By statutory requirement, all such letters contain an explanation. The explanation is frequently a reference to a code section and, admittedly, to most people that may make no sense. However, the explanation is always present.
Call up and ask for an explanation. Most of the people who work the phones are pretty good at turning a letter full of legal jargon into plain English. They do it all day long.
Pro-tip: Tell the person who answers the phone the form number on the bottom of the letter. There are limited number of boilerplate paragraphs that go into each numbered letter and if they know the form number, they can help you zero in on your problem double-quick.
If a final report from a Tax Compliance Officer (the people who audit you in the office) is for a net tax increase and the taxpayer doesn't wait around, it will be mailed out for a signature. Thus, I doubt your friend; his story is very low-percentage.
Of course, there is that low percentage. If the amount is low enough, the TCO and their manager may decide to close the case with no further work (called a "Survey"; there are several sub-types) which means that they just dump it back into the central files because the cost of processing the new assessment is more than the IRS could collect.
That power-tripping you referred to? People who screw up on their taxes and get a lecture along the lines of "You did this wrong. Please don't do it again." will frequently perceive that as a power trip. The IRS looks at it as an educational opportunity.
I suspect the real truth of this story is somewhere in between.
It's part of the price you pay for a sweet government gig.
The price I paid for my sweet government gig was being paid less than half what comparable private sector employees earned. I once consulted with a group of 16 employees who worked a project for 3 years that netted the government just over $16B.
That's billion, with a "b".
Their average pay was about $60K/year plus benefits. They got no bonus for bringing in that staggering sum. That sort of treatment was normal.
My sweet gig will only pay off if I live for quite a while more, since the only advantage I have over the private sector is that I earned a small pension and decent health insurance, both of which are unlikely to be threatened because my employer goes into bankruptcy.
I had to spend 30 years behind the earnings curve to get where I am now; I wouldn't call that a "sweet gig". It was a trade-off I made with my eyes open and if I live another 20 years, it'll turn out to have been the right choice, but please disabuse yourself of the notion that there are more than a small handful of federal jobs that can accurately be termed "sweet gigs." They just don't exist.
I retired a couple of years ago from a near-30 year career with the Internal Revenue Service.
People tried to kill me on more than one occasion. Dogs were set on me more times than I can remember. A man once openly threatened to kill me, in front of witnesses, while we were standing in a courthouse hallway, on a break, during a jury selection.
People comitted suicide from dealing with us even when doing so made no sense; they simply let their ignorant fears of the Big Bad put them in a bad place, mentally.
When a parade of kooks and idiots testified to Congress in 1998 that we were all baby-eating monsters, NO ONE stood up for us. Horrific legislation that left the agency permanently hamstrung resulted.
Over the last 3 decades, the IRS has actually deserved about 1% of the vitriol poured out on it. Morale is a thing of the past.
Yet, still, no one stands up for the IRS. Those of us who worked there had to adapt. It's possible.
To those at the NSA who are just awakening to the new reality that people are, now and forevermore, going to hate you whether you deserve it or not, I can only say "Welcome to my world. Learn to deal with it. It'll drive you nuts if you don't."
You need an external DA converter that uses DSD to convert to analog, but that can accept PCM.
Maybe I'll buy one some day. For now, though, I don't want to buy new hardware. I like my Schiit Loki. That DAC, however, will only accept DSD files. Whatever I feed it must come to it via DoP.
So if I want to play my FLAC files, I'll need a player that converts PCM to DSD on the fly then sends that file to the DAC via DoP.
As for audio pebbles, I haven't tried them. My initial reaction is that they probably wouldn't work so I haven't tried them. However, if you have some good experimental data point me to it. Otherwise, I'll pass. Audiophilia nervosa is not a disease I intend to contract.
Thanks for the reply but I've seen that. Yes, MPD can handle DSD files these days. However, I have an outboard DAC that *only* accepts DSD files, a Schiit Loki. It's a great little DAC but to use it for my FLAC (for example) files, I need my player to convert PCM to DSD on the fly, then send the newly-created DSD file to the DAC via DoP.
On Windows, both JRiver and foobar can do that. On Linux, there is no FLOSS solution I know of; there's only the very expensive HQplayer.
BTW - There's absolutely no need to apologize for potentially wasting my time. I find your courtesy refreshing. Thank you.
I need a player that will convert PCM files to DSD and send them via DoP to an outboard DAC that converts DSD files, only.
