“ It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally”
As a government employee: it often is the employee personally. Not always, but surprisingly often. There is a type of mid-level bureaucrat who just can’t be bothered to make anyone else’s life easier, even if they can. It’s just easier not to, and over time that becomes its own form of malice. The tales I could tell you about security officers basically abusing their power in order to make their own lives as easy as possible, while making everyone else’s live almost impossible…
Many large organisations put people into a position where there is zero personal upside to action, but some non-zero upside to inaction. Risk avoidance, less work, lower stress, no need to learn anything new, etc.
Government bureaucracies do this most often, but you also see it in thankless software maintenance where the people empowered to merge PRs simply… don’t. It’s easier to do nothing.
I also notice this behavior at large corporations when dealing with something small that they do, where even huge improvements won’t “move the needle” for the corporation as a whole so they just can’t be bothered. No bonus, no work!
As a random example: I found a one-line fix that improved the performance of a flagship enterprise software product by a factor of five and was told that nobody would lift a finger unless I could prove that this change would directly increase sales by at least $5 million!
I have often heard this story. To my ears, inexperienced in the tech industry, but experienced in others, it sounds absurd. If a modification improves performance even in the slightest perceptible way (of course it needs to be perceptible by the user), it is the job of the sales team to hype it up to the heavens.
To me, these stories sound like a ridiculous failure of the sales team or of the executive team to communicate the change to the sales team.
If this was a self-funded startup where performance directly translates to less of an impact on the hip pocket of the founder, then yes, absolutely, you'll traction with even the smallest improvement.
Similarly, I love watching CppCon talks by Andrei Alexandrescu where he describes a 1-2% improvement across a huge fleet of servers that probably got him a nice bonus and/or a promotion. That's because he directly reduced the costs to the corporation itself, making his manager look good, or his manager's manager, or whatever.
Nobody gives the slightest f%&# about their customer's experience. They really don't.
I say this with confidence because I just looked up Andrei's video on YouTube and the page froze for a solid 30 seconds while it loaded 200 bytes of text and a few thumbnails.
Google doesn't care in the slightest what my experience is.
Nobody does!
That's because in any larger organisation, only your superior's opinion matters. Customers are not superiors.
But we do NOT want random government employs accepting data in random format by email they just decided that are safe and non-executable. It is not like the admin lady in the office got an extensive training about what can be done with pdf, xls, usb stick, txt and what not.
They just have no idea. From this woman point of view, pdf in email is as safe as usb stick in a an envelope.
Most health information transferred online between patients and other entities goes through a portal rather than email to ensure PHI isn't transmitted over unencrypted SMTP or simply forwarded on to some insecure mail server. I.e. data loss prevention.
Wherever it goes, there are a various services that can be used to ensure the file is not malicious. Probably API integration with Palo Alto WildFire or ICAP protocol with Opswat would be the best choices. Neither would be affordable for small government offices.
People given a tiny amount of power with no consequences for misusing it, inflicting their power on people for no better reason than that they can.
Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences.
I find the story unlikely, reading more like a vengeful malicious compliance fantasy than how humans behave. In real life, a nasty Karen like that, after being inconvenienced or having their time wasted, would go out of their way to ensure the offending citizen was punished. In this case, they'd find a technicality or process to ensure the blind author lost their benefits, or was greatly inconvenienced to whatever degree possible.
You get fuming, frothing at the mouth inchoate rage out of people like this when they're directly challenged. They seethe.
They'd find a technicality, wait until Friday at 4:59 pm, drop a letter in the post box that declines benefits because the ink on pages 33 and 138 smudged some critical detail, or some other completely made up nonsense. If the author wanted to get back to baseline, they'd have to go to heroic efforts, either pressuring the tinpot tyrant government bureaucrat in social media or through journalists, or by escalating through the government bureaucracy and appealing to higher powers.
This has "and then everyone clapped" vibes. Or maybe OP just got lucky with a novice government worker that hadn't fledged into their full Karen powers.
It's amazing how many people seem to have learned their civics from conservative talk shows.
government employees work for elected officials, who hear often from angry "customers" and are constantly at risk of losing their jobs following scheduled "performance reviews"
Some government employees do. Lots of local, state, and federal departments fall under more or less permanent bureaucracatic institutions, and while they might follow the lead of an elected official, often those officials are far more ceremonial than functional.
When those departments are part of public sector unions, they're even further removed from any sort of quality based feedback loops.
