
Show HN: govuptime.com - thatrailsguy
http://govuptime.com/
======
bithive123
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.

~~~
bmelton
> 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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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...](http://www2.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/Natl_Federation_of_Independent_Business_v_Sebelius_No_Nos_11393_1)

~~~
bmelton
It was not originally presented as a tax, but as fees, Justice Roberts'
categorization of the fee as a tax was the first time that had happened.

Beyond that, yes, I did conflate spending and taxation, but both taxes are
indeed at the discretion of the House, or we wouldn't have the impasse that we
currently do.

Regardless, my point remains that either the Democratically controlled Senate
or the Republican controlled House could reopen the government today with a
simple vote, and I cannot fault Boehner or Reid for being just as obstinate as
the other, when both are clearly being equally bull-headed.

~~~
dragonwriter
> It was not originally presented as a tax, but as fees.

How something is presented is tangential, and often outright irrelevant, to
its Constitutional status. You statement that the Court struck down the
mandate but offered a tax as an option is simply, directly, factually _wrong_.
They upheld it, which is exactly the opposite of striking it down.

> but both taxes are indeed at the discretion of the House, or we wouldn't
> have the impasse that we currently do.

No, if anything relevant to the current situation (in which the critical thing
which allows it to produce a shutdown is _spending_ , not _taxes_ ) was at the
_discretion_ of the House, we would _not_ have an impasse. The House would
dictate their will, and it would be done -- no impasse.

We have an _impasse_ because, like any law, appropriations (whether in the
form of the budget or more limited appropriations bills) must be approved by
both houses and the President (or by both houses with sufficient support to
override a veto), and there is a lack of consensus between the _three_ (two
colletive and one individual) actors involved, not because the matters
involved are at the discretion of any one of those actors.

~~~
bmelton
I feel like this argument is one of semantics, so I'll just attempt to
clarify.

Justice Roberts, the swing vote, would have struck down the penalty but for
his characterization of it as a tax, as well as having characterized that tax
as a flat penalty against which modifiers were imposed. As a result of its tax
characterization, it violates the Origination Clause of the Constitution,
which has never been remedied.

Whether not the House approves of a new tax is at the discretion of the House.
You are clearly correct in that both wings of Congress need to approve of it,
but either party can reject and be simply done.

I appreciate the corrections, but much of them were, I feel, implicit in the
tone of my original post, though yes, I did overstate the NFIB decision.

~~~
dragonwriter
> As a result of its tax characterization, it violates the Origination Clause
> of the Constitution

That's a fine assertion, but _if_ it were true _then_ it would not be a valid
exercise of the taxing power, and since the Supreme Court ruled that it was a
valid exercise of the taxing power, a majority of the Supreme Court clearly
does not believe that it is true. And note that the issue of whether it was a
proper exercise of that power was briefed in the case by both supporters and
opponents of the bill.

The procedural history of PPACA is, to say the least, convoluted, but the
actual bill in which it was contained was a bill originating in the House (as
was the reconciliation measure immediately passed amending it which is
generally viewed as part and parcel of PPACA) [1] -- so, strictly speaking,
the bill _did_ originate in the House (every single letter in the final bill
was the result of an Amendment in the Senate, and the House then concurred in
the Senate amendments, but the Origination clause _explicitly_ permits the
Senate to amend bills subject to it the same as any other legislation.) So,
even ignoring the fact that _NFIB v. Sebelius_ essentially forecloses the
argument anyway, the facts seem pretty clearly contrary to your Origination
Clause claim.

> Whether not the House approves of a new tax is at the discretion of the
> House.

The House _did_ approve of the individual mandate in PPACA. Otherwise, there
wouldn't be an Act of Congress to be the subject of _NFIB v. Sebelius_.

[1] for details, including an in-depth discussion of the procedural history,
see [http://www.aallnet.org/main-menu/Publications/llj/LLJ-
Archiv...](http://www.aallnet.org/main-menu/Publications/llj/LLJ-
Archives/Vol-105/no-2/2013-7.pdf)

~~~
bmelton
That'll take a bit to read, so don't take my non-response as ignoring you.
Thanks for the link, I'll get back to you.

------
mwsherman
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...](http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-
oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/historical-
tables/total-government-employment-since-1962/)

~~~
brown9-2
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.

------
Fuzzwah
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....

