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SUPPORT AR TROOPS! SUPPORT AR TROOPS!! Another GOP lie exposed.
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Nov 15, 2018 19:16
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It only really ramped up in 2005 with Bush II's attempt to privatize social security (a big reason Republicans lost the House in 2006), and was a front-and-center issue for the "deficit" attacks on Obama. The public didn't really get the 'starve the beast' strategy at the time of the Bush II tax cuts, or the Reagan tax cuts. They get it now.
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Nov 15, 2018 19:16
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evilweasel posted:It only really ramped up in 2005 with Bush II's attempt to privatize social security (a big reason Republicans lost the House in 2006), and was a front-and-center issue for the "deficit" attacks on Obama. The public didn't really get the 'starve the beast' strategy at the time of the Bush II tax cuts, or the Reagan tax cuts. They get it now. It's true the public didn't get it before, but I really think Democrats need to hammer home that Social Security and Medicare were passed by democrats, opposed by republicans, and hammer that every single election.
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Nov 15, 2018 19:18
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VH4Ever posted:SUPPORT AR TROOPS! SUPPORT AR TROOPS!! Was it this bad under Bush, with the VA scandals and such? I remember hearing about it but I was too young to understand. "Use of Force: Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson’s Long Record of Justifying Police Misconduct and Shootings" by Andrew Fan and Sam Stecklow for The Intercept.
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Nov 15, 2018 19:20
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VH4Ever posted:SUPPORT AR TROOPS! SUPPORT AR TROOPS!! That lie has been exposed multiple times. Shifty Pony posted:The Republicans in Congress repeatedly saying in September and October that we need to look into cutting Medicare and Social Security due to the massive budget deficit was also a pretty huge help in exposing the con. Oh the GOP was not making a mistake. They were talking to the people with the big checkbooks.
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Nov 15, 2018 19:20
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VH4Ever posted:SUPPORT AR TROOPS! SUPPORT AR TROOPS!! When Donald insulted a gold star family the veil was lifted and surprising absolutely no-one Republicans didn't care. They still shouted "support our troops you unpatriotic traitor" while their leader farted away. You would think Donald not giving a flying gently caress about World War I casualties would be a big deal for them but they only "care about the troops" insomuch as they can shout at other people about "not caring about the troops".
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Nov 15, 2018 19:38
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Madkal posted:When Donald insulted a gold star family the veil was lifted and surprising absolutely no-one Republicans didn't care. They still shouted "support our troops you unpatriotic traitor" while their leader farted away. You would think Donald not giving a flying gently caress about World War I casualties would be a big deal for them but they only "care about the troops" insomuch as they can shout at other people about "not caring about the troops". Specifically, the GOP cares about the military and the military-industrial complex. The actual people in the military are irrelevant and inconvenient.
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Nov 15, 2018 19:41
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Madkal posted:When Donald insulted a gold star family the veil was lifted and surprising absolutely no-one Republicans didn't care. They still shouted "support our troops you unpatriotic traitor" while their leader farted away. You would think Donald not giving a flying gently caress about World War I casualties would be a big deal for them but they only "care about the troops" insomuch as they can shout at other people about "not caring about the troops". They became traitor military as soon as Donald attacked them. It's purely tribal.
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Nov 15, 2018 19:43
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Madkal posted:When Donald insulted a gold star family the veil was lifted and surprising absolutely no-one Republicans didn't care. They still shouted "support our troops you unpatriotic traitor" while their leader farted away. You would think Donald not giving a flying gently caress about World War I casualties would be a big deal for them but they only "care about the troops" insomuch as they can shout at other people about "not caring about the troops". its been obvious from day 1. the idea that you can support the troops while also supporting 2 pointless wars based on lies has always been absurd. also what happened with Max Cleland.
