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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

#281

Post by s1artibartfast »

alephnerd wrote: post #128
trentnix wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reflexive "ugh govt" is a result of decades of Reagan-ite propaganda I (and many others) have worked for, contracted for, interacted with, and/or closely observed government for decades. The only “reflexive” thing here is your argument that people who disagree with the you are the victims of propaganda. You can certainly quibble with the details on how to deliver government efficiency (and I highly encourage people…

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…

Reduction of scope is required to decrease cost and waste. Unfortunately, reducing scope and regulation is a legislative problem, not an executive one.

Having an government organization underfunded and understaffed to fulfill its mission leads to more waste, both on the public and private side.

For example, the solution isnt to fire employees, it is to simplify the tax code.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#282

Post by unclebucknasty »

atlgator wrote: post #210
garrettdreyfus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post says very little and you can look up almost all public salaries.

What good is knowing their salary if you don't know what their skills and experience are? How can you say they would make more in the private sector? You're just trading one set of assertions for another and neither of you have data to back up your claims.

This report from the CBO is more balanced and accounts for the variables you mentioned (and more). [0]

"Compared with private-sector workers, federal workers tend to be older, more educated, and more concentrated in professional occupations. To account for those differences, the Congressional Budget Office limited its comparisons to employees with a set of similar observable characteristics—education, occupation, years of work experience, geographic location, size of employer, veteran status, and certain demographic characteristics (sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, immigration status, and citizenship)—in this report"

[0] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60235

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#283

Post by dcow »

scintill76 wrote: post #276
dcow wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!…

I don’t think you’re interpreting the article’s wording correctly.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#284

Post by HideousKojima »

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…

>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 complete destruction in State And Revolution.

And yet every single time Communists (Lenin included) have gotten into power...

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#285

Post by nobodyandproud »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #257
nobodyandproud wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t think of one privatization effort in the US that improved services, or kept services steady at a lower cost. There may be one but it’s certainly the exception. Though it greatly enriches those helming the effort.

ahem SpaceX. No Musk fan, but that company has been doing a real bang-up (literally) job of developing affordable launch systems. I think the SLS is a disaster, and I suspect is very much in DOGE's crosshairs. As always, "it depends" is really where the truth lies. There doesn't seem to be anyone that is "always right," or "always wrong." It's the extremists that believe that there is "always right/wrong," that cause…

That’s a good one and that should be a case study: https://www.forbes.com/2003/02/03/cx_ah_0203space.html

Privatization was well under way, but the incumbents were (and still are) awful.

NASA later took a risk with SpaceX, fostered competition, and it paid off enormously.

But this worked out because there was a market and demand (private sector satellites).

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#287

Post by troupo »

HideousKojima wrote: post #277
troupo wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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.

First you claim oversimplification and then you write a sentence that feels like a "but when implemented well".

Tell me how this is a market in a reasonably sized city, and how many parallel electric lines, water and sewer pipes you can run for the market to be well implemented?

Bonus question: how many competing power lines can be run from a single power plant? 1? 2? 10?

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#288

Post by nosianu »

skissane wrote: post #105
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…

> 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 str…

That is a common take, but it ignores that you need competent people and processes for that to work. But the reality is that you get lots and lots of office politics.

It is incredibly hard to understand what people are doing, and how that works out in a complex organization!

The effort and likelihood of reasonable success is a precondition for your argument.

I have been in a lot of companies, and I have seen soooo much useless busy work. Including my own well-paid IT consultant job, not infrequently.

Employees and managers on all levels try very hard to justify their existence. When they are under-employed they may also start looking for new projects themselves, which the next level of management is okay with because it appears that they are doing something useful, and they don't have to deal with that problem.

Overall, I will claim that your argument is far too simplistic and ignores the complexity of humans and their organizations.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#289

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

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.

The request was at best a bad joke, and I think you know that too.

If the real purpose, as Musk later stated, was to see who would respond and who would not, with no consideration of content, why deceive? Be direct: "This is a test of government employee email deliverability and responsiveness. Please reply to this email when you receive it. An empty reply is fine, you do not need to put anything in the email."

If you want to know what people are working on, you work with the management chains because those are the people whose job it is to know what their people are working on. You take your time to dig into the data, talk to people at all levels, understand the structure and the work. This request, in the way and fashion it was made, shows an incredible lack of disrespect, distrust, and disregard for federal employees across the board. If I were a government employee and received that mail, I would be unable to avoid expressing my own disrespect and distrust in my reply.

These emails sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy where government fails to serve the people. Some people leave public service. Others stay but are disillusioned and checked out because they know their actual job performance no longer matters, the whims of a billionaire who voted with his wallet to make himself co-president can destroy their livelihood at any moment. Over time, you have people who are unable to leave and thus will do what they're told out of fear, and unqualified loyalists who just do what they're told.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#290

Post by hnaccount_rng »

atlgator wrote: post #210
garrettdreyfus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post says very little and you can look up almost all public salaries.

What good is knowing their salary if you don't know what their skills and experience are? How can you say they would make more in the private sector? You're just trading one set of assertions for another and neither of you have data to back up your claims.

I mean 18F was essentially "hey you earn ~infinite money selling ads to people. Whenever you grow bored come here, you'll have the same kind of colleagues but get to work making this country work better". So yeah.. they recruited from Silicon Valley and they didn't pull the low achievers
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