I didn't realize that call signs could be reused. I looked up the call sign of an old friend of my dad who's been dead for a number of years. The guy was Olaf Pearson and he had been involved in radio for so long that as a child he, literally, had been employed as a go-fer and floor sweeper in Marconi's lab.
It just struck me as odd that his old 4 digit call sign now belongs to some guy in Georgia.
Actually the second amendment specifically recommends military weaponry
Agreed. 100%. I'm a strong gun rights supporter. It's just that I've had to argue the pro-gun position to people who didn't understand the definition of "arms" and were attempting to paint all gun owners as wackos who want to own nukes. That's a straw man argument, but it still has to be countered by acquiescing on one good point that the anti-gun folks make (that there are limits to the 2nd amendment protections) and then pointing out that what the amendment does protect includes just about everything that private American citizens might want to own. Specifically, I point out that modern assault rifles are exactly the sort of weapons that the Founders would have expected us to keep and bear.
That sort of outlook, that the Kentucky rifle and the Brown Bess were the assault rifles of their day and that modern assault rifles should be afforded the same protection, sometimes will really knock the antis for a loop. They expect a hunting/sporting use/self defense argument and I give them something completely different. It can be fun.
It requires that you be able to work as a go-between the hardcore techs and the mouth breathing users
Hmmm. That's exactly what I do best. Maybe my upcoming layoff may not go as badly as I anticipate. Time to do some research on alternate career paths...
They're also keenly aware of how out-of-whack the user/nerd ratio is. Conservative (read:CHEAP) companies will let it get to 70:1, users:nerd. Good companies will go 40:1. Exceptional companies will go 20:1.
Wow. I work in a federal govt office and a fairly well-funded one, at that. We're struggling to get down to the official goal ratio of, IIRC, 112:1. Right now we're at about 130:1 for desktop support. The server support folks are a different function; they have a ratio of servers to admins that varies widely within their ranks. Some admins have as few as a dozen servers to look after. Some, if current plans come to fruition, will have more than a hundred spread across multiple states. (Yes, that's right, more than a hundred servers per admin, all in geographically diverse clusters.)
Bottom line? We're pretty good at prioritizing around here. We have to be or we'd go nuts.
Yep. And those limits are explicitly stated in the Second Amendment. It guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, not artillery, and the difference between the two was well understood by the men who voted on the thing. Unfortunately, because that basic understanding has passed from the popular consciousness lots of people try to make specious arguments like "You want assault rifles? Well, what about howitzers? What about nukes?" To be fair, there's some crossover between the two categories. The old brightline test of "man-portability" no longer really applies since weapons with the power of artillery pieces can now be carried by one man; there are also rifles too big for one man to practically carry. And U.S. law says almost nothing about certain odd categories of weaponry, like flamethrowers (surprisingly legal and unregulated in most places). Generally, though, the line between arms and artillery is still pretty easy to draw. The Second protects the right to keep and bear the former and provides no such protection for people who want to collect the latter.
The thought of McBride with a nuke is pretty chilling though. Why did you have to conjure up that image for me?:-)
In the last couple of days an additional good link on the subject came up. It's a round-table discussion among Union reps, contractor reps, and some other observers, of the way the process of contracting out government jobs works these days. If you don't mind a 9-meg wma download:
Hmmm. If this is a troll, I'm guilty of rising to the bait. But if it's not a troll, I'd really be interested in hearing how you reached the conclusion that the parent poster complaint (that, as I understand it, an English-speaking Indian on a conference call with an accent so thick that s/he can't be understood is no more useful than an employee who doesn't speak the language at all) could only be made by a racist.
Personally, I've experienced something similar. We had a sysadmin who needed help on some software who got connected to suppport in (we presume) India and simply couldn't understand the person on the other end. She wound up forwarding the call to our conference room, putting it on our very good speaker system, and hauling in random passersby to listen and try to translate. There were, eventually, a dozen folks in the room, all listening intently. We were able to tell that he was speaking English; the occasional word was clear. But not one of us could understand enough to get the problem solved. She asked him to transfer the call to someone else but he refused. Eventually, she hung up, called back, stayed on hold for a dog's age, and finally got someone with an accent less thick who could be understood. Was she a racist for hanging up on the first guy?
For God's sake, don't bypass the opportunity to rent an automatic weapon while you're in the States. Unless you've gotten burned out on them via military service, I know few things that will bring a bigger smile to a geek's face than watching that rope of big, fat.45 slugs spit out of a Thompson.
I've rented in Dallas and Las Vegas at the places shown below. I'm sure there must be a zillion other places, too. Here are a few links to give you a quick taste of what's available:
From the sources you provided, it seems the initial test was screwed from the start. The test should be conducted again, making sure:
Y'know, I won't disagree with you there. I think such a test would be just as dismal a failure as the first, but I won't disagree. Things are different now and maybe contracting might work out better now.
However, I think you should understand why I don't think it would work and why those of us with real-world experience with this thing find the whole shebang irritating.
First, you want to make sure that
a. the contractors are given the delinquency cases they are supposed to get
That's a tough one. If we give them small-dollar cases (the sort of thing they previously asked for and agreed to take only a small margin on because they think they can do the collecting with just a phone call), they'll complain that we didn't give them anything big enough to make a profit on. Perhaps that'll be taken care of by the fact that the people pushing this thing now want to give away 25% commissions.
