Another one Larry did on the Book of Faces- Jack
What are your favorite bits of Chevron powered government overreach that you’d like to see get sued into oblivion now?
In my various jobs I’ve seen unelected bureaucrats make up all sorts of goofy nonsensical shit we had to obey or else.
When I was young and working on farms, factories, or construction I saw OHSA regulations that made job sites LESS safe. “Why are we doing it this stupid way?” “Because that government asshole who has never done this himself said we’d get fined if we don’t.” “Oh cool, let me unnecessarily insert my hands into this thing that can chop them off for the mandatory safety check then.”
I’m a rural westerner. Dear Lord, don’t get us started on the BLM. 90% of their bullshit isn’t law. They just make up wacky shit on the fly. Ignorant fucks who live in cities hundreds or thousands of miles away think they “protect the environment”. Lol no. There can be some obvious terrible problem, but some fucker in DC will say nope, you have to leave that terrible problem there to grow bigger or else we’ll fine you or shoot you if you try to fix it. If you’re in the west and you see some land that’s got some obvious issues or is about to burn down it’s government land.
Then I went into accounting, and the dirty secret of that industry is 3/4 of what companies pay accountants for is to do government mandated paperwork to send to the government which nobody in the government will ever read, and to respond to government audits which are usually useless. IRS just makes shit up as they go. And the shit they made up last time? They changed it this time. Either way, shut up and pay your fine.
But it isn’t just the agency that takes your money directly. Oh no. (honestly, the IRS was one of the more professional agencies I dealt with in my career! Not even joking. The others are worse.) Then there’s the dozens of other agencies that meddle in your industry who you also have to appease, even though sometimes they contradict each other, and all of them can fine you.
Then I worked in the gun business, where I got to discover the wonderful world of ATF inspections, where holy fucking shit, the dumbest people in the universe who don’t know how anything works at all, pretend to be mechanical engineers and lawyers. But Chevron said they’re “experts” so clearly that must be true, and if you disagree they’ll shoot your dog and burn your house down. The list of dumb shit the ATF makes up on the fly could fill a book (literally. I did write this book).
But surely, the ATF is the worst right? Oh no. Not even close. Because then for my next job I went into military contracting! Where the rules are whatever the DCAA or DFAS say they are today. And sure, you violated that secret impossible to know rule on accident, so we’re going to ruin your company and put hundreds of people out of work… but the big megacorporation did the same thing, only on purpose, and a million times worse? Oh well. Fuck you. Lockheed builds missiles. You don’t.
On that note, as an accountant I got companies through audits from probably eight or ten different federal agencies. The DCAA audit is by far the most annoying. This is the industry where the customer actually knows exactly how much profit you expect to make, and then you have to guess what everything will cost in the future, and if you guess wrong, they will fine you. Hell, if you guess in a way that actually SAVES the government money, they will fine you. If you charge the government too little, they will fine you. They will fine you for bookkeeping errors. They will fine you for typos. (keep in mind of the hundreds of government spreadsheets I saw, I never saw a single one that didn’t have serious computational errors on it… which I got to fix for them for free… or they’d fine me).
I once actually had a DCAA auditor sit behind me while I typed on my computer for about 4 hours to WATCH ME TYPE. At the end of this month long colonoscopy which cost the tax payers tens of thousands of dollars in government employee salary, they had found one mistake where I had UNDER CHARGED the government something like $16.
Keep in mind, none of this shit was a law passed by congress. It’s all stuff that the agencies made up based upon a vague idea congress gave them.
But the worst, the absolute worst, dumbest motherfuckers in the entire US government? The SBA.
The motherfucking SBA who I will despise with the fire of a thousand suns until the end of time. This is an agency congress created to HELP small businesses, and instead its a wretched hive of scum and villainy, who because they can just make up the regulations as they go, will always find a way to reward their friends and punish everybody who competes with their friends.
