This video lacks a lot of salient details.

Yes, the F35 is aiming at the A10 because contractors want jobs (something to do).

However, the strength of the A10 is also its weakness. Low and slow also means that it takes you a long time to get to your troops. Fast jets arrive much sooner (significantly so). A combination of both would be ideal. F35 to get there ASAP, and A10 arriving later to take over.

It's not really worth debating the merit of new fighters. You don't wait for a war to start developing weapons.

Yes, our recent enemies are durkas with small arms, and you don't need an F35 to fight them - but you also don't even need to fight them to begin with - they aren't an existential threat. Terrorist attacks are emotionally charged (well, until they happen so often that you get used to hearing about them, and they stop affecting people), but they are nothing compared to say, a carpet bombing campaign.

The relevance of things like the F35 is to have weapons ready and able to face a large national power, should a nation v nation conflict arise with a significant other nation. In the event that such a conflict ever does, you don't want to be caught with your pants down.

Defense spending costs scale with oversight requirements.

Keep in mind that money pays people. Even materials are simply salaries of the material suppliers. The more people you put on a program, the more that program will cost.

Yes, big contractors make big profits - but the major chunk of their charges is still salaries.

Let me explain what is going on.

Remember the $100 hammers?
In fact, the hammer still cost a few bucks. What cost 100+ bucks was the total charges associated with acquiring a hammer.
Everything someone does in association with acquiring the hammer, gets charged to a charge code that's specific for that task.

Someone has to create a material request - $time.
Someone has to check contracts for whether or not it will be covered - $time.
Someone has to place the order - $time.
Someone has to receiver the package, inspect it, and put it into a received bin - $time.
Someone has to go through the received items and assign them property tags - $time.
Someone has to take the item to the department that needed it, and get someone to sign for it - $time.
Someone has to update the monthly contract report - $time.
Someone has to generate an entry in the process artifacts report, detailing the actions taken in order to acquire the hammer - $time.
Someone on the government side has to review the process artifacts report, and validate that proper process was followed (and if not, punish the company for skipping steps) - $time.

Add up all the minutes here and there that each person charged in association with getting a hammer, and it's $95 on top of a $5 hammer. Which is why little things cost so much.

You could say "Hey, why do all that? Just buy the hammer".
Well, if a company did that, it would be in trouble with govt. oversight folks because they violated the process.
If an employee bought a hammer of his own volition, he would be in trouble with his company for violating the process.
The steps are required, and if you don't follow them, and there is ever any problem/issue, your lack of process will be discovered on investigation, and you could face massive liability - even if it's not even relevant - because it points to careless company culture.

Complex systems like jet fighters necessarily have bugs to work out. When you start using the system, that's when you discover all the bits and pieces that nobody anticipated - and you fix them. That's fine. That's always been the case.



As an airplane example, imagine if there's an issue with a regulator that ultimately causes a system failure - but that issue is just some constant value in a piece of software that determines a duty cycle.

Say for example, that all it takes is changing 1 digit, and recompiling. Ez, right? NOPE!

An engineer can't simply provide a fix.

If something went wrong, even unrelated, but simply in the same general system, he could be personally liable for anything that happens.

On top of that, if there is no contract for work on that system, then an engineer providing a free fix is robbing the company of work, and he could get fired.

A company can't instruct an engineer to provide a fix for the same reasons that the engineer himself can't just do it.

So, the process kicks in.

