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Grombobulous

$2 million a year is wildly insignificant for the federal government.

Less than one cent per year per person in federal taxes.

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Its tiny, setting up traffic lights on some road junction might cost similar.

The epa doesn't have access to the federal budget

That’s not really the point, the point is that $2 million isn’t a lot of money for a service that is for the benefit of over 300 million people.

It serves a lot more than just the citizens of the US, for what it's worth.

And yet the number of projects with similarly insignificant costs is large, and they do add up.

The argument cannot be "this money doesn't matter", it has to be "this represents good value for money" (imo)

They literally don’t add up. Just look at a pie chart of the US government budget. The administrative state is a bargain.

Departments like the EPA are so small that they have to be put in the “other” umbrella that makes up 1% of federal spending (go to the Agency tab):

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

sad, the spending chart doesn't load in my version of firefox, and both links in the caption also have page-load issues. very sad.

Works for me on 158.0.1

Just a note that pie charts are not well regarded in this application.

Stephen Few, “Save the Pies for Dessert” (https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_inte...)

Edward Tufte, “The only worse design than a pie chart is several of them.”

The “1% other” is more compelling.

The link I shared wasn't even a pie chart, so when I said "pie chart" I was speaking in a colloquial sense.

> "this represents good value for money" (imo)

Wouldn't you say this archive represents good value for the money?

A nation that forgets its past is a nation that repeats its mistakes.

> Wouldn't you say this archive represents good value for the money?

Yes, that's the point. Not "this is so cheap it's irrelevant" but "this is an important resource worth funding".

This is so disingenuous. We all know where the money goes.

The checks that add up are the social security checks cashed by the quarter or so of baby boomers who don’t need them.

Is the suggestion that social security (a (progressive) program where people largely pay in) should be replaced with a welfare type program? Or if we're just talking about biggest expenditures, things like the 1) Medicare, 2) other gov health spending, and 3) interest paid on the debt are far larger than the item your comment mentioned.

A program that is only used by poor people will immediately be scrapped. Never underestimate the seething hatred that the middle class has for the underclass. Besides all that social security money goes straight into the economy.

Ok, but I could replicate this process and archive for under $20,000k per year(probably way under) and set it up in less than 1 day with claude...

You've obviously never worked in government before. The technology is likely not the issue; the bureaucracy is.

Would have been nice if DOGE had worked on stuff like this instead of performative cruelty.

I’ll come back in 3 days and you can share the link with your web archive. I’ll Venmo you $20 for your Claude pro subscription.

Looking at the 2024 to 2025 archive, it's around 1TB/year:

https://app.browsertrix.com/explore/usgov-archive/collection...

If that's true, something has clearly gone wildly wrong with the, most likely several, departments involved/created with maintaining this. I suspect if you look at the breakdown, it's 90% administrative costs, with the rest being inflated Cisco contracts, or whatever other parasite latched on.

As others have said, it's been archived already.

Will you pay me 20k a year? I will absolutely do it for 20k a year.

With or without claude, this is a trivial job.

Did you set up a working backup with Claude? It is still extremely difficult to do right.

If you did please, please share your setup. And how you audited it.

You're acting like it is super hard to setup basically a large file repository.

That it is reasonable for it to cost 2 million/year. It isn't. It obviously isn't.

Using claude or not, this is not a large job. With claude it is a hilariously small job though. I could do this in addition to my real job and it would be trivial to do so.

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