Show HN: govuptime.com

http://govuptime.com/

by thatrailsguy • 13 years ago

267 168 13 years ago

govuptime.com

jstalin• 13 years ago

Excellent. I look forward to that downtime number getting worse (or better, depending on how one looks at it).

hartator• 13 years ago

Do you think they have some kind of SLA, you get your money back a la amazon EC2 ? :)

goshx• 13 years ago

good luck trying :)

VladRussian25• 13 years ago

not until Bezos becomes President. How about Government-as-a-Service? (I mean for regular citizens :)

nucleardog• 13 years ago

Read "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson, if you haven't.

csomar• 13 years ago

What I understood (not an American citizen) is that your money (tax payer) has run off (actually it's a quite of a negative balance).

So no, you won't get any money back. You probably should pay your due bills.

VladRussian25• 13 years ago

you're mistaking Continuing Resolution (Congress giving President(Exec Branch) weekly(or whatever) allowance - current drama) for Debt Ceiling (the source of the money for the Continuing Resolutions - next show coming in a couple of weeks)

Fuzzwah2• 13 years ago

I chuckled at the "A SysAdmin would be pissed." line and then checked the source to see if there was any javascript which was going to change this line as the uptime % dropped lower and lower.

I was disappointed there wasn't, but perhaps it is some dynamic magic that happens on page load or something....

thatrailsguy14• 13 years ago

That's a great idea.

muzz• 13 years ago

I don't get the downtime comparison. In government, it's not the result of an unplanned outage that is being addressed to bring the system back up. Rather our governmental "sysadmins" decided to bring the system down, and can simply decide when to bring it back up.

RailsResearch12• 13 years ago

When we launched the site we were already down to two nine's, so a sysadmin should already have been pissed. We can add more descriptive and dynamic options.

PhearTheCeal• 13 years ago

What does ``Service level for last year:'' mean?

benmanns• 13 years ago

It's the percentage of time that the government was functioning for the last year. So, if they are "down" for 36.5 days, their service level for last year would be 90%.

arscan3• 13 years ago

Ah, that chart on the bottom is on a log scale. I wasn't expecting that... and if I didn't look closer I would have completely misinterpreted it (for example, it appears that the DoD is mostly shut down).

bbarn• 13 years ago

It took me a sec too. It's a confusing application, since the intent is to compare to adjacent rows.. the first one for example is "half furloughed" but only a slightly smaller red line. Visually confusing.

benatkin• 13 years ago

I like it. You need only look at a few log charts to get the hang of it, and if it wasn't a log chart, it would be hard to see the difference between organizations with less than 20,000 employees, because the bars would all be very short.

Edit: took another look, and it is quite a bit more confusing than I thought, because of furloughed vs total employees. I can't quickly tell if the furloughed for an agency is linear based on the percentage of the total employees for that agency, or is also logarithmic.

khawkins• 13 years ago

It's downright deceitful, in my opinion. The entire page is trying to exaggerate the significance of the shutdown.

arscan3• 13 years ago

I personally think the author did this because otherwise the DoD would so heavily dwarf everything else that you wouldn't be able to see whats going on. But I agree, intended or not, this has the effect of heavily exaggerating the proportion of people on furlough. Its like using a log scale on a pie chart. It really makes no sense.

The author really should consider this and think hard about what point he is trying to make with that chart on the bottom.

thatrailsguy14• 13 years ago

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.

dinkumthinkum4• 13 years ago

It seems like you're loading it with the Sean Hannity inane view that its basically no big deal though, right?

timtoo• 13 years ago

Exaggeration seems to be a common theme for one of the authors: https://twitter.com/JustineTunney/status/385843326085132289

RailsResearch12• 13 years ago

Exaggeration was not the intent. We've updated our graphs to be more clear.

_7fvc5• 13 years ago

I agree that the bar chart is misleading, especially horizontal scale. Pie chart can show which department is being affected the most.

http://vida.io/discussion/WgBMc4zDWF7YpqXGR

NASA, HUD, ED are the most affected, not DOD.

