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Why US Gov't Retirement Involves a Hole in the Ground Near Pittsburgh
Increasing automation worries some people as a danger to the livelihood of those who currently earn their livings at jobs that AI and robots (or just smarter software and more sophisticated technology generally) might be well-suited to, as the costs of the technology options drop. The Washington Post, though, features an eye-opening look at one workplace where automation certainly does not rule. It's "one of the weirdest workplaces in the U.S. government" — a subterranean office space in what was once a limestone mine, where 600 Office of Personnel Management employees process the retirement papers of other government employees. The Post article describes how this mostly-manual process works (and why it hasn't been changed much to take advantage of advancing technology), including with a video that might remind you of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. As the writer puts it,
"[T]hat system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper. The employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time. They work underground not for secrecy but for space. The old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records."
The 1973 Fire, National Personnel Records Center
They are still recovering from that one.
Experts Recover Military Personnel Records 40 Years After Fire
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
My wife worked 30+ years for two different government agencies. Getting OPM to figure out her pension correctly was a nightmare.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
This makes perfect sense. Who are people eligible for retiring? People who have worked for the government longer than 30 years (lesser time depending on age). Thus a lot of the records having to deal with these employees are on paper, because that was what was in use when they were hired.
So there are two options - spend a ton of money all at once and digitize everything, or simply process the old paper records only as needed when those long-term employees retire. The first option is very inefficient because a significant number of the records will not be needed by the Office of Personnel Management for individuals who have died or no longer work for the government.
As time goes on, more and more people retiring will have all digital records, and eventually the whole paper thing can go away. As the article quickly glosses over, only 15% of the cases require referencing the old paper records actually stored in the mine. And that number will constantly be dropping as those older employees retire.
So the current method is more cost effective and will naturally "go away" on its own after another decade or so.
Better known as 318230.
Mutants living below New New York? That is New Pittsburgh...
Actually that is the regular Pittsburgh. We call them "yinzers".
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
... insert witty comment about government secrecy and overreach */
Government secrecy and overreach aside, I'm not certain the power of technology is ready to challenged an entrenched army of bureaucrats.
Long after every assembly line job is automated, government functions will still be as efficient as they were in the fifties.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
"Isn't a "Hole in the Ground Near Pittsburgh" that is full of government employees funny enough without resorting to rectal humor?"
To be honest, I thought they fit together rather well.
Played for me in FF 28 under 64-bit UBUNTU Desktop 13.10.
Check your add-ons. Sometimes I have issues with Ad-block plus or No-Script blocking stuff.
The NSA is the exception. Still snowden proves the NSA relies on 50's era trust for documents. Why wasn't secure connections established for Hawaii? How many other sites does the NSA allow full access to their documents.
Also the NSA fired 90% of their Admins shortly afterwards. If they were that overstaffed what else is their bureaucracy screwing up?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
if that isn't efficiency, I'm not sure what efficiency looks like...
The NSA may be efficient at amassing lots of data. But I doubt if that is an efficient way to achieve their real mission of identifying useful intelligence. They are efficient at creating haystacks, but that doesn't mean they are finding many needles.
This clerical shop processes once in a lifetime events. Once the retirement data for an employee has been calculated, it goes into a pension payout system that automatically generates the checks every month. So it's not bad that it's mostly manual.
Some years ago, I got a look at the USAF Satellite Control Facility, which until the mid-1990s controlled all USAF satellites from a big blue building in Sunnyvale, CA. They "drove the bus" - handled orbital insertion and adjustment, stabilized the satellite orientation, monitored solar panels and batteries, and handled operational problems. (Payloads, such as cameras, radars, and such were controlled elsewhere by the owning agency over separate data links. Very USAF.) The systems used were so antiquated that one was a custom-built emulator for a tube computer. For each satellite pass, physical patchcords had to be set up to interconnect three computers (one to buffer data, one to decode it, and one to compute orbital mechanics) to process the data for the pass. The consoles looked and worked exactly like the 1960s ones from the Apollo program. The operation took about 600 people to run.
