• Hellfire103@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    Why do I keep expecting the US government to be remotely competent at anything?

    • [deleted]@piefed.world
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      22 hours ago

      It was more competent before they fired everyone competent and replaced them with incompetent sycophants. It wasn’t perfect before, but far better than now.

      • Carnelian@lemmy.world
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        24 hours ago

        To be fair it’s genuinely a super common mistake. I see redacted documents often at work (I do nothing fancy, just some privacy policy thing we deal with) and on like 30% of the documents we get you can either just highlight the underlying text or literally click and drag the black box off of the words lol.

        I guess what happens is people can redact it such that they can no longer see it in their particular pdf software but then a different software can bypass it

        • Iced Raktajino@startrek.website
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          24 hours ago

          I guess what happens is people can redact it such that they can no longer see it in their particular pdf software but then a different software can bypass it

          That’s pretty charitable. I’ve worked civil service many years ago and the computer skills of some of them were beyond laughable. I never dealt with redacted documents during that stint of my life but I can say with 100% certainty that I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if someone “redacted” a document by making the text and background highlight color black and posting the Word docx file online.

        • A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world
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          23 hours ago

          It’s a mistake you can expect interns to make, Feds should do better. They’ve pulled this same stunt many times before. And considering Trump ordered the entire FBI to work on this, one would think they’d do it properly.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      24 hours ago

      It’s entirely dependent on which parts of the government you’re dealing with. The parts operated by the career civil servants and people who got there by working the job tend to be run perfectly well.
      In cases where it’s political appointees following rules and guidelines setup by the aforementioned people, it tends to be… Fine.

      It’s the political appointees who actively disregard or are hostile to the civil service who are profoundly incompetent. You know, because they were selected for ideology, not competency.

      For some reason that I think is spelled really similar to “traitorous anti American assets and useful idiops” the trump administration has been opposed to. and in favor of making it easier to fire, the civil service, AKA: the competent part.

      It’s why you can end up with the parts that work well, like the military, NOAA and others like it wandering around being competent (prior to the current “let’s fire everyone and try to destroy the country” moment), while political appointees accidentally add a reporter to an illegal group chat. It’s the authoritarian impulse to demand orthodoxy and committed belief not just from the people who decide direction, but from the people who make day to day decisions as well.

      As a fun aside, it lets you know who was doing the redaction work instead of the people who would normally be responsible for ensuring a smooth release of documents.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        As a fun aside, it lets you know who was doing the redaction work instead of the people who would normally be responsible for ensuring a smooth release of documents.

        Does it? It seems to me that the ineffective redactions could be either hostile Trump appointees acting with incompetence or patriotic career civil servants engaging in malicious compliance, so it doesn’t actually reveal which.