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Are Shuttered Gov't Sites Actually Saving Money?
Lots of U.S. government agencies' websites are partly or fully shut down, many of them with messages like this one, from the front page of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory: "Effective 7 p.m. EDT, Friday, 4 October 2013, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) temporarily suspended all US operations because of the US Federal government shutdown. All NRAO facilities and buildings are closed; NRAO personnel, other than a skeleton crew, are on furlough and cannot respond to emails or phone calls." Brian Doherty argues at Reason that many of these shutterings don't actually seem to make any financial sense, and that the sites are down more as a public statement than out of fiscal prudence. If you're involved with running an organizational web site (government-funded or not), do you agree?
Since when does the majority of the actions of the US Government make "financial sense"? This is about what is required, not what is saving money. I've heard from various news sources that the shutdown, itself, *costs* millions per day. By that logic, "financial sense" would have been to not shutdown in the first place.
It does hardly save any money, but it reminds the public how fucking stupid Republicans are.
And that's worth it.
that the sites are down more as a public statement than out of fiscal prudence
You mean, the populist faction of the Neocon Corporate Party could possibly do something just to put the public blame on the authoritarian faction? That cannot be!
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
but either way shutting the gov't sites is a great way to remind people that gov't does things they want done. For the last 20 or 30 years we've been hammered with a 'Gov't is Evil' message. Never mind that it was the Federal Gov't that did away with Child Labor, Slavery and Segregation, created Superfund sites for cleanup of the messes made by private business and made them stop poisoning ground water.
With all the small gov't Tea Party blather out there it's nice for Americans to be reminded that gov't is a tool, and one they depend on. I for one don't want to see EPA regulation, anti-slavery and usury laws, OSHA Safety and FDA regulations go away.
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I imagine it costs less to defend against and clean up after DDoS or XSS attacks on a static page, than it does against an active web site.
It's a statement and a very good one by the federal entities that are affected. No reason to shut down a website or even suspend it, but it does make a very visible statement to the stupidity that is the government shudown. Just look at how silly that congressman looked yelling at the Park Ranger for shutting down the park on the Mall in DC when it was the Congressman who supported the actions that brought abou the shutdown. Anything for a TV soundbite.
I wrote to my Congressman about the shutdown, Rob Woodall, and recieved a reply that "due to the shutdown he would not be able to respond to emails." Apparently he has too much to do that prevents him from reading emails while he has nothing else to do during the shutdown.
Does anyone really believe the facilities they shut down are due to lack of funds?
All the actually expensive stuff is "essential", and they keep paying for it. Instead, they pay people to barricade off open-air monuments, and to add modify websites to become non-functional; they pay rangers to stop people from "recreating" in national parks. It's fairly obvious that the shutdown is just Washington Monument Syndrome writ large.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
These are the same idiots who try to slash IT budgets each year because "the computers do all the work"
It saves money, Servers use electricity, they have maintenance requirements, bandwidth has associated costs. Back-end databases trigger other processes which may have a human labor component (for example a site to file a complaint does no good if no one receives it) In addition if anything goes wrong there are support issues. My guess is all of those shuttered sites are running the not available message off a single consolidated box in an "essential" facility.
Those sites are down because there is no-one who can tend for it when something needs attention. Also nobody can follow up on the forms that people may submit. Leaving it up may give the incorrect impression that your requests actually gets processed. Easiest way to avoid ANY misconceptions whatsoever is to lock the site.
It's very, very expensive to move out of your home and then back in again, even to the same home. But if you don't -- for whatever reason -- have the money to pay the rent, that may well be your only choice.
If you're expecting to have the money but your boss's accounting department is simply incompetent, you might be able to plead with your landlord. Or maybe not.
But whether staying at home or moving out is cheaper is irrelevant to the question when the rent check comes due.
That money is being wasted isn't the fault of the agencies that are shutting down. It's the fault of the Republicans who're holding the entire country hostage in a blatantly un-Constitutional attempt to repeal majority-supported legislation. They've tried dozens of times to repeal the legislation through the normal legislative process and failed miserably each time; now, they're determined to wreck the national economy (with the shutdown) and possibly even the global economy (with the default) if the majority doesn't give in to their demands. They've shot multiple prisoners already (don't forget the ongoing sequester!) and are now threatening to blow up the whole building.
In a modern democracy, their actions would long ago have resulted in the dissolution of the government and a new round of elections. And the Obama administration's support for the NSA wiretapping would also have triggered elections. Such a shame we live in a place that's rested so much on its laurels and is now so far behind the times.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
As well as possibly benefits being frozen: This is how it always works - those not part of the "good ole' boys club" in politics or business (or family members, friends, or part of the same fraternal organization (e.g. masons)) won't keep their jobs, those who are, will. So that the wars (the MOST PROFITABLE ENTERPRISE POSSIBLE for the 1% wealthy controllers there is) can continue - Folks, It's how it's always been, it's just more apparent now (must be part of the "government transparency" they speak of, eh? Not. They can't HIDE this crap, anymore).