Someone has to generate a trouble report - $time.
Someone has to identify a possible solution - $time.
Someone has to check contracts to see if work on that fix would be covered under current tasking - $time.
Say it's not covered (it's a previously closed [i.e. delivered] item), so you need a new charge code.
Someone has to write a proposal to fix the defect - $time.
Someone has to go deal with the government to get them to accept the proposal - $time.
(say it's accepted)
Someone has to write new contracts with the government for the new work - $time.
To know what to put into the contract, "requrements engineers" have to talk with the "software engineers" to get a list of action items, and incorporate them into the contract - $time.
(say the contract is accepted)
Finance in conjuration with Requirements engineers has to generate a list of charge codes for each action item - $time.
CM engineers have to update the CM system - $time.
Some manager has to coordinate this mess, and let folks know when to do what - $time.
Software engineer goes to work, changes 1 number, recompiles - $time.
Software engineer checks in new load into CM - $time.
CM engineer updates CM history report - $time.
Software engineer delivers new load to testing manger - $time.
Test manager gets crew of 30 test engineers to run the new load through testing in a SIL (systems integration lab) - $time.
Test engineers write report on results - $time.
If results are fine, Test manager has 30 test engineers run a test on real hardware - $time.
Test engineers write new report - $time.
(assuming all went well)
CM engineer gets resting results and pushes the task to deliverable - $time.
Management has a report written up to hand to the governemnt, covering all work done, and each action taken - documenting that proper process was followed - $time.
Folks writing document know nothing technical, so they get engineers to write sections covering actual work done, and mostly collate what other people send to them - $time.
Engineers write most the report - $time.
Company has new load delivered to government (sending a disk), along with the report/papers/documentation - $time.
Government reviews the report, but because the govt. employees are not technical and don't understand any of the technical data, they simply take the company's word for the results, and simply grade the company on how closely they followed process (the only thing they do understand) - $time.
Company sends engineer to government location to load the new software and help government side testing - $time.
Government runs independent acceptance tests on delivered load - $time.
(Say all goes well)
Government talks with company contracts people, and contract is brought to a close - $time.
CM / Requirements engineers close out the action item - $time.

And this is how a 1 line code change takes 6 months and 5 million dollars.

And this gets repeated for _everything_.

Then imagine if it is a hardware issue, and the only real fix is a change of hardware. For an airplane, just getting permission to plug anything that needs electricity into the airplanes power supply takes months of paper work and lab testing artifacts for approval. Try getting your testing done in that kind of environment.



Basically, the F35 could actually be fixed quickly and cheaply - but the system that is in place right now does not allow for it. And if you tried to circumvent that system, you would be in trouble. The system is required. It's how oversight works - to make sure everything is by the book, documented, reviewed, and approved - so no money gets wasted on any funny business.

Best part, if the government thinks that the program is costing too much, they put more oversight on it to watch for more waste.
Because apparently, when you pay more people to stare at something, the waste just runs away in fear.
Someone at the contractors has to write the reports that these oversight people are supposed to be reviewing - so when you go to a contractor and see a cube farm with 90 paper pushers and 10 'actual' engineers (not a joke), you start to wonder how anything gets done.

Once upon a time, during the cold war, we had an existential threat.
People took things seriously. There was no F'ing around with paperwork - people had to deliver hardware. The typical time elapsed from "idea" to "aircraft first flight" used to be 2 years. USSR went away, cold war ended, new hardware deliveries fell to a trickle - but the spending remained, and the money billed to an inflated process.

-scheherazade

At least Obama put a stop to it. Except for the CIA facility at Mogadishu's airport where they held people in an underground dungeon and comforted them with some electric current through the genitals. Yeah, except for that.

Also, let's not talk about the torture camps run by the military, by contractors or by the Iraqi forces trained and instructed by folks like Colonels James Steele, who had already run Salvadoran death squads. And while we're at it, let's not talk about the outsourcing of torture to the goons of Gaddafi, Assad and Mubarak.

By the way, Brazil just published documents about 20 years of torture. Who trained the torturers? The usual suspects...

I disagree, a better comparison would be a remote rural town in the US compared to the remote rural town in China, since what we are comparing is the ability to withstand the same shaking. Comparing earthquake damage to tornado damage is useless and teaches nothing.
In small rural American towns you have the same issues with corruption of inspectors, and also many unscrupulous contractors that will cut any corner they can to make more money (that's the same everywhere, but with less oversight there's more opportunity to do so in smaller communities).
Comparing the damage of a 6.1 in China to the near complete lack of damage and complete lack of injury from the 6.1 in Fortuna/Ferndale, Ca, for instance, would be a much better comparison of apples to apples.

It's unfair to compare this remote rural town with a big urban city with well established infrastructure. A better comparison would be the tornadoes that hit rural towns in the US, annually destroying many homes and taking several lives. Yes, those houses could be built to be tornado-proof, but they aren't because it would cost 3x as much and the average residents are too poor to afford it (and storm shelters and advanced warning make it less deadly)

(Of course, China should still be more strict about building codes. Although they'd have to tackle corruption first- too easy to bribe inspectors, and too many contractors cut corners to save money. They are rightly focused on improving food safety now - what other country would you find counterfeit eggs?? )

Free market doesn't come into it. The internet itself is not a free market invention. It is essentially a public service that we allow contractors (the ISPs) to maintain in the same way that building companies maintain roads.

