The National Design Studio Is a Scam

Sites like these that bury articles like this sure aren't helping. What our administration is doing is beyond just political, it's immoral, dangerous, and plain old fascism. This submission will be flagged within the hour.

>Will the nation be worth a fragment of what it was

America was worth something during Biden's days?

What is happening in the US now has happened in other developing countries in the past.

The US will be paying for this for decades. For reference, in the Philippines, the effects of the Marcos regime still resonate some 50+ years later, and the changes imposed by it (and the corruption as a consequence of it) have solidified and have become normalized up to the present day. There is no going back.

Why would I ever go to a Microsoft store? To buy a Windows CD?

AirBnb has one dark pattern that I'm aware of, that I absolutely despise: the search listings don't display the actual price, but instead the price minus the fees (so not what you'll actually pay). Thankfully some jurisdictions made this illegal (e.g. if you use the Australian AirBnb website you'll get the actual prices), but it's a horrible pattern presumably designed to get people to commit to initiating a booking and thus less likely to not proceed when they see the final total.

I have zero faith that anyone who was okay with that should be in charge of anything for the public good.

> In a local mall, we have an Apple Store on one end, and a Microsoft Store on the other.

I had to check if I had opened an old thread. Microsoft closed all of its stores in Jun 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Store_(retail)

> But the Apple Store is always packed, and the Microsoft Store is always empty.

Perhaps because more people associate Microsoft with software and Apple with hardware? Also there are way more stores selling Windows-based hardware equipment compared to Apple stores.

hero

As mentioned in the piece - the designers at 18F were explicitly following the UKs lead here and were attempting to do just that before being DOGE’d in favor of some political hacks with no understanding or appreciation of the task at hand.

Former CTO of a country here. Anything GDS did filled me with deep envy: it was beautiful and made so much sense and I had none of it at my disposal. Then Brexit. I was there in GDS offices a few weeks after the vote and the organization was being dismantled under my very eyes. See, the trick with such endeavors is not what you can drive centrally, it’s what you can make others implement. Reporting to the Man is a good way of creating pressure, but as the current examples in both UK and US show, you can’t sustain that pressure for, say 30 years. Also, centralization neither scales very well nor is democratic as it centralizes control and removes responsibility from the service owners. So how do you have something placed fairly low in the government working horizontally effect meaningful change in other organizations? Have tried it in a few countries, have a few answers and many questions, AMA.

They are using a non-Arial font which already makes them better than 90% of what you see online.

envy isn't necessary for legitimate critique you know

the author didn't write anything like that

It's poorly written but you've misread the intended meaning. It says that they learned from illicit transactions on Craigslist. And then wanted to replicate that on their own platform.

They've edited a correction:

> They realized money could be made, and built a website to let other people do the same thing, through them, not Craig. Good on them, but renting a space is regulated differently than selling a used couch for many good reasons. What you could once attribute to the same quaint naivety of setting up a lemonade stand, you can no longer. The people who funded them knew better, and eventually, so did they.

When politicians of certain stripes wanted to spend money on renaming SF schools to atone for "past trauma" and canceling math because it's "not equitable" - that somehow wasn't a travesty. Spending some money on design is apparently the most evil thing imaginable though.

Thankfully the tiger moms of SF stood up for their kids and got the grifters kicked out. Let's stand up to lowbrow idiotic articles like this one too.