APK
P.S.=> What was Obama's campaign slogan? Change?? About time for one - wholesale... apk
And now Congress is considering legislation to assure that furloughed workers get back pay for the vacation.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/10/04/obama-backs-backpay-furlough-shutdown/2923221/
The real loss is in having to work *around* the government shut down. I have logistics work out of the country that has >2x the cost of my stay because I've had to pick up the slack of other, more qualified workers.
Not complaining about where I am (I like the travel), just pointing out that the reimbursement for my work and the logistics I've had to line up as a contractor, in my case, have far exceeded the cost of keeping the people who are responsible and proficient at this work on for another few days. Ultimately, all of this will be coming out of taxpayer dollars. While a drop in the ocean, I like to keep high standards. I can only assume I'm not the only contractor having to take on additional roles.
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
Basically, the key point is *when* the money is spent. Leading up to a furlough, the guidance was very explicit. Do whatever it takes to assure things would be consistent during the lapse. For many employees, they were essentially required to piss more money away than the company would save on that employee being out because it was too complicated to sort out the case-by-case and the deterimination was that, on the whole, things would largely work out cheaper.
The quote he throws out is precisely that, the unreasonable expense was incurred prior to shutdown, to conceivably skip out on manpower maintenance. Some will take this sort of direction as being politically motivated to make GOP look worse, but it actually has some sense given the inherently illogical things that happen in Furlough for legal reasons. Some orgs interpreted it differently than others (some inserting a warning that data is not being updated, some deciding that meant, explictly, tell people that it is not working even though they could have left it up). There is certainly some degree of people guiding their decision in order to make a point about them being furloughed (I would guess in most cases it is more likely to feeling their own livelihood personally threatened than any sort of political allegience one way or another).
then sure why not shut them down? But if the sites are displaying a message explaining that they're not up because of the shutdown, then isn't that an oxymoron? If you send an HTTP request to a web server and it responds with a tailored message, then the service isn't down.
I'm assuming that there are parts of these sites that the functionality of the parts require man power that isn't there now. But why not at least leave the site intact and process it all later?
Also, a better question:
Since the government is shutdown right now, why not take note of all of the money saved vs. how much life sucks now. If your life isn't sucking any more than normal, then maybe your government is fat. If your life is sucking more now, then maybe have a little more respect for your government.
No.
It's government THEATER.
"Closing" the WW2 memorial? It's an OPEN AIR MONUMENT. I've been there several times and never seen a park service employee. But simply stopping trash pickup or whatever wouldn't "make a statement about how bad those dirty Republicans are."
Closing Mount Vernon? IT'S NOT EVEN GOVERNMENT OWNED - it's privately owned. They share parking space with the NPS, but again, not serviced by staff anyway.
Closing WW2 Cemeteries in Europe? Seriously?
But the chattering masses suck it up because it's easier than accepting that they're being manipulated on such a grand scale, and the news media cheerfully bleats it everywhere.
-Styopa
speaking as a hosting engineer, the sites youre seeing are in 'static maintenance' meaning the original content is replaced with a banner. since each site has a banner page for a shutdown, for example usda.gov, its feasible to presume the shutdown sites were created ahead of time and are all hosted on one or two machines at government facilities that have not been shut down.
static maintenance pages arent saving cash in the form of hosting costs or electricity but they do mean your normal 'staff' of engineers and content creators for the sites can be sent home safely. you dont need to worry about content expiring, which if your the USDA or the FCC thats a good thing because you dont end up misleading people inadvertantly about advisories or notices because no one was around to remove expired content.
now, once the crisis ends and everyone goes back to work, im certain lifting the 'shutdown' banners and playing catchup with a few weeks of missed content and data is going to cost money. congressional staff are likely to begin filing their helpdesk tickets in a 'zerg rush' fashion, so anticipate their cost centers to accrue more charges than usual ( as a government IT worker, you often assign every minute of time to a department.) any unforseen outages or problems caused by say, two weeks of database updates or transactions, might be problematic and require more engineering time than had we not shut down the government. also for the static maintenance team (those guys in charge of the banner only) you'll need to start sending them backpay for their ongoing work and overtime for their miserable on-call rotations.
TL;DR: shutting down the government does not save money in the long term or short term in any appreciable amount.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Of course website shuttering is mostly posturing. And I'm no fan of Obama but look at the other guys: They're threatening to pull the trigger on their own government because they can't accept they lost one political battle. One single issue and they'd rather have no government than admit that for once the Democrats got to score. I'd say some posturing and showing the people that stuff is at stake seems called for.
captcha: crisis
lol
Well, duh, it costs them basically no money to leave a web server running as long as the web server has no failures and is not attacked. But do you want a government server up and running when you know that there will be no one available to deal with any problems that may come up???
This has nothing to do with saving money and everything to do with spending money. This is a very important distinction as there is an old law that strictly prohibits spending money during a shutdown. If you spend money on something that isn't a critical you risk serious legal consequences. I am not defending the shutdown or either party.
