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zen death robot posted:He'll slime his way back into our hearts, so it is done At some point you could shuffle them all to keep us on our toes. I look forward to the maple grandpa's big speech at the GOP convention - it'll be yooge. As for those emails (Indictments any day now, just you watch): How much classified information was from public sources? If it's classified and you quote a NYT article that has it, is that email now classified?
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May 25, 2016 09:54
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Am I the only one who reads this thread because I actually want to read about US politics? I guess it's a bit more novel for a non-American, but I do find it fascinating. Seems like lately every single discussion that comes up is met with "UGH can we talk about literally anything else", and then eventually the topic changes and "UGH can we talk about literally ANYTHING ELSE". Now even disussion about the presidential election is considered off-limits for the thread? I don't get it, but I guess I don't have much reason to open it anymore.
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May 25, 2016 10:06
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Periodiko posted:
More filter goodness.
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May 25, 2016 10:08
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Gustav posted:Am I the only one who reads this thread because I actually want to read about US politics? I guess it's a bit more novel for a non-American, but I do find it fascinating. Seems like lately every single discussion that comes up is met with "UGH can we talk about literally anything else", and then eventually the topic changes and "UGH can we talk about literally ANYTHING ELSE". Now even disussion about the presidential election is considered off-limits for the thread? I don't get it, but I guess I don't have much reason to open it anymore. There's discussion and then there's goons being pedantic about discussion.
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May 25, 2016 10:31
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Dead Reckoning posted:The congressional hearings were a partisan farce, and I'm sure they were extremely disappointed to have shot their wad before evidence of actual wrongdoing came to light. The FBI investigation is still ongoing, so I'm not sure how I can be "reopening" that. Even if they conclude that no laws were broken, I can still think that what she did demonstrated an appalling lack of judgement from someone who wants to be President. And the FBI? Just a farce too? Y'know I'm not really surprised this argument is coming from a guy who praised that cops recent acquittal while at the same time ranting about how all suspects complain about injuries/being unable to breathe before being shoved in a police van. I think we all know who the actual partisan hack is. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 25, 2016 11:31
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CommieGIR posted:And the FBI? Just a farce too? It makes sense because the only thing less flimsy than the email case investigation is the BPD's usual "investigation" to effect an arrest The academy unironically taught my brother how to manufacture probable cause which is or maybe now was an integral part of the crime fighting effort in the city (literally just catalog every black person via an arrest for future reference)
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May 25, 2016 12:06
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Holy goddamn hell, did no one notice Vince Foster oh my god.
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May 25, 2016 12:19
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silvergoose posted:Holy goddamn hell, did no one notice Vince Foster oh my god. It was me Austin! It was me all along!
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May 25, 2016 12:29
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Rappaport posted:It was me Austin! It was me all along! Had to quote just to make sure nothing got wordfiltered to Austin. 
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May 25, 2016 12:32
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silvergoose posted:Had to quote just to make sure nothing got wordfiltered to Austin. i am not good at this but I think it could be used for Jeff Weaver
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May 25, 2016 12:34
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CommieGIR posted:And the FBI? Just a farce too? Wait what, is someone making the "he unreasonably hated cops so much he broke his own spine to make them look bad" argument here?
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May 25, 2016 12:37
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DemeaninDemon posted:Any of the white dudes who ran. Trump is a hair squig who ate its host's brain, but I'd still take him over Cruz or Huckabee.
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May 25, 2016 13:43
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Cythereal posted:Trump is a hair squig who ate its host's brain, but I'd still take him over Cruz or Huckabee. I agree. The other two would destroy our nation and build a theocratic empire out of the ashes. Death is preferable to that.
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May 25, 2016 13:50
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Harik posted:At some point you could shuffle them all to keep us on our toes. I look forward to the maple grandpa's big speech at the GOP convention - it'll be yooge. I think this is Hillary's secret strength: tons of people who have grown to adults hearing all this pearl clutching about the Clintons.
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May 25, 2016 13:52
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ok am I gonna have to be the rear end in a top hat who asks what caused the new filters?