RailsResearch12• 13 years ago

We incorporated this graph with the permission of the author.

tptacek• 13 years ago

It just doesn't work. Similar visual comparisons between agencies mean vastly different things depending on their position on the graph. This is an example of a dataset that would have been better served by a simple list of numbers and percentages.

hughlomas• 13 years ago

It should also be a stacked bar chart, not two individual bars.

coldcode• 13 years ago

NSA still working. Damn.

Fuzzwah2• 13 years ago

Feature request: hover pop ups explaining what each of the acronyms mean.

m_ram• 13 years ago

This is exactly what I was going to recommend. Maybe a sentence or two describing what the department does as well. I'm sure most non-Americans (and even most Americans) don't know what the DOI does, for example.

thatrailsguy14• 13 years ago

I'll look into this.

asperous• 13 years ago

It's too bad the http://www.usdebtclock.org/ isn't updated for Furlough, it would show some pretty happy numbers right now.

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

A facile assumption.

jleader• 13 years ago

Except I had the impression that restarting shelved projects, catching up after delays, etc. is going to end up costing more money than the shutdown saves. Not to mention the effect on the economy if it goes on for too long, which will affect tax revenues.

[Edited to add:] Also, my understanding is that you can't get an EIN (Employer ID Number) issued during the shutdown, which means you can't legally start a new business and hire employees until this is over.

RailsResearch12• 13 years ago

Interesting.

dandelany2• 13 years ago

Nice dashboard :) Out of curiosity, where did you get the data re: who is furloughed from which departments? I have been working on a similar data graphic but had to collect that data in a Google Doc by hand with a couple colleagues from the OMB's list of contingency plans. I'd be curious to compare my data with yours.

FWIW I'm working on visualizing it with a treemap instead of bar charts - my progress is here but still has lots of design work left to do:

https://github.com/dandelany/shutdown2013

http://cognitiveharmony.net/experiments/shutdown2013/

thatrailsguy14• 13 years ago

I've got to ask one of the other guys where he got the data. It's available via json in our project here: https://github.com/dvito/govuptime

dandelany2• 13 years ago

Thanks! If anyone is interested in my data, there's a CSV & JSON in the github and the shared Google Doc is here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsyXWqYXia4PdGl...

Looks pretty similar to yours, mostly... Mine is less-complete at the moment but also tries to break some agencies down by sub-agency (eg. IRS-specific stats within the Dept. of Treasury). If anyone would like to contribute, let me know and I'll make you an editor on that doc (my email is in my HN profile or on that github project).

kimagure• 13 years ago

Could you add comma formatting for the mouseover bubble numbers?

RailsResearch12• 13 years ago

Added to our TODO!

dreamdu5t• 13 years ago

It'd be nice to see a percentage of the Federal government shut down. I heard it's only around 18%.

guelo2• 13 years ago

Just going by the rough employee counts it would be 40%, 800k furloghed out of 2 million total. This whole business of forcing "essential" employees to work without pay, which would be illegal for any other employer to do, is keeping things from getting out of control for now.

officemonkey• 13 years ago

Point of technicality, it's not "essential," it's "exempt from furlough."

There are plenty of government functions that are "essential" that have been mothballed for the shutdown. For example, there's no money for Federal Highway Grants, so the people who manage Federal Highway Grants are furloughed. When there's no funding, there's a lot fewer people needed.

The "exempt from furlough" employees constitute a much smaller pool of activities: those that can not be stopped. For example, FEMA employees that are responding to TS Karen, Border Patrol agents, TSA employees, VA Hospital workers.

bayesianhorse• 13 years ago

My condolences to people living in countries with dysfunctional politics.

mdigi• 13 years ago

So, most of the world population?

blahblah12345• 13 years ago

The IRS is also shut down.

dvito2• 13 years ago

I'll see if I can't find some better data. I know there are some groups we are definitely missing.

thatrailsguy14• 13 years ago

They fall under the Department of the Treasury.

protomyth• 13 years ago

Partially, they are still collecting money just fine.