That being said shutdowns do end up costing more money than they save by the time they ramp things back up. Minnesota had a shutdown a while back where the government shut down over a similar stubborn argument. The shutdown ended up costing millions of dollars more than it saved because it caused massive delays in road construction projects and the like. The construction companies (and others) sued for costing them money and the state paid out a hell of a lot of money.
Human beings aren't really that efficient. You're drive for gov't efficiency gets used to excuse cutting services for the lower classes while the rich continue to use gov't to their benefit. You're not going to win that battle. The rich will make use of gov't, so I say why don't we? But nice troll anyway...
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The funding for NRAO comes from the National Science Foundation, which is funded by the federal government. When an appropriations bill was not passed, NSF did not get any money, so they could not give any money to NRAO to continue operating. The National Science Foundation could not authorize NRAO to continue operating without funding. So, in short, this isn't being done to save money, it's being done because there is no money.
No really. Its just smoke and mirrors people.
When they're shutting down non-essential services. Moreover, like I said, I don't know if Obama planned this effect or not. Keep in mind, it's Post 911 and post Boston-Bombing. Somebody on fark who lives in DC was talking about how these days the monuments are crawling with guards watching for terrorists. Blocking off the monuments does more than keep the terrorists out. It keeps their real targets (ordinary Americans) away from the hot spot...
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Longer answers as to why:
1. As someone else mentioned, a simple static page is a lot less vulnerable to attack or disruption than a functional page.
2. Bandwidth costs are lower, since all you have are people hitting the site, seeing the shuttering, and going away again, rather than actually using it.
3. Anything behind the front page, such as databases, can and probably are shut down completely, saving on power and bandwidth.
4. Information provided on sites that aren't updated is likely to be inaccurate, which is worse than no information at all.
5. The cost to shutting them down can't have been all that high, since here's the process: (1) Have a developer make a static "We're not open for business" page, (2) have your admins configure front-end webservers with a mod_rewrite (or equivalent) to direct all traffic to that page, (3) shut down anything that's not a front-end webserver. Yes, it wasn't free, but my guess is whoever is coming up with the costs is factoring in paying the tech staff they already had on salary to do the work.
Basically, what I'm seeing is people who advocated shutting down the entire federal government as a complete waste of money are now going "Wait, I didn't mean that, or that, or that other thing." It's sort of like the reaction if you are told to remove everything from a messy room and start throwing absolutely everything out.
I am officially gone from
There is someone out there ignorant enough to believe the entire shut down is *not* a political ploy?
It's Obama saying "Oh you want a shut down" and then focusing on the very things that piss the most people off, it has absolutely nothing to do with running the country or common sense.
It's petty, it's vengeance, and I've had enough... how about you?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
So many experiments destroyed mid-way that have to be restarted, so much data lost. All for nothing.
http://www.examiner.com/article/park-ranger-admits-being-told-to-make-life-as-difficult-for-people-as-possible
A federal Park Service Ranger admitted being ordered to make life as difficult as possible in order to make Americans feel the most pain as a result of the partial government shutdown ... Same happened at the beginning of the sequester..
And for a lot of these sites, I'd bet the server is already turned off and the DNS redirected to a server hosting only static pages.
Financial sense aside, it also makes sense from a customer service perspective. Most people (at least I assume as I have no idea what is considered an essential versus non-essential) will have no idea if the functions of some department are still working. Leaving the site up normally would lead one to believe all is normal. Thinking things are all normal and not being able to get any response from anyone there would be quite annoying I'd assume. Seems a good idea to notify users via any communication channel they use be it email, web, phone, etc that "sorry nobody is here to help".
It also may be cheaper to just have email pile up in your mailbox while you are away instead of sending automated out of office replies, but you'll likely piss off a lot of people.
It's likely that a different HTTP server is handling the requests, just as DNS for a parked private-sector domain is pointed at a different server. The real server is probably shut off because a powered down server can't get 0wn3d.
If one were involved with running, say, several dozen government websites, one would probably have received several briefings regarding public speech in one's capacity as a government official, and how such speech could constitute a violation of the Hatch Act.
This is, of course, nothing more that a devious political act by the Obama administration to stir up anger among liberal socialist and his democrat ilk. As one park ranger angrily stated, he has been ordered to do everything possible to cause disgust and anger among the politically ignorant. The democrats are a politically corrupt and exceeding evil group. Their sole purpose in everything is to try to force their ways upon every American with the goal of a totalitarian state in the end. This is the reason for their relentless push for gun control. As long ad the American people have guns, they will be able to stand up and resist the state's totalitarian pursuit. All wise men know that the eventual purpose and result of a totalitarian state is to purge any perceived opposition through mass genocide.
It's a damned show for everyone. They aren't shutting down the things I'd like them to shut down. And they have even gone through the time and expense of shutting down Mt. Vernon... a PRIVATELY OWNED tourist location.
It's a big show and no one is convinced.
