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18F's Micro-Purchase Experiment: Why I Bid $1

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Re: 18F's Micro-Purchase Experiment: Why I Bid $1

#41

Post by brownbat »

ksk wrote: post #38
brownbat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't want the money you're willing to pay You could run this same critique against any bid after the first bid, because it's lower than the amount they were willing to pay. The consequence of your argument is that all auctions are immoral. In reality, prices are negotiated between a field of willing suppliers and purchasers. There will almost always be some "producer surplus," some amount producers get beyond thei…

No, you could not. I can do it cheaper is distinct from I can do it for free.

> I can do it cheaper is distinct from I can do it for free.

Why? I don't understand why these aren't just other prices.

I'm not trolling, I'm asking for clarification. It's like you just said to me "3 is a number but 0 is not a number." I literally don't understand your position.

Also is $1 free in this context?

Note I'm responding to your critique of the low bid, you said the reason it was bad was because you're taking less than they're "willing" to pay. If that's really your justification, it would apply to non-free bids as well. Maybe that's not your actual justification though...

Sorry if we're talking past each other. My perspectives on this are highly shaped by my experiences with economics courses, especially micro. Really recommend working through some of that material, which can be found free online. It might change the way you look at the world: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-121-microeconomic-th...

Re: 18F's Micro-Purchase Experiment: Why I Bid $1

#42

Post by zeckalpha »

ksk wrote: post #20

Working for free is a luxury for the people not struggling to ends meet. "Oh, I already got paid elsewhere, but let me work for free and outbid others who are doing this as their primary job" is the unstated context and it feels a tad bit smug and elitist. Personally, I think that the goal should be to get paid while you work on open source. But, I know that its not an option for everyone. >I use open source technolo…

> If you want to contribute to open source, then please feel free to join an open source project.

It IS an open source project: https://github.com/18F/calc/blob/master/LICENSE.md

Re: 18F's Micro-Purchase Experiment: Why I Bid $1

#43

Post by ksk »

kbenson wrote: post #36
ksk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Complaining about this is essentially the same as complaining about soup-kitchen volunteers. No, it is not the same thing at all. People volunteer for organizations because the organizations DO NOT have the resources to pay them because all their money goes into buying goods and what not. When you bid $1 and work for free, you're saying I don't want the money you're willing to pay . To fail to understand this basic…

> No, it is not the same thing at all. People volunteer for organizations because the organizations DO NOT have the resources to pay them because all their money goes into buying goods and what not. The organization does have enough money to pay some of them, but the savings from people volunteering goes to other resources, and since people align with the goal of the organization, they are fine with that. This is the…

>The organization does have enough money to pay some of them, but the savings from people volunteering goes to other resources, and since people align with the goal of the organization, they are fine with that.

You are comparing two very different things. The material costs of feeding 100 people would probably equal the labor costs of one worker for one day. Nobody is going to make the labor compromise when the question is "Do I feed 10 people or 100 people".

>Any money saved here isn't going to some CEO, this is the government, it's budgeted and if it doesn't go to another project here, it goes to some other service for the American people.

Um, do you have any idea about federal funds just languishing in bank accounts? Just google "unspent government money".

Sorry, your argument does not hold any water. In any case, we're entering into the minutia of a topic that I have little interest in, so I am not inclined to continue.

Re: 18F's Micro-Purchase Experiment: Why I Bid $1

#44

Post by Johnny555 »

USNetizen wrote: post #6

The problem with this isn't that the bidder wanted to do something noble, it's that it set a precedent that the government is going to expect on future bids moving forward. "Buying a contract" is nothing new - companies do it all the time (i.e. deliberately dramatically underbidding just to get the past performance). However, reverse auctions are a lose-lose for the government and commercial sector. This approach ass…

"For commodities, perhaps it works, but for IT you get what you pay for"

Well, you don't, sometimes you just pay for overhead you don't need.

My wife works at a small 15 person non-profit - I was shocked when I heard how much they pay for IT support from a small support organization.

She asked what other choice they had, because they don't have anyone on-staff that can do it, and their old hardware needed a lot of support.

So I put together a proposal - for less than they were paying for a year of support services, they could replace all of their hardware with new hardware (including desktops, network and printer), plus move from hosted Exchange to Gmail (for another big cost savings).

I spent a weekend setting up the hardware, including automatic backups to a local fileserver plus crashplan for remote cloud backups (they had no backups at all before, just a bunch of flash drives with various bits of information).

They saved money after the first year, plus they had all new and reliable hardware. They bought a block of 40 hours of support from their IT support organization and haven't even used half of that over 2 years.

Re: 18F's Micro-Purchase Experiment: Why I Bid $1

#45

Post by pavel_lishin »

TurboHaskal wrote: post #25
mdpopescu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I upvoted you for the "this is free markets gone right" part, but I have no idea where you're seeing "a tendency of HM toward libertarian and free market approaches". Every time the issue comes up, I'm seeing about 90% comments against it. Maybe I'm reading the wrong threads :)

Such tendency exists, depending on your timezone.

I host a general-interest VBulletin forum, which at one point had something like a hundred people posting. One day, we discovered that via the "groups" functionality, there was a whole parasitic forum co-existing with ours - we didn't know it existed, we didn't know any of the people there, and they didn't know us, and the two groups didn't interact at all.

