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apsofacto

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Everything posted by apsofacto

  1. Hi, Vern, I think it is wise to omit this sentiment from your response to the general: How does you response or procurement strategy differ if the general was referring to the primary weapon, rather than the back-up pistol? Asking as a firearms-ignorant person, is it sufficient to purchase a good commercial weapon in this circumstance?
  2. I think TurboTax enables a more complex tax code. This may enable a more complex procurement environment. We'll see if it takes off.
  3. When Watson recommends the dismantling of socio-economic programs, they'll pull the plug immediately (that was the reaction to the AI who became racist). Chess has one goal, we have many.
  4. My favorite comment on the article Vern just shared.
  5. When I hear pistol procurement, I think of this: http://www.gao.gov/assets/500/492927.pdf I can purchase a pistol within 2 miles from my house. However, I don't need to use it in extreme temperatures, I don't need it to fit a wide variety of hands, I don't need to train thousands of different people on how to use it, and I don't need to incorporate it into a complex logistical system for ammo/spare parts. The General is making a decision that the advantage of purchasing Glocks off the shelf outweighs these considerations (and many more I cannot think of). I think the root of his objection is the one-size-fits-all mentality which leads to the large spec-book and consequential customization and marathon testing. Does the military need to standardize to the degree it does? Is the perfect pistol for the Middle East the same as the perfect pistol for South America?
  6. Responding to Shall7: Does the hormone therapy affect the chromosomes? I don't think so, but I could stand some education here. Also, I think I'd question him/her. I could stand a few bigot-labelings. It would keep me humble. Not challenging your overall point regarding the injustices of the past, but the 3/5 compromise is counter-intuitive. If you were an abolitionist at that time, you would have preferred 1/5 or 0/5 representation for slaves as they could not vote. The purpose of negotiating the fraction downward was to limit the amount of representation slave states had in the House of Representatives. If this is not the case, I yearn for correction! Ultimately, this will all go to court and it will be settled- enraging half the country.
  7. High school biology is but a hazy memory, but I think the answer to this question is stamped on every cell in the in the business owner's body. A woman who gets gender reassignment surgery should be eligible for the WOSB program.
  8. Thanks to everyone who participated. There's no reason I should be exempt from the shame. Just for reference- here was the original abhorrent sentence I drafted: What I hated about it was those two modifiers at the end: "with Agency employees" and "while on site". You cannot tell if those modifiers affect the first two prohibited items. (e.g. contractor can drink alone on site as long as no Agency employees are around) There is a contract interpretation rule which addresses this problem, but you are already up a creek if you are relying on that. I learned there was even more to hate about that sentence through all the back-and-forth. Here was my attempt at a solution: I cheated a little by simplifying the sexual activity prohibition. I hope it was enjoyable. It was educational to me. If someone runs across a horrible sentence or paragraph in the wild, maybe we can do this again. May be worth trying to submit entries via private message rather than through the public board, though.
  9. In necessary I can private message some Urban Dictionary entries. But not from the work computer.
  10. Verily and forsooth I am now improved!
  11. There has been some lamenting about bad writing recently on these message boards recently. I propose a small contest to re-write this sentence for clarity: I nominate Jamaal Valentine as Judge since he brought up the subject recently. I'll abstain. Winner lives in eternal glory. Loser wallows in eternal shame. Only the first seven attempts will be accepted. EDIT: Only one entry per person. Hope this is fun!
  12. Category Managers are announced for the Category Management Initiative are announced here. Savings are predicted. Duplication will be reduced. Small business Goals will be met. A 10% savings is characterized as modest. I don't think that word means what they think it means . . .
  13. Question: Answer: No.To be fair, they should not assume that of us either. I really enjoy helping our project managers with their statements of work. My only rule is that they generate the first draft- I don't even care how bad it is. We sit together and try to eliminate passive voice, convert it to language that compels the contractor to do things, re-arrange sentences so the background material isn't cluttering up the tasks, and usually come up with some questions. It's not perfect but it helps. If it was all that I did all day my employer would be getting their money out of me. However, we must invent exciting new paperwork and go to Very Important MeetingsTM (VIMs).
