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Comment by guywithahat | Hacker News Reader

I cannot think of anything worse than an official post office email I have to maintain. Do you not remember how many government sites would simply shut down after business hours because they couldn't figure out how to do on-call? Have you ever used US-treasury direct?

This site would be slow, the code base would be unmaintained, it'd get enormous amounts of spam you have to sort through to get some important tax document, and it would be down all the time. Think the line at the post office but for server up-times.

Similarly if the mint maintained a payment processor then they'd just create a legal monopoly (like the USPS did) and ban new processors. Not only would they be worse than VISA and MasterCard, but they'd make paypal and venmo illegal. Don't forget the USPS bans competitors from being cheaper than itself, and this is exactly what would happen if the Mint had its own payment processor.

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Hard disagree on every point. Just because implementations aren't always perfect does not mean you should not have public services.

I know a librarian who spends an inordinate amount of time helping the elderly and tech illiterate members of the public with creating emails, because they're necessary. However, you can't create emails anywhere without a phone number these days - a post office option would fix that.

Email already gets enormous amounts of spam, and the only reason most don't see it is because private service providers like Google expend resources filtering them out. Why would a business not be able to charge for premium filter services on an email they don't host? Not to mention that private email services send you ads.

To be clear, I'm not saying we should shut down Gmail tomorrow, but having a free public email service option would allow many people to use internet infrastructure they don't have. It's an accessibility problem that should be addressed in the public's interest as well as shareholders.

I'm not trying to take away from the thrust of your point. But pragmatically it seems like it could be in the scope of libraries to maintain some $4/mo prepaid SIMs to facilitate people signing up for new online accounts. Win-win for serving both the poor and people who care about privacy.

But what happens when the Gov decides they don't want to fund it anymore? Or the gov decides something shouldn't be funded.. Say truckers on strike, or wiki-leaks? Well then boom we have the same game, just a different player.

that's already happening? are you going to be funding your own vaccine research?

None of what you say is inherent in a public service.

The DMV often gets singled out as an inefficient system that is emblematic of the failure of public option, but I assure you as someone who's had to deal with a privatized version, you're not getting better service and in fact the fees are much more expensive without recourse or oversight.

The answer to a bad system is a good system. Adding a middleman who is only interested in extracting as much money as possible is rarely the improvement the consultants would have you believe.

Washington state has privatized much of the DMV, and it's much better then what I've experienced in other states.

I was under the impression that government sites having "business hours" had as much or more to do with their backends dating from the mainframe era, with nightly batch jobs that take all cpu time or prohibit database writes.

Anyway, I agree that government provided services functioning as you described would be intolerable, but disagree that's somehow inevitable. Rather than expecting government services to be unaccountable monopolies of the "line at the DMV" archetype, what if we expected effective and valuable baseline services of the IRS FreeFile archetype? Or models like unemployment benefits and FDIC insurance, where the government quietly provides citizens an umbrella without limiting access to alternatives?

I strongly resonate with gp's sentiment that when services like email or payment processing become requirements for modern life, ensuring access to them becomes a government prerogative. We're in agreement that it must be a net improvement, not trading one monopoly for another.

My local city runs a water heater rental company. It provides water heaters more or less at cost to residents because we have exceptionally hard water here and they need to be replaced every ten years or so. It's a well run, valuable public program, and its cost is minimal.

The US Digital Service made a number of good web services for the US federal government while it lasted. They didn't close at night.

There are many times where governments do a bad job of things, and times where they do a good job. They're just institutions made of people, but they have no other default orientation. Describing faults in some non-existent service you're just imagining, as though they would obviously happen, is frankly a bizarre thing to do.

May I suggest: consider getting involved in the governance of your world. You could meet the many humans who are already doing so, working to improve it, and learning something. You can actually do that! It might surprise you how much good work is being done.

You might also then be able to help prevent others from implementing your worst dreams, instead of treating them as obvious or foregone conclusions.

Largely opinion here, but the glaring issue with many modern governments is that they don't do. They get some consultants to come in, make some requirements, then shop for a contractor. IMO, governments should do a lot more themselves, should own infrastructure/utilities outright & ongoingly.

Particularly hard in today's climate where so so many people are empowered to say no, or to come in and add their own pet complications/expenses to a project. The meta-governance of staying to mission, to relentlessly caring about value optimization (in the pursuit of public good) is fraught with failure modes. Yet still it feels vastly less dangerous and expensive than shopping the work out, than governments perpetually seeking to do things it itself doesn't know much about & can't do.

We've had decades of nihilism that sees this juncture of difficulty & says: maybe we shouldn't have a government. But some day, I hope, maybe, possibly, we'll redisocver the spirit of makers and doers, and the eternal jibing critically can give way to a some will & make happen.

It's telling that in order to interact in many ways with the IRS online, you have to verify your identity using a private company (ID.me). Identification of citizens and residents has to be on the short list for core competencies of any government, but we outsource even that.

> US-treasury direct

Ok but this one is good. And it works because it’s a tool they need to generate revenue

It's better now, but during the era of the on-screen keyboard it was atrocious.

I thought they still had the on-screen keyboard? They had it as of 6 months ago at least.

But still, atrocious site. I can't use the back button or it logs you out; logging in is like a 5 step chore, it's unintuitive and looks like it's from 2005. I can only assume it's unsafe and doing simple things like checking your balance take 20 minutes. There will never be an app and I'm sure they will continue to do no innovation on the customer service side.

> looks like it's from 2005

Fantastic. Really fast pages, simple forms, no Js. trendy is not what I want from my government service site.

> There will never be an app

Good. I want more websites and less apps on my phone. That also helps me trust the security more.

Further invalidating the original objection that the site would be unmaintained.

I hate this approach so much. Something doesn't work very well, so instead of putting pressure on making it work better, let us abandon it!

Don't get me wrong. There are cases when it makes sense, but only when it is certain that there is no way to make it better, or when making it better would be a waste of resources. And neither is case here.

In my country, we have, what is essentially, a centralized email for communication with authorities. Taxes, permits, trials, it all goes there. There is no spam, you can set it up so that reminders about unread go to your normal email. It's not perfect, but it saves me hours of time I would otherwise have to waste in line.

So try for something like this. Instead of just giving up.

> Don't forget the USPS bans competitors from being cheaper than itself

That’s a disingenuous take. USPS legally cannot be undercut on certain types of postal services but in exchange they must serve EVERY permanent address without price discrimination.

No private company has to do that, nor would any sane profit maximising company want to.

It's also a necessary protection because, for some ass-backward reason, we force the USPS to operate in the black instead of funding it with taxpayer money.

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