The weakness of the Democratic Party is not due to an underrepresentation of venture capitalists and tech company board members.
—Alex Lawson of Social Security Works
This was in response to the self serving proposals put forward by WTF (Really, their initials), a goup of self-absorbed narcissistic Silicon Valley dweebs, which come down to “more of the same”.
What you may not know is that the Trump administration is talking with Prince about increasing the mercenary involvement in Afghanistan, and that Betsy DeVos has invested in another mercenary firm run by her son in law:
Department of Education Secretary and billionaire heiress Betsy DeVos invested in a defense contracting firm owned by her son-in-law at the same time her brother was helping the Trump administration craft a new Afghan war strategy — one that called on the military to use more private contractors.
Betsy DeVos invested between $100,000 and $250,000 in LexTM3, LLC in May according to U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE) disclosure reviewed by the International Business Times. (Disclosure forms give only a range for the value of purchases.) LexTM3 is a defense contractor led by CEO and co-founder Nate Lowery, DeVos’ son-in-law. The company has received 70 contracts worth $1,425,248 from the Defense Department since the company formed from the merger of Lex Products Corp and TM3 Systems Inc. in September 2015.
DeVos has invested repeatedly in LexTM3 since Donald Trump became president. Disclosure forms show she invested between $250,001 and $500,000 in LexTM3 in February and in March, and between $100,001 and $250,000 in April. This is all after she disclosed that she owned a total of between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000 worth of the company in an initial disclosure form submitted the day before Trump took office in January.
But DeVos’ most recent investment was filed with the OGE on May 30, the day before her brother Erik Prince published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for a new approach to the Afghan war and urging the U.S. military to use “cheaper private solutions.”
It’s repulsive, but by the standards of the Trump family, members of the Trump administration, and her own family (Eric Prince and Nate Lowrey are renting out mercs for a living) she’s a piker.
And zombies.
In my neighborhood, I frequently walk past “shop local” signs in the windows of struggling stores. Yet I don’t feel guilty ordering most of my family’s household goods on Amazon. In a world of fair competition, there will be winners and losers.
But when a mail truck pulls up filled to the top with Amazon boxes for my neighbors and me, I do feel some guilt. Like many close observers of the shipping business, I know a secret about the federal government’s relationship with Amazon: The U.S. Postal Service delivers the company’s boxes well below its own costs. Like an accelerant added to a fire, this subsidy is speeding up the collapse of traditional retailers in the U.S. and providing an unfair advantage for Amazon.
………
In 2001 the quantity of first-class mail in the U.S. began to decline thanks to the internet. Today it is down 40% from its peak levels, according to Postal Service data. But though there are fewer letters to put into each mailbox, the Postal Service still visits 150 million residences and businesses daily. With less traditional mail to deliver, the service has filled its spare capacity by delivering more boxes.
Other companies, such as UPS and FedEx , compete with the Postal Service to deliver packages. Lawmakers, to their credit, wanted a level playing field between the post office and its private competitors. The 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act made it illegal for the Postal Service to price parcel delivery below its cost.
………
In 2007 the Postal Service and its regulator determined that, at a minimum, 5.5% of the agency’s fixed costs must be allocated to packages and similar products. A decade later, around 25% of its revenue comes from packages, but their share of fixed costs has not kept pace. First-class mail effectively subsidizes the national network, and the packages get a free ride. An April analysis from Citigroup estimates that if costs were fairly allocated, on average parcels would cost $1.46 more to deliver. It is as if every Amazon box comes with a dollar or two stapled to the packing slip—a gift card from Uncle Sam.
Amazon is big enough to take full advantage of “postal injection,” and that has tipped the scales in the internet giant’s favor. Select high-volume shippers are able to drop off presorted packages at the local Postal Service depot for “last mile” delivery at cut-rate prices. With high volumes and warehouses near the local depots, Amazon enjoys low rates unavailable to its competitors. My analysis of available data suggests that around two-thirds of Amazon’s domestic deliveries are made by the Postal Service. It’s as if Amazon gets a subsidized space on every mail truck.
