Bringing civic tech to Taiwan's coronavirus pandemic response [audio]
npr.orgAs 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 software with similar utility to that of the mask finder. I can't wait to jump to private industry.
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".
Something I really enjoy at Taiwan is the bike sharing system they've put all around the country. Liking it at a point where I've wrote an essaye about it[1]. It's cheap, everywhere, and built on a really high standard
They are trialing 2nd version of the system and it's better in every way - as in all the things you wish can be improved, they went ahead and did it (more solid bike, faster card swipe, better lock)
However, in most cities the trafic is just so bad that riding a bike on the road is risking your own life.
I get downvoted for telling the truth.
Disclaimer: I am Taiwanese. We have been doing well handling the COVID-19, but we did far worse on traffic accidents prevention than our neighbors.
The design of Taiwanese Roads leaves no room for bikes and passengers. Taipei does this better because it has MRT and so U-bike is widely used there. Other cities are not so lucky.
> 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....
With 14x the population, isn't the cost of a given mask-finder app like the one the OP pointed out amortized over 14 times as many taxpayers?
If you update your Hacker News profile with an updated bio and contact info, then perhaps we'd be able to help ;).
This is a 24 minute Planet Money podcast named Fork the Government but the HN title has been changed to match the title in the HTML header. The show interviews two civic hackers [1] Howard Wu and Audrey Tang (Taiwan's Digital Minister) about the technical aspects of Taiwan's coronavirus response.
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
> Taiwan has had a total of 815 cases and 7 deaths [2] in a population of 23 million.
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.
They also carefully managed the quarantine of the first set of returning travellers. They were sent home with a kit that included a thermometer and a set of surgical masks to use and public health officials contacted them daily via SMS and/or voice.
Assuming they could have their own bathroom in a sequestered area of the home. Otherwise required to stay in a hotel room.
Yes, they are strict about their quarantine. It's much easier to do that when you don't have to quarantine millions of people.
Consider that we know that the virus was spreading in the US in January (via Europe), and there's phylogenetic and blood-screening evidence that it was here as early as late 2019. Even the strictest quarantine wouldn't have helped much at that point.
You would not have to quarantine millions if governments had acted decisively like Taiwan. I think Taiwan shows the endgame, how to eradicate. For an idea in how to deal with mass community spread, listen to Michael Mina.
Taiwan has not eradicated the virus. Their quarantine systems are good, but not perfect:
https://thediplomat.com/2021/01/taiwan-tightens-pandemic-mea...
While they have certainly come closer than most places, the downside of this approach is that it comes at a debilitating economic cost (edit: for most countries...Taiwan specifically may be able to get away with it for a while because they're a manufacturing hub), and literally any minor slip up can lead to the virus spreading like wildfire through the population.
Again, considering the vast differences in scale and complexity here, it's pushing the bounds of credulity to claim that the United States could do something similar. Even a "science-following" state like New York can't conduct a quarantine of remotely similar strictness.
Pretty much the only equivalent thing the US might have done would be to stop all immigration in January. Neither political party would have supported such a thing.
> debilitating economic cost
citation needed. Their internal economy works normally, they never had any lockdown. Far lower impact than those states that just let the virus go rampant every couple of months, followed by months of lockdown.
And yes, you could eradicate with this strategy, if enough places would adopt it and work together. I'd imagine a list of trusted covid free countries that can reintroduce bilateral travel without quarantine.
> they never had any lockdown
...and that's largely irrelevant in a tiny country whose economy is mostly making stuff for the west. As I said, they've stopped essentially all international travel. They've benefitted from the US-China trade war, and have been able to boost exports:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/taiwan-shrugs-off-pandemic-to-d...
> Taiwanese manufacturers have been relocating back home from China over the last two years, lured by subsidies and hoping to dodge tariffs and other complications from U.S.-China tensions over trade and technology. The resulting boost to production capacity has put Taiwan in a good position to meet voracious demand for electronics as work-from-home professionals place orders for additional computers, monitors and smartphones, analysts said.
> Domestic consumption was still holding back the island’s economy in the third quarter, but much less than before. Private consumption contracted 1.5% from a year earlier in the third quarter, compared with a slump of nearly 5% in the previous quarter, according to the statistics bureau.
My point was that if you do the same thing in the US, it would be a debilitating economic cost.
> And yes, you could eradicate with this strategy, if enough places would adopt it and work together.
And if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a very merry Christmas. String enough speculative hypotheticals together, and you can justify anything.
Again, very few countries can adopt such a strategy. It's a strategy that works...tenuously...for an island country with the population of a single US state, who can afford to be isolated from the world for a year or more. Hawaii tried the same approach, and it nearly bankrupted them in a few months:
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/20/925795410/facing-economic-dev...
> that's largely irrelevant in a tiny country whose economy is mostly making stuff for the west.
