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Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

> The first candidate I'd propose for the top slot is diffusion of responsibility stemming from a US obsession with localism

If it were only localism, there would be localities that were fantastic at investing in their own infrastructure. Responsibilities, even funding local schools, have been nationalizing slowly over the years without an explicit change in the U.S. Constitution. So the national government has to 'hack' the system with grants and taxes to indirectly get national policies enacted. It's a corruption of the system to work around the Constitutional protection of federalism.

One solution would be to amend the Constitution to make things like education national policy once and for all. Another would be for the national government to leave things like building roads and funding schools to the local governments.

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The feds could also do some easy, central infrastructure things that would reduce school and local govt funding needs in the first place. If the schools or localities want to buy their own, great. Three examples:

1. It seems every school uses a mishmash of Moodle, Schoology, and some Sharepoint abortion. If the feds would spend around the cost of 3 or 4 F-35 helmets ($1.6M) they could build and offer a decent school site. You know, homeworks, attendance. It could be the same software everywhere, even if you changed schools. Teachers wouldn't need retraining and kids would have their stuff follow them.

2. Fund a decent central, unbiased curriculum with open source text books. Kansas can suck an egg. Localities really _don't_ need their own curricula. The 3 R's don't need to vary with district.

3. Same as 1 but for local government operations software. Do they really all need their own?

Number 2 is never ever going to happen. Do you remember all of the bugaboo about Common Core? That wasn't even the Feds getting involved in setting curriculum directly.

The right of a parent to indoctrinate their children trumps the right of the child to have an actual education.

I don't know the answer, but it's a gross feedback loop.

>an actual eduction

I'm not one of those people, but here it should be "indoctrinated by the state", because I think that's what our schools do. I think we play fast and loose with the term "school". For being an institution supposedly concerned with imparting knowledge on kids, the current system does a pretty shitty job of it. Most kids don't even know the algebra they "learn" in school, let alone stuff like how to pay rent, taxes, how to drive, how to budget, how to vote, how to work effectively in team situations on common tasks, how to survive in the wilderness (yes, that skill is taught in some countries). Our "schools" are awful. Maybe it's as simple as a big money injection. I dunno. But as is, it's awful.

I think you're being a little hyperbolic. And the question is whether the parents' exercising their "right" to promote their religion of choice and cut out the teaching of evolution and sex ed might not leave the child with some deficiencies in their education. It generally depends on how qualified the alternatives are, but the answer is probably "yes it does".

I'm not saying anything about those awful people. I'm saying that our education system is a giant mess. I am the polar opposite of those parents, but I know a few of them on Facebook and find that I agree with their sentiment about schools more often than not. And that is a problem, when the system is in a condition such that I find myself agreeing with those people about schools.

I wouldn't bet on a money injection fixing anything - I've read a number of reports that show almost no correlation between performance and per-student-dollars.

Yeah, you're right, douche.

On paper that's interesting. I'm skeptical that the national government can do that well, however. The rollout of the ACA websites makes it clear that the government isn't good at producing that sort of product.

Furthermore, the premise of the article is that the government is very inefficient. I'm not sure $1.6M is a fair estimate for the cost of this sort of product. There are millions of teachers in the U.S. not to speak of parents, administrators, and kids.

I'm open to providing incentives to make this sort of progress more feasible. I'm partial to better support of open source software that meets these ends (like tax deductions for time or cash contributions to OSS projects the government uses).

>The rollout of the ACA websites makes it clear that the government isn't good at producing that sort of product.

You mean that the private contractor hired to do the HealthCare.gov website, CGI Federal, did a lousy job?

Most of the things the government "produces" are not produced by the government. They're sent out for bidding by private companies - roads, guns, websites, whatever - and the government is in charge of oversight.

And the fact that they've been proven incapable at oversight and management should figure into the planning.

But what makes you so sure the government wouldn't do better taking it in-house? And even if we throw out that possibility, we're talking about implementing off-the-shelf software here, no producing custom software.

