I was quite confused why the government would create an entire site telling people to stop consuming manga. I mean, I personally don't care for manga/anime stuff, but really?
Turns out it's just a website for Quitman, GA. https://quitmanga.gov
We know at least one New Hampshire politician really wasn't a fan.
This brought out an audible chuckle from me. Definitely stealing this and sharing this site with a few co-workers who are heavily into manga/anime. Thanks for the laugh.
If only DNS could be namespaced..., eg quitman.ga.gov
Only a marginal improvement though
We have that in Ontario and honestly it's often just kind of a source of confusion, like this is for a specific agency overseeing just the St Lawrence:
Whereas the actual Ontario Parks website is this:
Isn't delegating a zone pretty much the same concept in DNS? Or am I missing sarcasm here?
Sarcasm.
People get confused (particularly in the US) if they are always used to x.y.
I like fully qualifying domain names (like x.y. in your example) and it’s funny how many sites break when you do this
Wait, really? Could you share some examples? Why would they break for a FQDN. Wouldn’t that mean that the root servers aren’t configured correctly for that TLD?
I'm not sure exactly why things break, but as an example: fully-qualifying youtube.com (to youtube.com.) used to break the code that displayed the ads and you could watch ad-free
Yeah was sarcasm as it seems to be a really obvious thing to do.
We do it in the UK with <councilname>.gov.uk
(Not sure if it's actual delegation or just A records though)
We also do it in the US, although I feel like it was more common 20-years ago than it is now. For example, here in North Carolina, local school systems are typically “https://[county name]schools.k12.nc.us”
Yeah, our state did that kind of thing 20 years ago, but people get confused with more than x.y, because nobody ever taught anyone the concept that domains are a hierarchy and that periods have a specific role that’s different to slashes, hyphens, etc. So to 90% of people they couldn’t explain how “order.TacoBell.com” is different than “TacoBell.order.com” and as such wouldn’t ever remember what order “k12” “nc” and “us” might go in.
Indeed, because the hierarchical nature of addressing conventions is a new thing.
Not sure if sarcastic or not. I think most people don’t think of a URL as an address in the way that a building has an address with a strict hierarchy of meaningful parts. I think people think of it more as an atomic long string of characters that the person who made the site labeled it with just by being the first to claim a certain URL.
You still have the "email can't get to Essex or Sussex" problem though.
They are lucky it isn’t quitmaga.gov.
Hopefully there's a Dem leader in Georgia who will jump in on the map changing game for this domain
The Pen Island Effect [0] is so strong I read the comment to mean that the writer was happy it was not the whole of government but a only particular town in Georgia was against Japanese comic books.
Some days I wonder if DNS was a colossal mistake. I have plenty of room for remembering numbers now that phones are dead. (Ignoring the ever looming never quite here ipv6.)
> Pen Island Effect
In my days it was referred to as expertsexchange...
> The Pen Island Effect [0] is so strong I read the comment to mean that the writer was happy it was not the whole of government but a only particular town in Georgia was against Japanese comic books.
LOL, no. Like I said, I personally don't care for manga/anime but I have nothing against others enjoying it.
My apologies, I didn't mean to claim you supported the town of Quitman's online jeremiad, but an appreciation that the effort was limited to one municipality.
My favorite is handynasty.net which is a great schezuan place here in philadelphia and totally not Handy Nasty.net
The ultimate remains that great pre-Stack Exchange site, expertsexchange.com. They had to rebrand to add hyphens.
My favorite (maybe apocryphal) has always been the Italian division of PowerGen.
powergenitalia.com
There was also childrenswear, therapist, speedofart, molestation, cumstore, lesbocages, teacherstalking, and a few others I no longer remember.
I understand most of these, but the original meaning of cumstore eludes me.
I first thought it was quitmaga.gov
As an insider revolt against Musk's shenanigans. lol
xD.gov
Someone needs some pocket cash I guess.
groan
Reminder: in 2007, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture issued a statement that they're "not in charge of Gundam" (because of a "scandal" where their employees were editing the Japanese Wikipedia page for it while at work).
US government domains seem a little over the place. I'm surprised by the number of courts and counties that have random .org and .com domains. In Australia, it follows a pretty strict structure: Federal: entity.gov.au State: entity.wa.gov.au (example for State of Western Australia) Local: entity.stirling.wa.gov.au (example for a local government in Western Australia),
So, for example, the Federal Court is fedcourt.gov.au as it's federal.
Strange how the US has such a mishmash.
I work with US state governments a lot. Departments treasure their .com domains because they can actually get updates to the zone file without having to go through months (literally) of repeated requests to get something added to the .<state>.gov/us domain. If a department or agency has to reach outside to the state IT department for anything the timeline doubles or triples. It’s a real problem.
Same for the enterprise (non-tech I assume) world. When I was on the business side, we treasured any compute we could get that was not tied to corporate IT. Going through them would turn a 1 day fix into a 2 week endeavor. Product development would go from 1 month to 6 or more.
You've found out a huge reason cloud took off so hard. Lots of it is shadow-IT.
Nobody except a few universities actually uses subdomains as they should be, where you actually delegate the subdomain to the business unit using it.
I tried to access gettysburg.edu the other day and was greeted by a stupid redirect page (with a meta refresh tag) insisting on use of www rather than just issuing the redirect immediately.
The reality is they're stuck in 1995 and won't make rational changes.
I think someone extremely rational is making a lot of big changes and I could not be more excited to see the outcome.
Yes. I remember the delight of deploying my first server with a credit card. The previous one had taken 6 weeks and $100,000 out of our department budget. Such a godsend.
Do you mean that all .gov domains are handled by the same dns service provider? I can understand if the TLD registry is a pain to deal with when it comes to changing information at the top, but zones files? The whole design of dns have delegation as a central feature so that the registry do not need to do everything.
I used to do lots of consulting work for various departments and agencies in the state I was in at the time. The biggest issue was that the state IT department wanted everything centralized, running on only department servers, using a single platform chosen by them (Vignette StoryServer). Most agencies found that to be too restrictive, especially since at the time Vignette only used TCL.
Even worse was the IT department's insistence that agencies sign a 99 year contract for cost sharing, the amount of which would never be known in advance since it would only be calculated quarterly based on all expenses the state IT department incurred hosting state agencies.
Just my $0.02 as a net/sysadmin for a small municipality in the US:
A big part of why we haven't been able/bothered to migrate to a proper .gov domain boils down to the amount of technical debt we'd need to pay back in the process of doing so. Everything that we do uses our non-.gov domain, namely our Office 365 connectors. On top of that, end users' day-to-day communications with the public make use of the existing domain. Modifying that in any capacity could prove disruptive to ongoing communications and potentially render them liable for dropping the ball somewhere. Not to mention that every single internet account ever created by staff using the current domain would need to be migrated or risk being lost forever.
Additionally, we're a small team. Only myself and one other individual would really have the technical knowledge to migrate our infrastructure. The opportunity cost involved would be massive. There are grants available to help us with this, but obtaining/using those can get complicated at times.
Ultimately, the pros just don't outweigh the cons enough to make a huge difference. From a purely academic angle, should we have a .gov TLD? Absolutely. In practice though, the residents and staff are familiar enough with the current one to render it a non-issue. The average non-technical user doesn't "see" "[municipality].[state].gov". They aren't familiar with the concept of a domain hierarchy at all. They just memorize "[municipality_website]" and move on with their day.
