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Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

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Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#21

Post by narrator »

colechristensen wrote: post #18
dnautics wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the mechanism by which government spends money - it issues a bond, which gets converted to dollars. The bond comes with interest, and the interest payments go to rich people (banks).

This poorly represents where the US national debt goes. About 30% of the debt is owned by federal agencies ... that is the government owes itself that money. Social Security is the easiest (and largest) example. It owns about $3 trillion of the federal debt which it is saving (for now income>expenses for SS) for when it is needed as the population ages. 40% is owned by foreign governments. Being indebted to foreign c…

"40% is owned by foreign governments. Being indebted to foreign countries isn't so bad. It means they have faith in you and are rooting for your success. It supports peace and cooperation."

"As for "rich people" mutual funds and banks own together about $1.5 trillion. A lot of those are pretty average folks. Even then this is only ~%10 of the $18 trillion debt."

Ok so still that's 9 trillion in debt owed to people who get to collect money from the U.S taxpayer. A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money! The annual payment of interest on the debt is 430 billion dollars[1]. So rich people get roughly 43 billion a year totally risk free for doing absolutely nothing courtesy of the tax payer. Meanwhile, in China, whenever the government needs some money they just print it up at the PBOC and hand it out, usually to bail out bad debts to state owned enterprises, but at least they aren't sticking it to the taxpayer like we are.

1.https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/ir/ir_expense.ht...

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#22

Post by jxm262 »

Nice read. I don't mean to derail the discussion, but I wonder what sort of developers they were looking for when recruiting for the program. When I applied to the US Digital Service, I received a message back - "we are seeking candidates with skills tightly matched to our current projects. Members of our team reviewed your application, and we don't have the perfect match for your background right now". I'm mostly a web developer, so perhaps they were looking for a different background.

I have many of the same thoughts as the author (feel like my dev skills could be used to help some greater causes), but not sure where else I could make an impact. Particularly in government where I have alot of interest.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#23

Post by walshemj »

linkregister wrote: post #19
walshemj wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a big ask Googles software requires a different mind set than say correctly calculating veterans pensions. From googles perspective having 2 or 3% suboptimal query's is fine but that wont pass muster for other types of work. Try building billing systems for a global Telco and have one of Vint Cerfs reports nudge you and say this had be right otherwise we are both out of a job :-)

I'm pretty sure that a billing error in Adwords would cause a fairly large controversy!

True and I bet that they pay more attention to detail on that but what proportion of googles SE's work on ad words billing.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#24

Post by Kephael »

walshemj wrote: post #15
rayiner wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't argue that doesn't happen, but it's overstated. People from industry go into government for the same reason people join the digital service: because they think that the skills and knowledge they gained in industry can let them do the job better than the government can without them.[1] And these appointments are temporary for the same reason digital service appointments are temporary: people are only so willing…

That's a big ask Googles software requires a different mind set than say correctly calculating veterans pensions. From googles perspective having 2 or 3% suboptimal query's is fine but that wont pass muster for other types of work. Try building billing systems for a global Telco and have one of Vint Cerfs reports nudge you and say this had be right otherwise we are both out of a job :-)

Calculating a pension and building a billing system is rather basic CRUD work compared to scaling software to handle millions of concurrent users. Google's hiring bar is relatively high compared to any government position in terms of quantitative skills you'd need to demonstrate.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#25

Post by jrochkind1 »

walshemj wrote: post #15
rayiner wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't argue that doesn't happen, but it's overstated. People from industry go into government for the same reason people join the digital service: because they think that the skills and knowledge they gained in industry can let them do the job better than the government can without them.[1] And these appointments are temporary for the same reason digital service appointments are temporary: people are only so willing…

That's a big ask Googles software requires a different mind set than say correctly calculating veterans pensions. From googles perspective having 2 or 3% suboptimal query's is fine but that wont pass muster for other types of work. Try building billing systems for a global Telco and have one of Vint Cerfs reports nudge you and say this had be right otherwise we are both out of a job :-)

I don't understand what you mean by "2 or 3% suboptimal query's", or really, in general what you mean.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#26

Post by dnautics »

narrator wrote: post #21
colechristensen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This poorly represents where the US national debt goes. About 30% of the debt is owned by federal agencies ... that is the government owes itself that money. Social Security is the easiest (and largest) example. It owns about $3 trillion of the federal debt which it is saving (for now income>expenses for SS) for when it is needed as the population ages. 40% is owned by foreign governments. Being indebted to foreign c…

"40% is owned by foreign governments. Being indebted to foreign countries isn't so bad. It means they have faith in you and are rooting for your success. It supports peace and cooperation." "As for "rich people" mutual funds and banks own together about $1.5 trillion. A lot of those are pretty average folks. Even then this is only ~%10 of the $18 trillion debt." Ok so still that's 9 trillion in debt owed to people wh…

Well, ok, so some of that debt does go to things like retirement funds and mutual funds, which help individuals that are not the mega-rich (like middle-income folks) but still the very poor in this country are not being helped by this.