Amygaz• 13 years ago

And this sucks, because I can't get my mortgage approved. No joke. I feel like have been taken hostage by the government...

Glyptodon• 13 years ago

I'm not sure if it's just me but the scale on the graph seems a little odd.

CoachRufus87• 13 years ago

Nice! Just a suggestion: add mouseover tooltips to the department acronyms w/ their full name.

thatrailsguy14• 13 years ago

The other guys that did most of the work will weigh in in a couple of hours. I just wrote the hour calculation.

thatrailsguy14• 13 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dvito is one of the creators.

agotterer• 13 years ago

Looks great! Id advise adding some Facebook sharing tags and maybe an image. Right now its just a link with no content or image on my fb feed.

RailsResearch12• 13 years ago

Can do!

savrajsingh• 13 years ago

Feature request: It would be nice if this page had the total # of employees / furloughed employees.

dvito2• 13 years ago

I'll get on that. I'm thinking of adding some other ways of looking at the data as well, since I'll have some actual time this weekend.

javert• 13 years ago

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.

VladRussian25• 13 years ago

Frankly, I'd like it if it stayed this way. The government shouldn't tax-and-force in "non-essential" areas.

you must be kidding.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/2/irs-collectin...

"IRS collecting money but not sending tax refunds during shutdown"

bmelton15• 13 years ago

That's just due to the politicization of the shutdown. The Executive has actually taken great pains to make things as inconvenient as possible for the citizenry, to ensure that they get the message that government is necessary to their daily lives, whether it would otherwise impact them or not.

Websites are shut down, but not like, in a way that would save any actual money. Instead of turning the servers off, they're serving up error pages carping about the shutdown, which takes power, bandwidth, etc. Also, of course, those pages had to be modified, which given how dispersed federal webservers are, was far more than a single search-and-replace effort.

Moreover, freestanding monuments are closed. These monuments don't require daily staff, y'know, cause they're just buildings, or walls in many cases, but instead of not manning them (which would be free), we're sending dozens of guards to keep people out of a place that ordinarily requires no staff. On top of that, at least in DC, they're renting barricades and pasting them with signs carping about the shutdown. In some cases, we've even tried to close parks that weren't affected, like when the Feds tried to shut down Mount Vernon, which is operated through private funds.

On top of that, there are essential persons in place and on duty that the executive branch has instructed not to do their jobs... Border Patrol, for example, has been instructed to "just let anybody through", despite their roles being considered essential.

Edit, for clarity, I was in debate mode, and did not intend to imply that the shutdown does not have negative effects. I've worked in the federal government, and have federal customers currently, live in the DC area, and am well aware of the pain that some are feeling. That said, the Executive Branch has specifically gone out of their way to make that pain even more acute.

krapp• 13 years ago

"Non-essential" services have been suspended, while "essential" are still operational.

I see quite a few departments on this list of suspended or partially suspended services which I wouldn't consider "non-essential": http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/09/politics/government-s..., such as the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Department of Labor, CDC, EPA, EEOC, FDIC and most of the USDA.

CodeMage• 13 years ago

Why, no, I don't really need to get an SSN, but thank you for asking! I guess it's not really essential to me and my family... [1]

Seriously, though, why are people popping up like mushrooms saying how it would be much better to get rid of stuff the government currently does, without proposing to actually replace it with something? I recommend reading Yegge's "Have you ever legalized marijuana?" [2]

[1] http://www.socialsecurity.gov/shutdown/

[2] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...

bcoates• 13 years ago

I would greatly prefer not to have a SSN as long as I wasn't the only one.

That essay's factual assertions were disproven by later events in Colorado where a chaotic and mostly unplanned transition (which neglected to come up with solid answers to any of stevey's questions) towards mostly-legalization went down without any serious consequences.