The US Post Office has been subsidizing package delivery for decades, and it has continued to do so even though this was forbidden by Congress in 2006.
This is not surprising. It is a feature of the current economy that subsidies (copyright, patent, implicit bailouts, the Pentagon, stadium deals, etc.) are at the core of the businesses of the big players in almost any US industry.
The fact that they are taking from the rest of us for their profits is a major driver of inequality.
What pronoun do you use for a transgendered ship?
In rather unsurprising news there are some Democratic Senators looking to cut a deal with Republicans on healthcare.
At the top of the list, of course, is Democrat in Name Only (DINO), and father of the price gouging CEO of Mylan Pharmaceuticals, Joe Manchin will give a bipartisan gloss to something aweful. Primary him, and failing that vote republican
With Senate Republicans struggling to cobble together the votes needed to pass an Obamacare replacement measure, bipartisan talks on health care legislation have picked up pace on Capitol Hill.
Multiple lawmakers and high-level congressional aides have told The Daily Beast that moderates from each party have begun taking the temperature of the other side for a more modest approach to reforming the health care system. Aides and lawmakers insist that these talks are in their nascent stages. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), in an interview, odescribed them as both informal and ephemeral.
Any Republican plan will kill tens of thousands of people a year, and engaging in some narcissistic strutting to polish your bipartisan street cred is intellectually, morally, and politically bankrupt.
Obamacare sucks, but any Republican plan will make it far worse.
Barring anything that directly moves a public healthcare solution, like adding a public option, the response to Republicans has to be no.
Like pretty much every major player in the real estate market in New York City, Trump aggressively aided the Russian mob in laundering their proceeds through property purchases:
In 1984, a Russian émigré named David Bogatin went shopping for apartments in New York City. The 38-year-old had arrived in America seven years before, with just $3 in his pocket. But for a former pilot in the Soviet Army—his specialty had been shooting down Americans over North Vietnam—he had clearly done quite well for himself. Bogatin wasn’t hunting for a place in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn enclave known as “Little Odessa” for its large population of immigrants from the Soviet Union. Instead, he was fixated on the glitziest apartment building on Fifth Avenue, a gaudy, 58-story edifice with gold-plated fixtures and a pink-marble atrium: Trump Tower.
A monument to celebrity and conspicuous consumption, the tower was home to the likes of Johnny Carson, Steven Spielberg, and Sophia Loren. Its brash, 38-year-old developer was something of a tabloid celebrity himself. Donald Trump was just coming into his own as a serious player in Manhattan real estate, and Trump Tower was the crown jewel of his growing empire. From the day it opened, the building was a hit—all but a few dozen of its 263 units had sold in the first few months. But Bogatin wasn’t deterred by the limited availability or the sky-high prices. The Russian plunked down $6 million to buy not one or two, but five luxury condos. The big check apparently caught the attention of the owner. According to Wayne Barrett, who investigated the deal for the Village Voice, Trump personally attended the closing, along with Bogatin.
If the transaction seemed suspicious—multiple apartments for a single buyer who appeared to have no legitimate way to put his hands on that much money—there may have been a reason. At the time, Russian mobsters were beginning to invest in high-end real estate, which offered an ideal vehicle to launder money from their criminal enterprises. “During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.” When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.
In 1987, just three years after he attended the closing with Trump, Bogatin pleaded guilty to taking part in a massive gasoline-bootlegging scheme with Russian mobsters. After he fled the country, the government seized his five condos at Trump Tower, saying that he had purchased them to “launder money, to shelter and hide assets.” A Senate investigation into organized crime later revealed that Bogatin was a leading figure in the Russian mob in New York. His family ties, in fact, led straight to the top: His brother ran a $150 million stock scam with none other than Semion Mogilevich, whom the FBI considers the “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia. At the time, Mogilevich—feared even by his fellow gangsters as “the most powerful mobster in the world”—was expanding his multibillion-dollar international criminal syndicate into America.
