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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

#171

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #130
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's funny to me to see this kind of thing labelled as "communist" considering that classical Marxist theory itself actually has a very cynical (and determinist) view of the state and does not in fact see the state as performing this "civic" role at all. Old school dogmatic Marxists see the state as nothing more than the coordinating arm of capitalism, or a "relief valve" for it, and Lenin spoke openly about its comp…

I didn't say that. The current American populace seems to be saying that.

I was raised in the Cold War "Red Menace" days, and Civic Duty was considered "Red-Blooded American." My father[0] was in the CIA. He was a Harvard LLB, and could have been quite wealthy, but chose what he considered his Civic Duty, as a career (which wasn't really rewarded well).

I've never been particularly extreme, myself (very centrist -a vanishing species), but Civic Duty has always been important to me, and to my family, for generations.

That no longer seems to be the case.

[0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/MikeMarshall.htm

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#172

Post by plagiarist »

psychlops wrote: post #143
IgorPartola wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company that makes birthday party banners that fails can be replaced. If your electric company runs itself into the ground, there is no replacement without government assistance. So why add the overhead of a for profit company?

Private companies are funded by willing participants and have economic incentives to be efficient. The incentives for your electric company and other government programs for efficiency are not nearly so clear. It seems reasonable to favor efficiency wherever possible.

Private companies have economic incentives to charge as much as they can get away with and pass that excess to the owners of the company. This includes participating in collusion with peers and regulatory capture to artificially raise the rate in the market far beyond what efficiency would dictate.

Private companies are inefficient by definition when individuals are able to extract millions to billions of dollars from the market.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#173

Post by cmrdporcupine »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #171
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny to me to see this kind of thing labelled as "communist" considering that classical Marxist theory itself actually has a very cynical (and determinist) view of the state and does not in fact see the state as performing this "civic" role at all. Old school dogmatic Marxists see the state as nothing more than the coordinating arm of capitalism, or a "relief valve" for it, and Lenin spoke openly about its comp…

I didn't say that. The current American populace seems to be saying that. I was raised in the Cold War "Red Menace" days, and Civic Duty was considered "Red-Blooded American." My father[0] was in the CIA. He was a Harvard LLB, and could have been quite wealthy, but chose what he considered his Civic Duty, as a career (which wasn't really rewarded well). I've never been particularly extreme, myself (very centrist -a v…

Yes, I was agreeing with you. I'm not the person who downvoted you.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#174

Post by consumer451 »

modeless wrote: post #68
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…

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…

> The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced.

The US healthcare system is evidence that this is an overly simplistic view.

In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, and we work to decrease it.

In a for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered shareholder value, and we work to increase it.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#175

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #173
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say that. The current American populace seems to be saying that. I was raised in the Cold War "Red Menace" days, and Civic Duty was considered "Red-Blooded American." My father[0] was in the CIA. He was a Harvard LLB, and could have been quite wealthy, but chose what he considered his Civic Duty, as a career (which wasn't really rewarded well). I've never been particularly extreme, myself (very centrist -a v…

Yes, I was agreeing with you. I'm not the person who downvoted you.

Cool. Sorry about that, Chief...

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#176

Post by nonchalantsui »

spwa4 wrote: post #152
IgorPartola wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company that makes birthday party banners that fails can be replaced. If your electric company runs itself into the ground, there is no replacement without government assistance. So why add the overhead of a for profit company?

Because a million things can be replaced. An electricity company can use private contractors (either individual or with lots of small regional companies) for maintenance, build, diagnosing, private power plants, ... and these can fail and be replaced independently, even if the power company as a whole cannot.

Each one of those “independent” points that can potentially fail is just added dependencies that increases inefficiency due do increased oversight, adds more red tape, and slows down production.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#177

Post by yapyap »

so smart, privatizing essential parts of the government.

it’ll make it seem like you were able to do massive budget cuts in the moment and then you’ll spend 5x the money on consulting firms when nobody is focused on the budget anymore cuz they moved on

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#179

Post by psychlops »

plagiarist wrote: post #172
psychlops wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private companies are funded by willing participants and have economic incentives to be efficient. The incentives for your electric company and other government programs for efficiency are not nearly so clear. It seems reasonable to favor efficiency wherever possible.

Private companies have economic incentives to charge as much as they can get away with and pass that excess to the owners of the company. This includes participating in collusion with peers and regulatory capture to artificially raise the rate in the market far beyond what efficiency would dictate. Private companies are inefficient by definition when individuals are able to extract millions to billions of dollars fro…

I agree, except with your last sentence. There are many examples of efficient organizations that extract billions from the market from willing participants.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#180

Post by [deleted] »

_fat_santa wrote: post #125
jkubicek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 18F going private is a terrible idea. The US government should directly employ the people that are responsible for building and owning its core infrastructure.

I would argue that companies like Plantir show that it's actually quite viable to be in the private sector while simultaneously serving the public sector. Granted Plantir is primarily military and law enforcement but I would say the overall model could work well for other parts of the govt.

[deleted]
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