Category: Government versus private sector

Quarterly inventory – 2025 Q4

Dear FutureMe,

Today would be a good day to do a quarterly inventory.

How is your personal life going?

How is your work life going?

How is your Volunteer Service life going?

Future Me

Personal Life

This quarter gave me the opportunity to attend two weekend conferences out of town, and I enjoyed both of them.

I’m a little depressed because cold-and-overcast season is here again. I can see why people like living in the desert. I have relatives who live in the Pacific Northwest, on the coast, and man, that would be depressing nine months out of twelve.

A walk to remember

Mildly amusing, I needed to get some car work done, so I took it to the dealer I bought the car from. This is probably not the best idea because they don’t treat me as well as I would like. No matter, I dropped off the car first thing in the morning, went to a little cafe and got breakfast, and then texted a retired friend in town that I’m in town, and would he mind if I dropped by for a visit? He said, Sure, did I want a ride? No thank you, I’ll walk – I need the exercise; it will only be a 25 minute walk from downtown to his house.

I was about five minutes into the walk when the gastric distress kicked in.

I successfully did not poop my pants. Let’s get that said right up front. But man, it was an excruciating walk: go some number of feet, stop, pause, clamp down, and wait for the spasm to pass. Nowhere along the walk was a public park with a public restroom. I wasn’t going to walk up to a random house (if anyone is even home) and request to destroy their bathroom. Anyway, the mildly amusing part was that at some point, I paused, crossed the street, and paused again right behind a small pickup truck sitting in front of a house. I look up, and on the back of the pickup truck was a sticker that was essentially this:

 

(click the + sign to reveal the spoiler)

Thank you, God, for reminding me You have a sense of humor. 😉

Public sector Uber / Lyft

Another thing that happened is that I became miffed with the City of Visalia for using my tax dollars to play the big shot. Visalia Connect

You see, I have friends who supplement their income by driving for Uber and/or Lyft. I’m 100% in favor of people who want a side hustle getting out there and doing the work – in the private sector. I despise when the public sector tries to undermine them, because they are doing so with your and my tax dollars. If the city wants to spend tax dollars on police and fire, I’m 100% in favor of that. If the city wants to spend tax dollars on a bus system with fixed routes, okay, that’s not the worst spend of tax dollars. It’s not a great spend of tax dollars, but sure, when someone gets so elderly that they cannot drive anymore, that there is a bus system they can use is a public good. Walking would probably be better exercise for them, but sure, it’s not the worst spend of tax dollars.

But Uber and Lyft? Why the hell should the city be trying to compete with that?

WORSE – the City of Visalia contracted with a French company to provide the service.

You can barely make it out on the photograph, but the side of the van says “Operated by RATp Dev USA”. RATP Dev USA is the North American subsidiary of RATP Dev, the international arm of the Paris-based RATP Group that operates public transportation systems worldwide.

My USA tax dollars are enriching a French company to undermine local taxpayers trying to improve their lives with a side hustle.

What the hell‽

Microtransit is a luxury, not a necessity. Let the people who want to bask in luxury pay their own way at private sector prices. Let local people make some money. Let Uber and Lyft, both based in California, make some money. Don’t be taking money away from our local police and sending it off to Paris, France.

Cynical me thinks that really, some corrupt official at the City of Visalia pushed through the idea to get kickbacks. I have no proof of it, but it wouldn’t surprise me. We’ve had lots of corruption in other areas. But yeah, I wouldn’t mind seeing the officials and bureaucrats behind this tarred and feathered.

Amazon shopping this Christmas (not)

I did just about zero Christmas shopping with Amazon this year. Their “Black Friday” prices are not better value than the rest of the year. I did buy a large Christmas gift from Costco.

Personal mail server

For about nineteen months now, my personal mail server has been rebooting. I just replaced it with a different installation here the third week of December. I expect that it will be rock-solid now.

Way back when, I built it as a combination WordPress (this blog), Dovecot/Postfix, and Nextcloud server. On Ubuntu. Well, the machine I was renting was too small, so I started splitting things off. Nextcloud I moved in-house onto bare metal. WordPress I moved to a different machine, but on Debian. I left Dovecot and Postfix on the Ubuntu box, because it was probably going to be the most painful to move.

