Quote :

"And i somehow doubt eyedrb was accurately informed that census workers are only allowed to do 1 house per hour... his (and your) propensity to believe this just shows how irrationally you're really looking at this issue. "

First off my info came right from the mans daughter to me. Its a rural county and, apparently, there is a lot of paperwork to fill out. They have to go by a house three times in order to mark it off thier list, even if the property is owned by someone they have already talked to and is vacant. He said he was doing about 3-4 an hour, and they told them to slow down. Their quota is one per hour in this county.

The question I have for your moron, is how is my relaying direct information about how the census is operating in one area irrational, but you ignoring that information completely simply to continue your belief(based, apparently, on your opinion) that the govt is always right and good (although, I would imagine your opinion of that shifts 180 degrees with a R in office) is not irrational?

Look im not against the census taking place, but it is just another example of how our govt wastes our money. Try google moron and im sure you will find similar stories, more will come out over time. I only point out how CNN and the Admin were claiming some form of victory with the jobs report when it was nearly entirely temp census workers.

[Edited on June 6, 2010 at 4:27 PM. Reason : .]

6/6/2010 4:26:03 PM

^ I'm just saying, of all the wasteful things you could be complaining about, at least find one that isn't a constitutional requirement. The founding fathers would tell you it's necessary, proper use of tax dollars, and to shut your pie hole.

6/6/2010 4:32:48 PM

the census is a waste of money? WHAT!

its probably the MOST democratic thing we do in our country.

you are an idiot.

6/6/2010 4:58:56 PM

Do you guys read? Like I said, I support the census, but you are really kidding yourself if you dont think there isnt massive amounts of waste/inefficiencies associated with it.

As I ALSO JUST SAID, my problem is with the coverage and the admin's spin on the jobs report.

6/6/2010 5:13:57 PM

i just think its hilarious that you know how to do the census better than the methods that have been developed. statisticians masturbate to that kind of shit, they dont just pass out pads of paper and tell people to go at it, everything is planned and there are reasons behind the methodology.

in conclusion

you are an idiot

6/6/2010 5:35:42 PM

TSB playbook: resort to name calling when you lose.

6/6/2010 6:01:05 PM

TSB playbook: resort to when you have nothing of value to contribute.

6/6/2010 6:07:34 PM

all government programs have huge margins of waste because there is zero/very little accountability. most workers have minimums to meet and choose to do that and nothing else, because there is no incentive to do so.

this is basic and obvious to anyone who has ever had to deal with a government agency past buying postage.

trumpeting a huge force of temporary workers taking Census as a sign of increased productivity and movement out of the recession is laughable at best and barely worthy of discussion.

[Edited on June 6, 2010 at 6:18 PM. Reason : /.]

6/6/2010 6:17:33 PM

criticizing census workers for returning to some homes more than once is laughable

6/6/2010 6:43:24 PM

^^ there are so many unproven sweeping generalizations in that post. ALL government programs? HUGE margins of waste? MOST workers choose not to do more? bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. you have neither facts or figures to back up those broad claims.

you should have kept that mustache you were growing... it made you a bit more intelligent than you're showing here. <-- see what i did there?

6/6/2010 7:06:58 PM

Quote :

"criticizing census workers for returning to some homes more than once is laughable"

Good lord kid. I was being critical of them being required to return to the same house 3 times even though they were told by the actual owner of the property that it was vacant. You would think ONE trip would be sufficient to tell if it actually was. BTW, you forgot to call me an idiot in your last post. I missed it.

Optimum and Dabird, with big organizations/operations (private or public) there is always more room for waste and being ineffective. In a mom and pop store you can bet they can keep an eye on how its running bc they can physically see things and they are the ones directly funding thier employees. When you get into bigger operations "the money" starts to come from a faceless source. ie the coorporation or the govt. Thus is easier to not care. Its just human nature. People are generally more protective of thier money and loose with others. Its just a matter of scale. From riots in greece, to teachers unions, failing businesses etc.. they dont care if there isnt any money in govt/coorporation...they still want THIER money. The problem is when the govt pisses away my money (or I feel it is being pissed away) I cant stop sending them money without going to jail. I can certainly stop buying from a company I dont like how they do business.

I think the real danger is that we are fostering the idea of someone else doing something, instead of the individual. People calling for the govt, etc to DO SOMETHING..while doing nothing themselves. I seem to see that more often.