As it turns out, it really is as easy as saying "whatever, just do it now" and answering every hypothetical issue with "if that actually happens, we'll deal with it when it happens". The demons the government is protecting us from don't actually exist.

dinkumthinkum4• 13 years ago

Well that's just a very particular, narrow, Tea Party, simplistic mindset. In reality, it is a shutdown. You can spin it but that's all you're really doing. There nothing interesting in this attempt at pedantry, not to be mean, just being honest.

philwelch2• 13 years ago

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

dmm• 13 years ago

Entitlements , interest and defense are most of the federal budget. discretionary spending is only about 17%.

That includes all sorts of nice things like the National Parks. The budget is really dominated by mandatory spending, not affected by this shutdown.

ANH• 13 years ago

There are a lot of contractors sitting on the sidelines, too, made to take leave or, if they don't have leave, they go without pay. In other words, the "man hours lost" is probably much higher.

thatrailsguy14• 13 years ago

But very hard to calculate. If we had a solid source of information on this, I could add it.

RailsResearch12• 13 years ago

Agreed. It's hard to track some of these, though.

mcculley• 13 years ago

That could benefit from the <abbreviation> tag.

ok_craig• 13 years ago

Is the IRS still operating?

winslow• 13 years ago

Yes and No. They are still collecting their "fair share" but their support lines will go unanswered.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2013/10/04/cant-stop...

j_baker• 13 years ago

It would be nice if this also showed how much money the shutdown has cost, being that it costs $12.5 million/hour.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101078145

enoex1• 13 years ago

like this? http://shutdown.outline.com/

nextstep• 13 years ago

It would be cool if on the bar chart the two bars for each agency could be combined; make the furloughed employees in blue and show the rest of the agency in grey-blue or something like that, so it more visually shows how the agencies are diminished.

arscan3• 13 years ago

If the author chooses to do this, absolutely get rid of the log scale. The chart makes it look like 95% of the DoD civilians are on furlough. Its 50%. The author is simply trying to show too much on that chart, and s/he is inadvertently making it look way worse to the average person (who doesn't know what a log scale is) than is intended.

I may lose my salary because of this shutdown (this thing affects way more than direct govt employees), so I am probably biased towards making this seem as bad as possible. But I can't stand charts that are misleading.

Avitas• 13 years ago

Seconded--I like seeing my data on a linear scale.

_7fvc5• 13 years ago

The best way to visualize this I think is with pie chart. I made one here:

http://vida.io/discussion/WgBMc4zDWF7YpqXGR

rayiner• 13 years ago

Non-linear bar graph scales should be a last resort.

dinkumthinkum4• 13 years ago

Very nice, good job!

RailsResearch12• 13 years ago

Thank you!

bithive123• 13 years ago

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.

jeremybencken• 13 years ago

The budget process is also a law.

trothoun2• 13 years ago

Yep. Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones.

moocowduckquack• 13 years ago

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.

bmelton15• 13 years ago

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 House. This is called the 'Origination Clause' (Article 1, §7), and states that "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills".

The ACA originally imposed fees, but as the Supreme Court challenge (NFIB v Sebelius) declared imposing fees would be unconstitutional, but that could be easily circumvented by imposing the fees as a tax, for which Congress has authority. In that process though, taxes are at the discretion of the House, and the Senate ignored that -- then neglectfully failed to pass even a single appropriations bill over the past five years that could have headed this off.

Yes, I know that blaming Republicans is cool and all, and fits the current media narrative, but in this particular case, it bluntly ignores the absenteeism of the Senate for the past five years, and both parties, and indeed both wings of Congress are at fault.

dragonwriter4• 13 years ago

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.

This is simply false.

The Constitution prescribes that all spending bills must originate in the House.

Presumably, you mean tax bills, as saying this of spending bills would both be wrong and irrelevant to the issue at hand.