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Nov 15, 2018 19:45
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Lightning Knight posted:Was it this bad under Bush, with the VA scandals and such? I remember hearing about it but I was too young to understand. the VA's payment processing has been hosed up for a decade if not more, it's all old as hell and needs to be replaced but it is more or less unfixable by our current bureaucracy
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Nov 15, 2018 19:47
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I think I read somewhere that the other issue with the VA is that actually transferring over to a modern system is practically impossible because they have this Hodge podge network of computers with different databases that all basically communicate with each other through intermediary computers . Also some of the code is so old no one knows what the gently caress it does. https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/03/vista-computer-history-va-conspiracy-000367 Here's a interesting story about the VAs hospital and medical computers. Hollismason fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Nov 15, 2018 |
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Nov 15, 2018 19:51
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Hollismason posted:I think I read somewhere that the other issue with the VA is that actually transferring over to a modern system is practically impossible because they have this Hodge podge network of computers with different databases that all basically communicate with each other through intermediary computers . this is one of the most significant obstacles that escalates the problem from "extremely complicated but doable" to "holy poo poo" but it's not like the system is magically going to upgrade itself or get better over time the first step would be to conduct a detailed forensic computer science reconstruction of the whole system and how it works since it's been build as a patchwork of systems over the entire lifespan of modern computing and a project on such a scale might be unprecedented
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Nov 15, 2018 19:53
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luxury handset posted:the VA's payment processing has been hosed up for a decade if not more, it's all old as hell and needs to be replaced but it is more or less unfixable by our current bureaucracy Here, have a 5 year old special report about it: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part1 I can't find it offhand, but in one of the followups about this there was a bit about how some information had to be printed out, walked across the building, and re-entered by hand. Because it's sensitive payroll information, only people above a certain rank and with security clearance could carry it. We've been paying some very capable people a lot of money to walk back and forth between two offices in the Pentagon.
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Nov 15, 2018 19:59
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The IRS also has obnoxiously old computers. I remember reading that some big portion of the IT infrastructure is a holdover from the KENNEDY administration. Edit: Article on subject. https://money.cnn.com/2015/02/03/pf/taxes/irs-budget-cuts/index.html Lol at COBOL. My dad was like the COBOL master lmfao. Hellblazer187 fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Nov 15, 2018 |
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Nov 15, 2018 20:49
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luxury handset posted:this is one of the most significant obstacles that escalates the problem from "extremely complicated but doable" to "holy poo poo" but it's not like the system is magically going to upgrade itself or get better over time The same issue is present in a lot of other systems across the government too. I believe the systems used to manage federal employee retirement and calculate pension benefits is also absurdly archaic and overburdened to the point that people looking into retiring are encouraged to have several months of living expenses in cash equivalent accounts to ride out the delay. In many cases commercial software solutions just aren't anywhere close to what is needed and the government ends up paying out the rear end for custom stuff. In my opinion we really need a Federal IT Bureau or something that would handle upgrades, judging which commercial solutions are appropriate to adopt, and writing specialized software when needed for various other departments.
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Nov 15, 2018 20:50
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Hellblazer187 posted:The IRS also has obnoxiously old computers. I remember reading that some big portion of the IT infrastructure is a holdover from the KENNEDY administration. I sadly do not have the article handy but there was a mind blowing report not too long ago about how the US Government is paying Microsoft millions of dollars to maintain a custom version of Windows XP because they don’t want to change lol.
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Nov 15, 2018 20:51
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Deteriorata posted:+1 more D in the House
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Nov 15, 2018 20:55
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Shifty Pony posted:The same issue is present in a lot of other systems across the government too. I believe the systems used to manage federal employee retirement and calculate pension benefits is also absurdly archaic and overburdened to the point that people looking into retiring are encouraged to have several months of living expenses in cash equivalent accounts to ride out the delay. The veteran's administration is only now digitizing the paper files which track veteran's disability claims. At one point a big chunk of the warehouse where the files are kept, burned. Those veterans are hosed. That's actually better than most military billing though because at least raw paper files can be digitized. Most military salaries are run through multiple proprietary essentially undocumented systems from the 1970's that have literally been determined to be prohibitively difficult to upgrade. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part1 https://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part3 quote:To fix that, the Defense Department has launched 20 or more projects to build modern business-management systems since the late 1990s. At least five were subsequently killed as complete failures after billions of dollars were spent on them. Nine projects now under way or already implemented carry an estimated total cost of $13.9 billion to build and operate, according to the Defense Department comptroller’s office. All of those in use can’t do everything they were supposed to do and are hooked to legacy systems they were supposed to replace. quote:Q: What’s preventing the Pentagon from being audited? edit: D'oh that's the article y'all are discussing, I didn't read up far enough Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Nov 15, 2018 |
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Nov 15, 2018 20:55
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Deteriorata posted:+1 more D in the House Now to watch as some people take this result to sing the praises of RCV and others (including the loser of this very race) swear that RCV corrupts the voters' intent and blah blah blah.
