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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

   > Perhaps one reason startups work so well…

If you take any individual startup its probability of success is very low. Most startups fail. There is a very extreme survivorship bias at work when people say startups work well or that particular tactics are why startups are great etc (pointing at a successful startup).

Startups as a whole produce a lot of innovation because there is this extreme Darwinian process where the vast majority fail and a few succeed but you have a huge amount of risk-taking in parallel in a very compressed time frame.

Government generally doesn’t have the luxury of failure because the consequences for people’s lives are too extreme. So by definition government is going to be slower-moving and more risk-averse. They are essentially paying to reduce the standard deviation of possible outcomes because they can’t afford the risk of the extreme negative tail.

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Perhaps you don't realize how badly run the government is and how much of a problem that is in real terms.

Education, physical and mental health, cost of living, healthcare, wealth inequality. They've all gotten worse the past few decades, would you agree?

The NYT just reported that the federal government lost $236 billion to apparent fraud ("improper payments") in 2023 alone.

The US GAO says "2018-2022 Data Show Federal Government Loses an Estimated $233 Billion to $521 Billion Annually to Fraud"

USAID literally set up fake AIDS prevention workshops to topple foreign governments https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/08/0...

This is a small sample of the extreme waste, fraud and abuse, while we have very serious issues here on the ground that are systematically ignored. For DECADES. Unaddressed.

Fixing this is what the majority of voters voted for and are rightfully thrilled to see these brilliant young tech nerds untangle the beurocratic leviathon. There will be, and have been, mistakes, things deleted that shouldn't have been. Anything important and that the people actually want, will be added back in. DOGE was upfront about this process.

Because Republicans refuse to adequately fund and staff the govt agencies that can crack down on fraud, they prefer to allow the fraud to happen so they can scream "see, govt doesn't work!" (and also because some of it is their friends doing the fraud)

See: their demonizing adequately funding and modernizing the IRS

So I've dealt with mental illnesses throughout my life and I can confidently say things are a hell of a lot better now than when I was a kid. They literally understood so little about the subject that there were basically 3 categories with rigid qualifiers. If you didn't fit 100% into a mold you were considered lazy, undisciplined, etc.

Instead of just blindly rattling off a bunch of buzzwords that you know nothing about maybe select 1 or 2 of the things from your list you actually have experience in.

But doge doesn't want to improve fraud, it only wants to make the department efficients by somehow firing their workers, how does this improve fraud detection?

Furthermore, why should i trust a billionaire who has spouted lies more and more times?

What about data protection? We're giving billionaires and their team access to federal workers data. Project 2025 emphatizes replacing federal workers for loyal one, why shouldn't an american feel threatened by this? https://www.muskwatch.com/p/musk-associates-given-unfettered

And why should i care about saving all these money if the middle class is gonna get screwed with higher taxes?

In fact if you listen to what they actually say, at least half of what they're doing isn't even about efficiency, it's about ideological purity.

>>Government generally doesn’t have the luxury of failure because the consequences for people’s lives are too extreme.

Im guessing they will eventually discover why bureaucracy even exists. That is to move slow enough to ensure big mistakes become impossible and provide stability for newer things to happen at their own pace.

Im guessing any chaos inside bureaucracy for as little as a decade could cause a lost century to a country. The cost of stabilising, course correcting, recovering and then going on upwards could take decades.

Civil society is a precious gift, one that is hard to build and easy to destroy.

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