Saving 820 years is great, but it would be nice to define it better. From the article I not sure if they mean 820 man years in total or man years per year or something else. It would be useful to know how much energy was spent to achieve this e.g. of they spent 8000 man years to achieve this it would change the perspective.
I think itake understands this and was making a point (an important one at that). Douglas R. Hofstadter made the same point (perhaps more eloquently) in "A Person Paper on Purity in Language"[0], which might be another avenue if you wish to understand what the parent comment was pointing at.
I didn't mean to gender, sorry if it was perceived that way. My understanding is that this is a standard industry term. Anyway, I'll try to use human years in the future.
"Human years" makes it sound like you're differentiating from some pseudo timescale like 'dog years'. Man years doesn't have any connotation of sex of the people involved. Ironically the person objecting is the only one projecting a gendered interpretation on to it; it's like punching yourself in the face and complaining that punching people in the faces shouldn't be allowed.
"Man" is just Saxon/Old English for person (and is considered to be from at least PIE origins).
My late mum used to complain about the term Chair instead of Chairman, "I'm a person not a piece of furniture", she was chairman on lots of committees.
When I renew, there's no test (not even vision), and they don't even retake my picture or let me update my height. They just print the same ID with new dates
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Obviously, Americans filing tax information the government already knows every year is another canonical example
Renewing online sure takes a lot of the burden out of the regular renewals.
Of course, I'm now 33 and still using a picture of 21yo me on my license which gets me second glances from bar tenders, TSA, etc. But if it keeps me from having to go in to the DMV...
They do, you need to submit at-most 6 month old photo while renewing. Or go to the office to take one. Either way, you also still need to go get the document from the office as it is only handed over by person (but you can pre-book a time slot!). Passport is a bit more complicated, since it requires fingerprints as well.
I got an online renewal for a REAL ID, but that was for a 4 year replacement of a 4 year card, and there was specific language about having renewed in person the previous time.
So technically yes, but an 8 year REAL ID that has to be renewed in person would be strictly better.
It's not even necessarily an American problem; when I lived in Washington State, the last time I got a renewal was expedient and surprisingly efficient. I was impressed with how well run the place was.
Sounds exactly the same as the US. The question is: how difficult are the exams and tests? In the US, the written exams are 80% irrelevant information that you pass by wrought memorization right before, and the driving test is trivial (parallel park, left turn, k-turn, right turn back to start).
I'd go the other way; we really should require retesting for driver's license renewals.
New Jersey for example just enacted a "safe passing" law earlier this year in an attempt to make bicyclists and pedestrians safer. But existing drivers will never have to demonstrate that they know this because we never retest people after they get their license once.
It's usually an equity issue, or championed as such by equity groups. America is so car dependent that for folks at the margins failing a driving test is the equivalent of losing your job. That's why DL renewals almost rarely require any re-testing and never require demonstrating driving skills.
Hitting pedestrians also poses issues for folks at the margins, yet we don't seek to educate those people on how to avoid this potentially life destroying situation.
I bet I can find plenty of people who have a licence, but if retested now would fail -- which suggests they now can't be trusted not to willy-nilly hit pedestrians.
I agree but a lot of equity groups are not willing to advocate for pedestrian lives. The perception a lot of Americans have is that folks are either walking because they have literally no option and are thus probably not really working-class folks or they're out for recreation.
There's a growing number of organizations advocating for pedestrian and cyclist safety but they have a lot less funding and fewer connections that equity groups which protect drivers. If you have the opportunity in your area, donate to such a group or help make one yourself.
Devil's advocate: Maybe you shouldn't be driving, if you might fail a driving test. Being tested on this should be a complete non-issue for anyone with a few years of real world driving experience.
People discuss with each other. Someone from social sciences could probably back me up but out of my ass it'd prob. be enough to each 1/4 of people (likely less) and it'd eventually spread to everyone through word-of-mouth.
There's a difference between knowing the laws of the road, and being a competent enough driver that you can perform them. The rules are rarely, if ever, enforced, so a lot of drivers just figure it's not a big of a deal.
It's easy to believe that road safety isn't that important when you're surrounded by several tons of plastic and metal armor.
The reason we have licenses (aka controls on who can drive cars) is to curb dangerous and irresponsible driving, mark drivers for driving egregiously, and remove people or not allow drivers on the road when they don't have the motor skills to navigate a vehicle on the road.
Knowing the rules is secondary, if not tertiary. Otherwise bicyclists should also have licenses and license plates because rules apply to them as well.
Rules apply to them but they aren't driving a 2-3 ton hunk of metal that's basically a murder machine. Their danger to other road users is much, much lower than from anything self-propelled just due to physics.
