By that logic we should expect all governments to regress to totalitarianism, which hasn’t happened, and isn’t what’s happening here.
The question isn’t if some would attempt these behaviors, but rather if we and our democratic structures empower those people or fail to constrain them.
It's free as long as Cash.app wants to maintain it. I'd rather there'd be no incentive to complicate the tax code such that many people need to hire accountants to figure it out.
It should do that, because it's still not actually an intelligence. It's a tool that is figuring out what to say in response that sounds intelligent - and will often succeed!
There's an incentive problem here because litigation is so expensive. If the fine is large enough, it becomes more and more worth it for the company to fight it in court - and therefore more expensive to the regulatory agency's legal budget. The only folks who benefit from it going to court are private lawyers.
Whereas, settling meets the company's incentives (eliminating uncertainty), meets the regulator's incentives (bad behavior is stopped locally). The moral hazard created by making fraud seem less risky (because the punishments aren't that bad) is born by the public.
The solution here would be to limit the possible legal shenanigans that companies can use to increase the cost of taking a case to trial.
The author of this is presenting their view and you have hours of content to watch about this if you want to dig into it. One problem is that "lab leak," as Peter says, means a bunch of amalgamated theories. It's hard to discuss this without going through in depth, which is what this debate tried to do.
> is it fine to work on open source projects at Meta, or is it bad because Meta is bad?
I think OP would say its better to work on open source at Meta than closed source at Meta, and we should celebrate someone being paid to write open source. We can also condemn their specific employer while not denigrating their open source compensation.
re your second point, looking at this thread, "what is open source" is taking up a lot of the brainspace.
Representatives have elections to determine how long they can serve; career civil servants have strong protections against firing but the downside is a challenging hiring process that can be very slow.
USDS's willingness to use term hires makes hiring folks in easier, in addition to ensuring that the office doesn't become stagnant.
> we let them post an RFP that basically says do this thing in this amount of time for this amount of money with payment after we get the “thing” in time.
These exist; they are called "firm fixed price" contracts. You still have to write the contract correctly to be outcomes focused, and that can be hard when you don't know until building/testing if you are building the right thing.[1]
Serving at USDS, posting personally. The biggest thing with the gov is the requirements on usajobs are always explained specifically so you know exactly what is needed.
Beyond that, you'll want to show in your resume how you've delivered successfully and ideally in challenging circumstances, because working in the gov can be challenging. It will really vary depending on the job and agency.
The pay cap is set in law, but you need people sufficiently invested in the mission to forgo a higher possible salary, which isn't possible for everyone (especially folks who might have to support their parents).
Current USDSer here posting personally. I hear this and you aren't alone. It's not a decision specifically about USDS, more about the entire White House staff and federal law.
As someone who does this sort of work (but posting personally, not officially), you're 100% right. There are groups of already-networked folks you can join like USDS or 18F that are already connected to the problems. The post reminds me of some of the stuff you might see in gov, though I've never seen someone save money and be punished like this.