  14. Hi, Desparado, I think in this particular case the contract got their e-mail sent 4.5 hours prior to (emphasis mine): FWIW I *hate* getting offers over e-mail because I have no concept of when the Government has control of the damn offer. This is partly a failing on my part because I don't understand how the internet and e-mail works, but the whole technique is also inherently non-transparent, at least to the KO. Hello, Napolik, My employer is moving to an electronic submission system (which is not e-mail based). I hope is it better than e-mail. I have sent these kinds of things to my management and to our IT department before. I'll send this one as well. Thanks so much for posting.
  15. Hello, Bagheera, You may find a skeptical crowd here because this requires a long series of events (data entry, data collection, data analysis, decision-making) where everything has to work well. Each link in that chain is weak. The idea is a beautiful one, but I don't think it will work, and will pull resources away from other things. Never forget the human decision-maker at the end of the chain. They will be impervious to whatever "chaos theory" has to offer because . . . THEY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT CHAOS THEORY IS.
  16. If you review 9.505 as Jamaal suggested, there is an exception for allowing multiple companies to have input into the SOW. I think this is good advice when you do not have adequate know-how within the agency to write a good SOW.
  17. Hi, Vern, My wife destroys me at scrabble by using solfege syllables. She may be cheating by using the chromatic ones. I'd provide a link but I can't get the comment system to insert one. No useful for those specific letters, though, sorry.
  18. B-232681.2; B-232681.3 This was useful to me as it fit very closely to a certain circumstance, but I think it's useful to talk about incumbency since there is often an incumbent. The gist here was that it was unfair to afford an offeror the competitive advantages of incumbency when that incumbency was the result of a prior, flawed procurement.
  19. To reinforce what Jamaal writes above, there exists a peculiar style of decision-making where a statistician analyses your organization's data and finds hard-to-discern correlations. If the mechanism behind the correlation is not understood, this can be dangerous. Discovering these mechanisms is not convenient. This is referred to as "Big Data". I think it is a gimmick to sell software. To quarrel . . . I have hit-or-miss experiences with single reviews, but very good luck with the aggregation of a large number of reviews (e/g Amazon's 4/5 stars). I may just be lucky.
  20. Jut to clarify, you are talking about deliverables, reports, etc.? You're not talking about submitting proposals/bids/offers, correct? If deliverables/reports: there may be a document management reason why they don't want to keep paperwork on your server (I'd guess FOIA). If proposals/bids/offer: the offer needs to be under the Government's control. You asked for policy inforamtion about why your customer is behaving in a certain way- answer may depend on what that data is that you refer to . . .
  21. H2H is correct in our particular case- there is a rule in the project that there will be no coding (although things called BADIs are OK). However, the consultant is writing their own functional specification subject to our approval. I think this is normal- I could be wrong. Our consultants have spent a lot of time generating documentation about our AS IS business process, and the proposed TO BE business process. These are piles of paper they use to build the functional specification. They have likely also begun configuring SAP to do the things we plan on. While there will be no new code generated, but they will do a fair amount of configuring. I confess I can't explain, nor do I quite understand, the difference. I'm told that configuring is much less risky than coding, and makes upgrading the system later a much easier job. I think our largest source of cost uncertainty is our ability to stick to the new business processes we agree to. So I would add to H2H's statement that the consultants: Generate a picture of our current process (AS-IS) (paper) Generate a new busienss process (TO-BE) (more paper) Generate a functional spec based on the preceding (yet more paper) Configure SAP to conform to those specs (Configuration) Stick around to support the aftermath and provide grief counseling Fix-pricing they whole job seems trickier since they develop the functional spec partway through the process. H2H- Are BADIs considered coding? We are doing some of those.
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