The ACA originally imposed fees, but as the Supreme Court challenge (NFIB v Sebelius) declared imposing fees would be unconstitutional, but that could be easily circumvented by imposing the fees as a tax, for which Congress has authority.

No, NFIB v. Sebelius [1] upheld the individual mandate as a valid exercise of Congress' taxing power.

It did not strike down a "fee" in the law and say that that "could be easily circumvented" by imposing a tax to replace the fee, as you suggest.

In that process though, taxes are at the discretion of the House, and the Senate ignored that

No, as noted, tax bills must originate in the House, they are not at the discretion of the House. And, in any case, that's all irrelevant, since, contrary to your mischaracterization, the Supreme Court didn't strike down the PPACA individual mandate and invite Congress to replace it with a tax, it found that it was valid as a tax.

[1] http://www2.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/Natl_Fe...

unclebucknasty2• 13 years ago

Man, this just misses the point by miles and is consistent with the cynical narrative that the Republicans are now trying desparately to establish. That is, "the Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, blah, blah, blah".

The bottom line is that the action of shutting down the government as a means of forcing a completely unrelated concession from the White House/Senate is just plain wrong and damn near extortionate. They put the ACA to a vote 43 times since its passage and couldn't do anything with it. You really think it's healthy Constitutional politics to then subvert that expression of the people's will by inflicting harm on the entire country unless they meet your demands?

But, if you want to pull out the Constitution, then cool: let Mr. Boehner put it to an up-down vote so that the will of all of the people can be expressed via their elected representatives. But, what is this handful of people shutting down the government nonsense?

The past five years have nothing to do with this. Both parties are not at fault. Both houses are not at fault. A small minority of Republicans and a gutless Speaker are at fault. Period. Anything else is just a cynical red herring. Discussing the merits of the ACA in the context of the shutdown simply indicates that you're either following the red herring or dragging it.

BTW, yes, I voted for Obama and have had mixed feelings on his performance. But, this truly rises above partisan politics to what's good for the country. Just a handful of people are ready to burn the place down for one very narrow ideological obsession. There is a real threat/problem here that should concern everyone.

ewoodrich2• 13 years ago

taxes are at the discretion of the House, and the Senate ignored that

Wrong. Taxes (actually, any appropriations or taxation) must originate in the House. Which is easily circumvented by replacing the text of an appropriations bill that passed in the House using a Senate amendment, and has been used far before the passage of the ACA.

This is hardly new, and doesn't mean "taxes are at the discretion of the House". Every bill must be approved by both the House and the Senate (and the ACA did, otherwise it wouldn't even be a law at all), the original bill is required to have technically originated in the House.

"According to the Origination Clause of the United States Constitution, all bills relating to revenue, generally tax bills, must originate in the House of Representatives, consistent with the Westminster system requiring all money bills to originate in the lower house. House appropriations bills begin with "H.R.", meaning "House of Representatives". The Constitution also states that the "Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills," so in practice, the Senate and House each drafts and considers its own bill. The Senate then "cuts-and-pastes", substituting the language of its bill of a particular appropriations bill for the language of House bill, then agrees to the bill as amended." [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriation_bill

indrax2• 13 years ago

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.

guelo2• 13 years ago

None of what you say makes sense. Obamacare is constitutional because the Supreme Court said it was constitutional, that's how our system works.

The Republicans are dead set against the law and are prepared to burn the government down to stop it. Simple as that. It's not some techinical procedural legality as you make it out to be.

teh_klev2• 13 years ago

For us non-US folks what is the "ACA"?

aaronblohowiak• 13 years ago

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 playing out.

Rubio is the coward of the hour: http://www.nationaljournal.com/daily/what-happened-to-marco-...

shrikant• 13 years ago

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

Aqueous• 13 years ago

Not just subverting the budget process, but inflicting economic damage targetted at not just a single party or a single individual but all of us.

