Bradley.Kohr.II said:

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Does your job involve meeting with regulators, regularly/getting permits?

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Bradley.Kohr.II said:

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Does your job involve meeting with regulators, regularly/getting permits?

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AggieBarstool said:

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Yesterday said:

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You don't think the retailer or consumer would pick up on that? Complain? Leave reviews and shop elsewhere?

I feel the consumer would regulate that much better than the USDA.

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The same consumer with a, on average, middle-school education who also voted to put a criminal back in office?

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CT'97 said:

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BenderRodriguez said:

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allthefishes said:

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If you really want to burn it all down and start from scratch, understand that the scope of damage that will be done in the process likely will not be recoverable. I don't that that's an over the top statement full of internet hyperbole I truly believe it.

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Okay.

I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum. The current waste, fraud and corruption in our federal govt is unsurvivable as a free nation.

We existed somehow without the current vast federal leviathan for the first 200 years of nationhood. I'm confident we can somehow figure out life without a corrupt kleptocracy.

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What really scares me is that after all this chaos I don't think Republicans stay in power and it will be Democrats in place to conduct the rebuilding.

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txags92 said:

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rather be fishing said:

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txags92 said:

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AggieBarstool said:

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Yesterday said:

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You don't think the retailer or consumer would pick up on that? Complain? Leave reviews and shop elsewhere?

I feel the consumer would regulate that much better than the USDA.

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The same consumer with a, on average, middle-school education who also voted to put a criminal back in office?

Yeah, I have a lot of faith in that.

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Cry harder.

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I've heard nothing but crying for the last 12 years from both sides. Everyone sounds like a bunch of babies.

Go look at the last 5 years of forum 16.

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Yeah, I just have no patience for the whole "ThEY voTeD fOR A FelOn!!11!1!" narrative. Anytime I see somebody resort to that as part of their argument, it is clear they are just eaten up with incurable TDS and I turn off listening to their argument. Anybody with half a brain knows those court cases were incredibly partisan lawfare with all kinds of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct. So if that is what they are going to resort to complaining about, I just stop listening to them and hope they stay sad for the next 4 16 years.

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here's one way to do it: double the admission price. It's been way under market relative to other vacation type prices for way too long. Taking a 7 day pass to Yosemite from $35 to $70 will still be 85% cheaper than one day admittance for a family of four to Disney. Boom. Revenue is doubled with no drop off on attendance. And for folks that complain about not being "fair" from their $900 cell phones…well they aren't the people that typically go to parks anyways.

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txags92 said:

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rather be fishing said:

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txags92 said:

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AggieBarstool said:

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Yesterday said:

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You don't think the retailer or consumer would pick up on that? Complain? Leave reviews and shop elsewhere?

I feel the consumer would regulate that much better than the USDA.

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The same consumer with a, on average, middle-school education who also voted to put a criminal back in office?

Yeah, I have a lot of faith in that.

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Cry harder.

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I've heard nothing but crying for the last 12 years from both sides. Everyone sounds like a bunch of babies.

Go look at the last 5 years of forum 16.

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Yeah, I just have no patience for the whole "ThEY voTeD fOR A FelOn!!11!1!" narrative. Anytime I see somebody resort to that as part of their argument, it is clear they are just eaten up with incurable TDS and I turn off listening to their argument. Anybody with half a brain knows those court cases were incredibly partisan lawfare with all kinds of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct. So if that is what they are going to resort to complaining about, I just stop listening to them and hope they stay sad for the next 4 years.

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amateur gene ecologist said:

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Yeah, when I posted this I was hoping for a discussion on the decision to cut ag research resources, including people, and whether or not we could find a way to keep the good while making cuts. But somehow it turned into parks and public lands which are all run by the department of interior and not the USDA.

Which is ironic since we're taking shots at each other's education and whether or not one ideology is smarter than the other.

Generally, deciding that your food production system is good enough and we don't need to look at ways to improve it is a losing mentality. That's a very expensive enterprise and is commonly done by private companies but that's a part of what is making inputs more expensive. Those private companies are jacking up prices because they're run by MBA's who only seem to have paid attention to the "raise prices and fire people every chance you get" lesson at B-school. If you think the private industry isn't out to fk over their customers as much as they can get away with, that's ignorant. On the other hand, the gov running the research gets bloated because most of those researchers have never had to run a business, so have never felt the same pressure to be as efficient as possible. Couple that with the fact that they don't sell a product, they "sell" data and you need to make intelligent cuts occasionally. I've worked for both and there's a balance that needs to be maintained.