OTOH, if we give them large-dollar cases, they can't handle them. Congress has written into law so many safeguards against abusive collection practices that no private entity could cut through the Gordian knot of red tape that surrounds every case and protects every taxpayer.
So the cases they are supposed to get should be the small ones off of which they can make a decent profit at the higher commission level with minimal work. Fine. The problem is that we've already asked nicely for the money. We've already sent those debtors multiple letters asking for the money and explaining the possible consequences of non-compliance. I firmly believe that if they didn't pay us, they're not going to pay a private company. But, hey, if someone wants to test this thing, let them knock themselves out.
Second, you want to ensure that
b. the contractors are actually able to collect the debt
This one is going to have to be explained to me. How do contractors collect debts other than by asking for the money? Last time around, the contractors complained that the test wasn't fair because IRS personnel had collection tools that weren't available to the contractors. And we do. We can levy wages and seize property, we can file notices and actually take tthe nitty gritty actions required to enforce a federal tax lien. All without court proceedings. But private contractors are not law enforcement officials and it's just flat out not legal for the state to sell to the highest bidder the power to enforce the law. So our alternative is to either grant public sector law enforcement powers to private contractors (something strictly prohibited by law), limit those contractors to just asking for the money and then being powerless if the debtor tells them to go to hell (which is what happened last time, much to the contractors chagrin), or require the contractors to use the civil enforcement tools that are normally available to them such as suing in court, getting a judgement, and enforcing on that judgement. That last alternative is not what collection agencies are good at. Delinquent accounts that are worth pursuing to that degree are not commonly discounted to collection agencies because they're worth pursuing by the original holder of the debt.
So what does making sure "the contractors are actually able to collect the debt" really mean? I don't think anyone really knows. But I sure as hell do know that the public good is not served by having people working on commission deciding whether or not they should levy wages. The potential for abuse and the creation of untold human misery is just too profoundly obvious. (And no, I'm not exaggerating. I've seen the devastation that can occur in people's lives when the IRS mistakenly takes too aggressive actions to collect debts. Lives can be destroyed.)
Straw man. You're talking about two totally different things.
Nope. Law enforcement is law enforcement and law enforcement should be done by the government. Unless, of course, you think there are degrees of importance in the law and some laws are so minor in importance that they should be handed over to private entities for enforcement. Is that what you're saying?
Can you provide any official statistics to back this claim up?
Yes, I realize the first cite is a biased bit of testimony by a Union wonk. However, obtain and read the cited references contained therein before you pass judgement.
The second link is even more interesting. Authored by a function that can only justify its existence by finding things wrong with the IRS, it goes to great lengths to say, in effect, "Well, contracting for private agencies to do tax collections was a giant cluster-fuck when it was tried before, but things have changed and you ought to try it again." For those of us on the inside, reports like this one are an endless source of amusement. But the central facts remain: private contractors have been tried, they performed poorly, and a comparison to the standards of performance upheld by IRS employees shows that Revenue Officers are multiple times more efficient at collecting taxes than private entities. And even if some pols want to try it again, I doubt anything will change those facts.
As an aside, if you actually read the report, you can work out the efficiency/effectiveness ratios for yourself. The 30x figure comes from an admittedly liberal interpretation of the internal report cited on page 5. I can't locate it on the web, but even accepting the TIGTA-biased summary of that report contained in my cite, the IRS is at least 5 times as efficient as the private sector. I suggest you ask your local IRS office for a copy of the full internal report, IRS Private Sector Debt Collection Pilot Program dated October 1997, if you want the full numbers.
If it's so obvious that IRS Revenue Officers are much more efficient, why is the government looking to private collectors? There's something missing in your argument.
Well, first there's the basic (totally flawed) bias held by a number of folks that hiring government employees is never the answer to anything. Government should be smaller, not larger, no matter the circumstances. That's just wrong-headed, but it's also an essentially religious belief (i.e. a belief based on faith, not facts) and I won't attempt to rectify your thinking there.
However, a bit of tedious explanation of how government budgeting works is, apparently, in order. I now realize that you are not familiar enough with the process to understand what's going on. My apologies; I should have realized sooner. This stuff can be a bit arcane.
So what am I talking about? Here tis: Hiring more Revenue Officers (and Revenue Agents and Tax Compliance Specialists, etc.) requires the government to spend money. Someone has to put a dollar entry on a budget and get Congress to approve it. That's hard.
Letting a contract for a private entity to collect taxes is, by contrast, nearly without cost. A few people have to be paid to read through the bids, make a decision, and oversee the process, but the cost is nominal. Nothing ever comes out of pocket because the contractors are only paid a percentage of what they collect.
Are you getting the idea? Even though contractors are FAR less efficient than Revenue Officers, they don't cost any out-of-pocket money. It's WAY easier for politicians to support programs that don't cost any money than it is to support programs that cost money, even if the programs that cost money might be far, far more profitable 5 years down the road. Hell, that's a couple of elections away! Who cares about that?! Basically, we're dealing with the same sort of short-term thinking and "next-quarter" mentality that so thoroughly sucks in the private sector.
Private businesses turn over delinquent accounts to a third party collector all the time. What's the difference?
The difference is the difference between government and private entities. It's wrong to turn over inherently governmental functions to private entities. Would you feel comfortable, for example, entrusting all the murder investigations in your area to a private corporation? Or would you feel better if those investigations were carried out by government employees who are at least nominally motivated by the pursuit of justice instead of a profit motive?
