… its a website run by the US Government. Why does it have such large downtimes in this day and age?

    • irkli@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      No, extreme budget cuts and operational undermining by lobbyist driven right wing politicians who are quite literally trying to take it down.

      • dx1@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        How and why would that result in a website having limited hours of service?

        • qfe0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          Archaic hardware and software requiring downtime on the backend to do standard maintenance like backups, software changes, changing vacuums tubes, pulling moths out of relays.

          As opposed to modern hardware and software architectures that allow for standard maintenance without downtime.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The excuses vary (taking systems offline to run archaic batch processing, pretending to want to protect jobs by not having machines outperform workers, etc.), but the bottom line is that a certain political faction deliberately writes stupid rules like this as sabotage in order to prove that government doesn’t work.

          It’s the same sort of reason why the local license plate office charges a “convenience fee” to renew your tag online even though it costs the public less than paying a clerk to process it in person.

          • dx1@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Can you actually prove that? Seems suspect because usually partisan BS remains in Congress, while tiny administrative details like that get written by agency bureaucrats, who in general could care less about said BS.

        • Kahomono@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          it’s part of the overall enshittification of that which does not benefit the rich

      • Betty White In HD@lemmy.world
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        Agreed. There is a party of people in our government that are religiously ironically, but non ironically anti-government and are constantly undermining publicly facing government services and then going “see how shitty the schools are after we’ve cut school lunches and teacher pay and all other school budget items? Gubment dun don wurk!”.

        Weird how a lot of the same people don’t mind half of the entire military budget going to “defense contractors” that nobody ever has any fucking interaction with here.

        No, cunts, how about we don’t cut relatively insignificant spending towards the most vulnerable in our society, including our kids and the poor because we’re as strong as our weakest link? Really shouldn’t be that difficult and that’s absolutely what Jesus, our corporate lord and tax haven savior wants.

        Don’t let these people win over this country, fight like hell that they don’t. Otherwise there will be war and bloodshed and indiscriminate violence that this country hasn’t seen on its soil yet. That’s an awful and unfortunate guarantee.

        • Square Singer@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          That’s the actual difference between right and left. Right is “me, me, me” and offended for every little morsel that does not go to me. Left is we, with all implications.

          That said, compared to other countries the democrates aren’t left at all, but instead center right.

          • MrMonkey@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Per the New York Times, 2018

            Their tor doesn’t seem to be paywalled.

            Red counties, which are overwhelmingly Republican, tend to report higher charitable contributions than Democratic-dominated blue counties, according to a new study on giving, although giving in blue counties is often bolstered by a combination of charitable donations and higher taxes.

            Maybe they come out more or less even, I don’t know. But to say conservatives are “me me me” and liberals are “we we we” is just ignorant and doesn’t jive with the facts.

            I a little bit of hope that you’ll read this and change the conservative strawman you have in your head just a little bit. You can’t engage in honest conversation when you do that.

            The problem is that you don’t understand conservative viewpoints. Not that you disagree, that you don’t understand.

            Here’s a short reading list, with liberal authors, about it:

            • “The Moral Roots of Ideology” by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham (2007):

            This study explores the moral foundations theory and suggests that liberals and conservatives tend to prioritize different moral values, leading to divergent political ideologies. Understanding these underlying moral foundations can contribute to a better understanding of political differences.

            • “The Ideological Animal” by John T. Jost, Christopher M. Federico, and Jaime L. Napier (2009)

            This article discusses the psychological underpinnings of political ideology and explores factors that influence individuals’ understanding of opposing viewpoints, such as openness to experience, cognitive flexibility, and exposure to diverse perspectives.

            • “Beyond Ideology: Predicting Political Bias and Attitude Extremity from Personal Need for Structure” by John T. Jost, Jack Glaser, Arie W. Kruglanski, and Frank J. Sulloway (2003):

            This study examines the role of psychological factors, such as the need for structure and certainty, in shaping political bias and the ability to understand opposing views.

            Or just continue to spew hate. Your call, buddy.

            • Square Singer@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              Democrats aren’t left either. Only an american would confuse liberals with the left, because there hasn’t been a relevant left party in decades. They are just not right-wing extremists like the average republican.

              You are living in a two-party system. What you call a democracy doesn’t have a lot to do with an actually democratic system. A binary choice every few years does not mean democracy in the slightest.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              higher charitable contributions

              What counts as a ‘charitable contribution?’ Is giving to your evangelical megachurch counted? Is giving to Donald Trump’s campaign counted?

              That’s not a very good metric without context.

              • Marruk@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Not to mention that it’s questionable whether the average Republican gives more than the average Democrat, or if it is just a case of a small population of extremely wealthy individuals donating large amounts for reasons of tax benefits (in addition to the political motivations you mentioned).

                Then there’s also this from one of the authors of the study: ‘It also wasn’t obvious “whether donors were being purely generous or whether they would also benefit from their donation. This relationship is called consumption philanthropy, in which people give to a religious organization or a school from which they will derive a benefit in the form of, say, a better religious education program or a new gymnasium.” Giving to a food bank or a homeless shelter has a very different outcome than does giving to a private school.’ (https://nonprofitquarterly.org/republicans-give-more-to-charity-than-democrats-but-theres-a-bigger-story-here/)

                “Without context” is one of the favorite argument methods of conservatives. It’s not that they disagree about the context. They don’t understand the concept of context nor its relevance.

                • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world
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                  The highest taking nonprofit in my county is the extraordinarily conservative mormon cult. They don’t have a lot of folk out here. They take in over five hundred grand a week in my town alone. Not a cent of those donations stay in my town. It all goes to this fund. The liberal folk in my town donate to stuff like the homeless shelter, the hospital, the fire department, stuff like that. Context IS important!

            • JudgeHolden@lemmy.world
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              I have at least a nodding acquaintance with that work and while I think it’s worth considering and talking about, I don’t find it to be at all the most convincing explanation for conservatism and am far more persuaded by conservatism as being motivated by a desire for the preservation of hierarchy that manifests itself through said psychological traits, but that is the ultimate prior that informs them. Otherwise we would expect to see liberalism and conservatism more evenly distributed throughout our population, as with other psychological traits, but we don’t, to the contrary, they are very geographically dependent.

              So while I don’t think that psychology has nothing to say about the issue, I definitely don’t think that its the most important factor.

            • MrMonkey@lemm.ee
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              The fact that this is downvoted speaks volumes about this place. Might as well be /r/politics.

              It was a link to the NYT and a list of three article by Liberal writers. And it gets downvoted for not being liberal enough.

              Have fun with your strawmen, assholes.

          • AshLassay@lemmy.world
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            The Democrats call themselves liberals. Liberalism is considered a centrist ideology across the globe. So not a surprise they are not left wing.

            • Square Singer@feddit.de
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              Well, they are left-er than the rightwing nationalist extremists that run the GOP. But yeah, they are center right.

    • JudgeHolden@lemmy.world
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      Not really. The real answer is that different parts of the federal government are underfunded or overfunded according to political ideology and expedience. This is a great example; the SSA is underfunded while the military is overfunded which results in clear performance differences.

      You’ll never hear a conservative bitch about the US military saying that it can’t do anything right, and it’s like, yeah, duh, because it has a huge fucking budget and basically gets anything it asks for.

      Social safety net programs? Not so much.