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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

This is why a competent and well staffed bureaucracy is so important. Screwworm is really easy to eliminate by flooding their population with males sterilized by radiation (females only mate once in their lifetime so their population falls off fast). There are factories in Latin America already set up to do so at large scale, all it would take is a contract with the USDA to guarantee enough supply for the states.

Edit: Hah, I get to eat my words. Turns out USDA and APHIS have been trying to fly planes over Mexico to release the sterile flies, but the Mexican government has been restricting the flight days and denying landing permission, which has hampered the program. Looks like the Mexican bureaucracy is the one failing here, and USDA/APHIS might be running pre-emptive releases in the US (but I can't find a source on that). They just agreed to lift those restrictions and cooperate more at the end of April.

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Good job the US is on such good terms with Latin America at the moment

It was partially the new tariffs that put a stop to the program and the April 30 agreement puts an end to tariffs on equipment associated with screwworm treatment program.

That competent and well-staffed bureaucracy is important also because they patiently work through these problems with their counterparts on the other side of the the Rio Grande.

Except they got fired, so now there's no one to do that work. We got what we wanted. God help us all 'cause no one else is.

And now those positions are listed as open. Disruption, but to what end. Sigh. https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5384961

> There are factories in Latin America already set up to do so at large scale, all it would take is a contract with the USDA to guarantee enough supply for the states.

According to the article the cases are in Mexico, so I don’t know that “Latin American origin” is a silver bullet.

Mexico is just a small portion of Latin America; A few places I can think of is Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil which have huge stockyards…

Why wouldn't the USDA pay to eliminate pests in another country if it meant preventing those pests from reaching US farmers?

They did exactly that for decades.

> Why wouldn't the USDA pay...

Maybe because there is an executive body hell-bent on the slashing expenditures regardless of any perceived benefit?

Perhaps their supporters should reconsider the burn-the-world-despite-who-it-hurts philosophy.

Hatred is a more powerful emotion than desperacy. Votes will continue to flow towards the man, even in the face of their very own livestock being decimated.

It's not like the alternative worked very well.

It clearly did, evidence: the exact situation we are discussing.

Other evidence includes the worst measles outbreak of the last 30 years and the second largest three-month economic contraction since WWII only topped by the last iteration of this administration.

I mean, it's not like the alternative got out of control spending under control.

We wouldn't be having Trump had that happened.

What were some specific problems caused by this spending? Seemed to work quite well.

Up until our international image was destroyed two months ago, we were in a privileged position allowing deficit spending while the rest of the world absorbed the negatives.

Trump certainly doesn't have a solution, but I'm also not convinced he has correctly identified a problem. Nation-state debt from the country whose currency is the de-facto international standard for the world, is categorically different than your mortgage or your credit card debt.

It's clearly unsustainable. Eventually it leads to a run on the dollar and inability to refinance the debt. At that point, the debt gets inflated away.

I ask you: do you imagine it can continue forever, with debt reaching arbitrarily high multiples of GDP?

I agree that the system can become unstable. Clearly; it's being made unstable currently.

I disagree that it must become unstable, especially on a time frame relevant to anyone currently alive. Perhaps certain resources could be sheparded more sustainably than they have been but I do not think we were previously heading towards a consequence worse than we are currently experiencing.

That argument applied to current administrative actions is like saying "we all die someday, therefore we should all commit suicide right now".

What on earth? Trump and other republicans are famous for increasing government spending while decreasing revenue, that's, like, their whole thing, isn't that why people vote for them?

That's true, and I expect Trump won't solve the problem either. He's a liar and a fraud, after all. But that doesn't mean the issue wasn't what got him in office.

Doge probably saw it as anti male propoganda. THEYRE STERALIZIN OUR FLIES

Better if all parties who benefit also pay.

> their population falls off fast

Superexponentially fast.

> This is why a competent and well staffed bureaucracy is so important.

Try: "This is why a competent and well staffed science institute is so important."

Bureaucracy not required.

Who exactly do you think staffs this part of a science institute? Bureaucracy is just another word for the kind of well-staffed administrative system that can handle these tasks.

the administrative parts - managers and approvers, aren't doing the science or the application thereof.

a couple university students in a van going around releasing flies every 10 miles is not a bureaucracy, nor a stand in for a bureaucracy

You think that would be sufficient? Did you read the article?