Just printing money is not a good solution. Inflation (despite what Paul Krugman says) is very bad for the poor. One: If it weren't bad for the poor, why is there a need to periodically raise the minimum wage? Two: The common refrain is that the poor are indebted and benefit from nominal devaluation while the rich will stuff their matresses full of bills if we had deflation, but the rich do benefit from quasi-loans, like leveraged investments. Leveraged investments get very favorable interest rates, and the poor, typically are not offered low interest rates. I will be impressed if you can find an urban money lender that offers an interest rate below inflation, but if you have access to IMF funds (which sometimes are below inflation!), you're probably not in the 99%.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#27

Post by Kephael »

gkoberger wrote: post #3
_nqbv wrote: post #2

I didn't catch this part- why did the author leave? Was it just a term end and he chose not to renew it?

They do "tours of duty", since I think they found people had a hard time moving to DC permanently. Using this, they've managed to get a lot of people to take sabbaticals from their Google/FB/etc jobs. "Quit your high paying job and indefinitely work for the government" is a hard sell; "come do something awesome for 6 months then go back" is much easier.

Most of those listed as employees of the digital service on the main site seem to be employed for political purposes, if you read their biographies most don't have deep technical skills. The whole department seems to have been created to help Obama deflect from the healthcare.gov debacle and make it seem like he was taking serious action to fix the site.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#28

Post by jsprogrammer »

narrator wrote: post #21
colechristensen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This poorly represents where the US national debt goes. About 30% of the debt is owned by federal agencies ... that is the government owes itself that money. Social Security is the easiest (and largest) example. It owns about $3 trillion of the federal debt which it is saving (for now income>expenses for SS) for when it is needed as the population ages. 40% is owned by foreign governments. Being indebted to foreign c…

"40% is owned by foreign governments. Being indebted to foreign countries isn't so bad. It means they have faith in you and are rooting for your success. It supports peace and cooperation." "As for "rich people" mutual funds and banks own together about $1.5 trillion. A lot of those are pretty average folks. Even then this is only ~%10 of the $18 trillion debt." Ok so still that's 9 trillion in debt owed to people wh…

The amount owed to SS is really just an accounting artifact.

SS works by promising future taxpayers will fund today's taxpayers' retirement benefits. The fact that all of the "saved" money was actually "loaned" back out to the taxpayer (while current taxes fund current beneficiaries) is a perfect demonstration of this facet of SS's internal workings.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#29

Post by alwaysdoit »

Why not take rich people's money for taxis, and then donate how ever much of your salary to charities that are trying to fight malaria you think is appropriate?

Is making $40K/yr doing something "meaningful" better than making $100K/yr doing something "meaningless" and donating $60k/yr to meaningful causes?

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#30

Post by saryant »

narrator wrote: post #21
colechristensen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This poorly represents where the US national debt goes. About 30% of the debt is owned by federal agencies ... that is the government owes itself that money. Social Security is the easiest (and largest) example. It owns about $3 trillion of the federal debt which it is saving (for now income>expenses for SS) for when it is needed as the population ages. 40% is owned by foreign governments. Being indebted to foreign c…

"40% is owned by foreign governments. Being indebted to foreign countries isn't so bad. It means they have faith in you and are rooting for your success. It supports peace and cooperation." "As for "rich people" mutual funds and banks own together about $1.5 trillion. A lot of those are pretty average folks. Even then this is only ~%10 of the $18 trillion debt." Ok so still that's 9 trillion in debt owed to people wh…

The "rich people" you're talking about includes pretty much every Average Joe with a 401k or IRA.

For instance, of that $1.5 trillion, $50-$100 billion is held in Vanguard's investor shares (by definition, retail investors with less than $10k in the fund). These people (mostly regular people saving for retirement) aren't "doing absolutely nothing"—they're helping fund the US government!

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