Peacoffee posted:

The U.S. just doesn’t Vaalue that relationship as much anymore.

evilweasel posted:

I'm pretty sure you can count the countries that get a "real" ambassador on the fingers of one hand. It's just not a position that demands someone qualified anymore. The few things they do have to do actually kinda match up well with the skills needed to be a major donor (good at schmoozing lots of rich friends).

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Does Woody Johnson get a title like “The Honorable” ?

Hellblazer187 posted:

But they are still going to do a hand recount, which was the real chance for this.

Teddybear posted:

Honestly, we probably should just make ambassadors non-senate-confirmable positions, or make it a senate-vetoable position. Is there a specific constitutional provision that requires they be senate confirmed that I'm forgetting?

quote:

2: He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

The Glumslinger posted:

JasonV posted:

https://twitter.com/MLevineReports/status/1063253354829291520?s=19

evilweasel posted:

I absolutely believe this; every time I draft a motion my first step is to find a similar motion someone filed to copy all of the formatting and boilerplate from. Holy poo poo is that an incredible find.

evilweasel posted:

despite the fact that the english have been subjected to the horror of watching jets football in person, yes

evilweasel posted:

I absolutely believe this; every time I draft a motion my first step is to find a similar motion someone filed to copy all of the formatting and boilerplate from. Holy poo poo is that an incredible find.

Spiffster posted:

When is Mississippi’s run off?

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

every day, making a dead spot in the gulf of mexico

predicto posted:

It has been decades since the Ambassador to anywhere really mattered, except under unusual circumstances. All the real action is done through the consuls, who are career State Department people

Xae posted:

If you want a good look at the crushing amount of legacy in the DoD or VA read this.

Its also a good thing to keep in mind when you're wondering why poo poo gets so expensive at big organizations. There isn't "a" system. There are hundreds, or thousands of systems with overlapping and contradictory puropses and they are interconnected in a way that no one knows or understands.

Systems talk to each other and no one knows or notices until it stops working. Files get randomly dropped to a share on a network drive and read by dozens of systems. Or none. Every day a critical report gets loaded into a system... that no one even has access to view. You can't shutdown or replace old systems because you have no idea what depends on it. You may also have legacy code on the inputs that you can't change. Because what loads your system is some compiled executable that has business critical logic in that no one knows any more and the code was lost in The Great Source Control Purge of '05.

Even if a particularly good team knows the direct ancestors and descendant systems for their little corner of the world they have no idea what happens outside that scope.

That is enterprise IT: Thousands of barely managed, barely functional systems in a rats nest to end all rats nests. Now add being managed by geriatric Congressmen to the mix and you have Government IT.

evilweasel posted:

I'm pretty sure you can count the countries that get a "real" ambassador on the fingers of one hand. It's just not a position that demands someone qualified anymore. The few things they do have to do actually kinda match up well with the skills needed to be a major donor (good at schmoozing lots of rich friends).

enraged_camel posted:

This is not true. It's actually the exact opposite.



Click here for interactive version, along with the explanatory article.

Shifty Pony posted:

The military has a 26 page brownie recipe/specification document. The guide for how my job works is over 2000 pages.

evilweasel posted:

I'm pretty sure you can count the countries that get a "real" ambassador on the fingers of one hand. It's just not a position that demands someone qualified anymore. The few things they do have to do actually kinda match up well with the skills needed to be a major donor (good at schmoozing lots of rich friends).

Charlz Guybon posted:

That's just the opposite extreme. I don't care if you're the royal chef of Saudi Arabia, under pain of death if you gently caress the brownies up, you don't a 26 page brownie reciepe. You've gone way past the point where the recipe is an active hindrance to making good brownies.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

IT planning words

The Glumslinger posted:

https://twitter.com/mattzap/status/1063288025193594890

We need Mueller to do some poo poo so we can finally start to untangle all of this stuff

quote:

The US government says that "in or about early October 2018, the Government learned that Schulte was using one or more smuggled contraband cellphones to communicate clandestinely with third parties outside of the MCC."

A search of his housing unit performed by FBI agents revealed "multiple contraband cellphones (including at least one cellphone used by Schulte that is protected with significant encryption); approximately 13 email and social media accounts (including encrypted email accounts); and other electronic devices."