And they make up these arbitrary rules, which their employees don’t understand, and then if you fail to comply with the rule correctly, but they understand it wrong, they will actually actively try to destroy that small business, RATHER THAN ADMIT THEIR MISTAKE. I’ve got a saga about this particular one that would take ten thousand words to tell, where I fought with the SBA making shit up on the fly and lying about it for 6 straight months, and the only reason we got it solved was my company brought it to the attention of @BasedMikeLee who then stomped on their heads (with glee, which is why that dude has earned my vote).
So how has Chevron fucked you? š
All I know is the people who couldn’t get paperwork done when WFH in COVID are the reason I have an accountant. It’s like I’ve hired an, albeit professional and classy, witch doctor to ward off bad spirits.
We have an accountant but it has nothing to do with “Chevron” or government over-reach, and everything to do with tax services violating their contracts.
We used to use the big tax services, and signed up for their “audit protection” service — you pay a bit extra and they promise to defend you if you get audited. Then we got audited over something in the paperwork that wasn’t perfectly clear — which they did — and they basically said, “Screw it, you’re on your own,” and we had to provide extra documents to prove to the IRS that everything was kosher. So that “audit protection” we bought and paid for was worthless; when we got audited it was on us to protect ourselves.
The very next tax season, we retained a real accountant. Best move we ever made. Found more deductions, got us a much larger return, charged us half what the big services did, AND went to bat for us when we got randomly audited again.
Trust me – your audit wasn’t ‘random’! The figured they missed you by this much -fingers showing a minimal spacing- and they would get lucky this time.
The widest and most ridiculous overreach was the EPA and their “Waters of the United States” takeover attempt.
They took a law which was explicitly designed to protect major waterways and basically tried to pretend it reached down to a manmade ditch that could barely hold a small canoe. Literally.
Or an area of someone’s privately-owned land that gets “soft” and “marshy” a few weeks of the year when it rains heavily. That mud puddle becomes “navigable” because when it finally drains, the water goes into a creek (which is dry any other time of the year), which feeds a stream, which miles and miles away finally feeds a river capable of hosting small boat traffic.
All the land-owners wanted to do was fill in the “marshy” area so they could actually use and enjoy the land they own, but the EPA said no, it’s a navigable waterway (that nobody can navigate to by water) so they can’t touch it.
I know a guy who dug a stock pond on his ranch. Got hit by EPA for digging without permission on his land (he was just expanding an already semi-pond) and then by the EPA for not maintaining it when they told him to stop meddling with it due to ‘navigable issues.’
The electricity company needed to update a cable on my property so that I could get stable voltage for my solar panels. Digging permit was refused because the ditch would cross a “stream classified as a beaver habitat”
The fact that said stream was closed in 1957 and has run in a 3-inch pipe ever since didn’t seem to register. That took 2 years to sort out.
So did the Corps of Engineers.
No, they went further than that. They wanted to (and I believe they tried to) regulate ‘wetlands’ (one guess as to who would decide what was a wetland or not) with no surficial connection to any waterway including your aforementioned ditch by claiming that subsurface movement of water made said wetlands part of the WotUS. For all practical purposes ALL Land within the US.
Honestly, despite the fact that a lot of regulations that both the right and the left enjoy will potentially be called into question, this decision really does restore at least a little of the intended balance between Congress and the President. The President (and the agencies under him) have been able to make their own versions of the law using a combination of badly written legislation from Congress and this legal theory. Now Congress might have to actually do their job and write real legislation instead of the performative nonsense they usually pass, and the President will be more constrained to the actual powers granted to him in the constitution.
This isn’t really a partisan thing. Both sides have abused this to push their own agendas when they controlled the Presidency. Right now it is mostly Democrats upset about this change, but if Republicans had their guy in office they would be complaining just as loudly.
Agreed. It’s ironic that Chevron was originally decided as a way to enable Reagan to dial down regulations, but then just made regulations a free-for-all based upon whoever was reading and implementing it.