~~~
thatrailsguy
That's a great idea.

~~~
muzz
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.

~~~
jaggederest
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".

~~~
patmcc
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).

~~~
jaggederest
Then I'm sorry to say, you're doing 4 nines wrong.

~~~
patmcc
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?

~~~
jaggederest
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.

------
javert
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.

~~~
CodeMage
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/](http://www.socialsecurity.gov/shutdown/)

[2]: [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-
legali...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legalized-
marijuana.html)

~~~
bcoates
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.

~~~
lukifer
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.

------
arscan
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).

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

~~~
thatrailsguy
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.

~~~
gohrt
Make a 2nd chart, with little inset zoomy lines to connect the 2 charts (like
you see on a paper map that shows a zoom of the downtown core)

Like this: [http://xkcd.com/radiation/](http://xkcd.com/radiation/)

~~~
thatrailsguy
Is there a good js library for doing this style chart?

------
dandelany
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](https://github.com/dandelany/shutdown2013)

[http://cognitiveharmony.net/experiments/shutdown2013/](http://cognitiveharmony.net/experiments/shutdown2013/)

~~~
thatrailsguy
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](https://github.com/dvito/govuptime)

~~~
dandelany
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...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsyXWqYXia4PdGlDWGVFODF2T0hYV05nM1NESXp4OHc&usp=sharing#gid=0)

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).

~~~
thatrailsguy
I talked to dvito, he said he compiled it by hand, so he might incorporate
your data into ours.

~~~
dnprock
Thanks for the data. Any idea where to get $ of salary not being paid to each
department.

~~~
thatrailsguy
I think the only source for that data would be through the OMB, but I'm not
sure where you could find it.

------
dreamdu5t
It'd be nice to see a percentage of the Federal government shut down. I heard
it's only around 18%.

~~~
guelo
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
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.

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

~~~
jleader
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.

~~~
RailsResearch
Interesting.

------
nextstep
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.

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

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

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

~~~
VladRussian2
not until Bezos becomes President. How about Government-as-a-Service? (I mean
for regular citizens :)

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

~~~
VladRussian2
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 :)

------
smoyer
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
"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.

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

[http://vida.io/discussion/WgBMc4zDWF7YpqXGR](http://vida.io/discussion/WgBMc4zDWF7YpqXGR)

thatrailsguy, thanks for the data.

~~~
thatrailsguy
Thank dvito for compiling. This is a great visualization.

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

~~~
m_ram
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.

~~~
thatrailsguy
I'll look into this.

~~~
RailsResearch
Ya, this would be awesome.

------
coldcode
NSA still working. Damn.

------
CoachRufus87
Nice! Just a suggestion: add mouseover tooltips to the department acronyms w/
their full name.

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

------
ANH
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.

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

------
agotterer
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.

~~~
RailsResearch
Can do!

------
RailsResearch
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!

------
j_baker
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](http://www.cnbc.com/id/101078145)

~~~
enoex1
like this? [http://shutdown.outline.com/](http://shutdown.outline.com/)

------
alexmr
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.

------
bayesianhorse
My condolences to people living in countries with dysfunctional politics.

~~~
mdigi
So, most of the world population?

------
mcculley
That could benefit from the <abbreviation> tag.

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

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

~~~
thatrailsguy
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dvito](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dvito)
is one of the creators.

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

~~~
dvito
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.

------
frank_boyd
The funnier version:
[http://www.thedailyshow.com/](http://www.thedailyshow.com/)

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

------
ok_craig
Is the IRS still operating?

~~~
winslow
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...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2013/10/04/cant-stop-the-
machine-during-shutdown-irs-computers-still-churn-out-tax-liens-levies-and-
bills/)

------
kimagure
Could you add comma formatting for the mouseover bubble numbers?

~~~
RailsResearch
Added to our TODO!

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

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

~~~
benmanns
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%.

------
nraynaud
It reminds me of the counter for Belgium.

~~~
RailsResearch
Oh? Got a link?

~~~
nraynaud
[http://lerecorddumonde.be/](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).

------
ep103
Should include cost to the economy!

~~~
RailsResearch
Really hard to calculate

------
blahblah12345
The IRS is also shut down.

~~~
protomyth
Partially, they are still collecting money just fine.

------
dinkumthinkum
Very nice, good job!

~~~
RailsResearch
Thank you!

