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Discendo Vox posted:To be clear, I generally support federal employee tenure protections, but I've heard and witnessed some real horror stories of folks at the VA (thankfully not on the clinical side). It took about two years and a liason with the DoD funding committee to get one person fired from a state VA IRB system. The person in question had refused to perform their duties for the entire period in question. While in the Air Force, my jobs tended to work with federal employees more than most military career fields. I could tell you stories for days about federal employee trouble. There are two major problems when it comes to federal employees. 1 - It is near impossible to get them fired. 2 - They get promoted until incompetency. This is more a systematic problem. For example, you have a guy who is a really good worker at one job. He keeps getting promoted. He eventually gets promoted to a level that is beyond his skills. You can't really demote him back down so he just fills the role inefficiently and screws up the process for everyone working with him. In one position I worked, there was a civilian that repeatedly broke protocol when selecting servicemembers for deployments. For about 18 months we were issuing complaints to his organization. Eventually, he just got promoted to a different department. In another position, we were dealing with a sexist boss. He would show favoritism to male workers over females. He would always put males in charge even when there were far more qualified females and would often disregard pretty much anything they said. I can't get too much into the details, but it was really bad sexism. For two years we worked on complains and setting up a case against him. We had to have secret meetings with a Major with the IG's office. He got promoted to a different position while the case went on and it was still ongoing when I separated. Often times with problematic federal employees, it is more efficient to promote them out of harm's way. You give them a promotion where they sit at a desk in a corner and really do nothing of value and it's more efficient than firing them. The poo poo that has to happen to actually get someone fired seems expensive as gently caress. Thousands of man-hours of very high ranking people will be spent on it.
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May 15, 2014 17:32
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Mordiceius posted:When I was separating from the military, they claimed that the VA process was slow just because of a bottlenecking of the whole process. So we currently have massive unemployment and an organization that desperately needs more workers and they aren't being given the funds to hire more people because...? I'm legit asking because unless there's some key piece of information I skipped over it seems like this is something that's being handled really incompetently.
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May 15, 2014 17:44
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VA processes take a lot of time because you have 5 branches (Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy, Coast Guard) and while they all are separate right now, when you file your claims, all claims from all 5 branches go through the one center at one organization.
So why not just hire more people at the organization who can deal with an approve/disapprove claims?
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:this is something that's being handled really incompetently. Welcome to the federal government and the US Military.
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May 15, 2014 17:46
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Mordiceius posted:
Because congress doesn't want to spend a reasonable amount of money on veterans
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May 15, 2014 17:54
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Saint Sputnik posted:
Where's the gently caress you gif... WHERE ARE MY EXPLICATIVES!
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May 15, 2014 17:55
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Mordiceius posted:Often times with problematic federal employees, it is more efficient to promote them out of harm's way. You give them a promotion where they sit at a desk in a corner and really do nothing of value and it's more efficient than firing them. The poo poo that has to happen to actually get someone fired seems expensive as gently caress. Thousands of man-hours of very high ranking people will be spent on it. This is an unfortunate side effect of the need for that sort of protection to make it difficult for incoming administrations to just fire everyone in the federal government for their political gain.
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May 15, 2014 17:58
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Mordiceius posted:Welcome to the federal government and the US Military. Wanna empty quote this so bad.
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May 15, 2014 17:59
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:So we currently have massive unemployment and an organization that desperately needs more workers and they aren't being given the funds to hire more people because...? Congress is too busy giving the military more tanks than they ask for to allocate any more funding towards soldiers once they've left active service.
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May 15, 2014 18:02
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54.4 crowns posted:Where's the gently caress you gif... WHERE ARE MY EXPLICATIVES! Here, I can help: 
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May 15, 2014 18:05
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Nostalgia4Infinity posted:Wanna empty quote this so bad. You pretty much did, you know.
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May 15, 2014 18:07
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forbidden lesbian posted:You pretty much did, you know. That's the joke.
