Outside of that, it sounds like the system worked perfectly. They launched, they paid DB costs (the 8M was not a ledger mistake) and then they rebuilt after they wanted more cost savings. Also a bunch of folks got promoted.
The 8M came from VCs lighting money on fire. Honestly this seems like the system worked as planned to me, not a case study in how not to do things.
Is weed legal in the UK? Do people still smoke it?
This might play right into the hands of bootleggers and gangs but also into the Swedish / American nicotine pouch industry which is basically marketing straight at kids.
Also - vapes. Most folks don’t smoke cigarettes anymore. How does this control vaping?
There is a big difference between weed and tobacco.
I am a fairly regular weed smoker. I used to grow my own.
I used to smoke tobacco.
I can go weeks, months and even years without smoking weed. Kicking my nicotine habit took many, many, many tries and I didn't even enjoy it!
They are not the same.
That's a different in the harm, not a difference in the effectiveness of prohibition. In fact, the more addictive the substance, the less effective I would expected prohibition to be (and the more ancillary harms to result, especially from criminalisation).
That's exactly what this is. The money has moved on to pouches and vapes.
It's like how everyone pat themselves on the back for banning child labor after the industrial revolution had rendered it obsolete outside a few niches that weren't economically important enough to put up a real fight.
Politicians "win" by pandering to voters and interests. So this is an obvious move since they can pander to all those people who grew up being told a cigarette takes a minute off your life while only pissing off some niche industry and a few smokers who are unwilling to vape.
They had these kinds of programs for a long time, but many of the engineers were vilified and the programs disbanded as soon as this administration took office. I'm not sure why someone would sign up to work for a government that has no respect for its employees (or a company for that matter) if they already have gainful employment.
In fact, a bunch of NASA labs were recently closed where folks with this exact skillset could do these exact jobs. Why re-post under a different skin and expect a different result?
Well... the TSA was a jobs program for people who couldn't or didn't want to get jobs as cops. Stennis (Space Flight Center) is a jobs program for Aero Engineering grads to keep them from going to work in Europe or India. Who knows... we might need them to design newer expensive missile systems sometime.
There are all these 30-60 year old engineers who look like they should be good hires on paper, but the tech economy has been pooping out bullshit products (and jobs) for the last 20 years. The last "real" job I had... my official role was to sit at a desk and "coordinate" development. While no one was looking, I wrote code and passed it off to a dev in India to check in (US engineers weren't allowed to check in code.) My job at Amazon was similar... the higher up the food chain you went, the less management understood what engineers did (modulo a few notable exceptions -- the guy who ran Route 53 when it launched was amazingly tech saavy for a VP level manager.)
There's only so much idiocy you can expect the tech industry to digest. It's time to send engineers to the government so they can write documents about how we should evaluate the requirements for evaluation criteria.
Not OP. Sounds like he was considered to be a manager and wasn't allowed to get into the weeds. So instead of just managing the off shore team, he wrote some of the code for them and then let them take credit for it.
Which also means that he wasn't doing his job (management) and instead micromanaging his staff by doing their job.
This is such a common problem with highly technical managers because they can't seem to understand how to change focus or scope and do their jobs better. Instead they fall back on trying to ship features thinking that this is productive and to pat themselves on the back for staying technical.
We had a working system. It was the current administration that slashed NASA's budget and castrated the JPL aerospace employment pipeline. NASA's talent shortage is a self-inflicted wound.
Panic-firing and panic-reemploying your workforce every <4 years is not a sustainable rate of attrition for professional, research-oriented culture.
It's funny to me how much this administration gets the blame for everything. NASA would had been widely regarded as schlerotic and archaic before these most recent budget cuts. Filled with beaurocrats who didn't even know what their job was. But, the budget gets cut under Trump and now the rot in the organization is forgotten.
I don't think they should have their budget cut but they weren't a great agency before and were still declining.
A program like this, targeting younger people for short stints sense like a great way to bring in some new blood and ideas. Hopefully they can do something innovative that gets people thinking that investing in NASA is worth it.
It's funny to me how quickly people leap in front of the train to pretend like this fixes everything. NASA still has an anemic culture, and opening the door to interns is not a replacement for their failing talent acquisition. Budget cuts, revoked contracts and fired personnel will not stimulate positive change either.
> they weren't a great agency before and were still declining.
"Were"? They are. You're again giving premature credit to a policy that hasn't worked yet and ostensibly throttled NASA's capabilities. This is this administration's problem as much as it was Biden's, Trump 1's, and Obama's. You don't have to come in here with a chip on your shoulder just because I'm blaming the current iteration of the disaster.
> "Were"? They are. You're again giving premature credit to a policy that hasn't worked yet and ostensibly throttled NASA's capabilities.
I didn't assert otherwise. In fact, I clearly stayed that I _hoped_ this move would help. The status quo certainly wasn't working and I could see a way for this move to be helpful.
I'm not saying it's a great idea and it'll for sure work but, I guess, fuck me for trying to be optimistic about a decision made by this administration...
