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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

#431

Post by jmathai »

xivzgrev wrote: post #11
mharrig1 wrote: post #3

So Mark Cuban wants to lean into exactly what DOGE is pushing by putting himself in the middle of the Governmental to Private shift? That doesn't surprise me and gives more evidence that Cuban is not dissimilar to Musk, just that he has much better PR.

I don’t think they’re similar at all. Musk is cutting things left and right, creating large messes and giving himself hand outs. He is making things less efficient (vs more). Cuban sees the mess, and an opportunity to make some money while also providing value to the government. I guess they’re similar in taking advantage of the moment and looking to make money, but I don’t see how Cuban’s proposal is destructive, un…

Different or not, we need fewer billionaires involved in government.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#432

Post by luckylion »

surgical_fire wrote: post #419
luckylion wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are also a powerful driver for exploitation both of employees and of the general public. Yes, but you'll always have that. An average person working for the government, be that as an employee or as an official, will optimize their work load and try to do the minimum amount required. That's individually much less of a problem than that greedy CEO you envision, but it adds up in large numbers and becomes a probl…

> Yes, but you'll always have that. An average person working for the government, be that as an employee or as an official, will optimize their work load and try to do the minimum amount required. Except that is not really my observation of someone that dealt with the public sector extensively in multiple different countries. More often than not I dealt with people that were really trying to do a good job and were he…

> You mention the Soviet Union as an example of a government that worked against the people, ignoring plenty of good examples in different countries.

No, that's not what I meant. I mentioned them because they are the largest experiment in having everything run by the state and ignoring human nature (or, in their case, thinking they could change it by pretending it didn't exist for 20 years). The outcome was people voting with their feet and leaving. And because that's terrible PR and they needed the people to stay, they had to build walls to keep them in.

But that's not because they were "working against the people", it's because their assumptions were deeply flawed.

> And I am not really the one ignoring human nature when you are essentially willing to surrender the public good to relentless greed.

What public good? You mean public services? Why would I pay amount X for garbage collection if someone comes up with a better system and can do it for half of that amount? Currency is a placeholder for resources, why wouldn't you choose the more resource-efficient way? Would it be "greedy" to replace inefficient ways?

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#433

Post by surgical_fire »

luckylion wrote: post #432
surgical_fire wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, but you'll always have that. An average person working for the government, be that as an employee or as an official, will optimize their work load and try to do the minimum amount required. Except that is not really my observation of someone that dealt with the public sector extensively in multiple different countries. More often than not I dealt with people that were really trying to do a good job and were he…

> You mention the Soviet Union as an example of a government that worked against the people, ignoring plenty of good examples in different countries. No, that's not what I meant. I mentioned them because they are the largest experiment in having everything run by the state and ignoring human nature (or, in their case, thinking they could change it by pretending it didn't exist for 20 years). The outcome was people vo…

It is also more efficient to refuse hospital care for those with serious medical conditions. Letting them die is probably more cost-effective.

I can come up with countless examples of how it is more cost-effective and innovative to exploit people for profit, but I am sure you already got my point.

I think here is where we will have a fundamental disagreement in world views, probably in a way that is impossible to reconcile. You think that profit-seeking can be a force that results in progress, whereas I think it is fundamentally adversarial to the public at large. Some government functions are simply incompatible with it, and elsewhere it needs to be curbed with proper regulation.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#434

Post by bookaway »

dralley wrote: post #421
JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An opportunity to provide value to the government by replacing their own service with an inevitably more expensive one which can be recontracted out to whoever suits the interests of a specific administration with minimal pushback. It's not Musk's ideal scenario I'm sure, but he'd be an awful lot more happy with it as the new status quo than what was there before.

Cuban isn't in charge here, in fact he literally campaigned for Harris. Trump and Musk destroyed USDS and 18F. At worst Cuban is trying to salvage something from the wreckage.

