You were so focused on whether you could make this meme you never stopped to think whether or not you should make it.
That's a great write up. I really appreciate all the time and diligence you and the team are putting into the instance. I also appreciate your patience, both with those of us new to Lemmy as well as your outlook on what might (or might not) happen in the future.
As a former executive branch employee, the required ethics training is clear: the appearance of a conflict of interest is just as severe as an actual conflict of interest and we were counselled to avoid both at all cost. If that means it is inconvenient for you or a contractor, that's too bad because impropriety in government dealings is unacceptable.
This is codified in many areas, such as any employee - up to and including the president iirc - not being allowed to accept gives or honoraria above a fairly low financial threshold.
It's "broken by design."
[deleted rant]
I use a 3M 6200 half mask and 60923 cartridges. They’re good for organic vapor, some acids, and P100 (99.7% particulate blockage including oily particulates )I keep it on a hook near the door and use it for painting and epoxy work in closed areas. Cheap and effective, iirc the cartridges only need changing every 100-200 hours of use.
Reminds me of big corporations, most of the time. My personal identification has been leaked or compromised by dozens of companies - some multiple times.
People also tend to underestimate the scope of something as large as the government. The US government is not just the biggest employer in the US, but is the largest by almost a factor of 2 (2.9M to WalMart's 1.6M). It's been around longer than basically any corporation in America, and was often on the cutting edge of IT, which means the number of legacy systems involved in anything is an order of magnitude larger than any private entity. Throw on the pile that many government systems are consider life or safety critical and cannot be taken offline very frequently for maintenance (ATC, military, food and health services, etc) and that they are often delicately intertwined with other systems (gotta make IRS talk to BLM for ranchers, for example) and the "simple" process of upgrading becomes a quagmire very quickly.
Not to mention that the US has a fixed scale of pay, and the IT salaries you see at most large tech firms would not be tenable to the governments bill payers (aka you and me, as represented by 535 men and women who need to be re-elected every 2/6 years).
c/restofthefuckingbanana
I, too, will celebrate when we have universal healthcare, until then it’s a way for my sister to have good, routine follow-up care for her unexpected cancer diagnosis and for me to be able to purchase comprehensive healthcare on the open market, as I'm an independent contractor and don't work for a corporation with leverage to get private insurance.
While I can appreciate the freedom of boxers, I don't like the gentlemen down below wandering all day long. A nice mesh boxer-brief is where it's at. If I were rich, I'd have a full set of the Saxx Quest Ballpark™ Pouch boxers - those are my go-to for travel days. Sadly, they're also $30+ a pair.
It's more than that, though - it's used to setup custom sheet widths as well as enter new server and login details for sending scans via FTP to a server. If I'm doing billable work, I'm charging $225/hr. If I'm snooping the network, which isn't my field and I do almost never so it takes me several times longer than an expert, I'm making nothing. With an annual value on the machine's services at less than $500 (more than half of which would become reimbursable if I didn't have it), there's no actual value in "fixing" it by creating a different work around. 🤷♂️
I'm also describing the machine in my office that runs my $20,000 laser plotter/large format scanner. The software in the machine uses (Java?) over a web interface which was deprecated and removed from all browsers around 2012-14, iirc. The machine isn't supported anymore and the only way to clear an error or update where it sends scans is using that interface. I have a XPSP2 machine running the internal IE6 browser which will still display the interface. Since I'm now a one-person office, and I use the scanner about 6 times a year, I keep that machine around in case I need to turn it on to update the scanner or clear a print error. Buying a new plotter isn't worth the time/money - when it dies I'll just farm out the work to a 3rd party vendor; but while it does work it's convenient to have in-house.
That's sort of how I do mine. I put all my data onto dropbox/onedrive. I've got a $100 HP USFF hooked up in my office that is a 100% online mirror for those cloud accounts, and it backs up to an 8TB external each week. I rotate that drive with a spare each month (give or take), putting the "offline" one in a firesafe. It means I have a live copy (my pc), a cloud copy (OD/DB), a second hot copy (USFF PC), a near-line backup no more than 7 days old that isn't "live" and a cold storage copy that is no more than a month old (aka less than Apple's deleted-pictures and Dropbox's previous version storage time). It cost me two external drives and the mini-pc. And if all those fail I'll probably be roaming the radioactive wasteland looking for food and losing that data won't matter.
Oh, and that little box also runs a small FTP server and my Torrents for my Linux distro collection.