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Posted
22 minutes ago, BurdineBandit said:

You're describing my brother. 2 tours in Iraq, now 100% disabled (PTSD) but able to work when he wants. He's a middle school coach when he wants to be, but frequently takes a year or two off and just hops to another school when he's tired of being an at-home dad. The checks keep clearing.... 

I think it’s horseshit and this needs to be changed. If you tried to work while collecting 100% disability checks from Social Security, they would throw your ass in jail and make you pay back the money. But if you are considered 100% disabled by the VA, you can still work any career you want with no salary limits or checkups into what career you actually work.

My brother has been part of a few officer involved shootings but I think the police union invokes HIPAA or some other bullshit to stop an inquiry into his disability status at the VA. They probably don’t even fucking know. And he pays ZERO property taxes too with his half a million dollar house because of his disability status. It fucking pisses me off that he is so stupid about Trump yet he is sucking on the government tit way more than people on “traditional” welfare. 

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Posted (edited)

I work in a very military-adjacent field. At least half of the ex-military that I know have 100% disability. Granted, a lot of them are divers, small boat operators, spec ops support, and helo crew, so they have a case...but it's understood that it's largely a "scam." Know the right doctor kind of thing. But it's a "scam" that I'm perfectly okay with.* We'll see if it lasts.

*other than that lean heavily MAGA and complain about the big, bad, wasteful government.

Edited by aggie08
Posted
1 hour ago, MrBig said:

I think it’s horseshit and this needs to be changed. If you tried to work while collecting 100% disability checks from Social Security, they would throw your ass in jail and make you pay back the money. But if you are considered 100% disabled by the VA, you can still work any career you want with no salary limits or checkups into what career you actually work.

I believe the difference is VA disability is based on permanent medical issues acquired while in service to the nation where SSDI does not. The VA distinguishes between unable to be employed and being disabled but employable. Everyone you know that has 100% VA disability that works falls into the latter designation.

Personally, I think SSDI should be closer to the VA method.

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Posted
1 hour ago, MrBig said:

I think it’s horseshit and this needs to be changed. If you tried to work while collecting 100% disability checks from Social Security, they would throw your ass in jail and make you pay back the money. But if you are considered 100% disabled by the VA, you can still work any career you want with no salary limits or checkups into what career you actually work.

My brother has been part of a few officer involved shootings but I think the police union invokes HIPAA or some other bullshit to stop an inquiry into his disability status at the VA. They probably don’t even fucking know. And he pays ZERO property taxes too with his half a million dollar house because of his disability status. It fucking pisses me off that he is so stupid about Trump yet he is sucking on the government tit way more than people on “traditional” welfare. 

I prefer to rage that there are caps on how much a disabled person can earn but no caps on how much a billionaire can earn.

Tax those threats to national security on their wealth, not their income. They have too many ways to earn without those earnings being declared as income.

And any reluctance to see such wealth as a threat to national security ought to be seen as fucking foolhardy.

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Posted
2 minutes ago, F250 said:

I believe the difference is VA disability is based on permanent medical issues acquired while in service to the nation where SSDI does not. The VA distinguishes between unable to be employed and being disabled but employable. Everyone you know that has 100% VA disability that works falls into the latter designation.

Personally, I think SSDI should be closer to the VA method.

There is a good bit of "fraud" in both of them (SSDI and VA).  I'd be supportive of full subsidy of cost of care where the disability is short of unable to work at all.

From what I've seen, VA disability is much more generous than SSDI.

Posted
5 minutes ago, F250 said:

I believe the difference is VA disability is based on permanent medical issues acquired while in service to the nation where SSDI does not. The VA distinguishes between unable to be employed and being disabled but employable. Everyone you know that has 100% VA disability that works falls into the latter designation.

Personally, I think SSDI should be closer to the VA method.

This is an excellent post. It makes me understand better how the VA method allows for vets to work.

I know I said I thought it was horseshit that you can get VA disability and still work, but I do believe my brother has severe PTSD from being in Afghanistan/Iraq in the early 2000s. He came back a shell of himself and is a very volatile person. I don’t think he’s “faking” his disability but it’s hard for me to understand how he’s allowed to work as a police officer when his VA disability is PTSD based. There doesn’t seem to be any regulations regarding what fields you can work in while claiming VA disability. 

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Posted
4 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

 

They can redefine it all they want.  BLS is likely the next bit of fuckery coming anyway.  Private organizations will use their own data.  What we’re going to see is the people who can, shifting anything they rely on away from government provided information, because you can’t rely on it.  Can’t wait for private floodplain maps!

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Posted
3 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

From what I've seen, VA disability is much more generous than SSDI

And should be, for what I think are obvious reasons

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Posted
12 hours ago, Willfully Horn said:

I prefer to rage that there are caps on how much a disabled person can earn but no caps on how much a billionaire can earn.