The internet itself (i.e. the physical network and the IP layer) grew out of DARPANet; a US government-funded defence initiative and the world wide web (the HTTP layer, HTML, etc) came from CERN; an EU multi-state research project.

The point is that the infrastructure itself was not created by the cable companies, they merely built on it. And they have no more right to decide to charge for different data than a road maintenance company does to charge different freight companies different rates.

The results/consequences of the '03 invasion was predicted and understood from the get-go, but of course, "peace" was never an intended goal.. The "weapons of mass destruction" narrative that was sold to the American public, and the concomitant "unintended consequences" of a destabilized region is, in fact, a much-welcomed result by those who stand to benefit greatly from an entrenched perpetuation of a constant war and continued unrest: the crony contractors, the kleptocrats, the war profiteers, and the politicians whose very wealth is contingent upon the continued (mis)perception of power and control.

So long as there are citizens who remain convinced of the *lies and the impoverished 'patriots' who are willing to "die for a cause" (and have their deaths revered like martyrs: "NO THANKS for your service!"), there will always be a "market" for wasted "blood and treasure" which comes to the benefit of some and at the expense of everybody else.. .. for the foresseeable future and for many many generations to come... Amen.

EDIT: Wouldn't it be more efficient if Obama funded ISIS directly and cut out the middlemen? I guess doing so would require that the administration gives up its layer of plausible deniability.

Some answers here from the cyclist. SHE responds to a lot of the comments from others: http://www.altdaily.com/features/news/121-opinion36/6911-first-person-a-vdot-contractor-hit-me-my-bike-on-a-pedestrian-bridge

What you seem to overlook is that Samsom is basically a PR guy. As far as the Bilderberg attendees go, he ranks rather low on the totem pole, way below monarchs, American military brass, defense contractors, oil barons, and the many others with more real power.

For anyone that hasn't followed what this is about...

For the problems itemized in this video.
Loss of :
- power brake assist
- airbags
- power steering.

This affair was actually about 1 specific issue :
The detent in the key socket rotator was not as strong as it should have been.

What that specifically meant was that :
IF you had a large heavy keychain on your key, and you jerked it, or knocked it such that it swings hard, the keychain could pull on the key hard enough to turn the key to the OFF position.

So when the car would turn off, you'd lose the power brakes, power steering, and airbags would be inactive.

Under "normal" circumstances, this wasn't a problem.
But for the folks with a christmas tree hanging off of their key, it was a chance to turn off their car while driving.

(side note : Crying about the power steering and power brakes really misses the big issue : The steering lock can kick in while moving... which apparently no one gave enough of a crap about to think for the 2 seconds it takes to notice that elephant in the room)



In this case, the contention over whether or not the core problem with the key socket was negligence boils down to semantics.

Car companies buy their parts from sub contractors.
They spec out the parts, and sub contractors manufacture the parts 'to spec'.

The spec isn't a 'hard' requirement.
If you say "5 Newtons of force", that doesn't mean that 4.999999999999123 Newtons is unacceptable.

Actually, it's standard for ~all parts to not be exactly the spec. They just have to be 'close enough to work right'.

And for that matter, many of the numbers in various specs are 'off the cuff' values that are 'generally known to work fine'. Getting hung up on a specific number isn't salient - what matters is 'does it work right?'.

So the question becomes, what is "good enough to work right?".
In practice, that ends up being a judgment call. Often made by engineers that try out the parts.


Here's where congress and GM differed.

Congress said : The ignition socket wasn't 100% exactly what GM had in the spec that they sent to the subcontractors, so it was wrong from day 1, and they knew it wasn't 100% the spec since pre-production. Hence, GM was negligent.

GM said : Of course it wasn't 100% exactly the spec. That was to be expected. At the time, we had no indication that the actual provided part was so far out of spec that it would not work right.


My personal take :
If this was something as simple as 'actual malfunctions/breakages of parts', then it would be black and white.
But in these cases, nothing was actually broken or malfunctioning.
So you had to rely on statistics and analysis to identify the issue.
Statistics require data, data requires evidence, evidence requires time to collect.
Seeing as how the vast majority of cars had no problem, this isn't the kind of thing that just leaps out at you.

