>This is the authority we trust to build our roads and virtually every other meaningful physical infrastructure in our civic life.

Trusting the government to be able to do something is not the same them actually doing it, nor is it the same as them doing it well. With roads the people using them have much more incentive in maintaining them than the government. What a person experiences driving down the road everyday is just a statistic to the government.

▲

wredcoll 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> With roads the people using them have much more incentive in maintaining them

Are you implying the random people driving down a road also do the maintenance on it? What? How is this any different from literally any other government service?

▲

doginasuit an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

How about the electric grid and our water/sewer systems, is it reasonable to trust the same entity that manages those vital services to build a basic web form?

> Trusting the government to be able to do something is not the same them actually doing it, nor is it the same as them doing it well.

You are absolutely right. My point is not that the government has proven its competency in this domain, it is whether we should expect it.

▲

charcircuit 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

>we should expect it.

The monetary incentives for the most governments don't exist to run projects efficiently, so I don't think it is realistic to expect it. The government can just print money or steal money via taxes to cover up inefficiencies. And since government bureaucracy tends to force things to move at a glacial pace that will be reflected in how it executes projects.

	▲	wredcoll 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is so wrong I literally don't know where to start. Governments have as much incentive as anyone else to save money. I shouldn't even need to type this but raising taxes is unpopular and tends to cause people to get voted out of office. People need to stop repeating thise weird talking points about "the government" and its incentives. It's a big, complixated entity made up of literally millions of people all of whom have different motivations and incentives and non-government employees affect those not just in the super obvious way by voting but by every interaction we have with anyone who works there.