Taiwan has roughly the same population as Australia packed into an area 1/10th the size of Japan. This makes it more not less difficult and yet Taiwan stopped an outbreak and went eight months without a single local transmission.
Also your representation of Taiwan's trade is completely disingenuous.
Please google the phrase, "Taiwan's largest trading partner".
> This makes it more not less difficult and yet Taiwan stopped an outbreak and went eight months without a single local transmission.
Again: they shut their borders before there were any cases. Population density is a detail when you can just keep the virus from getting into your country in the first place.
> Please google the phrase, "Taiwan's largest trading partner".
Arguing about China does not change the fact that Taiwan's economy is export driven, which was the point.
I live in Taiwan and have been reading the news here all year.
> Again: they shut their borders before there were any cases.
Again, your claim isn't true. Taiwan had cases from the very first set of Wuhan evacuees.
The virus has "gotten in". No local transmission doesn't mean people haven't been returning infected from Wuhan, other Chinese cities, Europe and elsewhere all year.
Those infections haven't spread, though.
Why are you so unwilling to give credit where credit is clearly due? Taiwan has done an exemplary job during this pandemic, despite high population density, close proximity to the initial outbreak and zero support whatsoever from the WHO.
I grant you that Taiwan had a very small number of confirmed cases early on. Then they closed their borders.
Taiwan deserves credit for reacting quickly enough that they could do contact tracing to eradicate a small number of cases. But you keep missing the point: it's much easier to do this when you're an island nation with a paucity of international travelers.
Even in a year where international arrivals are down by >80%, the US had more than a quarter of Taiwan's population arrive internationally. And that's just visa arrivals.
Please read my initial comment again. I'm not arguing for the US, in its current state, to adopt the Taiwanese strategy. Once community spread is such high as it is now, another strategy is needed. And I'd say the current lockdown & reopen has been proven inefficient in sufficiently many places now.
Michael Mina has a much different idea: Cheap mass testing at home, regularly, for the whole family. Even with less sensitive quick tests it should be possible to suppress ~50% of new transmissions this way, which could bring case numbers down to traceable levels in 1-2 months. The key would be cost and availability of these tests - that's a problem that can be solved, as production is simple and is already currently costed at $1 a pop. From a regulatory standpoint it should be treated more like toothpaste and less like a medical good (i.e. certify the efficacy but don't go overboard).
After all else has pretty much failed, all western governments are now just betting on the vaccine. This is a dangerous proposition - all you need is a resistant mutation and we're back at square one. Plus, vaccination at current rate will take 1-2 years - I don't think that's a good place to be in both in health terms and economically. There needs to be a backup plan put in place, as well as lessons learned taken for the next pandemic.
> Cheap mass testing at home, regularly, for the whole family. Even with less sensitive quick tests it should be possible to suppress ~50% of new transmissions this way, which could bring case numbers down to traceable levels in 1-2 months.
I agree it's a good idea, but doubt that it would bring case numbers "down to traceable levels"...we know that the vast majority of transmission (>70%) is happening in the home, and the vast majority of interactions (>90%) don't produce more than a single infection.
You essentially have to catch the connecting edges on a sparsely connected graph -- you don't have to miss very many for the problem to be unsolvable.
I do think it would go a long way to making life more normal. It's completely idiotic that we're killing restaurants (for example) when we could be making mandatory rapid testing a pre-requisite to indoor dining, instead.
The same goes for nursing home and hospital staff -- nosocomial infection has been a huge problem, and most fatalities are out of nursing homes. I get why you don't want to depend entirely on quick tests that have an elevated false-negative rate, but when it takes days to get back a PCR result, it's useless for screening staff.
I think that the >70% number is misleading. It's 70% of cases for which we have data where the transmission happened. For a good majority of cases the transmission happened at an unknown place. It's just that for those where it is known, most are happening at home (as opposed to e.g. at work). Those unknown transmissions are what you want to attack with a mass testing regime. That seems entirely doable, given cheap and simple testing at home.
It'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?"
Things like the "where do I get masks" map don't seem antithetical to personal privacy the way a contact tracing tool is. That's pretty low-hanging fruit that we didn't appear to make any attempt to pick.
Not to mention the scrapped plan to just simply mail masks to every US household:
https://www.postal-reporter.com/blog/white-house-axed-usps-p...
Volunteer groups like findthemasks did, but in a get-PPE-to-hospitals context.
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.
I don't think a Masks Map would work in a country where the population believes COVID is fake, and masks are an Islamic plot.
Don't you have to address those fundamental issues first?
Contact tracing isn't antithetical to personal privacy. I suppose you can say it compromises absolute personal privacy, but so does someone seeing you in a store, so it's not very interesting.
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.
Good luck convincing many people in the US of the same. I'm certainly not convinced. As you point out, Singapore has already abused the system. If some abuse is technically possible, it's probably already happening.
