Even on mobile I find the requirement for app installation to be an irritating requirement. Many of these mobile apps are much larger than they need to be, and clutter the user experience. Throw in excessive push notifications, and in many cases I would like to just go to a website for services I use infrequently.
There probably is sufficient demand to pay for it, the issue is that there is no mechanism for orchestrating such funding while remaining uncompromised. If you split out the cost of salary for 1 or 2 people, you'd likely end up with individual citizens paying pennies to have people sit in and provide this information. If you look up the average population of a small city, where such an operation would be the least efficient, its about 50,000 to 100,000 people. That would pan out to maybe a dollar per year to cover the salary - I don't think many people would be opposed to that if they actually trusted it and the money was allocated efficiently.
However, there is no way to actually get that payment consistently. It would have to become a government subsidized operation in order to actually extract that payment at a consistent distribution, at which point a huge conflict of interest is introduced, and faith is lost in the independence of such individuals. As soon as this becomes a government apparatus, costs grow heavily to account for administrative overhead, and there becomes heavy incentives to provide more favorable coverage to political figures who are responsible for budgets.
The answer is never to have government pay, obviously it then becomes biased as you point it.
If it doesn't justify a human salary then the right answer is usually to eliminate the need for a full salary with tech. Current LLM models do a sufficiently good job of meeting summarization and will only get better. Those could be published and even reviewed by human influencers for newsworthy bits.
Definitely one of the best options. I think the biggest obstacle here is actually getting that information public so it can be analyzed and summarized. Local government meetings often have no recording to analyze, and in the cases where it is most important, there is often incentive to keep it private from the public. Additionally, government moves extremely slow, with local government being one of the worst offenders. Mandatory public recordings of government functions would probably be the biggest step towards solving this issue.
Most of the issues you described, such as carrier registration issues, are just as likely with eSim as they were with physical SIM cards. The difference is that you can't swap out the eSim physically, which was a pretty reliable way of getting around misconfiguration. This isn't really an indictment of eSim as a technology, but the reality is that Telco's are incredibly slow and inefficient, and by removing a workaround for their incompetence, it can make the problem worse.
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