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Comment by robador | Hacker News Reader

This reads like an article of 5 years ago... Did time stand still?

I have some friends in the employ of the federal government, who was raised Catholic. One time we were having a conversation that started about the Catholic church. He said is that some of the decisions of the Catholics are odd and slow because they are making decisions on the scale of a hundred years. They intend to be around by then.

The USA Feds seem to be on a similar plan, but it's more like a 10 year lag, and it finally seems to them like this HTTPS thing isn't just a fad.

Funnily enough the official website for the Holy See is also not HTTPS encrypted. (http://www.vatican.va)

> Funnily enough the official website for the Holy See is also not HTTPS encrypted. (http://www.vatican.va)

So that turns out to be a funny misconfiguration. https://www.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html works perfectly fine, but https://www.vatican.va redirects to http://www.vatican.va/content/vatican/it.html.

I find it funny that their website looks like a menu from Rome Total War.

This is a really good point. Organizations that play a stabilization role tend to benefit from this kind of dampened response to the various proddings of rapidly evolving tech.

In the US Government, for almost all of the last 5 years, there has been a concerted effort to move backwards, not to stand still or move forwards.

From my experience as a US government-adjacent worker, there are a few agencies that are really working hard to drag the govt into the present. The General Service Administration's digital efforts (login.gov, Digital Strategy, etc.) are fighting inertia to try to modernize the gov't. Additionally, the public research being done at NASA/NIH/other labs requires a lot of infrastructure—and that's spilling over into other labs and agencies.

However, it's all fighting the insane bureaucratic system that requires mountains of paperwork to do anything, as well as requirements to contract out jobs to expensive and shitty contractors.

This has nothing to do with any administration, governments move slow. They have a lot of internal special interests (and I'm not talking about contractors) that fight to keep the status quo, largely because change can lead to people's jobs becoming irrelevant, etc. Then there are heaps of channels and regulations you have to go through to get anything done, even if you are an independent agency. Anyone that has worked in a large corporation or government knows how it works. The bigger is it is, the harder it is to implement change...even if it is the most basic change imaginable. This is one reason I currently would rather work for smaller companies where my voice can be heard and changes are more agile. Granted if a big tech giant like Microsoft offered me a job, I wouldn't decline...but some other corporations/government, especially old media companies, are like trying to roll a boulder up a muddy hill in terms of getting anything done; and I'd want nothing to do with it.

Just 5 years?

Okay, 50 years.

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