The same thing is true of tax collections. The IRS, despite all the negative (and mostly untrue) media coverage that preceded the 1998 Restructuring Act, is motivated not just to collect tax but to do so in ways that do not make a mockery of serving the common good, a concept that private entities do not grasp in any way. Look at it this way: Law enforcement should be done by the government, not private entities. Slashdotters have been pretty unanimous about that and, I think, rightly so. Well, collecting taxes is law enforcement.
Who was it who said that the power to tax was the power to destroy? Do you really feel comfortable with handing over the enforcement component of that power to any private entity?
You're arguing that a government entity would be more efficient than a private company?
Yep.
Where have you been for the past century?
For most of it, I've been nonexistent. But for a substantial portion of the time I've been around, I was a tax collector.
Besides, most collectors don't get paid on a contract basis - they get a percentage of what's collected. This gives them much more incentive to collect than a government desk worker.
Yep, you're absolutely right. That's why the last time Congress foolishly forced the IRS to turn over a portion of our delinquent accounts receivable to private companies for collection, those companies did such a stellar, highly motivated job of collecting money. (That's sarcasm, in case you didn't realize.) All that "piece of the action" motivation did was cause those private collectors to go ape shit. There were documented cases of telephone calls being made to debtors at 4:19 AM. The number of documented violations of the Fair Debt Collection Act were nearly uncountable. And when all was said and done, the private contractors used more man-hours at a higher cost to collect the money than the control group of government employees. The final figures indicated that IRS Revenue Officers not only collect money more efficiently than the private sector (almost THIRTY times more efficiently) but they do so without abusing debtors at all hours of the day and night and without running roughshod over their right to be treated like human beings.
Knee-jerk reactions of "The government is incompetent at everything!" are not something I can overcome with logic, so ignore this post if you wish. But the fact remains that the IRS collects debts far more efficiently and humanely than any private enterprise.
Even if that weren't true, I'd argue that it's wrong to give law enforcement power to private entities because of the abuse that inevitably happens. But you take your pick of which argument you like, the practical or the moral. I'm ready to defend both approaches.
I bet you couldn't count on both hands the number of private organizations that have your SS# and other private info in their databases
I'll bet you can count on one finger the number of organizations that have both your SS# and a complete, itemized breakdown of everything you earned as well as near-complete insight into how you live your life and plan your finances since you entered the work force, all in one place. That one place is the IRS. Even your mortgage lender on
Want private thugs in pin stripe suits enforcing all those laws
OK, this is probably off-topic, but I have to point out that lots of people seem to be in favor of handing over what we think of as governmental duties to private industry. The current administration is paying off big corporate contributors with lots of juicy contracts for what were once thought of as government jobs. Take that most governmental of duties, collecting taxes. The current administration wants to give away fully one quarter of our (that's you and me, the taxpayers) delinquent accounts receivable to private contractors to collect the money. The simple idea of just hiring more government employees whose job is to collect taxes (and who do so umpteen times more efficiently than private industry) just doesn't occur to the powers-that-be. To top that off, all your computerized records at the IRS will soon be controlled by private company employees because the Office of Management and Budget has recently (illegally) revised the rules (a document named Circular A-76) for contracting out work so as to make virtually no government job safe from easy privatization. For references, just google on NTEU (one of the unions fighting this crap) and A-76.
Yes, law enforcement is being handed over to big corporations in lots of ways these days. Any suggestions for how to stem the rising tide of government-by-corporation?
think about one thing. you fire at a moving target, say 600 meters away
Arg!
We're talking about snipers! Where in the bloody hell did you ever get the idea that real snipers shoot at moving targets? (To be fair, yes, it is done in very limited circumstances where accuracy requirements aren't stringent, e.g. anti-materiel applications and perhaps massed troops. But in those circumstances, subsonic bullet velocity isn't necessarily a factor, either.)
I repeat: I never cease to be amazed and amused at the way Slashdot readers will pop off about stuff they obviously have no experience with. Firearms-related subjects are about the worst. You'd think most Slashdot readers know no more about ballistics than what they gleaned last weekend when they thumbed through a copy of Guns and Ammo at the local newsstand. This is really getting hilarious.
Of course it is possible to keep the bullet subsonic, but then your weapon is pretty useless as a sniper rifle.
Wow. I never ceased to be amused by people who pop off so confidently about things they obviously know so little about. What on earth makes you think that supersonic projectile velocity is necessary for a sniper rifle? The whole family of Whisper cartridges are astonishingly useful while deliberately being designed to stay subsonic. In fact, it's become clear from some long-range shooting sports that holding velocity below the sound barrier avoids certain wind drift problems. Try reading Understanding Firearm Ballistics by Robert A. Rinker. If you can hack the math, his explanation of the characteristics of transonic bullet flight make very clear that low velocity rounds can be highly useful in a number of applications.
I was in an analogous situation about 10 years ago. I worked for a large government agency charged with some responsibility for regulating a new and growing sort of business. It was a problem. The good people in that business were making good money but having problems navigating outdated regulations. The bad people in that business were ignoring all regulations, making more money than you can possibly imagine, and had nothing to fear from a regulatory enforcement infrastructure that was just coming into existence.