Chevron was initially written by Scalia as a restraint on activist Judges. It wasn’t initially viewed as a significant case. Later on Scalia realized the monster he had unleashed with Chevron and turned his focus to pushing texualism/originalism. But it has taken 40 years to get rid of Chevron completely (although the Supreme Court and not referred to Chevron since 2016, so it’s been on it’s way out for almost a decade)
Except Congress does not write legislation. Lobbyists and ‘think tanks’ write the laws, and the Congresscritters vote as their ‘donors’ direct them to without ever even bothering to read those 1,000+ page goat-chokers and door-stoppers. There could be summoning rituals for Dagon and Cthulhu in those bills and they’d never know.
Nothing compares to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Every time Congress passes a law that affects the processing of veterans’ claims for disability compensation benefits, education benefits, etc., VA invariably interprets and enforces it solely in the VA’s favor. VA’s slogan to veterans should be “you suck and we hate you.”
American’s Public: “There’s nothing too good for our troops!”
VA: “Got it, nothing too good.”
āNothing? Too good.ā
āAward feesā are the bane of professionals who work as federal contractors. Contracting management will chase an award fee to the end of the Earth.
My personal favorite is replacing custom software with COTS for the document database at Savannah River Site. Not only did they miss a module which double checks for search results, they screwed the entire database. This put the entire 300 mi.Ā² site into a āstop workā condition for five daysā¦ They had never tested it before declaring it online.
Now it takes six people do the same job that one did. But they could lie to say it saved money, and presto!! Award fee!
I love that the Supreme Court has been placing the responsibility of lawmaking back in the hands of lawmakers and requiring elected officials to own up to their votes.
Chevron is only one of the more recent decisions that reflect this attitude.
The current Supreme Court is slowly dragging the government, kicking and screaming, back toward the bounds set for it by the Constitution.
For this, the Democrats condemn them as ‘illegitimate’ and a ‘rogue court’.
Only a career politician could look at a judicial body required to follow the Constitution, see that it is in fact following the Constitution, and label it “illegitimate” and “rogue”.
Note I said “career politician”, not Leftist or Democrat. There are plenty of Republicans (usually RINOs, but not always) who get butt-hurt when SCOTUS — correctly — slaps their pet projects down, too.
I look at it this way also, problem is, lobbyists are already writing the bills…
The Supremes are creating conditions that are pushing the United States towards being just like Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale, but people like you can’t see that, of course.
For those of you just joining us, Servelan is like the 10th name of a fucking dipshit moron who likes to show up on my blog to lie about obvious shit and then cry that everyone is racist.
He’s too stupid and dishonest to actually communicate with so I just make fun of him until I get bored then mark his latest itineration as spam.
And can’t even correctly spell her name either.
But to stay on subject, I estimate that at the small family business a quarter of the staff had to devote part or all of their time to satisfy various government paperwork diktats. This was a company that maxed out at 30 people. As it was a profit-sharing firm, this cut into everybody’s paychecks, to no one’s happiness. We occasionally had dealings with DFAS, but thankfully nothing that involved cost-accounting or future estimations of cost. And I am grateful that we never EVER had anything to do with the SBA.
One of you dip shits should read another book, this Handmaid’s tale thing is getting pretty old.
In my hometown the fire chief saw lightning start a brush fire and could have taken care of it himself with the brush truck.
Nope! BLM land, can’t touch it.
Led to the biggest fire in Utah history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milford_Flat_Fire
Back in the 70’s, 60 Minutes did a segment on why medical expenses in the US were rising rapidly. Turns out, yep, federal regulations regarding Medicare and Medicaid.
Go to your doc’s office. Look at the worker-bees who aren’t nurses or doctors. Most of them are there to handle the paperwork required by the feds directly and indirectly to the feds through various insurance companies.
You see the same thing with the Department of Education. All that money to ‘improve’ schools generally goes into expanding the administration while screwing over teachers and students.
When a school district has more “administrators” than they do teachers, that’s part of the problem. (Those administrators aren’t all on-site, either. Have you seen how large a school district’s “education services” or “administration” building is?)
And yes, all the federal grants to “improve schools” tend to be used to hire more administrators, not hire teachers or provide for better classroom experiences.
