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US Virtual Border Fence Doesn't Work
lelitsch writes "The Washington Post reports that the initial pilot of the Virtual Border Fence planned by the DHS and subcontracted to Boeing has been a miserable failure. A lot of the points in the report have the hallmark of death-march software development projects. Some choice quotes include 'did not work as planned or meet the needs of the U.S. Border Patrol,' 'DHS officials do not yet know the type of terrain where the fencing is to be constructed,' and 'the design will not be used as the basis for future... development.' The article notes that Boeing was forced to deliver 'something' early as President Bush pushed for immigration reform in Congress in 2006. That reform effort died last year in the Senate."
Relevant quote: If you're so woefully underinformed, just keep from commenting, ok?
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
some relevant quotes
"Boeing has already been paid $20.6 million for the pilot project, and in December, the DHS gave the firm another $65 million to replace the software with military-style, battle management software. "
"Boeing has said that the initial effort, while flawed, still has helped Homeland Security apprehend 2,000 illegal immigrants since September"
A quick division $85 600 000 / 2 000 gives $42 800 per illegal immigrant. And this is the cost to the taxpayer without personnel salaries and other expenses, just what was payed to Boeing. I strongly doubt that each illegal immigrant, if not apprehended, will cost the US tax payers $42 800.
Shakespeare poems - infinite monkeys with infinite time.Computer tech support - a few trained ones working from 9 to 5.
England, France, and the Netherlands have the same problem. Fear not, though. With every day that passes, they're being bred out of their own countries, their position of moral superiority slips a little bit further, and they begin to awake to the reality that tolerance of Islam means to tolerate their own demise. We Americans shouldn't gloat, but should instead take note and ensure that we don't follow the same path of allowing our politicians to force us to tolerate the demise of our culture, our history, and our way of life - indeed everything that allowed America to rise to prominence in the first place. I'm truly sad that the London, Paris, and Berlin that I fell in love with as a kid will be reduced to smoldering Muslim ghettos by the time my own kid is old enough to make the trip. This is what happens when you allow unfettered immigration without any attempts whatsoever to assimilate the immigrant population. This is what happens when you allow people to immigrate from countries that have polar opposite views from your own regarding personal freedom, self-determination, respect for women's rights, and respect for human rights in general. The "tolerant" position is that no single way of life is any better than another, and that we shouldn't try to force our way of life on another culture. But the facts of history betray this naive fantasy.
I'll end with an anecdote about my "Palestinian" (if there really is such a nationality) roommate from college, Khalid. One day he made the comment that all alcohol should be outlawed. Ah, I'm constantly surprised how naive and ignorant about history and human nature Muslims are. Had he paid attention in his mandatory American History class, he would have known that the so-called "Progressives" had already tried to foist the massive failure that was Prohibition on us at the beginning of the last century. Nevermind the fact that Muslims can't even stamp out liquor sales and consumption in their own lands. But to come here and presume to tell us that WE should adapt to accommodate THEM with an idea that was already tried and failed? Ideas have consequences, folks. This is just one small example. I didn't even mention the rights of non-believers living in Muslim lands, or female circumcision, or forced marriages, or honor killings. Wake up, people. The barbarians are at the gates, and we're not only being told that we have to leave the gates wide open, but we must silently tolerate our own demise or risk being called *ghasp* racist!
Captcha is "outburst." How appropriate.
I work for DHS and a friend of mine runs a small program that's been managing sensors on the border for 25 years.
Boeing was hired as the project's integrator and instead of subcontracting or working with the existing systems tried to do everything themselves. Why? To keep as much money for themselves, of course. They ignored, at first, all the existing systems and tried to replace them with proprietary technology that would anchor them into govermnent contracts in perpetuity.