It's called a "shadow government" in European (?) parlance[0], though not to be confused with the term "deep state". That is, the opposition basically prepares a shadow government to signal to the public that, despite not being power, they have the qualified personnel ready to go on day 1 if they come back to power. The down side for MAGA when firing all these workers in all these agencies is that it gives the opposition the opportunity to organize a "department in waiting" for every agency that is gutted by gathering the most-qualified of the fired employees.

But just another billionaire doing this instead of an organized opposition is not ideal, to say the least. ex 18F workers should get someone they trust more in the mix.

[0] https://www.yourdictionary.com/shadow-government

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#435

Post by spwa4 »

mindslight wrote: post #377
spwa4 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A municipal electric company can use private contractors just the same. The difference is that the municipal electric company is accountable to the captive residents they serve, while a privately-owned monopoly escapes most accountability.

And the whole issue is that this accountability is generally used by a group of people that make it serve different issues. Municipalities use it like a way to raise taxes to do what they want to do (like a work program, a way to pay pensions for municipal workers, ...)

Of course a privately-owned one doesn't work either, because there's no competition.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#436

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

reaperducer wrote: post #408
JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An opportunity to provide value to the government by replacing their own service with an inevitably more expensive one which can be recontracted out to whoever suits the interests of a specific administration with minimal pushback. It's not Musk's ideal scenario I'm sure, but he'd be an awful lot more happy with it as the new status quo than what was there before.

"Replacing" sounds like he's taking it away. It's already gone. He's resurrecting it.

I meant in terms of what people expect this kind of service to be.

If his vision is a privately-ran for-profit contracted agency he's not resurrecting anything.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#437

Post by consumer451 »

tmoertel wrote: post #416
consumer451 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, so we give it to ourselves and find a way to call it patient care. Can you share some significant real-world examples of this happening?

Sure. In many parts of the United States, regional hospital systems have captured their local markets through consolidation and exploitation of their non-profit status. They then offer their own health insurance plans to provide access their own hospital systems, sometimes even denying access to other insurance plans. So when these insurance plans spend on patient care, they are, in effect, paying themselves at rates…

Wait, I previously replied too passively.

Yes, that is corruption. However, it is being punished!

If a for-profit insurance/hospital group does this in the USA, taking money from patient care to profit... there is no punishment. Instead, it is encouraged. Correct?

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#438

Post by nobodyandproud »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #272
nobodyandproud wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cutb…

Never wholesale, but largely because there was a long tradition of resisting Federal government services.

So, very many government services were and still are at more local government levels.

Still, there are things ripe for privatization, such as commercial rockets, as another poster pointed out.

Then there are complete failures like privatized state and local prisons which are nonsense—what does it even mean to have a competitive market for prisons?—or our monopoly-by-design internet services held hostage by the large ISPs.

These should be largely government run.

But then the monstrosity of US healthcare is a design-by-committee. A pure private system with regulation AND mandated 100% price transparency of services; OR a Japanese/South Korean style national healthcare would still be better than what we have today.

It’s hard for me to give a cohesive answer because it’s such a mixed bag.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#439

Post by mollerhoj »

mharrig1 wrote: post #3

So Mark Cuban wants to lean into exactly what DOGE is pushing by putting himself in the middle of the Governmental to Private shift? That doesn't surprise me and gives more evidence that Cuban is not dissimilar to Musk, just that he has much better PR.

One guy burns down a shop. A capitalist comes in buys the ground, builds a hotel.

Unless they were coordinating this, how on earth is it the same?

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#440

Post by s1artibartfast »

nerdponx wrote: post #426
s1artibartfast wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Reduction of scope is required to decrease cost and waste That doesn't follow at all. Plenty of cost and waste arises while carrying out things that are solidly within the scope of a federal government in the eyes of belief system but anarchism and other forms of extreme heterodoxy. To "provide for the common defense" is literally in the Constitution, yet the DoD is a black hole of funding, while soldiers eat powde…

Fair. I agree that scope is not the only source of waste.
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