There were better ways to word this and a better name to give it.
And better people to run it.
Why is this not run by PG or SAMA?
YC's request for startups: Government 2.0
151–160 of 226 posts
Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0
#152In a recent newsletter from Robin Sloan (sci-fi writer), he shares what he's heard from a few engineers that work in China:
"The Chinese government is building an OS and, in the not-too-distant future, the world will be split: those nations that adopt it, and those that don’t. This OS isn’t just software – it’s also access to Chinese capital, investments in infrastructure, and more – but it is ALSO software, a very capable suite, and it includes the world’s best facial recognition software. The sales force is out there now, signing up clients. This is happening."
Anyone else heard more details on this?
Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0
#153The real disruptive techs for govt will be advances in things like fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), data tokenization, identity (happening today), privacy enhancing AI and other privacy enhancing technologies that facilitate data sharing that is impossible today due to jurisdictional and legal issues.
One of the biggest things that is going to hit government that people haven't articulated is the effect of Agile development on service economics.
Short version is, iterative development was designed for things that grow revenue, so the cost of maintaining them using devops is minor when you are a growth SaaS business. Waterfall methods were designed to be built by expensive developers and passed on to cheaper operations groups for long term maintenance lifetimes of a decade or more.
Keeping developers on staff to patch libraries, iterate on features and maintain solutions that have fixed revenue/funding allotments is much more expensive than most agencies understand they are signing up for.
Going to a cloud subscription model creates massive procurement problems with vendor lock-in and competitiveness issues, and it also takes PII and sensitive data out of their custody and control.
I think to understand government, you need to understand public sector economics, which are centrally planned and do not reflect the reality of the outside economic world.
Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0
#154The solution to income inequality is not going to come from venture capitalists and private companies. I have an idea for a non-profit that tackles a systemic problem, but I can't help but look at some of the other yc grads and think that their companies seem hopelessly out of touch with the problems they're trying to tackle. Promise is mentioned as "tackling mass incarceration", but their company seems geared more t…
> It's ridiculous to suggest that an app that sends reminders of court dates will make an impact on any of these problems. I listened to a podcast with the founder. She was impressive. In terms of the impact of reminders, you'd be surprised. One of the student loan guarantors tried a model where they were paid more if they kept people paying their loans. Their program was very successful with just well-timed reminder…
Source: https://www.asa.org/about-us/
"...By proactively reaching out to borrowers at risk of delinquency and default, ASA helped to avert more than $120 million of loan defaults before the program was eliminated by the Department of Education."
Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0
#155I have to confess, this effort makes me very, very nervous. I already think that business has replaced too much of what government should be doing, and has too much influence over what it hasn't replaced. Also, given the activities coming from the tech industry over the last decade or more, I'm even more nervous that this is aimed in that direction. Increasing the amount of that doesn't seem wise to me.
Bleah - government shouldn't be the default actor in a space unless it's absolutely necessary. It's actually a good thing if community problems can be solved by smaller organizations which don't need tax money or coercive measures to get things done.
> It's actually a good thing if community problems can be solved by smaller organizations
As long as those organizations are not for-profit companies.
Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0
#156In Andrew Yang's recent panel at Monetery Tech Summit, he was making the case that most of these are problems that the free market doesn't reward solving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhNpbPhFwRc&t=957 These are all important problems, but there have been people working on them for decades already without much progress. What we really need is for either government to tackle these problems itself, or else to put in…
I didn't watch the linked video, but aren't things like education and affordable housing also problems that governments have been tackling for decades without much progress and even often making things worse? For example, economists are almost uniformly against rent control, which many cities try to implement. And the flood of government money encouraging educational loans seems to have made college costs spiral. Per…
The government is in charge of determining what types of businesses are profitable though, so even areas where the government hasn't been effective usually still require better government policies in order for the markets to be able to offer solutions. There are certainly problems that businesses can ameliorate given current government policies, but it just isn't realistic to think that we can solve every problem on our own by routing around government.
Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bleah - government shouldn't be the default actor in a space unless it's absolutely necessary. It's actually a good thing if community problems can be solved by smaller organizations which don't need tax money or coercive measures to get things done.
> It's actually a good thing if community problems can be solved by smaller organizations As long as those organizations are not for-profit companies.
That’s not true. If an organization benefits its customers/users in some way, it’s still doing a good thing if it captures some of that benefit in the form of profit.
Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0
#158In Andrew Yang's recent panel at Monetery Tech Summit, he was making the case that most of these are problems that the free market doesn't reward solving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhNpbPhFwRc&t=957 These are all important problems, but there have been people working on them for decades already without much progress. What we really need is for either government to tackle these problems itself, or else to put in…
I didn't watch the linked video, but aren't things like education and affordable housing also problems that governments have been tackling for decades without much progress and even often making things worse? For example, economists are almost uniformly against rent control, which many cities try to implement. And the flood of government money encouraging educational loans seems to have made college costs spiral. Per…
> aren't things like education and affordable housing also problems that governments have been tackling for decades without much progress and even often making things worse
Not exactly. Government has been throwing band aids at the symptoms, while continuing full steam ahead with the underlying policy - an inflationary treadmill that keeps pushing "full employment" at a time when human labor is rapidly less required.
Housing is not affordable not because it has become expensive to build, but because it has been effectively financialized into a rent extraction scheme. And changing those fundamentals would disrupt the exit plans of everyone that has bought into the bubble.
I'm not excited about private industry approaches - they can succeed in isolation but they can't change the game. Even if innovation does say, bring down the cost of housing. The explicit government policy is to then raise prices across the board to make sure that average costs still keep going up. Essentially, economic progress itself has been turned into a zero sum affair for everyone but the upper class.
This feedback is exactly what happened after free trade and big box stores brought the benefits of cheaper goods and economies of scale, but also hollowed out our local economies. Rather than everybody ending up with more buying power that compensated for the local lost income, prices were raised to erode those gains. So we were left with lower quality goods for the same price, and displaced workers unable to take over a share of the still-needed work, as the still-employed had to keep working "full time" to keep the same buying power.
Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0
#159If anyone wants to help Veterans, I am an attorney, 5+ years in assisting Vets get VA benefits. I have A LOT of fully formed concepts, but amateur/hobby technical ability. Most immediate goal is to compliment but go well beyond the very minimal efforts that USDS has been doing for Vets directly the last 2-3 years. VA has coopted USDS into assisting the VA first, Vets only incidentally. matt@deutermanlaw.com
What kinds of issues are you thinking about tackling in that space?
Empowering Vets to package up and view their own claims information in a way that more closely aligns to what claims adjudicators are going to be looking for, without bogging them down in laws/regs and making it as burdensome as it is when the VA explains it. Maybe some gamification of the process, in manageable and unintimidating steps.
The biggest thing to understand is that Veteran's do not currently have a way to even view their static "file" that is being reviewed. The VA and advocates with proper clearance can view both top-level and detailed information much more than the claimant themselves can. They basically get to logon to vets.gov to be told they are #10253 in line and it is currently at the "Processing Evidence" level and that's it.
Doesn't really make sense to have the claimant have to work so hard to know how to shape their own claim that they initiated. The easier the claimant can do the legwork, the less the government has to do to explain and pickup extra work (the government has certain obligations to fully assist).
Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0
#160Here's a better idea: encourage talented young people to join civil service or run for office. Companies can help government in many ways but have a relatively low positive impact.