People wonder how charter schools can operate with so much less overhead than a public school; this is how. They don’t have to pay for nearly as many “administrators”, just enough office staff to keep things running. The kids get educated just fine at a fraction of the cost; the “per-student” expenditures are less, but with fewer invisible bureaucratic money pits, the students actually see the benefits.
It’s also why the government and public school unions HATE charter schools. The government hates them because fewer administrators means less government control, and the public school unions hate them because they demonstrate — live and in color — how ineffective and inefficient the standard public education models are.
Before their practice got bought out by a local health system, the Doctor that I see was in a practice with four other Doctors. Each Doctor has a medical assistant and a scheduler. Then there’s 25 people to handle the insurance paperwork. Those 25 are nothing but overhead. They don’t deal with the patients. There’s part of your expenses. The other part is at the Government’s end. My Mother used to get identical paperwork from both the State and Federal Governments in four different languages. When I had to go to Harrisburg there was building after building full of people generating that paperwork. When you are on I-70 North of DC thee is building after building full of people who generate the same paperwork for the Federal Government.
I was an interior qualified firefighter. OSHA made up rules “to improve safety” that actually made our jobs more dangerous.
When I lived in New York, I worked as an IT instructor. As the saying goes: those who can, teach. Those who can’t, make up regulations about teaching.
I currently work as an instructor and RSO at a gun shop. BATFE, ’nuff said.
My wife works in the finance department for a multinational corporation. The list is too long to put here.
I used to work for JP Morgan Chase. There is a process by which the government requests all financial transactions of anyone who is on social security … or anyone who is three degrees of separation away from anyone who is on social security.
The government submits names and social security numbers…yes, ssns in plain text … to the banks. The bans respond with a dump of financial transactions. Every single transaction they have ever had at the bank.
Is the bank allowed to check if the person is on social security? Hell no! Is the bank allowed to check if the person is less rha
three degrees of separation away from someone on SSI? FUCK YOU. Give us the data now!
Anyway, JP Morgan Chase could never get the automation piece working. The data they sent us was fucked and the response process (which was supposed to be an api) always failed no matter what you did.
They had to respond, though, so Chase’s decision was to hire a fleet of Indian contractors to manually compile the data and manually upload it to the government server.
Yes. The government sent Chase plain text names and SSNs in and unencrypted text file. Chase folks then email that unencrypted text file to some random people in India who then get all your financial transactions from the dawn of time and send it to the government.
And people wonder why their data gets out so easily.
Anyway … I dug into the process, read through the government’s documentation and found several technical errors. I fixed the glitches so the data we got from the government was right, and Chase was able to compile and respond automatically.
Chase fired the fleet of Indian contractors, and I got a very nice coffee cup as an award at the annual meeting.
We informed the government of the glitch and how people can fix it. The government responded by fining us for altering their process, even though we never altered it. Then, they fined us for 1. Using international contractors and 2. Firing those contractors.
Then, they changed the process again so it no longer worked. This time, they didn’t publish documentation so there was no way to fix it. Naturally, Chase was unable to respond quickly enough, so they incurred fines.
I left the company shortly thereafter.
American Disabilities Act regulations. Construction or renovations just 5 years apart have whole cloth changes in materials and specifications. Free electric carts for any disability have exploded costs in access, doors, and ramps (sidewalks!). No two inspectors measure to the same specification.
LOLZ, the ADA was interpreted as an abortion from the start.
For architects, the first response to it was the remarkably straightforward “Handicapped Bathroom” — a single, unisex bathroom that satisfied the requirements, usually between the two and sharing the wetwall.
“Oh, noes, you’re singling us out and making us deeeefurent!!”
Wham, new regs: “No, you can’t do that!!”
So EVERYONE ELSE gets to wait, because there is at least one less stall in any given bathroom, because the handicapped functionality, which was perfectly satisfied by the original unisex single, independent stall, has now been duplicated. So every bathroom has one less stall in it because almost always the handicapped one takes up most of the space for two stalls.