Tax those threats to national security on their wealth, not their income. They have too many ways to earn without those earnings being declared as income.

And any reluctance to see such wealth as a threat to national security ought to be seen as fucking foolhardy.

If I were supreme dictator and wanted to stick it to the oligarchs, I would start with the bullshit where they take out a loan against their stock, don't pay any taxes and get to write off the interest payments.  You take out a loan against stock, that stock is considered "sold" for tax purposes and you pay tax on the gain in value of the stock from the time acquired until the loan is taken out.  Later on if you actually sell the stock, you pay tax on any gains from the time of the loan until the time you sold.  Oh, and the tax write off on the interest payments?  Yeah, that's gone.

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Posted
16 hours ago, aggie08 said:

I work in a very military-adjacent field. At least half of the ex-military that I know have 100% disability. Granted, a lot of them are divers, small boat operators, spec ops support, and helo crew, so they have a case...but it's understood that it's largely a "scam." Know the right doctor kind of thing. But it's a "scam" that I'm perfectly okay with.* We'll see if it lasts.

*other than that lean heavily MAGA and complain about the big, bad, wasteful government.

Perhaps someone should look into military and how they're disabling so many who serve. I know we picture a vet who lost a limb in a war but I'm gathering that the majority do not represent that picture.

Of course disability also occurs with non-military as well. You can't tell me that, for some, disability is orchestrated as their retirement pension. A friend of a friend hurt himself playing softball. The guy worked for the USPS. He quietly limited into work on a Monday morning and then "fell" down.

 

Posted
1 hour ago, Ted Lange said:

Opinion Fareed Zakaria Opinion Fareed Zakaria Why DOGE is an essential and important idea "Tech bro Maoists' are torching the country that made them rich I'm not holding my breath. But even failure could be instructive. November 22, 2024 DOGE is performance art, playing into MAGA movement fantasies about humiliating the establishment. February 28, 2025

This tracks with a lot of what I've seen and heard as well, essentially a "DOGE is a good idea on paper and with a rational, sane process-- what we've seen is NOT that and is horrific abuse."

Posted

Republicans: Social Security is a ponzi scheme!

Half of US citizens: No, it’s not! It has met every obligation it has promised.

Republicans: We will see about that.

 

3 minutes ago, Red Five said:

Everyone should start saying what it is. DOGE is Republicans destroying our government, intentionally. We are just setting ourselves on fire. 

Fixed it for the truth.

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Posted
5 minutes ago, Red Five said:

Everyone should start saying what it is. DOGE is our government destroying itself, intentionally. We are just setting ourselves on fire. 

image.png.64897055228a06e94ba8ce851e72fca1.png

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Posted
1 hour ago, Red Five said:

Everyone should start saying what it is. DOGE is our government destroying itself, intentionally. We are just setting ourselves on fire. 

This. People who think DOGE was/is a good idea have no clue how our economy works. 70% of our GDP is consumption, people buying goods and services. You start laying off tens of thousands of people from the country's largest employer, cutting their entitlement benefits, etc. that GDP will take a massive fucking hit. The COVID economic shocks don't have shit on what we are about to see. 

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Posted

Probably going to turn the Maryland location into a bitcoin mine

https://www.axios.com/2025/03/03/doge-noaa-weather-building-leases-trump

 

Quote

The Trump administration has informed NOAA that two pivotal centers for weather forecasting will soon have their leases canceled, sources told Axios. 

Why it matters: One of the buildings is the nerve center for generating national weather forecasts. 

It was designed to integrate multiple forecasting centers in one building to improve operating efficiency. It houses telecommunications equipment to send weather data and forecasts across the U.S. and abroad.

 

Quote

The NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction is on the lease cancellation list, according to a NOAA employee who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. 

Two ex-National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials also confirmed the list.

The building houses the National Weather Service's National Centers for Environmental Prediction, or NCEP, which includes the Environmental Modeling Center. It opened in 2012 and has about 268,000 square feet of space.

 

Quote

The modeling center runs the computer models used in day-to-day weather forecasting, and ensures that weather data correctly goes into these models and that they are operating correctly. 

The lease cancellation was first reported by The Verge. The National Weather Service didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The NOAA employee told Axios the cancellations — along with recent layoffs, early retirements, and travel and hiring limitations — point to an effort to dismantle the agency.

 

Spoiler

The NOAA employee told Axios a nightmare scenario could unfold if the College Park building was shuttered, but the agency still was tasked with the same missions as at present.

In that case, NOAA would have to somehow replicate its functionality somewhere else in a process that could take a year or more and leave critical forecasting gaps.

It would also require new congressional appropriations to get that done.

