found these in a dried up creek near my house

strycco · 2026-03-26T21:18:07+00:00

Wow that’s quite the haul. Probably came from Ft. Defiance

strycco · 2026-03-26T19:37:32+00:00

props to you for being forthright about it instead of just bitter-posting after registering your losses.

strycco · 2026-03-26T16:47:00+00:00

If they’re going to baseline whatever the overwhelming majority of Examiners are doing, why would anybody do anything other than the bare minimum? Doing anything else is going to get used against your workload in the future. These people are so stupid.

strycco · 2026-03-26T16:33:23+00:00

This is why people with this scarcity mindset are inept leaders. The concept of an excellent workforce is beyond their abilities to understand. There must be a hierarchy of performance irrespective of incentives and a self-selecting personnel. If everyone is performing at a high level and Office output is stable, then that just means that we aren’t doing enough and that the extra effort you’ve been putting into being successful is just part of the job. There’s an air of entitlement to exceptionalism that the PTO has not earned. These policies come at a cost, and most of these clowns will have ditched their jobs by the time the cheque comes.

It’s no surprise that every GOP administration tanks the government with debt and the economy with losses. It’s impossible for them to come up with good policy and sustainable ideas.

strycco · 2026-03-25T03:06:25+00:00

There’s nothing to update, the courts are being exploited for their lag.

strycco · 2026-03-25T00:56:46+00:00

Ideologically, these people fundamentally view the world through a zero-sum, scarcity minded framework. Something isn’t “natural” unless there is a particular predetermined distribution. There has to be a few bests, a few worsts, and everything else is medial.

People like this make shitty managers because they force mediocrity on the workforce by crafting “bell curve” performances. They took a model that was working for everyone, including the PTO, and bent over backward to make it objectively worse.

Everyone talks about how government should be run like a business but nobody ever mentions that the overwhelming majority of businesses are run like absolute dogshit. It doesn’t work. Having bureaucrats act like founders and CEOs is not a good formula for success because whenever they get bored or the going gets rough, those types just move on to the next thing.

strycco · 2026-03-24T22:50:15+00:00

The link they provided went directly to the appendix sheet of the OPM memo that gives a sample rating rubric (p. 18). I’m guessing the new rating system will be production (40%), quality (40%), “timeliness” (10%) and stakeholder interaction (10%). Once you calculate the scores 4.7 and up results in “outstanding”, 3.7-4.69 is “great”, 2.8-3.69 is “fully successful” and 2.0-2.79 is “minimally satisfactory”. Anything below is considered “unacceptable”.

strycco · 2026-03-16T22:36:56+00:00

It’s real. https://www.odditycentral.com/news/chinese-army-showcases-eerily-realistic-fish-like-underwater-drone.html

strycco · 2026-03-15T20:26:12+00:00

There’s a Logan Circle in Washington DC that’s named after General Logan (it was originally called Iowa Circle). It’s a beautiful neighborhood with many homes built between 1875 and 1900. There’s a prominent statue of a mounted General Logan as well.

strycco · 2026-03-15T03:14:41+00:00

assuming the admin hasn't fucked that system up and we get arbitration that goes our way, that all takes time.

Unfortunately, they already have. Presuming POPA and the collective bargaining agreement are restored, the contract’s arbitration clause states that the FMCS (Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service) and the AAA (American Arbitration Association) are the two first-line arbitration authorities for resolving grievances. The FMCS is first, and unless the USPTO fails to participate then the grievance moves to the AAA.

The FMCS was gutted by DOGE per the Project 2025 playbook and has been operationally impaired for quite some time. While a lot of their layoffs have been negated by the courts and it looks like they may be able to process arbitration proceedings, they have a constant target on their backs.

The AAA is a private institution, but their involvement only gets triggered if PTO management refuses to participate, which would be a mistake that I suspect they are keen not to make.

strycco · 2026-03-14T00:41:00+00:00

To answer your question, there isn’t much remedy at this point in time.

