151–160 of 230 posts
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Okay, but increasing state and federal government staffing levels by a few percent to try to save that time would cost more than 100,000,000 hours per year.
If you want to speed it up with staff, if. The point of the article is that you don't have to waste nearly as much human time at all, if you have a working electronic identity and goverment services.
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I bet you USAA's Insurance run DMV would be a lot more efficient and have good customer service, but hey, we don't want any Ayn Rands around here
How anyone alive today can think that is beyond me. Everytime I call anything these days I get 3 minutes of disclaimers about why I should use their website or app instead and a pre-recorded sob story about being really busy etc etc just to try and break me before I even get into a queue to be connected to someone. 2022 is a dehumanising time to be alive and just get the most basic shit done.
Time wasted filling in forms and talking to service staff should really be tracked and associated with the business or government agency, then it's possible to actually assign a "bureaucracy/red-tape tax" based on the hours they waste for people using the service. Without externalizing the cost of all the time wasted, it's just too easy to push time-costs on to the consumers/citizens. It's already a huge problem, and…
A major loss of productivity? I think maybe i've spent an hour at the DMV in the past 10 years. I spend maybe an hour or two each year doing my taxes. I struggle to think of a single other case where my time is consumed with dealing with any kind of bureaucracy. I'm not convinced it's a major problem.
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> Time wasted filling in forms and talking to service staff should really be tracked and associated with the business or government agency Isn't there a US law on this? The Paperwork Reduction Act?
Only for the federal government, and as far as I can tell only for "regular people" forms. I.e. if you fill out an NSF proposal or want to drill an oil well or fill out Form D for a stock sale the forms don't seem to include any estimates. I know the time required to fill out an NSF proposal is "how long is a piece of string" but parts of it (some of the financial portions) are as boilerplate as an IRS tax form.
Ideally people would have a single universal identifier and then I'd never need to put my date of birth or tax number on another form again.
I think Austria moved even more services to the digital age then Estonia. It is not fancy, nor modern. But a lot of documents primarily exist only in a digital form (all laws, court files, official documents, financial administration documents, ...). They are often printed out, but they are just a random piece of paper, just a "copy" of the original. The official and valid version is the digitally signed PDF.
It is mostly implemented via some really boring and antiquated Java Server Pages HTML forms, that are not always easy to use. But they work nearly all the time, and once you send them you immediately get a signed and legally binding confirmation that it was filed.
The roots of the system go back to the early 2000s, and used elliptical cryptography right from the start. Which was really hard back then to deal with, because most libraries or applications didn't support it yet. For example native Windows support came only with Windows 7.
In Austria everyone and every company that has E-mail is required to accept digital signatures. If you cancel your phone contract with a signed PDF via E-Mail the company can't refuse to accept it, as every court will instantly decide in your favour.
Even without changing processes, hundreds of years of time could be saved by reducing the frequency we have to interact with government at all For example, almost 20 American states require license renewal every 4 years or more frequently: https://ballotpedia.org/Driver%27s_license_costs_by_state,_2... When I renew, there's no test (not even vision), and they don't even retake my picture or let me update my height. T…
I'd go the other way; we really should require retesting for driver's license renewals. New Jersey for example just enacted a "safe passing" law earlier this year in an attempt to make bicyclists and pedestrians safer. But existing drivers will never have to demonstrate that they know this because we never retest people after they get their license once.
The reason we have licenses (aka controls on who can drive cars) is to curb dangerous and irresponsible driving, mark drivers for driving egregiously, and remove people or not allow drivers on the road when they don't have the motor skills to navigate a vehicle on the road.
Knowing the rules is secondary, if not tertiary. Otherwise bicyclists should also have licenses and license plates because rules apply to them as well.
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Even with the same amount of work or service provided, under-staffing absolutely consumes and destroys peoples productivity. What an awful waste it is to take the morning off work to go somewhere like the DMV, wait forever in line and see half the service counters empty. Sure, the government saved on some staff salary but society lost more in productivity.
And then those empty counters and slow service are used as evidence that the government is incompetent and should have its budget reduced further. It's a vicious cycle and I am confident the reduced service is a deliberate attempt to undermine confidence in government. See also: bans on common-sense measures like including sales tax in price tags, making it easier to pay income taxes.
Yes. The strategy is known as "starve the beast" [1] and it is pursued with ferocious determination by its proponents. The goal is to create some kind of minimal government libertarian paradise.
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I didn't mean to gender, sorry if it was perceived that way. My understanding is that this is a standard industry term. Anyway, I'll try to use human years in the future.
"Man" is just Saxon/Old English for person (and is considered to be from at least PIE origins).
My late mum used to complain about the term Chair instead of Chairman, "I'm a person not a piece of furniture", she was chairman on lots of committees.
I wonder how many years the US could save its citizens by modernizing and digitizing the IRS, DMV, etc. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?
US democracy could change by having a central registry of everyone, ensuring everyone gets their voting pass automatically, skipping the faulty and bumpy process of voter registration amd inequality of identification-ability