Please read something about scaling and on demand instances in the cloud. This is how stuff is done at the moment. If you do not need to process much visitors, you can shut down some AWS instances, for example.
I'm a scientist and there's a conference going on right now at my institute. Researchers have already paid for everything in advance (weeks/months ago): meeting fees, food, accommodation. The total comes to around $2k. However, researchers from the NIH institute have been told that they can't attend because of the shutdown. Clearly this isn't about cost savings. One researcher was apparently planning on visiting relatives in the area after the meeting and asked if they could just go and do that instead (on their own dime) and they were told "no" and that it would be "bad if we found out that you went". So there you go. Makes little or no sense to me. Frankly, I find cordoning off memorials in DC to be similarly silly.
soylentnews.org
They've furloughed IRS employees. Does *that* make financial sense? They've shut down FDA food inspection. Does *that* make financial sense, if we count the cost to the nation of food borne illness? This shutdown is about many things, but "financial sense" is not one of them.
We live in a country full of idiots who say things like "Keep the government out of my Medicare," without realizing that Medicare *is* a government program. Many more understand that things like the military or NIH cancer research are part of the gummint, but only on an intellectual level. On a visceral level they only associate the government with things they don't like, such as pollution regulation. The stuff they *do* like apparently just happens, as far as they're concerned.
So put yourself in the shoes of the zookeeper who has to take care of the pandas as the National Zoo. Pandas don't stop eating or shitting because Speaker of the House doesn't have the balls to bring a clean continuing resolution bill to the floor. So you've still got to show up to feed them and muck out their enclosure, only now you're not being paid. Your landlord still wants paying; the grocery store still wants paying, the daycare center you leave your kids at so you can go to this job still wants paying, but *you* don't get paid.
Wouldn't *you* pull the plug on the panda-cam? If you *don't*, people *will* say, "look, we shut the government down but things are still working." Yes they *are* that stupid. So you pull the plug so they'll understand that things like the pandas being cared for just don't "happen" on their own. Sure, people get pissed off, but they're not paying for the panda cam so they can lump it. Not seeing Mei Xiang and her cub isn't going to kill anyone. They weren't paying for panda cam anyway; that was paid for with a grant from corporate sponsorship, so if anyone has a beef with this, it'd be Ford Motor Company.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The willful stupidity here is incredibly massive, and I have no sympathy at all for those propagating it.
What part of "shutdown" do the tea party types not understand? The Government operates at the pleasure of the Congress, as expressed in the yearly budget. If the Government has no budget, it cannot operate (except for a few pieces that run on fees or other direct income). Whether it makes financial sense to close any particular part in the absence of a budget is irrelevant.
There is this fiction, that everyone agrees to accept, that there are "essential" parts that have to keep going, such as much of the DOD, but, really, those should be shut too. What is essential is set by each agency well in advance of any shutdown; if the Congress does not like any particular agency's policy, in this or any other matter, they can and should hold hearings about it. What is of course really going on here is a fairly pathetic attempt to deflect the proper blame by bleating about parking lots being closed and other irrelevancies, when a simple open vote in the House would fix this within a single afternoon.
Seems like it would take more effort/time to replace the running sites with one stating they're down as part of the shutdown.
Yesterday I discovered I could visit NIST's NVD database, but clicking on external links didn't show a redirect warning as normal and instead showed the shutdown message.
The Reps are trying to avoid funding the Obamacare boondoggle. They allocated enough money to everything else, but the Senate would not accept it that way. Now they are going to propose a multitude of small funding requests - for each thing that enough people are screaming about, except Obamacare.
It looks like the government is going for 'punitive' action as opposed to responding to financial reality. Many websites are on auto-pilot. You could add a message that there won't be any updates or technical support available because of the shutdown but just taking down the site is meant to create an emotional response. The government giveth and it taketh away.
If the sysadmins have to go home, then hell yes, shuttering the sites is absolutely the right thing to do.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Do we really need 100 anti-government right wing tea party bullshiy articles every day? An y chance we could actually get a couple of technology articles some time?
The shutdown is not an attempt to save money. It's a result of the Federal departments and agencies lacking the _authority_ to spend the money that they have. Congress grants the Executive (and Judicial, and its own) branch the _authority_ to spend money on an annual basis (there are exceptions). Congress has also set the boundaries on how money may (and must) be spent during a lapse in appropriations. The Executive branch is (pretty much) just following the legal instructions that Congress has set out.
The Treasury has said that the cash reserves will run out on October 17th. You will at that point (actually, beforehand) see some symbolic attempts to save money. Interestingly, I believe that even if the government is still shutdown come October 17th, the Treasury will _still_ not have enough cash to pay all of the bills. Again, this is because the Executive branch is (pretty much) just following the legal instructions that Congress has set out.
Signed, a Federal worker with time on his hands.