They’ve slightly moved back from this, so there is often a single unisex family/trans/handicapped stall, but not really, because this does not stop the requirement that there be a handicapped stall in both men’s and women’s bathrooms.
I stopped respecting the handicapped when that happened. I specifically always use the handicapped stalls whenever the option is available — usually “it not”, it’s because someone else beat me to it. Fuck ’em.
Was remodeling an office, and it had an existing bathroom, with a door that swung in. It was a small bathroom, and it was pretty tight. ADA inspection said it couldn’t swing in. OK, it can swing out. Nope, that blocks the hall. OK, pocket door. Nope, that isn’t fireproof enough for an office. OK, I’ll take the dam thing out. Nope, that can’t be changed in a remodel without more permits.
I left the door as is.
When I was in College I had a job working for the College. I was asked to layout a Computer Lab. I was told which room in which building. So I measured the room and the layout of the electrical and data connections. I figured out how to fit 24 computers in there without overloading the breakers. when I submitted my design, it was refused because there were no wheelchair accessible computers. I questioned this because the Lab was going to be on the 4th Floor of a building that had no elevators. It was grandfathered in before ADA. I had to change it to 18 computers with 4 being wheelchair accessible.
This ‘ruling’ by a ‘court’ is Not going to stop a single instance of bureaucrats inventing “Law”. All it does is give a ‘legal standing’ for a Victim of the bureaucracy to “Sue” the agency, in a government ‘court’. Bureaucrats will not Pay for the ‘defence’ of their Actions, nor will they be ‘Punished’ in any way. The Bureaucracy knows this, and knows that the People that they are harrassing will make a calculated decision that ‘compliance’ is cheaper than ‘going to court’.
Anyone who thinks that this Corruptocracy can be corrected by ‘voting’ or through its own Corrupt ‘courts’ is a Fool.
You know how you have to change your corporate password every 90 days? Or 60? Or 45 in my case? I’m pretty sure there’s no actual law that says you have to force your employees to do that.
The government uses something called “GMP,” or Good Manufacturing Practice. That’s pretty much their operating system. “If everyone else does this, you should do this, too. If you’re not doing it, you need to explain why you’re not doing it.”
They have no idea if it’s a good idea to do the thing, just that everyone else is doing it. Businesses being run by spaghetti spined business grads, they just do whatever everyone else is doing. The government says to themselves, if we set standards, people will just do what the standard is. If we leave it blank and say “you better do what everyone else is doing or better, they’ll kill themselves competing with each other to keep raising the standards.”
So businesses started forcing mandatory password changes every 90 days. Then everyone else started changing every 90 days. But you can’t just do what everyone else does, you need to exceed the industry standard, even the standard on stupid shit. So it crept down to 60 days. And in my case, 45 days.
I have a list of future master work passwords stored on my phone. I change my password. Then I spend two weeks trying to remember my password. Then I have two weeks where I can easily remember my password. Then for two weeks my computer bitches that in two weeks I have to change my password.
And this will never change, despite the National Institute for Standards and Technology having changed their recommendation on password changes back in 2017 to “change it if it gets compromised, or every 365 days.”
Had that password headache for a while. Used to use a system that worked well for me. Had 2 speeches and a song decorating my office wall, they were my passwords. Just take a line, take the first letter of each word add in punctuation as it occurred, Every month just switch to the next line. Everyone has a favorite song or two memorized.
I used Bureau Numbers for helicopters that I worked on when I was in the Navy. I had enough that I could rotate through in a cycle. I’d leave a post-it note on my monitor with the aircraft number as a reminder. Like “610-1” The B number that was 610 when I got to the squadron. “610-2” was the second aircraft with 610 on it, but, the B number was different. I had written them so many times on paperwork that I can remember them almost 40 years later.
I’ve had to deal with this since my days as a Private in the Army. Have to do it anytime I need to check anything regarding my ongoing medical care, because it resets my DS login info and I have to spend an hour trying to access my account to change the password.