They failed. Now they have to rely on refined data from a government-developed system to produce any results at all. This is a pattern I've seen in 26 years of working for the government: we hire an outside vendor who comes in and has to rely on our knowledge to make anything work. In a lot of cases they get us to do much of their work for them. The vendor's employees get huge bonuses and we get downsized. Granted there are times where if you don't bring in someone from the outside nothing will change, but the number of times internal staff saves the vendor's ass has been, in my experience, much higher than the other way around.
Sometimes it's better to spend your money on what your own staff can do instead of just assuming that an outside vendor will automatically develop something better. For some reason, too many executives undervalue the abilities of their own people and hire big names like Boeing for many times what it would have cost to develop better systems in house. The Secure Border Initiative is apparently one of them.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
Well yeah, but the problem here is that H1B is pretty much your only option if you need to hire a foreigner.
If you are a large multinational or your employee is a Canadian, you can use TN and L visas. For all the others, H1B is the only way since green cards take way too long.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
And you do know that SDI was a pipe dream that tricked the Soviets into a defense spending contest that basically collapsed the Soviet empire and caused the breakup of the USSR? It was never designed to be a working solution. And shooting down one of our own satellites is a far stretch from the "global missile defense blanket" we were promised. From all the test results at trying to take down actual missiles, they had a very poor success rate. And they were talking about using satellite mounted mirrors/laser system to blast down missiles. Where is that? I'd also be willing to wager that advancement in the technology field and computers are more responsible for us being able to hit fast moving targets with our missiles than the SDI research.
Besides, big deal, China can do it too. Have they been spending billions of dollars since the mid-80s to come up with their success?
"But this one goes to 11!"
SDI had two purposes. One: win the cold war. Only we could afford to go into space over and over. Two: produce technology for the weaponization of space.
And they were talking about using satellite mounted mirrors/laser system to blast down missiles. Where is that?Uh, do you know the contents of every US military satellite currently orbiting?
No? I didn't think so.
The technology, however, is on the way. Being able to do these things from the earth is much harder than being able to do them from space (aside from power requirement issues, which can be solved by spending more money to put up more mass.) If you can fly a 747 with a chemical laser in it and shoot down a missile (done) then you can build the laser anti-missile satellites. Especially since our spy program has taught us so much about optics and tracking.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's part of the circle. We are the largest consumer of Mexican drugs (we're one of the world's largest producers of cannabis but still consume the lion's share of the product from mexico... we're also the world's largest consumer of cocaine as per the CIA WFB) which both puts money and crime into their country. We support military regimes in Mexico; you could buy a car in Brazil and drive towards Canada and the hardest part to get through would probably be Mexico. There's 16 year olds toting M-16s and wearing green (probably both US Military castoffs) serving all over that country. Mexico is a pit and we made it that way intentionally. Partly because we could put Maquiladoras there and get cheap products out of Mexico even before NAFTA, and partly because we need Mexicans to come up here and pick fruits and vegetables.
I'm from Santa Cruz, which is surrounded by seas, mountains... and farmland. I'm living in Kelseyville which was Oaks before whitey got here, then we cut them down and built with them or burned them and planted walnuts specifically to deny the natives their food source (the Walnuts were never significantly economically beneficial to the region) and which later became the pear capital of the US and possibly the world. Now it's turning into almost all grapes. The pears and the grapes alike were and are picked by Mexicans more or less exclusively, although some white guys occasionally work in the packing sheds. And, I live in the boonies with vineyards in both directions down our road so I see Mexicans at work almost every time I leave my house. Some of them are legals and live in my neighborhood, of course. But any agricultural anything in California depends heavily on migrant labor, much of which is illegal (I had a Mexican Martin Espinoza using my social to get jobs, but he never paid taxes of course - I had some fun with that one) and that's just how it is.
The simple fact is that Mexico is our bitch. Sorry Mexico and Mexicans, it's true. I doubt things are going to get substantially better there unless they get substantially saner here, and I don't see that happening.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm the senior administrator/programmer/dba on a financial system that deals with about 2,000,000 dollars a week. I've got 7 years of college and 3 degrees, so 19 years of education. Some of what I do could be done by someone with only a high school degree, and a fricking ton of training, but the bulk of it is hilariously abstruse, and really needs someone with a bit more skill.