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Nov 15, 2018 21:01
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Lightning Knight posted:I sadly do not have the article handy but there was a mind blowing report not too long ago about how the US Government is paying Microsoft millions of dollars to maintain a custom version of Windows XP because they don’t want to change lol. it's not that they don't want to change, but that they have to maintain backwards compatibility for increasingly aged systems. the entire process of bureaucracy and consistent record keeping is almost the complete antithesis of startup culture and starting fresh and new with the most current technology/practice every few years. this is a big issue in healthcare too - i used to work for a software company which had to maintain backwards compatibility with IE8 in the year 2016 because a large chunk of our client base were large government/healthcare institutions which straight up told us that if they couldn't use our software in IE8 then they wouldn't use our software. and it's not because doctors love old browsers (they do, but that's another story) but because the need to deal with the complexity of medical records means it's much harder to move fast and adopt new technology https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their-computers Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Nov 15, 2018 |
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Nov 15, 2018 21:03
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https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/11/15/ken-starr-trump-mueller-attack-tweet-newday-vpx.cnn when Ken Starr is telling you to shut the gently caress up about the Mueller Probe. Sadly much as he was a gently caress stick back in the 90's he's right on this one. Nobody besides MAGA's really loving care about Trump's self-inflicted legal problems and it doesn't help the nation to constantly hear his droning repetitive opinions on it every other day. Quit loving whining for a second and just do your job. This is literally how I'm going to remember the Trump years, just the ceaseless loving impotent whinging and whining on twitter like a 12 year old that just lost 10 League matches in a row.Also "screaming and shouting at people and going absolutely nuts in a disgrace to the nation"....is he summarizing the content of his twitter account out loud? Literally the only person looking like a raging gently caress nut in all of this is Trump. Kale fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Nov 15, 2018 |
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Nov 15, 2018 21:06
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Kale posted:https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/11/15/ken-starr-trump-mueller-attack-tweet-newday-vpx.cnn Hey, show some respect. Ken managed to achieve his life-long ambition of getting someone fired for inappropriate sexual behavior.
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Nov 15, 2018 21:07
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Deteriorata posted:Hey, show some respect. Ken managed to achieve his life-long ambition of getting someone fired for inappropriate sexual behavior. I'm just amazed how few opinion pieces there are on how loving whiny the guy is and how pathetic it looks as an image to portray American strength and values abroad, which is usually what an elected leader is supposed to do in a Democracy. Like it's by far been his dominant personality trait as President. Just literally the whiniest public figure let alone President I've ever seen in my life by leagues. I used to think it was Rob Ford (former mayor of Toronto) who complained fairly often about surveillance and being hounded on his property by the media during his tenure but Trump eclipses him since he does it all the loving time. Every single day it's just wake up, watch Fox News and just whine, lie and exaggerate in ever increasing hysteria about how everyone is out to get him and that's basically the National Agenda of the United States through two years. Everyone just must know how much they're all out to get me and how mean they are, then we can worry about the other poo poo on the GOP agenda......maybe. I think back to I believe it was John Oliver pointing out how the guy goes completely against the John Wayne imagery the GOP base is supposed to idolize in the big strong silent type that takes care of their business but shuts the gently caress up while doing it. I didn't realize how relevant that was going to become once he was elected.
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Nov 15, 2018 21:19
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3RHnKYNvx8
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Nov 15, 2018 21:20
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Lightning Knight posted:I sadly do not have the article handy but there was a mind blowing report not too long ago about how the US Government is paying Microsoft millions of dollars to maintain a custom version of Windows XP because they don’t want to change lol. That doesn't seem that mindblowing, windows xp embedded still has just regular old support till 2019 as a current OS and custom extended support is a thing you can just get if you have premier support, it's 250 dollar per computer and caps out at 250,000 for 10,000 computers. Like, it's a standard thing microsoft offers businesses with set prices and stuff, not some super crazy bargained unique deal or anything hyper unique. Microsoft even released an XP patch for all users last year. Like XP isn't a current OS but it's still solidly in recently current for like, businesses and governments and medical stuff that have actual special requirement and certification and stuff. It's still actively supported in a straightforward way compared to things that are like, software made by someone's grandfather in a cave a generation ago in a lost computer language on a no longer manufactured mainframe like a lot of stuff is.