90% of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) is based on TD’s. these are “Treasury Decisions”. These are listed in the IRC as having the force and effect of law.
Pure bullshit handed down over generations. The code is simply a thick book of comittee decisions that are then forced on the American public under the threat of a barrel of a gun.
I suspect the common thread is empire-building. Dr. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy – that the people who serve and grew the bureaucracy will be promoted over the people who are focused on performing the mission.
And after over 40 years working for the Navy, I can confirm he was 100% right. The only force I’ve seen that can fight the Iron Law is the Band of Brothers Effect – a small team, working outside the normal channels, can perform miracles.
Col. Boyd’s “Fighter Mafia”. š
Which was an overreaction to the pre-WW2 bomber mafia.
Did you see the latest from the German Navy? They’re seeking a replacement solution for 8″ floppy disks for their frigates.
https://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/2024/07/from-military-intelligence-is.html
Noted in the article is that SAC -finally- replaced 8″ floppies in 2019.
This is the sort of thing I saw in the Canadian military at age 17, and decided it would be better to do -anything- else than stay in the military. Respect to you boys and girls who toughed it out, but I freakin’ -ran- out of there.
Does the E-4 Mafia come in here?
My main villian aside from the Democraps has always been the ATF. But the FBI is coming up fast on the outside rail… they were actually more squared away under Hoover, Fer Gawd’s sake….
I work in maintenance at a factory that produces veterinary pharmaceuticals. We are tightly regulated by the FDA and USDA. The amount of energy, resources, raw materials, and man hours that are wasted due to meeting their often unnecessary obligations is astounding.
Iāve seen millions of dollars of product thrown out due to paperwork typos. The BTUs that are wasted everyday keeping unused machinery online and āhotā so that we donāt have to do their mandatory 3 or 7 day testing could power a small town. I could retire on the amount of water that goes down the drain due to it not meeting the standards set by the regulators. We have several full time employees whoās only job is to maintain and track years worth of paperwork and records that are rarely if ever checked by the government.
Given all this waste it amazes me that pharmaceuticals are as cheap as they are.
The DEA’s \Office of Diversion makes up the rules that say how much medicine you can get, and when you can get it. My wife can’t get more than 30 days supply of a medicine that keeps her alive, and can’t get it more than once every 30 days. We can’t even pick up her prescription a single day ahead of time.
This is to keep citizens from stockpiling and selling their medication. While the government paid Afghani farmers to grow Opium for 20 years. And China ships Fentanyl into the country by the ton.
I used to work for the DEA. Everybody in the Administration hates the morons at Diversion. That’s where they send the real screw-ups. They’re so bad they have their own off-site office, so they’ll annoy everybody else less.
And don’t even get me started on the paperwork required if you lose or misplace your doctor-prescribed “controlled substance”, or (heaven forbid!) it gets stolen.
If that happens, you are presumed guilty of trafficking your drugs until you fill out and sign a mountain of papers swearing up and down that you didn’t. Even then, it’s ultimately up to some bureaucrat whether or not to let you replace it.
And they wonder why the black market is thriving when drugs are “legal”.
Every regulation implementing the Civil Rights Act is contra the Constitution. The CRA is now considered to be the highest law in the land.
I have but one response to you to give:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfYJsQAhl0&pp=ygUidGhlIHVsdGltYXRlIGluc3VsdCBiaWxseSBtYWRpc29uIA%3D%3D
Every single implementation violates the 1st Amendment right to free association.
Men in women’s sports? CRA
Bake my cake? CRA
Loans to people who can’t possibly pay them back? CRA
Hiring based on quotas instead of capabilities? CRA
Mandatory promotion, regardless of performance? CRA
The FAA preferentially hiring the mentally deficient? CRA
Make the Department of Agriculture DOA.
My electric handsaw has a blade protector which is supposed to rotate out of the way as the blade cuts into the wood. Often this device hangs up on the material and prevents the saw from continuing the cut. This results in having to move a hand from controlling the saw to freeing the āprotectorā which makes the work more dangerous. This device was probably mandated by OSHA.
