[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

Paleocon wrote:
LouZiffer wrote:

Is it cheating, or is it retaining what higher education has been about all along? (Maintaining/reinforcing the economic stratification of society while allowing for some 'degree' of upward mobility for the talented few.)

IMAGE(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2c/45/0d/2c450d23031aac06d1805ea8bcb352d1.jpg)

If the goal is to remake higher education into something other than what it has always been, then that starts with a clear view of what it is.

I'm not clinging to a mistake. I'm saying that your criticism misses a very real target. The rich aren't interested in personal authenticity. They're interested in maintaining the opposite, and our institutions (including education) reflect that reality.

So, I wasn’t aware of the “Fake Melania” conspiracy until the President tweeted about. Had someone just told me what it was, I would have said that was pretty stupid and likely fake.

However, now that El Jefe made a point of denying it on Twitter, I firmly believe it is 100% true.

Reaper81 wrote:

So, I wasn’t aware of the “Fake Melania” conspiracy until the President tweeted about. Had someone just told me what it was, I would have said that was pretty stupid and likely fake.

However, now that El Jefe made a point of denying it on Twitter, I firmly believe it is 100% true.

sh*t. If I was Melania, I would hire a body double out of my own money just so I wouldn't have to touch that turd.

No problem there, Trump hires people himself to spare her that. Or maybe that was just because she was pregnant at the time?

(Laura Benanti, Tony winner for Gypsy, and Christine Baranski, Emmy and Tony winner, and comic Bryan Stack)

By the way, if you haven't already, please consider giving a listen to Pete Buttigieg, who is running in the Democratic primaries. He did a CNN town hall, and this is a good review of his book that gives some background.

Plus, he's been my mayor for the last 7 year or so (even when we lived the next town over, I thought of him as "my mayor"). He's done a stupendous job.

The main thing I hope everyone will consider is just listening to his ideas. He's a hell of a longshot for the nomination and presidency, but if his ideas trickle up, a lot of good could be done.

Paul Ryan has joined the board of Fox Corporation

This makes perfect and depressing sense...

A truly depressing look at the completely unfixable financial mess that our Department of Defense has become.

Despite being the taxpayers’ greatest investment — more than $700 billion a year — the Department of Defense has remained an organizational black box throughout its history. It’s repelled generations of official inquiries, the latest being an audit three decades in the making, mainly by scrambling its accounting into such a mess that it may never be untangled.

Ahead of misappropriation, fraud, theft, overruns, contracting corruption and other abuses that are almost certainly still going on, the Pentagon’s first problem is its books. It’s the world’s largest producer of wrong numbers, an ingenious bureaucratic defense system that hides all the other rats’ nests underneath. Meet the Gordian knot of legend, brought to life in modern America.

Last November 15th, when the whiffed audit was announced, Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan said it was nothing to worry about, because “we never expected to pass it.” Asked by a reporter why taxpayers should keep giving the Pentagon roughly $700 billion a year if it can’t even “get their house in order and count ships right or buildings right,” Shanahan quipped, “We count ships right.”

This was an inside joke. The joke was, the Pentagon isn’t so hot at counting buildings. Just a few years ago, in fact, it admitted to losing track of “478 structures,” in addition to 39 Black Hawk helicopters (whose fully loaded versions list for about $21 million a pop).

That didn’t mean 478 buildings disappeared. But they did vanish from the government’s ledgers at some point. The Pentagon bureaucracy is designed to spend money quickly and deploy troops and material to the field quickly, but it has no reliable method of recording transactions. It designs stealth drones and silent-running submarines, but still hasn’t progressed to bar codes when it comes to tracking inventory. Some of its accounting programs are using the ancient computing language COBOL, which was cutting-edge in 1959.

Those DFAS accountants in the Reuters exposé were told by superiors that if they couldn’t find invoices or contracts to prove the various services spent their one-year money and two-year money and five-year money on time, they should execute “unsubstantiated change actions,” i.e., lie.

The accountants systematically “plugged” in fake numbers to match the payment schedules handed down by the Treasury. These fixes are called “journal voucher adjustments” or “plugs.”

As a result, those year-end financial statements will look like they match congressional intentions. In truth, the statements packed with thousands of plugs are fictions, a form of systematic accounting fraud Congress has quietly tolerated for decades.

The fake-number system is such long-accepted practice that it’s acquired numerous dull-sounding names. You’ll see the invented numbers called “forced-balance entries” by the General Accounting Office (which is run by Congress), “adjustments not adequately supported” by the Defense inspector general, and “journal vouchers” or “JVs” or “workarounds” by the Pentagon’s own comptroller general. On the Hill, everyone refers to “plugs.”