It's like threatening to blow a hole in the boat you are on with others, or shoot the glass out of an airplane window if x, y, and z demands are not met.

nhebb• 13 years ago

They cannot be allowed to do this.

Government shut downs are practically the norm since the 70's:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdown_in_the_Unit...

The federal government shut down once under Ford, five times under Carter, eight times under Reagan, once under Bush Sr., and twice under Clinton. Both parties have been responsible over the years.

frank_boyd• 13 years ago

The funnier version: http://www.thedailyshow.com/

Or as a download: http://thepiratebay.sx/search/daily%20show/0/7/0

_7fvc5• 13 years ago

I made another chart to visualize percentage of furloughed. NASA, HUD, ED are among the hardest hitters:

http://vida.io/discussion/WgBMc4zDWF7YpqXGR

thatrailsguy, thanks for the data.

thatrailsguy14• 13 years ago

Thank dvito for compiling. This is a great visualization.

thatrailsguy14• 13 years ago

Mind if we add this to the site?

mwsherman• 13 years ago

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-oversight/data-analysis-docum...

brown9-2• 13 years ago

Do you have a source for the 4 million number? Most reports this week have said 1.8 million total.

Regardless of how many are furloughed versus working unpaid, not paying that many people will have a big economic impact the longer this goes on.

_7fvc5• 13 years ago

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.

spikels• 13 years ago

But clearly most of the government continues to run because either it was declared "essential" (a rather haphazard process) or is "self-supported" by fees, like the Post Office* or Amtrak.*

More detail about "essential" workers/activities: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-shutdown-ess...

*-ironically both lose money

Ankaios• 13 years ago

I'm not sure that civil-service headcount will give you a good indication of how much of the government is operational.

At NASA, IIRC only ~ 20% of the funds go to civil servant salaries. The rest goes out the door in contracts, grants, etc. I don't know the fractions for other agencies.

RailsResearch12• 13 years ago

Hi everyone, @GSMcNamara here reporting from a car on the side of an interstate over 4G. Deployed an update just now. Once at my destination I'll respond to all the comments. Thanks for the support! 13,695 unique visitors so far, keep it up!

nraynaud2• 13 years ago

It reminds me of the counter for Belgium.

RailsResearch12• 13 years ago

Oh? Got a link?

nraynaud2• 13 years ago

http://lerecorddumonde.be/ Now they have a government, so they changed the page. But it was a counter of days, with comparison to other countries, then they passed Iraq, and got the world record of days without a government.

If you're unfamiliar with the situation, they got stuck in the reverse situation of the US, where they didn't have a government (technically the government resigned, but stayed in place for the transition), so they where simply passing the same budget as the year prior, and rolling everyday life as usual, but not starting any new project or making any change to the laws (not making any real political).

alexmr• 13 years ago

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.

daned2• 13 years ago

How many 9s does the US government have for its existence?

smoyer• 13 years ago

Since 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.

pmorici• 13 years ago

"I'd also like to see a ticker that shows how the deficit is behaving during the massive furlough ... is it going down?"

Doubtful; historically furloughed employees are given back pay once a shutdown of this nature is over. Also don't forget all the lost productivity from all those employees sitting at home instead of doing what they normally do.

"are furloughed federal employees eligible for unemployment compensation?"

Yes.

"we can see what it's like without most of the government"

I don't think you can. If you didn't mow your grass or trim the landscaping in your yard for a week or two no one would likely notice. Let it go longer and all of a sudden your property is the eye sore on the block and you're going to get angry calls from the neighbors.

I'm with you on government being generally too big or rather inefficient but politicians never seem to want to address that in a meaningful way it's always in terms of we are spending to little or to much. Instead they might look at making it easier to fire an under performing worker and provide more budget flexibility and incentives for automation and efficiency instead of just throwing more clerical workers or benjamins at a problem.

ep103• 13 years ago

Should include cost to the economy!

RailsResearch12• 13 years ago

Really hard to calculate

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