Some government staff follow politicians. A whole shit ton of more or less permanent staff put in for lifelong careers, doing boring work that has nothing to do with politics, that gets funded on autopilot, because the IT department is needed, because the DMV, and birth records, and GIS and all those functional, boring bureaucratic departments don't directly fall under, or benefit from constant cycling through with each change of political leadership.
They're protected from arbitrary firing by political leadership - no consequences for being wasteful or incompetent, even if the politician du jour really really wants to make changes or campaigned on it.
Any sort of legislative reining in of that cadre of careerists has to wrangle with unions and general public resistance to messing with "civil servants" - optics are easy to game, and it's easy to garner sympathy. The politics are rough, and not worth the fight for many politicians.
What you're describing with the performance reviews and the like sounds like it's not unionized, and/or your local legislators have been making moves to bring some accountability and actual real world feedback loops into the system. Good on them. That's not anywhere close to the norm in the US.
I thought the “performance reviews” they were alluding to were elections.
Which doesn’t really make sense as permanent civil servants don’t have any stake in those and can’t be summarily dismissed by the elected politicians in a lot of places I’m aware of, particular at local level.
I have to fill out paperwork for the government on a regular basis. I can tell you from first hand experience, the government's main problems are completely their own fault. They are easily 25 years out of date in technology. They can't accept encrypted files, they can't accept credit cards, they can't seem to even do the most basic things that even my dentist's office with 2 total employees can seem to do.
Its so bad that I can't help but think its because the contracts to support government workers are handed out in questionable ways. While I don't think much of the people who work in government offices, I do think they could accept emails if their bosses wanted them to and their contractors provided the tech. They aren't any more or less capable than the dentist's office workers. They just have to work with terrible tech that was clearly chosen for the wrong reasons.
This is not correct and we have recent examples to counter this claim:
1. There are government employees directly employed by various branches of the government (ex: USDS was under the executive allowing them to be retasked by EO into DOGE)
2. There are government employees appointed into office who cannot fired after appointment (ex: Fed Reserve Chair)
3. There are also government employees who are non-political appointments
I think there are also more categories. I don't think your reply was charitable.
Sorry, my comment was not clearly phrased looking back. #1 is an example of an elected official who can hire/fire. #2/#3 are not. These are all from recent litigation (in the court room and within public discourse) during the Trump presidency.
LOL government employees and "at risk of losing their jobs following scheduled "performance reviews""
And you are criticizing half the country based on a ideology? These employees are at almost no risk of losing their jobs because someone calls their representative to complain, this is fantasy.
>Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences.
While I agree that the market feedback is a problem with gov jobs, I've worked corporate and small company jobs with all these negative tropes and the same result, you build a hierarchy and some weirdos find a way past (or are) HR and nestle in the folds. I think the best solution is working for smaller companies that have a high standard for employee behavior enforced by everyone, strong boundaries are key. When people are seasoned and emotionally aware you realize that working in the vicinity of people like that takes way more energy from everyone then it's worth to be tolerant or ignore the problem.
You have the same phenomena in mega coorps. They would for a internal promotion point place the externalities cost of half an hour of work on all of mankind.
For sure - culture is a huge component. Government is unique in that incompetence and laziness and all the shitty behaviors that get people canned in the real world don't have an impact on money coming in. In some places, revenue increases steadily, completely decoupled from any sort of functional attachment to value.
So you can be a terrible, worthless, lazy, no-good, do-nothing, awful employee, skating by on the bare minimum level of effort, checking whatever set of boxes you need to avoid getting fired outright, make sure you kiss the appropriate asses and put on a show when you need to, and because there's no direct, immediate, obvious negative consequence to the overall organization, it's not worth the enormous effort it would take to fire you. If managers that care somehow get into leadership positions, people get shuffled off to a corner somewhere, assigned duties where they won't have a negative impact on morale or operations while the real, actual working employees do what they can.
If one of these fake-work employees ends up as a manager, through inertia and organizational default and seniority, the culture is guaranteed to be toxic, and because they're expert box checkers and ass kissers, they know how to put on a good show of "yep, everything's fine right here!" for whoever they need to report to. I've worked for all sorts of awful bosses, but awful government boss under an awful government department under this type of civil-service kabuki was the worst. Nothing destroys the spirit of a good leader faster than an entrenched department full of clever lifers who can't be fired or motivated or penalized because they've got the entire system gamed to their advantage.
You can, and do, get management and employees all throughout government that actually do give a shit and do good work. I'm not saying all the jobs are fake or useless. I do think a majority are fake and useless, and if you had a market dynamic that allowed competition and merit to reinforce strategy and weed out bad actors, you'd get a much leaner, more effective government overall.
