As an alternate framing, with the paperwork be giving her what she needs to go to her boss and escalate, and their boss as needed - the paperwork as a magic ticket for everyone to advocate.
To qualify that, the fax is a limited resource, and I'd be concerned about how what other things the fax might be needed for to help other people in a timely manner...
Perhaps the fax-related expenses would be the magic ticket their boss needed to justify security scanning of emails with PDFs. I just listened to Trump brag for ten minutes about replacing the thousand-dollar signing pens.
The post is tagged non-fiction, but it ignores the option to "Complete your Disabilty Update Report Online (https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/text-cdrs-ussi.htm), which I found after following the link in the first sentence.
The form is an embedded iFrame from "Adobe Acrobat Sign", supposedly pure Javascript . It would be a bigger story if this form were not accessible to the disabled.
The form includes a place to attach two PDF, text, or image formats. "Attachments are limited to 5MB and 25 pages".
The post dated March 25 2026 says "This week, I received The Letter."
More likely he had a fun idea and ran with it to illustrate other problems he's had.
I can say from personal experience that the people on the phone for US Social Security are enforcing inhumane policies. A relative with a speech impediment and in serious pain who was unable to travel to the office for an interview had to be ready for a phone call. If the phone wasn't answered after four rings, have to reschedule a phone call. When the phone call arrived, they had to answer questions personally without assistance or "coaching". The caller couldn't understand the relative due to the speech impediment, and the relative was in distress and having difficulty understanding the questions. But we weren't supposed to help.
> I am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd.
I always just assumed that the all-around "prepper" framing was just the market gravitating towards people with cash!
In my conversations with neighbors, people understand preparedness for specific situations well. For example, disaster preparedness – "if the internet goes off, I'd like an LLM to tell me what the best way to stablize X medical emergency". Given the complete long-term erasure of Gaza's educational system, a lot of people also empathize with how useful educational resources would be for children.
In that context, I've assumed people just react against commercialism and the kitchen-sink paradigm of preparedness. (I certainly react against the first, but not the second... but then again I love playing the handyman even in times when things are going well.)
This is a fun bureaucratic aside, but in Oregon the governor _is_ the statutory superintendent, rather than an elected official. (There are other oddities in Oregon: policy is otherwise extremely devolved, _and_ because property taxes are capped, funding goes through the legislature.)
I peeked at the front covers from the archives - 2007 has everything from global warming to the French riots, for example, although there's certainly more current affairs content. I'm not sure what you mean by the other decline in standards, though.
Well, of course, a lot had already been done by the time I got there. But what really struck me about CSP was how easy it was to reason about concurrent programs because synchronization and communication were the same thing. In my doctoral thesis I created a provably secure multi-user file systems which went from specification to CSP to occam.
It was not a fun time.
In Java,
for example,
the concurrency & threading primitives were so low level it was almost impossible for anyone to use them and get it right.
The concurrency package introduced in 2004 brought higher level concepts
and mostly eliminated the need to risk the footguns present in the thread/runnable/synchronized constructs.
> In Java, for example, the concurrency & threading primitives were so low level it was almost impossible for anyone to use them and get it right.
I disagree with this. As long as you had an understanding of critical sections and notify & wait, typical use cases were reasonably straightforward. The issues were largely when you ventured outside of critical sections, or when you didn’t understand the extent of your shared mutable state that needed to be protected by critical sections (which would still be a problem today, for example when you move references to mutable objects between threads — the concurrent package doesn’t really help you there).
The problem with Java pre-1.5 was that the memory model wasn’t very well-defined outside of locks, and that the guarantees that were specified weren’t actually assured by most implementations [0]. That changed with the new memory model in Java 1.5, which also enabled important parts of the new concurrency package.
So you're saying that as long as you knew what you were doing,
you'd be OK?
My point is that at that time,
and still to a large degree today,
most programmers don't know what they are doing.
Now I see it written down I realize how lucky I've been to have spent time at the Programming Research Group at Oxford when Tony Hoare was running it and then to have worked for and founded a company with John Ousterhout. And, yeah, when I worked with him he wasn't a fan of threads.
Parent already knows this, but for completeness to the grandparent, the LRB is part of a small genre of literary journal that does this with "reviews of books". The New York Review of Books (which begat the LRB), and the Times Literary Supplement when it's feeling risque.
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