………
The very nature of Trump’s businesses—all of which are privately held, with few reporting requirements—makes it difficult to root out the truth about his financial deals. And the world of Russian oligarchs and organized crime, by design, is shadowy and labyrinthine. For the past three decades, state and federal investigators, as well as some of America’s best investigative journalists, have sifted through mountains of real estate records, tax filings, civil lawsuits, criminal cases, and FBI and Interpol reports, unearthing ties between Trump and Russian mobsters like Mogilevich. To date, no one has documented that Trump was even aware of any suspicious entanglements in his far-flung businesses, let alone that he was directly compromised by the Russian mafia or the corrupt oligarchs who are closely allied with the Kremlin. So far, when it comes to Trump’s ties to Russia, there is no smoking gun.
But even without an investigation by Congress or a special prosecutor, there is much we already know about the president’s debt to Russia. A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part. Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics. “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s.
(emphasis mine)
Some observations:
This is something that an enterprising reporter could have covered during the election, but they were all to busy covering Trump’s latest tweets.
Seriously, This ain’t rocket science,* this is just decent shoe leather reporting.
I get that everyone goes to J-School imagines themselves meeting with Mark Felt (Deep Throat) in a parking garage, but most good reporting is an artifact of hard work, connecting the dots, and understanding the institutions that you are investigating.
*Full Disclosure, in 1999-2000 and 1996-1998, I worked as a mechanical engineer for what is now Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, and I have some claim to actually having been a rocket scientist.
The bill was promulgated by a Republican state senator who had been successfully sued by the union for wage theft:
Earlier today, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, signed the state’s Farm Act, which prohibits farmworkers’ unions from collecting union dues directly from workers’ paychecks.
Labor activists say that the provision in the bill, SB 615, was aimed at the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, which represents 10,000 farmworkers in North Carolina. Earlier this year, FLOC was able to force a major settlement from North Carolina State [Senator] Brent Jackson.
“This attack on farm workers’ rights is most likely in retaliation for a series of lawsuits brought by farm workers and their union (Farm Labor Organizing Committee) over wage theft and mistreatment on several farms in Eastern NC — including one owned by Sen. Brent Jackson, who sponsored this bill and chaired the Senate conference committee” said North Carolina AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer MaryBe McMillian. “It is a clear conflict of interest and blatant abuse of power for legislators who are also growers to push policies that allow them to gain more and more profit on the backs of their workers.”
Organized labor had hoped that Democratic Governor Roy Cooper would veto the bill,meeting with him twice to lobby against it. Yesterday, however, they received word that the Governor intended to sign it.
Normally, I’d be supportive of someone like Governor Cooper, but he could have vetoed it, even though there was a veto proof supermajority, or he could have allowed it to become law without his signature, signifying his disapproval.
He did neither, and I will neither forgive nor forget.
“Bernie called me the day after our election here,” Jeremy Corbyn said in an interview published Thursday by the Intercept. “I was half-asleep watching something on television. And Bernie comes on to say, well done on the campaign, and I was interested in your campaigning ideas. Where did you get them from? And I said, well, you, actually.”
Corbyn, who won the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015 and held it after a 2016 challenge, has frequently been cited by Sanders as an example of how left politics can win. This year, a snap election that began with predictions about Corbyn driving Labour into the wilderness ended with a series of surprise gains, and Prime Minister Theresa May clinging to power in a controversial deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party. According to a post-election analysis by Ipsos Mori, over half of eligible British voters under age 30 turned out — double the youth turnout rate in some American elections. That led to surprising Labour gains in cities with large universities, with student turnout overturning large Conservative majorities.
This amuses me no end.
You know that clusterf%$# of a healthcare bill that Mitch McConnell is trying to push through the Senate?
It turns out that it exempts the US Senate from their “reforms”. Funny that, huh?
Senate Republicans included a provision that exempts members of Congress and their staff from part of their latest health care plan.
This exemption could have the effect of ensuring that members of Congress have coverage for a wider array of benefits than other Americans who purchase their own coverage.
A Senate Republican aide confirmed that the exemption existed but was unable to comment as to the specific effect it would have. The aide said it was included to ensure that the bill hewed to the chamber’s strict reconciliation rules that limit the policies this health bill can include.
