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Oh boy, having worked w government/elected officials a lot, I can tell you that this is just for sure not true.

Sometimes bad behavior really is just incompetence




Sometimes bad behaviour and incompetence are indistinguishable partners in crime.


Even if it was ‘just incompetence’ 95% of the time it would still be irrelevant to the average HN reader, since the remaining 5% would still be too much to ever feasibly track.

As there are tens of thousands of government departments, offices, committees, etc… with some amount of decision making power.

And as there are an exponentially large number of subtle ways the 5% of bad apples could influence the 95%, via a few degrees of separation, that cannot be easily reasoned out.


Such as the Hawaii missile alert.


Ever since we decided that that was just an unfortunate example of bad UI, we only encouraged more public fuckups.


Sounds like a common occurrence, maybe we should give it a name...




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