Great point! And since - as described - it's all open source, there doesn't even need to be Federal oversight or management.

If the only thing standing between now and doing it is the will and tech support, that's an easy problem to solve.

> You mean that the private contractor hired to do the HealthCare.gov website, CGI Federal, did a lousy job?

That may be true as well, but any customer that's changing requirements at the last minute and demands idiotic deployments (nationwide, hard deadline, untested, lots of PR, etc.) is ultimately responsible for what happens.

Maybe every single vendor should have sensed that outcome, but it's more realistic to think that someone will take that contract, even if it's doomed.

ACA was very complex and the time from the law actually passing to the site going live was pretty short. Until the law was completely signed there was basically no spec for GCI to work with other than some vague generalities about what it'd have to do. I'd put a fair amount of the blame for how shoddy it was to that compressed timeline as much as contractor waste and inefficiency.

> ACA was very complex and the time from the law actually passing to the site going live was pretty short.

And the federally-run state exchanges were a fallback that was intended to not need to be used, anyway; the whole point was that every state was going to have an exchange and that not setting one up wouldn't affect that, with the idea being that in that scenario even states that didn't support the idea would prefer to have control of the state exchange rather than handing it to the feds. The timeline from determining that there'd actually need to be federally-run exchanges to the site needing to be live was even shorter from the time from the law actually passing to the site going live.

> I'd put a fair amount of the blame for how shoddy it was to that compressed timeline as much as contractor waste and inefficiency.

That's more or less my take, but I consider that part of the government's terrible project management.

> There are millions of teachers in the U.S. not to speak of parents, administrators, and kids.

How's the number relevant? It's not like they'll charge per user, and each school only cares about O(10,000) users at most.

Huh? I worked in school district IT for quite some time and a huge number of services are billed per-student.

> How's the number relevant?

I'm just saying $1.6M is underfunded for something that complex. That's on the right order of magnitude to build out a proof-of-concept to pitch for an actual production rollout.

Keep in mind that you'll be dealing with a lot of relational data with some interesting security requirements, some of them legal. It's not just photos of cats.

I believe the US recently paid about as much for the functionality of a coin flip on an iPad and the software was only used for a few months.

OP is talking about much more complicated software than simulating a coin flip.

But the reason the Fed don't build cheap schools is the same reason the Feds do buy million dollar helmets.

Regulatory capture extends to every level of government so switching the level of government you deal with won't change the problem.

> Fund a decent central, unbiased curriculum with open source text books.

The key with this would be to fund the effort but not mandate it. The carrot for using the federal standard books is that they would be without license fees, which means localities would have to justify spending their own money to use something else. But if the feds do such a crap job that localities find it worth it to do that, they should still be able to. Or do that with some books but not all of them etc.

The free software model (something like the GPL) would be very interesting here, because you could have local schools making contributions to the national curriculum that other schools could adopt or not based on merit rather than local budgets. But not have some textbook publisher doing what Apple does to BSD, i.e. making sufficient improvements that theirs is the dominant version and then prohibiting further improvements by anyone else.

If a transportation system crosses more than one jurisdiction than it doesn't really matter if some localities are fantastic at investing in their own infrastructure. It is inherently a problem that can be solved optimally only at a different level. It might be possible to design a system such that metro areas are always a single jurisdiction, but given that such areas grow and shrink over time it wouldn't be easy.

I don't think that "corruption of the system" is a cause in and of itself of the high cost of infrastructure construction or repair. Whether or not the Constitution would need to be changed, that's an implementation detail. First we need to figure out if diffusion of responsibility is actually a major problem (as I suggest), then get widespread agreement that that is the case, only then should we start worrying about what legal barters may or may not be in the way of mitigation strategies.

It's in the national interest to have well maintained roads the military would be able to traverse. That's really why we have the interstate highway system in the first place.

It's also in the national interest to have a well educated population with a generally common knowledge foundation. Education is a cultural and nationalistic cornerstone.