The exemption is similar to the one that existed in the House health bill. After Vox reported on its existence, the House voted to close the loophole — and the Senate aide expected their chamber to follow the same path.
The revised Senate health bill draft released Thursday lets health insurers offer plans that do not cover the Affordable Care Act’s essential health benefits, which requires insurers to include a wide array of benefits such as maternity care and mental health services.
Insurers can offer plans without these benefits — unless they’re selling coverage to members of Congress and their staff, who are required to buy coverage on the health law marketplaces. The exemption says this part of the law still applies to any plans sold to Congress.
So not a surprise.
I have always wanted horns on my helmet, but I’ve wanted to have squeeze bulb type horns.
In any case, this note shows that the Norse were far more sophisticated than the generally thought.
In dry dock, stern view
Hull patch
More Damage
Another view of patch
Following its collision with a cargo ship, the USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) is in dry dock, and it got seriously damaged.
Now we have pictures, and this ain’t just door dings:
A new series of photos released on Wednesday by U.S. 7th fleet now show the hidden damage suffered by USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) from its June 17 collision with a merchant vessel.
The pictures of the guided missile destroyer from the Navy’s dry dock facility in Yokosuka, Japan show the size of the hole the bulbous bow of ACX Crystal punched into Fitzgerald’s starboard side amidships below the waterline.
Four five foot by 20-foot hull patches have been installed to cover the hull breach welded in place by divers since the ship was been pier-side following the collision.
While published images from Fitzgerald show the extensive damage to the ship’s superstructure above the waterline – including the collision’s effect on the ship’s A/N-SPY-1D(v) radar and the crushed commander’s cabin – the Wednesday images are the first that show how badly the destroyer was wounded below the waterline.
The below-the-waterline collision flooded two berthing spaces and one machinery space and resulted in the death of seven sailors.
This really is kind of horrifying to look at in detail.
I do look forward into an inquiry as to what happened, but US Navy culture being what it is, it is clear that the career of the Fitzgerald’s skipper is over.
When Cuomo declared an emergency in the New York City subway, and I noted that the emergency was largely precipitated by Cuomo’s hostility to and neglect of mass transit in New York City.
Well, now some of the specifics are coming out, and now we know that just a year ago, Andrew Cuomo ordered the MTA to cut a $5 million dollar check to ski slopes in upstate New York:
What’s come to be known as “the winter that wasn’t” in 2015-16 was so bad for business at state-owned ski centers such as Whiteface Mountain that Gov. Andrew Cuomo swooped in late last winter and directed a major downstate authority, cash-strapped in its own right, to expedite funds to this region’s state Olympic Regional Development Authority.
In March 2016, Cuomo’s administration directed the downstate-based Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the largest public transit authority in the U.S., to write a $4.9 million check to ORDA after its ski centers ailed from a lack of business amid 2015-16’s mild weather. ORDA owns and operates Whiteface Mountain Ski Center in Wilmington, Gore Mountain Ski Center in North Creek and Belleayre Ski Center in the Catskills.
The inter-authority transfer of funds was atypical, as Cuomo’s administration told the MTA to send the money directly to ORDA rather than to the state’s Division of Budget, which could then reallocate funds to ORDA.
………
Cuomo also has pledged $20 million worth of upgrades to its winter sports facilities at Whiteface and Gore mountains and at Mount Van Hoevenberg in Lake Placid, with a specific focus of emphasizing year-round attractions. At Mount Van Hoevenberg — currently home of the state’s bobsled-luge-skeleton track, cross-country skiing and biathlon venues — the state wants to finance the construction of the longest “mountain coaster” in the United States. At Whiteface, the state plans to build one of the longest zip lines in North America. Cuomo said in January that Whiteface and Gore aren’t good enough to compete globally without upscale amenities and conveniences and year-round attractions.
What a complete sh%$heel, which probably means the DNC is probably grooming him to be the 2020 Democratic nominee for President.