Yet they never lost a satellite through an error made at that faciilty. The USSR has lost satellites through such errors. NASA has. COMSAT has. But not all those old guys in Sunnyvale.
There were two attempts to modernize the facility; one using mainframes, and one using VAX computers. Both failed. It was finally replaced, cautiously, with a new facility at Falcon AFB. I have no idea what they're using. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the old software for some of the older satellites is still running in emulation.
The NSA may be efficient at amassing lots of data. But I doubt if that is an efficient way to achieve their real mission of identifying useful intelligence. They are efficient at creating haystacks, but that doesn't mean they are finding many needles.
But is NSA's job really to 'idenfity useful intelligence' or create the databanks ready for when they do actually find a needle throught other means, that all they have to do is write the needles name into the search box and they get a list of needles friends and relatives and all juicy little dirty secrets as well, unabridged, in-detail history of you and your relations?
I believe that law enforcement catches as many criminals as it can afford to catch. There are probably millions of Americans who could feel a hand on their shoulder at any moment but the simple truth is catching a criminal creates a huge expense in many cases. It is rather like an IRS auditor who can easily catch far more cheaters than the system could ever hope to deal with. It is also part of the reason that arrests are sometimes seen as racial in nature. If you were running a cop shop and knew that one segment of the public could afford good lawyers while another segment almost had to plea bargain due to lack of funds from a tax payer perspective you simply don't want to arrest those with enough money to fight back. Racial issues and money issues are welded together and it is only when a society is willing to hurt itself economically that the cops can go after well heeled citizens.
I mean paper doesn't have to be inefficient, in fact it rarely is since paper based workflows are often optimized. Everybody working with paper understands the process and can therefore come up with ways to optimize it.
I once worked at a hospital which had paper files. It makes sense since the documents in there can be in a lot of different types. The process of dealing with it was rather efficient on the paper side, you had some numbers and got the file with that number from a cabinet. The actual bottleneck was the computer based indexing system. We had something similar to E-Mail called "Outlook/Exchange". We ended up printing out those pseudo E-Mails, looking up each number individually in the indexing system, and writing the number of the file next to it. There was no way of sorting the entries to be able to reach them efficiently, nor was the system well designed. (it had SQL injection bugs!)
This is just one example of how badly designed computer based workflows can be.
Then there is the other point of governments being supposedly less efficient than companies. I have no idea where that idea comes from. I have 2 retirement funds, one run by a private company, the other one run by the government. While the government one manages to pay out millions of pensions every month and flawlessly adapts to any changes in my life, the private one can't even get a simple address change right, twice in a row!
Why should companies change? Companies mainly act to self-preserve. Any change is not just constructive, but also destructive. For a company to change it would need to have a vital reason, without that reason it cannot change.
Some people claim that there is the magic hand of the market which will somehow fix the problem though something called "competition". Those people go on citing exotic areas where their dogma actually worked and there was competition. However look around you. Go to an electronics store with a list of brands that come from the same manufacturer and then look at how many different prices exactly the same product gets sold. If there was competition, everyone would buy the cheapest of the otherwise identical products. There is no competition on many markets.
Then the NSA does a hell of a non-job. It wasn't able to find the nadle named "Tsarnaev brothers", though there were warnings about them. Same with "Abdulmutallab", which seems to have turned up nothing despite even his own father was warning about him.
Their pontifications about the Steelers make it an amusing town to live in 'n'at. Yinz don't even know...
I believe that law enforcement catches as many criminals as it can afford to catch. There are probably millions of Americans who could feel a hand on their shoulder at any moment but the simple truth is catching a criminal creates a huge expense in many cases.
Considering the prison population in the USA in comparison to many other countries, the American law enforcement would seem to be rather well funded.
It is what it is.
Wow. What was it like before you implemented SAP?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
General deterrents don't exist. If they did, the death penalty would be a deterrent.
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With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight that warning was proved to be accurate. That means it wasn't noise, it was actually a signal lost in the noise.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.