Archive for the ‘Uncomfortable Truths’ Category

Modern students suck

Posted: August 12, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncomfortable Truths
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One of my jobs involves teaching classes for an internationally recognized certification exam. I teach both in-person and online, and I enjoy teaching the materials and helping people prepare to pass the exam. For me, this certification opened up a lot of doors, connected me with a great network, and in general changed my career for the better. I’m pretty passionate about it, and I try to bring that passion and care to the class.

But man, sometimes, it is hard.

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a decline in the care level people place on education. Now, to be fair, education is always a challenge, especially if we’re talking middle or high school education. Many of those kids just don’t want to be there. I don’t measure that engagement. I teach post-secondary classes. My adult students should, theoretically, want to be in class, and place some value on it.

It shocks me how little the modern student cares. As an instructor, I’m full of knowledge about the certification exam, yet most students ask few if any questions about the exam. I’ve then had students that failed the exam say “I wish you would have covered this aspect of the exam…” only to have me send them a link to their class video where I explicitly state “This aspect is really critical and you need to memorize it for the exam.”

In college, I had an electrical engineering instructor that used to work for NASA. He was the guy that designed the carbon dioxide filter for the Apollo 13 mission. If you saw the movie and remember where they made a square filter fit a round hole…yeah, that was him.

Most of the people in my class never asked him any questions. He never volunteered information about his time in NASA, and it wasn’t until the last week of class that I had the opportunity to ask him about his NASA experience. I learned so much in just that short time, and I’m glad I took that opportunity while in college.

We live in an era of information abundance, where gaining knowledge is simply a matter of applying yourself. Gone are the days where knowledge was kept under lock and key, only reserved for the powerful or rich. Yet this abundance has resulted in seemingly dumber students who are not ready to actually work. When you have mechanical engineering graduates who can’t make basic parts on a lathe, you have to wonder what that person did for 4 years in college.

I don’t think its a matter of education availability. The opportunities are there, and they’ve been there since I was a student all the way to today. But whether its laziness, lack of care, or something in the water, our modern students suck.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

On clouds, fires and data

Posted: July 22, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in opinion/news, Uncomfortable Truths
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Because I run a business installing network equipment, security cameras and offline storage, my business phone number rings all the time with someone wanting me to sell their latest stuff. Most of the time its a cloud-based service, and I politely tell the person on the phone my clients aren’t interested in cloud based…anything. One person challenged me on this about a year ago, saying that I simply didn’t understand the technology.

Remember, I have a bachelors in electrical engineering, AND a masters in electrical engineering (with a 100+ page technical thesis), AND quite a few industry certifications, plus many, many years working in this field. To say I was insulted is an understatement. Rather than rage on the guy, I simply replied “All that cloud means is my data is on someone else’s computer, which gives someone else control of it, and my clientele don’t like that.”

Now, I still use cloud services for some storage and a lot of network access. It’s convenient and makes it possible to open the garage door while you’re on vacation so your neighbor can borrow your posthole digger. But I don’t depend on it. If the internet goes down tomorrow, I still have access to my data locally, still can see my security cameras, and still can operate my doors. False accusations can’t stop any of my stuff from working.

The one big thing that cloud services offer is security from fire. If your house burns down, you can still pull all your files from the cloud. And well, by the featured image, you can guess what happened.

My mom called me yesterday to tell me my dad’s shop caught on fire. Thankfully the firefighters got there in time to keep it from spreading to the rest of the house. But his shop is where all his business paperwork, business computer, Veteran’s Affairs paperwork, and plenty of other important items are stored. It’s a mess.

THANKFULLY, I had set them up with a QNAP Network Attached Storage (NAS) a while back. While I don’t know if my dad had scanned and backed everything up, most of his files are there. He lost at least two external hard drives and his computers, but the NAS is in a different part of their house and wasn’t affected by the fire.