> They just memorize "[municipality_website]" and move on with their day.
I haven't even done that much, I couldn't tell you offhand the URL for my county government. I always just search in Google, which takes me right to the page I need (roads, solid waste, library, etc.)
> The average non-technical user doesn't "see" "[municipality].[state].gov". They aren't familiar with the concept of a domain hierarchy at all. They just memorize "[municipality_website]" and move on with their day.
That mean they can easily be redirected to a phishing website.
Absolutely, and that's a risk that we carry, especially in the public sector. That being said though, I don't know if adopting a better-regulated domain is itself enough to alleviate that.
The very unfortunate reality is that many (most?) users evaluate phishing attempts with the null hypothesis that "this is trustworthy". They are looking for evidence that something is wrong and assuming all is well if they don't find it. To that sort of user, the thinking goes something like:
* Some trustworthy sites use .com.
* My municipality is trustworthy.
* My municipality uses .com.
If you draw out the venn diagram, there's a clear gap in that line of thinking. That doesn't matter to someone's Great Aunt Linda though. She just knows that .com is what goes after Amazon and Google, so it must be good.
With that in mind, could using .gov help to protect those folks? To a certain extent. I can see the argument for keeping the more discerning few from getting scammed. For the broader group though, it won't change anything.
Offhand, the alternative solution that I'd offer would be providing clear communication standards to the public. Specifically, defining when, how, and from whom municipal notifications go out. Think of it like the IRS only sending physical letters; archaic as it seems, it makes it pretty obvious that an email "from them" is bogus. The clearer someone's understanding of where to find us is, the more optimistic I am that they'll get where they need to be.
> They just memorize "[municipality_website]"
Nah, even worse, they type “municipality” or some butchered typo of it into their browser, triggering a Google search, and click the very first link they see (sponsored or no) - so they can wildly easily be tricked into phishing websites.
Arguably we’re all victims of the decade or so when Google was so good at serving up the right site, so most people just got used to not knowing any URLs. People Google “YouTube” or “cnn” rather than type even the .com after those words.
IMO, poor website UX plays a big part in this too. People are far less likely to Google "[city] public works" if "public works" is a top-level menu item on the city website. When you first need to click a hamburger menu, hover over the "departments" entry, select "other departments", and then pick "public works" from the site header though, Joe Public is just going to do a search.
People type full domain names, including the .com, into Google, because they have no idea that the address bar on their browser even exists.
Yes, what really makes people like us cry is watching someone type in just the word Google into the ubiquitous search/URL bar, hit enter, click Google’s first result for Google which is google.com, then type “cnn.com” into the search field, hit enter, and then click an ad or result for CNN.
You say there are grants available, but given the current environment actually relying on those seems risky - even if you were actually to get the money up front it seems like it might get clawed back.
You are correct. This is a consideration at all levels of government currently, with faith in those grants' persistence varying based on an individual recipient's responsibilities.
> The average non-technical user doesn't "see" "[municipality].[state].gov". They aren't familiar with the concept of a domain hierarchy at all. They just memorize "[municipality_website]" and move on with their day.
You've just highlighted the problem. This is something every single human being in America should know, and arguably almost the entire world.
This falls directly under the rubric of Basic Computing Knowledge > Basic Internet Knowledge.
Every single time I see someone searching for "microsoft" or "apple" I immediately stop them and tell them, "You've already done most of the work. Microsoft and Apple are commercial entities. Add .com at the end, which is what .com means. Commercial. You're adding extra work for yourself."
Yes, a few people pop off at the mouth at which point I remind them ignorance is of a thing is easily remedied with a little give-a-damn, and saves everyone time and money.
Talk about a fucking miserable failure of education. I'm 44. I expected the generation 20 years younger than me to be impossibly skilled with computers to the point that I wouldn't hope to even match them, much less surpass them. Instead what we got was a world where we dumbed every goddamn thing down so even the most drooling moron can utilize it.
It's pretty disappointing, to put it mildly.
I think your view on the world might be a little skewed. Every human in the world needs to know how domain names work? What?
Everyone should know how phone numbers work too, no different
They should know the basic principles! For the same reason they should know what a noun and a verb is. For the same reason they should know that you can multiply something by 10 by adding a zero. When so much of our lives revolve around the Internet, basic literacy about its fundamental mechanics makes a lot of sense. The alternative is the world we live in now, where it’s trivially easy to scam people because they believe www.irs.gov.login.html.b3293.cn/login is functionally equivalent to www.irs.gov/login.html?b3293.cn
Imagine if people were this bad at counting, or at knowing the difference between US currency and monopoly money.
> so much of our lives revolve around the Internet
This was my core point, that this is true for you but is not actually true for everyone. To claim the entire world needs to know this when people get by just fine every day without being online or being on a device is absurd to me.
I wasn’t only talking about nerds. There are not a lot of people anymore who are not impacted by the Internet and who don’t usually use it.
And they don’t get by just fine every day.
People get phished and scammed constantly, in many ways that could be prevented if people had and remembered like a 2-week unit in high school on how the Internet works.
I’m not saying they need to understand even the fact that DNS converts names to IP numbers. Merely that it’s a hierarchy and how to trace responsibility (originating from the right side).
That’s no more difficult to grasp (if taught properly) than how to read the address on an envelope and understanding that “San Francisco, California” means a city in San Francisco located in the state of California.
Other lessons in the unit would include how email works including its lack of guarantees of authenticity. And finally, what encryption means and applying that knowledge to safe and unsafe ways of storing and transmitting information.
My county government started w/ a "co.Name.oh.us" domain name back in the late 90s. People in the government hated it. The complaint I heard most frequently was that the public couldn't get it right-- too many dots.
I was a fan of the ".co.name.oh.us" naming because it made logical sense. I could easily find any County website in the state. My intuition now is that anything logical (or, perhaps, just anything I like) will be hated by the public. >sigh<
The county moved to "NameCountyOhio.gov". It's 5 characters longer than the old domain name but isn't hated. The public still gets it wrong often, expecting it to be "NameCountyOH.gov".
Edit:
Okay, so I got this totally wrong. Chalk it up to poor memory for stuff 20+ years ago.
There's RFC 1480, first of all: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1480
The old County domain was "co.name.oh.us". I completely forgot the hierarchy was flipped for localities, with the locality being the higher level domain and the designation for type of locality (city, county, etc) being second.
For K-12 school districts, libraries, colleges, and others, the hierarchy comes first (like "name.lib.oh.us").
[countyname].co.[stateabbr].[ctld] is injecting ontological metadata into the data, which is bizarre.
Would be better to just get rid of the “co” layer.
There are separate hierarchies for cities (".ci.oh.us", school districts (".k12.oh.us"), public libraries (".lib.oh.us"), and probably others I'm not aware of. It seems like there could be name collisions between those different entities that would necessitate the additional layer.
Edit:
Per my parent comment I screwed this up and misremembered the hierarchies. The locality name comes first for localities, so you'd be looking at things like:
ci.medina.oh.us - City of Medina
co.medina.oh.us - County of Medina
medina.k12.oh.us - The Medina City School District
medina.lib.oh.us - The Medina County District Library
So far as I am aware, every US state is split into counties, and most entities (cities, districts, etc) exist within counties.