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May 25, 2016 14:10
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Waffles Inc. posted:ok am I gonna have to be the rear end in a top hat who asks what caused the new filters? Endless, circular, boring election arguments.
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May 25, 2016 14:13
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Waffles Inc. posted:ok am I gonna have to be the rear end in a top hat who asks what caused the new filters? ZDR's drinking habit Nessus posted:I think this is Hillary's secret strength: tons of people who have grown to adults hearing all this pearl clutching about the Clintons. Also it seems silly to filter all of the candidates names and not filter an overused phrase like pearl clutching.
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May 25, 2016 14:15
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Aesop Poprock posted:I didn't see it in the last 5 pages but that Texas woman Mary Lou Rutner who was running for a state education post lost in the runoff. She was the one with all the crazy rear end conspiracy theories like Obama being a gay prostitute, that the Boy Scouts were a homosexual organization, encouraging all parents to homeschool their children to avoid indoctrination etc. She had earned the most votes in the primary but didn't get enough to avoid a runoff. A lot of people are crediting a bunch of school superintendents calling her out on just plain making poo poo up at a meeting with them, which caused one of her main Tea Party-related backing groups to drop support of her days before the election. She reminds me of my little brother, who not only lies a lot, but lies really really badly.
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May 25, 2016 14:17
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Aesop Poprock posted:I didn't see it in the last 5 pages but that Texas woman Mary Lou Rutner who was running for a state education post lost in the runoff. She was the one with all the crazy rear end conspiracy theories like Obama being a gay prostitute, that the Boy Scouts were a homosexual organization, encouraging all parents to homeschool their children to avoid indoctrination etc. She had earned the most votes in the primary but didn't get enough to avoid a runoff. A lot of people are crediting a bunch of school superintendents calling her out on just plain making poo poo up at a meeting with them, which caused one of her main Tea Party-related backing groups to drop support of her days before the election. https://twitter.com/lsqnews/status/735458816418971648 Gay Hitler yes! Gay Obama no!
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May 25, 2016 14:19
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Aerox posted:Government attorneys still generally write and file everything in unreadable, often unconvertible, insanely old-rear end unsupported versions of WordPerfect. This is why we should restructure government so everything runs through contractors. They do the job government employees do but do it much better and are much more adaptive. Keep the government employees around as supervisory or policy-making only, have contractors do literally everything else.
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May 25, 2016 14:22
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axeil posted:This is why we should restructure government so everything runs through contractors. They do the job government employees do but do it much better and are much more adaptive. Keep the government employees around as supervisory or policy-making only, have contractors do literally everything else. Speaking as a government contractor, this is a goddamned terrible idea, if only because the first people the contracting companies would hire would be the government employees being 'replaced', so now the government has the same people with the same problems doing the same things, but now they're paying 50% more in overhead to a contracting company. If you're actually serious about this idea, realize that you're basically asking for any institutional knowledge within the government to get wiped out every four years as one contracting group gets replaced by another, and for every office to spend six months out of every four years doing practically nothing as the entirely newly hired staff gets up to speed on what its job should be and how it should do it.
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May 25, 2016 14:29
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Nessus posted:Clintons. ZDR I demand this be filtered to Wet Willies.
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May 25, 2016 14:29
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Eschers Basement posted:Speaking as a government contractor, this is a goddamned terrible idea, if only because the first people the contracting companies would hire would be the government employees being 'replaced', so now the government has the same people with the same problems doing the same things, but now they're paying 50% more in overhead to a contracting company. Institutional knowledge? What about next quarter's profits?