On Linux, that means HQPlayer. It's expensive. The interface seems designed by someone who thinks about everything in a way that would never occur to me. But it does the job for now.
When there's an add-on for MPD that will do PCM-to-DSD for all files, I'll migrate to that.
If you're on Windows and have the same need as me and also need bit-perfect output via USB to your outboard DAC, your choices are JRiver and foobar.
Yes, because I would just love having to go through regulatory channels...
No one would ever require that from small producers. After all, if you have just a couple of cows and want to sell a little raw milk and some craft cheese from your small farm, no one would ever interfere with that. That would be silly.
Back when [unions] still had power though, they served a very good purpose for people in non-union shops - they made employers afraid of them. As a result, it was considered good business practice to treat employees well enough that they didn't want to unionize.
The whole "working your way through the courts" process can be radically shortened if you're willing to play the game. To wit:
1. File in Texas. 2. Claim less than $25 in damages. 3. Lose in small claims court. 4. Texas law provides ZERO appeals for cases this small, so 5. Go straight to the Supreme Court.
The SC has previously heard at least one notable case that got there through this mechanism.
You work(ed?) in a situation where pissing off your coworkers would not cause you trouble. Few people are able to find positions where they can work in such splendid isolation. Since you're not a team player, your attitude is appropriate for you.
For those of us who must rely on others in our workgroup to get things done, life is different. The second best project I worked during my entire career was group-evaluated. We wrote our own evaluation and we all shared a single collective evaluation narrative. We informally evaluated each other every quarter in a frank, open meeting with all present. Annually, our official evaluation determined raises and ratings. In three years on that project, we gave ourselves raises twice but passed once because we faced the fact that the project had bogged and not met goals in that year. Making sure the entire team was happily working together was, obviously, *extremely* important.
Given our different experiences, I'd say we both have valid viewpoints, depending on circumstances.
Not caring what your co-workers think and deliberately pissing them off is a bigger ding on your evaluation than just a general comment about communication skills.
"Actively antagonizes others in workgroup" is not a good replacement for "could use improvement in communications skills".
...you might find you have to start filling out detailed weekly status reports...
I was in this situation once. My manager said he didn't have enough info on my day to day activities so he demanded a "detailed daily report" of what I was doing.
What's that old "Dungeons and Dragons" rule? Sometimes the worst thing you can do to a player is give them *exactly* what they ask for. I started churning out ~3 pages, single spaced, at the end of each day with excruciating detail of everything I did during the day.
In about 2 weeks, my boss told me he no longer needed status reports. After that, he let me write my own evaluations and he just signed them.
Send an email to the whole team at the end of each day...
Before I retired, I got fed up with spam from co-workers. I especially got fed up with spam from executives who thought that anything they sent out was automatically NOT spam.
We had an enterprise mailbox to which spam was to be forwarded to help our mail admins look after their filters. I started forwarding emails from various executives to that box, routinely. If they were sending me shit that wasn't about my job, it was spam. It got forwarded.
Once, our management decided to put everybody on a dozen mailing lists at once. 99% of the content was completely useless to any one person. I forwarded them all to the *spam reporting address.
Eventually, someone took notice. I got emails, later phone calls, later personal counseling telling me that various folks high up the food chain had gotten their feelings hurt that they were reported as originators of spam. I was repeatedly told that if I didn't like being on mailing lists, I should remove myself. I repeatedly replied that since I didn't put myself on those lists, they were spam and I'd continue to report them as such.
I never stopped stopped reporting spam just because the source was internal.
Eventually, the emails did stop. Email admins blocked me from receiving mail from various executives. They also took me off lists that I hadn't placed myself on.
Now, is there a guy in your office who hates spam as much as me? If there is, how do you think he'll react to being spammed daily by someone he can walk over to and scream at? Do you really want to be on the receiving end of that?
So many posts yet no one has commented on the fact that the car is just seriously ugly. It reminds me of a Corvette C7, what with all the cut-outs and creases.
Hey, for all I know it's super-duper in the wind tunnel but it sure looks like something from the sketchbook of a motorhead who's still in junior high.
My opinion, of course. In all seriousness, though, if I'm going to spend that much money on something, I want it to not just work well but be pretty to boot.
And yes, "pretty" is a valid criteria for choosing a car. If you're spending that much, you should be able to get everything, including "pretty".
