nitflegal

This is one of more than a few things that I think the Trump admin has done that uses a really poorly thought out fix for a real problem. And it also is an understandable one because the agency and the private sector resisted appropriate fixes for so long that they blew their chance to fix things themselves. The advisory groups in question tend to be there to provide guidance for research and share NIH/FDA/EPA/USDA research to industry researchers. Which requires people making these decisions to have in depth niche knowledge to make informed decision and the people who are good at it sure as hell aren't going to work for government salaries and crap funding for research. What the industry is expecting off of this is for these groups who are supposed to say "these are the key markers for an effective chemotherapeutic or the primary biomaterial compatibility standards for these newly developed materials for our cell on a chip technologies" to come from groups who either have no training or have never had the funding in government service to actually have experience driving these to production. It's going to make things much more difficult and obscured; 'cause God knows already what an individual auditor is going to interpret the regs from these groups already! As an analogy, if you are designing the next generation of tank armor would you fire the engineers and tank crew veterans and have binding regulations/requirements written by the first people who show up for the next Bovington Tank Day? Maybe you get lucky but most likely you won't. . . Having written that, they brought this on themselves because they refused to deal with the blatant conflicts of interest when it was in their court.

My problem working in burn and septic wards was you get nose blind and exhausted and then make the mistake of getting take out or groceries on your way home and suddenly realize that you are carrying that stench with you. Right up there with being pulled over after marathon surgery and suddenly realizing that you have dried blood soaked into your hair and on your face and it's 2 AM on a Saturday morning. . .

But here's the thing, you could use that. If somehow LA could create a program with federal funding that was optimized towards the people truly down on their luck you could let it serve as a magnet, draw that population there (you wouldn't get the addicts and parasites once it became known they'd get tossed out on their ass or imprisoned/committed), and then use economy of scale to provide safe housing, charter schools, and job training in one area of the country and support the expanding job market there. You could literally build 3-4 nationwide programs, provide transportation for vetted individuals and families (which incidentally gets them away from the social group and family that they often don't want to leave but is dragging them down) and now they are surrounded by others who are also striving to get a real life instead of bangers and addicts. The fact that we all know there is literally no chance that LA or NYC or Chicago or Atlanta will ever do that tells me everything I need to know about whether the political and bleeding heart class actually care about these people.

Thank you for this, my wife had a similar experience but it fortunately ended at 18. And yeah, those are exactly the people this process should be optimized for. Most of the people I worked with who clawed their way out came from abusive homes that continued with abuse from boyfriends/girlfriends/husbands/etc afterwards. If we spent a fraction of the money being poured down the majority and spun up actually policed safe places for them to escape to and worked on their mental health and schooling and job training we could actually do real good. I got into my volunteering because I was when my wife was going through her CNA certification she had classmates who were consistently failing out because of the life around them and nobody helped and there were no services provided. So we were able to jump and volunteer help. It actually worked and after several years I utterly failed at getting anyone in city government or state to put up a dime or start a similar program. When we had to move for my work the program died the day we left and the dropout rates went right back to what they had been.

I spent way too much time trying to explain this stuff away as them being stupidly inclusive and attempting to be non-judgemental to an absurd degree. I've since come to the conclusion that they simply are OK with adults wanting to f*** children and likely have people in their social circle who want to/like to f*** children. The tell is when they state from experience that everyone has some desire to f*** children at some point. That may be true in their social circles. . .

