https://www.thenation.com/article/society/los-alamos-laboratory-waste-fraud/
The nuclear weapons complex is so mismanaged that employees are collecting full salaries to play chess and catnap.
Reading the story the guy actually does more than a lot of LANL people. He has to show up to do nothing. In many places people show up once every two weeks talk and go home. Bizarre place. They should have the decency to at least let these electricians stay at home.
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If your a new hire at LLNL, with no accumulated sick leave and subsequently have to be hospitalized for kidney stone surgery etc., your LLNL manager will throw IWS or other workplace related documents on your hospital bed and declare you “at work” so you don’t have to take leave without pay. Again, no worries for the employee.
But if LLNL management doesn’t like you, they will require justification for every minute of your sick leave or they will claim you’ve committed time card fraud requiring disciplinary action.
Yes, Livermore has the good ole boy system for using sick leave / being allowed to use sick leave / return to “work”.
Then on the same note there is overtime allocations and retention bonuses for the important folks sitting at home during Covid.
They are voting to impeach Biden (for no reason) , cut Pete Butigieg's and Karine Jean Pierre's salaries. How futile is that?
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/voices/oral-histories/walter-simons-interview/
Fermi was very discreet about disagreements. He was a very pleasant person. He had a mind that raced all the time. For instance, if there was a little time to kill while they were loading the reactor, he would do equations in his head, with someone next to him with a calculator. You know, multiply 999 by 62 and divide by this and that, and he did that for amusement. His mind raced so much the only way he could relax was to walk on the desert. They would try to take him to a movie, and he would sit there and in five minutes he would have the whole plot figured out. He had a tremendous intellectual capacity, absolutely. Fermi was interested in chess and one or two of the men who were run of the mill technical people had spent a lot of time playing chess. Boy, when he found a good chess player, he tied him up. One boy was not particularly intellectual but he was a supremely good chess player. Fermi would come around calling for him, “Where’s so and so?”
Sounds like my new secret quarterly goal should be to apply at LANL.
Come on. It’s not enough to just double dip as a LLNS TCP2. You can’t expect me to follow through and just throw away thousands of hours of my sick leave, every though I knew this was a TCP2 requirement. LLNS won’t touch me because I’m part of the clique. So sad for other LLNS non-management employees right LSEO “Bob”?
Of course, you could be an honest fellow and only use it when needed, but integrity is so over rated these days.
No doubt, just look at how many former UC/LLNL quality managers were “turned” and have quietly profited under the direction of LLNS at the clear expense of the worker bees.
"How many people work at the lab?....About Half on a good day."
Sounds like your job isn’t Davis-Bacon work, you might have to wait another 3 years before you find another non-retainable unimportant electrician to come take a look at it.
11/19/2023 2:40 PM
There is still some small pockets of cutting edge science, but these are fading fast. LANL just put out a new statement about future directions and it is pretty clear science is out. The question is when do they officially get rid of the postdoc programs, LDRD and so on which are making less and less sense at LANL. With the priority on pits having a large LDRD makes little sense and is of little return to pit production. It needs to be reduced to fit with the portion of the lab that is science, or changed to be relevant to pits. The postdoc program is starting to make little sense either as postdocs are academic like positions to prepare for jobs in academic settings or in research science and make little sense in the future direction of LANL. Instead we should move toward in intern like approach where we test people out for a few years for training and to see if they fit in. This could attract people who would be a better in the mission. I am not saying to get rid of LDRD or the postdoc program entirely but reduce it size and rework a portion of it.