This is Not the Jobs Program You Are Looking For

Or at least it isn't the one you should be looking for if you want something with waste approaching a rationally low level of waste. After all, no project undertaken by humans will be perfect. But using massive "defense" projects as job projects is more wasteful than usual. But there's wasteful and then there's two of the most disgraceful excuses for defense programs in existence that have, so far as I can tell, continue to exist and grow solely because of jobs. First up, that favorite that has received tons of bad press, the F-35. It has been featured on 60 Minutes in a relative puff piece, slammed as not really being stealthy in The Daily Beast, had its multiple software glitches pointed out in the IEEE Spectrum (The newsletter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.), and most directly for what I'm pointing out in this post, the Washington post has a column pointing out that the entire problem riddled program shows the complete hypocrisy of anyone who claims to be worried about the deficit even as they push for this program to continue. As pointed out in the Plum Line column:

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was supposed to extend American air superiority deep into the 21st century. The F-35 was designed to evade not just enemy fighters, but political accountability as well. Its subcontracts were spread out over 1,300 separate companies in 45 states, ensuring that members of Congress from throughout the land have an interest in keeping the project going. It’s an incredibly poor way to create jobs (depending on how you count, a single job supported by the F-35 costs the taxpayer as much as $8 million). We’ll spend around $400 billion to build the planes — nearly twice what the program was supposed to cost when it began. When this happens, nobody gets punished or held “accountable.” We just keep shoveling taxpayer money into the Lockheed coffers. And that doesn’t count the cost of repairing and maintaining the planes, which could push the cost past $1 trillion over time.

Then comes this gem courtesy of iO9. Something about the idea of spending billions to roll out a missile defense system whose functionality is still highly questionable is a pretty big waste of money as well. Even an L.A. Times article pointing out the success of a test in June included this confidence building section.

Sunday's test carried high stakes for the system, called GMD, which was declared operational a decade ago and has so far cost about $40 billion. A failure could have sharpened skepticism among members of Congress about the missile shield's reliability and cost. Before Sunday, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency had conducted 16 tests of the system's ability to intercept and destroy a target. Eight had ended in failure. Sunday's outcome may ease doubts but is unlikely to dispel them entirely. The test, like all previous ones, was carefully staged: Specialists operating the system knew the target's precise dimensions, expected trajectory, speed and time of launch — information they would not have in combat conditions.

Now, as a science fiction fan, techie and all around lover of cool technological toys I have nothing against amazing defense technology. When it works and when it can actually be deployed at a cost somewhere in the same solar system as the original estimate. But when utter garbage like these projects and the many others that have been foisted off onto the American public over the last few decades in the name not only of defending the country but in the name of jobs that have carefully been distributed to key congressional districts then I don't like them even a little bit. I cannot help but wonder how many bridges, roads, sewer systems, water systems and other vital parts of our national infrastructure could be repaired with that wasted money. There are a lot of things that need to be done in this country and programs that produce far too few jobs for far too much money hurt us, they don't help us. Cross posted at The Moderate Voice

Politicians for Pot

The Daily Beast reports on politicians who are making the legalization of marijuana part of their campaigns. I would think that any candidate who is really and truly fiscally responsible should be able to run on that platform because this is the most inane and fiscally irresponsible part of the War on Drugs. The amount of money wasted on prosecuting and incarcerating people who use or even sell marijuana is huge. I just don't buy into the arguments that it is more harmful than alcohol. Even if you could prove that it is marginally more harmful the problem would still be the big fail that is the attempt to handle it through criminalizing it. Cross posted at The Moderate Voice

A Debt Ceiling Petition

After the near disasters in 2011 and earlier this month I've come to believe that the only way to avoid this kind of idiocy is to take away the political toy that is the debt ceiling. No political party should be able to threaten the economy of the nation for an instant whether it's to extort concessions from their opponents or to "make a point". We don't have to default to create potential economic problems and it should just not come up. I was surprised to find on the We the People site at whitehouse.gov that no one had yet thought of this but they hadn't so I created a petition on the site that reads as follows:

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO: work with Congress to eliminate the debt ceiling Since the budgetary processes that have been in place since 1974 serve the same purposes as those originally envisioned by the legislators who wrote the 2nd Liberty Bond law in 1917 and also those of the members of Congress who modified it in 1939 to cover all general debt of the United States government the law should be eliminated or superseded by new legislation that would provide long term stability to purchasers of debt of the United States government. The law currently seems suitable only as a political Sword of Damocles that both political parties have used with varying degrees of responsibility. Since that level of responsibility has noticeably decreased in recent history no political party should have this "weapon" available any longer so it should be removed.

If you're interested in signing it the link is here. Cross posted at The Moderate Voice

Commodities markets look free...to be rigged, that is.

