thank you, sounds interesting about brainstem BIOS/etc... , while other staff (i looked up from Wikipedia):
" The federal government of the United States has ceded most of its power to private organizations and entrepreneurs.[3] Franchising, individual sovereignty, and private vehicles reign (along with drug trafficking, violent crime, and traffic congestion). Mercenary armies compete for national defense contracts while private security guards preserve the peace in sovereign, gated housing developments. ... . The remnants of government maintain authority only in isolated compounds where they transact tedious make-work that is, by and large, irrelevant to the dynamic society around them."
sounds very similar to USSR/Russia around 1989-92. It were a fun times :)
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)
> you're mistaking Continuing Resolution (current drama) for Debt Ceiling (next show coming in a couple of weeks)
They aren't separate issues. Part of the current drama is that:
1) A sizable portion of the Republican congressional delegation is demanding separate votes on, first, a CR that would be linked to various policy demands and, second, a debt ceiling increase (to which, presumably, additional policy demands would be attached), while
2) The White House and a sizable portion of the Democratic congressional delegation are calling for a single "clean" (independent of extraneous policy changes) vote on continuing funding and a debt-ceiling increase.
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....
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.
Downtime is downtime - if you're measuring service reliability the planned or unplanned nature of it being offline doesn't really come into play. When people say five 9s, they don't mean "except for when you decide to take it offline".
What? No, that's completely untrue. We guarantee 4 nines on some of our services, but they're measured with 2 hours of allowed downtime early Sunday mornings (we usually don't need this, but very occasionally we do).
You're wrong. It's really up to the SLA and business circumstance. For instance, a lot of financial businesses don't operate on the weekend; surely their maintenance on Sunday doesn't count toward them operating at full uptime while open.
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.
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.
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%.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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).
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.
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.
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.
If you owned property, would you allow huge numbers of tourists access to it if you had no staff onsite and no idea when you were going to be able to get staff? Now consider if you owned 401 pieces of property* across the country. Some of these are historic sites that are pretty delicate. Some of these consist of thousands of square miles of wilderness where people get killed even when there ARE park rangers around. These people are charged with protecting the nation's heritage. They're not just going to allow somebody to wander into the Lincoln Memorial and start chiseling their name on the walls. And of course there are liability issues.
*The National Parks Service has 401 units. The actual number of individual sites is higher.
No, but if my complaint was that I didn't have the money to staff it with the fraction of a full time employee it takes to run and administer (periodically, I might add; There is no full time staff for any of the particular monuments in DC), I would have a hard time justifying paying for multiple guardsmen, police and park rangers to keep people out of them.
The rental of barricades I can see as sensible -- the rental of barricades as well as a 1400% increase in staff? I cannot.
I don't know what the staffing level before the shutdown was. Wikipedia says that the WWII memorial was patrolled by park police 24/7 and staffed by interpretive rangers from 9:30am to 11:30pm, which suggests that your claim that "there is no full time staff for any of the particular monuments" is false. Also, the WWII memorial has become something of a circus with media, congresscritters, etc. They need to have staffing to deal with this circus. This is one site out of hundreds. I'm sure if you go to any of the hundreds of parks that don't have cameras pointed at them you'll see a massive DECREASE in staff.
1) The park police are roving, and not dedicated to particular monuments or parks in the DC area. I wasn't aware of the interpretive Rangers working 2 hours a day, but regardless, they have definitely increased staff at all of the DC monuments.
In addition, they've attempted to close attractions they don't manage, like Mount Vernon, among others.
2) The WW2 memorial, and memorials in the DC area aren't the only places that security has been increased.
I'm sure you're not wrong in that over all of the 400+ locations, we have likely seen a decrease in personnel, but the executive branch is decidedly making a point of ensuring that the most pain is felt because of the shutdown.
Oh snap. Thanks, that was a pretty severe oversight.
Anecdotal, for sure, but as I live in the area, and visit those monuments fairly often, I find it a little interesting that I've never seen an 'interpretive ranger'.
I'll have to keep my eyes open for them if and when our government gets back up and running.
>"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.
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]
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.
Yegge wasn't trying to say such things are impossible, just that they are non-trivial. The legalization process here in CO is still underway, and is involving a lot of hard work from both lawmakers and the fledgling MMJ industry, not to mention all the years of leg-work by activists to pass the law in the first place.
