... And the fine, levied by bureaucrats paid with taxpayer's money was paid with... Taxpayer's money.
“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”
― Ronald Reagan
> I think you all know that I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help. A great many of the current problems on the farm were caused by government-imposed embargoes and inflation, not to mention government's long history of conflicting and haphazard policies. Our ultimate goal, of course, is economic independence for agriculture, and through steps like the tax reform bill, we seek to return farming to real farmers. But until we make that transition, the Government must act compassionately and responsibly. In order to see farmers through these tough times, our administration has committed record amounts of assistance, spending more in this year alone than any previous administration spent during its entire tenure. No area of the budget, including defense, has grown as fast as our support for agriculture.
From this 1986 speech: https://www.reaganfoundation.org/media/128648/newsconference...
Just a week ago a friend of mine (who does not share my views, and is generally positive of Reaganomics) said something along the lines of: "not only was Reagan a clown, he surrounded himself with crooks"(regarding Bush and Meese).
Can someone explain it like I'm 5?
What Reagan and Nixon mainly ran on, which is still the current Republican strategy, is making white people feel good about being white by telling them that all black people were criminals, and proving it by taking away their welfare and putting them all in prisons.
Over here in Europe he is praised for liberating us from communism.
Loyalty politics beats actual accountability. That's why the man who illegally sold arms to an enemy of America ended up as head of the NRA selling arms to America.
I'm from [name of big corporation] and I'm here to help.”
really sound any better?
I guess any big entity with lots of power has the same mechanism. Arrogance, intransparency and ignoring or misunderstanding (or knowing better) of the real needs on the people on the base.
The outsourcing is to be blamed on the project model.
I could staff up a small team and build this thing on a fraction of the budget, as proven by the “competing” initiative.
Many of us could!
You could even outsource some of the work to individual devs around the world.
What you can’t do is accomplish that under the weight of a PMO spawned project with a billion in budget.
* That team is still necessary for future changes and maintenance, including security and transitions.
* The public sector has many institutions* where such a team should have tenure (and other work to fill the non-public works projects time).
Offhand, These institutions include the temples of information worship (libraries), information provisioning (higher education of all sorts; elementary and lower are for converting feral humans to educated people), and any civil engineers (civilian or military at any level).
This wouldn’t as much rub me the wrong way had this been an effort of actual employees and staff at some govt agency where this were a longer term (indefinite?) initiative. At least then it turns in to:
- mostly a zero sum game with my tax money
- opens up for other, future, opportunities and lessons learned
Hiring services from consultancies and third parties that after project end will “hand-off” to maintenance and operations to... another third party. I mean. Come on!