When I built my personal mail server before, I used the excellent guide by Christoph Haas (workaround.org) to build it. Back then, I’d struggled a little bit with the difference that Christoph’s instructions were for Debian, and I was installing on Ubuntu, but I made it work okay. Let’s Encrypt certbot was a little tough because I wanted a wildcard certificate for multiple domain names.

But then the server started running out of memory. I built a script that checked for an out-of-memory condition, and if so, I rebooted the box automatically.

That was twenty-seven months ago. Initially, it would go three or four days without rebooting. Nineteen months ago, it was rebooting one to three times per day. Last month, it was rebooting at least three times per day and up to six times per day. I knew I wanted to work on it, but I also expected it to be a big job. Being ruled by a hundred forms of fear, I made it into a larger problem than it was – go figure.

I’d scheduled some vacation time for Christmas and even took off the Friday before Christmas week. Then my mom called me and changed my plans on when we were going (to later). Suddenly I have four days off before I need to be on the road, and that should be plenty of time – no matter how hard the migration went. It actually took about a day.

One thing Christoph doesn’t go into is fail2ban for the webmail. I did have that on the original Ubuntu box, although it was more for WordPress than anything. But for all I know, that was the source of the memory leak. I had also done a sort of funky disk layout, so I was running Restic for local backups. Maybe Restic was the source of the memory leak? I don’t know. But the new box has the email-on-reboot script in place, so I’ll see if it doesn’t reboot on its own any time soon.

Since I re-enabled comments on this blog with the spam protection coming from hCaptcha, I thought I’d try it with my webmail client. It is working great.

KDE Donation

I’ve donated to the EFF and Internet Archive for close to a decade now – I’m happy to support projects I think are worthwhile. I started donating to the Thunderbird project two years ago in November.

This quarter the KDE project did a request for donations, and I have really liked KDE, so I signed up for a small, $5 monthly contribution. Not very long later, over on the KDE mailing list, their community manager called everyone on X/Twitter Nazis. Maybe I’m the one off-kilter here, but I thought a community manager was supposed to grow their community. The exclusionary stance ends up alienating normal people and stunting the growth of the community instead. Later, the KDE community said they supported their community manager being a bigot.

Yeah, I’m out.

If these people are so infected with TDS that they don’t see the damage they are causing, I’m certainly not going to be an enabler and continue donating to their project. It is sad because I was first exposed to KDE back in 2006, and I like the desktop environment. But perverse behavior should not be rewarded. I’ve cancelled my donation going forward. If a different desktop environment shows up that is as good or better, I’ll switch.

Work Life

Well, I found out I’d miscalculated my retirement date; the pay period ends one week later than I’d thought.

It is mildly amusing to me that February 2026 has perfect alignment, with the first Sunday being on the 1st and the last Saturday being on the 28th. On the calendar, February takes the space of exactly four weeks. May and August 2026 have the worst alignment, spanning six weeks. I did a post this quarter about programming in RPG II under the heading Helping Sales make promises they could keep. May and August were the sorts of configurations that RPG II was not naturally a good fit for.

I got (probably my last ever) Performance Appraisal and my boss was kind. I’ve been feeling guilty about how much work I’m not doing, but my boss said this is a good thing. Proper succession planning means I must train everyone else what to do when I’m not here, and the best way to test my training is to let them do the work.

Volunteer Service Life

The Events Calendar Pro (TEC)

Well, I added TEC to the website for the fellowship, but it has bugs. I’m having to watch for errant behavior and then run a MySQL statement on the server:

DELETE FROM wp_options WHERE option_name LIKE '_transient_tribe_views_v2_cache_%';

DELETE FROM wp_options WHERE option_name LIKE '_site_transient_feed__%';

Still, TEC is remarkably better than Sugar Calendar, so overall it is a win. We might try out ticket sales next.

Flyers for events

One thing where AI has been a blessing and a danger is in adding events from outside sources. I uploaded a flyer for an event to an AI and asked it to convert the flyer into WordPress-compatible HTML. In one minute it did the job that would have taken me an hour or two. So that was great.