Since any given car, when made in massive quantities, will have all kinds of multiple complaints about multiple systems, you can't just go back and point at incident(s) X and Y and say that it was the smoking gun - because if it was, then you'd have a pile of smoking guns for every other part out there.
Every instance of every part has a small chance of going bad, and with enough cars, you'll have a lot of 'item A went bad' reports to sift through.
You can't jump to the conclusion after the first couple reports that the part is improper, and it's unrealistic to expect anyone to immediately make that conclusion.
In order to make an informed determination, you simply need a pattern to emerge.

(I listened to the CSPAN coverage of the hearings while driving.)

-scheherazade

There is no special procedure in these matters.
You just leave a note, and then go about your business.
They will contact you whenever they return to the damaged property, you exchange insurance info, and deal with it.
Nothing else to it. No rituals. No special calls or reports. No authorities to inform. It's between you and the property owner.
And unless you have some reason to believe that they will return any moment, waiting around for them to do so is pointless. So yeah, you leave.

I believe you may be confused by my statement "his insurance will cover it".
The "he" in that statement, was the sub-contractor who's saw flew off.

-scheherazade

While I see where you're coming from, I have a few issues with what you're saying:

1. The organization you're referring to is staffed, has offices and overheads. Assuming it isn't corrupt and skimming and holding multi-million-dollar appreciation nights and galas (and we probably shouldn't assume that it isn't), the money you're giving this organization still gets portioned off quite a bit. Your point about helping on the systemic level is quite valid (provided you are channelling your concern into actually doing so), but I'd look more into local community health centres or the nonprofit down the street, and still, that money isn't guaranteed to reach the person in front of you. Much as a social worker can help him connect to essential services, advocate for fair and affordable housing, counsel him on trauma, etc, he will still need money for a lot of basic needs.

2. You are vastly oversimplifying the needs and situation of every person on the street. That person may actually depend on money from strangers to make rent (being that welfare barely puts a dent in even the lowest affordable housing costs), feed kids, buy food that isn't McDonald's or canned food, get a haircut, or a million other things that everyone needs money for.

3. Even if that person intends to spend some of your money on oxy or crack, it is not in your right to judge that. While addiction can very generally be called "bad", this person may suffer from chronic pain, trauma, mental illnesses, or some combination and short of governments finally realizing that housing and caring for the poor is cheaper than incarcerating them and treating emergency health conditions, self-medicating is the only reasonable way they can continue functioning for another day. This isn't even an unlikely scenario; think how easily someone can go from your (or my) comfy life to homeless, poor and desperate. It isn't always "bad decisions"; you could be a contractor that falls and gets a serious injury, hit by a car, stricken with a mental illness you have no control over, traumatized earlier in life, born into a high-risk environment or social strata, or anything else, and then start sliding from there. You develop an addiction, your income comes to a screeching halt, your loved ones can't or get too tired to support you, bills that were routine become suffocating, and there you are on the street, pain exploding relentlessly in your body/mind, on the other side of the decision, seeing chins turned up and eyes turned away from you and hearing people mutter "Don't give anything to him; he's just gonna use it to get high," to each other.

4. Not a single person in the video (and really, in just about every situation you see on whatever street you're on) speaks to or even looks at the guy.

While I wouldn't expect that everyone gives money to folks on the street (I myself have only done it a few times), it frustrates me to hear people insist that nobody should. "He's just going to use it for drugs/booze" is a presumptuous and ignorant statement and mindset.

One more thing: if you really care about urban poverty and those suffering from it, the biggest thing (IMO) you can do is vote for politicians/parties who openly and strongly support social services and welfare, then hold them to their promises. I don't make a ton of money, but I am happy to pay higher taxes and lose some luxuries if it means people who need help just to get by get it.

This is also Mike Judge's new project. Apparently he has a physics degree and worked as a software engineer for a defense contractor before Beavis and Butt-head. Weird.

contractors-stone has been nominated for banination by kulpims. This may be due to abuse or violations of the posting guidelines. If this nomination is seconded, the account will be permanently disabled.

Actually, the proof that something did not end up in the hands of the Chinese, the Russians, or myself for that matter, is quite difficult, given that evidence of absence is impossible to obtain. However, the absence of evidence to the claim that they have gained access to information through Snowden himself is reason enough for me.

You want proof that nothing was transfered to them? Might as well try to prove the non-existance of the famous tea pot in orbit.

So the basic argument boils down to motivation as well as credibility of claims.