That's my stance. I was all for the cuts to most of the departments, but once I saw the effect on some of the projects that I knew were useful, I thought "Maybe they're cutting too deep here and people should be aware".

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Quote:

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Generally, deciding that your food production system is good enough and we don't need to look at ways to improve it is a losing mentality. That's a very expensive enterprise and is commonly done by private companies but that's a part of what is making inputs more expensive. Those private companies are jacking up prices because they're run by MBA's who only seem to have paid attention to the "raise prices and fire people every chance you get" lesson at B-school.

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Bradley.Kohr.II said:

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I was in a meeting at TAMU, where various researchers were grumbling about losing corporate research opportunities to UC Davis - and also talking about how it would be at least 6 months to make a decision to take a research contract and 2 years to start it, if they hurried - for a project where all of the infrastructure was already in place and idle.

Now, that's not really on DC, TMK, but it is disgusting how wasteful the management is at TAMU, and we are supposed to be a fairly economically efficient school.

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amateur gene ecologist said:

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Bradley.Kohr.II said:

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I was in a meeting at TAMU, where various researchers were grumbling about losing corporate research opportunities to UC Davis - and also talking about how it would be at least 6 months to make a decision to take a research contract and 2 years to start it, if they hurried - for a project where all of the infrastructure was already in place and idle.

Now, that's not really on DC, TMK, but it is disgusting how wasteful the management is at TAMU, and we are supposed to be a fairly economically efficient school.

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"We" (I have been but am not employed in a research capacity at A&M currently) are relatively efficient by academia standards, but when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, we waste money and time in many obvious ways that staff are extremely discouraged from pointing out. I don't work for them anymore, so they can't fire me for saying it.

Couple that with many of the labs having to resort to maintaining outdated equipment that hampers the research process or scaling back on the scope of what each project could accomplish since 51% of any grant to the university going to pay for indirect costs (salaries for multiple layers of administration who take 6 months to 2 years to approve those contracts) and we get to what you are talking about.

I have toyed with the idea of starting a nonprofit to process donations in a way that could circumvent that 51% IDC rule. Like, say you want to donate $10k to a particular lab but didn't want $5,100 going to the department head for their pet projects, donate to my nonprofit with instructions and we could make sure $9k actually made it to that lab by way of materials and paying for their advertised services. But I like my job more than I like circumventing bureaucracy.

I hadn't heard about losing out to UC Davis. That stings when a california school is more efficient than we are.

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mpl35 said:

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amateur gene ecologist said:

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Bradley.Kohr.II said:

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I was in a meeting at TAMU, where various researchers were grumbling about losing corporate research opportunities to UC Davis - and also talking about how it would be at least 6 months to make a decision to take a research contract and 2 years to start it, if they hurried - for a project where all of the infrastructure was already in place and idle.

Now, that's not really on DC, TMK, but it is disgusting how wasteful the management is at TAMU, and we are supposed to be a fairly economically efficient school.

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"We" (I have been but am not employed in a research capacity at A&M currently) are relatively efficient by academia standards, but when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, we waste money and time in many obvious ways that staff are extremely discouraged from pointing out. I don't work for them anymore, so they can't fire me for saying it.

Couple that with many of the labs having to resort to maintaining outdated equipment that hampers the research process or scaling back on the scope of what each project could accomplish since 51% of any grant to the university going to pay for indirect costs (salaries for multiple layers of administration who take 6 months to 2 years to approve those contracts) and we get to what you are talking about.

I have toyed with the idea of starting a nonprofit to process donations in a way that could circumvent that 51% IDC rule. Like, say you want to donate $10k to a particular lab but didn't want $5,100 going to the department head for their pet projects, donate to my nonprofit with instructions and we could make sure $9k actually made it to that lab by way of materials and paying for their advertised services. But I like my job more than I like circumventing bureaucracy.

I hadn't heard about losing out to UC Davis. That stings when a california school is more efficient than we are.

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you don't understand IDC I see

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B-1 83 said:

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Speaking of obtuse…..

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The USDA as it stands is not, as a whole, good for tax payers.

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You like animal and plant diseases? You like soil erosion and flooding? You like food borne illness? Youre showing you really don't know what all they do.

Some of these can certainly go bye-bye or be combined…..

https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/general-information/agencies

Start with cutting and revamping the SNAP program - there's where the fraud thrives

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AggieBarstool said:

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Yesterday said:

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You don't think the retailer or consumer would pick up on that? Complain? Leave reviews and shop elsewhere?

I feel the consumer would regulate that much better than the USDA.

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The same consumer with a, on average, middle-school education who also voted to put a criminal back in office?

Yeah, I have a lot of faith in that.

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