… 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.

        • 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.

          • AshLassay@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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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              1 year ago

              Well, they are left-er than the rightwing nationalist extremists that run the GOP. But yeah, they are center right.

      • dx1@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

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

        • 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.

        • qfe0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • JudgeHolden@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.