Here in Sweden it doesn't matter how much right of way you have, if you are driving a car you're responsible for the safety of others in the road, even more if they're a pedestrian or cyclist. It's not excuse that a pedestrian was jaywalking or whatever bizarre law to limit access to the road for people you got in the US, you are ultimately responsible for the safety of other users. You're drilled and tested on that in your driving lessons and exams, you will fail your driving test if you fail to yield for a pedestrian at any moment, even if it was just briefly not pressing the brake pedal way before another road user is in danger.
This is a false equivalence, yes, the road is shared and has rules but one user of the road is safely driving on tons of metal powered by hundreds of horsepower, the other is pedaling a bike.
Degree and level matter. Don't hold such a black-and-white view of the world, it's reductionist and not very smart.
The US has the same laws. Jaywalking is hard to prove. The bigger the vehicle, the more responsible it is, eg truck trailers are responsible even if the car crashes into them. Cars Always yield to pedestrians. Cars and Peds always yield to bikes. Bikes have to yield to no one unless they are driving on sidewalk. Then they should not be riding.
Bikes are not dangerous (unless you're talking about e-bikes with beefy frames and tires), if you get hit by a bike as a pedestrian you're probably only getting bruised.
It's a decade over here, same for most forms of ID; there was a period where it was reduced to 5 years, but that was due to developing digital technologies, that is, chips on board the documents - they foresaw that they might be outdated or insecure in a few years, and they were right.
>Obviously, Americans filing tax information the government already knows every year is another canonical example
Yeah it's pretty ridiculous, especially when you hold things like mutual funds. You have to figure out how much to pay every quarter. Why can't the gov't bill me with the info they already have?
Until there's a solar flare and instead it's just cost them 1640 years. Or a catastrophic computer virus. Or any number of black swan disaster scenarios.
I'm a tech guy and I do think that this is good news. I just hope that the people in charge of designing these systems have also thought about what happens if these systems catastrophically fail. And that measuring things like '820 years saved' are only really claims you can make after waiting a long period of time to ensure it's proven itself stable.
Black swan events affect non-digital information as well. How many paper records have been lost to fire, floods and simple decay over the millennia? At least with digital records there's the chance that they're backed up offsite somewhere
Personally I think the ideal system would include both. Maybe a digital system that is periodically (say once a year) transferred to tape and stored in a secure facility like the Svalbard Seed Vault.
> Maybe a digital system that is periodically (say once a year) transferred to tape and stored in a secure facility
This has been standard procedure (not at Svalbard, obviously, but at one or more secure offsite facilities) for every critical data system I’ve ever personally encountered in regulated industry, though rotations are usually weekly/monthly rather than yearly.
But I don't blame you for asking, when there are stories of irreplaceable nuclear test data being stuffed on some RAIDs and then nobody replacing the disk failures for years and years...
This is good to know. I've never had the privilege of working on such a system so it is nice to know that this kind of thing is actually happening. Especially when government preparation for any potential pandemic seemed to be piss poor right across the board.
After recognizing that risk, Estonia famously signed an international treaty with Luxemburg "in the spirit of the Vienna Convention" to host an offsite backup (and plans to extend such initiatives).
Isn't it all still stored digitally though? Paper tax forms that have to be sent in are still processed to be read and stored digitally, but it would be much easier to not have to send the paper forms.
The solar storm will strike individual systems that aren't connected as well.
Yes, considering they're on the doorstep of Russia and Belarus this is a fairly likely scenario. If their power utilities were targeted the way Ukraine's have been how many of these systems are still going to be able to run? That said if you've imposed martial law and men aren't allowed to leave the country because they've got to stay and fight then at least demand for your online passport service will have dropped by at least 50%
If things get targeted with physical attacks like that, you won't be getting a passport internet or no internet, in impacted areas. It will be the least of your concerns.
The last sentence was a bit of dark humour mate, I probably should have put a sarcasm tag on it. Probably should have said 'on the plus side' which is a bit more of a common way to start those kinds of jokes
Any modern society is relying on digital supports for most of its administration. Estonia is just proposing more "frontends" to its citizens. Not all of them decide to use it btw (article mentions 46.9% of people use online voting)
So if we're talking about "black swan disaster scenarios" or "catastrophic computer virus", I don't see any difference between Estonia and other countries.
This highlights one of the things I've recognized, for a long time the digital existed beside the paper, the computer often had problems and people knew things would have problems so they would always have a manual paper backup. "The HR computer is on the fritz and can get paychecks out, well wheel out the file folders, and get everyone in HR some ballpoint pens because they're here until midnight", but nowadays digital first really means digital only, and we see the consequences of that when people are no longer able to do rational or reasonable things because the computer won't allow it.
"Sorry I know this document has to have your legal name, but unfortunately the system can't handle a character with an accent have you thought about changing your name instead?"
I mean I am starting to see more and more places, that don't have a til or register, just a tablet and an app which sure saves you some overhead, but if a backhoe decides to dig through the fiber line, congratulations your shop just got shut down until it works agian.
