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Comment by fathermarz | Hacker News Reader

There are over 150k water utilities alone in the US.

Passing the buck to the Federal Government is not understanding the problem.

There are 1000x as many tax payers and the government still makes sure every single mom who gets a venmo payment for $60 pays taxes. National security is a federal responsibility, they should absolutely do their jobs.

> There are 1000x as many tax payers and the government still makes sure every single mom who gets a venmo payment for $60 pays taxes.

That's a join in an existing database.

Where's the database and what's the code for this case?

Is the idea that the federal government of the United States, which created and maintains a database of hundreds of millions of taxpayers, is powerless compile a database of 0.1% that number of water utilities?

> What's the code for this case?

Are you seriously asking me to provide a program?

I believe the comment was to say you can not create a join for data that does not exist. Access to financial records is trivial, but there is likely no such comparable record that one can query on for water/industrial. Maybe metrics like water quality for some of them, but not the other security data exists other than shodan/censys (weak and out of context) which could take months per site to collect.

AFAIK the most robust data they have on industrial sectors is within the national labs, and even then its considered sparse.

How did the federal government create the database of taxpayers? How do they keep it up to date? Why can these mechanisms not work for water utilities?

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