We spent three years studying the business, briefing lawyers who, in turned, briefed the Secy of the Treasury, and writing reports. At the end of three years, we had seen everything, done everything and knew every aspect of the business frontwards and backwards.
At our last group meeting, I told the group "The people in this room know, collectively, more about this business than any other similarly-sized group of people in the world. Let's all resign and start our own firm. We'll all be millionaires before the end of the next calendar year."
It never happened. Two of the key people were lifers with the government and had never paid any social security. The option of going out on their own, literally with absolutely no safety net for retirement or health problems, scared them to death. They refused to participate. Without them, the entire necessary skill set simply wouldn't have existed and even if the rest of us had jumped ship, we would have failed.
So we all stayed.
I was pissed. Then resigned. And then vindicated. You see, after several more years had passed, literally everyone at that meeting had approached me to say they should have gone through with it.
Ah, well. C'est la vie. I moved on to work that I thought was OK. Then I moved on to work that I dearly loved, so sticking around was ultimately a good enough choice for me.
Of course, a couple of weeks ago I got official notice that my job would be coming to an end at the end of 2004. One of the nice things about working for U.S. federal government and enduring our low wages is that when you're going to be downsized, there are rules that prevent it from happening without exploring other alternatives and you get plenty of warning.
So I'm looking. Being a lifer, though, my universe of potential positions is limited to the federal civil service. Anybody know any agencies hiring a qualified field investigator/Unix sysadmin/writer/photographer/frontline support tech/analyst....et al?
Well, I feel sorry for me. My whole career is built on the rack of servers 20 feet from me running SCO OSR 5.0.4. The OS is reliable and does the vital jobs we require but we're migrating off of SCO, anyway. The servers are being migrated to virtual machines running on mainframes and the clients are now a part of Interix, er..., Microsoft Unix, er...,
oh, hell, what do they call it now?
Oh, yeah - Windows Services for Unix.
Joy.
Now my career consists of jumping to the mainframes or dropping back to supporting a Unix running on top of WinXP. I'll probably wind up doing the latter and, thus far, it's been a nightmare. Anybody got any good book recommendations on "Windows Services for Unix"?
Personally, one of my fave guilty pleasures is going to FotoFest, a huge photography exhibition that makes (or used to make...I haven't been in years) Houston the center of the photography world for a month every two years. The main exhibit hall is in our downtown convention center but doesn't take up the whole thing. Other events go on. One of them, invariably, will be a gun show.
You don't know fun until you've seen a gaggle of good old boys strolling down the street with AKs, riot guns, and various destructive devices slung over their shoulders while visiting photo enthusiasts from France skitter away looking alarmed and Japanese tour groups start firing off the strobes. It's hilarious.
Multiple U2s shot down over China
on
Secret Empire
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Does anybody have a link to pictures of all the U2s that were shot down by the Chinese? I know I've seen photos of them on display. We gave the planes to Taiwan, they flew them over the mainland, and down they came. I guess the loss of pilots and aircraft was considered to be an acceptable price for the information garnered from the program.
This page recounts some details of a half-dozen U2s shot down over China between 1962 and 1969. Interesting stuff.
On the off chance that you aren't an idiot or a troll and might actually be willing to learn something, try this FAQ. It goes to great lengths, more than these anti-tax bozos deserve, to explain just how our tinfoil-hat-wearing nutjob brethren have been misled. For even more good info, try this link,this link and this link.
And if you want it straight from the horses mouth, the be-all and end-all summary page explaining why these tax resistor folks are barking up the wrong tree, try this link.
They may not be the guys you're talking about since they're HQ'd in Alpharetta, Georgia, but these guys are used (in a big way) by the Internal Revenue Service. Is that scary enough for ya?
No joke. Old-fashioned water taps with metal seats and rubber washers will wear out but they are then repairable. The parts are terribly standard. Even if they weren't, they could be made out of common materials at some point in the future. Washerless faucets, otoh, use proprietary and expensive gadgets to control the flow of water. Some are not repairable. Some are, but require expensive, funky kits. And all of them will be eventually go out of fashion and their replacement parts along with them.
Faucets with washers and seats. With $10 in spare parts, they'll last for 10 lifetimes. If I ever build my own home, I'm gonna use faucets with plain round rubber washers and simple, standard metal seats.
The ex-apartment-maintenance man in me wouldn't have it any other way.
Staph researcher? More power to you. My sister got a "massive type G staph infection" (at least, that's what the doc called it) after open-heart surgery a few years ago. It was my privilege to drain, clean, and dress the incision daily. I never knew the human body could extrude through wounds so much material that looked so much like lime-green Play-Doh. And I was very much surprised that it had *no* smell. All in all, not a pleasant experience.
Anybody who's working to overcome such illnesses has earned my heart-felt appreciation. Thanks.
The issue here isn't whether people should be allowed to repair their own guns, but whether they should have to register their guns in a ballistic identifier database
OK. Agreed. Allow me to restate -
The purpose (according to the politician proposing it) of this legislation is to close a loophole in the ballistic fingerprint database law.
The actual effect of this legislation would be to make repairing firearms burdensome, drive gunsmiths (especially unlicensed ones) out of the state, cripple gun shops by killing off a lucrative part of their business, utterly destroy many target shooting disciplines in the state that routinely change barrels and other parts, and generally harass law-abiding gun owners (who rank right down there with child molestors in the view of a number of NJ lawmakers) to the point that they decide that owning guns is more hassle than it's worth.
