Startup says it wants to fight poverty, but a food stamp giant is blocking it

This proposition is missing an actual motive. In other words, what’s comfortable about that?

We might also ask “what is ‘their own’?”

If you are proposing that the government is the organization of the elected officials, you’re wrong. A democratic government belongs to the members of the society. Many Americans don’t realize that so I’ll assume you’re one of them.

In reality, most American elected officials don’t make decisions on behalf of their electorate because they get paid more by private companies to specifically not do so, which is clearly the issue at hand.

But furthermore, if you are an American, it is your society who hired this company by proxy, and who is paying for it.

When you give these strange narratives which insult your own government, you are only insulting yourself. You are the people who let this happen.

I think the difference is that they are using public funds and public data which they are withholding. Google is/was a natural monopoly due to sheer technological advantage however someone can (and sort of has) built a competing product. There is no way to build a competing product in this case because it relys on data that is being withheld, it is doubly annoying because that data is (or should be) public and is funded by taxpayer dollars.

Oh I thought stock implied ownership. Maybe it doesn’t mean that in this case.

>>There will always be government created markets.

Maybe, maybe not, but that was not my point. The Goal should be to eliminate as many of those as possible.

>Who else should pay for infrastructure for example?

Depends on what infrastruture you are speaking of, Roads are often an example but you do understand there are private roads, probably more than you think.

"But who will build the roads" is a tired dead horse in libertarian circles, that problem has been solved countless times

>Do you want to privatize all of that?

Again that depends on what you mean by "Privatize", I believe goods and services are best when the consumers that consume them directly pay for them. My goal would be to have the payment for goods and services as close to the consumption of those goods and services as possible.

The more people and organizations you put between a consumer and vendor the more quality suffers, and prices raise.

But we do already have more than one Company for "National Security Space launches" (ULA and SpaceX) with more attempting to become contractors.

We have seen directly in that market what competition will do, massively lower costs. ULA is somewhere on the order for 5x more expensive than SpaceX, and SpaceX had to sue to get the privilege of bidding on the contracts for the Defense Dept which previously did No-Bid contracts to ULA

So your own example debunks your comment

Further I never stated we could eliminate ALL government markets, but that should be the GOAL, national defense is likely one that can not be eliminated however it is also an example of the extreme waste and over reach these markets create where now the government has programs that even the military says they do not want because they are Jobs programs not for actual defense.

> e-reading, I realized that I should have said "artificial" rather than government created. There are many ways to catch mice, and it's worth varying more than just the colour of the cat.

All markets are artificial. You can't have any kind of market without some enforcement of the rules that make it a market. Otherwise it degenerates into a free market, which, despite its name, is not a market.

Incidental to your point about apps, I wonder if Propel can't deliver a devastating blow with a digital records FOIA request. Conduent will fight it tooth and nail, and it may be worth Propel's while to put some professional legal help on it, but since the data is being paid for by the taxpayer, as long as it can be redacted so that personal information isn't shared (which Propel could be required to pay for), Conduent may have no recourse to keep their data under lock and key. App users could be shown how to request their primary key or some other permissible identifier under FOIA from Conduent, and then they'd be reduced to a mere primary data warehousing and collection outfit.

Well, that solves one kind of graft and opens the door to another. The history of Petrobras is a great example of the kind of corruption that can happen in state run enterprises. Chinese SOEs are another example. Transparency, audits, and open procurement processes are probably more useful at fighting graft than nationalization.

True, but that results in other problems - lack of accountabbility and control. Perfect example is the VA.

I think the ultimate solution is to simplify access to, and limit govnerment control of, all entitlement programs. The ultimate expression of that would be UBI - I'd even be in favor of a means-tested phase-out of the UBI.

After that's done, all we gotta do is fix the tax code...

Good luck with that approach.

Amazingly paternalistic. You think that just because somebody does not have a lot of money they should not be allowed to choose from among a marketplace of providers?

I'm not an historian, but I think “E pluribus unum” and “liberté, egalité, franternité” should be analyzed in the context of their own time. “liberté, egalité, franternité” was a war cry promoting brotherly union against monarchy. "freedom" and "equality before the law" are not competing goals, but were revolutionary ideas on their time.

