Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 454 posts

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#271

Post by vpribish »

blactuary wrote: post #200
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Every accusation is a confession. Elon and his band of criminals know that if they were in government they would try to get a make work job and grift, direct money to their own businesses and friends, etc, so they assume that all civil servants are like that

They are also performing for a constituency who like believing that the government is their enemy. It's straight from the authoritarian playbook : claim the government is broken, get into power and break the government, replace it all with your own organization and declare victory.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#272

Post by cmrdporcupine »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #261
dcow wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ineffi…

So I'm actually trying to recall if the US has ever been through a serious public austerity wave before. I'm Canadian, so I may have missed it, but... I'm 50 years old, and in the 90s we were (along with many other countries) put through a massive and brutal government cutback wave. Which in fact, most public services never really recovered from. But I don't actually recall the US ever really having the depth of cutbacks then under Clinton (or afterwards under Bush)... like not nearly at the same level. Services in places like New Zealand and many parts of Canada were cut to the bone, there were giant cuts.

But the TLDR, and I think our generation learned this lesson and maybe it needs to be learned again...? these austerity waves don't actually work. They don't produce better governance and they're actually generally ineffective at reigning in the budget, because there's just a base cost to actually doing things in government that doesn't go away, and the best way to reign in budgetary deficits is to improve the revenue side. The massive inefficiency assumptions are mostly right-wing fantasy and there's just a lot that government actually has to do to keep mass society running.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#273

Post by boothby »

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…

I can't wait until highways and roads are carved up and sold to oligarchs. Every mile driven is a microtransaction (or maybe not so micro, if it's a monopoly). Maintenance is a major cost center, so they'll minimize that in a race to the bottom. Companies in disaster areas will simply fail, because insurance is expensive! It's such a beautiful system. I can't wait for this tax-free utopia.

Canada and Mexico will be happy to buy some of your failed states.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#274

Post by dcow »

sgarland wrote: post #270
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.

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?

If the board of my company (my CEO’s boss) showed up in Slack and asked, I would probably listen to my CEO’s boss. And what a poor CEO for risking his entire workforce and his own position on a political squabble.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#275

Post by troupo »

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.

Elon Musk is not the boss or the king to order employees to submit to his will.

And yet you act like he is.

Who is he to order DoD or DoJ employees to write this email?

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#276

Post by scintill76 »

dcow wrote: post #263
blactuary wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

TFA: “After thousands of government layoffs, the Office of Personnel Management on Saturday directed federal workers to email a list of roughly five accomplishments”

(Edit: I accidentally pulled this from a different article not about 18F, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/02/24/musk-doge-fe... . I believe my broader point still true, but I'll elaborate more below.)

This email came AFTER thousands of layoffs!

You have implied every laid-off employee was given a chance to reply to the email and didn’t, which is contrary to TFA.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#277

Post by HideousKojima »

troupo wrote: post #266
esafak wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you not read the first sentence of the post you're replying to?

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#278

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Lionga wrote: post #265
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you actually have evidence of corruption, charges should be laid.

If all you have is insinuations and hearsay... Well, can't help you.

But one does not run a decent poultry farm by putting foxes in charge of the hen house.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#279

Post by vpribish »

dcow wrote: post #263
blactuary wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It absolutely is not. The article says no such thing and you show yourself as an untrustworthy participant in this discussion.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#280

Post by alistairSH »

boothby wrote: post #273
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…

I can't wait until highways and roads are carved up and sold to oligarchs. Every mile driven is a microtransaction (or maybe not so micro, if it's a monopoly). Maintenance is a major cost center, so they'll minimize that in a race to the bottom. Companies in disaster areas will simply fail, because insurance is expensive! It's such a beautiful system. I can't wait for this tax-free utopia. Canada and Mexico will be h…

Wait? We’re anlready there…

All the new HOV lanes around DC are public-private partnerships with flex tolls that are paid by the mile. And have revenue protection for the private entity built in.

Post reply on HN