I stand by my original post; I believe it caputures the true essence of this legislation. Gun control, especially measures so fatally flawed as the ballistic fingerprinting and concomitant enabling legislation in NJ, is designed by anti-gun politicians, no matter what they might say publicly or the actual text of the legislation, who simply want to make guns unavailable. If they can't do it by banning them outright, they'll settle for red-taping them to death. Anything that gets the job done.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't realize that call signs could be reused. I looked up the call sign of an old friend of my dad who's been dead for a number of years. The guy was Olaf Pearson and he had been involved in radio for so long that as a child he, literally, had been employed as a go-fer and floor sweeper in Marconi's lab.
It just struck me as odd that his old 4 digit call sign now belongs to some guy in Georgia.
Good advice. Also, the start-a-business help provided by the Internal Revenue Service can be a great source of information.
Try this link and this one for starters.
Agreed. 100%. I'm a strong gun rights supporter. It's just that I've had to argue the pro-gun position to people who didn't understand the definition of "arms" and were attempting to paint all gun owners as wackos who want to own nukes. That's a straw man argument, but it still has to be countered by acquiescing on one good point that the anti-gun folks make (that there are limits to the 2nd amendment protections) and then pointing out that what the amendment does protect includes just about everything that private American citizens might want to own. Specifically, I point out that modern assault rifles are exactly the sort of weapons that the Founders would have expected us to keep and bear.
That sort of outlook, that the Kentucky rifle and the Brown Bess were the assault rifles of their day and that modern assault rifles should be afforded the same protection, sometimes will really knock the antis for a loop. They expect a hunting/sporting use/self defense argument and I give them something completely different. It can be fun.
Hmmm. That's exactly what I do best. Maybe my upcoming layoff may not go as badly as I anticipate. Time to do some research on alternate career paths...
Wow. I work in a federal govt office and a fairly well-funded one, at that. We're struggling to get down to the official goal ratio of, IIRC, 112:1. Right now we're at about 130:1 for desktop support. The server support folks are a different function; they have a ratio of servers to admins that varies widely within their ranks. Some admins have as few as a dozen servers to look after. Some, if current plans come to fruition, will have more than a hundred spread across multiple states. (Yes, that's right, more than a hundred servers per admin, all in geographically diverse clusters.)
Bottom line? We're pretty good at prioritizing around here. We have to be or we'd go nuts.
Yep. And those limits are explicitly stated in the Second Amendment. It guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, not artillery, and the difference between the two was well understood by the men who voted on the thing. Unfortunately, because that basic understanding has passed from the popular consciousness lots of people try to make specious arguments like "You want assault rifles? Well, what about howitzers? What about nukes?" To be fair, there's some crossover between the two categories. The old brightline test of "man-portability" no longer really applies since weapons with the power of artillery pieces can now be carried by one man; there are also rifles too big for one man to practically carry. And U.S. law says almost nothing about certain odd categories of weaponry, like flamethrowers (surprisingly legal and unregulated in most places). Generally, though, the line between arms and artillery is still pretty easy to draw. The Second protects the right to keep and bear the former and provides no such protection for people who want to collect the latter.
The thought of McBride with a nuke is pretty chilling though. Why did you have to conjure up that image for me? :-)
In the last couple of days an additional good link on the subject came up. It's a round-table discussion among Union reps, contractor reps, and some other observers, of the way the process of contracting out government jobs works these days. If you don't mind a 9-meg wma download:
Discussion from FederalNewsRadio.com
Hmmm. If this is a troll, I'm guilty of rising to the bait. But if it's not a troll, I'd really be interested in hearing how you reached the conclusion that the parent poster complaint (that, as I understand it, an English-speaking Indian on a conference call with an accent so thick that s/he can't be understood is no more useful than an employee who doesn't speak the language at all) could only be made by a racist.
Personally, I've experienced something similar. We had a sysadmin who needed help on some software who got connected to suppport in (we presume) India and simply couldn't understand the person on the other end. She wound up forwarding the call to our conference room, putting it on our very good speaker system, and hauling in random passersby to listen and try to translate. There were, eventually, a dozen folks in the room, all listening intently. We were able to tell that he was speaking English; the occasional word was clear. But not one of us could understand enough to get the problem solved. She asked him to transfer the call to someone else but he refused. Eventually, she hung up, called back, stayed on hold for a dog's age, and finally got someone with an accent less thick who could be understood. Was she a racist for hanging up on the first guy?
For God's sake, don't bypass the opportunity to rent an automatic weapon while you're in the States. Unless you've gotten burned out on them via military service, I know few things that will bring a bigger smile to a geek's face than watching that rope of big, fat .45 slugs spit out of a Thompson.
I've rented in Dallas and Las Vegas at the places shown below. I'm sure there must be a zillion other places, too. Here are a few links to give you a quick taste of what's available:
Robbinsdale, Minnesota
Bogart, Georgia
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Glen Burnie, Maryland
Dallas, Texas
Smithville, Texas
Las Vegas, Nevada
Y'know, I won't disagree with you there. I think such a test would be just as dismal a failure as the first, but I won't disagree. Things are different now and maybe contracting might work out better now.
However, I think you should understand why I don't think it would work and why those of us with real-world experience with this thing find the whole shebang irritating.