While it's good that the sky isn't falling, and the situation represents a vast improvement over the Drug War, neither is it all sunshine and roses. Everyone involved has their laundry list of complaints and injustices as the exact laws and policies are being defined and implemented, whether it's the dispensaries, the authorities, or the consumers (not to mention all the counties that trying to opt out or pass their own laws). And of course, no one knows what will happen if/when the feds change their (mostly) hands-off approach.
Should we tackle hard problems? Absolutely. Voters in Colorado and Washington made the right choice, and in the end we'll have more freedom and fewer wasted tax dollars. But the worst way to start solving a hard problem is to pretend it's not hard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
180 comments
[ 195 ms ] story [ 778 ms ] thread" The federal government of the United States has ceded most of its power to private organizations and entrepreneurs.[3] Franchising, individual sovereignty, and private vehicles reign (along with drug trafficking, violent crime, and traffic congestion). Mercenary armies compete for national defense contracts while private security guards preserve the peace in sovereign, gated housing developments. ... . The remnants of government maintain authority only in isolated compounds where they transact tedious make-work that is, by and large, irrelevant to the dynamic society around them."
sounds very similar to USSR/Russia around 1989-92. It were a fun times :)
So no, you won't get any money back. You probably should pay your due bills.
They aren't separate issues. Part of the current drama is that: 1) A sizable portion of the Republican congressional delegation is demanding separate votes on, first, a CR that would be linked to various policy demands and, second, a debt ceiling increase (to which, presumably, additional policy demands would be attached), while 2) The White House and a sizable portion of the Democratic congressional delegation are calling for a single "clean" (independent of extraneous policy changes) vote on continuing funding and a debt-ceiling increase.
Though "Hobbit" becoming 3-movie series would undoubtfully generate more money this way, so it seems Republicans is right on the money here :)
I was disappointed there wasn't, but perhaps it is some dynamic magic that happens on page load or something....
If you turn your monitor off at night, does it suddenly have 70% availability/reliability?
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.
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.
The author really should consider this and think hard about what point he is trying to make with that chart on the bottom.
To try to avoid the confusion, I'm working on another graph of percentages working for each agency, and a disclaimer about the scaling.
Like this: http://xkcd.com/radiation/
http://vida.io/discussion/WgBMc4zDWF7YpqXGR
NASA, HUD, ED are the most affected, not DOD.
[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.
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/
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).
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.
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.
you must be kidding.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/2/irs-collectin...
"IRS collecting money but not sending tax refunds during shutdown"
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.
*The National Parks Service has 401 units. The actual number of individual sites is higher.
The rental of barricades I can see as sensible -- the rental of barricades as well as a 1400% increase in staff? I cannot.
In addition, they've attempted to close attractions they don't manage, like Mount Vernon, among others.
2) The WW2 memorial, and memorials in the DC area aren't the only places that security has been increased.
I'm sure you're not wrong in that over all of the 400+ locations, we have likely seen a decrease in personnel, but the executive branch is decidedly making a point of ensuring that the most pain is felt because of the shutdown.
Anecdotal, for sure, but as I live in the area, and visit those monuments fairly often, I find it a little interesting that I've never seen an 'interpretive ranger'.
I'll have to keep my eyes open for them if and when our government gets back up and running.
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.
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...
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.
While it's good that the sky isn't falling, and the situation represents a vast improvement over the Drug War, neither is it all sunshine and roses. Everyone involved has their laundry list of complaints and injustices as the exact laws and policies are being defined and implemented, whether it's the dispensaries, the authorities, or the consumers (not to mention all the counties that trying to opt out or pass their own laws). And of course, no one knows what will happen if/when the feds change their (mostly) hands-off approach.
Should we tackle hard problems? Absolutely. Voters in Colorado and Washington made the right choice, and in the end we'll have more freedom and fewer wasted tax dollars. But the worst way to start solving a hard problem is to pretend it's not hard.
That includes all sorts of nice things like the National Parks. The budget is really dominated by mandatory spending, not affected by this shutdown.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2013/10/04/cant-stop...
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101078145
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.
http://vida.io/discussion/WgBMc4zDWF7YpqXGR