So in Los Alamos there are so many new people hired and so much construction that no one has anywhere to park. People have had to part in illegal or make shift parking spots for months now. Today they have out hundreds of tickets. I think LANL should have some parking or hire less people. On the other hand it is also know that hundreds of even thousand of people are not showing up to work. You cannot have it both ways. Some one needs to look into this. What we do at Los Alamos is serious, we need to act like a serious place to work. The buildings are falling apart, the infrastructure is horrible, and our overhead rates are insane. Something does not add up. It might be time for a contract change.
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The offer was kinda sad currently the housing shortage and the relocation process was essentially nonexistent compared to other DOD offers and Tech industry offers.
Regardless, it wouldn't really matter because no amount of money can pay for the ever expanding bureaucracy. However, the bureaucracy doesn't just get paid, it returns the favor by slowing all actual work to a trickle. Say you are a LANL construction worker or civil engineer and you just want to build another parking structure. Good luck. If you try to do it, there are literally hundreds of compliance, regulatory and "manager" positions that will stop you or even get you fired for so much as trying.
What do these paper pushers do all day? Nobody really knows. I see them checking Facebook, hear them working from home with three dogs barking in the background, watching YouTube videos and leaving at 2:30 in the afternoon. Regardless, many of them are so incompetent that they are terrified and simply unable to do their jobs. To the novice Waste Manager, all the world is filled with scary sounding chemicals. Who knows, if they let somebody at LANL use a few drops of rubbing alcohol to do their job, they might get fired someday. And who knows what isopropyl alcohol is anyway? Sounds scary.
The best practice for dealing with these people is to make them feel stupid and ridiculous in a friendly and helpful sort of way. Like, "Oh, my gosh, how long have you been on the job? You don't know how to evaluate the maximum exposure to dihydrogen monoxide in the lab? Why don't you ask ChatGPT before the indirect cuts put you out of a job. Or better yet, let me call your boss and find out if he can help you check this box."
There is a lot of hate for Trump on this blog, Scooby not the least, but I will tell you one thing, there has recently been a slow change in the attitudes of the overhead and indirect staff at LANL. I'm hearing words that were never spoken before, "fark it, that's stupid, let me sign this approval form for you" or "Oh, I can get that done, there, signed" or even "I see we already evaluated that identical process for compliance ever year for the past 6 years, it's not necessary to repeat that work." Once, a few weeks ago, I heard something truly astounding. An IH guy told me that if there are multiple regulations in conflict that actually make the worker less safe, it will soon be permissable to do the smart thing and go with the correct solution. Who knew that the most effective way to get a bunch of useless middlemen to do their jobs was to incentivise them by expecting results or risk a 1% chance of being fired?
If nothing else, understand that lab management are experts at shifting with every change in the winds. If NNSA or DOE tells them that we are in a new era where the incentive is no longer to create useless jobs and is instead to get actual work done efficiently, on schedule and within budget, or heads will roll, changes will happen. But since 1992, the mission of the labs had been as a sort of museum curator, or perhaps, as performance art. With China now besting us at nearly everything, and for a quarter the cost or less, that might slowly continue to change. But it's so slow at the moment that it can't really be seen by the naked eye. It's like watching grass grow or the drip of a pitch drop experiment.
National security and work conditions are not very important to them.
This happened to be once already with another far off parking spot, once others heard about it filled rather rapidly.
To provide the fix required to bring this lab back would require a massive contract with a union agreement where they essentially set up their own camp and bring in union journeyman craftsmen from halls from across the country. The first step would to get the operating engineers on site with a loader mounted remediation rock mill and prep some new parking lots.