Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by la64710 465 days ago
It’s a well written comment. Just because you disagree is no reason to downvote a well written comment.
2 comments

"Politics aside for a moment" and then following up with politics is at the very least a logically inconsistent statement.

Logical inconsistencies aside for a moment, the comment would've carried a little more weight if cited any sources for their claims.

we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE

What is political about that statement? You may disagree with him, I certainly don’t think all of what happened with DOGE is justified, but that was a neutral statement.

Disagree. It was both political and speculative.

It presumes that DOGE will be successful in a political fight, which is possible but not certain. The statement is no more neutral (and less accurate IMO) than saying “we’re seeing the culmination of a decades-long war on competence”.

It's political because it assumes anything happened besides what actually did, which was arbitrary number of people were fired from the agencies that Musk was most easily able to do so at, with no regard for what their roles were or their relation to the actual functions of the agencies.
The comment (despite protests to the contrary) injected politics unnecessarily and a bit randomly (there’s no particular reason to believe Intel and the US government are very similar).
> (there’s no particular reason to believe Intel and the US government are very similar)

Large monopolies with limited market pressure to innovate?

Not really, no. Governments aren’t businesses. There isn’t much of a market for governance, people mostly become citizens by birth instead of by shopping around.

Governments have natural “monopoly” over their territory (if there is competition for governing inside a territory, you have a civil war going on).

Or, there is no monopoly, since you can “shop around” by moving to other countries. It depends on how you want to line up the analogy. (There’s room to line up the analogy in multiple ways because it is an analogy, and not a description of what countries actually are).

Governments don’t innovate much on governance. They might enable innovation in other sectors. But the process of governance itself should generally be pretty slow-and-steady because the stakes are higher than an individual business. The goal of a government is not to create new and interesting governance-products and then sell those products, but to rule over an area in a way that doesn’t annoy the populace too much.

How are the concepts of a state and a business the same?
Also they both own real estate?

Not all things that share some attributes are similar in general.

My shirt today is red. Do you know what else is red? Those buses in London!
Hah. Not even, though. Redness is a characteristic that means the same thing in the context of your shirt and a bus. Because there isn’t generally a competitive market for the service of “being governed” monopoly doesn’t even make sense there.

It is more like saying strawberries and ethyl methylphenylglycidate are both red tasting.

Fair point. Is that what they put in Code Red? Because that drink tastes damn red.
I dunno it was the first thing I came across for artificial strawberry flavor, haha.