Apparently, if one is cisgendered, the matching gender of one's mind and reproductive system conspires to weld the idea of gender so inextricibly to the experience of existing or being that one then neurotically seeks to paint every last thing in the world with gender!
I don't see that state of affairs as justification to assign to the transgendered some magical insight into gender, nor to disparage the cisgendered as sufficiently incapable of understanding the subject that they become almost universally neurotic in the way they deal with those concepts.
As an aside, I also see no justification for being so dismissive of the ability of the cisgendered to understand things. You cross a line into the territory of "rude for no good reason" when you say things like that.
Besides, isn't this an old concept that has nothing to do with being cisgendered? For example, I'm terrible at learning new languages but I occasionally take a stab at it. In my very limited experience, there are a number of languages that seem to want to assign a gender to everything. I don't see that as proof that those languages are inferior or derive from neurotic roots. I only see a different take on categorizing everyday objects. That's not actually bad, is it?
I have a ICD-Defibrilator as well. Yes the thing can be accessed wirelessly, once you place a receiver over the area,...
The ICD in my sister did not require a receiver placed over the area. The tech accessed it wirelessly from across the room. It was a small room, granted, but she and her equipment were several feet away.
That was the surprise. We had both thought that holding that puck over the area was required to access the device. We didn't know it could be done without her knowledge or consent from more-than-handshake distance. For that reason, I don't think Cheney is paranoid to have the wireless access to his device somehow limited.
I never said the sky is falling. We were just momentarily and, I think, justifiably startled.
You are describing a *pacemaker*, not a defibrillator.
Not in this case.
My sister has an implanted cardiac defibrillator that also functions as a pacemaker. It was my understanding that all implanted defibrillators have this functionality.
Of course, I could be completely wrong about that. The defibrillator she has replaced a previous pacemaker that was just a pacemaker. We were not informed if there was actually such a thing as a defibrillator that was just a defibrillator because such a device would not have been appropriate for her. For that reason, I may have the wrong impression.
Suffice it to say, she has a combo device that is always referred to by medical professionals as an "ICD" without mentioning that it also functions as a pacemaker. I assume they all do. If not, I'm sure someone on here more knowledgable than me will correct me.
I was being specific, not general. Here's what I mean -
Do you crinkle in fear each time a car comes at you from the opposite direction?
I'm sure I was quite afraid the first time I drove. However, I quickly learned that the danger was minimal, there were postive steps I could take to minimize it, and if something did go horribly wrong there was only a vanishingly small chance that someone was deliberately causing a problem. I got used to it, obviously, since they don't bother me now. I don't remember exactly, but I feel sure I actually got used to it before I finished my first drive.
I understand that all of life is potentially dangerous. That was not my point.
Prior to the implanted defibrillator, my sis had a pacemaker. It was just under the skin and checking it required placing an electronic puck of some sort directly on the skin over the pacemaker. That was how it was connected to a testing console. Making changes to the way it worked was a bit complicated, took some time, and required the cooperation of the patient (at minimum, to just sit there and let the work happen).
The defibrillator was very different. There was no puck and it could be accessed from a vastly greater distance. Also, the technician could instantly, with a few keystrokes, turn my sister's heart up or down whether my sister was cooperating or not. In my first post, I was relating that this was the first time we realized that the implanted defibrillator required her to trust her life to a technology that could be so easily abused. Now that she's gone through it, she accepts the risk.
However, it's a case of believing "I'm not a target/security through obscurity" that allows her to accept this situation. She really is completely defenseless against anyone close by who can send the right wireless signals. She accepts the risk in exchange for the rewards but the initial shock at realizing the risk existed (and having it so clearly, offhandedly demonstrated) was NOT unjustified. I feel sure that if she were a public person like Cheney, she, too, would have wanted wireless access disabled.
My sis has an implanted defibrillator. It's a weird experience to be sitting in a doctors office when a technician comes in with a machine to test the installation.
"I just need to turn up your blood pressure and heart rate for a minute" says the tech, as casually as ordering a cup of coffee.
A couple of button presses later, the look of shock on my sister's face as she realized that she was not, in a very literal sense, in control of her own heart is something I'll never forget.
She needs her implanted defibrillator but, holy shit, the power she must cede to Miss Random Device Technician by having it in her body is scary as all hell.
Thanks for that. Yes, I threw a bone to the one BAH guy who impressed me. (Seriously, he was worth his weight in gold.) I know from personal experience that there have been some GREAT people at BAH.
