patrick.net

Booger says

Why did kids backslide so much during the period of scamdemic Zoom edumacation then?

RWSGFY says

Why did kids backslide so much during the period of scamdemic Zoom edumacation then?

They didn't. At least mine didn't. Two college educated parents and both extremely street smart. My boys/nephew laugh at school work. Get mostly straight A's. Youngest is a bit off, but I think that's because we don't push him. Still A's and B's. We push the nephew hard because of his mom still being somewhat involved. My youngest will be fine. Worry more about him impregnating a chick in high school. The ladies like him and he knows it. He's a sly player.

Your kids didn't backslide because youtube replaced the school or because two college-educated parents de-facto homeschooled them? There is a difference between these two scenarios, donchathink?

Next, do you really claim based on your set of one, that none of kids backslid during the time zoom replaced in-person lessons? Because I remember lots of hand-wringing, pearl-clutching and teeth-gnashing accompanying demands to re-open schools on this very site and on many other platforms. Now it turns out school closures weren't a problem?

RWSGFY says

Your kids didn't backslide because youtube replaced the school or because two college-educated parents de-facto homeschooled them? There is a difference between these two scenarios, donchathink?

Next, do you really claim based on your set of one, that none of kids backslid during the time zoom replaced in-person lessons? Because I remember lots of hand-wringing, pearl-clutching and teeth-gnashing accompanying demands to re-open schools on this very site and on many other platforms. Now it turns out school closures weren't a problem?

Agreed. Most kids did slide back, and quite dramatically, despite the generally poor quality of teachers these days. Some developed a mask attachment and other phobias. We need better, not woke teachers, but they aren't the problem with the insane amount of money wasted by the dept of education. It's all the bullshit administrative positions and unions who suck up 80% of the money, teachers don't make a lot.

mell says

It's all the bullshit administrative positions and unions who suck up 80% of the money, teachers don't make a lot.

Correct. Admin explosion

mell says

It's all the bullshit administrative positions and unions who suck up 80% of the money, teachers don't make a lot.

Can confirm this via wife's experience as a teacher.

DOGEWontAmountToShit says

Biden can’t lock anything in, he has no such power. everything executive order does can be undone.

FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden says

Biden can’t lock anything in, he has no such power. everything executive order does can be undone.

Union contract, not executive order.

Looks like DOGE is not going to be an outside advisory panel after all..



This means all the preliminary lawsuits filed against DOGE as an outside panel are toast.



https://x.com/DefiyantlyFree/status/1881851718641549791

Patrick says

mell says

It's all the bullshit administrative positions and unions who suck up 80% of the money, teachers don't make a lot.

Can confirm this via wife's experience as a teacher.

What is a lot though? My mom was a teacher and is sitting on $2M Cash, $90k/yr pension and collecting SS at 70 as late as she could. As a 70 year old widow let me know how you're gonna spend $130k/year? Pays property taxes and insurance and that's it. Utilities, but we're talking $10k/yr. What do you spend $120k/yr on?

You could go ape shit on vacations. One big family vacation for 10 people maybe $15k-20k? You still have $100k tax free in that year. Love my mom, but I don't buy teacher bullshit. As long as they don't die they have it great. Younger years suck, but doesn't it for most?

Wife makes about $80K, but works 12 hours a day between teaching, correcting homework, and preparing lessons. Around here, that's not enough for a middle-class lifestyle.

On the other hand, it's her choice because we don't really need the money. She could quit and we'd still be fine.

The pension is supposed to be good, but I don't know how good. She's been a teacher for only three years.

Patrick says

The pension is supposed to be good, but I don't know how good. She's been a teacher for only three years.

Is that even enough years to get a pension? I thought it was usually 15-20 years minimum. I could be wrong. I think my mom was 35 years and maybe longer. Masters helped.

I think it's fractional depending on years worked.

Patrick says

I think it's fractional depending on years worked.

In Virginia, the retirement plan is vested. The teacher contributes 4% of salary and the school system matches. The accumulated fund is what is used to pay the retirement. A teacher who only works and pays in just a few years will still have retirement payments, but obviously much less than a career teacher.