First, you want to make sure that
That's a tough one. If we give them small-dollar cases (the sort of thing they previously asked for and agreed to take only a small margin on because they think they can do the collecting with just a phone call), they'll complain that we didn't give them anything big enough to make a profit on. Perhaps that'll be taken care of by the fact that the people pushing this thing now want to give away 25% commissions.
OTOH, if we give them large-dollar cases, they can't handle them. Congress has written into law so many safeguards against abusive collection practices that no private entity could cut through the Gordian knot of red tape that surrounds every case and protects every taxpayer.
So the cases they are supposed to get should be the small ones off of which they can make a decent profit at the higher commission level with minimal work. Fine. The problem is that we've already asked nicely for the money. We've already sent those debtors multiple letters asking for the money and explaining the possible consequences of non-compliance. I firmly believe that if they didn't pay us, they're not going to pay a private company. But, hey, if someone wants to test this thing, let them knock themselves out.
Second, you want to ensure that
This one is going to have to be explained to me. How do contractors collect debts other than by asking for the money? Last time around, the contractors complained that the test wasn't fair because IRS personnel had collection tools that weren't available to the contractors. And we do. We can levy wages and seize property, we can file notices and actually take tthe nitty gritty actions required to enforce a federal tax lien. All without court proceedings. But private contractors are not law enforcement officials and it's just flat out not legal for the state to sell to the highest bidder the power to enforce the law. So our alternative is to either grant public sector law enforcement powers to private contractors (something strictly prohibited by law), limit those contractors to just asking for the money and then being powerless if the debtor tells them to go to hell (which is what happened last time, much to the contractors chagrin), or require the contractors to use the civil enforcement tools that are normally available to them such as suing in court, getting a judgement, and enforcing on that judgement. That last alternative is not what collection agencies are good at. Delinquent accounts that are worth pursuing to that degree are not commonly discounted to collection agencies because they're worth pursuing by the original holder of the debt.
So what does making sure "the contractors are actually able to collect the debt" really mean? I don't think anyone really knows. But I sure as hell do know that the public good is not served by having people working on commission deciding whether or not they should levy wages. The potential for abuse and the creation of untold human misery is just too profoundly obvious. (And no, I'm not exaggerating. I've seen the devastation that can occur in people's lives when the IRS mistakenly takes too aggressive actions to collect debts. Lives can be destroyed.)
Finally,
Nope. Law enforcement is law enforcement and law enforcement should be done by the government. Unless, of course, you think there are degrees of importance in the law and some laws are so minor in importance that they should be handed over to private entities for enforcement. Is that what you're saying?
Yep and yep.
Yes, I realize the first cite is a biased bit of testimony by a Union wonk. However, obtain and read the cited references contained therein before you pass judgement.
The second link is even more interesting. Authored by a function that can only justify its existence by finding things wrong with the IRS, it goes to great lengths to say, in effect, "Well, contracting for private agencies to do tax collections was a giant cluster-fuck when it was tried before, but things have changed and you ought to try it again." For those of us on the inside, reports like this one are an endless source of amusement. But the central facts remain: private contractors have been tried, they performed poorly, and a comparison to the standards of performance upheld by IRS employees shows that Revenue Officers are multiple times more efficient at collecting taxes than private entities. And even if some pols want to try it again, I doubt anything will change those facts.
As an aside, if you actually read the report, you can work out the efficiency/effectiveness ratios for yourself. The 30x figure comes from an admittedly liberal interpretation of the internal report cited on page 5. I can't locate it on the web, but even accepting the TIGTA-biased summary of that report contained in my cite, the IRS is at least 5 times as efficient as the private sector. I suggest you ask your local IRS office for a copy of the full internal report, IRS Private Sector Debt Collection Pilot Program dated October 1997, if you want the full numbers.
Well, first there's the basic (totally flawed) bias held by a number of folks that hiring government employees is never the answer to anything. Government should be smaller, not larger, no matter the circumstances. That's just wrong-headed, but it's also an essentially religious belief (i.e. a belief based on faith, not facts) and I won't attempt to rectify your thinking there.
However, a bit of tedious explanation of how government budgeting works is, apparently, in order. I now realize that you are not familiar enough with the process to understand what's going on. My apologies; I should have realized sooner. This stuff can be a bit arcane.
So what am I talking about? Here tis: Hiring more Revenue Officers (and Revenue Agents and Tax Compliance Specialists, etc.) requires the government to spend money. Someone has to put a dollar entry on a budget and get Congress to approve it. That's hard.
Letting a contract for a private entity to collect taxes is, by contrast, nearly without cost. A few people have to be paid to read through the bids, make a decision, and oversee the process, but the cost is nominal. Nothing ever comes out of pocket because the contractors are only paid a percentage of what they collect.
Are you getting the idea? Even though contractors are FAR less efficient than Revenue Officers, they don't cost any out-of-pocket money. It's WAY easier for politicians to support programs that don't cost any money than it is to support programs that cost money, even if the programs that cost money might be far, far more profitable 5 years down the road. Hell, that's a couple of elections away! Who cares about that?! Basically, we're dealing with the same sort of short-term thinking and "next-quarter" mentality that so thoroughly sucks in the private sector.