The Dems are going to make them put there money where their mouth is. They are making an attempt at forcing a vote using a discharge petition. The GOP Congressmen who say they support a clean CR will have a hard choice. Sign the discharge petition and so bring the Democrats' bill to the floor or refuse and get lumped back in with the TPers.
this stupid stunt that politicians pulling by shutting down the federal government is foolish at best.
when can we hold elections to replace those that have caused this shutdown?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Then nobody will be able to buy a gun. The republicans would all of the sudden find a reason to pass a budget as to them there nothing more important to the health of a society than the ability to instantly buy a gun.
The anti-deficiency act requires that an agency cannot expend funds unless it has been appropriated by Congress.
In our case the agency must power the servers and air-conditioners to keep the web services going. We cannot buy electrical power without funding. Even if we did leave the machines on, if the AC fails then there is a high likelihood of damage to the infrastructure (with no staff to take action). For contracted (cloud) services the contractor can continue to provide service (and is obliged to do so) if the contract was made using appropriated funds but when those funds are used up they must cease. The Government is prohibited from receiving 'free' service even if the provider were to offer it.
It might cost more in the future, but the law says we can't spend what has not been appropriated.
Posting anon because I've been directed ... This is only a political stunt. All public facing web sites are contracted out. The contracts don't fall on the end of hte FY because that's a bad time to try to get things on contract. This will cost just as much as leaving the sites up because the contractors will file a REA in response to the stop work orders they've been given. Every one of the sites that have been shut down is payed for with FY13 money right now. This is nothing other than a crass political move.
Are these government shutdowns and "hostage crises" the new normal for our federal government? With the increasing polarization of Congress, it seems to be the case. People overwhelmingly do not like it (Congress has something like 10% approval rate), yet cannot resolve it through the normal election process. What can we do about it?
obama terrorizing the country.
I thought the penalty for this is death.
Has anyone found a answer to why https://www.healthcare.gov/ is the only US federal government web page that is not shut down?
No, but like the TSA at airports and their Security Theater, shutting down web sites that citizen access shows that one side or the other means business. No one knows which side.
We should vote all of them out of office next election cycle.
Looking at my soap box, but deciding no, not today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome
When hasn't this happened you asked. The Lincoln Memorial the Washington Monument, etc. have NEVER been closed like this. This stunt is an Obama original. The democrats defunded Reagan three times. He didn't spend money closing parks. Clinton took a small step in this direction by furloughing park service employees, resulting in parks that had federal staff being closed. He didn't spend extra money closing open air landmarks.
While the worst that's ever happened.before was that federal employees were sent home, Obama has spent more money posting federal agents to block access to private businesses that happen to have a federal contract. No president before has come anywhere near this ludicrous stunt.
I'm OK with anything that stop pretending we aren't broke.
Even with the parliamentary system, you have two houses. The lower house is supreme in matters of funding. If the House of Commons were to reject funding for Program X (whether that be the UK's involvement in Afghanistan or whatever), that would be the end of the matter.
There'd be nothing the House of Lords could do about it.
Here, the lower house has rejected funding for a certain program, and the upper house is refusing to recognize the lower house's power of the purse.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
"People would all move to the states that have [nice stuff]". Wouldn't that be horrible, if people lived in nice places.
California and Texas were of similar size, but opposite political policies. When the policies in California failed, people and businesses moved in droves out of California to Texas. California has seen that and very slowly started to implement policies more like the Texas approach that has worked. When different states try different things, people can move to states that do things that work well AND other states can emulate what works and avoid policies that haven't worked.
The alternative, with the federal government deciding things, is that the entire country is forced to try new policies which turn out to be disastrous. I'd much rather see one state experiment with something that fails than have the whole country failing as the feds force the country into each new experiment.
Shutting down cost sinks would save money. The trouble is that in some cases they're shutting down the revenue but can't shut down the cost sink. This is particularly the case with the parks. When parks are open, they collect entrance fees which offset costs. Now they've locked the gates and they still have to guard the parks. They shut down the revenue and increased the costs! That's the insanity of government. They should have instructed directors to maximize profit over services during the shut-downs, rather than use a strict "essential vs. non-essential" rule.
There's no consensus on how much the shutdown is costing, but the estimates are in the order of hundreds of millions per day. A wide-scale disruption of services is about the costly cost-saving measure you could possibly conceive of.
Just before the weekend, the National Park Service informed charter boat captains in Florida that the Florida Bay was "closed" due to the shutdown. Until government funding is restored, the fishing boats are prohibited from taking anglers into 1,100 square-miles of open ocean.
Now that you have information and opinion from a non-Foxnews site, do you all believe?
This country is moving towards authoritarianism, and BOTH parties are guilty. This is what happens when politicians make a career out of holding office. They don't care about anything or anyone; all they care about is keeping their power and to hell with the citizens. The servants have become the masters.
saves. Why did you think that.
In the planning two years ago, we were told that the reason for shutting off servers was that we coudn't patch them while we were out ... and if they got hacked, we weren't allowed to go and fix them (or monitor to discover it happened) ... so it'd potentially leave someone with access during the length of the shutdown.
