[robomartin]

> Private enterprise as whole is every bit as f'd up as the government.

This is wrong. What's the basis for this comment/idea?

I have founded and run multiple companies. I have worked for small, medium and large (8,000 employee) companies in various capacities. In a 30+ year career I could not name even one company that I would say fits your assertion at all. I am sure they exist. Yet, I am also sure they are an insignificant percentage of the total.

There's a key difference between private enterprise and government: Failure kills.

Again, except for corner cases or companies that exist due to government money (I don't include these in "private enterprise") entrepreneurship, private industry, capitalism if you will, is a survival of the fittest contest. Like it or not, this is reality.

Government operates with completely different metrics. Failure, for the most part, has no real consequences. A simple example of this is the "high speed" train project here in CA. I've lost track at this point. I think the last time I looked they were at $100BN and the whole thing is a massive smelly pile of manure. Nobody, except for taxpayers, will pay for the consequences of that failure...sadly, one of many at the hands of government.

This crisis is highlighting just how messed up things are under government control. Last night my son, who is in university pursuing a degree in CS, said "Dad, do you know COBOL?". When I asked why, he said New Jersey is trying to hire a bunch of COBOL programmers because their payment systems are badly broken, the code is done in COBOL and it is in need of fixing so they can pay people the aid funds the federal government is providing. I mean, this is typical, sad and ridiculous.

No, private enterprise is a universe away from almost anything government touches. The only service I can identify in government that lives (or dies) by similar metrics is the military. They have real and non-trivial consequences for incompetence. Death. And that means they can't run like a state payment system that's 40 years old and grossly outdated. I am sure the military have issues as well, yet, for the most part, given their mission, could not survive in the long run if they did not operate at a certain level of competency.

[mrkurt]

8,000 people is still pretty small.

I don't disagree with you about capitalism being survival of the fittest, or that companies should die. I don't think the US is a capitalist country though. We're living with corporate socialism.

I mean, look at the pandemic bailout. Nobody, except for taxpayers and employees, is paying for the failure of the airlines to operate responsibly. This is exactly the time every badly run company in the US should collapse and die, and it's not gonna happy. Restaurants, bars, small businesses, maybe some startups will crash and burn. But even private equity firms are getting bailed out.

This is not a one off. The same thing happened in 2008.

And it's weird to think only governments are running Cobol. What do you think the vast majority of hospitals are built on? Or things at IBM? It's the same problem.

[robomartin]

> I don't think the US is a capitalist country though

Pure capitalism has never existed anywhere. So, yeah, agreed. Yet what we have (not just the US but lots of nations around the world) has elevated society to levels not attainable through any other system we know.

> the failure of the airlines to operate responsibly

I don't think this is fair. Nobody could have predicted or prepared for this. Nobody. I mean, how?

I've read people say things like "We could have stockpiled 50,000 ventilators ten years ago". This is, frankly, silly on many fronts.

Technology being what it is, ten year old ventilators would have likely been 5 year old designs at the time of purchase, which would make them around 15 year old designs today.

The first level concern would be if those ventilators would be adequate or acceptable in today's context. I'll assume they could be. That said, professionals are trained to operate and know the equipment they use every day. If a dinosaur shows-up they might not be able to (or want to) use them because of lack of training that could lead to negative outcomes for patients.

People have this idea that a word, like "ventilator" fully defines a product, its usage and the entirety of the dynamics surrounding it. Things are never that simple.

Another point is equipment mortality. Anyone who has dealt with hardware in large quantities and across extended periods of time knows what can happen with 50,000 units of anything manufactured 10 to 15 years ago and in storage for ten years. You can end-up with massive failure and reliability problems. You would have to design and manufacture these devices to failure-tolerant aerospace/military standards to improve outcomes...and even then you have no guarantees.

Things are not as simple as "ventilators", not even close.

> The same thing happened in 2008

No, this is nothing --not even close-- to 2008. I lived through that period. It was an absolute mess precipitated by politicians loosening the rules on lenders and pushing them to let anyone buy homes. Great for votes but horrible for the economy, as history has proven. You had people making minimum wage buying half million dollar homes because the government (both Democrats and Republicans, BTW) removed all sorts of regulatory requirements on making loans. The banks operated under the law. And the consequences of the law ended-up being the opposite of what politicians sold us. Instead of "the American dream of home ownership" the thing turned in to the world nightmare of unintended consequences. Frankly, every single US Senator and Representative who voted for those demented changes should have lost their jobs and maybe even done some jail time. Sadly most of them are still there.

> it's weird to think only governments are running Cobol.

The issue is one anyone who has built non-trivial software for enterprises is familiar with. Once software "works" there's very little appetite to spend more money to continue working on it, much less migrate it to new tool sets, hardware, etc. It's just one of those things that, in the world of politics at least, doesn't earn you votes, so you ignore it until people are screaming for it because the system crashes and they can't get their checks.

Before the massive boost in throughput imposed by this pandemic these payment systems essentially worked as required, issued checks and payments on time, accurately and maybe even efficiently (per government standards). Anyone proposing to re-write the entire system, spend tens of millions of dollars or more in order to migrate to another language and add capacity would likely be laughed at. It is only in hindsight that these kinds of things can be justified.

This also applies to such things as CDC/NIH testing capabilities, manufacturing dependencies and more. Humanity rarely acts proactively. I can't think of a single example of this at scale in the history of humanity. For example, the dams in The Netherlands, brilliant as they are, were the result of a reaction, not proactivity.

Things are never simple. Sadly the media, politicians, popular conversation and social media tend to simplify everything beyond the reasonable and people end-up with distorted models of reality.