Dean Baker, who called the housing bubble collapse, and sold his house before it happened has a remarkably evocative and accurate description of modern economics. He calls them the inept firefighters club:
Suppose that our fire department was staffed with out-of-shape incompetents who didn’t know how to handle a fire hose. That would be really bad news, but it wouldn’t be obvious most of the time because we don’t often see major fires. The inadequacy of the fire department would become apparent only when a major fire hit and we were left with a vast amount of unnecessary death and destruction. This is essentially the story of modern economics.
The problem is not that modern economics lacks the tools needed to understand the economy. Just as with firefighting, the basics have been well known for a long time. The problem is with the behavior and the incentive structure of the practitioners. There is overwhelming pressure to produce work that supports the status quo (i.e. redistributing to the rich), that doesn’t question authority, and that is needlessly complex. The result is a discipline in which much of the work is of little use, except to legitimate the existing power structure. In terms of the poor quality of work, it is easy to point to the failure to recognize the size and risks posed by the housing bubble in the last decade. This failure has been unbelievably costly to the United States and the rest of the world. If we compare the most recent estimates of the potential GDP of the U.S. economy from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) with the projections made in 2008, before the severity of the crash was recognized, the difference is $1.8 trillion. This is an annual figure; it implies a loss of $18 trillion over the course of the decade. This amount averages out to more than $54,000 for every person in the country. Other countries have seen even larger losses.
………
I have suggested that economists who prescribe policies that turn out badly, or who can’t see multi-trillion dollar housing bubbles coming whose collapse sinks the economy, ought to pay a price in terms of their careers. Invariably people think I am joking. When they realize I am serious, they think I am crazy or vindictive.Leaving aside motives, let me just speak to the economics. If we have a profession in which people are rewarded with high pay and career advancement for saying the same thing as everyone else, and never face any consequences when the accepted wisdom proves to be wrong, then we should expect to see economists like the firefighters mentioned at the beginning of this piece. They aren’t qualified to do the job and our only hope is that we don’t see any more major fires.
Read the rest of the article, because it addresses some more serious deficiencies in economics, particularly the tendency of people in the field to take simple concepts and obfuscate.
Tronc, the company formerly known as Tribune Publishing, has failed in its bid to buy the Chicago Sun Times and the Chicago Reader.
Instead, a group of investors, including the Chicago Federation of Labor, purchased the publisher of the two papers, maintaining its independence of one of the largest media conglomerates in the nations:
In the end, one man made all the difference.
Edwin Eisendrath, the former Chicago alderman who ran losing campaigns for governor and congressman earlier in his career, just won the most unlikely challenge he’d ever undertaken: He kept the Chicago Sun-Times independent and out of the clutches of Chicago Tribune owner tronc. “It was bashert,” Eisendrath told me, using the Yiddish word for “destiny.” How else to explain the odds he overcame to make it happen?
On Wednesday, Eisendrath and a coalition of labor unions and individual investors closed on the purchase of the daily Sun-Times and the alternative weekly Chicago Reader from Wrapports Holdings LLC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but sources said the key was securing more than $11.2 million in escow to cover projected operating losses over the next two years.“Today’s deal to buy the Sun-Times preserves two independent newspaper voices in Chicago, a rare thing in America these days,” Eisendrath tweeted. “We wanted to make sure that Chicago had a genuine voice with honest and good reporting that connects with working men and women.”
Eight weeks ago it seemed all but certain tronc would take over the Sun-Times in a move that many believed would have stifled competition and led to the inevitable demise of the city’s No. 2 newspaper. All that stood in the way of the deal was the vigilance of the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division.
Alone in answering the Justice Department’s call for alternative bidders was Eisendrath, backed by the Chicago Federation of Labor and a belief that the Sun-Times was too vital to the life of the city to forfeit its independence.
My guess is that the (probably pre-Trump) DoJ call for bidders had a lot to do with Tronc losing the bid, because it implied a lot of litigation if the two big Chicago papers merged.
I’d like to see more official moves against consolidation.
an ice berg the size of Delaware has detached from the Larson-C ice sheet:
A hunk of ice the size of Delaware broke off from the Antarctic Peninsula.