The current theory (pending a complete investigation) is that a recent string of power surges damaged a power strip, causing it to smolder and then catch fire. My parent’s home lost a refrigerator, stove, microwave and other appliances after 3 days of surges and power loss affected their area due to ongoing storms. The NAS is plugged into a UPS with a monitoring cord, so it shuts down gracefully during extended power outages.

Which brings me to my main point: you should be thinking NOW about your data. If everything you have is in the cloud and the cloud company decides it hates you because you’re a conservative, or because the FBI thinks you’re a terrorist for being a traditional Catholic, or because you support Donald Trump, or because you opposed people brainwashing your children at public school, that company could wipe everything, or simply hold it hostage, like some kind of bitLocker scam. The cloud makes it deceptively easy to place yourself at the mercy of tech giants that want to keep you under their thumb. On top of that, you need to protect yourself from natural disasters as well, and the most common item that breaks is an external hard drive. It’s very easy to forget about the drive in a fire, or leave it somewhere where water can damage it.

My go-to setup is a local NAS hooked up to your robust home network with a VPN for remote access. You get the benefits of storing all your files in one spot and making it easy to access them from multiple devices, while also being able to remotely access them. If you needed to do it on the cheap side, it would cost about $500 dollars for the network and between $500 to $1000 for a NAS. You don’t have to be a tech person either, nowadays the network and storage solutions are well documented and the companies are typically more than happy to help you set it up. I am partial to Ubiquiti for networking gear and QNAP for storage, but there are a variety of companies you can use. You can even setup your device to backup to the cloud, but otherwise store your data locally, getting the best of all worlds. It’s more important that you think and plan accordingly now so that when these disasters happen, whether man-made or natural, your data isn’t affected.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Republicans find their spinal cord when it comes to DoD abortion

Posted: July 15, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncomfortable Truths, war
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I never thought I’d see the day. In fact, I waited till this morning to write this post, because I thought for sure someone would cave in.

But it happened:

And even better:

Lose talent??

Wait wait wait wait a second.

DoD thought it would simply bypass the Hyde Amendment without any consequences? Remember when I wrote that the Department of the Navy basically threatened anyone that challenged spending command funds on elective abortions? Re-read that again and think about how condescending that last paragraph is. Apparently at least a few people called their Senators and Representatives, because now we have some action on it.

I find it insulting that the military’s free health care won’t pay for orthodontic work or specialized contacts to prevent myopia in my children, but they will bend over backwards for abortions and transgender surgery. I’ve had Tricare for quite some time now, and yet I continue to spend money on my kids medical care, often in cases where the doctor says “This is necessary care,” but Tricare refuses to cover the bill.

And in case anyone is wondering, I had one kid with two teeth that came in at an angle that would have had them punching out her lip. I had to pay over $2,000 for specialized braces with chains to pull them into place. Somehow Tricare said that wasn’t “medically necessary.”

So yeah, I’m totally fine with the DoD taking it in the shorts and being slapped around by Congress and told to enforce the Hyde Amendment. Even better, the first person that violates it (and you know that is going to happen) needs to be investigated and blackballed from promotion, because if you don’t take enforcement actions, it’s just a hollow threat.

As to losing DoD talent, spare me. The same generals and admirals that lost in Afghanistan, lied to President Trump about putting troops in Syria (tell me again how good that’s going), can’t fix our ships, can’t roll out advanced weapon systems to deal with China, and have now presided over a huge drop in morale and can’t recruit enough warm bodies for the coming slaughter new young people to be Sailors, Soldiers, Airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsman and Guardians….that’s the “talent” we want to recruit?

If I got to say anything Senator Tuberville, I would simply ask: can you run off more of that so-called talent?

If anything is going to make a difference quickly, it would be finding the O-7, O-6 and O-5 talented warfighters that are somehow still in the service and to begin cultivating them for high level jobs. Getting the right leaders into place can make a huge difference. Just ask Admiral Rickover, who single-handedly drove the development of the Navy’s nuclear submarine and carrier program.

If you have Republican Senators or Representatives, tell them to keep it up AND to start searching for the talented O-6s and O-7s, because its only by promoting these people that we can hope to save the military. They need to search now because you can trust the current promotion boards to find talented warfighters for tomorrow’s conflicts.

