Availability of the Government of the United States
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govavailability.info
I remember this one. I was in college. I was sitting on the front stoop of the house I was living in when the mailman came by. I mentioned that I was surprised he was still working since the government was shutdown. He laughed and said that the USPS is self-funded and is flush with cash and had no debts so they had no problem staying open. Oh how things have changed.
requiring USPS to pay for obligations incurred today isn't some crazy scam to bankrupt them
You want to know what happens when they don't? They declare bankruptcy and the judge dismisses the pensions, and the federal government takes it over.
I went to the post office a few weeks ago, and while the building was open, they had stopped taking packages. Not that they wouldn't mail them today, but that they just wouldn't even take them. And that doesn't even count the hours they're meant to be closed.
In any case, it's clear that the length of any specific downtime matters as much as the cumulative downtime.
Many hardliners in the republican party, along with trump, want to starve the beast. And there's not much more you can do than by harming the rank and file with "you must go to work but we won't pay you". The people in federal positions I know of are already looking elsewhere. Some are trying to survive it. And others are going "sick-out".
Regardless how its being done, it is. And this shutdown is starving all non-military federal positions from TSA to the USDA. If this goes on for months, then those people will leave, along with their experience their tenure brought. And eventually, when the government is not "shut down", they will have proof that the government really didn't need those positions.
And we open our eyes, and realize the swamp wasn't Capitol Hill. The swamp was us. We're in the middle of draining.
Maybe that says something bad about the size of the rest of the budget. It's kind of disturbing that the wall cost is like loose change dropped down under a seat cushion and forgotten.
To put it another way, the wall cost is just half a day of the federal budget. Most likely, we've already blown far more than that on the cost of the shutdown.
Scaling things down to median American household sizes, it's like a couple getting a divorce because one person insists on spending $16.81 to $93.42 and the other person is flipping out over it.
"usa": { "start": "1789-03-04T00:00:00-05:00", "end": null },
{"screeching_eagle": true}Why is this the case? Do most birds of prey not have particularly virile screeches or what?
To quote Sibley: "Call rather weak, flat, chirping whistles, stuttering, variable. Immature calls generally harsher, more shrill than adult until three to four years old."
I guess that's close enough.
What changed in 1980?
An SLA I'd never agree to. There might not even be a single 9 in the this year's uptime percentage.