Now people will say "bad things could happen in the old days to!" That is true, but the difference was if bad things happened you generally had some measure of control and ability to effect change and at least find some temporary stop gap, the problem is now we have lost all autonomy because the shift to digital has also meant loss of control and locality.
Back in the day if the power went out you could open up a receipt book and a ledger and keep taking payments until it came back on, now you can sit and twiddle your thumbs.
My point is if you are "digital first" that means you are "digital only" and you sure as hell need to figure out a backup quick because it turns out shooting magic beams of light, across continents, has many more failure cases than a locked file folder.
> if a backhoe decides to dig through the fiber line, congratulations your shop just got shut down until it works agian. … Back in the day if the power went out you could open up a receipt book and a ledger and keep taking payments until it came back on, now you can sit and twiddle your thumbs.
This is nothing a good UPS and a standby 5G modem couldn’t handle. Digital systems can be made reliable and redundant, but most people don’t want to go through the effort (or expense) to make it happen.
So much government data is temporal. Many already have strict archiving guidelines that mandate destroying certainly classes of documents after some number of years... many are single-digit. Nobody needs a copy of which city councilman voted to approve new speed bumps on Main St. 20 years ago, or your first 2 rejected applications for permits to remodel your bathroom. Most archivists are pretty aware of the problems with digital storage and know how to mitigate it.
Many have policies informed by them. Even the town hall in the little 3k population town I grew up in had pretty standard data retention/destruction processes.
I recently discovered that the U.S. Social Security Administration has business hours ... for their website. They operate a website that is closed at night and on weekends. One is hard-pressed to imagine the level of IT dysfunction necessary to reach this point.
I investigated that once, and I don't think it's IT dysfunction in that case. My understanding (because I found this odd as well) is that it's because the support load for that site is so high, and the likelihood of abandoned processes without support so high, that the best solution they had at whatever point in time they instituted that was business-hours operation.
I have not researched this but rather than being a sign of IT dysfunction my guess would be the government contracts out the maintenance of the web site to the private sector and the contract specs happen to be written to say it will be closed on nights and weekends. In theory this makes the contract cheaper than if the government was buying 24/7 support.
It would seem to us that nights and weekends are the most convenient time for citizens to access government services such as this. But the things that are down for maintenance are not our publicly-accessible frontends, they're the backend databases that the administration uses internally as well.
So it would seem that all the worker bees in government offices rely on having access to those backend databases during USA office hours, and the only time they can realistically be shut down is while the civil servants are off the clock.
The Bangladesh Embassy in D.C. had a similar issue a few years ago. They had a document you needed to fill out that was just hosted on someones computer and when that person would shut their computer down each night or over the weekend the link would stop working. They've at least fixed that since then.
The IRS/tax problem is one of corporate lobbying and partisan politics (usually the proposals to reduce or eliminate tax regulations are met by opposition).
US democracy could change by having a central registry of everyone, ensuring everyone gets their voting pass automatically, skipping the faulty and bumpy process of voter registration amd inequality of identification-ability
Correct. There are still physical offices where people can go to do their stuff, with clerks sitting behind desks, etc. Nobody is left out, doing stuff online is just an option 99% people use.
In addition to public computers and physical offices, smartphones are owned by a large portion of homeless people (especially if younger) because they're quite affordable. It looks like a basic Estonian phone plan, plus financing for a budget smartphone, is only 20 EUR/month. Estonia has no free phone plan (like the "obamaphone" program in the US), but low income people can submit 200 EUR of expenses per year for essentials.
You can still go to the office and do it in person. It also comes with the benefit, that a lot of public offices can also provide you with different services they couldn't do previously. Before you needed to go to town A and get a document, add it to the paperwork and file at town B. Now town B can fetch the document in your name from town A, or town A can file the document in your name at town B.
Careful still, public services are also a matter of human representation, of accessibility, to nurture the relation between (all) the citizens and the state (as it also is in the private sector, between a brand and customers).
Moving public services online is great IFF it does not remove at the same time a satisfying option for offline/physical access to the same services, for those that are not able to use the online access (disabled, old, unused to computers or tablets, remote areas, etc. - those are still a significant part of the people, and even if, an equal access to public services is a must).
I'm just reminding, from a local experience (France), that in general, moving/reducing/replacing (public) services physical presence to online services has to be carefully considered & planned over quite a long period of time, especially regarding accessibility.
I'd argue that a paper is much more easily tamperable/replaceable than a digital signature. That, of course depends on how much you trust the ID chip card security and mathematics around the encryption..
While online voting isn’t perfect, in-person paper ballots aren’t magic. Estonians had some 60-odd years of paper-only voting experience under the Soviet Union, didn’t make one bit of difference when it came to the complete fabrication of the results.