Maybe there should be a “falsehoods programmers believe about government structure” article, but I can think of very few exceptions.
“cleveland.cuyahoga.ohio.gov” seems like a logically guessable domain.
Oh, I agree. It's logically guessable and the right hierarchy. It'd also never fly. >smile<
> So far as I am aware, every US state is split into counties...
re: falsehoods - Alaska has no counties. Louisiana has "Parishes". Connecticut and Rhode Island have counties but no county governments. Also, see Townships.
Sometimes I think our country would be better understood as 50-something separate countries, kind of like the EU, except without the general goal the EU has of increasing amounts of cooperation and convergence. Since in America, everything that’s different from one place to another is generally different because somebody very influential wants it to be. As programmers I feel like all this inconsistency drives us crazy because it seems pointless, but as a citizen, I can see how it would be a tremendous waste of effort to try to force national standardization merely for standardization’s sake when we have so many real problems that need to be addressed.
Virginia is another edge case here, where cities aren't part of counties and are directly under the state. If you look at a map, you'll see holes in a bunch of counties where the cities are, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_counties_...
> Connecticut and Rhode Island have counties but no county governments
This breaks my brain.
And even where everything seems the same on paper, different states can handle things wildly differently.
Some the counties run almost everything except where a large city is, some the county does almost nothing, and everything is tied to whatever the biggest town is.
I'm always a little bit angry that New York calls Townships Towns.
All of these are tiny exceptions compared to the vast number of counties within US States. However, reality is made of exceptions! All things considered, it is interesting and important to have local exceptions in a nation IMHO.
New York spans five counties, which lack county governments, instead having borough governments subordinate to the city government.
Washington, DC is a city which is in neither a state nor a county.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._municipalities_... has a hundred or so cities that span counties.
it turns out, cities are among the least well-defined geographical features in local government of the USA. There are many odd and unusual arrangements at the city level. The US Census maintains a collection of more clearly defined entities.
I can think of lots of exceptions to the part about substate public entities existing within counties; CA, for instance, has quite a number of JPAs and similar entities that involve multiple counties, or entities from multiple counties, for some purpose; e.g., The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, etc.
You can't get rid of the "co". It's needed for disambiguation.
For example, here in Texas, the City of Dallas is located in Dallas County, but they are separate things. If you want to pay a parking ticket that you got in the City of Dallas, you need to go to the city's web site. If you want to pay your property taxes, you need to go to the county's web site.
Also, the City of Austin is located in Travis County. There is an Austin County, but it's 100 miles (160 km) away. The only connection is that they are both named for Stephen F. Austin.
Interesting. Here in CA we have a few fused “City and County of X” governments. In those cases, the borders are one and the same, and there is only one governmental entity in charge of it. Mostly, this is convenient.
Actually I just looked at the original post, which indicates that both oh.gov and ohio.gov exist. Ohio.gov actually works.
So countyname.ohio.gov would be perfect.
The city of Medina Ohio, Medina County Ohio, and the Medina City School District have entered the chat.
County: medina.ohio.gov
City: medina.medina.ohio.gov
From brief googling, the school district is subordinate to the county, not the city, despite its name.
medinacityschools.medina.ohio.gov
Or
cityschools.medina.ohio.gov
Or
mcc.medina.ohio.gov
Or
bees.medina.ohio.gov
What would you do for the City and County of San Francisco? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco
Do they get two separate websites?
(I’m not OP but) Since there is only one entity, you would probably create a simple website redirect for the redundant lower level, and keep everything (web, email) at the domain (the one that would have been a “county” anywhere else). E.g. sf.ca.gov
> medina.medina.ohio.gov
I love this so much.
It makes me sad that Buffalo, NY is in Erie County. That could have been great.
That's the genius of having states, counties, cities, towns and villages that are almost entirely decentralized. When an evil force takes over the government and wants to rule the whole country, they can't, because nobody even knows how a single tiny village is organized. Complete disorganization and inefficiency as a defense against tyrrany. (or, well, at least, slowing it down)
I swear 'defence against tyranny' is the justification for every ridiculous thing the US does.
Have you been following US politics lately? Right now there is an election denier in a cabinet position. It’s partially a good thing that elections are controlled by states as some protection.
That just proves my point. All that obsessing about preventing tyrants, and you still end up with one. Maybe if, as a culture, you spent less time poring over quotes from eighteenth-century political thinkers to divine the best possible theoretical form of government, and more time solving concrete problems faced by real-world people, this wouldn't have happened.
The Westminster system is looking very 'worse is better' at the moment.
> The Westminster system is looking very 'worse is better' at the moment.
The same one that just today got Apple to remove E2E encryption from iCloud, so it could get backdoor access to people's data?
I beg to differ. Centralization is bad. IIRC, it's what's enabling Musk to do so much damage so quickly, and the UK has more of it.
Culture's a funny thing. Extremely hard to change, very hard to predict or control. Based on my understanding of history, almost all cultures fail.
The ones that have lasted the longest have been taken over by foreign empires and despots, but persisted nonetheless. Others were taken over and converted to some other culture, or died entirely.
Want a really long-lived culture? Look at Egypt, India, Persia, China. Want a culture that resists outside influence? Probably Egypt, maybe next India, and then Rome - but the former were conquered, and the latter died.
(I'm a shit lay-historian so please somebody correct me)
If you look at the evolution of life on this planet, it's never really clear what's a "superior" lifeform until you look at it for a few hundred million years. Crocodiles looked like the dominant lifeform for a pretty long time, but even that ended. Our cultures are absolutely infantile in the grand scheme. We can come up with ideas and try them out, but there's no telling what works long-term. Only future generations can judge.
Are you proposing we create a government position for Musk and promote him into it so he can officially have no power? I think I'm on board.
How does it work, does one have to consent to become king or can we just sort of make it happen?
The majority of the people in the US want the current situation. Between the fear of the country becoming minority-majority,losing “traditional American values”, and protecting pets from being eaten by Haitians, they see Trump/Musk as their last hope.
Admittedly, it didn’t help that the DNC re-enacted “Weekend at Bernie’s” with Biden for two years.
No, a plurality of people voted for the current situation. Not a majority of people, not a majority of voters (many of whom didn't vote, or weren't able to vote), and not even a majority of people who voted (49.8%, and no you can't round up).
Also, voting for slate of candidates on one day in the middle of a billion-dollar multi-year misinformation campaign, does not equal "want the current situation". I agree that an egregious number of people are actively cheering for the current chaos, but let's not give them more psychic power than the institutional power they are already wielding.
The DNC keeps itself alive on a steady diet of fantasy that the bloc of nonvoters agrees with them and hates the Republicans, which if true would make the Democrat orthodoxy a robust majority in opinion, even if not in actual elections. Yet everyone outside the DNC echo chamber knew Trump would likely sail to victory over their hilariously unpopular candidate, yet the nonvoters didn’t lift a finger to try to prevent it. I think most of them don’t think either party is serious about anything actually important to them. Of the people who have an opinion, a lot more wanted the current outcome than wanted whatever the Dems were selling last year.
A little chaos is probably healthy at this point — we can’t grow government forever, and now the ideas that actually have popular support will have to be enshrined in actual permanent law instead of operating solely by the old gentleman’s agreement that we never cut any government program ever, since that agreement has been torn up and thrown out now.