JPMorgan looks like they are about to cut a deal concerning the rigging of energy markets. This comes right on the tail of news about aluminum markets having been rigged by some of the biggest players. Gee, could anyone have any questionable motives for pushing hard for smaller government and less effective regulations?

The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

PBS Newshour's blog has a guest column on an issue that really bugs me. The executives of tech companies gripe about how few workers they have who meet their needs. Do they really? How exacting are the job descriptions they use? Do the people they bring in using H1-B visas really meet those requirements or are they just useful in that they'll do anything to keep those visas including working absolutely insane hours, having no family or social life and never even thinking about asking for a raise? After all, if you hire an American they might do something entirely unreasonable like taking time off, expecting reasonable compensation given their expertise or some other shocking and completely unacceptable behavior for an employee. I've read articles about this issue online at sites like ComputerWorld, CIO and others and have seen IT professionals in the comments section mention that they don't recommend to their own children that they consider IT as a career. If you want students to consider STEM careers, do something about what's happening to the employees in STEM fields.

So Much for Sunshine

Brendan Greeley at BusinessWeek writes about Congress's really classified work, giving a whole new meaning to "I've Got a Secret". Apparently the big favors some legislators would like to do for their friends and big contributors should be something that none of the voters should be able to find out about.

Conflicting strategy messages from the FBI

The FBI, among other government agencies, has been warning us against coming cyber-terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, they put forth proposals that will significantly weaken computer security - h/t Boing Boing. As the article points out, you can't leave chinks in your defenses for the sake of FBI surveillance and expect software to still be secure against others breaking into the system.

Blame Congress For the IRS-Tea Party Mess | Mother Jones

Among all the faux outrage, the claims of paranoia being justified and attempts to link the IRS actions in Cincinnati to the White House,remember this essential truth, that the single entity most responsible for what happened is most likely Congress itself for passing such a vague, even mushy law.

Were the Benghazi emails altered | The Moderate Voice

The Moderate Voice links to reports that it appears that the emails GOP critics of the administration are trying to seize upon as evidence of a cover up appear to have been altered. This is on top of revelations that in fact these emails had been shown to intelligence committee members, including some of the Republicans who'd been attacking the Obama administration back in March and dismissed as not really proving anything.

Even if all of these allegations against President Obama are thoroughly disproven, including the ones concerning the IRS I have absolutely no doubt that the Republican faithful will be talking about how everyone knows that Obama was responsible for the deaths in Benghazi and used the IRS against his political enemies for many years to come.

Medicare Pulls Back Curtain On Hospital Bills

While NPR tells us that Medicare has pulled back the curtain it might be more apt to say it shows how hospitals pull bills out of the hat. It is, after all, an area in which illusion and delusion run rampant. The NPR talk show Talk of the Nation had guests discussing this issue and one of them made the point that the hospitals actually have no idea what the actual cost of the services they provide is to them. There is no health care system in this country. There is health care chaos that works in spite of itself. So far.

Weird Anti-Science

Two different articles on Slate point out different aspects of Republican dislike of science. First Phil Plait on his Bad Astronomy blog addresses the broad anti-science agenda expressed by multiple GOP politicians, especially Lamar Smith who apparently thinks that peer review is highly overrated when compared with political review. The other article is actually linked to by Plait's article but is more focused on the dislike of research in the social sciences.

I consider it reasonable to judge some of those attitudes by those who hold them and one of the Republican members of the house mentioned in the article on the attacks on social science research is a real gem. When Rep. Bill Posey had been in office for a whole two months he became the first Republican to propose a birther bill, one of those masterpieces of legislation whose sole purpose was to legitimize those who thought Barack Obama was the result of a strange conspiracy to put a non-citizen in the White House. Basically he criticized multiple research studies on the basis of them not being vital to national security or our national interest. Apparently the concept that learning new things is inherently in our best interest lies somewhere beyond the ability of his mind to grasp. It's also rather sad that apparently Posey believes this doozy of a claim:

Posey slightly softened his tone. “I'm not advocating we stop all the social-science study spending,” he said. “I just think it might be appropriate that much of that be left to the private sector.” How much, though? Someone should probably conduct a study.

I'm not aware of any private sector funding for real research in these fields that isn't interested in predetermined answers, are you?

Nat Geo fact checks some science conspiracy theories

National Geographic does rational people bombarded with misleading claims about several issues in science a favor with their article Fact Checking 6 Persistent Science Conspiracy Theories. Back in 2009 Scientific American had a piece about why people believe in conspiracy theories.

In the age of internet research being so easy it would also help if people would ask themselves if an idea really passes the smell test, do some research on it and not accept one source as being authoritative and consider the reputation of every source they find while doing their research.