Comment by bogota | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bogota | Hacker News Reader

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It’s great wishful thinking but I really dont think our government can pull it off at this point. Maybe 30 years ago but not in today’s environment of everyone trying to screw the other side over at all costs.

Personally im happy we at least have one company who can get me stuff in a decent amount of time. But i gets it’s fun to throw out f the big company the government should do that. It’s not like it took thousands of well paid people years and years of work to develop that supply chain so im sure it’s as simple as “let the government do it”.

It’s the same in every Uber/Lyft comment thread. “It’s just a simple backend app why do they need so many people”. “I could do that in a year with a small team”. Yeah have fun dealing with every single state, city, country’s different regulations and requirements. “It’s JUST an app”.

I realize a lot of engineers have this problem. They oversimplify everything except the code they are working on and dismiss it as easy or unnecessary. I did early in my career as well but im surprised how prevent it is here.

> I did early in my career as well but im surprised how prevent it is here.

Most of the people here have never run or attempted to create a business. That's true about the general population as well. As you hint at, it comes from lack of life experience at doing a thing.

You get a similar naivety from the average consumer that fantasizes about starting a restaurant because they have strong opinions about food; they've eaten at many restaurants, they've made food at home thousands of times, how hard could it be.

> fuck ton of money

> tried to solve this problem for everyone

It doesn't sound like the GP was oversimplifying the problem, quite the opposite - wanting to spend a "fuck ton of money" to try to solve something implies that it is a complex problem that may not be solved with a "fuck ton of money".

Because it keeps being hobbled, on purpose In my industry we rely on mail. A few years ago it got bad around this time, but we'd still get mail. Now we go months without getting important documents in the mail. It gets worse every year. Look who's managing the current postmaster general and how political the appointment is. But somehow in these conversations people forget about these specific issues that bring things down, and feel instead it's just some impossible herculean task that has become entire impossible. Many of the common issues people complain about, are on purpose

> I really dont think our government can pull it off at this point

That's not, to be clear, for reasons of technical capacity. The vaccine drive that started in ~February or so of this year was pretty good evidence that the government is still capable of doing big things.

Hardly any of the vaccine drive has been done by governments. Overwhelming majority of the people have been vaccinated in non-government facilities by doctors and nurses not employed by government. To be sure, a huge chunk of that was paid for by the government, but if the analogy here is to work, you would need to ask the government to pay Amazon a fuck ton of money to run the postal service.

That's not at all the case in my state. The state and county operated facilities were huge, and moved a significant number of people through the vaccination process extremely efficiently.

For testing, I've been to many facilities. The county run facilities have been efficient and organized, whereas the private ones were not set up as efficiently to get tests issued and results returned.

That said, my primary care office is now set up to return results quickly, so private seems to be catching up.

Speaking from a Maryland PoV.

They use existing infrastructure. We don't have government hospitals and doctors in every city, it's easier to reimburse doctors and clinics to give out vaccines. We have a post office system hundreds of years old, which has worked fine for 95+% of that time. The idea that we need to rely on Amazon to send all postal mail, which they aren't actually capable of doing, is so strange to me

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