agreed... my error...

I was referring to Nixon's attempting to use the IRS to go after his enemies, as has Obama. Not sure about your money, but by some measures, Obama has out done all of his predecessors combined. I guess what matters are the stats that are important to you. Not meant to be an endorsement of Bush.

The feds don't have much of a retirement plan, or benefits... the defense company I work for runs circles around both of those. They get something around 1% per year of service at retirement, so if they work 30 years, they would get something like 30% of their salary per annum. They can add to that with a 401k (non-matching), etc. Their medical is pretty crappy, and they don't have vision.. didn't have dental until recently.

State of California in contrast is close to 3% per year, so 90% of salary for life after 30 years of service, quite a bit more vacation (40-60 days a year isn't unusual), and the medical benefits are rather poor compared to a fortune 500.

As for the technical analysis... I've built several of those systems, as recently as last year... I'm pretty sure I'm a little more up to date than some journalism major working for Fox News or whatever..

At least Nixon had an actual enemies list. Obama has subverted some 50% of the voting population with the IRS targeting. Again, this is the most heinous of all this Administration's plethora of crimes.

Not sure about the technical aspects of your analysis as there is plenty of contradictory expert advice all over Fox and the internet. However, I think you hit the nail on the head with your description of the training of government employees, "how to have zero job skills, how to have zero work ethic".

The biggest problem we have is that 50% of the voter base aspire to those jobs. Many government workers are paid well to do virtually nothing with first class benefits and the best retirement plan available. How can we compete when the opposition is incapable of seeing this as ethically immoral?

The other thing that I add, is that you have to consider how much of this kind of thing applies to the "vast government conspiracy"... versus just incompetence of federal employees. I will strongly say, in my experience, the latter. We had/have a saying.. that when they hire a "new fed", there is a deep cave under the building with torchlit walls that all the other feds bring the person into, and they "initiate" that new hire into how to be a fed... how to have zero job skills, how to have zero work ethic, and how to take months on a project task that should take anyone else a day or two to do. Unfortunately, they need a contractor to schedule the meeting for them because they don't know how to do that.

There are a lot of contractors in the federal IT workforce, it's probably 50% in some agencies. We're hired to manage and execute the technical requirements of a lot of these systems, and we just do what we are told to do in the contract. This stuff is setup years in advance and follows federal acquisition rules to the T... heck, most of our contracts right now were handed out under Bush...

If Lois Lerner is missing email, she deleted it, or it was not within the retention rules that the IRS has in place. Again... that's the defensive-element of our legal system these days... It's always better to say "we don't have it" when an attorney wants something than... "oh shit, here's 7,000 emails from federal employees mostly making fun of your client , and many of the threads contain pictures of their cat at home.. here you go, in high-res. " In her case, I would argue that the defensiveness worked quite well... obviously... she's out of a job, but not in prison.

Simple curiosity on my part. I did some work with SCO a long time ago

No.

Yup. The law is only a threat when it is enforced, and enforced evenly. The fact that the Justice Department has stopped prosecuting lawbreakers equally completely undermines the rule of law entirely, making the DoJ into nothing more than a group of strong-arm mob enforcers.

Holder needs to be impeached, along with every other corrupt-o-crat working for the DoJ - and it wouldn't hurt if his boss got dragged along with him.

Excellent insight into the actual technology they use.

Is the SCO in your handle the company?

I would put John Allison, formerly CEO of BB&T, as a separate case. Currently the CEO of the libertarian Cato Institute, he was on the Ayn Rand Institute board. He is on record as comparing what he had to do with what Rearden had to do, and the parallel is almost exact. He said what happened was "like a page right out of Atlas Shrugged".

Hey Kat,
Good for you! I call all the time as well and, living in Virginia, I hold their feet to the fire but when they don't do as I would like, I help get rid of them ala. Cantor. I won't give up. I am their boss. I am "..the people" and so are you. Tenacity is the key. The Dems will never go away so, neither will I. It is all very frustrating if you expect instant results. Don't expect instant results. Plan for the worst in your mind but hope for the best. This a war and sometimes we make headway and sometimes we have to fall back but we can never abdicate, ever.
I'm glad you help so much too but try to remember we are freedom lovers and naturally independent which is why we seem to have trouble being a unified front in the form of the T-Party. It may appear we have lost ground but the roots are all there and they grow.
Don't give up! Just keep your rep. on speed dial and hit all the news sites et. al. to stay informed, and give 'em hell. I take strength from you and hopefully you can gain some from me. We are in this together. Let's not make it so easy for them that we just get frustrated and go away. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER!
Let's move "forward" and push them off the cliff!

My comments are about banking in general and BB and T as a federal bank, not a critique on the person being interviewed. In the end ('in the best interest of shareholders?') BB&T does what all federal banks do, as described in my comments above. The entire federal reserve system is built on lies and must be dismantled for a decentralized, non-power-centered alternative based on real assets. Script is a tool to facilitate trade, not a machine gun to be used for robbery.

This is just a typical political circus. Smoke mirrors and lies. I work making the chips that run these things, and we use a LOT of technology. I know for a fact the law requires all business to have full backup capability and records so a legal hold results in a frozen picture of the data for investigative purposes. When they started that investigation, that should have happened at the IRS as well. The fact that it didn't shows you just what the "law" means. The law only works when someone wants it to work and has the power to make it work. Obviously that is what is going on here, they do not have the power to make it work, so this is all just a huge knashing of teeth and spittle. No records will ever be found, it will always just be "baseless accusations". Move along, these aren't the droids you are looking for......