Investigators said they confirmed Schulte used the phones and that he, among other things, "transmitted classified information to third parties, including by using an encrypted email account."

Now, the US government is seeking a superseding indictment that includes two additional charges on top of the 13 he was charged in June.

Charlz Guybon posted:

That's just the opposite extreme. I don't care if you're the royal chef of Saudi Arabia, under pain of death if you gently caress the brownies up, you don't a 26 page brownie reciepe. You've gone way past the point where the recipe is an active hindrance to making good brownies.

OddObserver posted:

I think the US Digital Service (arising from the fixing-healhcare.gov initiative during Obama administration) is supposed to address this sort of stuff, but it's possibly too heavily biased towards younger/Internet generation-type people, who may not have the best background in dealing with things designed using 1950s tech.

Ceiling fan posted:

Wow. It's been nearly a whole page since someone posted a story about how hosed the VA IT systems are.

Here, have another.

It's fresh, so it has lots of Trumpian incompetence, self dealing, and back-stabbing to go with the short sightedness, COTS capability shortfalls, and hopeless wishful thinking that's par for the course.

zynga dot com posted:

What you end up with is an unending cycle of people who know the solution but end up screaming into the void until they burn out and leave. Google developers at USDS needing to read a COBOL book as part of their project is not, comparatively, a huge deal.

TheMadMilkman posted:

In my experience, telling management what actually needs to be done is a sure fire way to dead end your career in government IT. Especially at these agencies where non-technical people get promoted into IT Management.

I applied to he COBOL dev position.

TheMadMilkman posted:

In my experience, telling management what actually needs to be done is a sure fire way to dead end your career in government IT. Especially at these agencies where non-technical people get promoted into IT Management.

I applied to he COBOL dev position.

quote:

In August, the VA spent at least $874,000 on a kickoff event in Missouri, where Cerner is headquartered. Morris and Windom squabbled over stage time and walk-on songs, and she clashed with Sandoval and Stone over how much they would participate, two former officials said. They presented a convoluted organization chart that couldn’t paper over the power struggle.

The week after, Zenooz quit. Morris followed three days later. She’d lasted less than two months.

The leadership struggles raised alarms on a House subcommittee organized to oversee the Cerner implementation. “It would be a tragedy for the program to be undermined by personality conflicts and bureaucratic power struggles before it even begins in earnest,” the subcommittee’s chairman, Indiana Republican Jim Banks, said in an Aug. 24 letter to Wilkie.

But that’s exactly what was happening. With Morris gone, Windom was back in charge. Windom also led the contract negotiations for the DOD; Cashour, the VA spokesman, said Windom “has been with the effort since its inception and has the necessary expertise and institutional knowledge to lead this initiative effectively.” Because of his acquisitions background, Windom thinks about the project in terms of “cost, schedule and performance objectives.” Windom has no background in health care, and other officials say his focus on schedule and budget could come at the expense of getting a product that achieves “seamless care.”

quote:

Another of the candidates recruited by the headhunters was Jonathan Manis, who was the CIO of Sutter Health in Northern California. Manis, 56, had led software implementations at two large hospital systems and is a veteran. He said he was excited about the opportunity and interviewed with multiple VA officials.

But then he heard from Moskowitz, the West Palm Beach physician. Manis said he didn’t understand Moskowitz’s role, but he could tell his opinion was important, or else he wouldn’t have been on the phone.

After that conversation, Manis withdrew. He said the politics at the VA seemed too volatile for him to uproot his life and take a massive pay cut for a job that might not last. “I understood this was going to be a difficult mission, and as long as we were all committed, I wanted to lead it,” he said. “But if this thing was bouncing around so much and people were in and out, that instability, given the compensation and the unknowns, was too much for me.”

The Glumslinger posted:

https://twitter.com/mattzap/status/1063288025193594890

We need Mueller to do some poo poo so we can finally start to untangle all of this stuff

luxury handset posted:

absolutely the worst outcome for assange is that he is questioned by the bobbies and released and then he's standing there having to figure out what to do with his life knowing that nobody wants to arrest or detain him