quote:

Originally posted by sunny225:
https://monsterhunternation.com/2024/07/03/chevron/

CHEVRON

What are your favorite bits of Chevron powered government overreach that you’d like to see get sued into oblivion now?

In my various jobs I’ve seen unelected bureaucrats make up all sorts of goofy nonsensical shit we had to obey or else.

When I was young and working on farms, factories, or construction I saw OHSA regulations that made job sites LESS safe. “Why are we doing it this stupid way?” “Because that government asshole who has never done this himself said we’d get fined if we don’t.” “Oh cool, let me unnecessarily insert my hands into this thing that can chop them off for the mandatory safety check then.”

I’m a rural westerner. Dear Lord, don’t get us started on the BLM. 90% of their bullshit isn’t law. They just make up wacky shit on the fly. Ignorant fucks who live in cities hundreds or thousands of miles away think they “protect the environment”. Lol no. There can be some obvious terrible problem, but some fucker in DC will say nope, you have to leave that terrible problem there to grow bigger or else we’ll fine you or shoot you if you try to fix it. If you’re in the west and you see some land that’s got some obvious issues or is about to burn down it’s government land.

Then I went into accounting, and the dirty secret of that industry is 3/4 of what companies pay accountants for is to do government mandated paperwork to send to the government which nobody in the government will ever read, and to respond to government audits which are usually useless. IRS just makes shit up as they go. And the shit they made up last time? They changed it this time. Either way, shut up and pay your fine.

But it isn’t just the agency that takes your money directly. Oh no. (honestly, the IRS was one of the more professional agencies I dealt with in my career! Not even joking. The others are worse.) Then there’s the dozens of other agencies that meddle in your industry who you also have to appease, even though sometimes they contradict each other, and all of them can fine you.

Then I worked in the gun business, where I got to discover the wonderful world of ATF inspections, where holy fucking shit, the dumbest people in the universe who don’t know how anything works at all, pretend to be mechanical engineers and lawyers. But Chevron said they’re “experts” so clearly that must be true, and if you disagree they’ll shoot your dog and burn your house down. The list of dumb shit the ATF makes up on the fly could fill a book (literally. I did write this book).

But surely, the ATF is the worst right? Oh no. Not even close. Because then for my next job I went into military contracting! Where the rules are whatever the DCAA or DFAS say they are today. And sure, you violated that secret impossible to know rule on accident, so we’re going to ruin your company and put hundreds of people out of work… but the big megacorporation did the same thing, only on purpose, and a million times worse? Oh well. Fuck you. Lockheed builds missiles. You don’t.

On that note, as an accountant I got companies through audits from probably eight or ten different federal agencies. The DCAA audit is by far the most annoying. This is the industry where the customer actually knows exactly how much profit you expect to make, and then you have to guess what everything will cost in the future, and if you guess wrong, they will fine you. Hell, if you guess in a way that actually SAVES the government money, they will fine you. If you charge the government too little, they will fine you. They will fine you for bookkeeping errors. They will fine you for typos. (keep in mind of the hundreds of government spreadsheets I saw, I never saw a single one that didn’t have serious computational errors on it… which I got to fix for them for free… or they’d fine me).

I once actually had a DCAA auditor sit behind me while I typed on my computer for about 4 hours to WATCH ME TYPE. At the end of this month long colonoscopy which cost the tax payers tens of thousands of dollars in government employee salary, they had found one mistake where I had UNDER CHARGED the government something like $16.

Keep in mind, none of this shit was a law passed by congress. It’s all stuff that the agencies made up based upon a vague idea congress gave them.

But the worst, the absolute worst, dumbest motherfuckers in the entire US government? The SBA.

The motherfucking SBA who I will despise with the fire of a thousand suns until the end of time. This is an agency congress created to HELP small businesses, and instead its a wretched hive of scum and villainy, who because they can just make up the regulations as they go, will always find a way to reward their friends and punish everybody who competes with their friends.

And they make up these arbitrary rules, which their employees don’t understand, and then if you fail to comply with the rule correctly, but they understand it wrong, they will actually actively try to destroy that small business, RATHER THAN ADMIT THEIR MISTAKE. I’ve got a saga about this particular one that would take ten thousand words to tell, where I fought with the SBA making shit up on the fly and lying about it for 6 straight months, and the only reason we got it solved was my company brought it to the attention of @BasedMikeLee who then stomped on their heads (with glee, which is why that dude has earned my vote).
So how has Chevron fucked you?