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".
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....
Taiwan has had a total of 815 cases and 7 deaths [2] in a population of 23 million.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_technology
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Taiwan
They also closed their borders to China in January, and in March to the rest of the world. The US, by comparison, has had 7.2M international arrivals in 2020 -- and that's just non-citizens:
https://www.trade.gov/visitor-arrivals-program-i-94-data
Point being: it's easy to overstate the importance of measures like these. If you had to draw one bright-line difference between Taiwan's response, and the response of ~most other nations, it's that they closed their borders early and kept them closed.
"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?"
https://www.postal-reporter.com/blog/white-house-axed-usps-p...
I am unaware of a US implementation of a direct copy of the Taiwanese webapp. In the US through at least May, health authorities were scrambling to get enough PPE to keep the healthcare system functional.
Don't you have to address those fundamental issues first?
Singapore has certainly decided to show how bad it can be, but the root of that is an authoritarian mandate, not the contact tracing itself.
Are we talking about the US? In what metric is the USA the epicenter? In deaths per capita? In infections per capita? I’m pretty sure US leads in testing per capita. I’m not being snarky, I really don’t know if you are referring to USA, and in what way.
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 the Chinese Communist Party is capable of being transparent and honest.
This is what worries me but perhaps the Chinese money has too much sway on YC and Silicon Valley in general to realize you are all being led into a death trap.
Pay attention to January 6th very carefully. A few hedge fund managers I speak to tells me they are hedged for a potentially a massive shock.
Similarly, the market seems to show that Biden's increase in corporate/wealth tax will become a reality at a time when the market desperately needs lower taxes and less punishment for the wealthy.
Some extreme end of the hedge fund managers think that the USD is going to collapse but I believe that this is just another ploy by people who bought Gold years ago are trying to dump their positions on people who buy this shit up.
the USD will never be allowed to fail because the rest of the world's currency is backed by it.
lmao. What world are you living in? The wealthy have never had it better at any point in history.
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 billion people testing positive, and it wouldn't matter one bit to our domestic planners - they'd just keep doing what they've been doing.
Huh? The savings rate for the rich zooming coworkers from the hamptons is huge. Yes, pursue counter-cyclic policies, but given the rich people unable to consume services as before, raising taxes on them is hardly pro-cyclic.
The issue isn't that we don't have leadership that would work with "groups" who do similar to what was done in Taiwan the issue is government would want control over the groups to include who was in them. pretty much they would drive the innovation right out the door.
then they would turn around and clamp down on anyone who dared do similar work that was not part of the government sanctioned cooperative effort.
I guess most people who are familiar with this at all are familiar with it from Star Trek, but it's worth mentioning that this is just a natural extension of Starfleet's pseudo-military basis.
When I was in the Army, my word carried nearly as much weight on medical matters as my immediate commanding officer's, even though I was a lowly line medic, not a near equal as the doctors in Star Trek usually are to their respective captains. I had no official authority of my own, but the fact that I could go to my medical superiors for backup meant that I was never questioned when I said something was medically necessary.
My point is, we don't need to go to a SciFi TV show to see this dynamic. It exists in our own current society.
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.
When a new person comes in to head an agency and bring about positive technological change, someone who genuinely knows technology and its potential, they're usually unprepared for what they see. Their tenure is usually time-limited and they hope to bring about change fast. Certainly not stick around for 8+ years to see things through, because that just doesn't happen and it really does take that long.
For one simple thing they're trying to do, they find out that it's locked in by multiple years-long contracts that aren't synchronized with their timelines. For example, a contract for a CDN expires possibly years after they would realistically stick around so they can't change that. Or a contract for cloud services they don't want in the long run might need to be renewed soon so they might choose to renew it so they can focus on their projects instead of migrating and upgrading existing pieces for the next few years, because it really takes awhile. Or they find out that four separate departments purchased four separate transcription services at different times and for different lengths, so attempting to standardize it is wasteful on the account of having already paid for the service a few times over.
I'm describing an environment with lots of moving parts, many that have been locked-in for unworkable periods of time. An environment that has many individuals working at duplicative or cross-purposes, not even intentionally - just because they didn't coordinate. An environment that will take years for someone to map out before they can truly grasp what's happening or streamline it. The new person who comes in now has to deal with existing contracts, things that might be counterproductive to what they are trying to do and they can't be just canceled or legally or even just easily modified. At that point, ... sadly, many such people just go for cosmetic appearances of progress. Even well meaning individuals - and entire groups - end up settling for a shortcut and then bolting.
That's what happens on an agency level. But what about centralizing and standardizing technology?
Turns out, that's been attempted several times and forgotten. Before GSA's 18F group came to be in the aftermath of the healthcare site debacle, there was another group that was put together and elevated to do just that- bring innovation and centralization to GSA and to the federal government. So, when 18F got stood up as a group to revamp tech federally, a group meant to do innovation centrally was fundamentally duplicated in that very step. There were role and identity collisions and they had to spend some time integrating while growing and anyone dealing with 18F in the early years first looked up who they were really dealing with - as in, the pedigree of old or new blood.
Whether any strategic lessons were learned here is anyone's guess, but, people who know better have argued that this innovation function shouldn't be centralized but evenly deployed in agencies. As in certainly bring in more tech savvy people to federal service, but spread them out permanently and empower them.
GSA's 18F tried to do that in a limited fashion. 18F is a group of well meaning individuals who've done a lot and certainly demonstrated their expertise. But, to be blunt, some of their work has clearly hit those very impassable barriers, the contract limits, the invisible limits anyway despite the effort. They've - I think - attempted to do good and embed their employees in agencies when they approach a project so that goes toward spreading people out in the field, but, I don't think their shadowing times and force sizes were realistic. As large as they might have gotten at their peak, it was nowhere enough to cover the workforce size I described.
And when engaged, they've certainly been treated badly by resident long term employees, who considered them a flavor of the month and expected the projects they were engaging with on to be minor and short-lived. Because, for one, they've seen what happened to the previous innovation group. If you look through 18F's github repository and really dig into some of the larger projects they've worked on, you can see the barriers they ran into and limits of what agencies were willing to engage on. One particular site had been rebuilt by them, and --- I confess much improved, both visually and in content. However, the login function would take you to a vendor site that was built a decade ago and contracted for another decade. Too complex to rebuild, surely. And too vital to mess with. So the site redesign had a jarring transition to a part where they couldn't contribute to the actual functional piece.
This was just my attempt to explain why things aren't changing.
"Woe is me the government is corrupt, won't the government save me from their corruption".
Take power away from the government and you'll find it a lot easier.
Having spent time there and seem some poorer areas and very dense areas, 7 deaths is unbelievably great.
There are a lot of variables, but the biggest factor: they're literally an island.
One fun bit from an interview on handling disinformation, was the comment that Taiwan has living memory of the trauma of SARS lockdown, and of its fight for press freedom. Making them disinclined to go back, to lockdowns, or to use takedowns for disinformation. Forcing other solutions. Like using humor, to defuse misinformation, and to increase precaution compliance.
A very sharp, nice person. Fun to work with. Was active in the perl and haskell communities. Her focus shifted some years back to civics tech. Emphasizing open source, open data, radical transparency, voluntary association, digital democracy, and more.
So I'd say the Taiwan situation is excellent Services per Authoritarian buck.
And to turn it around, while armed Civilians do erode the Government monopoly on violence, I will refuse to blame that for our current dysfunction. We suck, without or without the 2nd amendment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25539398
Taiwanese policies were not just much more successful in containing the virus, but also much less draconian.