There are innocent explanations for plugs, although even the best excuse is still incompetence. For example, if the Navy buys a helicopter from the Army (which is the “item manager” in charge of monitoring all rotary-wing aircraft), it will show up as an expense on the books of both services. Although the money has been spent only once, both the Army and the Navy will report the expense.

Instead of canceling out such intramural accounting discrepancies, which is what would happen at any chain of doughnut shops, the Department of Defense never bothered to fix its accounting rules. With hundreds of different acronymic systems, a single error might generate bogus numbers exceeding the transactions’ original value.

This is a generous explanation for news of the sort released by the inspector general in 2016 showing the Army — with an annual budget of $122 billion — generated accounting plugs 54 times that amount, a full $6.5 trillion worth, in 2015 alone.

If something remotely like that happened with, say, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Republicans would be screaming that not another penny should be allocated to them until they've proven they've fixed their financial controls.

OG_slinger wrote:

If something remotely like that happened with, say, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Republicans would be screaming that not another penny should be allocated to them until they've proven they've fixed their financial controls.

And then for 35 years after they fixed their financial controls.

The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit

AT THE TAIL end of last year, the Department of Defense finally completed an audit. At a cost of $400 million, some 1,200 auditors charged into the jungle of military finance, but returned in defeat. They were unable to pass the Pentagon or flunk it. They could only offer no opinion, explaining the military’s empire of hundreds of acronymic accounting silos was too illogical to penetrate.

The audit is the last piece in one of the great ass-covering projects ever undertaken, also known as the effort to give the United States government a clean bill of financial health. Twenty-nine years ago, in 1990, Congress ordered all government agencies to begin producing audited financial statements. Others complied. Defense refused from the jump.

It turns out that when you underfund regulatory agencies and let companies spearhead their own safety certifications, they're maybe more concerned with getting products to market.

As investigators race to determine whether the M.C.A.S. flight-control system on Boeing’s 737 Max was the cause of two deadly crashes in the space of less than five months, new reports have provided stomach-churning details about how the company fast-tracked the process of getting the highly lucrative jets approved and into airlines’ hands.

For one, the Federal Aviation Administration was reportedly more than happy to let Boeing take the reins vis-à-vis determining if its aircraft was safe to fly. According to the Seattle Times, for years the F.A.A. has “delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes,” citing a lack of resources and funding.

Even the work that remained under the purview of the government, though, was “sometimes curtailed,“ such as reviewing technical details provided by Boeing. “There wasn’t a complete and proper review of the documents,” the former engineer added. “Review was rushed to reach certain certification dates.”

Boeing was in a hurry to get the Max planes approved because, per The Wall Street Journal, a lot of money was on the line:

. . . in 2011 Boeing learned that American Airlines, one of its best customers, had struck a tentative deal with Airbus for potentially hundreds of A320neo planes to renew its short-haul fleet. American invited Boeing to make a counter-offer. Boeing realized it needed to act fast, and offered what would become the Max . . . American eventually bought 260 Airbus planes and agreed to take 200 upgraded 737s from Boeing.

As Boeing hustled in 2015 to catch up to Airbus and certify its new 737 Max, Federal Aviation Administration (F.A.A.) managers pushed the agency’s safety engineers to delegate safety assessments to Boeing itself, and to speedily approve the resulting analysis.

Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association at American Airlines, told the Seattle Times that his 737 Max training “consisted of little more than a one-hour session on an iPad, with no simulator training.” As for M.C.A.S., the system now implicated in two deadly crashes, “Boeing decided that 737 pilots needed no extra training . . . and indeed that they didn’t even need to know about it. It was not mentioned in their flight manuals.”

For what it's worth, the delegation of certification authority to manufacturers isn't new, has occurred incrementally over many years (and only after the previous increment was successfully executed), is used throughout the aerospace industry, and takes place with ongoing (and non-trivial) FAA oversight.

I say this as someone who does this exact job (though not on the MAX, nor on flight controls).

A significant part of the training I underwent to be allowed to do this deals with conflict of interest issues. I literally have a phone number programmed into my phone to report undue pressure from my management when exercising my certification authority.

It is also entirely an artifact of the underfunding of the FAA. Vote for people who'll fund government agencies, folks.

farley3k wrote:

The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit

AT THE TAIL end of last year, the Department of Defense finally completed an audit. At a cost of $400 million, some 1,200 auditors charged into the jungle of military finance, but returned in defeat. They were unable to pass the Pentagon or flunk it. They could only offer no opinion, explaining the military’s empire of hundreds of acronymic accounting silos was too illogical to penetrate.