And donāt get me started on āspill proofā gas cans.
Don’t you mean, “pour proof” gas cans? š
Thanks to the SCotUS on this one! I mean, fifty fucking years ago, when I first found out that Congress had managed to delegate their power to make laws , I was, like “WTF?”
And it’s only gotten much much worse, as the Deep State has built up massively.
Some gotcha even an accountant can’t fix.
If you search youtube for Chad Elkins, he had to send out notices to his tax clients that they needed to self report corporate ownership on a .gov website ( a law from Enron scandal fallout ).
Because this was a non-accounting or tax matter, he could not give out legal help with this, and included a contact with a lawyer who had agreed to help.
A bunch of clients got on his “drop this idiot customer” list by then replying to him and demanding he ( a non-lawyer ) help them with the form.
Regardless, failing to fill out this form when you have an active LLC can net you a fine of $600/day late, as well as either a $2000 fine or two years in jail.
The government created federal corporations out of thin air so they could make mortgage loans. When those corporations were going to crash and burn in 2008 the government propped them up and created… another entity to oversee the entities which should have already been gone. So now we”re paying for big government oversight on companies which are *still* in receiverships on 2024 when all they had to do was… nothing. Let them crash and burn. But nooooo….
There are some really important examples of overreach here. The one with social security is particularly bad but others are in the same area of “what in the ever-living hell is going on here?” The examples need to be brought to light in a big way.
When I worked at a hospital, EEOC came in and said the standalone water fountains had to be replaced with the type that project out from the wall so wheelchairs can move in close enough to use them. OK, fair enough. Then OSHA came in and said the water fountains that projected out were safety hazards and all water fountains had to recessed into their own little alcove so they were flush with the walls, which meant they were once again not accessable to wheelchairs. I recommended a cage match between EEOC and OSHA and we would obey the mandates of the winner.
RE: Chevron deference–within the past week, I have heard two former ATF agents refer to the SKS as an “AK-47 knockoff.”
Yeah, let that sink in for a moment.
The company I work for has had several OSHA inspections over the years, and the contradictions in their tribal knowledge are un-effing-believable. “No, that plastic cement is too dangerous, use this one.” “No, this plastic cement is too dangerous, use that one.” “No, you can’t have a stick of Loctite blue on the premises. It’s too dangerous.” “No, you can’t have a small bottle of Gorilla glue on the premises. It’s too dangerous.” That’s right, ordinary products consumers use daily are “too dangerous” to have at work.
You guys should see the Immigration and Naturalization cluster f- as an immigrant sometime.
Somalian goat herder? (Not kidding, actual goat herders.) Instant green card. Bring the whole family. We’ll find you a hotel and a job. Free healthcare!
Canadian? Forget it, no green card for you. We don’t care who you are or what you can do.
Canadian physician trained in the USA with a kid born in the USA? Still no green card, how dare you even ask.
I foresee some lawsuits in La Migra’s future. Every single legal immigrant in the USA should sue the f- out of them.
In formal business analysis, there is a term “Non-Functional Requirements”; meaning aspects of the system being described that are not required because they advance the system’s goals but are merely “required” by law.
My favorite over-the-counter cold medicine was caught up in anti-meth requirements imposed on retailers. One drug in the formula — used in most OTC cold treatments — was a precursor for meth, so the FDA required retailers to record and report how much each individual customer bought each month. But not as a package of pills, or even a number of individual pills, but by the weight of the drug. A fraction by weight which differed for each recipe of each medicine, to apply to each of the packages (30 count bottle, 214 count blister pack ….) ANYHOW the drug makers and the retailers and the FDA finally “compromised” by taking this familiar and effective drug out of OTC circulation entirely. Consumers, SUFFER!
Might have missed it, but I’m surprised no one’s mentioned FAFSA.
Government is half of it. As an example….one place I worked the woman in charge of verifying that the paperwork was complient told me as we chatted that she didnt have a technical background so if she didnt understand it, she asked for more detail. She said she did this because none if the government people had technical backgrounds. If she didnt understand they wouldnt either. So the more detail they figured the more accurate it was.