Along the same lines, I found India's Aadhar system to be pretty extraordinary. If you can put your civil liberties concerns aside (and to be clear, I don't think you should), Aadhar has made govt services in India several orders of magnitude more efficient and fraud resistant. I recently sold a piece of property in India and it took literally 10 minutes to do the transaction at a local district office. You just go to a place and get a scan while signing a document that says you are transferring the property. That handles everything ... changing the owner in the public registry, etc.
Compare that to buying a house in the US where you need to use all kinds of third party title insurers etc., because you can't necessarily be sure the person selling you the land actually has ownership of the land in the registry at the moment you are doing the sale.
Also, payment systems in India charge merchants something like 0.1% or less, while credit card companies charge merchants 3-5% in the US. In India everything is cheap because online transactions are very secure ... your Aadhar identity allows you to generate one time codes that are sent to vendors to authorize payments. Even if the one time code is stolen, it can only be used one time. Contrast that with the USA where if someone just gets your social security number and address, they can often impersonate you and charge thousands of dollars against your identity. That insecurity has spawned billions of dollars of costs in the US economy and enriched Visa and Mastercard. Its dead weight on the economy.
> I recently sold a piece of property in India and it took literally 10 minutes to do the transaction at a local district office. You just go to a place and get a scan while signing a document that says you are transferring the property. That handles everything ... changing the owner in the public registry, etc.
Even that is excessive. Digital signatures (if available) do the job.
As if any other authoritarian regime throughout history with analog paper bureaucracy ever had any problems finding anything they needed. At least with file encryption there actually isn't any way to bribe/threaten the clerk to show you the file.
Time wasted filling in forms and talking to service staff should really be tracked and associated with the business or government agency, then it's possible to actually assign a "bureaucracy/red-tape tax" based on the hours they waste for people using the service.
Without externalizing the cost of all the time wasted, it's just too easy to push time-costs on to the consumers/citizens. It's already a huge problem, and I suspect a major cause of loss of productivity in the western world.
Even with the same amount of work or service provided, under-staffing absolutely consumes and destroys peoples productivity. What an awful waste it is to take the morning off work to go somewhere like the DMV, wait forever in line and see half the service counters empty. Sure, the government saved on some staff salary but society lost more in productivity.
Why do you think that? Businesses cut staffing just as much as governments do. They already got your money, why would they care about spending more money on you when they know it's a pain in the ass to switch to another "provider"?
I worked for a private company contracted to provide a portion of a public service and later got employed by the the government agency.
- The contractor had no budget. Our servers were out of date and we were running out of date OSes and software. We were all paid below standard and overworked.
- We had a tiny budget at the agency to buy things at the very end of the year. We ran up to date software and OSes, except for a few large complicated systems that were setup with grant money. We were all paid well below standard. I was no longer on call at all times of the day and night.
But if the lowest bidder has some kind of penalty to pay if average queueing time goes over 15 minutes or random members of the public rate the service provided below 3/5 stars, then they'll do a much better job.
We were contracted because the agency lost lawsuits and had to payout and change policies. The contractor was never successfully sued, but I had to compile lawsuit discovery documents 6 times in 2 years.
How anyone alive today can think that is beyond me. Everytime I call anything these days I get 3 minutes of disclaimers about why I should use their website or app instead and a pre-recorded sob story about being really busy etc etc just to try and break me before I even get into a queue to be connected to someone. 2022 is a dehumanising time to be alive and just get the most basic shit done.
Here in British Columbia, Canada, our equivalent of the DMV is run by a Crown Corporation, ICBC. I've never had a problem with the wait times. (Mind you, they generally require you to pre-reserve a general timeslot to come in; so, like a restaurant, they can just say they're full for a given half-hour and push people to coming in earlier/later. That by itself fixes a lot of the issues around wait times.)
Where I live that's exactly what we have. We have a number of privately owned tag agencies that handle most requests which don't require an in-person visit to the DMV (like a new photo id).
This is fast and takes far less time than visiting the DMV. The various DMVs are bloated beasts with too-large budgets, yet they can't seem to staff people at all their windows.
And then those empty counters and slow service are used as evidence that the government is incompetent and should have its budget reduced further. It's a vicious cycle and I am confident the reduced service is a deliberate attempt to undermine confidence in government.
See also: bans on common-sense measures like including sales tax in price tags, making it easier to pay income taxes.
a deliberate attempt to undermine confidence in government
Yes. The strategy is known as "starve the beast" [1] and it is pursued with ferocious determination by its proponents. The goal is to create some kind of minimal government libertarian paradise.
I thought starve the beast was where non-wartime federal spending as a percent of GDP increased multiple times over the past 100 year period. The beast to be starved being the individual citizen and businesses.
Yes you can see, the beast has been horribly starved.
Looking at general spending doesn't tell you absolutely anything where the spending is going to and doesn't enable any kind of cost-benefit analysis. It's a meaningless metric to derive any argument from.