Won't matter much longer, though. AI can already do better, faster, more reliable work than nearly all government workers, including the elected ones. I'd rather have Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok based agents as representatives at this point, over whatever this flaming feces clown show is we've had going on for decades. Even with the jailbreaks.
In this case it's the system that's at fault. No mid level bureaucracy decided to ask disabled people to prove their disability again and again, that's clearly a political directive.
"The system" almost always consists of mid-level bureaucrats. Maybe not this particular one, but her bosses -- a job which, if she sticks around long enough, she will eventually get promoted into. A large amount of what the government does isn't formally law, it's policy, which is often decided by those mid-level managers.
And like individual bureaucrats, "the system" in this case finds it easy to make demands of people if those demands do not result in increased workload for the agency. But if they do result in increased workload for the agency, then the policies that result in that increased workload often get rethought, or the agencies suddenly discover that they can make allowances, and so on.
In this case, I'm confident that "agency X cannot accept pdf documentation" isn't actually law. It might be guidance issued by an agency lawyer, but that isn't the same thing. It is likely to be a policy decided fundamentally by the IT department, which is estimating a high cost for securing the agency IT system to securely handle pdfs. That cost is compared to the cost of accepting faxes, which is significantly lower, and so a policy is issued that the agency cannot accept pdfs, and the legal guidance is offered as justification.
What is not factored in to the decision is the cost to the taxpayer. That's an externality.
So, if the taxpayers can magically make it much more expensive for the agency to accept faxes, so that it is suddenly not an externality any more -- which is what happened in this case -- then the above calculus changes, and the agency discovers that, you know what, actually we can accept pdfs. The IT department is ordered to make the necessary improvements, and it all works.
In my particular case, we were told for literally decades that we could not telework. It wasn't secure enough. Then COVID happened, and suddenly we had a telework system in place, with all the necessary Microsoft licenses purchased and servers stood up and laptops issued and VPN accounts activated, in less than three weeks, and nobody said anything about telework not being secure enough ever again. Because the original justification wasn't true. Setting up telework was more expensive, so we didn't want to do it, and we came up with reasons why we "couldn't". As soon as it was cheaper, we found out that we could do it after all.
I know for a fact that in my institution (a university) certain things can't be done by sending a pdf because the guidence our adminstration is accountable to (city, state, national) mandates them to have it in paper. All clerks I have talked to find that silly, but they can't change it and since they have to proof things to these superior offices one cannot expect them to forge these document for you as a service.
There are stupid, lazy clerks who take any deviance from "the process" as an excuse to refuse work, but often it is the internal rules that are at fault and not the individual.
As a government employee, enmeshed in the bureaucracy:
This is the way.
The problem is that it took Karen zero effort to say “we only accept fax”. She doesn’t care about how much effort it takes you you — in fact, as implied, it taking you a tremendous amount of effort actually reduces her effort. In order to make a dent, you have to figure out a way for the idiotic policy to impact the person making and/or enforcing it. That’s the only way it ever changes.
So after almost 50 years of hacking, I'm starting to feel it in my hands. But I don't have any wrist problems -- no carpal tunnel. What I have is tendonitis in my fingers, primarily in my middle fingers and my right pinky (from slamming Enter several million times).
I've had steroid injections into the tendon sheaths of my fingers a couple of times, which hurts like a bugger when it's done but definitely improves things after a few days. It isn't a cure, though, and my hand doctor thinks I'm going to need surgery eventually.
I have to assume that a split keyboard won't help this. Is there anything that might, short of a voice interface?
Suggestion, don't use your pinky. I haven't used it for over a decade. Instead, move your whole arm as a unit, and primarily use your index finger. It takes some adaptation, but movement is better than stillness the vast majority of times.
As for the tendinitis, have you tried physical therapy for your fingers? Whenever I've had a stupid day of overusing the thumb with my phone, I wrap the smallest possible elastic band around my thumb, and do some curls. Slow and controlled. The mixture of force, movement and stretching feels great, and the issue is gone.
A split keyboard might still bring you some relief. Modifiers/enter/backspace/etc are usually moved away from your weakest fingers (pinkies) to your strongest (thumbs). I have Ctrl, Alt, backspace, delete, space, enter and shift all on my thumb clusters.
The rabbit hole goes very deep. Another option is home row mods: https://precondition.github.io/home-row-mods. A combination of thumb clusters and home row mods can reduce your finger strain a lot.