Sometime in the last few days, scientists say an iceberg weighing roughly a trillion metric tons separated from the Larsen C Ice Shelf and began its long, slow drift northward through the Weddell Sea.
The 2,400 square-mile mass of ice won’t immediately raise sea levels, but its loss has probably altered the profile of the continent’s western peninsula for decades to come, scientists say.
The Larsen Ice Shelf consists of a series of many floating ice chunks. It is named for Norwegian explorer Capt. Carl Anton Larsen, who discovered it in 1893.
By the time it was first photographed in the 1960s, the fateful crack was already visible, according to NASA.
………
The release of this iceberg has reduced Larsen C, the largest ice shelf in the Larsen formation and the fourth-largest on the continent, by more than 12%. Scientists says the remaining ice shelf could now be less stable, which could pave the way for a more severe event: disintegration.
“This ice shelf is on the trajectory to collapse in the coming decades,” said Eric Rignot, a UC Irvine glaciologist and research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.
While this has no direct impact on sea level, the ice was already floating in the water, it does have the effect of clearing the path for increased ice flows from land based glaciers, like removing a cork from a bottle, which could raise sea levels.
Also, the weight of ice over the land in Antarctica and Greenland has actually pushed the land down, so not only will the water melt eventually cause sea level rise, but more land will erupt which will further raise sea levels.
This is something that we need to address sooner rather than later.
I got nothing to add to this:
The use of sans-serif could leave Pakistan sans-Sharif. https://t.co/XtRrkVVRfI— Dhruva Jaishankar (@d_jaishankar) July 12, 2017
Amtrak is looking at making train travel more like flying Delta, because, much like the major airlines, they hate their passengers.
Amtrak is missing a key fact about their situation: Unlike the airlines sitting in their fortress hubs, they have a lot of competitors.
A bus is cheaper and only slightly slower than passenger rail:+
If there’s one thing that riding the rails has over flying, perhaps it’s comfort: Train passengers have a bit more legroom than on planes, and can get up and walk around at any time. We all may need to stretch our legs a bit more if Amtrak decides to pack in more seats.
The outgoing co-chief executive of Amtrak says the rail system — which is in need of a major financial boost — is thinking about possibly making it less comfortable in economy class by adding additional seats, Reuters reports.
He didn’t just say that Amtrak is considering adding more seats; he outright admitted that tightening up seat pitch — the distance between the seatback and the seat in front of it — is just one “creative” change under consideration that could make things worse for passengers.
“There will be some other things that just don’t make it quite as comfortable,” Wick Moorman told reporters at a National Press Club talk this week.
Cramped seating is likely nothing new for Amtrak’s recent hire, former Delta Air Lines CEO Richard Anderson. He joined the company as president and co-CEO on Wednesday, and will be sharing the top spot until Moorman steps down on Dec. 31.
When I first read this, I hadn’t realized that the new HMFIC at Amtrak was actually from Delta, I just defaulted to Delta as a standard avatar as agony in air travel.
Delta has long been the standard for poor quality in customer service in airlines, well, it was until United Airlines said, “Hold my beer.”
FWIW, here is John Mulaney on Delta Airlines:
The plans for a new FBI headquarters have been scrapped.
As much as I hope that a new headquarters would remove the name of J. Edgar Hoover, this was rather complex deal, which involves various “incentives” from competing state and local governments and a byzantine property swap for services to lower cost, and as such, it seemed to be a recipe for a fiasco:
The federal government is canceling the search for a new FBI headquarters, according to officials familiar with the decision, putting a more than decade-long effort by the bureau to move out of the crumbling J. Edgar Hoover Building back at square one.
The decision follows years of failed attempts by federal officials to persuade Congress to fully back a plan for a campus in the Washington suburbs paid for by trading away the Hoover Building to a real estate developer and putting up nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds to cover the remaining cost.
Officials from the General Services Administration, which manages federal real estate, said they plan to announce the cancellation in a phone call with bidders and in meetings on Capitol Hill on Tuesday morning. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the decision before it was announced.
