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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

#261

Post by nobodyandproud »

dcow wrote: post #241
nobodyandproud wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would this happen? More taxes? More government bonds to increase the national debt (an irresponsible, conservative favorite)?

When you cut out fraud waste and abuse you can actually reduce spend while increasing individual pay.

That assumes:

1. There is meaningful fraud or waste to cut out.

2. That the goal-post won’t be moved, to squeeze more savings.

3. That the methods that lead to inefficiencies aren’t being repeated.

4. That redundancies are a “waste”. Just in time supply chains are terrible in a disaster, for example.

And everything I’ve seen in the past 50 years and especially in the past month strongly indicate more long-term inefficiencies.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#262

Post by sgarland »

esafak wrote: post #140
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?

The last mile might be monopolized, but you are oversimplifying it. When implemented well, there are markets for generation, transmission, distribution, and retail, implying alternatives and resiliency. Every system has bottlenecks. This does not mean they are all equally resilient. To give a familiar example, your having one brain does not negate the benefit of having limbs in pairs.

There are partial markets at best. There is generally a single owner of the physical infrastructure for transmission and distribution. Also, don’t forget that the FCC forced utilities into in the 70s to allow telecoms to hang cable off of their poles; the utilities certainly had no incentive to do so at a fair rate.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#263

Post by dcow »

blactuary wrote: post #258
dcow wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t seen the main impetus for the layoffs brought up yet: the people let go were unable or unwilling to send an email listing 5 things they accomplished in the last week, twice. People are acting like DOGE is attacking tech support recklessly with a chainsaw. This appears to be a targeted cut of insubordinate or redundant individuals.

"the people let go were unable or unwilling to send an email listing 5 things they accomplished in the last week" This is entirely false. This is so incredibly false that I am actually shocked you were willing to post it. It is hard for me to imagine anything more absurd and untrue someone could have said about this topic. I tremble with fear thinking about what your media diet must look like in order for you to beli…

It’s from TFA.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#265

Post by Lionga »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #139
alephnerd wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no denying that there's bloat, but going in with a chainsaw is not a conducive or efficient way to reduce bloat in an organization. If you want to use the "private sector lense" (which I do not think is valid for a govenenent bureaucracy), there's a reason why when I've participated in M&A events, we would spend a year doing due diligence and understanding the organizational and financial structure before ini…

Indeed. The chainsaw approach will only produce an even less effective civil service, and one in constant crisis. If you want to actually improve governance (and we really should because it is in fact often quite dysfunctional), you don't come in with the notion that it is intrinsically rotten to the core and the very idea of governance is flawed by nature. You start by motivating people to improve. Which you don't d…

How do you "start by motivating people to improve"? Cause all the inefficiency at best, corruption at worst and all in between is there not randomly because it serves the motivation of the people working there.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#266

Post by troupo »

esafak wrote: post #140
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?

The last mile might be monopolized, but you are oversimplifying it. When implemented well, there are markets for generation, transmission, distribution, and retail, implying alternatives and resiliency. Every system has bottlenecks. This does not mean they are all equally resilient. To give a familiar example, your having one brain does not negate the benefit of having limbs in pairs.

> there are markets for generation, transmission, distribution, and retail, implying alternatives and resiliency.

No, there are not. You can't have 15 different companies running 15 different cables over 15 different sets of electric poles into a house, each competing on delivery of electricity (or water, or sewage, or...).

Well, you can, but there's nothing good or efficient about it.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#267

Post by Volundr »

trainsarebetter wrote: post #249
Volundr wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue the difference between private companies and government is that in government that spending is public. Spend a few mil on something of marginal utility, politicaly controversial, or funding a study for something that seems obvious? Congratulations! Fox News found it on USASpending.gov (maybe not now that 18F is dead), and is drumming up outrage. Now your fielding phone calls from senators who are looking to…

In theory I guess, but hasn’t all this gov spending essentially been hidden? If doge finding are true? (And in which now I guess it is public)

Honestly it's hard to guess what your talking about here. As far as things the administration has used as examples they are pretty much all incorrect (e.x. condoms for Hamas) or wildly distorted so I wouldn't call it a win for transparency, or revealing something "essentially hidden".

If your talking things like their "org chart"* maybe, sort of. There's nothing there that wasn't already available pretty easily via OPM, but one could argue it's a nicer interface. To the extent that it's actually revealed anything to anyone is argue that it has more to do with it being the trending news so people actually bother to look, rather than it being "hidden" before.

https://doge.gov/workforce?orgId=69ee18bc-9ac8-467e-84b0-106...

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#268

Post by lclarkmichalek »

microtonal wrote: post #163
modeless wrote: post #68

Earlier 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…

The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. Even if that is true, in some areas companies' interests strongly misalign with that of citizens. An insurance company earns more by rejecting customer declarations. An ISP earns more by giving customers less bandwidth for a higher price. A toll road company earns more by doing as little maintenance they ca…

Natural monopolies exist, for sure. Your insurance example is odd though - insurance markets are generally highly competitive. The recent cases where we’ve seen a loss of competition in the market (CA home insurance, for example) have been driven by regulators imposing price controls.

The issue with healthcare is that providers have leverage over insurers, not that there is a lack of competition for insurance.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#269

Post by troupo »

trainsarebetter wrote: post #249
Volundr wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue the difference between private companies and government is that in government that spending is public. Spend a few mil on something of marginal utility, politicaly controversial, or funding a study for something that seems obvious? Congratulations! Fox News found it on USASpending.gov (maybe not now that 18F is dead), and is drumming up outrage. Now your fielding phone calls from senators who are looking to…

In theory I guess, but hasn’t all this gov spending essentially been hidden? If doge finding are true? (And in which now I guess it is public)

Almost nothing DOGE has found is true, or as bad as DOGE implies

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#270

Post by sgarland »

dcow wrote: post #226
blactuary wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, support for the DOGE mission is entirely orthogonal to DOGE's actual goals and what they are doing so far. Sure, maybe there is broad support for making government more efficient, but that is not in any way what Elon Musk is trying to do. So if there is broad support for DOGE those people are entirely wrong to believe they are aligned with Elon, and entirely wrong about supporting DOGE as the means to achieve t…

I haven’t seen the main impetus for the layoffs brought up yet: the people let go were unable or unwilling to send an email listing 5 things they accomplished in the last week, twice. People are acting like DOGE is attacking tech support recklessly with a chainsaw. This appears to be a targeted cut of insubordinate or redundant individuals.

If a random person joined your company’s Slack and said “tell me what you do, or I will fire you,” and your CEO then said to ignore it, which one would you go with?
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