I wonder at this rate - will they privatize IRS tax filing software?
Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees
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Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. The exception is companies propped up by government regulation. The problem with modern big companies is that the exception has become the rule. Regulation is so pervasive it's become a "what the hell is water" situation. People don't even recognize that the dysfunctional companies are protected from failur…
Delusion belief in market forces that completely ignores the reality when companies reach monopoly status.
We have antitrust law for that. But antitrust law today is simply overwhelmed by the huge number of monopolies and oligopolies the government has created in almost every sector. And courts don't have the power to correct the problem by reducing the regulations that protected the monopolies in the first place, making their remedies temporary.
Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees
#103So Mark Cuban wants to lean into exactly what DOGE is pushing by putting himself in the middle of the Governmental to Private shift? That doesn't surprise me and gives more evidence that Cuban is not dissimilar to Musk, just that he has much better PR.
The question is what would you do if you were Cuban?
Buy back the Mavericks (probably for less than he sold them for), fire Nico Harrison and trade to get Luka Dončić back.
Oh, you mean about 18F? I’d just keep trying to draw public attention to what appear to be hasty decisions made by this administration that aren’t actually beneficial to the country.
Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees
#104Privatization is what a lot of people believe is the answer, thinking that there is so much waste and useless things the Federal government does. These people must have never worked at a large corporation. I have a relative in the federal government and we would share stories because the dysfunctions are basically the same. Any large organization of humans working uses a pyramid organization since like the middle age…
It’s very easy. Waste in private organisations costs the owners money and the organisation disappears when the money runs out. Waste in public organisations costs all of us, including me, money, and the organisation never disappears, if anything, it keeps growing and consuming more money forever. If Mark Cuban wants to spend his money on this I don’t see the issue. It’s his to waste.
And who will buy the newly privatized 18f's products? The government. It's back to square one except now there are shareholders in the middle and the government (you) doesn't own its code anymore. A strictly worse state of affairs.
Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees
#105Privatization is what a lot of people believe is the answer, thinking that there is so much waste and useless things the Federal government does. These people must have never worked at a large corporation. I have a relative in the federal government and we would share stories because the dysfunctions are basically the same. Any large organization of humans working uses a pyramid organization since like the middle age…
> There will be inept people, waste, corruption, people stealing, etc. but there will also be the vast majority trying to do a good job and feel satisfaction in their work. It doesn't matter if its the federal government or a private corporation, its simply a trade-off of the organization structure.
Private sector entities can have less “dead wood” because it is easier to get rid of people, and because there is a stronger incentive to do so - reducing salary/wage expenditure increases profit. Yes there will always be some in both, but having worked in both public and private sectors, you see more of it in the public sector.
A few days ago I was talking to the employees of a homelessness charity at a social event, one of whom was telling me he felt NGOs waste money more than for-profit businesses, but not as much as the public sector. The reason he said it, was his employer was still paying rent on an office building despite it being uninhabitable due to mould and water damage - my question was if the building was uninhabitable why not cancel the lease, surely that would give justifiable grounds to do so, and then they’d have more money to spend on the homeless (or, he added, pay their employees more)
Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees
#106So Mark Cuban wants to lean into exactly what DOGE is pushing by putting himself in the middle of the Governmental to Private shift? That doesn't surprise me and gives more evidence that Cuban is not dissimilar to Musk, just that he has much better PR.
The question is what would you do if you were Cuban?
I think it's disingenuous to see what Cuban is doing as the thing that anyone would do because I would assume most would prefer to have more wealth if they could.
My issue comes from the fact that Cuban is then directly aiding and abetting the process that Musk is putting in place with DOGE, thus my concern.
With that in mind, asking "Well what would you do?" to justify the actions of putting a generally well regarded and good service into the hands of the private sector is a fundamental lack of scope on what's continuing to happen.
Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees
#107Privatization is what a lot of people believe is the answer, thinking that there is so much waste and useless things the Federal government does. These people must have never worked at a large corporation. I have a relative in the federal government and we would share stories because the dysfunctions are basically the same. Any large organization of humans working uses a pyramid organization since like the middle age…
I think you're right, but I think there's a deeper connective tissue here.
Nobody likes bureaucracy, waste, pointless meetings, layers of management, etc. so why does this happen? I think the answer is people create these things to protect something, to feel safe.
So I think these things are inevitable with any large group of people with scarcity. The capitalist/libertarian solution is to remove protections so people cannot create inefficient systems as they will be destroyed through marketplace competition. At least that's what they hope for.
The first problem with this solution is people will always find a way to suppress competition, especially if the guardrails are removed. And secondly, this actually doubles down on the source of the problem. It makes people feel less safe.
Personally, I find inspiration in open source. Is it perfectly free of bureaucracy? No. But because the profit motive is de-emphasized in open source people actually do walk away when faced with BS which is exactly what the capitalists are trying to achieve. In other words, when people's safety isn't dependent on something they are more likely to not put up with corporate/government style bureaucratic BS.
That's why I'm a fan of safety nets and why I think a safe society where people are provided for is the future, not doubling down on this darwinian, survival of the fittest type environment that the USA (at least the people in power here) seem to be pushing for.
Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees
#108[dead]
Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing you see as waste from outside might be the most efficient system possible given the consequences and tons of time it had for evolving. These systems contain huge icebergs of knowledge gained, refined and organized over time. Rooting them like weeds which grow in three days flat is a huge mistake.
I cannot accept that sending 100B to an NGO where 90-95B ends up in politicians’ pockets and 10-5% ends up as actual aid or whatever is the most efficient system.
What if that 10% of aid that gets to the actual people prevents something like a multi-trillion dollar ebola pandemic?
Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having worked at large organisations and governments, they are literally the same. This is so obvious if you've ever had first hand experience of them. I think this is a great example of how a lot of people, even supposed "intellectuals" think with thought-terminating cliches and ideology, because the narrative of gov'ts being inefficient has been a talking point and narrative since Reagan whilst all the time any lar…
Having spent many years at government at different levels and in large companies as a consultant I disagree with a lot of that. Some government entities are great, really efficient, some seem nearly like startups. Some are nearly all deadweight. A majority of the senior older folks working for in one of the state governments, would eat breakfast, read the newspaper, have lunch, and then try to do something for a coup…
Do you have any examples of unions improving deadweight organizations?