But there's a lot of room outside of "do nothing" and "omnipresent perfect surveillance" to do good things with civic technology, including non-pandemic stuff. Why aren't all public records online and searchable through a single engine? Or all forms editable and submittable? Or budgets and financial reports navigable or comparable? I'd love to be able to know how some random municipality is going to gouge me before I move there.
There's loads of room for good solutions for these and tons of other pain points. But as far as I can tell, American government is scared of letting go so the private sector can develop these things. And it's not imaginative or technically competent enough to want or develop this kind of stuff on its own. Or maybe it's not organized or unified enough?
Singapore isn't making some dubious technical violation of their system, they are putting in place a top down mandate requiring it. My point is that it is a consequence of their politics more than of the contact tracing being technically possible.
I'll address why one would listen: to learn about some ways not to be the epicenter of a pandemic ever again.
Anyone at all responsible for the US being one of the worst countries hit is not browsing HN right now looking to learn new perspectives.
We're all responsible for our country
How so?
> not to be the epicenter of a pandemic
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.
I'm guessing you're referring to the probability/possibility of large, untracked or suppressed outbreaks in other countries - India, Iran, Russia, China, Brazil, etc.
Depending on the source of your data, extrapolations on personal experience or rumor or innuendo, or distrust of different government systems, there may very well be massive outbreaks - on the level or exceeding per capita infections in the US. Frankly, we don't have solid data, so it's hard to say.
The US has, best case, massive testing shortfalls and untested cases, periodic government attempts to downplay the issue, and chaotic spikes and overwhelmed systems. It is almost certainly still better in all of these areas than those countries listed above. We can't do anything about that though.
It's fog of war. But you're probably getting downvoted because the tone of your message seems to be one of 'pfft the US isn't that bad' - which by most metrics we seem to have, isn't the case, at least in high profile areas like Southern California. Keeping it from not being overly bad, near as we can tell, also requires taking serious and often painful approaches to the problem to mitigate it, which doesn't happen if it isn't taken seriously. Not taking those measure seems to make the problem even worse - in the sense of concrete, real people being dead that otherwise wouldn't be.
To more directly answer your question - in total number of REPORTED new cases and deaths, US is solidly number 1. As a percent of population, the only sizable country with more cases than the US right now is the Czech Republic - which is serious, but isn't going to get headline news like the US will. By tests per capita, the US is doing reasonably well - the only largish country doing better so far is the UK. However, considering the scope of it's spread in the US, that is probably misleading. Most countries haven't NEEDED to test so much.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Feel free to click on the various sorting widgets to see it from different views.
I think you are mistaken to lump China in those countries.
People are constantly underestimating the Chinese relationship with contagion. I guarantee that China would not be able to hide any major covid outbreaks. Word would escape to outside relatives.
Chinese people are extremely averse to contagion, coupled with a deep surveillance infrastructure and strong authoritarian government they are in a solid position to hold covid at bay.
Same with India. They could maybe hide cases due to incompetence but news of deaths just cannot be hidden in a country as dense as India.
Regarding India - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Regarding China - https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/china-up...
As I said, there is plenty of room to dig and analyze.
> I’m pretty sure US leads in testing per capita.
US is maybe 3rd, behind United Arab Emirates, and UK. But countries like Iceland and Korea that used aggressive test-trace-isolate to get the epidemic in control, they did get the epidemic in control so they don't have a continuous need for large daily volumes of testing.
We have a very high number of cases per capita, and while we do perform a lot of tests, it's not like we lead in tests per capita. [Here's a good graph to play around with](https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?time=ea...). We are middling to low in terms of tests per confirmed case (aka its not just that we're performing more tests than others), [here's that graph](https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?time=20...). And our case fatality rate is pretty good but not amazing (among first-world countries at least) [graph](https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?time=20...) ([Here's US vs World + regions CFR](https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?time=20...)).
Note, you have to play around w selecting different countries and dates on that website, I wish they had some kind "select by GDP quartile" or something.
> 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 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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
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 smartphone is integrated into everyday life, on top of the millions of urns, one can connect the dots at the true nature, and its imminent danger.
Example: As our Canadian Health minister quickly shot down criticisms of China's low case numbers as "conspiracy" and "racism", it absolutely is relevant to the decision makers who seem oblivious that they are quite possibly being lied to. Again. ( For a country that allowed the CCP to steal from their biggest telecom company and fund the rise of Huawei, it is absolutely puzzling as to why the US should trust Canada )
> 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?
> 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...
Look, it’s clear China lied about the virus early on, tried to cover it up, etc
But what accounts for this compulsion to argue that they therefore lost control like the west. You can’t hide widespread outbreaks. Iran failed to. Russia failed to.
