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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

I find it sad, yet interesting, how many things/institutions/processes have built up in a way that you would never actively choose as an option.

As in, if given the choice between building the current system and some alternative, there is no way you'd say, "for sure, build again what we have now, it's great".

Yet that's what we kind of do every year implicitly by continuing through inertia. Healthcare, financial/banking, transportation, rocket launches, etc.

I guess that's how a country gets old and slow -- too many legacy things that have to be supported or can't be changed without disruption to people's established habits or ways that they've come to rely on. (or make a profit from)

And it's not until some outside actor shows you it's possible that you're shocked into knowing that it can be done differently. Or forced to do it differently out of necessity now.

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I am currently in government. I would say that most processes are not really designed at all. They are the sum of a lot of other decisions kludged together.

We are currently putting together a software system for managing parking contracts and in doing so are excruciatingly copying how those contracts are currently handled (often to an absurd level). Nobody thinks the current process makes sense, but here we are baking it into a mega project.

It is sad indeed, but I guess no manager wants to change things not be responsible for changes that fail.

Eh, one of the larger challenges is figuring out who is responsible for certain things. We genuinely are not sure who is responsible for various elements of projects.

Here’s a whole article about that! “Kludgeocracy in America” (2013)

https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/kludgeoc...

Posted in its own thread:

Kludgeocracy in America (2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24310523

Private industry really isn’t much different. The commonality is: humans.

No. Just in the private industry, there is at least hope of change.

I do R&D for government. A significant portion of what my group develops is required to conform to or to mimic business processes that emerged, practically accidentally, 50+ years ago. Nobody dares innovate, perhaps for two reasons: professional risk, and institutional preservation (departments, unions, etc.). :-/

Sounds like every large code base I have worked on.

I'm going to tag the news media industry as the major problem. If a politician (of any stripe) says (the mature and reasonable thing...): "I'm going to compromise with the opposition, we're going to give them X, try Y, gather evidence and if it doesn't work out we'll reverse the decision" then:

1) All the media is going to report is "[Politician] is caving in to the opposition".

2) The media will report misleading stats and not bother trying to actually understand the evidence gathered.

3) Nobody will point out or honour the part of the deal that involved an unroll if it didn't work.

Can't negotiate, can't compromise, can't improve. Fools errand to try with the press waiting in the wings. They might even be purposefully hiring ignorant people because they are more entertaining.

> I'm going to tag the news media industry as the major problem.

I'd argue your critique would apply not so much to the industry, but to those in positions of power/influence who control and manage how the industry behaves - i.e. the decision-makers of the companies which own the media companies.

> Fools errand to try with the press waiting in the wings. They might even be purposefully hiring ignorant people because they are more entertaining.

This is how voting to hire politicians is going too..

Actually, I can't think of any news media (save Fox) that would report compromises in such a way. Instead, that negative reporting is more likely to come via outrage-generating feedback mechanisms like the commentary that accompanies sharing of news articles instead of the actual news pieces themselves.

The news media are owned by the same people who own healthcare, and they target anyone who threatens the value of healthcare companies, not the "mature and reasonable."

Compromise between the two specific parties that run the US government is not obviously reasonable. Completely ineffective compromises between a party who explicitly wants to preserve industry profits and another party who wants to appear like they do not while still maintaining their healthcare industry donor base - that they do often manage to come to an agreement is why our healthcare is not only the most expensive in the world, but also the most complicated.

Our large press is captive, not this force for extremism and disruption that you see it as.

While everything you say is true, my experience in software with the Big Rewrite suggests that continuing through inertia, while by no means always the right choice, is also not always the worst choice. Big projects can end up going very badly, and the devil you know is sometimes the lesser evil.

Although, in the case of healthcare pricing in the U.S., maybe not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve

For those wondering:

>The extreme detour of the recurrent laryngeal nerves, about 4.6 metres (15 ft) in the case of giraffes,[26]:74–75 is cited as evidence of evolution, as opposed to Intelligent Design. The nerve's route would have been direct in the fish-like ancestors of modern tetrapods, traveling from the brain, past the heart, to the gills (as it does in modern fish). Over the course of evolution, as the neck extended and the heart became lower in the body, the laryngeal nerve was caught on the wrong side of the heart. Natural selection gradually lengthened the nerve by tiny increments to accommodate, resulting in the circuitous route now observed

> given the choice between building the current system and some alternative, there is no way you'd say, "for sure, build again what we have now, it's great".

> Yet that's what we kind of do every year implicitly by continuing through inertia. Healthcare, financial/banking, transportation, rocket launches, etc.

Also on this absurd list: academic publishing

We do this in software engineering too. People need to find something that works, and then insert themselves in there to extract some value and get money. Service A talks to Service B? Put a message queue in there! You can monitor it, you can buffer it. Oh, it doesn't work? Just pay us and we'll fix it. Now some of the value your software creates is going to some middleman.

Healthcare is just like that. Patient pays doctor? That's fine, but what if we got some finance dudes in there? Maybe they could smooth out the costs for everyone -- fall out of the sky in your airplane, break every bone in your body, costs you $0. Just keep paying your monthly fee and you're covered. Sounds good, right? (Nobody really pays for healthcare, though; so they sold it to employers to use as a perk. "As long as you work for us, we'll cover the costs of any catastrophic health problem!" Kind of nice peace of mind.)

Ultimately, this is how people make money in capitalism. Find money, and insert themselves in the middle. When it gets to be too much, people push back. Amazon doesn't want to pay for UPS employees to have nice uniforms, a consistent route, and health insurance... so they found some randos on the Internet that will deliver packages out of the back of their sedan. The money saved is sucked out of giving people a decent life and into the coffers of one of the richest people in the world. No doubt, healthcare is going in this direction too. People are noticing the inefficiency, and stand to make a lot of money by eliminating it. (We'll all probably suffer, of course, because that's how it always goes.)

What's wrong with rocket launches?

https://www.amazon.com/Inadequate-Equilibria-Where-Civilizat...

This is how all life evolves. The bigger and grander the plans, in general, the harder and worse they fail. Communism and Brazilia spring to mind as examples. "Seeing Like A State" takes a look at the causes of failure patterns endemic to bureaucracy/government/planning. (Not saying we should give up on planning, but that we might learn to love and live with the idiosyncrasies introduced by iterative development in all domains.)

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