Also the type of the key matters for tendonitis. Some have tactile feedback after the key is pressed but well above the bottom so you learn not to bottom out with force.
Lead times are long, and Kinesis products are expensive. It gets a little more bearable if you take into account that you're using this tool 8 hours a day for years and years, but still. Cheaper options exist.
I can't second Kinesis enough. I have been using them for 20 years now. I was starting to have issues and I haven't have a single issue with my hands or wrists since changing over. Also a good vertical mouse will help if you use a mouse much. I use trackballs or vertical mice interchangably.
I forget the name of the layout (the board is a Lily58), but my keyboard does away with the staggered key spacing and has keys aligned vertically with a subtle bowling. You're usually pressing keys with your pad, not the sides or tips, and I suspect it would be even better with flat low profile keycaps.
There are some styles of "chording" keyboards that might help too, and some that would be way worse. Chording keyboard are also wildly different to regular keyboards, totally alien by comparison to just splitting a keyboard.
Maybe a low-profile keyboard with very-light actuation switches could help. Also choc keyboards have less spacing between the keys than traditional MX keyboards, which should required less finger travel.
Using a thumb key for Enter, would definitely help with your pinky.
Ok, fellow old hacker here. I have a similar problem and I found that a lot of the hand pain was from mouse/trackpad usage. My hands have been a lot happier since going to a trackball because I don't do nearly as much gripping and pressing.
One thing to try is to sleep with your hands underneath your pillow in a prayer position. If your hands tend to curl the fingers while you sleep all night, that causes real issues eventually.
That’s certainly an opinion. I’m not convinced that it's a good one, but it’s an interesting one.
I think it’s probably important to remember two things: 1) the novel is a relatively modern invention — Don Quixote is often thought of as the first novel, and it was written in 1605, but 2) fiction clearly is not. The Iliad, for instance. In fact, what we think of as “history”, a recounting of events strongly tied to facts, is also a relatively new invention. It is my understanding that ancient authors were more interested in telling you what was true, in a spitirual, philosophical, or moral sense than in telling you strictly what happened. Obviously this is more clear when reading e.g. religious texts like the Bible, but my understanding is that it’s also true of more “straight” histories — Roman historians were not above inventing entire speeches for which there were not extant records and placing them in the mount of a Julius Caesar or whoever. So strictly speaking if you’re reading sources as old as the OP suggests, there’s no getting away from what we would call fiction.
My wife and I have an ongoing conflict of taste in matters of literature. She prefers what I consider to be absolutely depressing high literature. One of her favorites is The House of Mirth, wherein the protagonist starts out wealthy, slowly goes into debt, ends up impoverished and addicted to morphine, and ends the book by committing suicide. She says she likes these stories because they’re “more realistic”. I claim that no, they aren’t, and even if they were I read specifically because I get enough realism by waking up in the morning, thank you very much, and although I’m not averse to deep thoughts in my literature I usually prefer it with a side of likeable characters.
Anyway, my point is: to pick an example, LOTR is a book of fiction written after WWII, and although Tolkien was an expert on and was drawing from a deep pool of literary traditions that predate written language, he was also addressing modern concerns, and that’s what makes the book more interesting than Beowulf. It’s don’t care that it’s labeled “fiction”; the concepts it explores are as true, in the ancient sense, as straight Greek philosophy, and maybe even as applicable. And if you want to read for information, you’re almost certainly going to get better information by reading a modern history of Rome than by reading Polybius.
> And if you want to read for information, you’re almost certainly going to get better information by reading a modern history of Rome than by reading Polybius.
It's not 'almost certainly'. Modern history books written by academics contain an historiography, references to archeological researchs, reference to archives when some exist (remarquably, while the French revolutionary council archived their discussions and those were kept since 1792, no historian reference them before 1998, and since then, every academic book do :/), linguistic research, economics (local economy: what was produced, what was imported) and probably other fields I never recognised/took interest in.
I was a grad student in Dave Akin's lab from 1994-2003. Like many labs, we had a journal club. Once a week (Wednesday, I think) somebody would give a presentation over lunch on a paper they'd read. We would get takeout Chinese and eat while discussing the paper.
On this particular Wednesday the presentation was on a failed spacecraft program. It's been a long time, but I think it was probably this paper:
which is the initial failure analysis of the Mars Climate Orbiter (1999), which famously crashed into Mars during its orbital insertion burn because JPL specifications were in metric, but Lockheed wrote code in imperial units, and as a result there was a failure to properly convert between newtons and pounds. One fact of note was that the the team responsible for spacecraft navigation had already observed anomalous trajectory data but their reports were ignored because they didn't follow program guidelines for filling out the paperwork to document the observations, so the insertion burn went ahead heedless of what the spacecraft's behavior was trying to tell them.