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May 15, 2014 18:12
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Indeed
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May 15, 2014 18:20
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I've been super busy the past two weeks, but luckily for me MacKay is currently on holiday at the Association of Canadian Editorial Cartoonists' Convention in Havana, Cuba. He published a lengthy article here about the trip and his thoughts on the Canada-Cuba-US relationship, so if you're interested in that there you go. Here are his cartoons from before his trip: 1You may have heard (it seems to be international news now) but yet more Rob Ford videos surfaced, this time showing him uttering a lengthy string of racist slurs, calling himself the most racist guy around, and offering to let the people he's with have sex with his wife, claiming that he has sex with girls in front of her all the time. They also show him smoking more crack, and were noteworthy for being filmed just a few weeks ago, long after the crack story broke and he was supposedly off drugs. He subsequently suspended his mayoral reelection campaign and went off to some fancy rehab in the US, at which point our city council stripped him of his remaining mayoral powers and gave them all to the deputy mayor who is now actually the mayor in all but name.  2The Ontario Budget, despite being very left wing (If Obama proposed it to Congress he'd be impeached as a socialist), was rejected by our ostensibly left wing party, the NDP, triggering a new election in Ontario for mid-June. You may remember this from bunnyofdoom's latest Canadian cartoons post.  3We love lawn signs here in Canada, and because we have more than two parties we may actually use them more than the US. I don't know the dynamics of American lawn sign usage, but holy poo poo do we love our lawn signs up here.  4House prices in Canada are insanely high, especially in Toronto and Vancouver, which are fueled by rapid condo building and have all the characteristics of a real estate bubble.  5A very famous Canadian author, environmentalist, and beloved hippie died.  6(larger but weird colouring for some reason) A part of the election campaign so far has been our Premier, Kathleen Wynne, attacking the federal government for their lovely treatment of Ontario. Tim Hudak has lots of insane ideas of his own, though, so this part of the campaign is already kind of over since Hudak has had more than five minutes to open his mouth and say crazy things like "Elect me and I'll fire 100,000 public servants" or "I want to cancel a ton of really good social programs just so that I can balance the budget one year before the Liberals" or "By cutting taxes, I will create ONE MILLION JOBS." Expect lots of cartoons about this once MacKay returns from Cuba. He also put up a gallery of cartoons covering Ontario elections for the past couple decades, so I'll probably upload those later, maybe this weekend.
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May 15, 2014 18:21
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Mordiceius posted:While in the Air Force, my jobs tended to work with federal employees more than most military career fields. I could tell you stories for days about federal employee trouble. Speaking as a lawgoon, I suspect that a large element of the "impossibility" of firing a federal employee is a social fiction built on the stereotype of the difficulty of firing employees. The process of showing cause might be onerous, but frequently the costs of delaying the process are clearly worse than the costs of the process itself. When I interacted with folks struggling with the troublesome VA employee I mentioned above, what I routinely encountered was that people didn't actually know what the dismissal process entailed, just that it was hard and they didn't want to bother doing it. Mordiceius posted:Welcome to the federal government and the US Military. Hey, now. A lot of federal workers and federal divisions don't have this sort of toxic work culture. Frequently the cause of dysfunction in federal agencies (especially the regulatory ones) is that they're being funded at about 10% of the rate they would need to accomplish their goals.
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May 15, 2014 18:29
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May 15, 2014 18:40
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vyelkin posted:Tim Hudak has lots of insane ideas of his own, though, so this part of the campaign is already kind of over since Hudak has had more than five minutes to open his mouth and say crazy things like "Elect me and I'll fire 100,000 public servants" or "I want to cancel a ton of really good social programs just so that I can balance the budget one year before the Liberals" or "By cutting taxes, I will create ONE MILLION JOBS." So he's a Republican?
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May 15, 2014 18:47
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vyelkin posted:
Not knowing who he is, I just assumed he was a professional beard grower.
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May 15, 2014 19:00
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Kakairo posted:So he's a Republican? Yes. He takes his policies straight from GOP talking points. It's incredibly jarring up here, and people never vote for him as a result. The difference is that he's had to actually lay out his supposed policies over the course of the election. That one million jobs thing isn't hyperbole. His entire policy platform is called the One Million Jobs Plan, and the only ways he plans on achieving this are cutting taxes, firing government workers, and cutting social programs. That's literally his entire plan. rodbeard posted:Not knowing who he is, I just assumed he was a professional beard grower. That as well: 
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May 15, 2014 19:01
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vyelkin posted:His entire policy platform is called the One Million Jobs Plan, and the only ways he plans on achieving this are cutting taxes, firing government workers, and cutting social programs. That's literally his entire plan. Wasn't Romney 2012's platform basically this plus "hate China a little more than the other guy" and "harp on gaffes a lot"?
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May 15, 2014 19:02
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loquacius posted:Wasn't Romney 2012's platform basically this plus "hate China a little more than the other guy" and "harp on gaffes a lot"? Tim Hudak is probably right wing of Mitt Romney. He's the closest we have to a Tea Party Republican in mainstream Canadian politics.