The resulting cleanup would be horrible for everyone involved, depending on the agency's security policies. (our are a wipe, and reinstall the OS from original media (which is much trickier these days due to how software gets distributed) ... then reinstall the software (can't simply install from a previous image).)
In my opinion, leaving servers on with a message is an absolutely horrible thing to do. GSA gave out bad advice in my opinion, as it's going to start getting cached by search engines the way they told people to do it. (302 redirections, not serve a 503 message).
And they just gave people a PNG to include ... which if people put it up directly without re-copying it all in alt-text, is a section 508 violation.
They *should* have done this with a static server per agency (or network), and some rules at the firewalls to redirect all port 80 traffic to it, other than those who had exemptions to keep running for whatever reason.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
If the web site is down, the web master does not have to be paid to be on call. Moreover, nobody has to observe the logs daily for suspicious activity. If your e-commerce site on Linode was left unattended for a whole month, wouldn't you worry?
What people haven't noticed is the total votes and how Boehner's behavior wouldn't make sense in a functioning political party.
Here are, roughly, the totals:
A) About 30-40 Republicans want a shutdown for some undefined reason.
B) About 150 Republicans do not want a shutdown, but will take whatever position Boehner takes, and will not be rebels.
C ) About 20 Republicans assert they will be rebels to stop the shutdown.
Now, look carefully at that. Remember the 'Hastert Rule', which was a way to enforce party discipline? Where bills only got to the floor the majority of Republicans liked them? Notice anything wrong here?
The vast majority, groups B and C, of Republicans want to fund the government. They would have voted for a CR at any point if Boehner had put it forward. (In fact, we'd probably had a little fight over the House wanting to continue the sequester and thus some Democrats would vote against it, but that's in an alternate universe where this isn't going on.) I mean, now there might be problems getting it to pass, now that some B-group Republicans have stuck their necks out trying to follow the party-line, but all Boehner had to do was put it up for a vote three weeks ago, tada, it passes, and we continue onward.
And it's not like Boehner was in group A. He's a perfectly reasonable person. There was no reason, in a functioning political party, for him not to put that bill forward. So why didn't it happen?
Because the Republican party is completely and utterly broken.
I don't mean broken in the sense of a 'pushing policies no one likes', although that is possibly true. It is broken because, thanks to gerrymandering, a large portion of this country has competing _Republican_ races, and that's it.
And that gerrymandering seemed liked a clever plan back when it was set up, but this is what we get. A party in a civil war, and Boehner picked the side with the biggest guns. (Although the least amount of people.)
Now, admittedly, there's not actually a way out of this. Republicans have to gerrymander like that. Without that, they wouldn't even control the House! So they're not going to stop that.
Basically, folks, this is how a political party fails. How it unravels.
In fact, there have been signs of that for a while. The Hastert Rule is something only a weak party would need to start with. The Republicans going full-bore anti-ACA instead of saying 'Hey, you finally agreed to _our_ health care plan.' All the incredibly weird bullshit getting spewed by the right.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Parent isn't insightful!
There is the business mentality that we can't just fully fund these things so we place usage fees and permits on them to provide some (or all) of the funding. You expect Disneyland to allow people in for free if they closed?
Would you like a bison head in your den? How about an endangered animal? Lets all pee in old faithful and put it on youtube or spray paint "God Hates Fags" on the Vietnam Memorial!
Your police dept covers your area with patrols and by being on call in case of emergency. They are not in everybody's yards (yet.)
The park services; a rather EXTREME example, have HUGE areas of empty land to manage with no hope of being everywhere all at once. They patrol routinely. Just like the police. The mere fact that they are paroling around (randomly unless you study their patterns) provides some degree of protection because people don't know if they are going to run into one and get caught. BTW, obvious tourist destinations are easy to patrol.
IF THE POLICE CLOSED DOWN, criminals would know nobody would be patrolling, nobody would be responding to reports of crimes. The park service is the same situation.
Have you even been around to the national parks? Idiot tourists are all over the place, throwing rocks at the bison, feeding the bears, dumping their trash (which blows around,) burning trash (no kidding, I've seen it,) driving off road, or walking off the board walks near the hot springs (making foot prints, if not holes where they fall to their death... all of which has happened and guess who has to clean it up to try to make it look all natural again so it is worth you going to see it? guess who warns and keeps people ON those paths?)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The government shutdown isn't about saving money, it's about putting on a big show.
They supposedly had to stop searching for a woman missing in a park due to the shutdown, but they can hire all kinds of bouncers to but up barriers and keep people out of normally unstaffed memorial locations. How does putting up barriers and hiring a bouncer for these save money??
I don't really understand what this show is supposed to accomplish, as all I get from it is that both sides are incompetent fools, trying to prove which side has the biggest thing between his legs, all who would happily let the country burn to the ground as part of making whatever point they think they have.
Yesterday's news about retroactively paying affected federal employees is welcome, but I would say that this part is very much expected.
I don't have the time to waste guarding it from you in case you don't respect MY wishes... so I will hire somebody do to that for me. I shall call them "Park Rangers." Rather clever name don't you think? Gee, I'm clever.
