Nice to see Audrey Tang getting props. There was a similar interview with @miyagawa on rebuild.fm that is a good listen.
Bringing civic tech to Taiwan's coronavirus pandemic response [audio]
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Re: Bringing civic tech to Taiwan's coronavirus pandemic response [audio]
#62Those are some really incredible Covid numbers for Taiwan, just, incredible . Having spent time there and seem some poorer areas and very dense areas, 7 deaths is unbelievably great.
Last I checked 6 or 7 was also the number of reported Covid deaths in Thailand.
I believe you are refering to Vietnam.
Re: Bringing civic tech to Taiwan's coronavirus pandemic response [audio]
#63I don't fully get the title from the content, but perhaps NPR is saying that we should have a different control structure for health related maters... Like for example in Star Trek the only people that can override the captain is the doctor. For medical emergencies they can basically force some course of action. It seems in most countries the top brass is making decisions even though they are not technically qualifie…
If the government is going to tell me I can't leave my house, I want that decision being made by an elected official with some accountability to the public, not by a staff doctor of some sort.
I hear you, and I understand your reasoning. And yet...
Let's say it's an election year, and the decision is going to be made just a few months before the election. Let's say that the lives saved by a stay-at-home order will be mostly saved after the election, but the pain of the lockdown will be before it. (If any of that sounds familiar, it should.) Now how much do you trust your elected official? Still more than the doctor?
I trust the doctor to be non-political. Sometimes I really need that. I trust the elected official to more politically cued in. Sometimes we need that. I don't know how to pick. I want a balance, not one or the other.
Re: Bringing civic tech to Taiwan's coronavirus pandemic response [audio]
#64I don't fully get the title from the content, but perhaps NPR is saying that we should have a different control structure for health related maters... Like for example in Star Trek the only people that can override the captain is the doctor. For medical emergencies they can basically force some course of action. It seems in most countries the top brass is making decisions even though they are not technically qualifie…
If the government is going to tell me I can't leave my house, I want that decision being made by an elected official with some accountability to the public, not by a staff doctor of some sort.
In Ohio, the only person in county government with power to arrest the (elected) sheriff is the (elected) coroner.
Re: Bringing civic tech to Taiwan's coronavirus pandemic response [audio]
#65It's hard to tell why you might want to listen to this from just the title: "But Taiwan has also been taking a relatively experimental approach to the pandemic with technology. Like working with civic hackers to code its way out of the pandemic. Today on the show, we dive into Taiwan's pandemic policies and ask: Would the U.S. ever take a similar approach?"
> Would the U.S. ever take a similar approach? Would the US ever admit their exceptionalism is perhaps flawed? Would the Europeans ever admit their exceptionalism led to ignoring Taiwan's alarm bells? I highly doubt it. They are not stupid, they know what's going on in China and they are not telling everybody else because they are worried of losing credibility as leaders. Almost all of our current response assumes th…
> the market desperately needs lower taxes and less punishment for the wealthy.
lmao. What world are you living in? The wealthy have never had it better at any point in history.
Re: Bringing civic tech to Taiwan's coronavirus pandemic response [audio]
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Almost all of our current response assumes the Chinese Communist Party is capable of being transparent and honest. Actually, all of our current response, up to this point assumes that if we half-ass our response to the pandemic, it will go away. "What China is doing" has largely stopped being relevant to anyone outside China in early/mid-February. As of today, China could have zero people testing positive, or a bil…
A simple litmus test here is: "Do you genuinely believe at face value China's statement that this virus originated from outside China" If the answer is yes, then you also believe the statement "China has zero cases since it stopped reporting them". Our responses are based on the numbers reported by the CCP, if you realize that there is now tens of millions of suddenly deactivated phone plans in a country where the sm…
> A simple litmus test here is: "Do you genuinely believe at face value China's statement that this virus originated from outside China"
My answer? Probably not, but even if I did, it wouldn't matter. It doesn't matter what I believe about China. What matters is that the virus is here, and we're not dealing with it, and instead of pressing our governments' feet to the coals we are busy getting distracted by pointless nationalistic arguments about what is happening in a country that we have banned travel from.
Let me say it again - it doesn't matter what's happening in China. It's not the reason for why our daily cases are rising.
> millions of cell phone plans cancelled
Allright, then.