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May 25, 2016 14:38
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Eschers Basement posted:Speaking as a government contractor, this is a goddamned terrible idea, if only because the first people the contracting companies would hire would be the government employees being 'replaced', so now the government has the same people with the same problems doing the same things, but now they're paying 50% more in overhead to a contracting company. I actually am serious. You retain institutional knowledge by ensuring every contract is set up with a very robust transition plan. The quality is entirely dependent on the skill of the contracting officer. If some contract has a lovely transition you blame the contracting officer, and if it gets bad enough you fire them. I'm also a big fan of making it way easier to fire/demote/remove employees who suck. Plus, if you force everyone to compete on best value instead of best price, you could actually get some innovation in government, instead of having people  that they're getting rid of LotusNotes or some other lovely system that no sane person would use in 2016.Since federal hiring reform will never happen, this is the only way I see of fixing the issue of staffing our bureaucracy. As an example of this, when I worked as a federal bank regulator, we spent three years trying to hire an economist (GS-15). Every single time we would either: a) get candidates not meeting the actual criteria we needed because USAJobs was worthless at filtering, b) get candidates who met the criteria but were unable to actually do the work when we interviewed them or c) get candidates who we offered to who ended up taking another job because the private sector was able to finish the whole hiring process in weeks while it took us months from interview to offer because of lovely government HR policies. The best part of this was the HR people got mad that we had to keep re-posting the listing, not realizing that their utter lack of ability to hire anyone with technical knowledge was why this kept happening. And I'm not even touching the pay issue, where most GS-15s can jump to the private sector and get paid an addition 30-50% doing pretty much the same job. The Federal Bureaucracy is utterly broken. I'm not even touching on what's going on in terms of IT/infrastructure. It's a complete mess, and sadly no politicians are running on any kind of plan to fix this beyond dumb soundbites because it's not a very sexy problem.
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May 25, 2016 14:42
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With wide bipartisan support, Louisiana is set to add police officers as a protected class under state hate crime laws.
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May 25, 2016 14:45
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axeil posted:I actually am serious. You retain institutional knowledge by ensuring every contract is set up with a very robust transition plan. The quality is entirely dependent on the skill of the contracting officer. If some contract has a lovely transition you blame the contracting officer, and if it gets bad enough you fire them. I'm also a big fan of making it way easier to fire/demote/remove employees who suck. Right, so the answer is to burn it all down because you were inconvenienced once. The whole "contractor" poo poo is poorly worded code for "race to the bottom". Want even more inefficiency? Set it up so that only contractors are hired and then you'll magically wind up with a shitload of middle managers who are "managing" "contractors" and "contracts". It's a grifters wet dream.
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May 25, 2016 14:48
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Luigi Thirty posted:With wide bipartisan support, Louisiana is set to add police officers as a protected class under state hate crime laws. So are they going to apply the actual standards hate crime laws require to demonstrate a hate crime was committed or are they just going to assume any crime committed against a police officer is oh son of a bitch I nearly finished without cracking up.
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May 25, 2016 14:49
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Luigi Thirty posted:With wide bipartisan support, Louisiana is set to add police officers as a protected class under state hate crime laws. Because committing a violent crime against a cop already doesn't already involve getting hosed by the giant, unlubed fist of justice.
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May 25, 2016 14:53
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DemeaninDemon posted:Because committing a violent crime against a cop already doesn't already involve getting hosed by the giant, unlubed fist of justice. Tom Cotton had some interesting things to say last week about how lenient the US is with suspected criminals.
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May 25, 2016 14:55
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axeil posted:I actually am serious. You retain institutional knowledge by ensuring every contract is set up with a very robust transition plan. The quality is entirely dependent on the skill of the contracting officer. If some contract has a lovely transition you blame the contracting officer, and if it gets bad enough you fire them. I'm also a big fan of making it way easier to fire/demote/remove employees who suck. Things are bad, but your solution is terrible. Listen, I speak from experience - in the Department of Defense, we do exactly what you're looking for because so many positions are filled with military people on assignment for 2 years. And nothing you're proposing works. No one writes good transition plans. No one who comes in actually gives a poo poo about transition plans, because they didn't write them, so why should they trust them? And even the best written, most followed transition plan still won't actually carry over the knowledge of what needs to be done, who the real power players are, what the real needs are, etc. Also, you're assuming that Contracting Officers aren't universally the people least interested in their jobs and most ready for retirement, which is 90% of them in my DoD experience. As for your other point, competing on "value" sounds great, except in sequestration and budget cut times, it still means competing on price because no one has the money they want. Yeah, sure, every once in a while it goes to a middle-priced contractor over the absolute lowest bid, but how on earth do you say "will bring innovation" when it doesn't actually correspond to that. You "bring innovation" by putting stipulations in the contract and budgeting for it, not by hiring different people. Finally, I find it highly suspect that because you didn't know how to write an accurate job description and get it passed through HR, the correct response is to regularly fire everyone so that no one knows how to get things through HR anymore.
