Having worked financial management in federal govt and private sector there is far far far more graft, outright theft and corruption, and incredible waste in the private sector than the public sector.
Pretty much this. I too have done both private sector and government. People think government is more wasteful than private because it's public. When government wastes a few million some unneeded program the details are just an FOIA request away. Oftentimes it's already published somewhere if you know where to look.
That (even a publicly traded one) business wasting millions on a Salesforce rollout that never gains traction and gets quietly abandoned? Odds are no one not directly involved knows. And the exec pushing it gets promoted.
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by unsnap_biceps on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @06:39PM
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In a past job, my company lost track of tens of thousands of servers. They were racked up, powered up, sitting at a PXE boot screen for almost 5 years before someone noticed them sitting idle. They were storage nodes with pci-e flash storage (very expensive at the time), so I'm sure it was in the high 10's of millions of Capex that was completely wasted, and I'm sure at least a million in opex for the datacenter space and power and all that jazz for the 5 years. By the time they were noticed, they were EOL and "recycled" (aka sold off to used server resellers).
I totally buy that Public is way more efficient then Private companies overall.
I witnessed the described Salesforce scenario first hand. The amount of waste and dissonance was staggering.
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by markus_zhang on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @06:29PM
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Can't say for public but private does have a lot of corruption. I always laugh at those who say everything is going to be efficient once private.
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by thisisnotauser on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @05:51PM
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Do you have any evidence to substantiate that fairly radical claim? Because literally every Google result on every subject seems to indicate you are incorrect.
Medical coverage: https://www.cbpp.org/research/correcting-seven-myths-about-m...
Education: https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI951123...
Heck, even things like increased funding for the IRS have incredible ROI: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57444
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by unsnap_biceps on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @05:49PM
(#42940227)
I fail to see how anyone can look at a treasury line item and determine if it's waste or not. This isn't the way to reduce waste. This is a way to reduce spending regardless of how efficient it is or isn't. Entirely different goal.
Govts departments are notoriously inefficient - more inefficient than you can believe possible. Sometimes very little of the money you allocate goes to the desired outcome.
Let's shine a spotlight on what works, what doesn't, and where the money is actually being spent.