For years, FBI officials have raised alarms that the decrepit conditions at Hoover constitute serious security concerns. But the plan to replace the building grew mired in a pit of government dysfunction and escalating costs with no end in sight.
………
The GSA’s unconventional strategy of trying to offset the development cost by trading the Hoover Building downtown to the winning bidder was aimed at saving the government money but became a laborious and expensive complication.
As the search dragged on, both the federal government and developers bidding on the project began to bear inordinate costs.
Real estate companies pursuing the deal spent years and millions of dollars attempting to make their case for the project. The GSA, meanwhile, is housing many of the bureau’s 9,500 headquarters employees using expensive short-term leases at about a dozen locations throughout the Washington region because the staff long ago outgrew the Hoover Building.
………
President Barack Obama had sought $1.4 billion toward construction of the project, but in May, Congress left it underfunded by more than a half-billion dollars. Congressional leaders had pulled together $523 million toward the project and possibly $315 million more through transfers of existing funds previously meant for other uses.
That was on top of $390 million that had been previously appropriated for the project.
Then in June, House appropriators rescinded $200 million from the project, drawing exasperation from local officials who have been pushing for the government to decide among three final locations: Greenbelt, Md., Landover, Md., or Springfield, Va.
At the time the House took back the $200 million, Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) and Rep. Anthony G. Brown (D-Md.) called the decision “reprehensible.”
………
Acting GSA administrator Timothy Horne is scheduled to testify before a House subcommittee Wednesday at a hearing about “Maximizing Taxpayer Returns and Reducing Waste in Real Estate.”
Hopefully, he will be aggressively questioned, because a cost more than $1½ billion for the building AFTER giving away some of the most attractive real estate in indicates that, “Maximizing Taxpayer Returns and Reducing Waste in Real Estate,” is not a governing principle here.
What centrists are missing is that elites have too much power and too little competence.
Mr. Dillow is noting that the Blairites have missed the reality, that their base, the highly paid managerial class is not particularly good at their jobs, and so are grossly overpaid, which costs the rest of us.
It’s a very specific critique that nicely frames the complete intellectual bankruptcy of the Blairites, because it is predicated on ignoring that, “Parasitic managerialism caused the financial crisis, greatly contributed to the productivity slowdown and is now wreaking damage to universities. New Labour’s fetishizing of “leadership” and targets helped to legitimate this.”
Case in point, they just issued a patent for using a computer to count calories:
This month’s stupid patent, like many stupid patents before it, simply claims the idea of using a computer for basic calculations. U.S. Patent No. 6,817,863 (the ‘863 patent) is titled “Computer program, method, and system for monitoring nutrition content of consumables and for facilitating menu planning.” It claims the process of using a computer to track nutrition information like calorie or vitamin intake. It is difficult to think of a more basic and trivial use for a computer.
The ‘863 patent is owned by a patent troll called Dynamic Nutrition Solutions, LLC. Dynamic Nutrition filed a lawsuit this month in the Eastern District of Texas accusing Australian company Fatsecret of infringing the ‘863 patent. Dynamic Nutrition had filed four other lawsuits. Consistent with a pattern of nuisance litigation, each of those earlier suits settled very quickly.
What “invention” does the ‘863 patent purport to cover? Claim 1 of the patent is reproduced in full below (with comments in brackets):
A computer program comprising a combination of code segments stored in a computer-readable memory and executable by a processor to provide nutrition content information related to consumables, the computer program comprising:
a code segment operable to receive and store an input related to consumption of consumables, and to associate the input with a calender [sic] date [i.e. program a computer to track daily food intake]; and
a code segment operable to generate an interactive display screen, wherein the interactive display screen includes— [i.e. include some kind of user interface]
one or more lists of consumables and related nutrition content information, and [i.e. list food options and nutrition information]
a summary section of past consumption of consumables. [i.e. list past food intake]
In other words, program a computer to help people keep track of meals and calorie or vitamin intake.
The USPTO may be more dysfunctional than the Pentagon, and that is saying a lot.