No apologies needed. As cynical as I am my volunteer time made me even more sympathetic to the people who have fallen through these cracks and we need people to hold their politicians responsible for actually finding workable solutions. My experiences are that the vast majority of these monies are slush funds for donor and voters, any help to the poor is a lucky chance. It's legit far harder for the Democrats because much of their base is utterly unwilling to deal with fact that their choices are directly responsible for the people being in these solutions. They also cannot reshape their worldview and admit that the majority of the homeless are mentally ill and incapable of living on their own or are addicts who have no interest in getting clean. So they spend vast amounts of money on making taking drugs safer and providing support for the mentally ill to live on their own. Both result in utter failure And the housing is objectively easy to sort out. Lower the permitting costs and hoops, have a truly competitive bidding process with harsh measurements for poor performance, and put armed security in every building with a robust accountability system where the contractor faces legal penalties for not keeping their house in order. One thing often not discussed is why the more violent gangs have made such in-roads into these apartment complexes. They are utterly ruthless and brutal, have clearly defined rules and codes of conduct, and flat out kill and mutilate anyone who breaks their rules. On the one hand, it means occupants will hold drugs and firearms with no questions asked, will assist with money laundering if they are in a position to, but then the druggies and violents will be confined to their own floors and if they harm the "keep their heads down folks" they get killed. It's actually safer than housing under state government contractors and police. How bloody sad is that? That's what is so frustrating; we have a good idea on how to address these problems but it's not socially acceptable to the voters and turns off the grift machine for the politicians. So instead we abandon these people and pat ourselves on the back for being virtuous. Infuriating.

I'll also add, none of these funds address the core problems that have caused the lack of affordable housing. At the very best, they provide ghetto housing where these poor bastards are forced to share their building with 95% of the population inside who are active criminals, gang members, mentally disturbed, and/or drug addicts. Which is why when you dig into these you find that poster children population typically last in that housing for less than 4-5 months. Which will then be touted as success stories when the actual data shows that almost all go back on the streets or move in with family members because they are more unsafe in these buildings than under an overpass where there is at least a chance of police going by. Actually, many of the homeless encampments are surprisingly safe in comparison. They usually have defacto leaders who keep some control of the place and segregate the drug dealers and addicts on the far side so they don't scare away the charity workers. I've also found that surprisingly often the guys who end up leading the place are often guys who work but have impulse control problems where they do enough dumb violent stuff they have been kicked out of their housing but in the encampment they don't have the same access to booze and actually are pretty solid guys. Have had more than a few over for holiday dinners in fact and they are pretty decent people with bad impulse control. I've literally had to hit the ATM before visiting the woman I was doing job training and interview prep with so I could have the $10 to the drug addict/gang members manning the first floor to be allowed passage. The poor single mom didn't dare leave to meet me elsewhere because if she left her 9 and 12 year old daughters there they would have forced to give blowjobs to those same addicts/gangbangers. The group running the place had bribed the state contractor who was paid to run the place and keep it safe for copies of all the apartment keys and it was against the housing agreement for the occupants to change their own locks as it would get them thrown out. Couldn't get her to leave until after she was working because she didn't want to leave her friends or trust anyone outside of the people she grew up with. That's why people who do this work (or God forbid the children focused ones like CASA) get as jaded as a 20 year cop or ER nurse. It's also why I tend to not go along with the whole "make them pick themselves up by their bootstraps horsecrap". Outside of some very determined individuals you don't grow up like that and just work hard and shake that. It's even dumber than expecting the average Afghani to just hit the "yea democracy" switch when we throw some candybars and corrupt building projects their way. I don't mean to be too harsh but as long as we fund corrupt and ineffective programs so that the taxpayer can feel satisfied they can check the "did something virtuous to help the poor" box we won't help the people who need it. BTW, the woman in question got out as a radiology tech and then became a practice manager. So mostly happy ending at the least.

My argument is a little different. But yes, I am arguing that. Because by voting for it they have allowed the average voter who tends to be completely ignorant of the lack of effectiveness to spend the next several years to go on thinking that they have checked the box and helped these people. Everytime they extend these types of deeply flawed programs it effectively prevents them from from enacting something that would actually work, both because the public thinks they've done their part but also because money spent this way can't be spent on something else. So without raising taxes as long as this program continues those same collected tax monies aren't available for a program that would work. This way they throw the money at the government employees and favored vendors to keep their salaries funded while wasting the typically small proportion of the funds primarily on drug addicts and mentally disabled people instead of the people you quoted. In effect, the people who are down on their luck are the poster children for these programs to tug on the heartstrings while simultaneously receiving the smallest fraction of the money spent.