> Right now there is an electric denier in a cabinet position.
There's a whole lot more than one. Remember that when Republicans win, the results aren't "denied" but the Democrats sure do cast a whoooole lot of doubt on the proceedings (i.e., "well yes they won but voter suppression, I'm just saying...", "well yes they won but Russian Facebook propaganda, I'm just saying...", "well yes they won, but hanging chads, I'm just saying...").
I'd say "election denial" comes in degrees...
Newt Gingrich outright chastised the Republican governor of GA for making voting more convenient in minority neighborhoods was going to increase the chance of Democrats winning. He said the quiet part out loud.
Not to mention that in Texas, student IDs issued by public colleges aren’t legal IDs to vote. But gun permits are.
Of course there is Russian interference on social media. Not that I think it makes a difference.
Complaining about any of those things though and saying that’s why Trump won is crazy looking at the numbers. He won fair and square. Both of those things can be true.
> Not to mention that in Texas, student IDs issued by public colleges aren’t legal IDs to vote. But gun permits are.
I'm going to take a wild guess here and assume one of those IDs can be obtained by non-citizens and the other can't, not sure what your point is here.
The ID presented when voting doesn’t have to itself prove citizenship if things are being operated in a sane fashion. Voters have to already be on the voter rolls to vote, and if they’re letting noncitizens register that’s the real bug. You should be able to vote with any ID that proves you look like a certain person named on the rolls. Someone who isn’t a partisan hack would probably want to just give poll workers pictures of all acceptable* “local” IDs issued by trustworthy institutions to be sure that people aren’t DIYing IDs. Banning school IDs is just trying to suppress the young vote, as people 18-22 are far less likely than older people to drive than they used to be, especially in urban areas.
And I say this as an independent who has walked away from the Democratic Party because I hate the DNC, not an “immigrants rights activist” or something.
*acceptable should mean they are real cards with at least a basic security feature, not a laminated thing you could print at home.
> I'm going to take a wild guess here and assume one of those IDs can be obtained by non-citizens
100% not relevant. Think about it: a driver's license is a valid form of ID for voting in Texas (https://www.votetexas.gov/voting/need-id.html).
A Texas driver's license can be obtained by non-citizens (https://www.dps.texas.gov/sites/default/files/documents/driv...).
So, I'm not sure what your point is, here.
Yeah... and it's largely worked. That's the reason it's employed in the first place.
> When an evil force takes over the government and wants to rule the whole country, they can't, because nobody even knows how a single tiny village is organized.
As we're seeing right now this isn't true. Everyone is afraid because the current federal executive doesn't give a flying f..k about norms, including telling people "comply with what DOGE wants or get fired" or drawing up lists of "Government Gangsters" [1]. And so, everyone is bending over in fear of getting in the crosshairs, getting government spending contracts cut, getting fired, getting death threats like Fauci, or getting extorted to buy ads on Twitter [2].
Side rant: where are all the "don't tread on me" gun nuts that have arsenals rivaling what would be a special forces unit in smaller countries?
[1] https://rollcall.com/2024/12/09/trumps-pick-to-lead-fbi-iden...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-linda-yaccarino-x-...
> As we're seeing right now this isn't true.
It's absolutely true. My county and state government has not changed. My kid goes to the public school, which has not changed. Indeed some of my state officials are suing the federal government.
State and local governments provide many services of enormous importance: schools, police, fire, roads. The President is not ruling all of that.
The problem isn't who provides it, it's where the funding comes from.
If the local school is 90% funded by local taxes, they can ignore the state and federal government for quite awhile.
But if it's only 10% funded directly by local taxes, and the rest (even if coming from the locality!) is funneled through the state and/or federal government, then they can be squeezed on the money side.
Fair point.
For the past few decades, though, it feels like we’ve been locked in a permanent war between two opposing factions that barely admit each other’s right to exist, let alone to disagree, with the goal of forcing federal government policy to agree with, alternatingly, the “left” or the “right” orthodoxy and for the feds to force those ideas on the whole country.
Wouldn’t it be more productive to just massively cut federal taxes and obligations, and let Republicans live in Republican controlled states and let Democrats live in Democrat controlled states? Then the state governments can raise taxes and be able to use their taxpayers’ money as they see fit.
This way, if you want any category of government goodies, from single-payer healthcare to fixing the roads, you only need to convince your fellow state residents to pay for and tolerate it, and the people you don’t trust from far away can’t block you.
The federal government has only shown any particular skill at operating the military (no one’s dared to invade us since 1812!). Maybe we just let them handle that, plus uncontroversial standards and maybe make trade agreements. Let states handle the rest.
> State and local governments provide many services of enormous importance: schools, police, fire, roads. The President is not ruling all of that.
A lot of that hinges closely on cooperation with the feds, and the Trump admin has repeatedly said they will go and target "sanctuary cities" - so much for states rights.
In doubt, the federal government will pull off another drinking ban - the age for drinking is 21 because the federal government threatened to retract highway funding many decades ago, and that was explicitly ruled to be constitutional [1].
Do not think even for a single second that you are safe from the impact of the Trump admin even if you live in a deep blue city in a deep blue state.
In doubt, your daughter might not be able to access plan B any more (or your son stuck paying child support) because, of course, that one is on the target list as well, or your trans kid might not receive the care they need because the federal government plans to ban that as well, and if it's just by banning federally active insurances from covering the cost for such treatment. Or if you're Black and your kid needs to take ADHD meds? Say goodbye to your kid [2].
You all are anything but safe, but by the time you realize it because it starts finally affecting you and your loved ones, it will be too late. Take that warning from a German and heed it because we actually lived through that and learn about the time of 1933-45 and the years leading up to it in school!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...
[2] https://wordinblack.com/2025/02/rfk-jr-black-kids-adhd-drugs...
> Side rant: where are all the "don't tread on me" gun nuts that have arsenals rivaling what would be a special forces unit in smaller countries?
They won the election?
Gun nut and republicans have overlap but aren’t the same group.
Quite a few are really into Libertarian values and hate Republican stances on a wide range of issues.
> Quite a few are really into Libertarian values and hate Republican stances on a wide range of issues.
Mostly abortion and to a lesser extent the "war on drugs". The rest is seeing especially Musk's blatant self-dealings [1] and teardown of "big gubmint" as something laudable.
"So This is How Liberty Dies, With Thunderous Applause"
There’s far more fundamental disagreement between the parties than that.
Libertarians strongly oppose government intervention in the economy like farm subsidies or specific tax cuts for specific industries. The Reputation party says it believes in free markets, but it doesn’t act that way.
The gap between Republican stated goals and actual policies is really stark. I think it mostly works because so few people dig into the details, but some people get really disillusioned.
Yeah, it's not "Don't tread on the executive branch". Quite the opposite.
Luckily they are not the only ones with guns.
Probably out celebrating the shrinking of government, which is one of their core desires, if not their top desire.
…while uploading their ID’s to government mandated databases in order to watch the trans porn they want to completely outlaw, in the same of small government?
Nah, they just dropped the pretense. Small government was always code for “leave me alone and make those people suffer.”
In that world, we should store that in a blockchain for more efficiency, rather than a csv file.