I dunno. Are DOT regulations covered under the Chevron deal? ‘Cause I have a bone to pick with ’em if they are! Not the least of which is the MANDATORY 10-hour rest rule, which results in confiscatory fines for failure to comply, and yet the government expects the private sector ( truck stops ) to provide the means for complying. So we have truck drivers paying for reserved parking spots that may or may not be available when the driver arrives, out of hours, bc some bint behind the counter gave your spot to some cute guy she’s “eye”balling.
Or the 14-hour clock rule; once you start, you have 24 hours and you’d better be done or-surprise!-we’ll fine you! So drivers avoid restorative naps and push themselves to get back to the yard before they turn into pumpkins, using ammonia inhalers, peppermint oil, cigarettes, unhealthy mega-doses of energy supplements, etc. And also not eating and drinking well so they won’t need a bathroom.
Please tell me the DOT will soon get its comeuppance!
Sweet Larry, youāve never felt the joy of a code audit with a regulator who canāt code.
I made an auditor cry once just by sending them too many documents. One of my proudest moments.
“I made an auditor cry once just by sending them too many documents. ”
You, sir, deserve a medal for that. My hat is off to you.
Joking aside, I felt kind of bad about it.
The auditor was being a dick. I look big and dumb, but if you want to talk about certain topics, well, then God help you. So I think they felt stupid because I *look* dumb and I was saying things they couldnāt understand so they just got insecure and burst into tears.
You try to remember everyone is a person with their own life, but I donāt know who becomes an auditor.
People are human doing their things, sometimes you take jobs you don’t like. That said you don’t have to be a jerk about it (and probably should be humble about things you don’t actually understand, like code when you don’t code), rather than assume things about people.
I have an uncle who was the head of my state’s legislative audit division. I remember he had a sign on his wall that said “Auditors are the people who come after the battle is won and bayonet the wounded”. I believe he started out in accounting.
Nice. My brother was an auditor for KPMG and then an internal auditor for a midsize corporation. He would have loved that (he’s a real-estate developer now because he learned to hate auditing and corporate life).
It isn’t only the Federal Government. State Governments can be just as bad. I have had a Liquor Control Board Agent tell me that he doesn’t care what is written in the book of Regulations (that we are mandated to have) it’s what he says the “regulation” means. Then the next Agent fines us for doing it the way the first Agent told us to. One time I got a notice of Driver’s license suspension due to an unpaid fine in Iowa. I’ve never been to Iowa. I’m told that I’m supposed to get a “Not me letter” from Iowa. I get one. Then I’m told that they are not allowed to accept it from me, Iowa has to send it to them directly. I ask who it’s supposed to be sent to and they say Iowa knows who. well Iowa doesn’t. I finally get it resolved one day after my license is “suspended”. I have to pay $37 dollars for a new license, a $25 fee to have the “suspension” lifted and then I have one point less than what is required for suspension added to my license, which raises my insurance rate.
I ran a small business. Back then you mailed the W2 to the employee the W3 to the Social Security Administration and the W4 to the IRS.
I used regular mail. Got a notice from SSA about a year later saying I hadn’t submitted. Sent a copy, certified, return receipt. Got another notice. Sent another copy cert, return receipt.
Then I got a phone call. SSA was going to make a criminal referral to the IRS for noncompliance.
I said, “I have two signed return receipts showing you received these documents on this date and on this date.”
She said, “We have no record of receipt” and that they were going forward with the referral.
I said, “When I hang up from this phone call, I’m calling Senator Larry Craig’s office and I’m going to send copies of the proof that you have in fact received these documents. I’ll let you deal with his staff.”
Her reply? “Well, there’s no need to get nasty about it!”
My take is that she probably missed an internal deadline and rather than take responsibility, was willing to have an innocent citizen prosecuted to CHA. These people are scum.
All these stories are what Unintended Consequences was about. Not a few of the feds in that book got extreme blowback from the people they screwed over.