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May 25, 2016 14:59
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Phone posted:Right, so the answer is to burn it all down because you were inconvenienced once. Not if you change the default proposal valuation from "best price" to "best value" and get much more rigorous about only hiring firms that have consistent high ratings in their annual performance review. As to your first point, this is not me being inconvenienced once. Any agency that requires highly specialized knowledge (basically all of them) are completely unable to hire or retain those employees because of how lovely the hiring process is. Wanna know why the 08 crisis happened? Because the only bank examiners the regulators could manage to hire and keep around were the lovely ones. Wanna know why there keep on being cyber breaches? Because the IT folks they hire aren't the best ones around. The Federal government should be hiring the best people, not the few good people who are willing to jump through hoops or the ones too incompetent to get hired elsewhere.
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May 25, 2016 15:02
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Eschers Basement posted:Things are bad, but your solution is terrible. We did write an accurate description. People either gamed USAJobs by putting in invisible keywords or they were doing high GS-level work at other agencies and applied and the system kicked them through because "hey she's a GS-14 with 10 years of experience so she's clearly qualified." I'm talking from a civilian perspective, so maybe things are different on the defense side, but I can't see any way of reforming the system from the inside. This would let you actually change things up without fighting OPM or Congress. edit: quote isn't edit, I'm an idiot.
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May 25, 2016 15:06
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Eschers Basement posted:Things are bad, but your solution is terrible. FYI axeil is the real democratic base.
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May 25, 2016 15:06
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Mr Hootington posted:FYI axeil is the real democratic base. The Democrats should stand for effective government that works instead of playing the game on the Republicans' terms. Not sure why you're insinuating this is a bad thing. 
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May 25, 2016 15:09
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Luigi Thirty posted:With wide bipartisan support, Louisiana is set to add police officers as a protected class under state hate crime laws. Remember that police unions are trying to make this Federal as well so think of this as ground zero and it isn't going to stop. It's the next logical step from vilifying all minorities as inherently dangerous to police; the police are the actual victims of hate crimes.
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May 25, 2016 15:10
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What if . . . we ran the government like a business and made it efficient because it would synergize with the free market? Ill take my 2 million dollar contracting fee, thanks! Look at all the money i saved by hiring value experts to manage our efficiency experts managing our short term contract hires that are all 1099 workers.
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May 25, 2016 15:11
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axeil posted:The Democrats should stand for effective government that works instead of playing the game on the Republicans' terms. Not sure why you're insinuating this is a bad thing. Never insinuated anything. Just informing Escher that you are representative of the democratic base. Be proud of yourself.
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May 25, 2016 15:13
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Shbobdb posted:What if . . . we ran the government like a business and made it efficient because it would synergize with the free market? I never said run the government like a business. Do you have an actual argument or are you just going to spew bullshit business jargon? Mr Hootington posted:Never insinuated anything. Just informing that you are representative of the democratic base. Be proud of yourself. Thank you. I am proud. The Democrats are Cool and Good (most of the time) and I'm glad I'm a part of their mainstream.
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May 25, 2016 15:13
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axeil posted:The Democrats should stand for effective government that works instead of playing the game on the Republicans' terms. Not sure why you're insinuating this is a bad thing. No a dumbshit with delusions of good ideas. Same as the Republican base, only your reasons why your ideas are good are different.
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May 25, 2016 15:16
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axeil posted:I never said run the government like a business. Nah you just want to privatize it. Do you also want to sell of assets? Maybe open federal land to development?
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May 25, 2016 15:17
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