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Comment by jaimehrubiks | Hacker News Reader

I've been in the US for 4 years and it seems like the government is just like a computer that you cannot talk to or get issues fixed somehow. It's like, if something goes wrong you're fucked. If USPS loses your documents or even your car's title, or your immigration approval notice, you're fucked, you might need to wait 2 months, or 6, or 8, and nobody cares, nobody will help you. There's no one that can help you.

At least that's how I feel here.

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It's no wonder that people vote for less government influence in the US. They just never had a good experience with it so they want to get rid of it as a band-aid solution.

And ironically, that is the entire problem in a nutshell.

People keep voting for less government (meaning workers) but not less government (meaning scope of responsibility), so the remaining workers must handle larger workloads. That's never worked out well in any industry, and it's bizarre people think it would work any better in government.

Are large organizations in other countries more human friendly? That sounds delightful. My impression from friends in the EU is that it is similar there, at least for housing and healthcare regulations.

Some “nice” bits of government I’ve hit recently in Canada:

When my kid was born I was given a convenient form to fill out that registered my child’s birth, applied for a SIN, applied for the relevant tax breaks, and registered me to be contacted about options for saving for my child’s education.

My city has a nice little online portal where I can see my tax and utility bills, register city maintenance issues, apply for local city programs, etc. It’s pretty decent.

Oh, and the CRA’s NETFILE system is pretty neat. In addition to the expected submitting of taxes online, banks, employers, etc can send documents to netfile which my tax software can automatically retrieve and ingest.

Not saying that any of the above are perfect, but government can (and does sometimes) produce decent systems. Of course, there are always bad parts - I’ve recently had friend and family deal with immigration and death systems that badly need a redesign.

As a dual-citizen, I've had some great experiences at the Swiss Consulate in the US. Though accessing the government through the Department of Foreign Affairs might yield much better service than going directly to the underlying bureaucracy.

Story: when my parents got married, my mother gained Swiss citizenship and they wanted her birth certificate. She told them she didn't have it and that it might not exist anymore, since she was born in South Vietnam, which was no longer a country. They had their colleagues in Vietnam find it for her, and even gave her a copy, without being asked.

For Belgium: The rules are often still a bureaucratic mess, owed in part to the fact that it's easier to slap bandaids on existing systems than design a new system from scratch. The bandaids compound into systems that are often unintuitive, and not always transparent.

I do feel like I benefit greatly from these systems, convoluted though they may be. The goal still is to help people.

The few times I got the short end of the stick, I managed to reach a human the same day.

With some experience in EU and in the UK - the only good experience I had with government is gov.uk information website.

The UK gov has its fair share of problems but gov.uk is great at explaining all their stupid rules.

South European governments are incredibly bad from my experience and from what my friends tell me, Germany, France and the Netherlands are fairly bad as well (in different ways). Maybe nordic countries fare better.

Russia used to be a bureaucracy nightmare but got much better in the last few years.

Government Can Do Nothing Right has been the propaganda line of the right-wing of the American business community since the end of WWII. A lot of the business community resented the social democratic reforms of that time (those ’50s white picket fence times) and so they sought to first argue that government was useless, and then later prove it through their government-sucks politicians.

This goes back way before the 1950's. The sentiment that government is a "necessary evil" is effectively what many, but certainly not all, Founders espoused.

Compare OP's story to, say, creating a Facebook account.

Why is the government's solution so much crappier? Why can a private company streamline a web experience much better?

Many Government orgs are underfunded and pay worse than private sector. FB engineers make bank compared to being a federal employee. It’s not surprising creating Fb accounts are easy. Why do we as a society value accounts on an advertisement marketplace more than essential services?

Follow the money, the government is not making money based on its performance, they just get a fixed amount from people and they can even increase it through legislation and a bit of propaganda.

In my neck of the woods (not the US) people do most government things like file their taxes through websites. And it’s for the most part a good experience.

The government probably spend a million dollars on the Treasury direct site, and Facebook spends billions on their site.

In general, the solution to your problem is to hire an attorney. They're expensive and overkill for most things, but they know how to "talk" to the government. And just as you'd expect from Vogons, it's painful to watch.

Otherwise you're effectively left as your own lawyer, having to know tricks of how to communicate/escalate and doing online research to find out. In general if you can get a government agency on the phone they can be quite helpful (their customer service hasn't been optimized away like private companies), but you still need to know what to ask for and how to work with their bureaucratic minds.

For example, for something like a car's title, you could probably apply for a duplicate title from the DMV and get another one sent. But for immigration problems I've got no idea.

With immigration, attorneys are not a solution either. If USCIS asks them to wait 3 months before asking for re-sending a document, they shall do that. It doesn't matter if you are 2 months away from getting deported. And the papers can get lost again.

For the title, I've known a person that had the issue. It was the duplicate that was lost again, not sure why they couldn't request another one, not sure if a lawyer would have helped. But the result was a wait time of 6 months (instead of the supposed 3-5 weeks)

Similarly why it's often a great idea to get an accountant to do your taxes, as this is also an interface with the government you can just hire someone to do

The immigration system is apparently designed to do as much damage as possible. It certainly is destroying a huge portion of the global economy and polity.

This is kind of my experience with government (or any actor with too much power for their own good) anywhere.

This has been my experience with basically any large company in the country.

The larger and prevalent a company is the more it tends to approximate a nation state in terms of bureaucracy and customer service.

Ok, but if USPS loses your important document, what do you expect them to do about it? They have no idea where it is and, unless someone paid for special tracking, no way to locate it aside from dumb luck.

Whatever agency was sending you your important document has to be the one to re-issue it and resend it. USPS has no role until it comes time to deliver it again.

Try canceling a gym membership, getting your deposit back, rearranging a flight, changing utility provider or cable.

The only difference is there are less opportunities for the bourgeois who are willing and able to pay to be on the other side of the velvet ropes

That sounds like Google!

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