I'm afraid I wasn't as clear as I should have been. I was commenting by example, mostly. People outside government often don't understand why things are done the way they are. Usually, it's simply because the law requires it. In my experience, BAH often wanted to change things in seemingly rational ways that totally broke all kinds of processes that they didn't even know existed. Why? Because they don't work here and don't understand how some little change in procedure can cause big problems completely outside the area they were hired to address. When us grunts would point out those kinds of problems, they'd just stare and go ahead on.
We had (famously, since this story got repeated ad infinitum inside the bureau) one BAH consultant give a high-level briefing to our law enforcement arm about changes that were coming to their work flow. As it turns out (I'll spare you the excruciating details), the BAH guy who was in charge of all changes for that division didn't know they did criminal investigations and was shocked to learn they carried badges and guns. He assumed they were the same folks as on the civil enforcement side, doing the same job. He literally had no idea what job was being done by the people whose job processes he was telling them he was going to completely overhaul.
He got about halfway through his briefing before he was physically removed from the building on the order of the Special Agent In Charge at that location. He was replaced and the next iteration of their changes started with them actually asking some Special Agents what they did all day.
At least that was progress.
This sort of "I'm from private industry so I know what I'm doing. You guys work for the government so you're obviously incompetent, low-IQ fools who need to be rescued." attitude just oozed from them.
Based on those experiences, I was trying to illustrate a more general point: Outside contractors aren't, by default, smarter than the people who already work at the organization. They need to ask questions before they start telling people how to better do their jobs. Too often, though, they get requirements (baked into contracts) from people so far removed from the actual work that they wind up doing more harm than good.
I realize this happens in private industry, too, but the problems are amplified in the public sector because so many things about business processes and goals are fundamentally (and rightly) different than in the private sector. Many contractors just don't "get it" at a gut level and the results are too often very, very painful.
One addendum - I have had some very positive project results where outside contractors did all the heavy lifting. "Outside contractor" is not equal to "incompetent" by a long shot. It's just that summary referred to BAH and my experience with them was consistently bad. The biggest success (that I was heavily involved in) using an outside contractor involved Lockheed Martin and I'm sure there are other folks out there who have as low an opinion of LM as I have of BAH.
I don't care. I'm willing to listen to him. I think he has a good message, for the most part.
In times like these, on this extremely important issue, when he writes really good opinion piece like this one, I think it's particularly important that people listen. Thus, I think it is fair to point out that a weird messenger can cause a good message to be ignored. It's lamentable but it's human nature.
Slashdot Mirror
By statutory requirement, all such letters contain an explanation. The explanation is frequently a reference to a code section and, admittedly, to most people that may make no sense. However, the explanation is always present.
Call up and ask for an explanation. Most of the people who work the phones are pretty good at turning a letter full of legal jargon into plain English. They do it all day long.
Pro-tip: Tell the person who answers the phone the form number on the bottom of the letter. There are limited number of boilerplate paragraphs that go into each numbered letter and if they know the form number, they can help you zero in on your problem double-quick.
The story of your friend needs some more details.
If a final report from a Tax Compliance Officer (the people who audit you in the office) is for a net tax increase and the taxpayer doesn't wait around, it will be mailed out for a signature. Thus, I doubt your friend; his story is very low-percentage.
Of course, there is that low percentage. If the amount is low enough, the TCO and their manager may decide to close the case with no further work (called a "Survey"; there are several sub-types) which means that they just dump it back into the central files because the cost of processing the new assessment is more than the IRS could collect.
That power-tripping you referred to? People who screw up on their taxes and get a lecture along the lines of "You did this wrong. Please don't do it again." will frequently perceive that as a power trip. The IRS looks at it as an educational opportunity.
I suspect the real truth of this story is somewhere in between.
The price I paid for my sweet government gig was being paid less than half what comparable private sector employees earned. I once consulted with a group of 16 employees who worked a project for 3 years that netted the government just over $16B.
That's billion, with a "b".
Their average pay was about $60K/year plus benefits. They got no bonus for bringing in that staggering sum. That sort of treatment was normal.
My sweet gig will only pay off if I live for quite a while more, since the only advantage I have over the private sector is that I earned a small pension and decent health insurance, both of which are unlikely to be threatened because my employer goes into bankruptcy.
I had to spend 30 years behind the earnings curve to get where I am now; I wouldn't call that a "sweet gig". It was a trade-off I made with my eyes open and if I live another 20 years, it'll turn out to have been the right choice, but please disabuse yourself of the notion that there are more than a small handful of federal jobs that can accurately be termed "sweet gigs." They just don't exist.