There's actually a different story here that the IRS is afraid to admit to congress... I manage a rather large division of a federal IT contracting firm, we do long term (many years) of IT services for federal / state / local governments. This is "in my wheelhouse" you might say. I'm also an expert with some 20 years of high-end enterprise clustered-systems, blade servers, big data databases, high performance systems, and huge enterprise networks of experience. The last time I touched a mom & pop shop thing was probably 1991.

The common thread I have always observed in "liberal" leaning governments - such as the feds, and the State of California I know in particular, is that they "purposefully" purge email content after 6 months. Backup tapes are shredded, anything stored at a firm like Iron Mountain is retrieved and destroyed, and yes... emails are purged from both the primary email systems as well as the shadow-copy email archiving systems (most government entities have a parallel system that everything is copied to in realtime". Some users are aware those shadow systems are there, some are not. I haven't seen direct-attached disk storage on an Exchange server in a long time in government... they usually have 5 - 7 nodes of blade servers running in parallel and cluster-attached to the same storage area network, with maybe 50-150 terabytes of storage for the email system on average. We're not talking a county clerk in Kansas here.. this is how "big government" operates in a large federal agency or a large state government.

Large mailboxes tend to corrupt on a large Exchange system when you have thousands of mailboxes... so many systems enforce a limit of like 20 gigabytes per mailbox or something like that and push users to SharePoint Team Sites or something for larger storage needs, at a maximum utilization of the 20 gigabytes per user at 25,000 users though, you are looking at something like 500 terabytes of storage needed... so at allowing say the 20 GB's to the users that will "actually" use it, versus the majority that don't and maybe only use about 2 GB, you can see that the systems would be pretty over-subscribed with a 150 terabytes of physical storage, compared to the theoretical need of 500... so those purge procedures are there...

End users tend to retain private archive files on either their local hard drive or their user-share on a network file server, but this has little to do with policy, it's more of a "CYA" type thing for decisions they make / etc.

The reason for the purge is almost always a directive from the local legal team from the agency as a defense against future lawsuits or unflattering Freedom of Information Act requests.

In a government town like Sacramento, it's rather normal for the local news stations during economic hard times to make a bunch of FOIA requests and go fishing through emails looking for evidence of people going home early and still reporting their time as present, etc.

In cases with "public facing" agencies... say... agencies that manage hydro dams that produce power and have transmission lines criss-crossing the country side... industrial accidents can and do happen. You can't be sued for something if there is no email trail to show that someone ignored a flag of something requiring maintenance (for example).

Not having the server-based email there, may very well be the case, and may very well be intentional.

Lois saying "the dog ate my email" may or may not be the case... or maybe she hit the delete button the day she resigned/terminated. Very likely as well. When an e-Discovery order is received from legal to turnover emails, high end email systems freeze the archiving scripts automatically and mailboxes are unable to delete email. This is a common feature on government systems.. If there wasn't an eDiscovery order in place on the day she quit though, if I were in her place, I'd probably delete the hell out of everything in one swipe before turned in my credentials. Just saying.

I don't support her, and I think the IRS actions here are highly biased and probably criminal and I'm sure they were not an "oops". But if I was in the same position, and knowing what I do of specific federal systems policies, and how those systems work... and also knowing she may have gotten technical advice from someone there... It would be relatively untraceable a few months out.

No one does tape backups of user workstations... that's a serious pain in the ass, and you need to realize how large storage systems are in government compared to those little tiny tapes.. We put in a 7 PETABYTE system not long ago for one of our clients. PETABYTES. Tapes are in gigabytes... and small numbers at that... you would need thousands of tapes a night to back up some of these systems. Dragging another terabyte or whatever off each of maybe 20,000 desktop & laptop computers, slow-as-snails over the 100 megabit or whatever... that would add months to a single backup job.

they think that they can get away with anything,
'cuz any disagreement is racism. at some point,
there will be an awakening like Yamamoto's
sleeping giant comment after Pearl Harbor. may
it start this november. -- j

Got to disagree with you re Nixon, who imposed wage and price controls. For my money, Obama hasn't even outdone Dubya yet.

(Obviously, the foregoing isn't meant as any kind of endorsement of Obama.)

Which BB&T CEO are you referring to? John Allison or his successor? John Allison was put into a Rearden-like situation against his will. TARP was a debacle he fought hard against.

If you want a fictional treatment of banking, read The Golden Pinnacle by straightlinelogic.

The BBT CEO talks a good line, but BB and T like all banks in the federal system loans money they don't have, creating it with every new loan. This is a ponzi scheme that benefits bankers and steals from everyone else. Can you create credit from nothing and make big profits on the interest? No. The banks should not be able to do that either. Look at every skyline in every city. More big buildings are bank buildings by far. It isn't because they are brilliant businessmen or super productive and efficient. It's because they get free money and charge everyone else to borrow it. (They also use it to buy favors in government e.g., the Sec of Treasury is always a big banker.) It's theft.
Rand did not include an expose of banking in her fiction. I firmly believe that if Rand was alive and writing today she would be writing alot about what looters the banks are.

That's funny because Bill will make his Presidential salary for the rest of his life. If anything, their income increased when they left the White House!!!

Not the people that don't pay taxes or the Democrat robots or the uninformted!!!

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/136911193...

http://capitalismmagazine.com/.../busine... -built/‎CachedSimilar