Ultimately, the loss of mission was a result of unclear responsibility for ownership of the orbital maneuvering software, including the mission requirements that traced to the software, the development of the software derived from those requirements, tests to validate the software, and reports from users of the software that it was behaving unexpectedly.
I was trying to be funny, and turned the statement around from "clear lines of responsibility" to "clear lines of blame".
I think he's saying that he (GlenTheMachine) is Glen Henshaw, "space roboticist", and (understandably) was a bit excited that a somewhat famous document contains a "law" bearing his name as attribution was posted by this water cooler. A way to get some minor attention for it in a comment thread full of like-minded users, and probably offer a genuine (and also maybe coy/tongue-in-cheek) offer to answer questions about that specific line item law.
I like that he waved from the crowd in this way, if only for the "huh. Small world" moment I had reading his comment.
You don't need this. Strictly speaking, we don't need much.
But a travel router can be nice to have.
I bring some tech with me when I travel.
Obviously a phone, but also a decent-sounding smart speaker with long battery life so I can hear some music of my choosing in decent fidelity without using Bluetooth [bonus: battery-backed alarm clock!], a laptop for computing, a streaming box for plugging into the TV, maybe some manner of SBC to futz with if I'm bored and can't sleep during downtime.
All of this stuff really wants to have a [wifi] connection to a local area network, like it has when I'm at home.
A travel router (this one, or something from any other vendor mentioned in these threads, or just about anything that can run openwrt well) solves that problem.
All I have to do is get the router connected to the Internet however I do that (maybe there's ethernet, decent wifi, or maybe my phone hotspot or USB tethering is the order of the day), and then everything else Just Works as soon as it is unpacked and switched on.
And it all works togetherly, on my own wireless LAN -- just as those things also work at home.
Bonus nachos: With some manner of VPN like Tailscale configured in the router, or the automagic stuff this UBNT device is claimed to be able to do, a person can bring their home LAN with them, too -- without individual devices being configured to do that.
I think travel routers are pretty great, myself.
(But using Ubiquiti gear makes me feel filthy for reasons that I can't properly articulate, so I stick with things like Latvian-built Mikrotik hardware or something running OpenWRT for my own travel router uses.)
In my opinion, you only need this if you don't like connecting to unknown (insecure or suspect) network to get access to the internet. Ideally, you would configure this kind of router to connect to a VPN so that as soon as it connects to the internet, it immediately logins to the VPN and reroutes all your network traffic through it. This makes it more difficult for someone to hijack your connection or crack it. From the comments it also appears that some people use it to connect to their home network, either to access their home server or to use as VPN (this can help you get around geo-fence and unnecessary additional authentications that some services require for fraud prevention). Some travel routers can also combine 2 or more internet connections (public WiFi + mobile data) to provide you a more stable internet connection, which is often desirable.
You have a workplace that insists you are working from your home while you travel.
It has limits, like the amazon hardware keypress thingy with north korea showed recently, but unless your working at superbigtech or defense contractor it would probably work.
connect screenless devices, e.g., Echo Dot
extend weak wireless range in hotel
screen share or network between multiple devices eg travel with two laptops and can virtual KVM
only have to do the captive device on one - many hotels limit number of devices
extra security buffer
phone can't bridge wifi for headless like this
etc etc
I wrote code to do this between a C64 and a 1541 disk drive when I was in high school. It got me to the international science fair and (probably) earned me a full tuition scholarship for undergrad.
I called MS support once because some random dude managed to get my son's account registered under his "family", and then locked my son out of being able to update his own machine.
The MS support guy literally tried to get me to password crack the random dude's account. Like, he wanted me to help him guess the guy's password so we could log in as him and change his family settings.
The Microsoft family/organisation situation is fucking ridiculous. If you somehow get enrolled in either, good luck ever ridding your device of it.
For literal years after leaving university, my windows install was still linked to my uni despite multiple attempts to fix it. All this, because I logged in using my university Microsoft account once.
As a government employee: it often is the employee personally. Not always, but surprisingly often. There is a type of mid-level bureaucrat who just can’t be bothered to make anyone else’s life easier, even if they can. It’s just easier not to, and over time that becomes its own form of malice. The tales I could tell you about security officers basically abusing their power in order to make their own lives as easy as possible, while making everyone else’s live almost impossible…
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