Let The Wintery Fun Begin!

So Its Cold, Suck It Up Princess!

This will probably be the one and only time y’all will ever hear me talking shit about the people in the great state of Texas. But, since I live northeast of Houston Texas I think I will take this opportunity to say my piece. Correct, snow and ice this far south is not a common sight and when Texans see it they absolutely freak out. Texans close public places, government places, roads, airports, bridges, and businesses. Why? Well, they claim we are not “equipped” to drive or be outside in these conditions. In other words, many Texans get cold and they let their pussies hang out for the world to see. When these weather conditions happen I just want to yell “Suck it up princess” because 99.9% of the time it isn’t quite as bad as they make it out to be. The sky isn’t falling or anything. Tell y’all the truth, it’s a bit embarrassing for me, because nobody knows how to act here in inclimate weather. Is it cold outside, depends on what one knows as cold. For people here tho, where this kind of shit isn’t normal, they freak out. For me, I really don’t care because the conditions are still tolerable. I don’t know, it’s strange how people act around here with a little snow and ice. Perhaps that is why we don’t see many Texans moving up north because mentally we are not equipped to handle below freezing temperatures. Who knows.

On the flip side, my year round ducks don’t seem to be minding it too much as they tool around the pond this morning. Perhaps they know that the “wintery mix” will pass sometime in the next few hours and we will get back to normal. I was up this morning bright and early to be into work by 6:30am and I will admit the roads were a little slick. I didn’t see any ice personally but I did see a few accidents on the way to work. The further north a person gets from where I live saw more than we did, one has to get up past the frost line to really be impacted, which they did, I saw on the news they had got 4″ of snow. What are we to do? Don’t these people know that life must go on, that life must press forward, and that living here we all know that we will be in the mid-70s again in a day or so. In my entire life I have never understood why people freak out and get their panties in such a twist when it gets a little chilly. I still wore shorts in to work today, although I did slip on a hoody to keep my core warm. Okay, I’m done. My fellow Texans frustrate me a bit because they freak out and start acting like giant pussies when it drops below freezing but we all know this isn’t shit compared to what the yankees up north deal with for way longer periods of time.

Doubling Your “IT System” Pleasure

In December 2012, the U.S. Air Force canceled an Information Technology (IT) program that it had been working on since 2005. The Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS) was an U.S. Air Force Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that was designed to merge base level and wholesale logistics systems, and to deliver hard net-savings for the USAF. The Air Force scrapped the program after dumping $1 billion into the project, with no identifiable benefit to the military or to the taxpayer. Furthermore, the project would have required an additional $1.1 billion to fix and the system would not have been completed until 2020.

Why settle for one IT system when you can have two that do the same thing? According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), that is the practice at several federal agencies, which are administering overlapping and duplicative IT systems. The federal government spends more than $82 billion on IT each year, but according to a recent GAO report three agencies have spent $321 million for overlapping IT purposes over the past several years.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spent over $30 million on two IT programs, both of which supported “immigration enforcement booking management, which includes the processing of apprehended illegal aliens suspected of committing criminal violations of immigration law.” The two systems identified by GAO are used by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but both collect nearly identical biographical data on illegal aliens arrested for committing crimes. However, DHS said it has no plans to address the duplicative expenditures.

Four duplicative IT systems were identified at the Department of Defense (DOD) with a price tag of $30.6 million. Two of these systems were in “Health Care Tracking” and two were in “Dental Management.” Unlike DHS, DOD agreed to work to eliminate the duplicity, but the results are yet to be seen. The most costly duplicative IT systems GAO found are maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) totaling $260.38 million. Four of HHS’s systems related to “Enterprise Information Security,” meaning the systems were used to “maintain and secure the operations and assets of HHS and its components.” Two other duplicative IT systems were used for Medicare coverage and contained similar information by the same contractor. While HHS was reviewing whether it could consolidate the four systems related to Enterprise Information Security, it stated it was too costly to consolidate two systems related to Medicare coverage.

Information found for this “Your Tax Dollars @ Work” post was done by using a Google search. Information compiled from multiple public websites & media outlets.

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