His motivation to keep access to his material restricted to the selected group of journalists is apparent from his own interviews. They are supposed to be the check on the government, they lack the information to fullfil the role, they need access to correct (what he perceived to be) a wrong, namely a grave breach of your consitution on a previously unheard of scale.
Providing access to Russia or China would instantly negate all hope of ever not drawing the short straw in this mess, as the US is the only country on the planet who can provide him with amnesty and therefore safety.

So why would he do it? For a shot at asylum? You know as well as I do that (permanent) asylum in China/Russia is worthless if the US is after you. Europe could guarantee one's safety, but given the lack of sovereignty vis-a-vis the US, it would not be an option.

That leaves credibility of claims. And that's where my first reason comes into play, the one you put down as "naive". His opponents, those in positions of power, be it inside government or the press, have a track record of being... let's not mince words here, lying sacks of shit. James Clapper's act of perjury on front of Congress is just the most prominent manifestation of it. The entire bunch lied their asses off during the preparation of the invasion of Iraq, they lied their asses off during the revelations triggered by Chelsea Manning and they lied their asses off about the total und unrelenting surveillance of American citizens in violation of their constitutional rights.

If you think supervision of the NSA by the Select Committee on Intelligence is actually working, I suggest you take a look at statements by Senator Wyden. The NSA even plays them for fools. Hell, Bruce Schneier was recently approached by members of Congress to explain to them what the NSA was doing, because the NSA refused to. Great oversight, works like a charm. By the way, it's the same fucking deal with GCHQ and the BND.

So yes, the fella who "stole" data is actually a trustworthy figure, because a) his claims were true and b) his actions pulled off the veil that covered the fact that 320 million Americans had their private data stolen and were sold out by agencies of their own government in conjunction with private intelligence contractors.

What else...

Ah, yeah. "Sloppy" and "stupid". Again, if he was sloppy and stupid, what does that say about the internal control structure of the intelligence industry? They didn't notice shit, they still claim to be unaware of what precisely he took with him. Great security, fellas.

"He could have allowed the press to do it's job without disclosing a much of what has been released."

He disclosed nothing. He is not an experienced journalist and therefore, by his own admission, not qualified to make the call what to publish and how. That's why he handed it over to Barton Gellman at the WaPo, Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian and Laura Poitras, who worked closely with Der Spiegel.

If Spiegel, WaPo and Guardian are not reputable institutions of journalism, none are. So he did precisely what you claim he should have done: he allowed the press to do its bloody job and released fuck all himself.

As for the cheap shot at not being an American: seventy years ago, your folks liberated us from the plague of fascism, brought us freedom. Am I supposed to just sit here and watch my brothers and sisters in the US become the subjects of total surveillance, the kind my country suffered from during two dictatorships in the last century?

Ironically, that would be un-American, at least the way I understand it.

And there's nothing gleeful about my concerns. I am deeply furious about this shit and even more so about the apathy of people all around the world. You think I want Americans to suffer from the same shit we went through as a petty form of payback?

Fuck that. It's the intelligence industry that I'm gunning for. Your nationality doesn't mean squat, some intelligence agency has its crosshairs on you wherever you live. It just happens to be an American citizen who had the balls to provide us with the info to finally try and protect citizens in all countries from the overreaching abuse by the intelligence industry.

In fact, I'd rather worry about our own massive problems within Europe (rise of fascism in Greece, 60% youth unemployment, unelected governments, etc). So can we please just dismantle all these spy agencies and get on with our lives?

Sorry if this is incoherent, but it's late and I'm even more pissed off than usual.

No, they were not put rest. To prove that the terabytes of data Snowden stole did not end up in the hand the Chinese and Russian intelligence agents is actually what requires the extraordinary proof.

Your two reasons seem really naive.
-So what he has told the truth so far? He has an ocean of stolen secrets, all of which are true to draw from. This guy who has lied and stolen and sold out his country is now some trustworthy figure? OK.

-Snowden has actually proved quite sloppy and stupid. He was an IT contractor, not some mastermind or strategist. That's why he indiscriminately grabbed all the data he could and scrammed to the two paragons of freedom and human rights: Russia and China. What a careful thinking genius Snowden is.

He could have allowed the press to do it's job without disclosing a much of what has been released.

Lastly, I wouldn't expect a non-american to care about the harm he's done to my country. Just try not to be so gleeful about it.

-