4 ms·

Bad result for America, as at least the two that I've been familiar with have both been dramatically better website implementations than much of the federal gov

by araes 2y ago

Bad result for America, as at least the two that I've been familiar with have both been dramatically better website implementations than much of the federal government. GSA, Digital Analytics Program: https://analytics.usa.gov/ https://analytics.usa.gov/ Huge amounts of data about how government websites are used including: locations (cities, countries), languages, referral sources, media sources, devices, browsers, OS, website destination, and top file accesses. Treasury, Government Spending Explorer: https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function Really thorough breakdown of government spending from 2017 onward, with per month, per quarter, and year spending totals by budget function and agency. Divable categories so you can look at the $1,400,000,000,000 in National Defense spending, and actually find out a little about where it all goes to each year. Edit: Here's their Github and 1200 repositories: https://github.com/orgs/18F/repositories https://github.com/orgs/18F/repositories If I had enough money to hire them, I'd snap their employees up quickly.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
The goal is to make government as dysfunctional as possible (beside the part that enforces corruption [for your side]), so people want it to get smaller and smaller (except for the corrupt parts that benefit exclusively them), so that it costs less, so that they pay less taxes, so that they have even more money (that they don't need). They definitely do not care if this "makes things worse". Often, it's intended.
- xyst 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    No, absolutely wrong. Neoliberalism is about a big, functional government that is utopian and takes care of everything for you. "You own nothing, and you'll be happy." You can argue in practice it's terrible (subjective, no one really cares about your opinion). But it's hard to argue its GOAL is to be small.
    - johnny22 2y ago
      No, this is closer to the definition of neoliberalism that people are using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
    - wisemang 2y ago
      That is definitely not what neoliberalism is about. GP is correct (though the current situation seems to be something much more extreme).
    - Philpax 2y ago
      Baffling definition. How did you develop this impression?
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      >that is utopian So, a useless definition? I'm sure dictators think they run a utopia. But your defiinition runs counter to my research and readings. Neoliberalism often refers to this blend of liberal social policies but capitalistic-centric economic policies. Being small isn't inherent to neoliberalism. >subjective, no one really cares about your opinion >Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- buran77 2y ago
  > The goal is to make government as dysfunctional as possible ...So it's easier to justify to the people when they tear it down completely and then "rescue" the country by replacing it with a true corpocracy.
  - araes 2y ago
    Thanks, term I'd never heard of. Usually think of that in terms of an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy". And as an added benefit it sounds a lot like "corpsocracy" with the "corp" and a country that's a "corpse" animated by "corps." That uses their military "corps" to exert control. Insurance company with a military.
- pstuart 2y ago
  This needs to be repeated to anybody who'll listen to it.
- _cenw 2y ago
  Given Musk has inserted industry CEOs into agencies where they definitely have conflicts of interests, the other goal is to privatize the scraps.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    The most important task now is for every civil servant and citizen to maintain a paper trail on what they can. So that when this gets litigated, everyone who broke the law is convicted.
    - gunian 2y ago
      lol i envy people like you my friend it is a feudal oligarchy wake up learn to read the graffiti
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      Bro, it isn't 1975, it's 2025. The president has immunity like some South American dictator. His agents will be pardoned as long as they stay in favor. The civil servant should collect his pay as long as possible and do as little as possible.