Overall, I’m happy House and Senate Republicans found their spinal cord. Let’s hope they continue to stay resolved on these matters.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. That’s because it represents actual views from warfighters, and as we’ve already seen, our existing government agencies don’t want to actually win any wars.

Health of the Force Survey 2023…sucks

Posted: July 8, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncomfortable Truths, war
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A few years ago, a young lady knocked on my door in Hawaii. She happened to be a volunteer from the Census Bureau, and I spent about 30 minutes answering Census Bureau questions. Unlike most of the other door to door surveys that I promptly ignore, I actually wanted my voice heard by the Census Bureau. About halfway through the survey, I was asked by the surveyor “Do you approve of smoking in the home?”

Me: “Uhm, in my home or other people’s homes?”
Surveyor: “The question doesn’t specify.”
Me: “Well, that’s kind of important. I don’t smoke, and I don’t let people smoke in my home, but I really don’t care if they smoke in their homes.”
Surveyor: “The question only has a Yes or No answers.”
Me: “Then my answer is Yes, I’m OK with smoking in the home.”

Not surprisingly, the overall results showed something like 85% of people disapproved of smoking in the home, which was then used as proof that we should conduct more smoking cessation programs.

I’m willing to bet that more than a few people felt the same way I did but chose “No.” When you design a survey question without allowing for nuance or more than a binary answer, you skew the results. That’s not good from a simple truth perspective, but its really not good if you intend to base financial and policy decisions on the results. With that in mind, flash forward a few years and I receive an email asking me to take the Health of the Force survey for the Navy. I wrote about this survey before and how it showed that the Navy is VERY unhealthy in so many ways, so I was hopeful the survey would dig further to identify the areas where the Navy can improve.

Yeah….not so much. I took screen shots as I completed the survey so you can see just how bad it was.

Let’s start with the question “What factors are or would most likely influence you to get out of the Navy?” That’s a legitimately good question, and you get to select your top five options. Maybe the Navy should put something in the survey about readiness and shipyard issues, given the massive amount of news coverage on ship schedules slipping and Sailors committing suicide in Newport News. Or what about wokeness? Or the COVID “vaccine”? Maybe people are particularly incensed about it, or maybe they aren’t, so listing it as a choice would help shed some light on it.

Nope. All the answers are super generic responses that don’t ask any hard questions. They have responses for “Leadership at current command,” but nothing about shipyards, logistics, medical, or other support services that Sailors constantly complain about.

The best option I had was “Senior Navy leaders.” I selected that, and I expounded in the comments, but again, super generic, and not going to result in anything actionable.

Another set of questions asked about Command leadership, still focused on the local command. They did bring in enlisted leaders, which is good, because in the past they often only focused on the Command Triad (the Commanding Officer, Executive Officer and Command Master Chief). But there are no support questions. Plenty of Sailors are frustrated with Navy’s Mandatory Crappy Internet (NMCI), or the lack of investment in our shore facilities, but neither of those issues are the command’s fault. Those decisions are made by top brass, who are never held accountable for how miserable they make Sailors.

What about “How I feel in the Navy” questions? Again, touchy-feely stuff, but nothing that gets at the hard issues we have going on.

And then the DIE questions. That’s like a full 30% of the survey, but I’ll spare you the agony of reading the questions. All of these ask about sexual harrasment and racism and such, which are important…but aren’t the reasons Sailors commit suicide in their baracks room.

This survey was frustrating. I wrote paragraphs in the free-form section, which I am sure will be promptly ignored by the non-warfighter HR officer bent on using the survey to justify more white supremacy training in the fleet. This survey will provide no useful results and will continue to ignore the actual problems in the fleet. It will be used by the Department of the Navy to justify more money in DIE and other stupid programs when we need more efforts towards fixing ships and training our Sailors to be ready for combat. As a taxpayer, you should be angry over this survey and demand better from your elected representatives.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

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