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Nov 15, 2018 21:35
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Navy itself is dropping almost 10 mil a year on it. Which isn't really that bad compared to their total budget.
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Nov 15, 2018 21:39
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Hellblazer187 posted:The IRS also has obnoxiously old computers. I remember reading that some big portion of the IT infrastructure is a holdover from the KENNEDY administration. The IRS is hiring COBOL devs right now. Not bad job security.
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Nov 15, 2018 22:11
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luxury handset posted:it's not that they don't want to change, but that they have to maintain backwards compatibility for increasingly aged systems. the entire process of bureaucracy and consistent record keeping is almost the complete antithesis of startup culture and starting fresh and new with the most current technology/practice every few years. this is a big issue in healthcare too - i used to work for a software company which had to maintain backwards compatibility with IE8 in the year 2016 because a large chunk of our client base were large government/healthcare institutions which straight up told us that if they couldn't use our software in IE8 then they wouldn't use our software. and it's not because doctors love old browsers (they do, but that's another story) but because the need to deal with the complexity of medical records means it's much harder to move fast and adopt new technology I think a lot of it also comes from a tendency to either attempt to immediately eliminate the old systems OR to bolt something else onto the old systems, but almost never to switch over on a rolling basis were the new system is used for new poo poo while keeping the old system up and running in parallel but not interconnected (with the plan to gradually move things over). Part of the reason that I feel that a dedicated agency would be ideal is that we direly need someone who is able to organize decades-long transitions between systems. That someone also needs the power to say "we missed the cutoff for this deployment but that will be considered for the next upgrade" and be able to deliver on that promise to cut down on people seeing every upgrade project as a once-in-a-lifetime now-or-never chance to get some favorite feature which results in every single upgrade from turning into the F-35 disaster.
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Nov 15, 2018 22:21
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There's good money in COBOL since hardly anyone can maintain those old things anymore.
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Nov 15, 2018 22:23
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It took surprisingly long for this to get national coverage. I had to help one of my buddies out with rent when their payment was late last month.
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Nov 15, 2018 22:26
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Frabba posted:It took surprisingly long for this to get national coverage. I had to help one of my buddies out with rent when their payment was late last month. It might have something to do with the POTUS seizing the headlines of the news cycle almost every day with some new wild behavior or conspiracy theory. It's extremely hard for any other news story to gain any real let alone long term traction in the current era. I sort of think the non-Fox News agencies are trying to run stories about other stuff as much as they can but it's loving hard when he does something almost every day that the world unfortunately really ought to be informed about. I couldn't care less about his bitch tweeting though, I don't see why any of that needs to be news worthy or analyzed for "what did the president mean by x" and it's kind of stopped being amusing and more just annoying and droning 2 years in. Like use it to collect evidence for pending lawsuits and that should be it IMO. Sadly this isn't surprising to hear though. The American government leverages "Are Troops" for political gain but treats it's vets of all ages like absolute poo poo when it comes to benefits and the like.