The DOGE people in the Trump administration are considering shedding a big portion of the massive office space that the government owns or leases nationwide, managed by the General Services Administration (GSA), including selling two-thirds of the office space the government owns and terminating three-quarters of the leased office space, according to the WSJ.

Much of this office space is vacant or underused and poorly maintained due to lack of funding, according to GSA testimony before Congress in 2023, cited by the WSJ, which further noted:

“A recent report from Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa who chairs the Senate DOGE caucus, found that not one of the headquarters for any major agency or department in Washington is more than half full. GSA-owned buildings in Washington, D.C., average about a 12% occupancy rate. The government owns more than 7,500 vacant buildings across the country, and more than 2,200 that are partially empty.”

The office sector is already in a depression, with default rates that exceed those during the worst moments of the Financial Crisis. Putting this inventory on the market for sale is going to weigh on the already collapsed prices of older office buildings – prices of 50-70% below the last sale before the pandemic are now common.

And terminating leases is going to stress office buildings, their landlords, and their lenders even more, likely entailing more defaults and foreclosure sales. This is a much needed but very bitter medicine to alleviate government waste.

What office landlords and their lenders are facing.

Here we look at the leased office space, where those buildings are, and what portion of the leased space the GSA has the right to terminate in 2025, and also through 2028 (Trump 2.0), based on an analysis from Trepp, which tracks commercial real estate debt and CMBS.

• GSA leases 149 million square feet (msf) of office space around the US.



• GSA pays $5.2 billion in annual rent to private-sector landlords.



• Through 2028, GSA has the right to terminate 53.1 msf of leases, or 35.5% of its leased space, spread over 2,532 properties.



• In 2025, GSA has termination rights on 21.2 msf spread over more than 1,000 properties,
  If GSA terminates all possible leases during Trump 2.0, it would save the government $1.87 billion in annual rent after 2028.



• In the vast Washington DC metro, GSA leases nearly 10% of the entire office market, 35.8 msf in 446 buildings, and can terminate 9.6 msf of that in 2025.



• In the Washington D.C. metro, GSA currently pays $1.47 billion in annual rent.



• GSA leases nearly 6% of the office space in the Kansas City metro (DoD, USPS, Treasury, VA, and USDA), 4.3 msf, of which it can terminate 1.0 msf in 2025.

...and more! https://wolfstreet.com/2025/01/25/doge-seeks-to-shed-vast-amounts-of-government-office-space-heres-how-much-the-government-leases-and-where-and-what-it-can-shed-during-trumps-term/

Patrick says

Wife makes about $80K, but works 12 hours a day between teaching, correcting homework, and preparing lessons. Around here, that's not enough for a middle-class lifestyle.

On the other hand, it's her choice because we don't really need the money. She could quit and we'd still be fine.

The pension is supposed to be good, but I don't know how good. She's been a teacher for only three years.

Your wife will get a pension, and it's a bonus that she started teaching later in life.

I started my teaching career in Watsonville in 1995 at 25 years old. I now teach for Los Angeles Unified School District and am in my 30th year. The way CalSTRS works is as follows (in my situation):

The earliest you can retire with a pension is 55. With 30 years in and retiring at 55 at the end of this school year, I would get about half of my yearly salary.

The way you maximize that monthly pension is by continuing to teach until you reach 61 1/2 years of age. That's why you see so many older teachers limping along after having passed their prime (some still do a good job, but most don't; elementary school teaching requires a lot of energy).

I'm assuming Patrick's wife came into teaching after having raised children. My aunt did that. She started at 39 and taught until she was 61 1/2. She gets a fine pension. So much of the monthly $ increase in the pension comes from those years between ages 55 and 61 1/2.

Once a teacher has taught 5 years in California, he is vested in the CalSTRS pension system.

If you start at 50 and make it to 61 1/2, you'll get a decent monthly pension for an eleven and a half year career!