Spending on services that are multipliers of productivity is very different than spending on the military, for example. Spending on public services that improves citizens' life like healthcare, parks, schools, culture, easiness of bureaucracy (e.g.: permits for construction, licencing of activities, etc.) is a completely different beast than spending on politicians benefits, military drills, and so on.
Starve the beast is about starving specific services with the goal of dismantling them by causing a negative sentiment in the public. Like what the Tories are doing to the NHS, you start dismantling it by underfunding the service, which forces cost-cutting (usually meaning diminished staff or changes to regulations on benefits, working hours, etc.).
Don't really understand your deflection and tone, it was completely uncalled for and doesn't at all address the point of my comment. Please, don't do that here on HN, I come here to foster intelligent and interesting discussions, not to read mindless hot takes and deflections.
To play devils advocate - sometimes the system itself is not just broken, it’s completely wrong! Where I’m from(Sweden) I can’t imagine going to the DMV even for just a second. So asking for better staffing at the service counters at the DMV sounds silly to me
> To play devils advocate - sometimes the system itself is not just broken, it’s completely wrong! Where I’m from(Sweden) I can’t imagine going to the DMV even for just a second. So asking for better staffing at the service counters at the DMV sounds silly to me
Do you not have driving tests in Sweden? Does Sweden allow residents to submit any random picture of their choice for their drivers license?
As an American, the only times I have to go to the DMV are when I have renew my license (every 4-5 year), and that seems mainly to take a (simple) vision test and get my photo taken. They also give tests to new drivers and people moving in from out of state.
Any time I had to go to Traffikverket (equivalent to the DMV), Skatteverket (tax agency, your IRS) or Polisen (the police, to get passports or national IDs) which are the only 3 agencies that I had ever to interact with to get pictures collected from, I book an appointment online for a time slot; I show up 10-15 min before my scheduled time and wait for the call for my booking; Go in, talk to someone, take pictures/collect fingerprints and get out.
> I show up 10-15 min before my scheduled time and wait for the call for my booking; Go in, talk to someone, take pictures/collect fingerprints and get out.
The last time I personally did license renewal, I waited approximately that long without an appointment, and the place had a line out the door.
Having an appointment at least makes you sure you will get it done around that time and schedule your day around it. Showing up without one makes it impossible to plan for the rest of the day if you are unfortunate to go do it on a bad day, no?
> Having an appointment at least makes you sure you will get it done around that time and schedule your day around it. Showing up without one makes it impossible to plan for the rest of the day if you are unfortunate to go do it on a bad day, no?
Theoretically yes, but practically it's moot. Were I live I don't think I've ever had to wait in line more than 10-15 minutes, even at what seemed to be "busy times." If the wait times are that short, it's more trouble to make an appointment and still wait about that long.
> Were I live I don't think I've ever had to wait in line more than 10-15 minutes, even at what seemed to be "busy times."
That's nice for you. Every time I've gone to my local DMV I've waited at least 45 minutes, even with an appointment. Luckily I work remotely so I could work from the waiting area, but most people don't have that luxury and are forced to take an indefinite time off of work to go to the DMV.
Yes we do! Now that I think about it, the main difference seem to be that in the US, you show up at (appointed?) date and stand in a queue to wait forever while in Sweden we show up at an appointed time.
> Yes we do! Now that I think about it, the main difference seem to be that in the US, you show up at (appointed?) date and stand in a queue to wait forever while in Sweden we show up at an appointed time.
That's not something you can generalize about in the US. Here, driver licensing is a state-level function, it's done >50 different ways. It's not even official done by the "DMV" everywhere, but that's what they call in in California, so that's what they call it on TV. Even in my state it's hard to generalize, since they allow contractors to perform almost all the common functions in their businesses.
Based on experience I’d say that focusing on the wrong staff-metrics is worse than under-staffing.
For example marking employees by how quickly they “process” someone (aka Handle Time) actually incentivizes employees to not listen, to tell people the wrong information, and to push them to be somebody else’s problem. The customer who might have taken 10min now takes 5 here, 10 there, 20 over there, 20 min of a supervisor’s time, and countless minutes taking up space in the various lines waiting to be told something else.
If a system runs like that it almost doesn’t matter how much staff they have because all those staff feel overworked and overskilled.
A major loss of productivity? I think maybe i've spent an hour at the DMV in the past 10 years. I spend maybe an hour or two each year doing my taxes. I struggle to think of a single other case where my time is consumed with dealing with any kind of bureaucracy. I'm not convinced it's a major problem.
So what? I waste far more time every year browsing Hacker News than I ever have dealing with government bureaucracy. The difference between 0.02% and 0% is indistinguishable in reality.
Okay, but increasing state and federal government staffing levels by a few percent to try to save that time would cost more than 100,000,000 hours per year.
If you want to speed it up with staff, if. The point of the article is that you don't have to waste nearly as much human time at all, if you have a working electronic identity and goverment services.