The whole point is for it to be disorganized and flexible. A blockchain is way too organized and rigid
otoh, a blockchain is also immutable unless you take out the entire thing, you can't just alter previous transactions without invalidating subsequent ones
You can't access the blockchain when the power + internet are gone.
Very true, and also true for the compared technology, csv. In a larger sense, the two are complementary and wouldn't be mutually exclusive.
My state has a telecommunications network that was responsible for bringing the Internet to schools and libraries in the 90s. As a result many of these institutions were assigned domain names under ia.us, which the network controls on behalf of the state. The state government gets the state.ia.us subdomain, libraries got their own second-level subdomain under lib.ia.us, schools under k12.ia.us (private schools under another level pvt.k12.ia.us, although their website now lists that as pvtk12.ia.us; my elementary school domain of the first form still resolves), community colleges cc.ia.us and so on. I didn't know better at the time and assumed the whole US was organized that way. In any case no one liked having johnd@excelsior.pvt.k12.ia.us as their email address so most of the schools bought a second .net or .org domain.
I know my high school moved off the ICN T1 service in the early 2000s, but it looks like the domain records are still maintained, as the old address still resolves correctly.
Edit: see EvanAnderson below I didn't realize this was ~formalized as an RFC and actually was relatively standard across states, I assume for the same reasons very few public entities were using these hierarchal addresses as their primary by the time I really got online in the mid 2000s.
URLs are a part of the UX of websites. The domain often represents the first interaction between the user and the site. Domains that follow a strict hierarchical structure that aligns to some real-world hierarchy may not be the best first interaction with the user, or at least not in the opinion of those that are creating the site.
So, I think it’s natural for site owners to want this freedom. Then it comes down to whether there should be constraints forced on them or not by policy for some greater good. In the US, generally, central planning on this type of stuff isn’t really part of the culture.
Oh I thought you were going the exact opposite direction with that reasoning. A hierarchical url is good because it immediately establishes trust and provenance. Currently I never know whether I’m dealing with a for profit entity pretending to be governmental, or actual government.
But maybe that is part of the culture?
To technical people, sure. I don’t think the average person knows about provenance rules of subdomains though and how it’s useful… it’s more just a bunch of symbols they don’t care about.
And we understand the threats here… a very real problem is someone forgetting to renew one of these .org or .com domains (maybe the person that maintains it retired) and a malicious actor grabs it after expiration, stands up a scraped copy, and uses it to collect parking ticket payments or whatever.
I was actually thinking a bit more about the diversity of domain names under .gov, though I realize now that the parent comment I replied to was about .org and .coms. I think you get a bit of those provenance assurances if they are under .gov, as a practical matter it’s harder for malicious actors to own one of those than one under other tlds. And then instead of forcing a strict taxonomy that is mostly for the benefit of the infrastructure maintainers (very enterprise software), there is freedom to use a name that makes the most sense for the target user.
No, people need to learn how the Internet is organized and named. It's the same as learning the Dewey Decimal system so you can navigate your local library.
It should be taught in school exactly the same way. It's more important in the year 2025 to know that, than it is the Dewey Decimal system, which is still taught in a majority of schools for some reason.
People should know what it means to be connected to a .gov, .com, .org, .edu, .net, .mil site, etc. I know we have a lot of new TLDs, but knowing the originals should be a bare minimum. This isn't rocket science, hell, most of these domains are almost self-explanatory even as three letter codes.
Nobody knows the Dewey Decimal system, they know subject/author/title hierarchy at best, and even then given the ambiguity in subjects they often resort to the computers or librarians to search the catalogue and get directions.
The .gov TLD was only for the Federal government in the past, it was opened up later to state/local governments. By then, some had already had <something>.<state>.us, or some other TLD. Most probably thought it was too troublesome to migrate over. That and the fees were more than any other gTLD (though not now).
Canadian domain names in the 90s also followed this newsgroup-like syntax: <website>.<city>.<province>.ca
At least one site (transit.toronto.on.ca) still has an active domain in that format, even though it’s not operationally-related by the City of Toronto.
It’s quaint that folks wanted to root their web presence in their physical world.
Like ouac.on.ca.
Tangential: toronto.edu redirects to U of T.
Major early 1990s vibes and the woody smell of the graduate computer labs.
Hopefully I get to go to Toronto lol.
> Strange how the US has such a mishmash
We have so many subdivisions, and in many/most cases there's no accountability (by design) from one level to the next
Feds can't force states to use .gov addresses, and most states don't force counties or cities to use whatever the state's top level is. Some do, or try to encourage, but it's like herding cats and when there's 50 states and a couple thousand counties, and then tens of thousands of cities that all have varying levels of authority to enforce anything on the next level down it's never, ever going to be uniform for us
It isn't really that strange, it mirrors how decentralized and fragmented government in the US actually is.
The most amusing example is https://gooutsideandplay.org/ which doesn't look like an official government website at all. And yet it's the official website for county parks in Santa Clara county. Anywhere in the world one can go outside and play and yet this vanity domain is restricted to Santa Clara county parks.
There was a period right when lots of entities decided that they needed a web address where the US government was making an effort to get everyone who wasn't the federal government (including local and state governments, federal contractors, etc.) off of .gov and stop new non-federal registrants to .gov (I don't think it lasted long, but I distinctly remember it occurring), there was a defined hierarchy for local governments under .us, but most local governments weren't aware of it, and I'm not sure the registrars they went to dealt with .us domains, and people ended up just doing whatever...
I can understand some local government official "I don't know how to validate things to get a gov ... but I do know how to register a domain" and it's .com.
Then they should use this amazing tool we have that contains damn near the entirety of accumulated knowledge of Humanity called The Internet.
You don't even have to search any longer. You can literally ask a conversational AI, like this...
How would a local government official obtain a domain name with .gov for their governmental office?
ChatGPT said:
A local government official can obtain a .gov domain for their governmental office by following these steps:
1. Verify Eligibility .gov domains are restricted to U.S. government entities, including federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial governments. Local government agencies, such as city or county offices, are eligible. 2. Choose a Domain Name The domain name should clearly reflect the governmental entity (e.g., cityname.gov or countyname.gov). Avoid abbreviations or acronyms unless commonly recognized. 3. Obtain Authorization The request must be authorized by the highest-ranking official of the government entity (e.g., mayor, county administrator). They will need to submit a letter verifying the legitimacy of the request. 4. Submit an Application Visit domains.dotgov.gov to apply. Create an account and complete the application form. Upload the signed authorization letter. 5. Await Review and Approval The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reviews all applications. If approved, the domain is registered, and the office will receive account credentials. 6. Configure DNS and Website Once the domain is active, configure DNS settings. Set up email services and website hosting as needed. 7. Maintain Compliance Ensure the domain is actively used for government purposes. Keep contact information updated to prevent domain suspension. There is no cost for registering a .gov domain as of April 2021, since it is funded by the federal government.
There is literally no excuse for not knowing what to do in the year 2025.
Not the best instructions given. I'd erase it all and simply say: Go to https://get.gov/domains and hit the "Start a domain request" button.
Looking at the list I wold assume that the majority of those are not the "primary" domain, and indeed if I click around randomly, most of them redirect to somewhere else.
That hierarchy exists for US states. It just is rarely employed because politicians and administrators don't know how the Internet works and insist on vanity domains that can't be easily discerned from scammers.