I did, and I have previously read an article in (iirc) The Atlantic about the screwfly program when it was working. It was a monumental effort to push screwflies back to the Darien Gap, involving widespread coordination of cattle ranchers and government workers, constant flyovers of planes dropping huge numbers of sterile flies, and a massive breeding program.

Two university students in a van can get about as much done as it sounds like. Some problems require coordination, government involvement, and yes, the organization — i.e., bureaucracy — that implies.

(Edit: it was The Atlantic, not The New Yorker. Comment further down has the link, but here it is: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...)

I think a lot of the objections here aren't really bureaucracy in terms of government employees doing things. A lot of what people mean when they complain about "government bureaucracy" is really that it often seems to be 20 people taking 6 months to do something that should take 5 people 6 weeks. So discussions on this tend to get confusing.

> it often seems to be 20 people taking 6 months to do something that should take 5 people 6 weeks

Sounds just like "enterprise" IT to me, tbh.

Leadership can reform enterprise IT, sometimes including staffing cuts while also improving productivity. I have personally seen this happen. It can actually get better.

This is why some people are optimistic about recent efforts at doing the same in government bureaucracy. It's possible to trend upwards.

I’ve seen that happen in government too: GDS. As a rule it does not though.

Leadership needs to be seen as both competent and trustworthy by employees to pull this off. Otherwise it’s the death spiral.

Sure, it's possible, but unlikely. And nobody ever notices or appreciates the efficient and effective goverment agencies.

Honestly the main problem is the fed gov has terrible pr.

Regular people (including me) think the same thing about why software projects take so long. In fact I consider engineering to be a form of bureaucracy. And I've had long conversations about it with friends who are developers, but it's still hard for an outsider to fully grasp why it's so hard. In turn, they can't understand why my job can't be replaced by AI.

Maybe there's an equivalent of Knoll's Law for non-media concepts.

Everything I know how to do is complicated and people don't understand why it's complicated. Everything else is obviously excess bureaucracy and could be done with a LLM running on a ZX80.

The reason bureaucracies seem efficient is that they must be able to (1) complete the mission reliably over long periods of time, in the face of (2) staff churn and loss, without (3) collapsing the first time a critical mass of experts leaves the org. This means you have to sacrifice systems that rely on the enthusiasm of "10x experts" in favor of systems that can reliably recruit talent (at GS salaries.) And this is before you get to the mountains of political crap placed on an org by elected leaders.

It is incredibly challenging to create orgs that reliably stay on-mission over many years.

Companies manage to handle all 3 of those things without the inefficiently (or at least a lot less of it).

As for the terrible salaries and mountains of political crap, that's the real issue here. But these are changeable and shouldn't just be accepted as inevitable as is so often done by defenders of government bureaucracy.

> Companies manage to handle all 3 of those things without the inefficiently (or at least a lot less of it).

Do they?

The first two results on Google for "government vs private efficiency" are https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/publicati... and https://www.epsu.org/article/public-and-private-sector-effic..., which both suggest that it is a myth that companies are inherently more efficient than government.

It's also worth mentioning that governments and companies inherently must operate differently. Governments are not set up to recoup investment; in fact, proponents of small government (as opposed to no government) generally recognize that the role of government is to assist in preventing "tragedy of the commons" by funding initiatives and programs that fundamentally do not make sense for a single market player to address. I.e. government helps when there isn't a good path for a single market player to see a good/reliable economic and market-competitive return from their investment.

> The report examines evidence from nine sectors - electricity, health, waste management and water, prisons, buses, ports and airports, railways and telecom,.

Yeah, if you examine only utilities and monopolies they are not more efficient than the government. That's not a surprise because they don't face competition and are heavily politically controlled.

Do you have evidence suggesting a clear discrepancy in efficiency in other sectors?

Only every single interaction with the government I have ever had and the experience of everyone I know who works in industries where they have to deal with the government on a regular basis.

If lived experience is the only bar of evidence you will consider, there are plenty of stories of fraud, corruption and anti-competitive behavior in industry that have hurt real people. Insurance (duh), devs who get shafted by Apple store policies or other entities without recourse to a human, outright scams and spam i.e. cryptodumps, every major game release that seems to either get delayed or released with show-stopping bugs, etc

EDIT: s/accept/consider

I think once you join the workforce and are employed you'll start seeing some company inefficiencies.

I see it every day and it doesn't come close to the insanity of government

>> generally recognize that the role of government is to assist in preventing "tragedy of the commons"

Not anymore. Great many now believe that there should be no commons, that everything should be owned by someone and leased back to those who use it. Such people see it as the duty of government to efficiently disperse the commons to the highest bidders. Those bidders will then "protect" their asset by ensuring it is put to the highest economic use.