That’s not what it was, and you have to have been exclusivity ingesting only the most biased media to believe that it was ‘fat-trimming’. It was muscle-trimming. Then again, why would I expect anyone working in tech to understand how an organisation is meant to function. Maybe the government should’ve just had another funding round instead?
Genuinely sorry he let you down and you're left holding the bag dude. But please understand people aren't going to accept your weak rationalizations anymore.
This is the problem. It's as if everything has to crash and burn for people like the person you responded to finally get some sense. By that point, it will be too late to catch up to our competitors overseas. The race will be over. I honestly don't know how to reconcile this seemingly unsolvable problem. They have no perspective whatsoever of the kinds of people that are real innovators in engineering & tech. This field is super open to alternative lifestyles because that's where a lot of out of the box thinking happens. They just don't get it. In the past, it seemed easy to just ignore them. They could live their lives. But now they're running the ship and its sinking.
> they may have trimmed some fat, which is normal and necessary, but it's disingenuous to say that "engineers were vilified"
You can always tell when someone is embarrassed to defend something (especially hurting people), when they have to mask it in ambiguous, impassive terms and stale euphemisms.
He didn't fire thousands of good people, human beings who have to worry about putting food on the table now, for purely ideological reasons, while vilifying them as "woke", unqualified, doing work not worth doing (only to open the same positions back up now, because it turns out it was). No, he just "trimmed the fat".
Oh, did people get hurt? Did we waste money and lose expertise for nothing? No, we just "trimmed the fat". Gotta "trim the fat", right? "Trimming the fat" is normal and necessary, and if I say something is just "trimming the fat", that's all it is.
"Build a website - it's almost like you got the job done already" - Someone in the White House OEOB
The new National Design Studio that replaced the USDS does not seem to be capable of building a website that is accessible, performant, and not overly bombastic / hyperbolic.
Completely unreadable. Animation fails at the top, on a decently provisioned Mac laptop with 16GB of RAM.
Either way - it's unfortunate that the Technology Fellows, GSA, and other programs that brought folks into industry for roles exactly like this were unceremoniously destroyed in quite cruel and silly ways. Why would I apply for this? Fool me once...
The copy also doesn't seem to be written by someone with a good command of English, even ChatGPT would do better
>technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery. You work on real missions, alongside the teams building them, and your contributions move from concept to operation. For a few days, access is granted to this work. The number is extremely limited. The window only lasts four days. Will you answer the call?
This was the first thing I noticed. The first sentence is not a grammatical or sensical sentence as far as I can tell.
Also who are they expecting to get with a hiring window open for 4 days? People susceptible to manufactured urgency I guess... these are the tactics that phishing scams use.
It's scattered and disorganized like this administration.
You work on real missions, alongside the teams building them
OK alongside, but not ON, the teams building them? So apparently not actually building them myself? And also, does anyone build missions, or do they perhaps build systems?
For a few days, access is granted to this work.
Access is granted to whom? And to what work, the work I'll supposedly be doing? Hopefully yeah I have access to my own work. Or do you mean the work of the people alongside whom I'll be working on missions (the builders of the missions that is)?
The number is extremely limited.
What number?
The window only lasts four days.
Oh now there's a window analogy too. And they already said "a few days" so one of the two is redundant.
Its prob some H1B Indian Contractor poop skin that wrote this tbh. Gotta love the charity jobs that the USA gives out to all of unqualified India. Our tax dollars hard at work...
I knew a bunch of folks from 18F and the USWDS team. You could not find a more capable team of designers, developers and true user experience professionals. They cared about the users and they cared about good design.
How did they make these tapes sound so incredible? I'm getting more fidelity out of these tapes than just about any cassette I've ever listened to - even new in the shrink wrap. Amazing.
This is like all of the great shows I couldn't go to in my childhood. Incredible.
If they were looking to access government back doors at these providers then it would not be your usual hack - and worth a lot more. I have no idea if this is how an entire domestic surveillance network got strung up, but it would make sense at those numbers (though those numbers still seem very low for such a betrayal and potential consequences)
I dunno - my boss has deployed a couple of claw agents that are pretty good at doing SWE and SRE work. They’re available for the whole company to use, and they save us a ton of time. Pretty decent use case! Personally I haven’t found claw agents replace anything really for personal use outside of commercial tools I’d pay for to handle scheduling and stuff, but I also haven’t tried / trusted too many new use cases outside of that cron / daily briefing or some family schedules.
I love the idea of returning to this to be honest. What was missing was the big awesome list of RSS feeds haha.
This is actually a great idea. The key is to actually continue to do this and not gatekeep and charge money for promoted crap and add algorithms once it seems profitable to do so. If that happens we’re just recreating the wheel!
Outside of that, it sounds like the system worked perfectly. They launched, they paid DB costs (the 8M was not a ledger mistake) and then they rebuilt after they wanted more cost savings. Also a bunch of folks got promoted.
The 8M came from VCs lighting money on fire. Honestly this seems like the system worked as planned to me, not a case study in how not to do things.
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