The difference is the difference between government and private entities. It's wrong to turn over inherently governmental functions to private entities. Would you feel comfortable, for example, entrusting all the murder investigations in your area to a private corporation? Or would you feel better if those investigations were carried out by government employees who are at least nominally motivated by the pursuit of justice instead of a profit motive?
The same thing is true of tax collections. The IRS, despite all the negative (and mostly untrue) media coverage that preceded the 1998 Restructuring Act, is motivated not just to collect tax but to do so in ways that do not make a mockery of serving the common good, a concept that private entities do not grasp in any way. Look at it this way: Law enforcement should be done by the government, not private entities. Slashdotters have been pretty unanimous about that and, I think, rightly so. Well, collecting taxes is law enforcement.
Who was it who said that the power to tax was the power to destroy? Do you really feel comfortable with handing over the enforcement component of that power to any private entity?
Yep.
For most of it, I've been nonexistent. But for a substantial portion of the time I've been around, I was a tax collector.
Yep, you're absolutely right. That's why the last time Congress foolishly forced the IRS to turn over a portion of our delinquent accounts receivable to private companies for collection, those companies did such a stellar, highly motivated job of collecting money. (That's sarcasm, in case you didn't realize.) All that "piece of the action" motivation did was cause those private collectors to go ape shit. There were documented cases of telephone calls being made to debtors at 4:19 AM. The number of documented violations of the Fair Debt Collection Act were nearly uncountable. And when all was said and done, the private contractors used more man-hours at a higher cost to collect the money than the control group of government employees. The final figures indicated that IRS Revenue Officers not only collect money more efficiently than the private sector (almost THIRTY times more efficiently) but they do so without abusing debtors at all hours of the day and night and without running roughshod over their right to be treated like human beings.
Knee-jerk reactions of "The government is incompetent at everything!" are not something I can overcome with logic, so ignore this post if you wish. But the fact remains that the IRS collects debts far more efficiently and humanely than any private enterprise.
Even if that weren't true, I'd argue that it's wrong to give law enforcement power to private entities because of the abuse that inevitably happens. But you take your pick of which argument you like, the practical or the moral. I'm ready to defend both approaches.
I'll bet you can count on one finger the number of organizations that have both your SS# and a complete, itemized breakdown of everything you earned as well as near-complete insight into how you live your life and plan your finances since you entered the work force, all in one place. That one place is the IRS. Even your mortgage lender on
OK, this is probably off-topic, but I have to point out that lots of people seem to be in favor of handing over what we think of as governmental duties to private industry. The current administration is paying off big corporate contributors with lots of juicy contracts for what were once thought of as government jobs. Take that most governmental of duties, collecting taxes. The current administration wants to give away fully one quarter of our (that's you and me, the taxpayers) delinquent accounts receivable to private contractors to collect the money. The simple idea of just hiring more government employees whose job is to collect taxes (and who do so umpteen times more efficiently than private industry) just doesn't occur to the powers-that-be. To top that off, all your computerized records at the IRS will soon be controlled by private company employees because the Office of Management and Budget has recently (illegally) revised the rules (a document named Circular A-76) for contracting out work so as to make virtually no government job safe from easy privatization. For references, just google on NTEU (one of the unions fighting this crap) and A-76.
Yes, law enforcement is being handed over to big corporations in lots of ways these days. Any suggestions for how to stem the rising tide of government-by-corporation?
Arg!
We're talking about snipers! Where in the bloody hell did you ever get the idea that real snipers shoot at moving targets? (To be fair, yes, it is done in very limited circumstances where accuracy requirements aren't stringent, e.g. anti-materiel applications and perhaps massed troops. But in those circumstances, subsonic bullet velocity isn't necessarily a factor, either.)
I repeat: I never cease to be amazed and amused at the way Slashdot readers will pop off about stuff they obviously have no experience with. Firearms-related subjects are about the worst. You'd think most Slashdot readers know no more about ballistics than what they gleaned last weekend when they thumbed through a copy of Guns and Ammo at the local newsstand. This is really getting hilarious.
Wow. I never ceased to be amused by people who pop off so confidently about things they obviously know so little about. What on earth makes you think that supersonic projectile velocity is necessary for a sniper rifle? The whole family of Whisper cartridges are astonishingly useful while deliberately being designed to stay subsonic. In fact, it's become clear from some long-range shooting sports that holding velocity below the sound barrier avoids certain wind drift problems. Try reading Understanding Firearm Ballistics by Robert A. Rinker. If you can hack the math, his explanation of the characteristics of transonic bullet flight make very clear that low velocity rounds can be highly useful in a number of applications.
I was in an analogous situation about 10 years ago. I worked for a large government agency charged with some responsibility for regulating a new and growing sort of business. It was a problem. The good people in that business were making good money but having problems navigating outdated regulations. The bad people in that business were ignoring all regulations, making more money than you can possibly imagine, and had nothing to fear from a regulatory enforcement infrastructure that was just coming into existence.
We spent three years studying the business, briefing lawyers who, in turned, briefed the Secy of the Treasury, and writing reports. At the end of three years, we had seen everything, done everything and knew every aspect of the business frontwards and backwards.
At our last group meeting, I told the group "The people in this room know, collectively, more about this business than any other similarly-sized group of people in the world. Let's all resign and start our own firm. We'll all be millionaires before the end of the next calendar year."
