And so our civil service races down an incentive gradient to avoid getting in the paper and avoid the ire of elected officials, who have their own incentive gradient isolating them from policies which they pass.
POLICY
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Government Lacks Reward Pathways for Innovation Success
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But we have basically no pathway for rewarding success. Mikey mentions that if you invent Gmail you end up taking home an eight figure award. Not only can we not do that in government (our own choice, to be clear), we can't even seem to award status for success.
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Civil Service Accountability and Project Management Failures
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You won't be fired as a civil servant, and won't suffer any consequence at all really, if your project is over budget, doesn't achieve goals, and arrives years late. All of that is par for the course; we wouldn't have a civil service left if there were actually consequences.
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Institutional Reform Paradox: Self-Inflicted Problems and Fraud Tolerance
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Some of the problems are self-inflicted, including due to patches for past iterations of reform against graft, waste, and abuse. It's also very difficult to openly pursue tradeoffs, as nobody wants to be the Optimal Level of Fraud is Non-Zero politician or administrator.
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Government RFP Process Favors Bidding Over Software Delivery
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Instead we focus on structural issues in e.g. how the government sends out RFPs and gets bids by the usual suspects, who are perfectly adapted to winning bids and don't put that many points into actually shipping software, because the government buys process not outcomes.
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Government workforce competence and economic outcomes
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Mikey is largely not of POV that workforce competence levels determine outcomes, with the somewhat persuasive argument that the government workforce is so large that it ends up being a sample of general competence levels available in the economy.
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Government Digital Transformation: Dickerson on Healthcare.gov and Digital Service
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This week on Complex Systems I was honored to interview Mikey Dickerson, probably best known as one of the architects of the healthcare dot gov rescue operation. He also founded the US Digital Service. We discussed government software, procurement, and staffing.
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AI Energy Consumption Sustainability Challenge by 2028
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La inteligencia artificial nos hace mucho más productivos, pero… a qué precio?
— Juan Merodio (@juanmerodio) 1 mai 2025
Se prevé que en 2028 la ia consuma más energía que países enteros, como España, en un año. Después de lo que vivimos el lunes esto da qué pensar.
Crees que este consumo desorbitado es sostenible? pic.twitter.com/oiyrSd6KtZLa inteligencia artificial nos hace mucho más productivos, pero… a qué precio? Se prevé que en 2028 la ia consuma más energía que países enteros, como España, en un año. Después de lo que vivimos el lunes esto da qué pensar. Crees que este consumo desorbitado es sostenible?
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Iris Biometric Data Privacy Risks and Legal Protection
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i guess it's that your iris is a unique biometric identifier and you should be extremely careful who you share that data with, as you never know what will happen to it (see the history behind Illinois' biometric privacy act, aka BIPA).
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AI Voice Cloning Legal Rights and Remix Challenges Emerge
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I remember the story (maybe in accurately) of DMX suing someone for using his gruff voice/tone. This will be very interesting to watch, especially as it’s likely people will add remixability. https://
x.com/minchoi/status
/minchoi/status/1917959652425245070
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