Honest question; how is what they are doing better? Instead of targeting the money at the fairly small proportion of people who are homeless because of temporary circumstances (bad financial decision, abuse, employment problems, etc) they are providing far less to that population (which would allow them to do job training, safe temp housing, child care to allow a parent to work, etc) and instead evenly spreading it over them and the significant majority who are homeless either because they actively want to be or have addictions or mental disorders which make them incapable of having any kind of a stable life. I worked with the homeless for years in both NE and Michigan and went from gun-ho to cynical over several years. For every one person that you can assist get out of it (and roughly 20% of those don't make the same bad decisions they had before and end up homeless again and usually then become part of the majority homeless population) you have 15-20 who simply can't function. Put them in temp housing they do drugs, steal the appliances and fixtures to sell, bring in their abusive SO or pimp, rob the other tenants (which hurts that one out of 15-20 who is actually reachable and instead of being safe are nor housed with a population of 95% who go after them because they have money and appliances in their apartment) or simply disappear for weeks at a time back to the streets if they don't just leave altogether. How is it virtuous to spend money so that you can feel virtuous when the money you spend demonstrably and over decades actually makes the problem worse? If I told you I was a good person because I went into famine stricken areas with unlimited diet soda and ozempic injections you wouldn't applaud me for "doing something"; you'd think me an utter idiot because I went in and made the problem worse through actions which were measurably counter-productive. Because we as a society can't bring ourselves to admit that many of the homeless can't be saved short of outright incarceration (and our prisons utterly fail at being safe anyways) we waste the vast majority of our spending on them instead of being clear-eyed and focusing those resources on the few that can be helped out of that situation. General rule of thumb in the social services and charity world is that, if they've been homeless for more than 18 months, they won't be pulled out of homelessness. If, in periods of below 5% unemployment, they have not had some sort of non-charity or government income in 6 months than they are unsalvageable. We let the ones who are actually f**ked and could come around be sacrificed so we can say we helped everyone. Put it this way, you want to hear judgemental condemnation for the homeless? Talk to s former homeless person who took advantage of help to pull themselves out of it.

Speaking as someone who is currently interviewing candidates, I'd suggest he look on the positive side and be grateful that they telegraphed "Don't Hire Me!!!!" so clearly before he hired one and spent the next 2 years fighting to performance them out if he even could. . .

Holy s**t, they are decimating the FDA today, roughly 20%. I have mixed feelings as they canned the entire top leadership, give or take a few, but they also closed some departments I personally thought valuable. The one that jumps out is the group that advises and works with small biotech and startups to guide them through the development and approval process. That group was key to avoiding big pharma having an insurmountable advantage with the labyrinth of regulations that a small company just can't predict. That one has me scratching my head.

One may hope. The truly frustrating part is that we effectively knew it was a lab leak in 2020 in the pharma/biomed research community. The people I know (former colleagues) who actually worked on the vaccines were convinced it was a lab leak by May. I've tried to convince them to go on record but no sale. Allegedly (CYA right here) there were significant threats made to their careers and their very companies if they went public with it.

I don't know that it's possible to bust that myth as I'm not convinced that it is one. The T-34 is ass to drive and unpleasant just to ride in (I'm 6'4" so YMMV) and if you told me it was designed by a sadist to drive metal bits into my head and torso I'd believe it. IS-3 is wretched and IS-2 is kinda better unless you're slipping into the coffin for the driver. I would agree with the T-55 being a real step up and would love to get in a T-44 and IS-4 someday. However, I feel the T-62 and T-72 I've ridden in (too tall and bulky to get in the driver's position, I tried) were a step down from the T-55. Better laid out than the T-34 but when you compare them to the comfort level of any western counterpart (OK, never played in the Japanese tanks so can't say about those) they are poorly laid out and uncomfortable. Nightmare is maybe a strong word for them after WW2 but they don't compare well against the Western designs IMO.

I was able to be unskilled grunt labor on it in 2002 (I think, I was there multiple times between 2002 and 2006, usually climbing on the T29 family or MBT70). I want to say it was when you all were still working on the interior as I was scraping paint inside but honestly, after 20 years my memory isn't especially detailed. . .

To this day it kills me what they did to the Patton museum. I spent so many hours down there and in the LST shed (and wherever the large building with the Centurion covered in insulation that hopefully wasn't asbestos. . ) and the staff was great, the vehicles were great, and I got to help on the Hetzer and trip the damned alarm around the Panther 2. They f**ked that museum but good. . .