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Show HN: govuptime.com

govuptime.com

111–120 of 181 posts

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#111

This is a misleading dataviz, I’m afraid. There are around 4 million federal personnel, of which 800k are furloughed, which means the government is running at 80%. So, at the very least, ‘Is the federal government operational?’ should be 0.8 instead of zero (aka, ‘no’). I would also expect the ‘service level’ calculator to reflect this. Update, citation from US Office of Personnel Mgmt: http://www.opm.gov/policy-data…

I don't think you can use 800k/4m to say government is running at 80%. Some departments are affected more than others. Furloughs can have ripple effect. NASA, HUD, ED are the most affected according to data.

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#112
Most enterprise apps have an SLA of at least 99.9%. If the government was an email server for example, for the month of October they'd like have to give a partial refund to their customers for the downtime.

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#113
post #80

Metrics are cool and all, but this glosses over the really important story here, which unfortunately seems to elude much of the general public: that a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law. They cannot be allowed to do this. I can only assume the rest of the RNC is going along with it because they are stupid or cowards.

> a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law So, not to get into a partisan argument (because I'm not a Republican), but the Supreme Court battle for the individual mandate imposed by the ACA circumvented the House's budgetary authority here, and that's why we're log-jammed at the moment. The Constitution prescribes that all spending bills must originate in the Hou…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#114

Metrics are cool and all, but this glosses over the really important story here, which unfortunately seems to elude much of the general public: that a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law. They cannot be allowed to do this. I can only assume the rest of the RNC is going along with it because they are stupid or cowards.

The budget process is also a law.

You could have a law that disallows the entire civil federal budget being held to ransom, such as declaring that the final date for a funding vote for an established government service must come at least 3 months ahead or else the service is automatically assigned funds. That way, all the sections of the budget that are not under contention would have been assigned funding 3 months ago and the worst that could be done would be a delay on sections of government business, not the shutting down of random stuff like parks.

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can only assume the rest of the RNC is going along with it because they are stupid or cowards They are not stupid; they are self-interested. With gerrymandering making many seats stable in terms of which party will win, the competition then comes from within the party; moderate GOPs face competition from the far right. If they don't tow the line, they risk losing their power. This is the end-game of gerrymandering…

OT, but I've been seeing this around a lot lately. It's "toe the line", and not "tow the line": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line

Think this: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZhvlxGTfYXo/TYLtUko9fwI/AAAAAAAAA2... -- toe on a line is easy to imagine.

Instead of this: http://www.glossophilia.org/wp-content/uploads/towline.jpg -- towing an oceanliner? Does that make any sense?

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#119
post #33

The federal government is operational, so the text at the top of the page is politically dishonest. We still have a federal government that is taking care of national defense, among a number of other things. "Non-essential" services have been suspended, while "essential" are still operational. Frankly, I'd like it if it stayed this way. The government shouldn't tax-and-force in "non-essential" areas.

Somalia has been operating in a state of government shutdown for years.

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#120
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not attempting to be deceitful. The problem is the DOD has 8x as many employees as the next largest agency. If spaced without a logarithmic scale, the rest of the agencies are so insignificant it doesn't have any effect at all. To try to avoid the confusion, I'm working on another graph of percentages working for each agency, and a disclaimer about the scaling.

Make a 2nd chart, with little inset zoomy lines to connect the 2 charts (like you see on a paper map that shows a zoom of the downtown core) Like this: http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Is there a good js library for doing this style chart?
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