You probably fall into that group of people who the government loves, just work your W2 job, autopay taxes without feeling the real loss of the money and don't raise any fuss. If you try to start your own business, hire employees or do contract work you will find it is a total nightmare.
For every person who spends 2 hours of their year dealing with US bureaucracy there are loads more that spend untold hours. I myself spent almost two days figuring out my taxes because they're just more complicated. And people dealing with unemployment, health insurance via COBRA/medicaid/medicare, food stamps, registering to vote, applying for various licenses, etc. It's ungodly amounts of time when you add it all up.
I AM convinced it's a major problem. Maybe not for white-collar people on Hacker News who have paid sick leave, random leave times and no expectations of certain hours, and high pay. But for many working class people in the US dealing with bureaucratic nonsense IS a big deal.
Where I live private businesses can act as agents of BMV. IT creates an economic incentive for productivity and pleasantness because the customers are not captive to this business and since they are in competition and profit from each license, they try to make the process as efficient as possible. Meanwhile go to an actual BMV and no fucks are given because there is literally no economic incentive to move along nor be nice to you.
Only for the federal government, and as far as I can tell only for "regular people" forms. I.e. if you fill out an NSF proposal or want to drill an oil well or fill out Form D for a stock sale the forms don't seem to include any estimates.
I know the time required to fill out an NSF proposal is "how long is a piece of string" but parts of it (some of the financial portions) are as boilerplate as an IRS tax form.
I don't get what's 'in it' for people to have overly complicated forms. Like they have to store all the data and in some cases manually input it (like customs forms.) What's the benefit?
Ideally people would have a single universal identifier and then I'd never need to put my date of birth or tax number on another form again.
Most likely theory is that they actually want to use the data (or once did, and nobody deletes it because they think somebody else must need it).
In the more general case of data collection I believe people collect data simply because they can. I strongly believe that the PII collected by advertisers and others is mostly never used. A liability they take on with no benefit.
I'm in Canada and all I can think of is how my Mom, uncles, other older relatives do not have a computer. They have no interest in anything on a computer and have never touched one. You could put one in front of them powered on, logged in, web browser open, and they'd have no clue how to operate it to enter info.
We had a hurricane here and Mom applied to the Red Cross for disaster relief. She got a PIN for her online banking which she doesn't have or ever will.
There are quite a few people without computers. It's maddening to see some or proposed government services only be offered exclusively on the Internet.
Perhaps we should consider it akin to literacy. In the past, and indeed present, plenty of people couldn't read and so would need to seek help to access government services that required, for example, completing a form or reading instructions.
Nowadays most people read (in my country, UK), though completing forms can have high literacy/intelligence demands. Some lack computer skills but almost everyone (in my country) has some access to computers in free local government libraries and in other local community centres. It's not terribly convenient, granted.
So should we avoid offering services that need literacy to access, or just those that require computer literacy? I'd argue neither, but people should have long transition periods (multiple years) when a system is moving to access only via computer and government should ensure all communities have ongoing access to computers where that's reasonable.
On a serious note, while the eID/digital gov system is great and all it does have some jankiness. The address search system everyone uses has been a PITA for a while and the tax system still keels over for a day or so when the possibility of submitting returns opens. Then we had the case of one dude scraping several hundred thousand ID card pictures [0].
Also the broadband part is so-so. Estonian internet is notoriously expensive and slow compared to our near peers [1].
When finland is mentioned on the internet then people post "torilla tavataan" - "lets meet at the market!!". So we estonians started saying "hiiele!" - lets meet.. at the sacred forest on the same occasion.
X-Tee, the protocol that allows information sharing between goverment systems, is also a horrible pice of XML and SOAP with some crypto sprinkled on it.
It does sound great when it works. It’s awesome that Estonia succeeded. I do believe this is a really hard problem - digitising public services - to solve at scale.
Whenever you have bigger countries you almost always have several levels of local governance - state, county or Land. These local governments often work with full autonomy and do not share date with the central government.
In this case even solving such simple and basic thing as a centralised login solution is difficult since why would the owner of the centralised login solution should have knowledge of which citizen used which local governments service?
I believe that’s why we see so many unfinished systems not working together because they have to be built completely separately by each local government since they operate in autonomy.
Which is why countries like Germany roll out federated decentralized login solutions – it's just a really slow process due to (among many other factors) the humongous number of stakeholders to involve.
In Spain they're trying... but not really succeeding.
> Whenever you have bigger countries you almost always have several levels of local governance - state, county or Land. These local governments often work with full autonomy and do not share date with the central government.
Here this is particularly relevant with healthcare. In some regions I get full coverage with my regional card with no questions asked. In others I have to go through hoops, and apparently they have no way of knowing my clinical history.
> In this case even solving such simple and basic thing as a centralised login solution is difficult since why would the owner of the centralised login solution should have knowledge of which citizen used which local governments service?
