How many 9s does the US government have for its existence?
Show HN: govuptime.com
141–150 of 181 posts
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then I'm sorry to say, you're doing 4 nines wrong.
How do you figure? 99.99% of the time our clients expect us to be up, we're up. We're not the electric company; if we're up the right 166 hours in a week our customers aren't impacted. If you turn your monitor off at night, does it suddenly have 70% availability/reliability?
99.99% availability is almost always predicated on 24/7 uptime numbers, not 24/6 plus an extra 22 hours.
If you say to someone "We have four nines of uptime", and they ask how you apply kernel patches, and you say "oh we just do it during our 1% of downtime", they'll boggle at you, and for good reason.
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#143Since a major part of the federal budget is its several million employees, I'd also like to see a ticker that shows how the deficit is behaving during the massive furlough ... is it going down?
And what about unemployment? Is it funded even with the shutdown? And are furloughed federal employees eligible for unemployment compensation?
I'm not going to pick sides in the current battle, but I do think the federal government is far too big, and that we really don't get enough for the money we put into it. One interesting side effect of the current standoff is that we can see what it's like without most of the government ... perhaps we should trim off the parts we (collectively) don't seem to miss.
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are currently laws that require the executive branch to submit a budget every year (the Budget Control Act of 1921), which the president violated for a few years consecutively, forcing the past few years' continuing resolutions (and in part, the sequester). There are additional Budget Acts (passed in the mid-70s, 90s, etc.) that require those budgets to be acted upon by Congress or reconsidered, which have all…
Here is a portion of the summary of the President's 2013 budget proposal. [1] I don't know where you get the idea that the President is violating the Budget Control Act. The issue is that the Senate and the House refuse to conference, due to the remote possibility of an actual revised budget being passed. Therefore CRs are used to maintain funding without dealing with the seemingly intractable partisan disputes in th…
When I spoke of the president's violations of the Budget Act, I wasn't referring to them in the present tense. Regardless, his violations have been numerous, though you are correct that he is not currently in violation of the budget act.
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#145Metrics 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…
For us non-US folks what is the "ACA"?
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
For us non-US folks what is the "ACA"?
ACA is the Affordable Care Act, more colloquially known as Obamacare.
Offtopic perhaps, but somewhat hilariously, ad-hoc polls indicate that if they are presented as separate things, people vastly "prefer" the ACA to Obamacare, despite them being the same thing.
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
For us non-US folks what is the "ACA"?
ACA is the Affordable Care Act, more colloquially known as Obamacare. Offtopic perhaps, but somewhat hilariously, ad-hoc polls indicate that if they are presented as separate things, people vastly "prefer" the ACA to Obamacare, despite them being the same thing.
Thanks, and insight appreciated.
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
>and that's why we're log-jammed at the moment. This implies that it's just a matter of mistakes made in the past, that it created some mechanical-procedural problem that all our politicians are powerless to fix, and it just needs to work itself out with maybe some nudging. This suggests that it is not the case that some group is actively maintaining a condition of closed government offices.
Putting that statement back into context though, I went on to explain that either party could reopen offices.
The problem is that generally, each party thinks that their opposition party is the one that can clear the jam, while ignoring that both parties are being stubborn on their points.
A fun, but unrelated exercise would be to see if you can find faults by members of your preferred party that has contributed to the intractability of the current standoff. If you cannot, then I would wager that your stance on this issue is colored by party lines.
More fun, as most people would do when faced with this challenge, is to watch as people acknowledge faults in their own party, but then go on to subsequently explain how much more egregious the faults are that reside in the opposition party.
Everybody's politics is naturally colored by their own beliefs, but as a debate on procedure, they're basically irrelevant here. We have a standoff. The timing of it is poor, and perhaps the motivations for it are even worse, but we have a standoff, and neither party is willing to negotiate in good faith.
That particular fault lies equally with both parties at present, and any attempts to influence the conversation otherwise are disingenuous, in my humble opinion.
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I talked to dvito, he said he compiled it by hand, so he might incorporate your data into ours.
Thanks for the data. Any idea where to get $ of salary not being paid to each department.
I think the only source for that data would be through the OMB, but I'm not sure where you could find it.
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#150Metrics 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.
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