If you said to a member of a royal family back then: "I believe all men are created equal", you could be imprisoned and executed, depending on his majesty's will. That's because your ideas jeopardized the foundations of monarchy.

Yeah but it's easier to look it up before you even go to the store. Why waste gas if you've only got $10, wait til next bit comes in a few days, that sort of thing.

The service was being used for exactly what the government was presumably paying Confluent to deliver -- the ability for EBT beneficiaries to see their balance. If Confluent can't deliver on serving customer data to customers, they have no business holding that contract.

Even small contractors do this.

I once worked on a range safety reporting application, with a budget of 4 hours per month for the developer maintenance. It was not by any means a big-money contract. But the site still had a database behind it, and I was given explicit instructions by management to not give too much of our data to the government customer at once.

It's almost like the company was trying to punish the government for not paying them more money. I really had a personal ethical struggle with that one, as I'm a citizen more than I am an employee, but the latter definitely pays better. In the end, I chose to not slip a complete copy of the database onto a delivery CD, and the company shuttered the branch office and fired everyone working in it shortly thereafter. But then I did get to do some consulting work for the successor company as I was looking for a new "permanent" position, which allowed me to pay some bills while otherwise unemployed. Slight win for me, individually, but that government customer got screwed, mainly because a different government customer (that was paying a lot more per month) pulled their big contract and awarded the work to someone else.

As I walked out of the customer's office for the last time, the Army officer in charge of the program encouraged me to apply for open government technology positions, and I couldn't help thinking about what a bad deal that would be for me financially. It all boils down to limits on individual direct employee salaries, but no limits on what a contractor company may be paid for hiring exactly the same person to do exactly the same work. So the government can pay me $35/hour directly, or they can pay a company $200/hour, so they can indirectly pay me $50/hour. Oh, and they can then fire me at the drop of a hat. (This was before 18F, by the way.)

I have no idea how anyone justifies the argument that outsourcing essential government functions to private companies saves money. It's pants-on-head stupid. It exposes enough flesh for the parasitic military-industrial contractors to dig in their mouth-parts, and then never stop sucking out the blood.

It's the same for non-military privatized functions. The agency problem always gets in the way. People insert themselves into the system to become unmovable middlemen, and extract maximum value by standing between work and workers.

My definition of optimal includes a provision that most people are able to plan their meals at least a week in advance, and no one ever has uncertainty over the place and time where they can eat their next meal.

Like those candy bar ads imply, people tend to make poor decisions when they are hungry, but the results in the real world aren't always amusing, or solvable by a timely application of chocolate and nougat.

The total quantity of food-producing capital in the US is large enough that it boggles my mind that there could be anyone in the country that can't always afford to eat nutritious foods, but such people exist. And they make poor financial decisions, because they have to constantly live in the short run, and are never able to plan far enough ahead to buy their way out of poverty.

Optimal would be when everyone has the ability to carefully consider and negotiate every financial decision, without being forced to act contrary to their own long-term interests by some exigent circumstance or necessity. Oxygen and water are mostly sorted already, but food security and secure shelter are also required before people can start thinking past tomorrow, and considering "do nothing" as a viable alternative to a negotiated deal.

With only 7 lookups per user per month, cloning the database likely doesn't make sense. The data will be stale, and the contractor would likely never permit a daily dump of the database either.

If a company provides a service on behalf of the government then really open data should be a basic requirement with default arrangements for high use, like a standard payment across all government open data per 100k accesses.

Government enabled private monopoly is surely anti-capitalist too (ie as well as anti-communist, etc.).

Unpopular opinion the US Post office should offer minimal banking services and SS, Unemployment, and EBT transfers should be always to those accounts.

Isn't the better response to start charging for API access at that point? Not revoke access and go silent?

Not necessarily. If someone pays you to do something, it doesn't mean they own what you buy with that money. E.g., your boss doesn't own your home computer.

Conduent entered the business under a certain contract and with certain expectations, and hosting a database for others might not have been part of that.