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Comment by mvc | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid this is the logical consequence of a majority of people falling for the lie that "government can't do things as efficiently as the private sector".

When people vote for politicians who say

  "government is wasteful",
  "there's too much red tape"

what did they think was going to happen?

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I don't think so, testing like you refer to is not scalable and even more inefficient.

Letting an external auditors understand all the small technical details and test them independently will basically halt any progress. It might make this specific change safer but for the long run will slow down innovation and development of better and safer products.

This has some similarity to software development- we test much better but prefer to move faster to achieve a better overall quality and be able to fix issues faster and better

When politicians say "government is wasteful" or "government can't do things as efficiently as the private sector", what they're saying is that their management style is wasteful.

Would somebody asserting that about _their_ _own_ _job_ even make it past the interview in the private sector?

What they're actually saying is "If you sponsor us we will make sure government money goes your way."

Efficiency - or the lack of it - is absolutely not the point.

Or they could be saying that centralized monopolies are rarely efficient. That is certainly my experience. For example, SpaceX undercut NASA by a factor of about 10, according to this FT report: https://www.ft.com/content/25e2292b-a910-41c8-9c55-09096895f...

plane-pal aircraft coming soon to a gate near you!

NASA sources their materials from the private sector. The private sector is notoriously "price gougey" when it comes to government money.

Government actors are responsible for acquiring material at normative costs. Their failure to do so is their own.

Normal costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection

"Price gougey" implies that the prices are unethical; not in compliance with ethical norms; not normative.

'Not normative' doesn't mean 'not in compliance with ethical norms'. It means not pertaining to ethical norms. It's not the correct word, however you twist it.

Here's some more info if it helps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_statement

Exactly! And when all US companies refuse to lower their prices, they should start sourcing from foreign companies to increase competition!

Oh hey look, I'm signing yet another contract with an arbitration clause when signing up for a cell phone service. Must be my fault that all of them require the arbitration clause...

I think the worlds greatest agency couldn't evaluate a so complex system as the Max. They should just have said no.

I believe it is foremost a complexity issue, and the MCAS(?) failure is just one of the many things that could go wrong, that actually did. Boing probably have more issues with the plane that is waiting to surface given their culture ...

Saying "no" would have been an evaluation.

It's a management function. If someone comes to you and says "We want to rewrite everything so it runs on a Raspberry PI powered by a hamster wheel" you don't need to ask about the engineering spec of the hamster wheel.

The Max MCAS was only marginally more plausible in overview. Details were never going to rescue it.

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