A historian, Walter McDougall, author of the excellent "Let the Sea Make a Noise", was planning to write a history of America around the duality of the word "hustle", which can mean both "energetic, go get 'em attitude" and "scam". In America we are very accepting of anti-social or exploitative behavior as long as somebody's getting rich.
I also think a lot about the term "puffery", which in American law is when companies make false claims about a product, but in a fashion where everybody is assumed to know that they're lying, which makes it ok: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery
It really says something to me that we supposedly have such a deep expectation of commercial lies that it's acceptable. I think in a healthier country someone would say, "Wait, what if they just didn't lie?"
Haha EU isn't perfect, but from a super high-level and personal point of view (and there are millions of nuances within Europe), but generally there's more emphasis on the common good as a society, than what I've seen in the US
(I grew up in France but part of my family lives in the US).
so you're saying $250k to build the app once you get specs from the $53,750,000 worth of meetings and planning committees? That sounds much more reasonable and not like $50million worth of tax payer money was stolen /s
Wouldn't it be fair to say that once an organization reaches a certain scale it is expected that communications constitute most of its overhead?
Something like ArriveCan requires the collaboration of several branches of government and ties in with a system that monitors over 2M arrivals in our country every month. Even all the doers attitude in the world won't change the fact that they won't just give you access to those databases without some pretty extensive review.
Just think of the QA needed on the arrival machines at the airport, you can't afford to have them all be out of order because they handle much of the incoming traffic, so the "ArriveCan update" has to be thoroughly tested so that it does not cause any significant downtime. This is the exact opposite of the "move fast and break things" environment.
To summarize, I do think that ArriveCan (the program) was a waste of money, but I think the program itself did not waste money. It's the price that comes with building multi-systems applications.
First, I fully agree with everything you said. It wasnt the best use of money, but these people fail to grasp what it takes to build a system integrated with the government. Dealing with any large org requires a lot of back and forth with contracts, legal, etc and the government is worse as they have entire organizations which seem to be created specifically to slow things down.
Second, your points are most likely falling on deaf ears. All they see is "simple CRUD app costs $54M" and can never see past this, have next to zero experience dealign with large orgs or their complexity, requirements, etc.
Your first point was excellent, but now you’re trying to prove too much. QA for a software update on those machines is hardly going to justify the cost. But, along with a million other things, I’m sure it was itemized and subitemized, inflated and billed and that’s how we got into this mess.
The fact that doing things in government is much more expensive than people think because you have to go through so many hoops and align so many stakeholders is valid. But in this case, they probably still managed to pay 3-5x more than they should have presumably because of basic incompetence and cronyism. Even though the criticism is imprecise (and you’ve legitimately noted why), it’s still about 80% right.
Life was extremely rigid not that long ago. People knew their place and did not break the rules.
I am not sure if this is better or worse than my idiot downstairs neighbors that would party every weekend til 3am with zero regard for any of their neighbors. Then they are banging on the ceiling at 4pm on a Wednesday because we were moving furniture around for 15 minutes.
I disagree there was far less rigidness to life than today. People broke way more rules back then. Laws weren't taken as seriously. You could break many laws and cops would let you off the hook easily if you were nice. Now days life is very strict and there is zero room for error if you make a mistake. You can screw up once you won't get another chance in today's world. Especially with cancel culture.
Everyday the country is developing new useless laws to control people. Soon there will be only one set way to live and thats it because all laws and rules will be written.
They have saved me from fraud 2x in 3 years. Then I simply closed that "card" with the click of a button. No need to call my bank, cancel my debit card that I use at ATMs, and wait a week for a new card
I don't have to worry about remembering to cancel free subscriptions. I set the card max at $1. This has saved me multiple times from the free trial scams that you need to opt out of. Free trials should be opt in after the trial. Opt out is a scam to trickle money into a company from non customers.
They stopped a contractor from charging me over $2k when I specifically told them they needed to tell me how much before charging me. Of course they didnt tell me and tried to run the charge. Privacy put a stop to their BS.
It is mostly automatic or easy to set up once you are using Privacy. Some banks have started to offer similar digital card numbers similar to Privacy.
I don't know, I've seen a lot of bad profiles, and I've helped people fix their (really bad) profiles. It's not a super hard problem, but I don't think people recognize it as something that they need to think about. It seems that by default people are extremely asymmetrical in how they perceive profiles, picking up a ton of nuance in other people's profiles that they are blind to in their own. They have to spend some time reflecting on how they infer information from other people's profiles, and reading what people online say about dating profiles, in order to understand how other people see theirs so they can turn it into a better reflection of themselves.
"gifting" women you barely know is a terrible strategy. This is the best way to land yourself a gold digger or some other undesirable. It signals to her that you are beneath her and are trying to buy her affection.
On one first date a woman I had been talking to for a week texted me late at night. I told her to show up at my house and for her to bring a bottle of red wine. The next morning she is telling me a recent dating story. A guy took her out for a fancy meal. He spent $120 on her and then he got pissed after the meal when she wouldn't kiss him.
I have some success and plenty of failure too when it comes to dating. There is so much bad dating advice out there for men. I feel bad for the men that are in the dark and being taken advantage of.
I will venture a risky post to say, the gifting strategy is probably most endearing to women who receive little attention. This is a mostly mutually exclusive set with Gold Diggers.
Hinge is a steaming pile of horse shit. If any match complains about you they will ban you for life (Guilty without any investigation) and refuse to tell you the reason. Good luck with your appeal.
Before any SJW replies that I must be some troll here is the proof "Revenge reporting" is real. Revenge reporting happens to men too.
Most of the comments here report the opposite of the linked article. Using Linux still seems to involve a significant amount of being your own IT department.
I have tried Linux a few times over the years. One test was for almost 2 weeks on vacation, in a developing country, where it wasn't safe to be walking around with a MacBook. Another was for a few days as a Linux home theater. After struggling for hours with the sound drivers I gave up. I was frustrated with the amount of trouble shooting involved with Linux. That combined with preferring the OS has kept me on MacBooks for the past decade+.