Thank you @brazil66

I will forward this to her. Didn't know about the 61 1/2 thing.

https://join.doge.gov/

OK, I applied because it did not require the usual Google spyware. That is, the application page worked even with Google blocked.

On the other hand, one nit: the page does not accept resumes in plain text. So I had to make a pdf out of my plain text resume to submit it. Not efficient!

iloveCefferMemes says

https://join.doge.gov/

Isn't this the opposite of what DOGE was for?

https://blissandblisters.substack.com/p/government-worker-games

I saw a few videos on TikTok where the video makers were talking about their experiences working for the Government which amounted to them watching their fellow workers waste time and brag about it.

And Amy Sukwan wrote about working for the census bureau and being told to work slower by her fellow workers because she was making them look bad.

Her experience reminded me of when I worked at the IRS in college. (Don’t hate me, I needed the money and the pay was good.) I was a Math major at the time and the IRS put notices in our building that they needed seasonal temporary workers for Tax Season. ...

Once I got to the PreAudit Department no one wanted to examine Schedule G’s. If you ever had to do one you’d remember why. Very long and complicated and lots of math with big numbers. But a friend and I were really good at them so the other workers gave them all to us and we’d have a contest every night to see who got the most done. He was only 16 and I was only 18 and we were processing these things 5 times faster than the permanent workers.

This was a huge problem for those permanent workers because it made them look bad. They were always telling us to slow down because we were making the average higher and then they had to work harder.

Truthfully, having those contests was the only thing that made a monotonous job fun so we didn’t listen to them. Once again I got promoted and this time it was to the full Audit Department. I think the permanent workers told their bosses to move us. And they split us up. He went to a different section of the PreAudit Department. We’ll handle the Schedule G’s ourselves! “So what if we’re slow? Who cares, it’s taxpayer money anyway.” That was the prevailing attitude.

And once again, me, the lowly college student was outperforming the permanent workers so they started sabotaging me. I could not believe that they were okay with mediocrity…I mean it’s our taxpayer dollars paying these people and they intentionally were working slow and trying to keep me from doing my job since it made them look bad.

We had to lock up all the returns when we left for the day, and somehow mine would be lost and I’d have to spend time locating them. Of course this would lower my productivity numbers. And I had clerks to take care of files for me and they would hide them and put them at the bottom of the pile to slow me down. And take stuff out of my desk so I’d have to spend time finding my stuff.

I remember walking by carts of tax returns waiting to be processed and thinking “I wonder if anyone just throws these away to help their productivity numbers?” Years later I read in the newspaper that a few hundred workers were found to have been routinely throwing tax returns in the trash to make their productivity look better. This was at the Austin, Tx service center but I bet it has happened elsewhere…

The thing is that these workers are almost impossible to fire! Once they get through the probabion period, they have to be guilty of gross negligence to be terminated. Just being slow is not really enough to get you fired. A lot of the workers just want to do as little as possible to get by. ...

My boss told me that I wasn’t finding enough extra overlooked tax. Our job is “revenue,” she told me. “I thought it was to collect the correct tax,” I told her. You can see why I was really popular there.

When I didn’t produce enough revenue, they started auditing me. By this time I was a permanent employee too, so they couldn’t easily fire me. And since I don’t cheat on taxes and they couldn’t find anything wrong, they audited my parents. Who also never cheated on anything in their entire lives, I’m quite sure of that. Lots of wasted audit dollars there. My parents took them to court and won. I actually didn’t start out to write a post about the IRS per se, it’s just that so much is wrong with it!

Patrick says

My boss told me that I wasn’t finding enough extra overlooked tax. Our job is “revenue,” she told me. “I thought it was to collect the correct tax,” I told her. You can see why I was really popular there.

Much of this could be replaced by AI even today.

Patrick says

experiences working for the Government which amounted to them watching their fellow workers waste time and brag about it

When I worked for State government, I had a boss that sat in his office and listed vintage camera crap on EBay. Bought and sold, all day long. He was an E4 Engineer (out of 5 levels).