In Spain they tried to solve this with DNIe (your national identity card has a chip) and cetificates. Turns out it's quite difficult to make it work for 99% of the people, and even if you're tech savvy some government portals make it SO HARD that you just want to give up.
In a job I had before they used VMs with Windows XP and IExplorer for some services.
It improved a lot in last years, but the improvement is in areas where you have to pay money, they've got fast for that. Everything else is still a mess.
So in the end they'd come up with Cl@ave 365 with is a login/password solution you have to set up in person into some government office but it doesn't give you access to the full catalog of services, so you still need DNIe/Certificate.
The thing is, they still get the money from you. Nobody gets fired. Friendly contractors still get money. There's no rush to improve. They have no incentives.
But the worst thing is that they have this mess going on, and when old people goes to some government office they tell them to go online and do their own thing.
Pretty much like companies. Feels nice to pay taxes for a service isn't being provided.
There's people pushing to get this fixed, but the spanish state is... like an angry elephant.
Eso en parte es porque la gente se concentra en el mensaje polarizador de los políticos en vez de ocuparse de lo importante, que es de qué vamos a vivir y cómo y cómo vamos a reducir la deuda y pagar las pensiones o mejorar el mercado laboral.
En cambio lo que oirás es que si los nacionalismos, que si LGTBQ o qué malos son unos o los otros en todas direcciones.
No tengo nada en contra ni de esos grupos ni de indepes ni de nadie a nivel personal. Tan solo pienso que no es lo fundamental y toda esa gente se mete ahí para sacar tajada.
I just returned to Spain and went through this Cl@ve thing only to realize it cannot be used for a lot of "federal" (estatales) services nor for the "state" (comunidad autónoma) services.
In Spain we have so many layers of bureaucracy that it's making me glad I left. Public notaries, the State Registry, and the Cadastre, are some of the most archaic institutions I've had the misfortune of dealing with. They even look at me like I'm an alien when I ask about digitized records (escrituras) or at least an index.
On the other hand in Singapore I paid my taxes and my company taxes in literally less than 5 minutes. In Finland I had an integrated citizen experience. Even in Germany, despite the reputation, things were somewhat integrated between the tax authority and the social security.
It depends a lot on whera re you. In Galicia is somewhat doable, for example, although they have their own service calle Chave instead of cl@ve (because why not?).
The Catastro is now digital too, I managed to get a nota simple through their website.
But yeah it's always a lot of friction. There's a clear lack of integration that makes everything difficult.
The success of our Estonian digitalized government services is possible because we have:
A nationwide digital ID, that can be used to authenticate someone,
We have a National Id Number for every citizen and residence permit holder, that acts as a global foreign key for all the services, the number alone can't be used for anything, is public, and should not and is not used for authenticating anyone.
The Id number enables the next thing: it is mandated by laws that every type of information should only be stored once. My name, date of birth, where I live and document photo is stored in the citizens registry. If elections start then the local municipality knows who are it's residents and everyone is sent an e-mail or letter about where they can go to cast the vote. If I want to renew my driver's license then I can choose to use the photo I last used to get a new passport or Id document.
The one place to store one type of information is enabled by the national id number, because we know exactly that this person in this registry is the same one with the same number in the other registry, even though they may have the same name and date of birth, there is no possibility to confuse someone. And this makes keeping data safe easier, because it's easier to secure one database, than twenty ones that some random government departments would otherwise have to store my name, address or whatever else they would need. And their data would be mostly out of date, since it would get updated only when I interacted with them.
> We have a National Id Number for every citizen and residence permit holder, that acts as a global foreign key for all the services, the number alone can't be used for anything, is public, and should not and is not used for authenticating anyone.
It's important to point out that a key part of this is having personal privacy protection (eg GDPR) that prevents private companies from abusing this identifier for their own nefarious purposes. Without private protections, such an identity number becomes a vulnerability for individuals. Like in the United States as it stands, it's a feature that giving out your social security number might result in a huge headache, otherwise every retailer would demand it for their consumer surveillance ("loyalty") programs etc.
Even without my number the retailers know my e-mail or whatever else I used to sign up for their loyality cards or benefits, they already know what I buy. If they know my personal number, then they can't know anything in addition to what they would have without it.
But having strong protection for privacy is a must also.
Every time someone accesses my data in the national registries the access is logged - who did it and when. For example I can see that the city I live in is checking if I still live there, because they offer free public transport to residents. Also I can see that the doctor I visited looked at my data, maybe also the aphotecary where I got my prescribed medicine from, because.. all the prescriptions are also digital documents, very-very rarely something is put on paper (for example, when a vet doctor prescribes some antibiotics and I can get them from the apothecary). Othewise I just give them my id card, they look at the number, type it in, and can see what I have been prescribed.