It makes it pretty difficult to tell whether your parking ticket is a phishing attempt.
I assume that this is the result of a few quirks here in the US
- Lots of things came online in the US before ccTLDs were common, and are still rare for US based orgs
- US states have quite a bit of freedom in how they communicate with their citizens.
- US states vary greatly in services provided and population (from ~600,000 up to ~40M)
It’s not terribly difficult to get a gov domain, it’s just much easier to do an ordinary one. Smaller towns and cities outsource to cheap WYSIWYG type builders that also include a domain so it’s really simple to just go that route too.
It can get quite unprofessional at that level. There was a small suburb in our metro whose .com domain was an insult against the core city. I'm sure they thought it was funny but eventually it did get changed to the town and state name.
Wait until you see the situation in Germany. Everything uses just a normal .de domain, no special TLD for government institutions at all.
It’s awful, really. Some domain names are so awfully chosen, they sound like scams. Take the government program for financial support to students, called BAföG. Here’s a bunch of domains related to that:
* bafoeg.de
* bafoeg-digital.de
* bafoegonline.bva.bund.de
Q: where you you think can you order that letter?
a) Bundesdruckerei.de
b) personalausweisportal.de
c) pin-ruecksetzbrief-bestellen.de
d) bmi.bund.de?
Healthcare billing in the USA has gone this way. You're going to see emails from my-doctor-billing.com directing you to hospital-pay-site.biz and they're all totally legitimate.
It's nuts.
The equivalent for the UK is https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/list-of-gov-uk-do...
(I helped open that up when I was there.)
The parish council websites seem to have a lot of freedom to run their own standards. Lots of WP and shall we say 'nostalgic' web design!
Given how many parish councils are just a bunch of biddies, be thankful they even have websites.
Having served on a parish council there can certainly be a technology challenge for some.
There are services which will do the work - https://cuttlefish.com/local-councils/ - https://www.parishcouncil.net - are two of many. These have their drawbacks, may not provide exportable data so locking the council in. Some will allow direct access, some require that any new content be sent to them and they upload it.
Some councils will own their domain name, some will not. Then there is the email issue and many will use a gmail / hotmail address.
Cost, especially these days, is also a factor.
I don't see it as a bad thing to have so much variety though.
Our local parish council don't have SPF, DKIM or DMARC set up so every single meeting is just a back and forth of "well I didn't receive that e-mail"
Our local parish spent literally years arguing about removing a dog poo bin from a park
Critical infrastructure projects require proper due diligence.
Let's hope they don't want to paint the bike shed!
something something Chesterton's fence
TIL a new word!
One thing that British local government definitely is NOT, is consistent. 500 years of continuous monarchic rule means the backbone of the State is a rickety Rube Goldberg machine, riddled with absurdities and obsolete entities that change every few miles. What you mention is the tip of an iceberg as big as Greenland, where every other town or region is administered in fundamentally different ways for no particularly good reason beyond "that's how it's always been".
For all their centralist instincts, the Westminster classes fundamentally don't care about how the provinces go about their business, as long as they keep paying into London and act adequately subservient whenever the Southern classes come knocking. So we have to live with constitutional aberrations like Cornwall and Lancaster.
There are over 10,000 of them, many absolutely tiny.
For those like me who want know how the page was built. It's using https://githubnext.com/projects/flat-data/. You can cycle through commits and files. Love it.
Example of another such pages: https://flatgithub.com/the-pudding/data?filename=boybands%2F...
It felt a bit like datasette and no wonder it's the inspiration as well
I struggled for some time how to maintain data in repository. Initially stored them in a JSON files (1k per file). This, eventually, became tedious.
In the end I just redistribute SQLite file now with the data. It is easier for the "user" to use ready database than a set of files.
If you are only interested in the neat table UI check: https://github.com/githubocto/flat-ui
Seems like this is missing quite a few :) https://www.merklemap.com/search?query=*.gov&page=0
Exported to use the same viewer as the other list:
https://flatgithub.com/barre/all_dot_gov_domains?filename=al...
The list in your link includes all the subdomains, so I can't really tell if it's more complete than OP's list.
Here is an interesting diff:
https://github.com/cisagov/dotgov-data/compare/57e66bcb0fccc...
dei.gov redirects to waste.gov. It's a PHP site with only a password entry form.
WordPress nevertheless.
whitehouse.gov is also WordPress
This is far from an exhaustive list of the .gov domain. Perhaps it is only the ones managed at the Top level. For instance, Texas.gov is listed here, but none of the subdomains are. For example gov.texas.gov, house.texas.gov, senate.texas.gov, comptroller.texas.gov, etc...
Interesting list. I geocoded the data and created an interactive searchable map of the sites - https://ramadda.org/repository/a/dotgov
Not every. Bart.gov is missing.
(I found it in the data source, but not on the website that was linked to.)
Yeah based on the linked document, it's missing about 1000 apex domains based on the .gov zone export from today. Even the current-full.csv on the latest commit in github is short about 1000 apex domains.
$ cat 2025-02-21-gov.txt | cut -f1 | uniq | wc -l 13345
But nevertheless, I like seeing it made easily available on github!
For a few years I’ve been operating the EveryDotGov bot; formerly on Twitter, formerly on Mastodon, now on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/everydotgov.bsky.social
Why did you stop posting on Mastodon?
botsin.space shut down.
I registered and currently manage one of these .gov domains. Registration took some time, but it was an interesting process and felt pretty cool once it was finally provisioned!
Give it a week and see how many of them are taken down in the name of "efficiency"
The moment .gov is opened to the public, I'm squatting as many domains as I can grab. Fill your boots! It's raining marks!
And with your X.gov premium subscription you will get your blue checkmark and are recognized as a real government entity.
I use a jokey ".gov" domain for some of my home IT stuff. I always said wistfully that I'd never actually be able to get that domain name. There's a glimmer of hope now that I actually will be able to (albeit I expect my family and I will be sent to a re-education / extermination camp before that happens).
The wast majority of those domains are either redirects or do not resolve at all, which is what I got when randomly testing them. I would expect that many of them are also be parked at dns service companies.
They could apply some efficiency but it would be terrible in term of cost savings. There doesn't seem to be a registration costs (at least not that I can find). DNS service companies might take a $0-50 fee per year per domain? It is a very small number in a very large budget for a government entity.
it's a good thing to spring clean, just like it's generally a good choice to change life habits and lose weight. humans get lazy or preoccupied and need to alter the "normal" state they get into that could be unhealthy or not as productive.the government is ran by humans as well, it's no surprise that it's gotten shoddy in some areas and some shuffling and fear has been injected to correct this in government operations and spending.
it won't all be fair or kosher for sure and some of the layoffs were already stated as mistakes publicly and jobs offered back to some(though not very many surprisingly). with that being said, i hope even you see a surprising amount of what has been uncovered is clearly bad?
I'm not sure what parts you're referring to as "clearly bad" because so far I haven't seen any examples of that. What actually seems "clearly bad" is the random stripping of funding with little to no research into the knock-on effects.