He made $96,000/yr in 2010. The Unions protect these chumps.

https://x.com/lukerosiak/status/1885523747425399247

Wild Thread abouit Trannies at the GSA's 18F Office, including use of a script blocking "Peanut Gallery, Ninja, Guru, etc." as offensive.

BTW any Buthurtards that thinks this had nothing to do with Elon Musk or isn't a big deal. You're sadly mistaken.
This is the main agency that undermined Trump at every turn during his first administration, and leaked sensitive information on Trump's loyal administrators, and doxed Federal workers to Antifa and the Media to harass. Elon targeted this agency exclusively to neuter them and clip their wings. The media will not have negative reporting coming out of the Trump administration as a direct result of this action.

This is Elon Musk's style it is the method he used to clean house at Twitter when he took over. And it worked wonders for Xwitter.

Just let that sink in.

Were any Hindus or Jews harmed in that email? Asking for a butthurt friend.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/the-occupation-saturday-february

On January 20th, the day Trump took office, a DOGE team including current and former Musk employees assumed command of the critical Office of Personnel and Management (OPM). DOGE delivered pull-out sofa beds to the fifth floor of OPM headquarters. The fifth floor is OPM’s top-management floor.

The sofa beds were installed so the DOGE team could work around the clock.

Meanwhile, OPM’s staff managers, like its CMO Katie Malague, were quickly and neatly moved out of their offices down to new offices on lower floors. It was a physical and psychological demotion, even if not any change in title or salary.

"It feels like a hostile takeover," one of the leakers complained to Reuters.

Next, OPM employees were unceremoniously cut off from all administrative access to the systems. They can still log in and do their work, but they cannot access any management functions or data. All this change is making their jobs much more exciting than usual.

OPM staff were “surprised,” for example, by the “Fork in the Road” memo last week, since the first time they saw it was at the same time it was sent out to all federal employees.

Amusingly, the article was sourced from leakers, but failed to connect the obvious dot: the DOGE team cut the OPM staff out of the loop because they clearly think the career people will leak like rusty sieves.

I’d hoped DOGE would do some good stuff, but I had no idea it would be like this. ...

The Treasury Department issues all payments on behalf of the United States. In that sense, every social security payment, every grant, tax refund, stimulus payment, Obamacare reimbursement, foreign aid, Fauci’s security detail’s strip club reimbursement, the whole works— if paid by the US, the check comes from Treasury. It issues more than 1.3 billion individual checks totaling over $6 trillion yearly.

In other words, Musk’s database engineers have been dying to dig into that Treasury data, to determine exactly what the US has been buying and who we’ve been paying. For example, does his name end with “-ensky?”

This database is the mother lode leading to the deep state.

But for two hectic, fast-paced weeks, the Treasury Department has stubbornly refused to give DOGE any access to the payments database. The rift leading to the resignation referenced in the headline happened when newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ordered the highest-ranking career bureaucrat at Treasury to turn over the passwords.

Instead of doing, that he resigned. (It could be more accurate to say he was offered a chance to resign. We don’t know. After all, he can still take that 8-month deal.) The bottom line is, he refused to turn over the passwords.

Late in the article, the WaPo got around to admitting that DOGE’s request for access was completely legal. Trump ordered Treasury to do it back on January 20th when the President created DOGE. So if anyone is breaking the law, it’s career Treasury officials:

The executive order Trump signed creating DOGE also instructed all
agencies to ensure it has "full and prompt access to all unclassified
agency records, software systems, and IT systems," which would appear
to include the Treasury payment systems.

Treasury officials’ resistance looks more like bureaucratic defiance than lawful objection. Bureaucrats cannot just ignore a President’s lawful order. If officials disagreed on the legality, they should have sought a court injunction—rather than deploying rogue bureaucratic resistance.

Trump’s executive order mandated transparency and reform. DOGE’s charter is to expose entrenched waste, inefficiency, or even corruption within the government, including the Treasury payments system. There is no reasonable objection to allowing DOGE its access.

GREAT Idea!

Another one: Credit Check, esp. if there is some way to check for Gambling Debts. Major Security Risk. Degen Gamblers always desperate for money to cover debts or get a stake.

