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Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

This apparently started on June 10th, so down for 12 days and counting!

In entirely unrelated news:

June 4th - OPM breach announced. June 12th - OPM confirms security clearance records exposed.

I'm glad I don't have an urgent need to US visa or passport or any form of vaguely federal security or residency or travel related paperwork to go through.

So they're saying We're terrible and we don't care that much. Wow.

If this where a business, they'd be losing customers... but thankfully, they're a government apparatus that holds people over a barrel and doesn't have to provide enough decent service to offer enough visas to meet the demand, hence 12-30 million undocumented immigrants.

Most good companies have extensive interview process to hire new employees - this is most direct comparison with getting new immigrants to the country. Comparison with having 12-30 million illegals in US is the Caltrain deciding not to eject drunk hobos living under overpass for tresspassing. Instead of getting immigrants compete on education/skills/job experience/employee referrals (aka relatives) like Canada, Australia or NZ, US allows unprofitable, illiterate and low skill immigrants into the country.

The US has a process for highly skilled workers as well, not an easy one but it exists.

I don't have the numbers but looking at the amount of illegal immigration into Europe, and looking at what "jobs" most of the semi-legal (refugees, asylum seekers etc.) who also outweigh the amount of high skill labor coming into Europe I won't say this is a US specific problem.

I would also suspect that Canada with it's point based system has the same issue as well. Their immigration system is just more publicized and was given a priority especially during the late 90's and early 2000's since they felt like they were losing the competitiveness with US based companies.

Heck I've been to Canada 3 times in the past 5-6 years and the amount of what i would assume is "illegal" immigration in some of the cities there seems to also be quite high, quite a high percentage of Asian and African decent workers that don't speak English or French and seem to be very wary of people in general.

What is government but a bunch of provided services? We could replace it with well written software. No?

The keystone service is cartel enforcer. That's probably not something that should ever take the human out of the decision-making loop. When the service is essentially, "I hold the same gun to everyone's head to make sure that everyone follows the same rules," you really don't want that automated.

Leaving aside the issue of whether such a service needs to be centralized or to exist at all, if you substitute human evaluation for a set of algorithmic rules, a systems cracker can corrupt the entire cartel more easily than someone individually subverting possibly thousands of independent human actors.

In terms of many of the other services typically provided by government, yes, those could potentially be replaced by software.

Technically, sure (assuming you also build the robot hardware) but we're quite far from having software that can negotiate treaties, figure out how to regulate water rights in California, etc...

Well of course I don't mean to completely replace the government.

But how about making it more lean? How about modernizing with the times? How about making it all much more transparent and accountable? Couldn't open source software do all of this?

We could start with systems that are used by smaller, poorer countries & grow from there.

A visa processing system might be a good start.

I completely agree with this. First, we need to make the lawmakers that such a system is necessary which is understandably, a bigger challenge.

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