Do you see what I'm doing here? Do you see what the "I have a right to use my public land anytime and in anyway I want" people are doing?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The government has ceased operation, and IT assets and physical locations have been placed into any unattended/closed status.
Did you know that every "day use area" in the NPS is "closed" at night, even though there aren't barricades or armed guards from sundown to sunup? You're not allowed to be there, for your safety, for the safety of the park, for the preservation of assets.
Think of it like this: when an amusement park "closes" they lock the gates and bar you from even parking in their parking lots. They still have bare bones staff, but they are closed. They don't let you walk around the park when it's closed, even if you don't plan on riding the rides or playing with the stuff there. They are Closed.
The same thing has happened with the federal government. Quit bitching and tell your congressman to re-open the country's assets and fight their grievances on their own merits.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This isn't a cost saving measure. It's not even about what the cost is to run these things.
The government is shut down because the congress has not passed a budget which allows the government to operate. The reason for this impasse has nothing to do with the cost of running the government, only a specific law which a minority of the House of Representatives finds objectionable. I know it's a minority because they have voted 40 times to reverse the law and have not yet obtained a majority vote. They have decided that the only way to enforce their will is o attempt to block operation of the country until they get their way, not unlike a child throwing a tantrum and sitting on the floor, unwilling to move. It has nothing to do with cost or savings.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It's all about punishing people as much as possible for the shutdown, thinking that they will get angry at the GOP and vote them out in 2014.
Everything this administration does is motivated purely by an "us vs. them" mentality and an obsession with power that it doesn't have anymore.
Are you high? It's clearly not the administration.
You really have to be delusional to think that.
Some pubs don't like a law of the land, and they will shut it all down to get that law changed. Had the pubs presented a clean bill, nothing would have been shut down.
"“We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”" Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind
Pubs are filibustering their OWN bills.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes, and of course ad hominem is the only thing you can come up with when you know you're wrong.
That "law of the land" was rammed through Congress in the middle of the night by a lame-duck congress with 80 "yes" votes from people who had just been thrown out of office BECAUSE of their support for Obamacare.
And, there is no such thing as a filibuster in the House. Filibusters only happen in the Senate where people are allowed to speak for as long as they like. There is no such procedure in the House, where speaking time is carefully and quite frankly stingily doled out by whomever is presiding over business at the time.
In any case, America never wanted this bill, and doesn't want it now. It doesn't do what it was advertised to do, and it doesn't work. Period. That's all there is to it.
Get used to it.
Anyone who's done a search for 'meet your strawman', should be aware that corporations representing governments have been acting unlawfully.
In February, governments were lawfully foreclosed. http://wakeup-world.com/oppt-in/
The shutdown by the Grinch was expensive as well. But what really matters is that congress thinks it knows better than the people. If the government is closed, we have nowhere to address our petitions. But that is a First Amendment Right put in place to deter tyranny. You don't know if you have the consent of the governed if you are refusing to hear them. So, now were are deprived of that Right and tyrants rule. http://slashdot.org/journal/527327/shutting-down-the-right-to-petition
Middle of the night?
After months, even years, of debate, discussion, and wrangling? In public?
It wouldn't matter what fucking time it was passed, you had fucking forever to contribute to the discussion in a productive manner. Instead we got complaints about government death panels and other nonsense.
And when asked about provisions of the bill, the majority of Americans show support for those, and ask why it's not in Obamacare. That's right, they don't even know what they're protesting, they just heard it's bad, so they hate it.
They don't bother to learn.
Instead, like Nancy Pelosi said, a lot of FUD was made up about it, to the point where only real experience would overcome the negative hysteria. Of course that line is misinterpreted too, but hey, who's surprised by that? Even Romney couldn't admit his own healthcare reform was the model for the President's.
Partially because nobody is around to fix it if things break or if it gets hacked into, and symbolic so people realize exactly what the government does for them.
Same thing for the parks. If they didn't shut them down they would still not have people cleaning up or stopping vandals.
Good point.
It may be rebublican/deomcrat/green/libertarian/occupy party doctrine that all Federal workers will get backpay, I think the point is, that history has been that they have gotten backpay.
There have been 18 government shutdowns since 1976, if you include this one.
What insane notion has you believing that this one is going to be like the other 17, and pay back pay.
Oh, wait. Never mind.
Look after the pennies and the trillions of dollars will look after themselves.
After all, a country is like like a house.
WWII vets are ok; it's all those other people who go to the memorial who can't be trusted to not paint swastikas all over it. They have money for basic security but managing the parks/monuments is not in the budget; guarding the park against visitors is 1 budget and keeping it closed is another budget. It is rather simple. Emergency staff includes the ability to save a WWII vet having a heart attack while visiting.
You can't legally operate a mega mall without the minimum emergency staff either. If they are gone, then it must be closed; by law.
BTW, Obama did something to let vets into their memorials anyway.