> Companies manage to handle all 3 of those things without the inefficiently (or at least a lot less of it).

Have you… never worked for a large company? They’re incredibly inefficient! And also, the staff cost a whole lot more.

A profound number of companies fail every year and cease to exist, which is probably more inefficient (and also not an outcome that many would consider acceptable in a government context.)

Of the ones that survive[1], some may be more efficient, but whether they remain efficient, effective and extant in the long term is not a given.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Can you tell me which companies have run very, very large financial systems in the US for the last 250 years?

Efficiency and resiliency are generally at opposite ends of a spectrum. COVID supply chain disruptions demonstrated that in spades

How is a bureaucracy not required when the solution involves coordinated multinational logistics to produce and distribute hundreds of millions of flies?

Yeah because bureaucracy (in its original term) is efficient at that. /s

Wait a couple of years, and then maybe.

This is surreal. The evil bureaucracy has successfully been doing it since the 1960s. It worked. And yes, it was efficient.

Now, the problem is that if you alienate your neighbours they stop wanting to play nice. Also, bureaucracies do not work when you fire civil servants indiscriminately. It’s not the bureaucracy doing this, it’s the guy who told you that the country would work better without it.

The Government is inherently ineffective, and bureaucracy, as a term, pretty much says so.

Plenty of evidence has been piling up with regarding to it.

Feel free to down-vote, does not make your Nanny State any more efficient. :D

You should read more about economics. I can give you resources.

How did you come to your conclusions?

https://mises.org/library/book/lessons-young-economist

https://mises.org/mises-daily/myth-efficient-government-serv...

https://mises.org/journal-libertarian-studies/austrian-theor...

https://mises.org/library/book/bureaucracy

I didn't ask for resources backing up your conclusions, I asked how you arrived at them.

Through rational and critical thinking and personal experiences? I am not sure I understand your question.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888836

I see from your link that you mentioned a specific: that court takes a long time.

What do you think the optimal system would be in that specific case? If you could design it, how would it look? It doesn't have to be realistic, but like an ideal system of justice. Are there any precedents you think are ideal or is there something you have in mind that would make it work better?

I think the answer to this cannot be summed up in a comment, and what would I even gain by really doing so? Most likely nothing. If you think bureaucracy does not slow things down or is not slow, God speed. I hope you will never have to directly get into situations that involve it.

I am trying to determine if you just hate something and want to destroy it without considering the effect it would have, or if you have actually put effort into thinking about how to solve the problem that the thing you hate is trying (perhaps poorly) to solve.

If you haven't thought about the consequences of tearing down parts of the system and what will replace those parts, than I think the entirety of your conclusions about this matter should be disregarded and I think most everyone reading this would agree.

No, I do not hate nor want to destroy.

First we would have to determine what you and I mean by bureaucracy. It does sound good, who does not like organization? Problem is, if you ever worked for the Government, or dealt with them in some meaningful way, you should have realized it is not so.

I truly hope you will not be caught up in the meat machine of the Government.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrcihaXqSU0 (Public Enemies: Government Bureaucrats as Societal Parasites | Tom DiLorenzo), uploaded just now!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43943953

Oh my, people complaining about bureaucracy!

>bureaucracy, as a term, pretty much says so.

Bureaucracy, as per Weber, is nothing but the rational and impersonal administration of resources and exists in any sufficiently large institution, private or public. It is in fact so efficient that it is omnipresent to the point of being the defining feature of modernity, having replaced familial, personal or arbitrary rule.

Whether it's the old aristocracies of Europe replaced by the Prussian state, workshops replaced by Fordist factories, Guanxi in China replaced by modern administration, all of that is simply introduction of formal management and organization, i.e. bureaucracy.

I did not mean in it in the dictionary sense, and please do not let us delude ourselves that bureaucracy has much to do with what the dictionary says so.

In what sense did you mean it, then?

I mean, have you ever had experiences with the Government? Have you been to court? Do you know how long everything takes? It speaks volumes. It took 3 years (!) here for someone to be finally given a sentence who almost killed 3 people (and it is on CCTV). This is just one instance, there are zillions.

how big is a zillion?

Very big.

The science is done. We know how to deal with this insect, the American government successfully eradicated it from North America ~25 years ago. Now it’s only logistics and diplomacy.

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