If these contractors had to make a bid, and if they couldn't meet the expectations or milestones, won't get paid, they wouldn't screw it up.

The screwups happen because they know the government will just extend their credit card in the event of failure.

fuck them: nationalize everything the government does.

Says the $5,000 hammer.

I think this is all going to be fine.

turn it back into a public function, pay a living wage and create jobs!


rocktivity

like the definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

I fully agree!

That was a success?

I have NASA on line 2. Do you wish to speak with him?

For example, engines, launch vehicles, manned spaceflight capsules, communications networks, computer systems, launch services, etc.

Jacobs Technology - NASA Contracts
http://www.jacobstechnology.com/nasa.htm
NASA awards multimillion-dollar contracts to Boeing, SpaceX and Sierra Nevada for human spaceflight
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/post/nasa-awards-multimillion-dollar-contracts-to-boeing-spacex-and-sierra-nevada-for-human-spaceflight/2012/08/03/a40938c0-dd89-11e1-af1d-753c613ff6d8_blog.html
NASA Needs Better Cloud Computing Strategy for Public Contracts According to Audit
http://www.dailytech.com/NASA+Needs+Better+Cloud+Computing+Strategy+for+Public+Contracts+According+to++Audit/article33068.htm
NASA Orders More Development Work Under Commercial Crew Contracts
http://www.spacenews.com/article/civil-space/36943nasa-orders-more-development-work-under-commercial-crew-contracts

It has always been thus. Systems engineering for the Apollo Program was done by a company called BellCom that was set up by AT&T as a subsidiary for the purpose.

Same thing with the Manhattan Project -- most of the work was carried out by US corporations under contract.

I put in 3 years at the Veterans Administration. Then over 25 years in banking and legal. There is absolutely no comparison. The IT department at the VA routinely succeeded at tasks that private sector considered impractical.

My first day in private sector: learned that Wang Labs and Xerox were unable to get Xerox laser printers working on Wang computers.

My second day in private sector: drove to VA to get copy of software VA developed to get Xerox laser printers working on Wang computers.

Another guy and I spent all of a couple hours writing that software in the first place. That was mostly the other guy who worked on the Xerox. I just had to provide him the details of how Wang printing worked so he could write a Xerox program to match. The guy at the bank told me Xerox and Wang technicians spent weeks on their failed attempt to make it work.



Private enterprise : we need a jumper to enable half the disk space. Hold meetings to discuss whether this is necessary since there must be a reason it came disabled in the first place. Conduct an exhaustive study to determine if it is safe to enable the other half. Approve. Purchase $35 jumper and install. Total price of study and meetings: $1 million.

Veterans Administration : we need a jumper to enable half the disk space. "Use a paper clip." (true story)

we are going the opposite direction, corporate entrenchment into healthcare, austerity, if we can't turn that ship around then what does that leave us?

A quirk in the Affordable Care Act is that while it gives HHS the authority to create a federal exchange for states that don’t set up their own, it doesn’t actually provide any funding to do so. By contrast, the law appropriates essentially unlimited sums for helping states create their own exchanges.

The lack of funding for a federal exchange complicates what is already a difficult task. HHS will likely be operating exchanges in states like Louisiana and Florida that oppose the ACA on principle and have said they will not comply with the exchange provisions. But HHS also will likely be responsible for several other states that may want to set up exchanges, but will be unable to enact laws and set up the infrastructure under the short time frame specified by the law.

A federal exchange will have the same authority states do to impose fees on insurance sold through the exchange once it is open for business. But there is no money coming in until people start purchasing insurance, and there is a great deal of work to be done to prepare to open the doors of federal exchanges.

“It’s very clear that [the HHS] secretary should ‘use such sums as may be necessary’” for supporting states in creating their exchanges, but it’s “sort of silent” on the federal fallback exchange, said Jon Kingsdale, the founding director of the Massachusetts Connector, who is advising HHS on the creation of the federal exchange.



Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61513.html#ixzz2iQBNZ5Yy

"Pick any two."

After the 1984 election, Ronald Reagan gave the Veterans Administration three goals: shut down all mental health facilities by January 1st (I won't relate the horror stories I heard about that), start forcing student loan collection and something-else-I-never-heard.

The VA programming department said the Education Loan System would take 20 people 5 years** to build. A guy at the Central Office in Washington called a man in the VA technical support department who used to work in programming. The tech support guy responded, "sounds about right. On the other hand, it would probably take 2 people only 1 year to do the job. Those 20 people are going to take a lot of effort to coordinate."

Therefore, he got put on special assignment for the White House and asked that he be allowed to hire an entry level programmer to help out. He specifically wanted someone who had no experience in how development projects are supposed to work. The finance people told us what they needed, then we did it. No financial analyst writing functional specifications for a programming analyst to use when writing technical specifications for programmers to write code with all the ensuing managers along the way. General Ledger, billing, collections all written by me, instead of being siloed, so there was never a question of interoperability.

I would learn why he wanted someone with no experience. I've found that a lot of programmers who learned the "right" way to do things get completely confused when you ask them to talk to the end user and figure out what they need to do themselves.

So I did what I didn't know I wasn't supposed to be able to do.





** VA personnel universally considered this project unfair to the veterans. This will sound weird to younger people, but repayment of government student loans was unofficially optional back then. That was the whole point of the government giving these loans before the Reagan Revolution rewrote the social contract. You could have just gotten a loan from a bank otherwise.

I knew people who got these loans. VA personnel told them, "take the loan, give college a try, if it doesn't work out for you, don't worry, you won't have to pay it back." And let's not kid ourselves, most veterans are *not* college material. But they could give it a shot. If it didn't work, they wouldn't lose anything.

Now, was that the actual rule? No, it was not. But that is how it was treated for decades. Deciding to enforce rules that hadn't been enforced for years is okay. But applying it retroactively to people who had been operating under the old enforcement rules was truly unfair. Most of these people would never have taken the loan in the first place. They took it under false pretenses. And that was not their fault.

So odds are, the 5 year estimate was intended to delay enforcement of the rules until Reagan left office in the hopes a new administration would kill it. But the tech support guy was a backstabbing SOB. And I was young. I needed a job and thought of the project as saving the taxpayers money.

It is notable that the one thing I failed to implement was the referral to a Credit Reporting Agency before garnishing tax refunds. I was told half that garnishment would go to the CRA because once they get a report any collections is legally assumed due to their efforts (even though it would clearly have nothing whatsoever to do with the garnishment). Somehow after learning that I just could not get the CRA referral to work. I'm afraid my "failure" ended up saving taxpayers millions of dollars.

Sorry about that.