Can we finally start calling Tea Party morons Tea Birchers? They are morons following the John Birch society without even knowing the Koch brothers simply shifted from their dad's society to their own; hijacked from the legitimate grass roots tea party people - and I know some; they have nothing but contempt for these morons and the John Birch people who stole their movement.
You're being logical. Actually it is not as pragmatic as you think; they are still allowed to spend money on law enforcement. They're just not allowed to take out the trash. And they can't offer non-emergency services without an appropriation. Anything with buildings has to be closed for sure. Anything with gated access has to be closed. Anything with rules establishing some level of services that are provided when they are open, have to be closed. Things like the National Forest outside of parks, campgrounds, and recreation areas are still open, because there are no services - except for law enforcement.
So the Forest Service aren't allowed to sell me a commercial mushroom permit, but they're allowed to arrest me for not having one.
Parent post makes too much sense to not be +5.
To the jerk at the NIST who decided to take down dlmf.nist.gov, I have only this to say: The day you need to accelerate the convergence of a power series, I hope some jerk comes along and shuts down your resource website too so you know how irritating this is.
To everyone else, I say: Use the archive:
DLMF: Wayback Machine.
May the Maths Be with you!
Basically, what I'm seeing is people who advocated shutting down the entire federal government as a complete waste of money are now going "Wait, I didn't mean that, or that, or that other thing."
No, they meant EVERYTHING, knowing what that meant.
INSTEAD what we get is "that, and that but not that". We get guarded parks but not letting people inside even though they are still paying the people who would protect the park anyway! We get the government spending money on barricading things that normally have NO staff!
A government shutdown should mean that, a SHUTDOWN. Instead what we get is what you described - the White House cherry-picking just what delectable services shall remain open and what shall not.
The shut down is total farce.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
California is seeing a bit of an exodus because too many people moved their driving up real estate prices to unreasonable levels. Their policies are working fairly well except for some lame brain tax rules put in place by Republicans that make it easy to cut taxes and hard to raise them. Also, most, if not nearly all, of the last 10 years worth of consumer protection laws exists because of California. Like knowing when your Credit Card #s get leaked? That was California. How about when there's carcinogens in your food? Also California.
Texas is running a race to the bottom funded by a modest oil boom that's wreaking their environment. Even if you don't believe fracking destroys ground water the fact is it's using it up so fast that towns are going dry.
Also, you can attract businesses all day long with slave labor wages. China does it. But is that the sort of world you want to live in? If the answer is 'yes' you're either a psychopath or just plain naive. Here's a hint: you're not free is someone controls your access to basic needs like food and shelter. You'll do exactly what they say. The phrase 'wage slave' isn't hyperbole.
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Suppose everything you said is correct . Unquestionably, Texas produces a lot of presidents and presidential candidates. Just recently, Bush I, Bush II, Perry, and Ron Paul. So the next president may very well be a Texan. Do you think it's better for the next president to set policy for California, or for Californians to decide their own policies?
Ps - it is true California is often "ahead of the curve". They try new things. Some of the new things they try work out well. Some turn out horribly. Right now, gas costs 50% more in California because California does things their own way. Texas sits is less experimental - they'll watchto see if tthe new approach works in California before they make a law requiring whatever.
It seems I was mistaken, Clinton started this sophomoric stunt, not Obama. This AC then demonstrated the vitriol borne of envy and self hatred that has become the hallmark of today's Democrat party.
On one hand, if the sites are run from government servers, then they may be turned off in order to save money. However, on the other hand, there has to be a server running to show the message, so I'm thinking this is more of a political message. BTW, the FCC's portion of the site that covers cyberbullying information for school students is also displaying a similar message.
Most, if not ALL, of the federal employees affected by this will get retro pay. Therefore, this SHUTDOWN, is only a paid vacation for those federal employees that saw fit to put something aside for a congressional day. It's a fucking farce and it's not the first time we've been screwed this particular way by ALL parties involved.
WAKE THE HELL UP SHEEPLE! We are but pawns in a lowering stakes political board game. Why the hell do you think they call them political PARTIES anyway? Fuck me.
Someone else hijacks the page on a different computer address, but similarly looking URL and now you get "no response" and google around, find a link that looks correct and it works. Enter your details, it's safe: it's the government.
U pwnd.
Moreover, even frigging high street shops put up a "We're closed" sign when closed. Why? People will try the door and think something wrong or the door is stuck if it doesn't say "We're closed".
However, you hate the democrats or maybe just the black man in charge, hence you "forget" that in order to complain about SOMETHING.
Shutting down a government website, taking it offline, may have a negative effect on SEO. If the websites are off the internet for quite a while, search engines may penalize the site and when it returns to the internet, it may have lost its ranking for keyword queries.
All those people can't afford to buy anything now, great move republicans. (yet, most people will blame this on Democrats).
Great way to throw away your economy...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
302 is a 'We've moved somewhere else'.
At the very least if they were going to use a redirect, they should've recommended a 307 ('We're at some other place, but check back later')
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.