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Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

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Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#111

Post by hooverd »

jisnsm wrote: post #61
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #19

Privatization 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.

Ugh. So much of that waste comes for not developing state capacity and instead farming everything out to the private sector.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#112

Post by atq2119 »

fire_lake wrote: post #50
hypeatei wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These people must have never worked at a large corporation Efficiency isn't the point, the point is funneling more money to themselves and their friends.

Efficiency is not resilient. Supply chains were efficient before Covid and look what happened. Efficiency is a non-goal for government. I’m surprised that DOGE engineers (who presumably have deployed a load balancer or two) don’t understand this.

You're overestimating the average competence of engineers. Besides, this is one of those situations where ideology easily trumps reason.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#113

Post by rorylawless »

Had DOGE been more than 2 brain cells fighting for 3rd place, they would have spun out 18F as an independent organization. They could have taken inspiration from how the British government did something similar with the Behavioural Insights Team.

The US government could have even secured favorable rates for a period of time so it could continue to benefit from the 18F expertise.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#114

Post by jisnsm »

thrance wrote: post #104
jisnsm wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not necessarily. The government will have several providers to choose from, which will have to compete in price. If the prices are still inflated, we are talking government corruption, which is yet another reason to make the government smaller, not bigger.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#115

Post by mopsi »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #90
blactuary wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this exactly. Reflexive "ugh govt" is a result of decades of Reagan-ite propaganda. Govt is just people, and people are flawed and have competing incentives. I've worked in massive companies that have incredibly dumb inefficiencies.

Reagan or not, what you can see clearly in the comments here and many other places is that what would be considered fairly extreme libertarian talking points have become common parlance these days. Taxation as "theft", the necessity of the threat of termination and other economic deprivation in order to coerce people to doing good work, the assumption that profit inevitably produces more efficiency, and that efficien…

The Ayn Rand types deserve to be reminded that she spent her final years on welfare.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#119

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #90
blactuary wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this exactly. Reflexive "ugh govt" is a result of decades of Reagan-ite propaganda. Govt is just people, and people are flawed and have competing incentives. I've worked in massive companies that have incredibly dumb inefficiencies.

Reagan or not, what you can see clearly in the comments here and many other places is that what would be considered fairly extreme libertarian talking points have become common parlance these days. Taxation as "theft", the necessity of the threat of termination and other economic deprivation in order to coerce people to doing good work, the assumption that profit inevitably produces more efficiency, and that efficien…

> Civic duty

I remember when this was considered essential to being an American Citizen. We had classes on this in K-12.

Sometime in the last decade or so, it's become synonymous with "communist."

Which is pretty rich, considering what's going on, these days.

Both Abe Lincoln and Joe McCarthy are doing 3200 RPM, right now. That's pretty crazy.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#120

Post by alephnerd »

blactuary wrote: post #91
luckylion wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience as a consultant with both (local) administrations (in Germany) and much larger corporations is that the corporations weren't even close to being as dysfunctional. I'm certain there are great parts of government, but I've never experienced it, and all I'm hearing from friends who work at the federal level is that it's no different there.

Has Germany had one of two major parties spending decades trying to undermine government to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy that government is bad by definition? We are 45 years into an intentional effort to sabotage public services to convince people they don't work, to cut taxes for the wealthiest people who don't want to fund them

Germany has issues as well becuase it's been a de facto austerity state since 2009 due to their debt break, but the American administrative structure is very different from Germany's, so it's an unfair comparison in either direction.

The only countries remotely similar to the US might be Canada and Australia.

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