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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   40374 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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The promblem isn't writing a list. That's a five minute job. It's sending a list to another agency that your certain doesn't violate the privacy act, the purpose act, and a million other little gotchas like:

publishes, divulges, discloses, or makes known in any manner or to any extent not authorized by law any information coming to him in the course of his employment or official duties or by reason of any examination or investigation made by, or return, report or record made to or filed with, such department or agency or officer or employee thereof, which information concerns or relates to the trade secrets, processes, operations, style of work, or apparatus, or to the identity, confidential statistical data, amount or source of any income, profits, losses, or expenditures of any person, firm, partnership, corporation, or association; or permits any income return or copy thereof or any book containing any abstract or particulars thereof to be seen or examined by any person except as provided by law; shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and shall be removed from office or employment.

Processes and operations are pretty broad, if I work in an agency covered by this law, and I meet with one of the corporations to discuss their processes and operations to make sure we're asking for data that we keep very secret and my bullet point discusses that meeting how much can I legally say and is OPM one of the exceptions provided by law. Now I have to run my bullet points by the agency's attorneys to determine those answers and that means I have to explain the full meeting, my summary, and that's what takes all the time.

If that's what you want to pay me and an attorney pretty generously to do, I'll happily send you weekly bullet points, but given I get to potentially chill in jail for a bullet point I'm going to take that time every single week to clear anything I send, and all of my coworkers are going to do the same thing.

It sounds like the US government is running pretty inefficiently if performing this simple task turns into a giant legal drama. If everyone is terrified of performing simple tasks in a straightforward fashion because it may violate some unknown body of incomprehensible laws, it strengthens the argument for Gordian-style reform...

Heads Musk wins, tails he wins.

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