Hacker News Reader

Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

Stories like this are infuriating. DA should be required to pay for 20 years of lost invested wages and missed career progression opportunities, alongside a hefty premium for the emotional distress caused by this issue.

The lack of accountability of public offices towards citizens is problematic. I think is a general apathy in government jobs. It doesn’t matter how incompetent you are, and how many people you hurt - you’ll never go “out of business,” tax payers will pay for your mistakes, and you won’t be held responsible for the impact of your actions. So why even try?

There ought to be some feedback loop that forces the public sector to improve itself.

View on HN

You can say the same about massive corporations as well, and every other day we hear about someone banned from FAANG companies and losing their livelihoods without any recourse other than trying to raise a stink on social media.

And yet, from a customer service experience point of view alone, FAANG companies provide leagues better customer service than any government-provided service. It's not even comparable. Try to get anything done publicly versus privately and it becomes clear why people pay for private solutions.

A solution that's being tested for corporations is ES&G metrics reporting. I wonder what ES&G would look like from a DA.

“There ought to be some feedback loop that forces the public sector to improve itself.”

There is. We live in a democracy. Work to elect better and more accountable officials. If none exist, consider running yourself.

> If none exist, consider running yourself.

Setting expectations of "don't like it? Well quit your job, give up 12 mo of your life to campaign and fix it yourself!" is not healthy for our society.

The recursion in how one would effect change like this amuses me.

But this is by design since policy affects all.

at a certain level, somebody has to think like that, otherwise nobody except power hungry psychopaths would be in politics.

Direct action matters, and to dismiss it as "not my responsibility" is shirking the entire point of democracy.

And yet, this is how our system works. We all need to participate and realize that politics is not a career -- it is part of living in such a system, and a part of our responsibility as citizens. The only way we are going to fix things is if we fix it ourselves.

I have tried in the past as well. Political apathy is a very real, very dangerous vulnerability in our system of government, and is being exploited all the time.

> The only way we are going to fix things is if we fix it ourselves.

The word "we" is pulling a lot of weight in that statement. All politics suffers a free rider problem. We'll fix it if we fix it, sure, but I don't have to be part of that.

Could you start small? if you live in a smaller city/village do you need to quit your job for 1 year to attempt to get a sit in the council?

Pressuring your representatives to do something about it, and helping others get mad about it too, and encouraging them to encourage their representatives likewise, is probably the most bottom-up response possible. It can do enormous good, but of course can also go nowhere.

It seems a fatal flaw of a system of government where my liberty might be at stake merely due to apathy of the citizenry. And it seems so much easier to excite the passions of a mob, than to engage the rational capacity of your fellow countrymen.

Government was created by man. It's a good idea that where we can improve them mechanically, we should strive to do so. Same as is done for everything else created by man.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com