The sad thing is that people don't miss the administrative state until it's too late.
I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet. Not to mention the background level of problems like the Purdue Pharma one.
This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen end up also not getting any credit to the institutions and regulators, so on the budget it feels (to uninformed voters) that these departments are simply wasting taxpayer money.
> This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
> On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen […]
Michael Lewis (of The Big Short fame) has two books on the things that government(s) do that no one else (often) can, either because they're too big, too expensive/unprofitable, or a co-ordination problem where it effects many actors simultaneously:
I haven't read _Who is Government_ yet (in spite of the fact that it has a better title!) but _The Fifth Risk_ was a fantastically illuminating paradigm-shifting read for me.
"What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?"
> This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
This is one of the more frustrating things working in SRE/ops/infra. Yes, if you have really good metrics and monitoring you can show to some egghead exec that might care that your numbers are improving - but lots of times that visibility doesn't exist, or no one cares very much. I've been advised more than once in my career to just "let it break" so when I come to fix it after I had warned about it breaking, it makes me more visible, when I easily could have prevented it in the first place. This mindset is rampant, in my own career anyway. I think it's really idiotic.
Thank you for reminding me of Y2K! It's the perfect example of what happens when you forget about the people keeping things together.
My team and I worked really hard for several years to make sure that Y2K didn't have any effect, or at least a dramatically downsized one. It worked but I did hear from several people that they were annoyed that we spent so much money, time, and resources on something that turned out to be "not that big of a deal". Arrrgggghh!!
> The sad thing is that people don't miss the administrative state until it's too late.
> I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
It's a problem with libertarian thinking, generally. Most of the things libertarians rail against exist for good reason, and the libertarian "solution" is actually the thing that already failed in the past.
Your typical libertarian becomes one by reading a ~300 page propaganda book as a teenager or young adult that outlines the problems with Soviet central planning, adds in some legitimate gripes about present-day government rough edges, then lays out a compellingly-neat libertarian free-market fantasy. It's very black and white, offering a stark, false choice between Soviet central planning or minimal government libertarianism.
It doesn't prompt anyone to think about history before the complained about government functions arose: e.g. how was food and drug safety before the FDA? How did that work out for the people then? Were people really better off being able to buy radium water to try to cure what ails them?
It's also very selective. I've never seen any libertarian advocate the abolition of all the government bureaucracy and regulation that protect property rights.
They fired a lot of people at the FDA and also deliberately made it harder for the FDA to regulate. That is likely to cause problems for our food and medicine supply, the FDA has been the world standard for a long time.
I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet. Not to mention the background level of problems like the Purdue Pharma one.