Tri-Valley Cares needs to be on this if they aren't already. We need to make sure that NNSA and LLNL does not make good on promises to pursue such stupid ideas as doing Plutonium experiments on NIF. The stupidity arises from the fact that a huge population is placed at risk in the short and long term. Why do this kind of experiment in a heavily populated area? Only a moron would push that kind of imbecile area. Do it somewhere else in the god forsaken hills of Los Alamos. Why should the communities in the Bay Area be subjected to such increased risk just because the lab's NIF has failed twice and is trying the Hail Mary pass of doing an SNM experiment just to justify their existence? Those Laser EoS techniques and the people analyzing the raw data are all just BAD anyways. You know what comes next after they do the experiment. They'll figure out that they need larger samples. More risk for the local population. Stop this imbecilic pursuit. They wan...
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NNSA is incompetent thru and thru.
Well there could be some truth in this but I say that many people wanted a for profit structure for all labs since there was money to made. The issues at LANL had to be blown to the moon in order to get it to go private along with LLNL.
NNSA is incompetent thru and thru.
Ok you have a fair point. Look there are lots of people who work at NNSA that need jobs and a big salary.
We tried DOE. It didn't work.
We tried NNSA. It didn't work.
How about trying something completely different?
How about letting DOD take over oversight of the nuclear weapon labs? They are the ultimate customers for the 'product'.
We tried DOE. It didn't work.
We tried NNSA. It didn't work.
How about trying something completely different?
What?
AEC worked very well.
DOE was worked ok.
NNSA total disaster.
July 6, 2017 at 11:08 PM"
This is partially true, however you leave out the fact the NNSA people typically have only have bs or ms degrees from mediocre schools with mediocre grades. They are paid much higher in the NNSA than they would ever hope to get in the real world. In other words the typical NNSA person is utterly mediocre with little in the way of actual skills and anyone who has dealt with them can attest to this. The very few that have some kind of talent cannot deal working in such conditions and move to other organizations very quickly. This is not arrogance and it is not meant to be mean, it is simply a fact. The top senior lab scientists have usually actually accomplished something and their pay scale is par with the pay scale for senior scientists at other DOE labs or universities.
One of the big issues about the DC crowd is that it has grown so large with so many employees that the talent pool has become completely diluted. This is coupled with the increase in the high-tech sector which competes for the talent. Sure you have a few selfless and talented individualizes who go into government work to serve. In the old days when the number of these jobs was 1/10 the size of it is now these people could actually make a difference, but now when you have literally millions of
of such government jobs they are a drop in the bucket and you get the current situation. If you think about this DOE and NNSA are not exceptions to this rule.
There is lots of evidence that our intelligence agencies no longer function very effectively. When you have 17 such agencies with a huge number of people than it is no wonder that they may longer have top people.
False, they completely lack organizational and strategic skills. That is the main issue.
"Lab scientists don't usually have those skills, and don't value them, which makes the NNSA staffers jobs even harder, and makes their perseverance more remarkable. "
Lab scientists are not the reason NNSA has done so badly. Could you please provide an example of how scientist are the problem?
"They have to put up with some of the most arrogant block-headed people on the planet"
Huh...NNSA people don't even deal with the workforce they deal with the management.
You have a nice anti-science screed but science has nothing to do with the problems of NNSA.
We tried DOE. It didn't work.
We tried NNSA. It didn't work.
How about trying something completely different?
What?
July 7, 2017 at 7:21 AM
Don't for the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) folks, another abysmal failure.
“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is (or was) real.”
― Cormac McCarthy
July 7, 2017 at 3:22 PM
How? 10:07 am did not have a point. They had a bitter rant against scientists. If there was a point it was that there are some very bitter crazy people who blame others for their own failures. Why one would need to keep making that point over and over again is beyond me but 10:07am who is presumably unemployed which may have something to do with them being bitter, has nothing but time to to simmer in their own hatred. Fortunately such bitter people are unique and that is a very good thing.
Every one of them I know has hired outside contractors to help them with those very things. Unfortunately, many NNSA staff don't have the experience to be able to tell the difference between a good contractor and a bad one, often sticking with bad ones far after they have proved their complete incompetence.
10:07 is completely dead on about scientists being blockheads and impossible to deal with. Everyone knows this is true and you would have to be blind to deny that that the problems with the labs is not rooted deeply in a cowboy culture of arrogance which is due to some of the most block headed socially inept people who have no appreciation of people skills and organizational skills and if you don't believe these people are weird than why would these people not even value you these skills? Have you ever meet one of these lab or university science creatures, they cannot even tie their shoes much less organize anything. Ever watch the Big Bang show, that is the truth this is what these "people" are really like. These are facts people, facts pure, simple, immutable and eternal. NNSA people should be paid millions and millions of dollars to have to deal with these people. Some of us have taken the blue pill of clarity and see the true realty of what scientists are really like and that they have utterly polluted the labs with cowboy of hell out of control cultures and that labs should be closed down. I take offense that just having these completely rational views would mean someone is bitter or has a agenda against the labs or scientists. 10:07 is not bitter or has any kind of agenda other than the purity in ultra truth and that is why he/she always provide a plethora of numbers, figures, and statistics back up their brilliant claims and no one can deny that.
But failure of stockpile stewardship at LANL or new pit fab may be a disaster for both labs and the country.
Evil, you should be able to tell if 9:27 misrepresented himself. If he did, do us (and the blog) a big favor and permanently block him.
Evil, you should be able to tell if 9:27 misrepresented himself. If he did, do us (and the blog) a big favor and permanently block him.
July 8, 2017 at 5:45 PM
Sound good, but I think 9:21 or 10.29 should be the ones that are blocked. 9:27 and 10:03 may be bad and should be blocked but unfortunately I cannot find their posts so I say the poster from 5.45 PM should be blocked, at least on freedom of speech grounds. These should be checked if the used the trigger word tattoo.
That being said, merely being annoying or grossly inaccurate is not justification for the ban-hammer.
This is true. Federal employees in the San Francisco Bay Area get a 20% bump in salary for cost of living, but the GS scale (I'm guessing here based on my 1st hand observation) for equivalent education/experience level Federal employees is 75 to 80% of Lab salaries, even including the SF Bay Area bump up.
To live in the Bay Area a Federal employee must have his/her spouse working a full time job. Bay Area homes are in the $900K to $1.5M range while equivalent homes in Los Alamos are $500K to $800K. And CA has high property tax, income tax, sales tax, insurance rates...
Why are we living here ? I ask myself everyday !
Why are we living here ? I ask myself everyday !
Because the rest of the country is a dark horrible place, just look out the plane window next time your fly to NYC...Trump country. Scary stuff.
As a Lab retiree in Livermore, I think very hard on whether I want to venture out of town on any given day. Am I up for the drive ? Got extra water ? Gas tank full ? AC working ?