Enabling ID card login for any random website usually only requires adding few config lines to your app revrese proxy. I wrote about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33639317
Locally they completely redid the computer systems of the DMV a few years back… And botched it. Everything started taking twice as long and you wouldn’t get a new license for weeks or months after you went in.
Why would having every government department, hospital, doctors/dentists office keep your data separately, probably in some unsecured excel file or whatever?
When we have one registry for everything, they can keep it secure by having some proper security guys design and audit it, we can see who has accessed my data and when, etc. If a hospital would keep your health records in their own system then.. they'd probably have some low paid IT guy design something and leak it accidentally online.
That's all good in theory. In practice, it's just a massive time sink for citizens. I know because I'm going through some of it right now for regularizig an inheritance and I've wasted so much time, but having this data separate has brought nothing to my privacy. In fact, given the legacy systems, I'd argue I have less privacy because there are fewer (or no) controls.
On the other hand, when these connected systems are in place it's not like employees can just tap your name and get the data, there is some Auth process with your eID/certificate.
It all boils down to people's trust in the government. In Scandinavian countries that trust is high. In Southern European countries it's very low (and much lower in the US).
5.4h more like 10+ h as older and younger population is not doing anything that require spending times in public que, and it is very impressive not waiting extra 6-10h per year + twice that for transporting to and out of the government buildings.
Which is nearly one day of holiday people can save every year. So I would call it very impressive, as most people work during the opening hours of public services and would need to take time off to go there.
Estonia using KSI Blockchain for government networks seems relevant here. I would love to get more info on the nitty gritty of how it's being used specifically though. None the less it does seem like a good use case of Blockchain tech.
Much government interaction in the US (at all levels- federal, state, local, court) is ultimately about revenue.
Adopting a single, simple (in terms of complexity) revenue model per polity would eliminate much interaction. For example a 20% flat income tax with a $25000 deduction would allow the IRS to pre-fill your return on a post card. Eliminating “fines as a revenue stream” would dramatically reduce local court and LE interactions. Reducing permitting, etc.
Not only would the citizen experience improve but we would also need less government resources.
Of course, there are reasons why we do all these things, but we rarely if ever revisit implemented government programs to see if they are meeting their goals and if their cost exceeds their benefit.
Given that, I much more support “less government” rather than “the same amount of government but most of it online”.
its part of why i moved there from germany. its crazy how especially germany treats its citizens time as an unlimited resource without any respect what that could mean for peoples lives. neurodivergence is especially amplified in such a system if you have strong adhd or depression like me, 1 or 2 hours paperwork per month is not just 2h but potentially weeks of dreading and self hatred. knowing what life could have been like it hurts to think of all the lost time but i am truly thankful i can finally experience it. there needs to be something like a human right to be left the fuck alone by your country if the task can be done automatically or semi-automatically.
In a lot of European countries there is a system to legally sign documents with a digital signature. Either via SMS/App TAN - like for online banking - or a smart card/HSM (mostly used by corporations).
I think Austria moved even more services to the digital age then Estonia. It is not fancy, nor modern. But a lot of documents primarily exist only in a digital form (all laws, court files, official documents, financial administration documents, ...). They are often printed out, but they are just a random piece of paper, just a "copy" of the original. The official and valid version is the digitally signed PDF.
It is mostly implemented via some really boring and antiquated Java Server Pages HTML forms, that are not always easy to use. But they work nearly all the time, and once you send them you immediately get a signed and legally binding confirmation that it was filed.
The roots of the system go back to the early 2000s, and used elliptical cryptography right from the start. Which was really hard back then to deal with, because most libraries or applications didn't support it yet. For example native Windows support came only with Windows 7.
In Austria everyone and every company that has E-mail is required to accept digital signatures. If you cancel your phone contract with a signed PDF via E-Mail the company can't refuse to accept it, as every court will instantly decide in your favour.
For the US if you automate public services you are going to eliminate Federal, State, and Local bureaucratic jobs as well as the support roles to interface to these services. For example if you automated taxing, you would eliminate IRS employees as well as accountants and software services such as Turbo Tax. In the US we don't have universal healthcare, universal free education, etc. so you be eliminating millions of jobs without a safety net. Automation would have terrible economic repercussions. The extreme level of graft and incompetence would mean the actual automated services would not be very good and would be horrifically expensive to produce and maintain.
What? You are advocating for inefficient bureacracy because otherwise the time-wasting bureaucrats would be laid off? Is this sarcasm or you are serious with this?
“Oh but this requires a government ID card and I’ll never allow that! Liberty, freedom, something!”
…later…
“Hello sir, you’ve just started a new job. In order for that to happen I’m going to need copies of your passport, driver’s licence, medicare card, citizenship certificate, and one recent bank statement showing your full name and address.” [Actual experience of mine, recently. Australia.]
“Sure! Here they are, which random web portal that I’ve never heard of would you like me to upload them to?”
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