Hacker News Reader

Comment by pstack | Hacker News Reader

Politicians, government, and many government employees are petulant children that will take their ball home the instant they feel they're not getting their way.

View on HN

I'm curious. When your funding goes away and your employer stops paying you, how long do you need to keep working for free to avoid being considered a petulant child?

When your boss is happy to pay for his useless secretary that he's banging, but he's not happy about paying for actual work to be done until he can continue squirrelling money away for his personal pet projects.

When your boss is happy to stop paying for expenses and we're forced to put it all on credit, thereby racking up 20% monthly interest.

When your boss is happy to allocate resources for his personal pet projects, but more meaningful contributions to the company are "temporarily" cut due to budget concerns.

So that's a timespan denominated in negative seconds, right?

This isn't funding going away, nothing and noone being paid.

It's more like the unlimited credit card was cancelled.

Do you know anyone who works for the federal government? I do; I have cousins who work at EPA. They got their hours cut because of the sequester; they weren't paid full weeks.

Obviously, some people are still getting paid. But your "unlimited credit card" observation is inaccurate.

Yep, the limit so far is 17 trillion, which is very limited..

It's always funny when the libs can't take what they dish out. Really? Negative points for pointing out the obvious - Obama only stands for what benefits Obama?

Wow, guess you can't take it, eh? :) that's ok, I know you're butthurt over it.

You are just plain wrong. If congress doesn't pass a budget, there's no money and most nonessential employees don't get paid.

It is illegal to keep working for the federal government for free. In a shutdown, most non-essential workers will be on unpaid vacation.

> how long do you need to keep working for free to avoid being considered a petulant child?

Um, they have to pay extra to shut down the website. Just leave the website up. Petulant is right, they are putting up the message to complain about things, not to save money.

What did government employees do to deserve a shutdown?

This is absolutely a failure of the politicians in the House of Representatives. The Tea Party wing of the Republican party will not pass a clean bill to allow the government to continue to function unless Obamacare is "defunded" which is both fairly ridiculous and not actually possible.

But when Wikipedia goes dark to protest SOPA, that's advocacy!

Wikipedia is not a government organization.

Wikipedia was always up, period. In addition, there are mirrors of the data all over the place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com