The audit is the last piece in one of the great ass-covering projects ever undertaken, also known as the effort to give the United States government a clean bill of financial health. Twenty-nine years ago, in 1990, Congress ordered all government agencies to begin producing audited financial statements. Others complied. Defense refused from the jump.

US Companies Are Moving Tech Jobs To Canada Rather Than Deal With Trump's Immigration Policies, Report Says

US companies are going to keep hiring foreign tech workers, even as the Trump administration makes doing so more difficult. For a number of US companies that means expanding their operations in Canada, where hiring foreign nationals is much easier. From a report:
Demand for international workers remained high this year, according to a new Envoy Global survey of more than 400 US hiring professionals, who represent big and small US companies and have all had experience hiring foreign employees. Some 80 percent of employers expect their foreign worker headcount to either increase or stay the same in 2019, according to Envoy, which helps US companies navigate immigration laws. That tracks with US government immigration data, which shows a growing number of applicants for high-skilled tech visas, known as H-1Bs, despite stricter policies toward immigration. H-1B recipients are all backed by US companies that say they are in need of specialized labor that isn't readily available in the US -- which, in practice, includes a lot of tech workers. Major US tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon, have all been advocating for quicker and more generous high-skilled immigration policies. To do so they've increased lobbying spending on immigration.

Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts

I don't think I have ever in my life been as pessimistic about the future as I am right now. On a variety of fronts, I currently believe that the issue is not "Will it get worse?" but simply "How much worse is it going to get?"

When Americans peer 30 years into the future, they see a country in decline economically, politically and on the world stage. While a narrow majority of the public (56%) say they are at least somewhat optimistic about America’s future, hope gives way to doubt when the focus turns to specific issues.

A new Pew Research Center survey focused on what Americans think the United States will be like in 2050 finds that majorities of Americans foresee a country with a burgeoning national debt, a wider gap between the rich and the poor and a workforce threatened by automation.

Majorities predict that the economy will be weaker, health care will be less affordable, the condition of the environment will be worse and older Americans will have a harder time making ends meet than they do now. Also predicted: a terrorist attack as bad as or worse than 9/11 sometime over the next 30 years.

These grim predictions mirror, in part, the public’s sour mood about the current state of the country. The share of Americans who are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country – seven-in-ten in January of 2019 – is higher now than at any time in the past year.

Underlining that we have a deeply unhealthy relationship with firearms?

JC wrote:

WTF does that accomplish?

Shows you just how much to trust the police?

NathanialG wrote:
JC wrote:

WTF does that accomplish?

Shows you just how much to trust the police?

Great. "Training" from slack-jawed gravel pit commandos from a Banjo County sheriff department.

If I were one of those teachers, this sort of thing would drive me to [violently quit]

edited out excessively violent content. ~d

Deleted mini-moderation. ~d

It would have been ironic if one of the teachers had pulled out there own nerf gun and engaged them in a shootout.

After all that is the proper response, correct? Arm everyone?

I don't agree with the assessment of mini-moderation and am frankly insulted by the accusation. That was a community member(me) calling out violent imagery and not silently and anonymously allowing it. I personally and visibly stand against that type of rhetoric. That isn't mini moderation.

MOD
Calling out violent imagery isn't the issue; suggesting that a forum member take a break from the forum is.

Any further issues can be discussed by PMs.

I said internet not forum, but whatever.

*I* want to take a break from the Internet after reading Paelocon’s post, so I agree with SallyNasty.

To put a fine point on it and make it clear I’m not just being difficult:

As a matter of fact I’ve largely been taking a break from D&D due to anxiety lately. This morning I made the mistake of clicking this thread. Of late I don’t think it’s healthy to spend time reading such violent imagery if you’re stressed and struggling. Probably not at all, but definitely not if you’re trying to be more optimistic and less vulgar about your response to the world as it is.

So reading a thread advocating degenerate violence was not a great way to start my day and I would also rather it wasn’t here. And similarly would encourage people feeling this strongly about things to take a break like I have. It’s been helpful to me.

MOD

SallyNasty wrote:

Well, that seems like a reasonable response.

People are literally being incited to murder other humans because of Internet posters psyching them up. Maybe try and be part of the solution instead of the problem?

Perhaps I was a bit hasty in deleting the entire post, when the above part is definitely acceptable and an important part of the discussion.

Let's move on.