Then for another event, I pointed the AI at a series of pages the organizing committee had put up. That went great.

Then for a third event, I did the same, but the information was wildly off. I went to the web page, copied the URL, and prompted the AI to read that web page and create HTML from it suitable for pasting into WordPress. It looked okay, but… the event is at a Sheraton hotel, and this says Hilton… and the Hilton is 25 miles away! Oof. I asked where the information it gave me came from, and it said the web page, “This is what it says”. I put into the AI prompt “No it doesn’t” – and of course, then it apologized and actually read the website and created correct content. Apparently, it had pulled information from ten years ago and had simply run with that. AI is not intelligent (yet).

Contact Form 7 and Captcha

Our office manager is a part of a community of other office managers. One of them did a demo of their website, and that office had an email contact form. My office manager requested we do the same. I’d tried Contact Form 7 back in 2018, but the spam was immediate and incessant – I quickly deleted it.

So now I need to add it back in, but not subject my office manager to the onslaught of porn, supplements, and cheap junk email. The nature of the fellowship is not a great fit for ratting out people to Google as members of this fellowship. Well, if reCAPTCHA is off the table, how about hCaptcha?

I implemented hCaptcha for the contact forms on the website, and it has worked great. I was happy enough with it that I signed up for a personal account and added it to this blog’s login form for user comments. Later I used the same account to protect webmail on my rebuilt personal mail server.

The only thing I’d like better is if there were a pricing plan between Free and Pro. I do believe in paying my own way.1 But for the month of December, I’ve used it twenty times (their dashboard tells me this). I cannot justify the Pro membership at $99 per month ($1,200 per year). The fellowship also believes in paying its own way, but also, we cannot afford $1,200 per year. $60 per year would be ideal – and I don’t actually want any additional features. I know that serving up their images and comparing the results takes CPU cycles. I just don’t want to be a freeloader.

  1. Unless you’re going to be an asshole and call me a Nazi for my choice in social networks (duh!) ↩︎

Why I would like to see the U.S. Postal Service privatized

  • I could pay to have junk mail thrown in the trash at the source
  • The USPS often gets used for corruption
  • Being government employees, bad apples last forever

No more junk mail

The number one reason I would love to have the USPS privatized is that it would become possible for me to pay a fee (to whomever takes their place) to trash any junk mail that gets put in the queue to be sent to me.

At work, we spend a rather large amount of dollars to combat email spam. Everyone’s life is better for it*. But that’s not an option with physical snail mail. Why the heck not? Because the USPS is a government agency. They are very specifically not allowed to “censor” mail by just throwing it in the trash.

If they tried, they would get sued, because if you’re a scumbag with a lawyer, you want to sue the really big organization with the large checking account.

But with a private company, I could buy in to a Friend of the Environment subscription plan, where I pay the delivery company a small monthly fee, and they chuck the junk mail into the recycling bin. They don’t want to spend the money on fuel to transport it. They would have a financial incentive to do the right thing early on in the process.

Indeed, it would take almost no time for the people who pay for snail mail spam to ask the privatized company “How many of these should we print? How many are actually going to get delivered?” The end result would be less trash generated; less trash to be wrangled. It’s a win-win-lose for me, the mail carrier, and then the spammer, er advertiser.

One problem of course, would be predatory advertisers implementing junk delivery, as a protection racket (to collect the fee to not deliver it). They’d hire an Uber or Lyft driver to put trash in your mailbox, along with a flyer that suggests you pay them for no more trash.

I’m going to have to puzzle out what antidotes there might be to a pristine mailbox protection racket. If you have any ideas, please feel free to make a SQRL identity, and login and post.

USPS as a political corruption tool

This is not the USPS fault. But, because they are a government agency, they are the tail on the dog that is Congress and their buddies. Congresscritters love to commission a new post office building to line the pockets of their buddy who has some land for sale. Whether that buddy then kicks back some of the overpriced payment back to the critter is an exercise for the reader.

Back during the Reagan and (first) Bush era, every post office building had a Novell NetWare server in it. When Bill Clinton got elected, every one of those NetWare servers were replaced with Microsoft Windows servers. It was a gift to Microsoft, at the expense of Novell.