Patrick says

Fauci’s security detail’s strip club reimbursement

gotta love Jeff Childers

database is the mother lode

MOAB

USAID on the chopping block!
https://patrick.net/post/1383456/2025-02-02-usaid-website-down-try-to-deny-doge

NED has 20 red flags of corruption:
Lack of Bipartisanship: Despite being legally required to reflect the diversity of American society, NED is predominantly staffed and led by Democrats, which raises questions about its political neutrality.

Political Discrimination: Allegations suggest that NED discriminates against Republicans and conservatives in hiring practices, potentially skewing its operations towards one political ideology.

Duplication of Efforts: NED's activities often overlap with those of other U.S. government agencies, suggesting redundancy and potential inefficiency in the use of public funds.

Lack of Transparency: Since 2021, NED has not updated its online database of grants, reducing the transparency of its funding allocations.

Reduction in Reporting: NED ceased producing printable annual reports after 2017, opting for less detailed multimedia summaries, which might obscure detailed financial and operational transparency.

Board Composition: As of late 2023, the NED board had more members than the legally mandated maximum, potentially affecting governance.

Partisanship in Events and Activities: The organization's programs and events are often seen as favoring one political perspective over another, suggesting a lack of balance in promoting democratic ideals.

CIA-like Operations: NED has been described as a continuation of the CIA's covert activities under a different guise, raising concerns about its true purpose and methods.

Interference in Elections: NED has been accused of influencing election outcomes in countries like Bolivia by funding media and NGOs to highlight alleged election fraud by incumbent governments.

Funding Opposition Movements: NED's support for opposition groups in various countries, often in line with U.S. foreign policy, can be seen as interference in domestic politics.

Manipulation of Narratives: There are claims that NED manipulates public opinion by funding media outlets and NGOs that promote narratives favorable to U.S. interests.

Undesirable NGO Status: Russia labeled NED as an "undesirable" organization in 2015, highlighting concerns over foreign interference in domestic affairs.

Historical Ties to CIA: The origins of NED as a response to expose CIA activities suggest a continuity in strategic objectives despite changes in operation from covert to overt.

Funding of Anti-Government Protests: NED has been linked to funding protests and opposition movements, like those during the Euromaidan in Ukraine, which could destabilize countries.

Selective Democracy Support: NED tends to support "democracy activists" in countries where U.S. geopolitical interests are at stake, questioning the purity of its democratic motives.

Infiltration and Subversion: Accusations of NED engaging in subversive activities, including ideological infiltration in regions like Europe and Latin America.

Support for "Color Revolutions": NED's involvement in various "color revolutions" worldwide indicates a strategic use of democracy promotion for geopolitical gain.

Lack of Accountability: There's a call for oversight and investigation into NED's operations, particularly its role in censoring U.S. citizens and its hiring practices.

Funding of Controversial NGOs: NED has funded organizations with controversial agendas or methods, raising ethical questions about the nature of the "democracy" it promotes.

Strategic Autonomy Suppression: In Europe, NED has been accused of suppressing voices for strategic autonomy in favor of transatlanticism, manipulating EU policy.

These red flags suggest areas where NED's activities might not align with its mission to promote democracy or could be indicative of broader geopolitical strategies rather than pure democratic support.

What is DOGE?

DOGE is Trump's reband of Obama's "Digital Service". All participants are go through a read-in to access all secrets and covered by a host of protections initiated by Obama and by inaction of RINO Congress

Basically, the Democrats will have to argue in Court that Obama had no power to do what he did, and a Judge will say "Why did Congress allow funding then?,,Does that mean everything Obama did with it is illegal?"

And it will be one long ass Court slog.

Whoever advised Trump to go this route is a real smart sonofabitch





TL;DR: Obama created a National-Security cleared Digital Service to look at anything and everything. RINOs funded it and never stopped him. Now it's Trumps.

DOGE is also a sneaky reference to the absolute ruler of Venice (Babylonian Banksters of yore) before 1800.