It never happened. Two of the key people were lifers with the government and had never paid any social security. The option of going out on their own, literally with absolutely no safety net for retirement or health problems, scared them to death. They refused to participate. Without them, the entire necessary skill set simply wouldn't have existed and even if the rest of us had jumped ship, we would have failed.
So we all stayed.
I was pissed. Then resigned. And then vindicated. You see, after several more years had passed, literally everyone at that meeting had approached me to say they should have gone through with it.
Ah, well. C'est la vie. I moved on to work that I thought was OK. Then I moved on to work that I dearly loved, so sticking around was ultimately a good enough choice for me.
Of course, a couple of weeks ago I got official notice that my job would be coming to an end at the end of 2004. One of the nice things about working for U.S. federal government and enduring our low wages is that when you're going to be downsized, there are rules that prevent it from happening without exploring other alternatives and you get plenty of warning.
So I'm looking. Being a lifer, though, my universe of potential positions is limited to the federal civil service. Anybody know any agencies hiring a qualified field investigator/Unix sysadmin/writer/photographer/frontline support tech/analyst....et al?
Well, I feel sorry for me. My whole career is built on the rack of servers 20 feet from me running SCO OSR 5.0.4. The OS is reliable and does the vital jobs we require but we're migrating off of SCO, anyway. The servers are being migrated to virtual machines running on mainframes and the clients are now a part of Interix, er..., Microsoft Unix, er...,
oh, hell, what do they call it now?
Oh, yeah - Windows Services for Unix.
Joy.
Now my career consists of jumping to the mainframes or dropping back to supporting a Unix running on top of WinXP. I'll probably wind up doing the latter and, thus far, it's been a nightmare. Anybody got any good book recommendations on "Windows Services for Unix"?
Yeah, it's just you.
Personally, one of my fave guilty pleasures is going to FotoFest, a huge photography exhibition that makes (or used to make...I haven't been in years) Houston the center of the photography world for a month every two years. The main exhibit hall is in our downtown convention center but doesn't take up the whole thing. Other events go on. One of them, invariably, will be a gun show.
You don't know fun until you've seen a gaggle of good old boys strolling down the street with AKs, riot guns, and various destructive devices slung over their shoulders while visiting photo enthusiasts from France skitter away looking alarmed and Japanese tour groups start firing off the strobes. It's hilarious.
Does anybody have a link to pictures of all the U2s that were shot down by the Chinese? I know I've seen photos of them on display. We gave the planes to Taiwan, they flew them over the mainland, and down they came. I guess the loss of pilots and aircraft was considered to be an acceptable price for the information garnered from the program.
This page recounts some details of a half-dozen U2s shot down over China between 1962 and 1969. Interesting stuff.
According to my employer, 100 users need about 0.8 support staff folks. If idle hands are the devil's workshop, we must be awfully righteous.
:-)
On the off chance that you aren't an idiot or a troll and might actually be willing to learn something, try this FAQ. It goes to great lengths, more than these anti-tax bozos deserve, to explain just how our tinfoil-hat-wearing nutjob brethren have been misled. For even more good info, try this link, this link and this link.
And if you want it straight from the horses mouth, the be-all and end-all summary page explaining why these tax resistor folks are barking up the wrong tree, try this link.
They may not be the guys you're talking about since they're HQ'd in Alpharetta, Georgia, but these guys are used (in a big way) by the Internal Revenue Service. Is that scary enough for ya?
No joke. Old-fashioned water taps with metal seats and rubber washers will wear out but they are then repairable. The parts are terribly standard. Even if they weren't, they could be made out of common materials at some point in the future. Washerless faucets, otoh, use proprietary and expensive gadgets to control the flow of water. Some are not repairable. Some are, but require expensive, funky kits. And all of them will be eventually go out of fashion and their replacement parts along with them.
Faucets with washers and seats. With $10 in spare parts, they'll last for 10 lifetimes. If I ever build my own home, I'm gonna use faucets with plain round rubber washers and simple, standard metal seats.
The ex-apartment-maintenance man in me wouldn't have it any other way.
Staph researcher? More power to you. My sister got a "massive type G staph infection" (at least, that's what the doc called it) after open-heart surgery a few years ago. It was my privilege to drain, clean, and dress the incision daily. I never knew the human body could extrude through wounds so much material that looked so much like lime-green Play-Doh. And I was very much surprised that it had *no* smell. All in all, not a pleasant experience.
Anybody who's working to overcome such illnesses has earned my heart-felt appreciation. Thanks.
OK. Agreed. Allow me to restate -
The purpose (according to the politician proposing it) of this legislation is to close a loophole in the ballistic fingerprint database law.
The actual effect of this legislation would be to make repairing firearms burdensome, drive gunsmiths (especially unlicensed ones) out of the state, cripple gun shops by killing off a lucrative part of their business, utterly destroy many target shooting disciplines in the state that routinely change barrels and other parts, and generally harass law-abiding gun owners (who rank right down there with child molestors in the view of a number of NJ lawmakers) to the point that they decide that owning guns is more hassle than it's worth.
I stand by my original post; I believe it caputures the true essence of this legislation. Gun control, especially measures so fatally flawed as the ballistic fingerprinting and concomitant enabling legislation in NJ, is designed by anti-gun politicians, no matter what they might say publicly or the actual text of the legislation, who simply want to make guns unavailable. If they can't do it by banning them outright, they'll settle for red-taping them to death. Anything that gets the job done.