Because email started replacing some snail mail, the overall volume dropped. Suddenly we didn’t need so many post office buildings. And magically, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s husband’s company was awarded the contract to broker the sales of 60 USPS facilities (one report says 600 were on the list to be considered for sale).

The problem is, that as a Federal agency, if there is corruption there, there is no incentive to get rid of it as long as it doesn’t become embarrassing. Did the CIO of USPS get a kickback from Microsoft? Nobody has incentive to rat the guy out, and, they do have incentive to keep their jobs by keeping their mouths shut. Did someone at USPS get a kickback from Richard Blum (Feinstein’s husband)? Nobody has incentive to rat the guy out, and, they do have incentive to avoid retaliatory employment decisions.

My local postmaster

So, my dad was a member of the California Young Republicans back in the 1960’s and 70’s. I would learn that the postmaster in town was on the Democratic Central Committee. I remember my dad suddenly going in to a rage one day; I had followed him out to the mailbox. “Do you see this‽ Do you see this‽”

The post office was reading our mail.

Of course, in school I was educated that one’s mail was sacrosanct, and the Post Office never read one’s mail. That turned out to be total bullshit.

What my dad was shaking in front of me was an envelope with a return address stamp of CYR California Young Republicans. The top of the envelope had been sliced open (all the way across the top, and not gently, either), and then lots of cellophane tape had been used to close it again. There was a rubber stamp on it: Damaged During Handling.

My dad would later go to the post office and speak with the postmaster, telling him that someone in the post office was reading his mail. The postmaster feigned an apology, but the mail reading did not stop. It was the postmaster himself who had ordered that all the CYR mail get routed to his desk first.

When I was younger, pretty much the very beginning of mass-shootings in America was in Post Offices. A new term entered the vernacular: “Going Postal”. What was happening was that guys were in line for promotion in every post office, and (some of) their bosses were real assholes. They would torment an underling for decades, and the underling couldn’t do anything about it, because his hopes for advancement would then be destroyed. 20 years later, it’s finally time to get the promotion to Postmaster of the Office, and the outgoing asshole gives the promotion to a junior bootlicker. The next day, the spurned postal worker would come in and shoot up the place. Institutional assholism works in government, because one cannot go to other bosses and say “This asshole is losing us money”. It’s a government agency. It’s not supposed to make money. If it’s making money, then it’s competing with the private sector who could probably do the job more efficiently anyway.

In my dad’s case of systematic invasion of privacy for political gain, there was nothing to do but to hide. The mail from CYR started using a fake return address. It was some sort of charity / orphanage, if I recall correctly.

That doesn’t mean that the California Young Republicans never sent another envelope with the old CYR rubber stamp. Indeed, one went out with “Remember that the big all-state dinner meeting will be held at the Black Oak Restaurant in Paso Robles at 7:00 PM on (whatever date)”. Our copy was opened and read and taped shut and rubber stamped with fuck-you-we’re-reading-your-mail as per usual. In the envelope with the charity return address, the letter said the meeting was still in Paso Robles, but it had been moved to a different restaurant. Someone from CYR did go hang out in the lobby at the Black Oak, and sure enough a total stranger walked up to the hostess and asked to be seated with the California Young Republicans group. Confusion ensued for the hostess and spy, although the CYR member got the chuckle he was expecting.

My bigger point is that management assholes exist in larger organizations, but, when that organization is private sector, the organization suffers enough for it that there is financial incentive to change (not always, due to monopoly power). But in public sector organizations, it is almost impossible to remove bad apples. There is no real incentive to change. The person who reports is asking for a target on their back and henceforth will never get another promotion, ever.

If Congress couldn’t manipulate USPS (because now they are UPS or Fedex or whatever), that would be a good thing. If bad apples didn’t have the career public sector employment worth suing over (for wrongful termination), that would be a good thing. And if I could pay to auto-trash junk mail, I would love that, and it would be the best thing.

*I would even argue that the spammer’s life is better for it: if you are a spammer, you are a loser who thinks there is a easy / low effort / low quality way to get rich. The quicker we clobber your delusion, the better for you.