I wonder if it's possible for something similar to happen on specific-interest a messaging board, but just as a function of time zones. (e.g., somehow, most of the population of the board is from Spain and New Zealand, 12 hours apart.)

Re: 18F's Micro-Purchase Experiment: Why I Bid $1

#46

Post by iMerNibor »

goorpyguy wrote: post #40
ksk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Switching contexts, you could say the same thing about garage bands I don't know much about the music business, but as a layman, I don't think the two situations are comparable. I think that when a band releases free music they're thinking "I just need to put htis out for free and if my song goes viral THEN I'm going to get picked up by this huge record label, etc ,etc" Its more of a "let me win the lottery" prayer,…

This is a good analogy, actually. You want a chance to do the work, and have people see your good work. You want that badly enough that you're willing to do the initial work for free.

Which is basically the reasoning behind bidding 1$ then..

He got a lot of attention from just doing that aswell, so a success for him

Re: 18F's Micro-Purchase Experiment: Why I Bid $1

#47

Post by cuckcuckspruce »

ksk wrote: post #20

Working for free is a luxury for the people not struggling to ends meet. "Oh, I already got paid elsewhere, but let me work for free and outbid others who are doing this as their primary job" is the unstated context and it feels a tad bit smug and elitist. Personally, I think that the goal should be to get paid while you work on open source. But, I know that its not an option for everyone. >I use open source technolo…

>Working for free is a luxury for the people not struggling to ends meet.

Go back to your gulch, John Galt. Just because someone chooses to be altruistic does not mean you have to crap all over their altruism.

Re: 18F's Micro-Purchase Experiment: Why I Bid $1

#48

Post by Jtsummers »

brownbat wrote: post #31
ksk wrote: post #20

Working for free is a luxury for the people not struggling to ends meet. "Oh, I already got paid elsewhere, but let me work for free and outbid others who are doing this as their primary job" is the unstated context and it feels a tad bit smug and elitist. Personally, I think that the goal should be to get paid while you work on open source. But, I know that its not an option for everyone. >I use open source technolo…

Switching contexts, you could say the same thing about garage bands. "Why are these amateurs playing all these shows basically for free? They're stealing money from hardworking musicians!" Some disciplines spark addicted, passionate individuals who get other benefits beyond the price. (In contrast, there aren't a lot of enthusiast janitors.) If you want to make a living and you opt to compete with abundance, you shou…

> (In contrast, there aren't a lot of enthusiast janitors.)

Totally unrelated, but this is the second time recently I've seen a remark like this. And I agree entirely, but I actually know one. Guy retired, wanted to help out an underfunded school, became their janitor. Retired military so he's essentially got a (much better than) living wage for the rest of his life, the income was irrelevant. He just wanted to see the conditions for the students improved.

Re: 18F's Micro-Purchase Experiment: Why I Bid $1

#49

Post by yellowstuff »

kbenson wrote: post #29
ksk wrote: post #20

Working for free is a luxury for the people not struggling to ends meet. "Oh, I already got paid elsewhere, but let me work for free and outbid others who are doing this as their primary job" is the unstated context and it feels a tad bit smug and elitist. Personally, I think that the goal should be to get paid while you work on open source. But, I know that its not an option for everyone. >I use open source technolo…

> and it feels a tad bit smug and elitist Saying that about someone who wants to help out so essentially volunteers their time to help a government project, which in essence means it helps everyone, seems a bit entitled and ill-informed. I'm sure many people want to get paid to work on open source, but it's a free market, and people will bid what they think a project is worth, and worth isn't always about monetary co…

Any form of volunteering replaces some amount of paid work. The pros and cons need to be evaluated on a case by case basis.

If volunteers do just enough free programming to drive professionals out of the market, it's possible the result will be that less work gets done. I don't think soup kitchens have the same risk.

Re: 18F's Micro-Purchase Experiment: Why I Bid $1

#50

Post by Jtsummers »

cuckcuckspruce wrote: post #47
ksk wrote: post #20

Working for free is a luxury for the people not struggling to ends meet. "Oh, I already got paid elsewhere, but let me work for free and outbid others who are doing this as their primary job" is the unstated context and it feels a tad bit smug and elitist. Personally, I think that the goal should be to get paid while you work on open source. But, I know that its not an option for everyone. >I use open source technolo…

>Working for free is a luxury for the people not struggling to ends meet. Go back to your gulch, John Galt. Just because someone chooses to be altruistic does not mean you have to crap all over their altruism.

You're basically name-calling, which is unproductive. While I'm not in agreement with OP, some levels and methods of altruism/volunteerism can end up being counterproductive. A certain level of free to a region is useful. Above that, or for too long, and you end up harming local farming and manufacturing, to the point where they may also depend on the free goods.

I'm lacking specific articles and lines of research, but charity seems to be better when it's establishing people on their own (teaching them a trade, providing them a global market for the goods they already produce, education, medical, etc.) than giving them a thing. We have to be careful when giving to others that we don't simultaneously diminish them. All of this is a balance, and the correct balance very much depends on the extent of the need and the existing capabilities and limitations of the people involved so no universal line can be drawn.

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