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        Cynicism is the rationalization of laziness. Someone has always disagreed with something the government is doing. It has always been the end of democracy as we know it. And yet, the future then and present now were formed by people who acted.
      - extra88 2y ago
        The president can't be criminally tried for "official acts" and this Court likely would use a very broad definition of those. But no one following his orders has any immunity. They should keep that in mind.
- jonstewart 2y ago
  It’s not about paying taxes. The super rich don’t really pay taxes, and they don’t care whether the middle class pays taxes. It’s about regulation. The only thing that can counteract the super rich are government regulators.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    > The super rich don’t really pay taxes, No. They often pay FAR less than an average person as a percentage, often times paying nothing for a year. In total amounts - most of them are still paying millions in taxes per year - most of them end up paying tens if not hundreds of millions in taxes over their lifetimes.
    - jonstewart 2y ago
      Thank you for agreeing with me. I think everyone else on HN understands how percentages work.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        You'd be surprised these days. But we should not understate how much they fight for tax cuts. Deregulation is nice long term, but we're in "number go up" mode right now. Tax cuts would benefit them very quickly.
- jmathai 2y ago
  The motivation behind DOGE didn't make sense to me until I also realized the money saved on government employees could be used to justify reducing taxes on corporations or the very wealthy. And the rhetoric that the reason the working class have lower quality of life now than 20 years ago being due to immigrants and the poor ... is a way to focus attention elsewhere instead of increasing taxes on the rich.
  - nxobject 2y ago
    I’m not sure why the downvotes are here - tax breaks and rebates are likely going to be part of Republican spending outlines going forward, damn the deficit.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      1. It's happening right now. House passed a budget cutting 900b from medicare to fund capital tax cuts. 2. That's been the republican spending outline for at least 60 years now. And it's no coincidence that our deficit tends to increase under republical administrations.
ein0p 2y ago
All that wonderful transparency and analytics, yet failed to uncover this here multimillion dollar Uniparty/DeepState money laundering scheme (one of many!): https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/1889172190282821690 https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/1889172190282821690. Uncovered by just one deaf, nonverbal, female hacker working part time (until she was doxxed, she's full time now).
- hypothesis 2y ago
  Ah yes, our favorite partisan actors, who can’t be bothered to mention how much her benefactor spent just this year doing same thing. Also, that chart is just magical, did she inflate the numbers by repeatedly adding same money being shuffled around (represented by those arrows between entities)?
  - meaydinli 2y ago
    Also seems to be unaware of the fact that NGO's are usually soft-power. They are either carrots or sticks in diplomacy or a cover for IC.
- djur 2y ago
  You can't "doxx" someone working as a government advisor. The public has an absolute right to know.
  - ein0p 2y ago
    She wasn't working as a government advisor until a few days ago. She was doing this in her spare time, for free. Or rather for negative amounts of money, since she was paying her own AWS fees. Her husband (who is not involved at all) was also doxxed.
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  This is hilariously bad analysis. She doesn’t even get the names right, let alone anything else of substance. This is perfectly emblematic of our national decline: a person with little interest in doing the work to understand things, spoon feeding their mistakes over social media to an audience with little interest in doing the work to know whether the things they read are real.
retzkek 2y ago
Their web dev guides - especially for a11y - are high quality, and were taken offline this morning. I stood up a copy (slightly modified) at https://guides.18f.kmr.me/ https://guides.18f.kmr.me/ Hopefully the GitHub repos stick around; I forked and cloned a few and suggest folks browse through them and grab anything that looks interesting in case they disappear.
- retzkek 2y ago
  Update: the former 18F folks have stood up a new site: https://18f.org/guides/ https://18f.org/guides/