There are millions of Chinese outside the country with relatives outside. Vast economic trade networks. Satellites scanning every inch of China every day. Witness the exposés on Uighur concentration camps despite intense Chinese effort to hide them.
Life in China appears to be....mostly normal virus wise. And multiple other countries achieved the same. It doesn’t strain credulity to believe China mostly contained it.
I could believe China has somewhat more cases than they say, but it’s simply implausible that they have a raging epidemic.
> if you realize that there is now tens of millions of suddenly deactivated phone plans in a country where the smartphone is integrated into everyday life
China is the land of the dual-SIM phone, to the point where Apple even made a special iPhone for them that takes dual SIM cards. People have a second SIM for work, or for their mistress, or just for cheaper calling rates to their family. During a lockdown where you're not working (=not making money) and you're stuck at home with your family (and free calling over WiFi), why wouldn't you cancel your second SIM?
> 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.
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.
Overall yes, but exactly what you mean by "China" here is highly ambiguous.
To be fair, I would never count Taiwan as China, but I honestly don't know what
> 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.
means. The rest of the post is about Taiwan. Is the insinuation that the politicians know they controlled it better in Taiwan, the PRC, or both? Or is this about stuff in Xinjiang totally separate from quarantining?
China as in Communist China
read the transcript, link at the bottom.
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 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 qualified to do so.
>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.
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.
That different control structure is why Sweden didn't lockdown. The health authorities were in charge, and pre-covid, lockdowns, masks, etc. were not recommended by mainstream health authorities as tools to deal with pandemics.
Lockdown is a terrible word for the measures taken in the US too. The most consequential orders were business closures and there was little or no enforcement of orders directed at individuals.
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.
In Ohio, the only person in county government with power to arrest the (elected) sheriff is the (elected) coroner.
Cool! She was the primary author on one of the first Perl6 compiler implementations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugs_(programming)
The 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 of the big issues for these kinds of things is that the United States has 51+ governments. The Federal Government has limited power and for a lot of stuff the 50 states can do their own thing. The Civil War did move more power to the Federal Gov, but the States are still very independent.
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) put it at somewhere around 130 - 270 - 440 agencies. Seriously, no one knows for sure, the org chart is not maintained or always that out of date.
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.
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.
What are you actually talking about, your just touting rhetorical nonsense with no actual content or thought beyond you on hypocritical echo.
"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.
Audrey Tang (featured in the audio) conducted a long form interview with Tyler Cowen a few months ago in which they talked about this kind of civic development.
Those 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.
Think about what that implies regarding the difference a competent government makes. Half a million dead, maybe even more, in the US alone. Granted, Taiwan was in some way lucky to have had SARS to get the acceptance needed to install their emergency law, but still, others had too and did scratch. Switzerland even gave up its stockpile of pandemic supply two years ago.
Are Germany and Italy equally or more incompetent to USA?
If you just compare to continental countries that are very interconnected (lots of travel, import+export), I'd say Germany is doing a bit better but still not as successful as you'd wish. I think it really shows when the highest executives have a higher scientific education.
Last I checked 6 or 7 was also the number of reported Covid deaths in Thailand.
As of right now according to the JHU coronavirus map Thailand has 8439 recorded cases and 65 deaths.
I believe you are refering to Vietnam.
They could also have motivations to use more specific testing or lower PCR amplification cycles. The PCR amplifications of over 40+ in the US and EU lead to many false positives. There could also be genetic factors found in only South East Asians. Also, they're an island, just like NZ.
There are a lot of variables, but the biggest factor: they're literally an island.
The UK is also "literally an island", though 4 times as big as Taiwan. Taiwan banned flights from China early on, and now only allows entry to residents and those on business. The UK has still not stopped international travel. Quarantine on arrival in the UK is weak and unenforced, compared to Taiwan where the only way out of the airport is in a quarantine taxi to an approved place and you get tracked by your phone for 2 weeks. By consistently refusing to take timely action, and refusing to take things seriously, the UK forefeited its island advantage.
Nice to see Audrey Tang getting props. There was a similar interview with @miyagawa on rebuild.fm that is a good listen.
There are also quite a few interview videos, and assorted articles.
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.
Is this the same Audrey Tang who created a haskell-based version of Perl6 for a number of years?
Yes, also many perl modules:
Yes. I don't know how to extend this answer tobe more informative. Yes.
A handful of states attempted to fork the US government 160 years ago. Didn't go well.
Keep in mind that a key feature of government is having a monopoly on violence within its jurisdiction...
In Taiwan the memory of military rule isn't all stale, and the current party in power is the one that is explicitly not the KMT with a romanticized view of the past.
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.
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.
This was much less about the topic at hand and more-so about a worldwide fact about governments that I often see some HN users forgetting about. Not that it's a HN user thing either - I run into it quite often in life. So many people that just aren't aware of or don't understand that a monopoly on violence goes hand in hand with a non-failed state/government.