The intrigue: The cancellation notice for the College Park facility isn't final, as a spreadsheet detailing all the properties on the cancellation list has an end date of "TBD" for that building, according to the NOAA staff member. 

Another building on the list, which came to NOAA by way of GSA, now has an end date of Sept. 30, 2025. 

That facility in Norman, Okla. is the Radar Operations Center, a centralized hub for technicians and researchers to work on improving and repairing the nation's aging fleet of Doppler weather radars. 

The DOGE website has a section on canceled or modified government real estate properties. It shows several NOAA facilities, though not the exact building in College Park as of Monday. 

In addition to the National Weather Service-related properties, numerous buildings on the so-called "wet side" of NOAA are on the list the agency received, including the National Marine Fisheries Service. 

What they're saying: Andrew Rosenberg, a former NOAA official on the agency's fisheries side, has seen the cancellation list. He likened the College Park situation to cutting the government via a "chainsaw" approach rather than more fully considered cuts. 

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) told Axios he hadn't heard anything final about NOAA buildings in Maryland. 

"I am worried," he told Axios after speaking at a rally Monday outside NOAA headquarters in Silver Spring, Md. 

"We know they're looking through GSA," he said of DOGE. "We should be concerned and worry about all these things, which is why the sooner we shut down the efforts to illegally get rid of federal employees the better." 

Van Hollen said his staff will look into the College Park facility in particular. He already has sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick seeking answers following the NOAA cuts of probationary employees last week. 

His office put the total of those layoffs to 650 out of NOAA's approximately 12,000-person workforce. 

 

 

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Posted
5 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Perhaps someone should look into military and how they're disabling so many who serve. I know we picture a vet who lost a limb in a war but I'm gathering that the majority do not represent that picture.

Okay, Elon.

They do research this information and it's publicly available.

Posted
15 hours ago, Willfully Horn said:

Bitcoin is based on the consumption of energy. Evil is too benign a descriptor.

It’s so fucking ironic that for years the right has screamed about how bad globalization is and talked shit about the evils of the IMF, yet they have no problem with Trump throwing our taxpayer money into buying Bitcoin reserves like we can totally trust him and not get the rug pulled out from under us. Fucking idiotic. This is going to make 2008 look like a light drizzle compared to the shitstorm that’s lingering ahead.

Posted
16 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Probably going to turn the Maryland location into a bitcoin mine

https://www.axios.com/2025/03/03/doge-noaa-weather-building-leases-trump

 

  Hide contents

 

 

 

Probably just cancelling the leases so Trump or a Trump surrogate can lease a new property to NOAA. It'll take a couple years to get things back up and running properly, but I'm sure there won't be any weather events that would require forewarning. 

Posted

The FBI headquarters, along with the DOJ, FAA, FDA, USDA, Department of Labor, etc may all be for sale:

 

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/03/04/politics/federal-properties-selling-list-gsa

 

Quote

The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it is considering selling off hundreds of “non-core” federal properties, including the headquarters of the FBI and the departments of Justice, Veterans Affairs and Labor, according to the General Services Administration.

“GSA’s decisive action to dispose of non-core assets leverages the private sector, drives improvements for our agency customers, and best serves local communities,” the agency said in a news release, claiming that it could potentially save “more than $430 million in annual operating costs.”

 

 

Quote

The list of “non-core” properties posted to the GSA website also includes the Federal Trade Commission, GSA’s own headquarters, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Old Post Office — where the Trump Organization had a 60-year lease until it sold it to the Waldorf Astoria hotel in 2022. Several of the buildings listed include staff from multiple agencies, such as the Sam Nunn Atlanta Federal Center, the biggest federal government building in the Southeast.

 

 

Quote

GSA said in the release that most of the buildings flagged consist primarily of office space and that selling them will “ensure taxpayers no longer pay for empty and underutilized federal office space.”

The release said the agency has identified certain “core” assets “that are needed for critical government operations,” including courthouses and facilities key to national defense and law enforcement, which “will be retained for long-term needs.” However, multiple courthouses, including the US Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, are on the list.

Though many of the properties are in the Washington, DC, metro area, the list includes buildings across the country, from Alaska to Florida.

 

And here's the full list:

 

https://www.gsa.gov/real-estate/real-estate-services/real-property-disposition/noncore-property-list

 

 

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Posted
1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

The FBI headquarters, along with the DOJ, FAA, FDA, USDA, Department of Labor, etc may all be for sale:

 

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/03/04/politics/federal-properties-selling-list-gsa

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here's the full list:

 

https://www.gsa.gov/real-estate/real-estate-services/real-property-disposition/noncore-property-list

 

 

With the RTO orders, where are all of these people supposed to office? Some Trump aligned REIT is about to pick up a lot of valuable real estate for pennies. The Pickle Federal Building in Austin sits on some pretty nice dirt.

