The Shutdown Wasn’t Pointless. It Revealed Information

Perhaps an analogy to war is useful. War is stupid–you could always take the result of the war, implement it without fighting, and leave everyone better off. But sometimes a weak parties believes it is stronger than it really is. This makes it overly optimistic in bargaining, leading to a breakdown and war. However, the process of fighting reveals the weakness, in turn making the weak side willing to sit down at the bargaining table. The Republicans are the weak side. The Democrats are the strong side. The costs of war are the costs of the shutdown.

William Spaniel says on twitter he is not sure about how he feels about our models of war also explaining U.S. Congress bargaining. Besides war being politics by other means, I say we obviously should expect the models to work to a limited extent. Democracy is a highly ritualized form of civil war and not any kind of war but the kind practiced in the 19th century when democracy began its march. Instead of drafting a mob and then ordering them to shoot the opposing mob, you orderly assemble your respective mobs and then count them via voting. Since Samuel Colt made men equal in the 19th century you assume the slightly larger mob wins. Some nations even factor in territory held to decide outcomes. After elections both mobs go safely home and about their business, while in theory the government implements a real outcome of the simulated war.

I'm half expecting that sooner or later someone will realize you can with current technology win civil wars with drones agains mobs and Democracy will be discarded in favor of a more stable equilibrium. On the other hand early 20th century thinkers, futurists and fiction writers expected people to realize air power changed the calculus of war and for this change to impact politics quite profoundly. Arguably maybe we would even be better off had they been right. All power to the pilots! Yet they weren't. Evidence against.

As a sysadmin, if I were to be furloughed indefinitely I would probably spin down any nontrivial servers. A server that goes wrong and can't be accessed is a really, really, really, really terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad thing. And things go wrong on a regular basis in normal times; when the government is shut down and a million things that get done everyday suddenly stop being done, something somewhere is going to break. Some 12-year-old legacy cron job sitting in an obscure corner of an obscure server written by a long-departed contractor is going to notice that the foobar queue is empty , which turns out to be an undefined behavior because the foobar queue has always had stuff going through it before, so it executes an else branch it's never had occasion to execute, which sends raw debugging information to a production server because the contractor was bad at things, and also included passwords in their debugging because they were really bad at things...

This is actually a terrible example of Washington Monument Syndrome.

" Hi, Server admin here... We cost money as does our infrastructure, I imagine a site that large costs a very good deal, we aren't talking five bucks on bluehost here.

I am private sector, but if I were to be furloughed for an indeterminate amount of time you really have two options. Leave things on autopilot until the servers inevitably break or the site crashes at which point parts or all of it will be left broken without notice or explanation. Or put up a splash page and spin down 99% of my infrastructure (That splash page can run on a five dollar bluehost account) and then leave. I won't be able to come in while furloughed to put it up after it crashes.

If you really think web apps keep themselves running 24/7 without intervention we really have been doing a great job with that illusion and I guess the sleepless nights have been worth it to be successfully taken for-granted."

I suspect it would be illegal to run those servers. The Anti-Deficiency Act forbids the government from "involving the government in any obligation to pay money before funds have been appropriated". The Army can't purchase new tanks, NASA can't order a new space shuttle, and I bet most agencies can't rack up more obligations with their ISPs and electric companies.

This act, by the way, is the reason nonessential workers are forbidden from volunteering for work.

An interesting post on the subject.

Theater, certainly; in the sense of staging an elaborate show for the public (see also "security theater") — but why kabuki specifically?

Actually, y'all wrong. It was simply a fun idea for celebrating 4chan's 10th birthday.