I retired a couple of years ago from a near-30 year career with the Internal Revenue Service.
People tried to kill me on more than one occasion. Dogs were set on me more times than I can remember. A man once openly threatened to kill me, in front of witnesses, while we were standing in a courthouse hallway, on a break, during a jury selection.
People comitted suicide from dealing with us even when doing so made no sense; they simply let their ignorant fears of the Big Bad put them in a bad place, mentally.
When a parade of kooks and idiots testified to Congress in 1998 that we were all baby-eating monsters, NO ONE stood up for us. Horrific legislation that left the agency permanently hamstrung resulted.
Over the last 3 decades, the IRS has actually deserved about 1% of the vitriol poured out on it. Morale is a thing of the past.
Yet, still, no one stands up for the IRS. Those of us who worked there had to adapt. It's possible.
To those at the NSA who are just awakening to the new reality that people are, now and forevermore, going to hate you whether you deserve it or not, I can only say "Welcome to my world. Learn to deal with it. It'll drive you nuts if you don't."
Maybe I'll buy one some day. For now, though, I don't want to buy new hardware. I like my Schiit Loki. That DAC, however, will only accept DSD files. Whatever I feed it must come to it via DoP.
So if I want to play my FLAC files, I'll need a player that converts PCM to DSD on the fly then sends that file to the DAC via DoP.
As for audio pebbles, I haven't tried them. My initial reaction is that they probably wouldn't work so I haven't tried them. However, if you have some good experimental data point me to it. Otherwise, I'll pass. Audiophilia nervosa is not a disease I intend to contract.
Thanks for the reply but I've seen that. Yes, MPD can handle DSD files these days. However, I have an outboard DAC that *only* accepts DSD files, a Schiit Loki. It's a great little DAC but to use it for my FLAC (for example) files, I need my player to convert PCM to DSD on the fly, then send the newly-created DSD file to the DAC via DoP.
On Windows, both JRiver and foobar can do that. On Linux, there is no FLOSS solution I know of; there's only the very expensive HQplayer.
BTW - There's absolutely no need to apologize for potentially wasting my time. I find your courtesy refreshing. Thank you.
I need a player that will convert PCM files to DSD and send them via DoP to an outboard DAC that converts DSD files, only.
On Linux, that means HQPlayer. It's expensive. The interface seems designed by someone who thinks about everything in a way that would never occur to me. But it does the job for now.
When there's an add-on for MPD that will do PCM-to-DSD for all files, I'll migrate to that.
If you're on Windows and have the same need as me and also need bit-perfect output via USB to your outboard DAC, your choices are JRiver and foobar.
No one would ever require that from small producers. After all, if you have just a couple of cows and want to sell a little raw milk and some craft cheese from your small farm, no one would ever interfere with that. That would be silly.
Oh. ... Wait. ...
This.
A thousand times, this.
The whole "working your way through the courts" process can be radically shortened if you're willing to play the game. To wit:
1. File in Texas.
2. Claim less than $25 in damages.
3. Lose in small claims court.
4. Texas law provides ZERO appeals for cases this small, so
5. Go straight to the Supreme Court.
The SC has previously heard at least one notable case that got there through this mechanism.
I submit.
You work(ed?) in a situation where pissing off your coworkers would not cause you trouble. Few people are able to find positions where they can work in such splendid isolation. Since you're not a team player, your attitude is appropriate for you.
For those of us who must rely on others in our workgroup to get things done, life is different. The second best project I worked during my entire career was group-evaluated. We wrote our own evaluation and we all shared a single collective evaluation narrative. We informally evaluated each other every quarter in a frank, open meeting with all present. Annually, our official evaluation determined raises and ratings. In three years on that project, we gave ourselves raises twice but passed once because we faced the fact that the project had bogged and not met goals in that year. Making sure the entire team was happily working together was, obviously, *extremely* important.
Given our different experiences, I'd say we both have valid viewpoints, depending on circumstances.
Agreed?
Not caring what your co-workers think and deliberately pissing them off is a bigger ding on your evaluation than just a general comment about communication skills.
"Actively antagonizes others in workgroup" is not a good replacement for "could use improvement in communications skills".
I was in this situation once. My manager said he didn't have enough info on my day to day activities so he demanded a "detailed daily report" of what I was doing.