If you use "in the national interest" as your threshold, you can apply it to almost anything:

It's in the national interest to have a healthy population. For everyone to work out regularly. For everyone to read every day. For everyone to travel the world and learn about other cultures. For everyone to get a full night's sleep.

That's why that is not the US standard. We explicitly have restraints and constraints on government. If you want to remove those restraints and constraints, that's fine. There's a process for that.

But if you ignore the restraints and constraints instead, then government power is based on whims and preferences of whoever is in power. And we know how that works out.

The government takes steps to encourage many of the things you've listed.

Highways are much less of a military necessity than when they were built. The nature of warfare is no longer based as much on troop movement.

> Another would be for the national government to leave things like building roads and funding schools to the local governments.

But then you'll have people from poorer neighborhoods/towns drive on worst roads and sending their kids to crappier schools compared to wealthier parts of the country. The roads' problem let's say is not the end of the world per se, but the fact that your kids will have less chances in life only because your neighborhood is not as wealthy as the one 5 or 10 miles down the road seems moraly wrong and a misallocation of resources.

School funding is already essentially through local government. It's where the vast bulk of property taxes go to. And, yes, it leads to high-priced suburbs with good schools, with schools that are often less good elsewhere. (It also means that people with children in large urban areas often feel they either have to move to the suburbs or put their kids in private schools.)

Bad urban schools often get more funding than better suburban schools[1], and how's that working out?

[1] https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-r...

Fair enough. Funding is often one factor but there are obviously many reasons why suburban schools in good neighborhoods are "better" (have superior outcomes) than those in many city neighborhoods. And, yes, there's not much evidence that more money is a particularly effective fix in many poorly performing school districts.

Mostly I was just responding to a comment that seemed to not be aware that school funding was already mostly local.

> If it were only localism, there would be localities that were fantastic at investing in their own infrastructure.

There's at least one: Bellevue, Washington, USA (across the lake from Seattle). I lived near there growing up and watched in awe how they repeatedly refactored the city in record time, over and over and over again, improving it each time. It was almost like watching agile development happen physically in front of you.

Realistically, I don't see how an "every municipality for itself" (or even at the state level) system wouldn't make things much slower and more inefficient no matter what. It seems like a recipe for either too much duplication of function or else an unclear chain of command.

>> One solution would be to amend the Constitution

Err. That's probably a tall order.

Maybe. It used to be amended every 10-20 years, depending on how you count. It has been 25-40 years (again, depending on how you count) since the last successful amendment attempt. I think that, to some degree, the amendment process has been abandoned because people think the government can hack around it with good results.

I think it's worth considering that this sort of corruption is a side effect of that approach versus the cleaner debate-and-amend process that the U.S. practiced historically.

I think the U.S. government will be ultimately doomed if the U.S. can't figure out a way to amend the Constitution again. All sorts of new wrinkles have popped up since the early 90s and we have abandoned the process for democratically deciding how to deal with them. It really erodes the legitimacy of the process.

No less a man than Scalia himself said that, if he could wave a magic wand and change the constitution, the change he would make would be to make it easier to amend.

I didn't agree with most of what he said, but I thought he was spot-on with that.

It has been abandoned because of a slew of SCOTUS rulings that have significantly broadened the powers implied in some clauses (most notably, the Commerce Clause, and the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment), allowing the federal government to work around the system more often than not; but also because of increasing partisanship of the political system making the 3/4 majority of states necessary to amend anything extremely unlikely on any issues where there isn't a near-unanimous consent already.

I think nationalizing more issues also leads to more divisiveness. If you get fed up with your city government, you can move. What do you do if you get fed up with your national government?

On top of that, if relatively slim majorities (55%, say) can drastically change the rules (Citizens United, ACA), then there is a loss of legitimacy in the government. This also causes divisiveness since the country becomes a nation of power (who can scrape together a majority?) and not a nation of laws.

> If it were only localism, there would be localities that were fantastic at investing in their own infrastructure.

Seattle. Great water, renewable energy, lots of transit investment.

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