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Nov 15, 2018 22:33
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Shifty Pony posted:I think a lot of it also comes from a tendency to either attempt to immediately eliminate the old systems OR to bolt something else onto the old systems, but almost never to switch over on a rolling basis were the new system is used for new poo poo while keeping the old system up and running in parallel but not interconnected (with the plan to gradually move things over). my read is similar to this, the scope of the problem is always massively underestimated so some sort of off-the-shelf solution can be pitched until it turns out whoops, there's nothing that can just inherently replace the giant bespoke contraption we built to fill this extremely unique need. nobody wants to be the project lead whose pitch goes "first, we'll need a blank check and five years minimum simply to understand what we're tangling with here" so every project is doomed from day one since the easiest thing is to say "this time, for sure, we can bring the modernization in on time and under budget using the new software developed since the last time our attempt to upgrade failed embarrassingly" you'd have to implement a total replacement that has a solid foundation for enhancement for decades to come and replace the entire existing system in one swift motion, to which the us military has demonstrated consistently for decades an inability to do anything like this in terms of procurement
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Nov 15, 2018 22:35
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ReidRansom posted:There's good money in COBOL since hardly anyone can maintain those old things anymore. There isn't good money in being a COBOL dev directly for the government though because federal GS scale salaries are capped at $164k and it will take you decades to get there, if you can at all in a particular position. That's what, the base + vested stock a few years in at any major SV tech firm? Lord knows what the Fintech firms would be paying. Frabba posted:It took surprisingly long for this to get national coverage. I had to help one of my buddies out with rent when their payment was late last month. I think the article hit a bit on the truth when it quoted someone saying "A lot of veterans are hesitant to raise their hand and ask for help", which has allowed the problem to slip under the media's attention.
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Nov 15, 2018 22:36
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luxury handset posted:it's not that they don't want to change, but that they have to maintain backwards compatibility for increasingly aged systems. the entire process of bureaucracy and consistent record keeping is almost the complete antithesis of startup culture and starting fresh and new with the most current technology/practice every few years. this is a big issue in healthcare too - i used to work for a software company which had to maintain backwards compatibility with IE8 in the year 2016 because a large chunk of our client base were large government/healthcare institutions which straight up told us that if they couldn't use our software in IE8 then they wouldn't use our software. and it's not because doctors love old browsers (they do, but that's another story) but because the need to deal with the complexity of medical records means it's much harder to move fast and adopt new technology The problems of backwards compatibility issues at the VA cannot be overstated, because they are required to take backwards compatibility to levels that would bring any simple corporation to its knees. For instance: did you know there are multiple people still receiving veteran's benefits for the Spanish-American War? There's at least one widow still receiving Civil War life insurance benefits. The VA has to maintain medical records hand-written from before the invention of the germ theory of disease, pay records from Filipino guerillas paid in livestock during WW2, and sheaves of literal punch cards. And they're still operating on, adjusted for inflation, about the same budget they had before Bush started two forever-wars. EDIT: Beyond that, the major cause of VA incompetence is a series of excruciating checks and baffles put in place by austerity conscious Republicans designed to constantly second-guess veterans' applying for benefits and making them jump through hoops to qualify over and over again. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Nov 15, 2018 |
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Nov 15, 2018 22:37
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:
Well, holy poo poo. I knew about the civil war payment, do you have a link to more info? Sounds interesting.
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Nov 15, 2018 22:43
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:The problems of backwards compatibility issues at the VA cannot be overstated, because they are required to take backwards compatibility to levels that would bring any simple corporation to its knees. You joke, but it got me curious and apparently the last civil war widow died in 2004! Edit: Well holy poo poo. I was amazed enough about the 2004 thing, but the policy itself not being a joke is amazing. HashtagGirlboss fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Nov 15, 2018 |
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Nov 15, 2018 22:46
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xrunner posted:You joke, but it got me curious and apparently the last civil war widow died in 2004! apparently it's a civil war pension that went to a civil war vet's kid, who is still alive
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Nov 15, 2018 22:47
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Meatball posted:Well, holy poo poo. https://taskandpurpose.com/152-years-later-va-still-paying-pension-civil-war/ it was common for super old veterans to marry young women so they could get their pensions, which could be inherited by children quote:The Department of Veterans Affairs cuts a pension check check every month for $73.13 to Irene Triplett, an 87-year-old who lives in Wilkes County, North Carolina. Why? Because she is the living daughter of a Civil War veteran. this only applies to union aka federal soldiers. confederate soldiers received pensions from the states as they were locked out of federal government benefits for obvious reasons
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Nov 15, 2018 22:47
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https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1063184904018673664?s=19
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Nov 15, 2018 22:49
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xrunner posted:You joke, but it got me curious and apparently the last civil war widow died in 2004! There's still one daughter collecting benefits: https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-08-08/civil-war-vets-pension-still-remains-on-governments-payroll-151-years-after-last-shot-fired
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Nov 15, 2018 22:50
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