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Show HN: govuptime.com

govuptime.com

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Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#71

Post by waqf »

thatrailsguy wrote: post #64
khawkins wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's downright deceitful, in my opinion. The entire page is trying to exaggerate the significance of the shutdown.

It's not attempting to be deceitful. The problem is the DOD has 8x as many employees as the next largest agency. If spaced without a logarithmic scale, the rest of the agencies are so insignificant it doesn't have any effect at all. To try to avoid the confusion, I'm working on another graph of percentages working for each agency, and a disclaimer about the scaling.

Mark more scale points: I suggest {1,2,4,6,8}x10^n for each n. That way the visual texture of the scale lines will immediately suggest "log scale".

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#72

Post by jeremybencken »

bithive123 wrote: post #67

Metrics are cool and all, but this glosses over the really important story here, which unfortunately seems to elude much of the general public: that a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law. They cannot be allowed to do this. I can only assume the rest of the RNC is going along with it because they are stupid or cowards.

The budget process is also a law.

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#73

Post by Avitas »

arscan wrote: post #70
nextstep wrote: post #61

It would be cool if on the bar chart the two bars for each agency could be combined; make the furloughed employees in blue and show the rest of the agency in grey-blue or something like that, so it more visually shows how the agencies are diminished.

If the author chooses to do this, absolutely get rid of the log scale. The chart makes it look like 95% of the DoD civilians are on furlough. Its 50%. The author is simply trying to show too much on that chart, and s/he is inadvertently making it look way worse to the average person (who doesn't know what a log scale is) than is intended. I may lose my salary because of this shutdown (this thing affects way more than…

Seconded--I like seeing my data on a linear scale.

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#76

Post by trothoun »

jeremybencken wrote: post #72
bithive123 wrote: post #67

Metrics are cool and all, but this glosses over the really important story here, which unfortunately seems to elude much of the general public: that a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law. They cannot be allowed to do this. I can only assume the rest of the RNC is going along with it because they are stupid or cowards.

The budget process is also a law.

Yep. Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones.

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#77

Post by dinkumthinkum »

muzz wrote: post #52
thatrailsguy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great idea.

I don't get the downtime comparison. In government, it's not the result of an unplanned outage that is being addressed to bring the system back up. Rather our governmental "sysadmins" decided to bring the system down, and can simply decide when to bring it back up.

No, not really, it's more like a Tea Party Virus hit the server.

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#78

Post by patmcc »

jaggederest wrote: post #56
muzz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the downtime comparison. In government, it's not the result of an unplanned outage that is being addressed to bring the system back up. Rather our governmental "sysadmins" decided to bring the system down, and can simply decide when to bring it back up.

Downtime is downtime - if you're measuring service reliability the planned or unplanned nature of it being offline doesn't really come into play. When people say five 9s, they don't mean "except for when you decide to take it offline".

What? No, that's completely untrue. We guarantee 4 nines on some of our services, but they're measured with 2 hours of allowed downtime early Sunday mornings (we usually don't need this, but very occasionally we do).

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#80

Post by bmelton »

bithive123 wrote: post #67

Metrics are cool and all, but this glosses over the really important story here, which unfortunately seems to elude much of the general public: that a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law. They cannot be allowed to do this. I can only assume the rest of the RNC is going along with it because they are stupid or cowards.

> a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law

So, not to get into a partisan argument (because I'm not a Republican), but the Supreme Court battle for the individual mandate imposed by the ACA circumvented the House's budgetary authority here, and that's why we're log-jammed at the moment.

The Constitution prescribes that all spending bills must originate in the House. This is called the 'Origination Clause' (Article 1, §7), and states that "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills".

The ACA originally imposed fees, but as the Supreme Court challenge (NFIB v Sebelius) declared imposing fees would be unconstitutional, but that could be easily circumvented by imposing the fees as a tax, for which Congress has authority. In that process though, taxes are at the discretion of the House, and the Senate ignored that -- then neglectfully failed to pass even a single appropriations bill over the past five years that could have headed this off.

Yes, I know that blaming Republicans is cool and all, and fits the current media narrative, but in this particular case, it bluntly ignores the absenteeism of the Senate for the past five years, and both parties, and indeed both wings of Congress are at fault.

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