by araes 2y ago

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

The goal is to make government as dysfunctional as possible (beside the part that enforces corruption [for your side]), so people want it to get smaller and smaller (except for the corrupt parts that benefit exclusively them), so that it costs less, so that they pay less taxes, so that they have even more money (that they don't need). They definitely do not care if this "makes things worse". Often, it's intended.

xyst 2y ago
[flagged]
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  No, absolutely wrong. Neoliberalism is about a big, functional government that is utopian and takes care of everything for you. "You own nothing, and you'll be happy." You can argue in practice it's terrible (subjective, no one really cares about your opinion). But it's hard to argue its GOAL is to be small.
  - johnny22 2y ago
    No, this is closer to the definition of neoliberalism that people are using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
  - wisemang 2y ago
    That is definitely not what neoliberalism is about. GP is correct (though the current situation seems to be something much more extreme).
  - Philpax 2y ago
    Baffling definition. How did you develop this impression?
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >that is utopian So, a useless definition? I'm sure dictators think they run a utopia. But your defiinition runs counter to my research and readings. Neoliberalism often refers to this blend of liberal social policies but capitalistic-centric economic policies. Being small isn't inherent to neoliberalism. >subjective, no one really cares about your opinion >Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
buran77 2y ago
> The goal is to make government as dysfunctional as possible ...So it's easier to justify to the people when they tear it down completely and then "rescue" the country by replacing it with a true corpocracy.
- araes 2y ago
  Thanks, term I'd never heard of. Usually think of that in terms of an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy". And as an added benefit it sounds a lot like "corpsocracy" with the "corp" and a country that's a "corpse" animated by "corps." That uses their military "corps" to exert control. Insurance company with a military.
pstuart 2y ago
This needs to be repeated to anybody who'll listen to it.
_cenw 2y ago
Given Musk has inserted industry CEOs into agencies where they definitely have conflicts of interests, the other goal is to privatize the scraps.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ethbr1 2y ago
  The most important task now is for every civil servant and citizen to maintain a paper trail on what they can. So that when this gets litigated, everyone who broke the law is convicted.
  - gunian 2y ago
    lol i envy people like you my friend it is a feudal oligarchy wake up learn to read the graffiti
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    Bro, it isn't 1975, it's 2025. The president has immunity like some South American dictator. His agents will be pardoned as long as they stay in favor. The civil servant should collect his pay as long as possible and do as little as possible.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      Cynicism is the rationalization of laziness. Someone has always disagreed with something the government is doing. It has always been the end of democracy as we know it. And yet, the future then and present now were formed by people who acted.
    - extra88 2y ago
      The president can't be criminally tried for "official acts" and this Court likely would use a very broad definition of those. But no one following his orders has any immunity. They should keep that in mind.
jonstewart 2y ago
It’s not about paying taxes. The super rich don’t really pay taxes, and they don’t care whether the middle class pays taxes. It’s about regulation. The only thing that can counteract the super rich are government regulators.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  > The super rich don’t really pay taxes, No. They often pay FAR less than an average person as a percentage, often times paying nothing for a year. In total amounts - most of them are still paying millions in taxes per year - most of them end up paying tens if not hundreds of millions in taxes over their lifetimes.
  - jonstewart 2y ago
    Thank you for agreeing with me. I think everyone else on HN understands how percentages work.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      You'd be surprised these days. But we should not understate how much they fight for tax cuts. Deregulation is nice long term, but we're in "number go up" mode right now. Tax cuts would benefit them very quickly.
jmathai 2y ago
The motivation behind DOGE didn't make sense to me until I also realized the money saved on government employees could be used to justify reducing taxes on corporations or the very wealthy. And the rhetoric that the reason the working class have lower quality of life now than 20 years ago being due to immigrants and the poor ... is a way to focus attention elsewhere instead of increasing taxes on the rich.
- nxobject 2y ago
  I’m not sure why the downvotes are here - tax breaks and rebates are likely going to be part of Republican spending outlines going forward, damn the deficit.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    1. It's happening right now. House passed a budget cutting 900b from medicare to fund capital tax cuts. 2. That's been the republican spending outline for at least 60 years now. And it's no coincidence that our deficit tends to increase under republical administrations.

ein0p 2y ago

All that wonderful transparency and analytics, yet failed to uncover this here multimillion dollar Uniparty/DeepState money laundering scheme (one of many!): https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/1889172190282821690 https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/1889172190282821690. Uncovered by just one deaf, nonverbal, female hacker working part time (until she was doxxed, she's full time now).

hypothesis 2y ago
Ah yes, our favorite partisan actors, who can’t be bothered to mention how much her benefactor spent just this year doing same thing. Also, that chart is just magical, did she inflate the numbers by repeatedly adding same money being shuffled around (represented by those arrows between entities)?
- meaydinli 2y ago
  Also seems to be unaware of the fact that NGO's are usually soft-power. They are either carrots or sticks in diplomacy or a cover for IC.
djur 2y ago
You can't "doxx" someone working as a government advisor. The public has an absolute right to know.
- ein0p 2y ago
  She wasn't working as a government advisor until a few days ago. She was doing this in her spare time, for free. Or rather for negative amounts of money, since she was paying her own AWS fees. Her husband (who is not involved at all) was also doxxed.
snowwrestler 2y ago
This is hilariously bad analysis. She doesn’t even get the names right, let alone anything else of substance. This is perfectly emblematic of our national decline: a person with little interest in doing the work to understand things, spoon feeding their mistakes over social media to an audience with little interest in doing the work to know whether the things they read are real.

retzkek 2y ago

Their web dev guides - especially for a11y - are high quality, and were taken offline this morning. I stood up a copy (slightly modified) at https://guides.18f.kmr.me/ https://guides.18f.kmr.me/ Hopefully the GitHub repos stick around; I forked and cloned a few and suggest folks browse through them and grab anything that looks interesting in case they disappear.

retzkek 2y ago
Update: the former 18F folks have stood up a new site: https://18f.org/guides/ https://18f.org/guides/