning how to navigate these processes is pretty lengthy and would make even the most resilient individual completely jaded with the whole thing. Finding a way to unwind the over-regulation in place seems to me to be the only way this market can be opened to true competition.
njharman 13y ago
> permitting special interests, cronyism, and incompetence to flourish. Apt description of Enterprise class business's. or any large organization of humans. Also, this system (as most things people blame gov for) was made not by a government but by private sector capitalist companies. Maybe who've should quit outsourcing so much to these fuckups.

by milhous 13y ago

milhous 13y ago

>> Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace, so it's in their interest to follow orders, at whatever cost, to keep their jobs. Some good points were raised about this, and what I should've said instead is that it would be extremely difficult to suddenly absorb a lot of displaced government workers into private industry. But aside from the protections they receive of near-absolute job security in any market condition, I subscribe to the thesis that as government expands, rights are lost.

jowiar 13y ago

> Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace, so it's in their interest to follow orders, at whatever cost, to keep their jobs. Citation needed. If you actually have evidence, I'll bite, but my anecdotal evidence tends to indicate otherwise. Generally, issues are caused by good people being hamstrung by ridiculous rules, not by bad people.

wonderzombie 13y ago

> permitting special interests, cronyism, and incompetence to flourish. We in the marketplace (minus Industrial Military Complex) have no such protections, and actually have to produce value to make a living in a fair exchange of goods and services. Cronyism and incompetence may or may not be inversely correlated with success, but the market does not select against those traits, specifically. To abuse a metaphor: as a business, you don't have to outrun the bear. You don't even have to outrun the other guys. And businesses are, in the end, run by collections of irrational-in-aggregate human beings.

moocowduckquack 13y ago

"Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace" This statement is so blatantly false that I have a hard time believing that you are engaged in honest discussion when you state it.

lemmsjid 13y ago

Responding to your edit about "a SF startup could've built out an amazing system at a fraction of the price"-- I hear that kind of attitude a lot, I'm not so sure it holds to scrutiny. Tackling the problem of a system that must be 100% reliable, synchronous, with complete uptime from day 1 is very very difficult, and not many startup environments will prepare you for it. A lot of systems that are scaling decently now (twitter was used as an example early on) had extreme early growing pains. In fact, I think it is impossible to build such a system without significant upfront cost, because a lot of the cost should go into the testing phase. It's almost as though you'd want to create a testing call center that receives realistic calls and needs to route them correctly, and have it running for months while the software is iterated on. A lot of effort should go into making the testing center as realistic as possible, and a lot of time should go into teasing out the inevitable bugs.

pcl 13y ago
Sounds like it doesn't need to be 100% reliable, though -- they have a painful backup system in place. Also, replaying traffic from the old system into the new seems like a viable way to test out this sort of system. Or, they could have run both systems in parallel, and just sent a percentage of the traffic to the new system and slowly ramped up. I wonder why they chose to just cut over rather than doing a full and seemingly irreversible cutover. Not that many startups would have done things that way, since the nature of startups tends towards the green field. But plenty of more-established tech companies would have, I imagine.

greghinch 13y ago

> Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace, so it's in their interest to follow orders, at whatever cost, to keep their jobs. My anectodal observation is that this may be true for some individuals, this could be said of any large institution. I encountered many capable and intelligent individuals in my time contracting for the government. The problem I see more has to do with the legal mandates in place, and the labyrinth of regulation and processes. Unless you are quite savvy to how the machine works, it's nearly impossible to get a contract. And the steps to learning how to navigate these processes is pretty lengthy and would make even the most resilient individual completely jaded with the whole thing. Finding a way to unwind the over-regulation in place seems to me to be the only way this market can be opened to true competition.

njharman 13y ago

> permitting special interests, cronyism, and incompetence to flourish. Apt description of Enterprise class business's. or any large organization of humans. Also, this system (as most things people blame gov for) was made not by a government but by private sector capitalist companies. Maybe who've should quit outsourcing so much to these fuckups.