There is a mountain of reasons for why that would happen in the middle of a global recession, and a travel ban. Please consider applying the same skepticism to a wild-ass claim that was made in March, and has not since had any follow-up. (If we were to take it at face value, the entirety of China got the virus, all by March. Which is, of course, complete bullshit.)
If you don't believe me, ask any five Chinese ex-pats about how their extended family's doing. Chances are near certain that they'll tell you that not a single one of their relatives got COVID.
I personally know a lot more than five people from China. I've talked to them about COVID. Not a single one of their relatives have caught it this year. [1]
[1] Meanwhile, much of my extended family in Eastern Europe, plus a few people they know got it. Funny, that...
Re: Bringing civic tech to Taiwan's coronavirus pandemic response [audio]
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Almost all of our current response assumes the Chinese Communist Party is capable of being transparent and honest. Actually, all of our current response, up to this point assumes that if we half-ass our response to the pandemic, it will go away. "What China is doing" has largely stopped being relevant to anyone outside China in early/mid-February. As of today, China could have zero people testing positive, or a bil…
A simple litmus test here is: "Do you genuinely believe at face value China's statement that this virus originated from outside China" If the answer is yes, then you also believe the statement "China has zero cases since it stopped reporting them". Our responses are based on the numbers reported by the CCP, if you realize that there is now tens of millions of suddenly deactivated phone plans in a country where the sm…
> If the answer is yes, then you also believe the statement "China has zero cases since it stopped reporting them".
China currently has 1332 symptomatic cases according to the official figures (which include Hong Kong and Taiwan, but Shanghai also has 100 cases) https://news.sina.cn/zt_d/yiqing0121
China has repeatedly announced localized outbreaks, usually attributed to failures of quarantine procedures, which were countered by localized lockdowns and subsequently fizzled out.
That's not too different from Australia and New Zealand. Do you believe that their numbers are also fake?
Re: Bringing civic tech to Taiwan's coronavirus pandemic response [audio]
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is absolutely true, but what are you implying in this context? Was Taiwan harsher with draconian lockdown policies early on?
Taiwan never had a lockdown! See the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25539398 Taiwanese policies were not just much more successful in containing the virus, but also much less draconian.
Japan didn’t either and both countries are performing way better than the West. I’m glad I’m living in a place that is taking the big picture into account (economic wellness of everyone) instead of hyperfocussing on saving few years of life of a very restricted demographic.
Re: Bringing civic tech to Taiwan's coronavirus pandemic response [audio]
#69As a programmer in state government this approach is not feasible for many reasons the chief of which is that at almost every level of government we lack technocrats. In the very unlikely event that one is appointed or hired that has Audrey Tang's(from the podcast, digital minister for Taiwan) background I predict that the amount of pushback received from other levels of government and unions would smother any softwa…
Yes the current Taiwanese government is truly one of the world's finest, and the US governance one of the worst. One of the reason I enjoy reading https://pedestrianobservations.com/ and other in depth discussions of public transit is that it's really quite the barometer for overall civic function. The rate of new public transit is also a fine derivative, and as such even more "low latency".
> Yes the current Taiwanese government is truly one of the world's finest
World's finest in what regards?
Have you seen what the conflict resolution[1] they chose in parliament meetings?
> and the US governance one of the worst.
Are you also aware that United States has almost 14x of the population than Taiwan's? The governance of 330 million people coming from many different backgrounds and ethnicities around the global vs. 98% of homogeneous Han Chinese[2] are an order of magnitude difficult?
I am afraid your anecdotal doesn't tell the full story.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-40640043
[2]: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/ethnic-groups-of-taiwan....
Re: Bringing civic tech to Taiwan's coronavirus pandemic response [audio]
#70The US government is full of corruption and closed-source companies basically destroying almost all open source collaborative efforts based on greed. Unless a leader steps in that truly understands this and works to get rid of it, then I don't think the US will ever be able to compete.
One problem is the complexity. To expand on what someone else said about US having 51 governments, the Federal government is also further fragmented. 2+ million people, and 5-10 million contractors (individuals who aren't full time employees but work alongside them). The true numbers aren't federated and there's not even a clear accounting of how many agencies there are - best estimates (including Federal sources) pu…
I was going to mention the exception of 18F. I'm truly impressed with their efforts after working FedRAMP and wish more government agencies would adopt their culture.