The only example I've seen that is potentially is a good move is removing the penny from circulation, but of course that has its own pros and cons.
well, im a tech bro american living in miami, from poor alabama to a bigger-city life and mid-income from basically working in IT infrastructure and datacenter operations. i've worked my way into some kinda something and worth basically through savings and working a lot of hours and also now operating in a leadership role for a $20B privately owned company. i myself know first hand wasteful spending and putting in minimal effort would have never afforded me where i have gotten today. i lived with roommates, bad neighborhoods in altanta, birmingham, all to save money and get by and build myself up to where i needed to be. so my 1st hand experience or anecdotes will highly sway my own viewpoints, so im saying all of this to say i will not be without bias when it comes to accountability and wastefulness.
now with that all being said, when i see contracts like this:
"Telephone Based Mindfulness Training to reduce blood pressure in black-women" $2million(https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_47PH0825C0001_474...)
"South Sudan Gender Aware Sustainanable Water and Sanitation": $40Million (https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_72066821C00009_72...)
State Department Spending on Social Media Influencers:$4M (https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/FESTIVUS-REP...)
Just some random example of currently killed or going to be killed contracts....I feel like all I had to do is have friends in government to basically just suck money off of the people while adding nothing back to society as a result of it. There are hundreds to many thousands of discovered "projects" and funds with these type of numbers. This is a plague in my viewpoint and does nothing to benefit society and move the needle, which engineers so pride themselves in doing...
Helping destitute people get water and sanitation seems like giving to society. It's very typical and likely very effective foreign aid. Probably it got picked here because of "Gender Aware", as if sanitation having gender-related issues is somehow weird.
Your link to the blood pressure reduction project is linking to something totally else, but in general such approaches seem to have some scientific backing. Improving public health seems like benefiting the society.
I wonder how many engineers really benefit society with their work, and how many even actively harm it.
https://bmccardiovascdisord.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11...
Sometimes viewing the world through your own lens is harmful, as you've learned here from the thoughtful replies to your comments. If you haven't traveled to places like South Sudan, haven't been black, and have no real understanding of the psychology of propaganda, then your responses are reactive and uninformed. It's a less-well-understood version of the "deleting" of USAID -- a tiny financial impact even there, but immense human suffering and loss of trust as a result. It's the lack of understanding of the average citizen that has resulted in this emotional, baseless movement we are witnessing.
I don't know about the mindfulness thing. But If at least want to hear about it before cancelling it. The others though are positive to me.
Water and sanitation are a HUGE issue in developing countries. It's a main disease vector. It's also very common in many places that women have to practically sneak out of the village at night to go to the bathroom (some field) and get raped. Given anything I've heard about South Sudan I'd need surprised if these issues didn't exist there.
Third one is a positive surprise. Propaganda is clearly of increased importance in this century and we must fight the fight.
That's the interesting part about their comment, is that they've instantly assumed that these are pointless contracts based on name alone.
Without looking into it you can't just assume that mindfulness training doesn't have a proven clinical effect on blood pressure, and if it does then it's a good use of money. Preventative healthcare is still healthcare
Blood pressure reduction and water and sanitation both sound like genuine issues though (I don't know what the social media one is about so I couldn't comment.
Do you actually know that those are pointless contracts or are you just making assumptions based on the titles?
I'm confused, I thought we were talking about laying off federal employees. Now we're talking about contracts?
There is waste in every org, but what they are doing is the equivalent of deleting files that contain the word "diversity" in them instead of going through and actually reading the files. Because that would take time and patience. It's a low-brow sledgehammer approach and is hurting people inside and outside the organizations in government. E.g., people handling nuclear safety. It's not just throwing out the baby with the bathwater, it is throwing babies, adults, scalding hot bathwater out onto the people that it was supposed to help.
These tech-bro-americans with very little experience with science, biotech, helping other people, international relations, understanding of how institutional knowledge works, or grant funding cycles and NIH works, are dismantling key infrastructure. It's worse than dumb it's much more terrifying.
To the degree that those contracts represent something farcical, they are a symptom of an upstream problem in decision-making. Is that upstream problem something that can be addressed? Or is the amount of error [0] within an a margin whereupon eliminating it costs more than dealing with it?
0. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
yeah man, you got yourself out of the salt mines of Alabama. So time to pull up the ladder, right?
> "Telephone Based Mindfulness Training to reduce blood pressure in black-women" $2million(https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_47PH0825C0001_474...)
The link you provided indicates funds were for repair to some bridge at port of entry in TX - "YSLETA, LAND PORT OF ENTRY PAVEMENT REPLACEMENT REPAIRS PROJECT, EL PASO, TX AWARD WAS MADE WITH LOW EMBODIED CARBON FUNDING"
> "South Sudan Gender Aware Sustainanable Water and Sanitation": $40Million (https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_72066821C00009_72...)
"tech bro American" doesn't want clean water for people in Sudan and promotion of basic hygiene practices.
https://dt-global.com/projects/afia-wash/
> State Department Spending on Social Media Influencers:$4M (https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/FESTIVUS-REP...)
There's so much wrong with this source material. It is so biased.
All of these "killed" contracts you deem as wasteful yet turn a blind eye to the _billions_ that public companies pour into stock buybacks. Minimal investment back into the company. This only helps _rich_ cunts and foreign investors.
Stock buybacks aren't inherently evil or immoral. They are just like issuing dividends, no difference, and are the reason companies exist: to return value to their equity holders for the equity risk they bear.
They could be a sign of a lack of better projects for the company to invest in.
There's likely something to be said about tying stock buy backs to more stock options for employees, but it'd have to be voluntary rather than regulated.
There's definitely something to be said about CEO compensation relative to worker wages. But that's a civil society discussion, not a government regulation one.
And finally capital gains taxes being lower than income taxes is morally reprehensible, but this one will take quite a bit of work to undo without destroying the US economy due to capital flight out of the country once the law changes
Why can't both points be true at the same time?
Because one of the points is false. A priori, you're right: there could be hideous waste in this area. There probably is, even. But you haven't provided examples of it, and there's no real reason to assume that the wasted effort would be obvious at a glance.
i guess elon can't run companies and detect inefficiencies, voters should trust this anon internet user instead!
Elon breaks almost every promise he makes and has constantly been proven wrong on the claims he's made in the past month. It astounds me that someone not connected to him would trust him at all
Does he actually run companies?
This is a genuine question; he’s the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, Boring Company, the CTO of Twitter, and the owner of several more companies.
If he’s running five or more companies, and trying to run a government department, how involved can he actually be with running any individual one? They can’t all be full time jobs.
I've heard rumors that at least one of his companies has team whose job is to distract him.
I haven't been a fan of his since he called the cave divers pedophiles for not using his stupid submarine, but I at least thought he actually did stuff.
But with the recent case where he bragged about being in the top 20 Diablo players in the world, only to find out that he paid people to level his character up for him, makes me think that maybe he doesn't actually do anything. I mean, he's bragging and lying about something that does not matter.
No one really cares if the CEO of your spaceship or car company or brain-implant company is good at video games. If it turned out that everyone saw he was bad at Diablo, approximately nothing changes (and potentially people like him even more if he's a good sport about it and laughs it off!), and yet he felt it was important to construct a lie around this so he could brag.
If he's going to brag about a completely insignificant false accomplishment, why should I assume that he's going to tell the truth for stuff that people would actually care about? At this point, I'm erring on the side of "Musk doesn't do anything outside of providing initial funding".
Maybe I'm wrong, that's certainly possible, but he really killed a lot of his credibility.