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Posted (edited)
On 3/2/2025 at 4:07 PM, MrBig said:

My brother is a Trumper and a vet, and he actually read Project 2025 and was concerned about his benefits potentially being cut. But he also trusted Trump 100% when Trump said he had nothing to do with Project 2025 and still voted for him. I think this is even worse than not reading Project 2025 at all. 

As of today, none of his benefits have been cut. He gets 100% disability benefits as a PTSD survivor of the War in Afghanistan and his multiple tours in Iraq. What I don’t understand is how he can get full 100% disability payments monthly, yet he’s still allowed to work a civilian job in a police department when he is considered 100% disabled by the VA. It’s not like he’s pushing papers at a desk either, he’s out there as a patrol officer arresting people while getting his 100% disability checks from the VA while also collecting his salary from the police department.

 

further proof that maga are the dumbest humans alive 

Edited by tx 3 putt
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Posted

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

THAT DIDN'T TAKE LONG: Plaintiffs in one lawsuit against DOGE have alerted the court to President Trump's remarks tonight calling Elon Musk the "head" of the office.

 

 

IMG_3215.jpeg

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Posted
9 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Link is no bueno.

Non-core property list (Coming soon)

We are identifying buildings and facilities that are not core to government operations, or non-core properties for disposal. Selling ensures that taxpayer dollars are no longer spent on vacant or underutilized federal spaces. Disposing of these assets helps eliminate costly maintenance and allows us to reinvest in high-quality work environments that support agency missions.

 

Posted
9 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

The FBI headquarters, along with the DOJ, FAA, FDA, USDA, Department of Labor, etc may all be for sale:

It sure is going to be expensive when we have to buy all that shit back later.

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Posted
39 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

Link is no bueno.

Non-core property list (Coming soon)

We are identifying buildings and facilities that are not core to government operations, or non-core properties for disposal. Selling ensures that taxpayer dollars are no longer spent on vacant or underutilized federal spaces. Disposing of these assets helps eliminate costly maintenance and allows us to reinvest in high-quality work environments that support agency missions.

 

 

It was working yesterday, so someone bitched.

 

 

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Posted
21 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

It was working yesterday, so someone bitched.

 

 

Two of note that were on the list and of local interest to this board were the Pickle Federal Building in Austin and the Mickey Leland Federal Building in Houston. When it was still up, there were also ten federal courthouses, the J. Edgar Hoover Building in D.C. and the Old Post Office building in D.C. (you know the one that Trump previously held the lease on) on it. This one reeks of a money grab for a REIT with Trump ties to buy up a bunch of well located assets for cheap.

Posted
9 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

I just wonder where all those workers are going to report to.

At my office when they first did RTO, the building's shared parking garage ran out of space and we had at least 2 people per desk in the office, with extra tables and temporary workspaces littering every hallway.

 

DOGE doesn't give a shit just as management largely didn't give a shit about if RTO actually would be positive for the business or not. It's about expressing their power over the workers.

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Posted
9 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

I just wonder where all those workers are going to report to.

 

Well, you see....on one hand you are firing half of them. On the other, you are getting rid of workspaces. 

Coming soon, a new, bold initiative from Trump:  we let workers work from home, and we can save money by not having a workspace.    

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Posted
9 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

THAT DIDN'T TAKE LONG: Plaintiffs in one lawsuit against DOGE have alerted the court to President Trump's remarks tonight calling Elon Musk the "head" of the office.

 

 

IMG_3215.jpeg

Like those around Trump have to constantly clean up after his statements: "He didn't really mean Musk is in charge of anything. DOGE is 'headed' by Musk in the sense he's just a figurehead. The face of it. Amy Gleason is the Acting Administrator." 

Posted
Two of note that were on the list and of local interest to this board were the Pickle Federal Building in Austin and the Mickey Leland Federal Building in Houston. When it was still up, there were also ten federal courthouses, the J. Edgar Hoover Building in D.C. and the Old Post Office building in D.C. (you know the one that Trump previously held the lease on) on it. This one reeks of a money grab for a REIT with Trump ties to buy up a bunch of well located assets for cheap.

The list also had the Austin IRS complex on South IH-35 on it.
Posted
3 hours ago, gernblansten said:

Like those around Trump have to constantly clean up after his statements: "He didn't really mean Musk is in charge of anything. DOGE is 'headed' by Musk in the sense he's just a figurehead. The face of it. Amy Gleason is the Acting Administrator." 

I think you’ve got it backwards. Gleason is the patsy and Musk is the liaison with the hackers.

Posted
3 hours ago, Willfully Horn said:

I think you’ve got it backwards. Gleason is the patsy and Musk is the liaison with the hackers.

Apparently, I wasn't clear. I was opining as to the bullshit the lawyers would be forced to say to try and explain it. 

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