Dabird, they really dont understand the issue and the reason the census is even brought up in this Jobs Thread in the first place. haha

6/6/2010 9:29:16 PM

Quote :

" Good lord kid. I was being critical of them being required to return to the same house 3 times even though they were told by the actual owner of the property that it was vacant. You would think ONE trip would be sufficient to tell if it actually was. BTW, you forgot to call me an idiot in your last post. I missed it. "

this is where you show your idiocy, our nation is great because of the lengths it goes to count everyone, even squatters that the property owner might not know about. its the most democratic thing our nation does.

you idiot

6/6/2010 9:45:15 PM

^^ i understand perfectly what you're saying, and have no major issues. the criticism i was providing of DaBird was of his wildly general claims, as they were simply too broad and shallow to merit substantive response. yes, large organizations have waste, but not to the extent he was portraying.

[Edited on June 6, 2010 at 9:45 PM. Reason : .]

6/6/2010 9:45:36 PM

Quote :

"^^ there are so many unproven sweeping generalizations in that post. ALL government programs? HUGE margins of waste? MOST workers choose not to do more? bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. you have neither facts or figures to back up those broad claims. you should have kept that mustache you were growing... it made you a bit more intelligent than you're showing here. <-- see what i did there?"

yeah, the economic efficiencies of the DMV, social security, medicare/medicade, military, and post office are staggering. ive worked in and around enough government agencies. i dont need to write a term paper for you.

btw...stalk much? what a creepy-weirdo statement that was. i dont know you. ill keep whichever facial hair style your mom prefers.

6/6/2010 9:56:01 PM

Quote :

"there are so many unproven sweeping generalizations in that post. ALL government programs? HUGE margins of waste? MOST workers choose not to do more? bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. you have neither facts or figures to back up those broad claims."

Well, I've got a doctor who used to work for the EPA before going back to school, and our complaints about both organizations are identical. I've also got dozens of business contacts in other parts of the government who I've discussed this with, and our different groups have these same problems despite being under different management and subject to slightly different rules.

There are generally a lot of unmotivated people who just kind of fuck off, a number of people who do a moderate amount of work (for government workers, anyway) who would have been fired long ago in the private industry, and a handful of people who actually bust their asses to get work done who will get put into positions of power (if they play the politics right) and get worked to death by the organization in their supervisory roles (one person at my workplace has had several heart attacks based on the stress of his position, this time he's decided to retire). Ethic violations and waste are widespread. People run businesses on government time with government equipment (phones and computers), people use government equipment for personal use (borrowing expensive tools and using them for construction purposes for a restaurant), people will be neglectful and deliberately perform their jobs incorrectly while signing off to the contrary (a major example of this just recently cost my group something like 25-50 million dollars over two weeks), people will intentionally just barely push a project along and stop at any point to avoid having to do real work (at which point, when it reaches a level of urgency or crisis, it is handed off to a competent worker), people will recklessly endanger other people without a second thought to what they are doing until somebody is killed/injured, and people will be promoted into meaningless management positions when it is proven they are incompetent and unable to perform their jobs (especially based upon racial and disability quotas that the EEO folks adhere to).

There is a guy working in my office who got his position legally reinstated after he made personal threats and threatened to blow up a building (some days he's pretty unstable). Five months ago I put in an order for some work to be performed by an outside company because having it performed with in-house resources would have been nearly impossible with all the restrictions we have, and this order is currently scheduled to be completed some time in may if we are lucky because it has taken all five of these months just to get our supply group to run the system through all the financial and procurement red tape. There are at least a half a dozen people in my group that literally do absolutely nothing on a given day, which is roughly 1/6 of my one group (dozens and dozens of various size groups (much larger and smaller) make up my workplace), and this doesn't include the mediocre performers. Overall I'd say our group works at 30-40% productivity as a whole. A handful of people (less than a quarter of the whole group) make up a majority of that productivity.

I have to put up with a group that already sold us $1.3 million in equipment we can't use, $0.3 million of which was damaged because they didn't bother evaluating what we needed to use it for and because people in our group didn't bother telling them what we needed it for. Nobody was put at fault or given a warning for this sort of performance. There were about to be another $2 million in wasted funds on another similar project, but since I'm involved I'm telling this group exactly what they are going to do, how the drawings will be (down to the weld symbols they're using), and I'm doing all the work for them because I realized we cannot trust them to provide us with equipment that won't pose a serious goddamn threat to some THINGS that are in the interest of the nation to have serviced correctly. I have already seen millions of dollars of waste in numerous separate purchases due to a terrible procurement system which relies upon people who don't know or care what they are doing, and who are content to commit the government to $0.2-5 million contracts without actually traveling on site to verify that the government is purchasing quality merchandise at a fair market price. They have also deliberately purchased equipment that does not meet required specifications because the contractor selling the equipment said it would work fine (this is a direct conflict of interest, not to mention idiotic).