I think Elon employees a lot of people who sit around and think of ways to be Elon in the most annoying extreme ways possible, then they run it by Elon, Elon nods, and they go do it.
I'm not american, I just genuinely haven't seen any clearly beneficial moves yet
PS. Your green username gives you away
Let’s imagine a Fortune 50 corporation wants to improve efficiency and audit its books for fraud.
Should they:
1) Hire professional auditors and business consultants to perform the undoubtedly massive review;
2) Ask the CEO of one of their suppliers to do the review as a fun side gig, let the CEO bring in a tiny team of teenage whiz kids, and give them full god mode access to the company’s books and databases and HR systems so they can fire anyone at will and ask questions later?
The approach chosen by America’s chief executive is bafflingly #2.
It’s worth noting that Trump has no experience managing a large corporation. All his businesses are partnerships with very few employees. He has no competence for this kind of thing, so he’s delegating everything to Musk who is the proverbial fox in the hen house, shutting down regulators who affect his own businesses.
> Trump has no experience managing a large corporation
And the little experience he has is of repeated bankruptcies and dodgy dealings, saved only by his political adventures (which now bankroll his Mar A Lago resort with public money).
Being on HN and someone posting a pro-consulting firm post is...rich...
Yes. Many times hiring experts is 100% the correct approach. Getting a rando with next to no experience or knowledge of the product to spend an hour looking before making sweeping changes isn't
Both options are a consulting firm, one just has experience and expertise, the other is DOGE.
To be honest, I’d choose the door #2 anytime.
How do you guys go about doing this? Is there some techy/reverse engineering way or you manually asking each department which domains they have?
There are a variety of ways!
Some TLDs gives you open access to just query the DNS and do an AXFR (download the whole zone), for example the .se and .nu ccTLDs (which I happen to work for the foundation managing those): dig @zonedata.iis.se se AXFR > se.zone.txt
For some zones you could use NSEC traversal https://linux.die.net/man/1/walker
For the new gTLDs (.app, .dev, .xyz, etc, etc) there is the Centralized Zone Data Service provided by icann: https://czds.icann.org/home where you can request access to zones.
So there's the possibility of some .gov TLDs being missed, like secret CIA stuff. Or the guy that commented on here that he uses a custom .gov for his home servers.
The custom .gov for his home servers doesn't exist except in his home network. You can put absolutely any domain in your home network that you want.
And the TLD .gov doesn't exist except on the internet. Similarly if there's a .gov in some CIA intranet, does it exist or not exist? That's a metaphysical question
I would want to do .gov.zw
How would I know if they have open access?
Even if there weren't official records, you'd probably be able to get a list of most of them out of the certificate transparency logs (Obviously that would just miss out the non-https enabled ones - less of those these days).
There are also Whois DB services, that will provide you with all domains on a given TLD.
It’s probably the non SSL ones that nefarious actors would find really interesting in the list, as who knows what else is up with them.
I suspect the non ssl ones aren’t holding anything particularly useful at this stage though.
Did you open the link? The the very top says Data Source: https://manage.get.gov/api/v1/get-report/current-full. Public API provides them all, this is just a website to more easily view that data.
You can download a list from here too: https://github.com/cisagov/dotgov-data/blob/main/current-ful...
They’re all listed in a csv at cisa, or at least a lot of them.
This info is provided by the registrar
The title should mention that it is for the US only.
The United States owns and operates the `.gov` domain, US only is implied.
No one else uses the gov TLD. Gov.xx maybe, but that’s a different TLD.
classic us defaultism. "the government" and no specifying needed
At the time .gov was defined, the entire DNS system was a US military project on the ARPA-Internet. It was neither global nor publicly accessible at the time.
This is a predominantly US site, run by a US business. There's other nationalities on here, which is great, but it's going to be US-centric.
Feel free to take it up with ICANN.
well we literally invented the internet, so...
Wild that there hasn’t been some sort of standardization yet.
Current:
Proposed:
{name}.{county|city|parish…}.{2 letter state abbreviation}.gov
- albany.county.wy.gov
- albany.city.ga.gov
- albany.city.ny.gov
- albany.city.or.gov
Then can easily distinguish between local, regional, state, and federal resources.
Local resource:
- parksandrec.albany.city.ga.gov
Regional resource:
- cad.albany.county.wy.gov
State resource:
- senate.ny.gov
Federal resource:
- fbi.gov
- nsa.gov
As a citizen, would make it very easy to find what you are looking for. Plus the added benefit of trust with .gov. Reduces the risk of our vulnerable citizens (elderly) getting phished.
Hard to standardize after decades of use. Each of these are well known to the public, referenced everywhere. Changing this would be painful and the benefice is not evident.
Why can't those sites just use a 301 or 308 and just change material going forward
Email, non-web content, 30 years of usage..
What do you do about Springfield Township(1) and Springfield Township(2)?
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Township,_Burlingt...
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Township,_Union_Co...
Point being that government is messy and exists to cover _all_ cases, not the common case.
Them having their own nearly random URLs that doesn't differentiate them is not a better solution.
I don't think they're "nearly random", they're just inconsistent. And it's a better solution because it works today and doesn't require a central authority to manage (and when you're talking about the tens of thousands of distinct government bodies in the country that central management overhead is the thing to optimize)
If the problem is inconsistency, and you want to fix that, you'd need to propose a solution that can be consistent, otherwise you still have the same problem.
springfield.burlington.nj.us and springfield.union.nj.us something like that
Note that Burlington County already has
I can tell you don't work in the government because you are surprised at the notion of a federated state lacking unity.
I took a shot at standardizing just a health domain: <city>.<state/district>.<country>.medicare.dev. example: Medicaid.dev -> https://marina-del-rey.ca.us.medicaid.dev/
Medicare diff so
- https://samhsa.medicare.dev/
- https://phm.medicare.dev/
- ...ok but .. no.. humans fight to the death over authority.. there is a tension between expansion and structural consistency.. physics has concepts of entropy! .. creative assertion: a growing system will never be completely in sync with itself.
Reading the other comments, you can see how much influence "engineering" and "orthogonal design" actually have.. not much.
Perfect librarianship of living entities has benefits, but overall seems unrealistic IMHO.
Are there government domains in the USA that don't live under ".gov" or ".mil" top-level domains? In Germany it is all over the place. For example the official website for federal elections is "bundeswahlleiter.de" and "bundeswahlleiterin.de" depending on whether the election manager is male or female.
If DNS were invented by German speakers, then requests would have a field for noun case...
Now you have me wondering how the cyclades protocol is different from IP. Presumably the protocol rejects malformed packets even if they would be still parseable, and they would additionally berate them in the reply code.
they could have solved this with a Nigerian tld bundeswahlleitu.ng and then shared it with the other German speaking countries :)
bundeswahlleitung.de would be fine
There's a quite comprehensive list of them here:
Yes, plenty, even for the federal government. There's nothing that compels government entities to use .gov.
A few I can think of:
"Trust" is a pretty compelling reason.
Probably worthwhile to start piping the contents of these into a private archive.
archive.org should already have this
where is doge.gov
It's there, under doe.gov and above dohfireca.gov in the full list when sorted alphabetically.
Is there a similar source for .edu ?
I have the zonefile for .education but not .edu =(
Many of those URLs could use subdomains, especially the state level ones.