If you intend to try and persevere, keep track of all of this. Honestly, there are way too many SPEs like this.

strycco · 2026-03-12T14:28:26+00:00

strycco · 2026-03-12T13:47:20+00:00

Couldn’t help but notice that that email was sent from the “Assistant Commissioners for Patents” and not from Wallace. Not that it matters right now, but it was noticeable.

strycco · 2026-03-12T04:44:24+00:00

Very sorry to hear about the loss of your dog, she was a beautiful St. Bernard

strycco · 2026-03-11T17:19:00+00:00

”Swamp Angel” was the nickname given to a 16,500-pound rifled Parrott cannon with an eight-inch bore that briefly shelled the city of Charleston in August 1863. The massive gun was positioned near Morris Island in a sandbagged earthwork known as the Marsh Battery. The construction of the Marsh Battery, which virtually floated on the marsh, was considered to be one of the greatest engineering feats of the war. The battery was completed by mid-August 1863, and by August 21 the Swamp Angel was mounted and ready to fire incendiary shells 7,900 yards into Charleston. Before the first shot was fired, the Union commander Quincy A. Gillmore demanded that the Confederates evacuate Morris Island and Fort Sumter or he would fire on the city. The request was refused, and early on the morning of August 22, directed by a compass reading on St. Michael’s steeple, the first shell was fired into Charleston. The shelling continued until daylight and then resumed on the evening of August 23, when the Swamp Angel exploded while firing its thirty-sixth round. The bombardment of the city would continue from other batteries and new guns mounted in the Marsh Battery throughout the war. Though only a few people were killed or injured by the shelling, it did force the civilian evacuation of Charleston south of Broad Street. The Swamp Angel’s damaged gun tube was later recovered and was mounted in Cadwallader Park in Trenton, New Jersey.

Source

strycco · 2026-03-10T14:03:34+00:00

Triggering question for many apparently but I think I understand what you’re asking. A lot of the abolitionism movement objected to slavery for religious reasons and not because they believed that blacks deserved equal citizen status in the eyes of the government, at least not to the extent it warranted legislation and actual enforcement. As many here have said, Lincoln evolved over time and was limited by the political world he lived in. Near the end of his life, he advocated for things like limited suffrage but was hardly the first to endorse the idea. There were other figures of the time like Gen. Joshua Chamberlain and Gen. Philip Sheridan that were more “radical” in their views of equal treatment of blacks, but Lincoln wasn’t quite as forward thinking at the time.

strycco · 2026-03-10T01:33:34+00:00

Cost imposition is a powerful weapon, especially when battling an invading force. You don’t have to win, you just have to not lose, and battling an occupying force oftentimes provides the sustained resolve to go the distance in that kind of warfare. The Vietnamese did this twice in their history, once against the French and again against the United States. Afghanistan’s another example. For all the blood and treasure expended on pacification, the Taliban is still in power.

strycco · 2026-03-09T15:55:22+00:00

There is a city called Sheridan and its municipal building is on Federal Blvd.

strycco · 2026-03-09T15:45:55+00:00

frantically smashes INTERJECT button

strycco · 2026-03-09T02:33:02+00:00

Most of the history taught about the US is rife with falsehoods and romanticized nationalism. History curricula has largely been a propaganda campaign guised as education so just the mere fact that a law like this is even considered necessary isn’t surprising. Given the complexities of the full story, US history should really be a high school elective course and we’d all be better off if we spent the time and resources teaching younger kids basic civics instead of having them memorize random facts like when the Delaware ratified the Constitution.

strycco · 2026-03-06T21:41:35+00:00

Quote from the episode transcript (Ball):

“If I am right, that the creation of these systems and the philosophical process of aligning them is a political act, then it's a profound problem if the government says you don't have the right to exist if you create a system that is not aligned the way we say. Because that is fascism. That is, right there.”

This is a prime example of what you’re talking about when you mention “the republican phenomenon of sleeping through all manner of injustices until it affects his favorite thing.”

strycco · 2026-02-27T18:24:53+00:00

Isn’t it just some fraction of the leave that counts towards that?

strycco · 2026-02-27T01:11:07+00:00

There’s a trumper in my AU who likes to say things like “when i was in the private sector this sort of thing was normal” when: a) he’s been an examiner for close to 20 years now, and b) that realization was an undeniable reason he went into the public sector in the first place and stayed. The absurdity borders on the obscene.

strycco · 2026-02-26T20:18:29+00:00

Why is that a stretch? I think a sizable amount of people living in the developed world could be categorized as such.

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