What's that old "Dungeons and Dragons" rule? Sometimes the worst thing you can do to a player is give them *exactly* what they ask for. I started churning out ~3 pages, single spaced, at the end of each day with excruciating detail of everything I did during the day.
In about 2 weeks, my boss told me he no longer needed status reports. After that, he let me write my own evaluations and he just signed them.
Before I retired, I got fed up with spam from co-workers. I especially got fed up with spam from executives who thought that anything they sent out was automatically NOT spam.
We had an enterprise mailbox to which spam was to be forwarded to help our mail admins look after their filters. I started forwarding emails from various executives to that box, routinely. If they were sending me shit that wasn't about my job, it was spam. It got forwarded.
Once, our management decided to put everybody on a dozen mailing lists at once. 99% of the content was completely useless to any one person. I forwarded them all to the *spam reporting address.
Eventually, someone took notice. I got emails, later phone calls, later personal counseling telling me that various folks high up the food chain had gotten their feelings hurt that they were reported as originators of spam. I was repeatedly told that if I didn't like being on mailing lists, I should remove myself. I repeatedly replied that since I didn't put myself on those lists, they were spam and I'd continue to report them as such.
I never stopped stopped reporting spam just because the source was internal.
Eventually, the emails did stop. Email admins blocked me from receiving mail from various executives. They also took me off lists that I hadn't placed myself on.
Now, is there a guy in your office who hates spam as much as me? If there is, how do you think he'll react to being spammed daily by someone he can walk over to and scream at? Do you really want to be on the receiving end of that?
I didn't think so.
So many posts yet no one has commented on the fact that the car is just seriously ugly. It reminds me of a Corvette C7, what with all the cut-outs and creases.
Hey, for all I know it's super-duper in the wind tunnel but it sure looks like something from the sketchbook of a motorhead who's still in junior high.
My opinion, of course. In all seriousness, though, if I'm going to spend that much money on something, I want it to not just work well but be pretty to boot.
And yes, "pretty" is a valid criteria for choosing a car. If you're spending that much, you should be able to get everything, including "pretty".
Does anybody actually think this car is pretty?
I don't see that state of affairs as justification to assign to the transgendered some magical insight into gender, nor to disparage the cisgendered as sufficiently incapable of understanding the subject that they become almost universally neurotic in the way they deal with those concepts.
As an aside, I also see no justification for being so dismissive of the ability of the cisgendered to understand things. You cross a line into the territory of "rude for no good reason" when you say things like that.
Besides, isn't this an old concept that has nothing to do with being cisgendered? For example, I'm terrible at learning new languages but I occasionally take a stab at it. In my very limited experience, there are a number of languages that seem to want to assign a gender to everything. I don't see that as proof that those languages are inferior or derive from neurotic roots. I only see a different take on categorizing everyday objects. That's not actually bad, is it?
The ICD in my sister did not require a receiver placed over the area. The tech accessed it wirelessly from across the room. It was a small room, granted, but she and her equipment were several feet away.
That was the surprise. We had both thought that holding that puck over the area was required to access the device. We didn't know it could be done without her knowledge or consent from more-than-handshake distance. For that reason, I don't think Cheney is paranoid to have the wireless access to his device somehow limited.
I never said the sky is falling. We were just momentarily and, I think, justifiably startled.
Not in this case.
My sister has an implanted cardiac defibrillator that also functions as a pacemaker. It was my understanding that all implanted defibrillators have this functionality.
Of course, I could be completely wrong about that. The defibrillator she has replaced a previous pacemaker that was just a pacemaker. We were not informed if there was actually such a thing as a defibrillator that was just a defibrillator because such a device would not have been appropriate for her. For that reason, I may have the wrong impression.
Suffice it to say, she has a combo device that is always referred to by medical professionals as an "ICD" without mentioning that it also functions as a pacemaker. I assume they all do. If not, I'm sure someone on here more knowledgable than me will correct me.
I was being specific, not general. Here's what I mean -
I'm sure I was quite afraid the first time I drove. However, I quickly learned that the danger was minimal, there were postive steps I could take to minimize it, and if something did go horribly wrong there was only a vanishingly small chance that someone was deliberately causing a problem. I got used to it, obviously, since they don't bother me now. I don't remember exactly, but I feel sure I actually got used to it before I finished my first drive.
I understand that all of life is potentially dangerous. That was not my point.