There are probably a number of people qualified to come and do my job. Frankly, that doesn't bother me, because I have a lot of skills, and there are plenty of other places I can work. I have my job because I work hard, and do a good job. I invest in training, I keep my skills current. If it comes down to it that I can't get a job anywhere anymore, I'll view that as more of a personal failing than a problem with other people having "stolen" my work.
During the post-bomb years, when I was just finished with my second round of college, I had trouble getting work. No one was hiring. So I started my own thing, and made good money undercutting the people who wouldn't give me a job. And they complained! I was "stealing their work!" They wouldn't pay me, but they'd complain about me, they'd badmouth me to my customers, tried to shut me out of contracts! They tried to rat me out to the BSA, but that flopped because I was only deploying OSS, mostly because I couldn't afford to use anything else.
So no, I've got no patience with that crap. If someone can do what I do, and will do it for less, then they deserve it.
And the jobs won't stop going away because you stop illegal immigrants. They'll send the jobs overseas, like they've been doing for decades. It's a better idea to bring in MORE immigrants, restart manufacturing here using the cheaper labor, and then employ the people who lost their manufacturing jobs in the expanding service sector. The idea that you can restrict the workforce and more people will have jobs doesn't make any sense...The more people who are working, the more people who will have to work to provide those people with services. A factory that employs 500 people will give jobs to 2,500 people, and money to countless more.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Where is the problem not of their making? I'm not seeing it here.
US automakers made shitty cars and blew their good name so the Japanese made a bunch of brilliant cars and now the US automakers are fucked. If they don't suck union dick the unions will strike and make them look like assholes and they'll sell even less cars. But this is really their fault because they blew it in the seventies with total shitpiles everywhere. The Japanese made light little unibody cars while we were still fucking with stub frames. Basically, this is precisely the same thing, the US automakers were not at all forward-looking.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That really doesn't sound likely, if they had trouble understanding the rodeo why were they there in the first place? Boycotting something you don't go to anyway doesn't make sense.
So I looked it up:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5573321.html
I don't know where you heard that (right wing media playing on people's prejudices no doubt) but you might want to consider the propriety of that source in future. They threatened a boycott because the rodeo was hiring non-Tejanos to perform at a Tejano cultural event, no mention of anyone printing or speaking spanish.
How much would the price of strawberries increase if the people picking them managed to get minimum wage, health benefits, safer conditions and unions?
Not much at all, all things considered. Labor costs are around 5% of the cost of an item. SO, you could increase labor wages by a factor of 10, and only raise the cost of the final product by 50%.
Example:
Price per apple = $1.00
Labor cost per apple= $.05
Non-labor cost per apple= $.95
New Labor cost x 10= $.50
New apple cost= $.95 +.50 = $1.45
That's not bad considering the wage of the apple pickers just jumped from $2.00 per hour to $20.00 per hour!! (which is WAY above the 'minimum wage' you mentioned) I'm certain that, at $20/hour, you could get citizens to do the picking, instead of having to rely on illegals "because no one else will do it (for crap wages)".
Can you provide any references to support this fact? 5% seems very low to me.
To be honest, it's just a number I remember from a previous thread on this topic.
But a little Google-Fu got me this:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003265139_imprices19.html
At a local QFC, Red Delicious apples go for about 99 cents a pound. Of that, only about 7 cents represents the cost of labor, said Tom Schotzko, a recently retired extension economist at Washington State University. The rest represents the grower's other expenses, warehousing and shipping fees, and the retailer's markup.
And that's for one of the most labor-intensive crops in the state
5%, 7%, close enough. The point stands: wages could go up substantially (even enough to attract citizens instead of illegals) and the price of friut would not 'triple' or 'quadruple' as some scaremongers claim.