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May 15, 2014 19:04
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:So we currently have massive unemployment and an organization that desperately needs more workers and they aren't being given the funds to hire more people because...? Part of the problem is that "unfireable" mentality - and I'm not trying to say whether it's truly harder to fire a government employee, just that there's an accepted attitude by everyone in the military, government, consulting and contracting industries, and in the general Washington D.C. area that it's next to loving impossible to really fire someone from the government even with cause - which means that no elected official wants to create new government jobs because those become unfirable government employees. The end result is massive contracts where you're paying for the lowest bidder to do your work; and a shitload of investment in tanks and guns and computers because you can pull the funding for those next year. Neither of those really work - hire crappy contractors, and they do crappy jobs; buy lovely tanks the army doesn't want and it certainly doesn't help - but at least next year you can cancel the funding and move it somewhere better. like to tax cuts to billionaires
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May 15, 2014 19:04
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loquacius posted:Wasn't Romney 2012's platform basically this plus "hate China a little more than the other guy" and "harp on gaffes a lot"? There was also "get rid of the program that's exactly what I'd have implemented had I won in 2008"
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May 15, 2014 19:07
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 1I'm surprised the rats aren't wearing sombreros.  2Branco has really out dumbed himself.  3
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May 15, 2014 19:08
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This owns.
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May 15, 2014 19:12
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Internet Webguy posted:
Great combo
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May 15, 2014 19:23
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This got a smile out of me.
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May 15, 2014 19:24
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Poopy Palpy posted:There was also "get rid of the program that's exactly what I'd have implemented had I won in 2008" This is a pretty compelling argument that it would have been better if Romney had won in 2008, as the exact same health plan with his name on it wouldn't have incited every single Red state to refuse federal Medicaid money for no reason and a lot more people would have ended up insured. Of course, it's probably not true and federal-level Romneycare probably would have been way worse in some way or other, so so much for that argument  Well cartooned, Bennett. 
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May 15, 2014 19:25
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Mordiceius posted:There are two major problems when it comes to federal employees. Might be just my experience, but I've seen several examples of the same in the private sector as well. I think it's as much an office-culture thing as anything else. They have no problem pulling the trigger on lower level employees for minor infractions, while office personnel having major problems just get moved elsewhere (often to departments where their shortcomings are an even larger risk to the company).
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May 15, 2014 19:26
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Internet Webguy posted:
This makes no sense. Why would rats not want to stay inside cheese? Also this cheese is not conveying the idea of borders, it just looks like a giant piece of cheese in the middle of some prairie.
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May 15, 2014 19:33
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I cannot tell you how hard I'm laughing right now.
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May 15, 2014 19:43
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I didn't know Mexican illegal immigrants had started eating the border fence.
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May 15, 2014 19:43
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Ouroborbutts.
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May 15, 2014 19:47
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Kurtofan posted:This makes no sense. "ICE is full of holes, like a Swiss cheese." It's a figure of speech! For that matter, ostriches don't actually bury their heads in the sand (or their asses) but it's not something to get mad at. Nenonen fucked around with this message at 19:51 on May 15, 2014 |
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May 15, 2014 19:48
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Saint Sputnik posted:Here's a really dumb and lovely cartoon: should have made Christine Lagarde orange  
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May 15, 2014 19:51
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Nenonen posted:"ICE is full of holes, like a Swiss cheese." It's a figure of speech! Yeah I got the metaphor, but it's done terribly here.
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May 15, 2014 19:52
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Man that thing's not gonna go down very smoothly in Gloucester.
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May 15, 2014 19:57
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Internet Webguy posted:
Q: Who is actually saying that contraction of macroeconomic data in early 2014 is likely due to weather? A: Analysts at enormous financial firms who make billions of dollars of decisions based on this analysis - yes, the ultra rich of Wall St, Obama's oldest allies.
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May 15, 2014 19:59
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Let's catch up real quick on Bill "Snafutoon" Trantham    (He was in the hospital himself recently for some heart problem. This is Rob Smith Jr. levels of misdirected admission of ineptitude)   
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May 15, 2014 20:04
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Saint Sputnik posted:Let's catch up real quick on Bill "Snafutoon" Trantham Did they treat his heart problem with LSD?
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May 15, 2014 20:08
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alnilam posted:Q: Who is actually saying that contraction of macroeconomic data in early 2014 is likely due to weather? I guarantee that you just put at least 200% more thought into that than Branco did. I feel like it's not even worthy of rebutting. It's like an editorial cartoon drawn by a child. No, no- a child would probably get a little more creative than "OBAMA=BAD because *rolls dice, consults table* Benghazi Fake Global Warming! drat you Obama!"
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May 15, 2014 20:09
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