Prior to the implanted defibrillator, my sis had a pacemaker. It was just under the skin and checking it required placing an electronic puck of some sort directly on the skin over the pacemaker. That was how it was connected to a testing console. Making changes to the way it worked was a bit complicated, took some time, and required the cooperation of the patient (at minimum, to just sit there and let the work happen).
The defibrillator was very different. There was no puck and it could be accessed from a vastly greater distance. Also, the technician could instantly, with a few keystrokes, turn my sister's heart up or down whether my sister was cooperating or not. In my first post, I was relating that this was the first time we realized that the implanted defibrillator required her to trust her life to a technology that could be so easily abused. Now that she's gone through it, she accepts the risk.
However, it's a case of believing "I'm not a target/security through obscurity" that allows her to accept this situation. She really is completely defenseless against anyone close by who can send the right wireless signals. She accepts the risk in exchange for the rewards but the initial shock at realizing the risk existed (and having it so clearly, offhandedly demonstrated) was NOT unjustified. I feel sure that if she were a public person like Cheney, she, too, would have wanted wireless access disabled.
My sis has an implanted defibrillator. It's a weird experience to be sitting in a doctors office when a technician comes in with a machine to test the installation.
"I just need to turn up your blood pressure and heart rate for a minute" says the tech, as casually as ordering a cup of coffee.
A couple of button presses later, the look of shock on my sister's face as she realized that she was not, in a very literal sense, in control of her own heart is something I'll never forget.
She needs her implanted defibrillator but, holy shit, the power she must cede to Miss Random Device Technician by having it in her body is scary as all hell.
In programming (and in other areas, too), aren't these sorts of solutions usually described as "elegant"?
Highly insightful, imo.
Baby food jars? No way. I need 5-gallon buckets.
Thanks for that. Yes, I threw a bone to the one BAH guy who impressed me. (Seriously, he was worth his weight in gold.) I know from personal experience that there have been some GREAT people at BAH.
I'm afraid I wasn't as clear as I should have been. I was commenting by example, mostly. People outside government often don't understand why things are done the way they are. Usually, it's simply because the law requires it. In my experience, BAH often wanted to change things in seemingly rational ways that totally broke all kinds of processes that they didn't even know existed. Why? Because they don't work here and don't understand how some little change in procedure can cause big problems completely outside the area they were hired to address. When us grunts would point out those kinds of problems, they'd just stare and go ahead on.
We had (famously, since this story got repeated ad infinitum inside the bureau) one BAH consultant give a high-level briefing to our law enforcement arm about changes that were coming to their work flow. As it turns out (I'll spare you the excruciating details), the BAH guy who was in charge of all changes for that division didn't know they did criminal investigations and was shocked to learn they carried badges and guns. He assumed they were the same folks as on the civil enforcement side, doing the same job. He literally had no idea what job was being done by the people whose job processes he was telling them he was going to completely overhaul.
He got about halfway through his briefing before he was physically removed from the building on the order of the Special Agent In Charge at that location. He was replaced and the next iteration of their changes started with them actually asking some Special Agents what they did all day.
At least that was progress.
This sort of "I'm from private industry so I know what I'm doing. You guys work for the government so you're obviously incompetent, low-IQ fools who need to be rescued." attitude just oozed from them.
Based on those experiences, I was trying to illustrate a more general point: Outside contractors aren't, by default, smarter than the people who already work at the organization. They need to ask questions before they start telling people how to better do their jobs. Too often, though, they get requirements (baked into contracts) from people so far removed from the actual work that they wind up doing more harm than good.
I realize this happens in private industry, too, but the problems are amplified in the public sector because so many things about business processes and goals are fundamentally (and rightly) different than in the private sector. Many contractors just don't "get it" at a gut level and the results are too often very, very painful.
One addendum - I have had some very positive project results where outside contractors did all the heavy lifting. "Outside contractor" is not equal to "incompetent" by a long shot. It's just that summary referred to BAH and my experience with them was consistently bad. The biggest success (that I was heavily involved in) using an outside contractor involved Lockheed Martin and I'm sure there are other folks out there who have as low an opinion of LM as I have of BAH.
I don't care. I'm willing to listen to him. I think he has a good message, for the most part.
In times like these, on this extremely important issue, when he writes really good opinion piece like this one, I think it's particularly important that people listen. Thus, I think it is fair to point out that a weird messenger can cause a good message to be ignored. It's lamentable but it's human nature.