There are numerous other organizational problems as well. Firing somebody takes a paper trail three years long, and even then if you mess that up in the slightest they can legally get reinstated based upon perceived discrimination or whatever ridiculous reason a lawyer can get them back in on. Travel fraud is very common and only corrected in the most blatant of situations (e.g. driving 20 miles and charging $800 in gas). This group (and most others in my department, if not the entire government) has a ~50% attrition rate with new employees (at least) where new employees leave government service not too long after starting due to a series of reasons (commonly this includes lack of available cubicles, no tasks assigned to the employees, nonexistent or ineffective training program). Whole generations of new hires have left government service after hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on each individual for security clearances, background checks, medical exams, optical exams, relocation expenses, recruitment bonuses, high salaries, directly paid benefits, fringe benefits, etc. I ran up some of the costs of this and found out that in two hiring seasons, with the attrition rate my group has, we're wasting around twenty six million dollars a year. This is enough to build several new office buildings to improve working conditions, to pay private companies to streamline (and, preferably, operate) the training for new employees, and to correct many of the commonly reported deficiencies that add up to the new employees leaving government service. Also, when we started we were given a presentation by the EEO office (Equal Employment Opportunity) who literally said (in just such language) that they needed more hispanics and asians and more people with real disabilities, not people who have diabetes or other such non-disabilities (those don't count for their metrics).

This is only a short description of how fucked up my group is and how fucked up the federal government is in general. If you want the federal government to get involved with the economy, with providing jobs (directly as federal employees), or to have the federal government expand then it is fairly apparent that you are entirely unaware of the problems facing the government today that will not be corrected through the application of additional funds or laws. The government is where productivity and efficiency go to die, and it is clear that you have no idea what you are talking about when you say that such claims are bullshit. The sweeping generalization is correct, in this instance.

Teal Deer: I work in the government, these sweeping generalizations are accurate, and I've never seen so many unethical/wasteful/inefficient/idiotic/corrupt business practices in my life before I started working in the federal government. *details details details*

[Edited on June 6, 2010 at 11:48 PM. Reason : aids]

6/6/2010 11:47:01 PM

^ where did you work before the federal government? Would you say businesses of similar budgets have more competent employees in general?

6/7/2010 12:21:40 AM

I can already hear your attempted retort "then how can you compare the two if no business has the same sized budget."

What business out there actually has an unlimited budget, as does the US gov't? part of his fucking point is that a normal business doesn't have the luxury of ignoring a budget. jesus, you are so difficult at times.

6/7/2010 12:29:15 AM

Quote :

"part of his fucking point is that a normal business doesn't have the luxury of ignoring a budget. jesus, you are so difficult at times."

lol

I doubt that’s the point, because the vast majority of gov. agencies definitely do have to worry about budgets.

I think the point was that gov. is unusually corrupt, but his descriptions can apply to any large corporation. There are tons of blogs/websites that document those same types of issues in any work environment, of any small, medium, or larged sized company. I would think i wouldn’t even have to point this out over the backdrop of the biggest oil spill in history, and one of the worst natural disasters in history.

It’s a scary anecdote, but i too have dealt with (state) level gov. and private contractors, and there are idiots all around.

To be clear, i’m not saying the government is perfect as is, there is most likely lots of waste. But that doesnt mean any gov. endeavor is naturally doomed to failure. That is often times a self-fulfilling prophecy, when it doesn’t have to be.

6/7/2010 1:27:17 AM

Quote :

"I doubt that’s the point, because the vast majority of gov. agencies definitely do have to worry about budgets. "

One big difference is that a typical public agency will piss away whatever is unspent in order to not get thier budget for next year cut. HUGE difference from a private organization who tries to lower thier expenses.

6/7/2010 10:55:37 AM

Interesting point.

Fiscal policy has not been very expansionary for the past year. In fact, for the past 2 quarters, government expenditures have actually been brought down GDP growth. This is because state/local governments have been cutting spending more than the federal government has been increasing it.

http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=2&FirstYear=2009&LastYear=2010&Freq=Qtr

&

http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2010/06/stimulus-what-stimulus.html

You can take that as you will I guess.

On the one hand, it probably deflates arguments saying we would currently be experiencing even worse growth if it were not for the fiscal stimulus.

On the other hand, it could possibly add some support to arguments for a new fiscal stimulus package (hopefully one with more aid to state and local govts).

[Edited on June 7, 2010 at 2:08 PM. Reason : ``]

6/7/2010 1:58:29 PM