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Comment by rubyfan | Hacker News Reader

Comrades! This seems like a good use of taxpayer dollars :-/

FTA:

The report said 18F spent about 20 hours or $4,148 on two customized "bots" for Slack, an online messaging application. One of the automated programs would monitor users' messages for the words "guys," "guyz" and "dudes," which could have been perceived as being not inclusive for women. It prompted users to consider replacing those words with 21 options that included buds, compatriots, fellow humans, posse, team, mateys, persons of any kind, organic carbon-based life-forms living on the third planet from the sun, comrades and cats.

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Hopefully they're just combining two efforts, because Slackbot can already reply based on certain word triggers, so you set it up so it picks one of a selection of messages when it sees the word "guys".

What's so bad about a few people spending some time on a bot to improve inclusivity in the organization?

Do you know what 18F competes with? $4000 is literally irrelevant.

Because it's taxpayer money.

$4,000 for some engineers to fuck around at work might not sound much but that $4,000 came from taxing people. Believe it or not but to a lot of people $4,000 is a lot of money. That $4,000 could go to school supplies, education, WIC, Medicare, etc.

It also illustrates tax payer subsidized income inequality while a lot of people are struggling. Again some highly paid engineer making more money fucking around at work than some other taxpayer delivering real value but at lower wage.

While I agree that given the information from the Inspector General's report, 18F certainly needs to be more disciplined about how it spends its resources, do you really think that 18F is the most egregious example of a government agency fucking around and wasting money? How about the DoD's $8.5 trillion of unaccounted taxpayer money [0]?

[0] http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/03/19/85-Trillion-Unaccou...

Of course it is not the most egregious. That someone else is wasting several orders of magnitude more money doesn't make it OK for 18F waste a smaller amount.

What if some of the taxpayers feel it's warranted? Personally I have no problem with them spending time on these types of projects.

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