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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."
It amazes me that the Mexican president encourages illegal immigration into this country and calls those of us who want immigration laws to be followed racist or anti-Latino. All the while, they have stringent immigration laws for those coming to Mexico and are trying to build a fence with Guatemala.
The chutzpah is unbelievable.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
...a wide area surveillance group, I would like to suggest a few reasons why this occurred, especially given what we know of Boeing's attempt to provide a solution.
;). There's a vast amount of 'learning through pain' which (of course) teaches you how to avoid stumbling blocks in the future. WAS is a fusion of architectural planning, mechanical engineering, network engineering, environmental engineering, and software engineering. It is also one of the more difficult management projects due to the fact that very few companies (almost none) have the in-house departments/divisions to handle all aspects of it; ergo, most companies do the more natural 'I am the lead contractor, you all can sub-contract to me for utilities, HVAC, network topology, integration software, camera systems, electromagnetic fences', et cetera.
;)
Wide Area Surveillance is, like any real world 'enterprise' solution, complex. That is not to say it is not achievable, it is just not something you decide to do on a whim
This means that during the bidding process for these jobs, as with any $$$LARGE$$$ government contract, much of the sub-contracting can be political and very rarely results in a proffered solution that is 'best in breed' in all (or even most) areas.
This is all very normal. The real difficulty is in identifying which aspects of a WAS solution will kill your project. For example, the article claims that using off the shelf commercial software for dispatchers was a serious issue. I can tell you from experience, there's no way that this derailed the project. There are several companies (the one I used to work at is one for example) that specialize in integrating their 'command & control' (for lack of a more encompassing term) suites with 3rd party streaming video, network systems, hardware devices, et cetera. The relative cost of these systems varies from very low (with a fair amount of services work being entailed) to moderate (where you get far more C&C stuff than you plan to use but it's there if you need it in the future - but they fully integrate the things you do need off the bat.)
Usually the biggest problems are from poor planning at the start or 'mid course correction' by people who didn't make careful consideration of their options up front regarding the physical infrastructure required. A good example of this is 'pole placement.' One of the easiest, conceptually, methods of watching swathe of territory where there isn't supposed to be much activity is to use a high quality camera mounted (usually mounted on a Pan/Tilt/Zoom gimbal) on a tall pole. How tall? THAT is the question my friends. From a cost point of view you want to put them up as high as is feasible given the terrain and what the local survey should be. This means less poles, less cameras, and less overall costs to cover a wider area; HOWEVER, the higher you put that camera the more difficult the installation of the pole because I assure you that putting a camera 60 feet off the ground results in shaking, deflection, twisting, and all kinds of other frame stabilization nightmares. Usually what happens is that the project denotes the max camera heights, assigns what types of poles/towers will support the cameras, how they will be built in order to overcome problems like these and then 6 months later they change the camera heights (usually because they want to cut out a few poles and the neighboring cameras must take up the slack), bingo you're well thought out and budgeted pole no longer serves your needs.
It is at this point that the reader will think 'ok, then we need to redesign the poles right? No big deal...' Sadly this does not usually happen. The change request costs associated outweight the money saved on the pole changes but that doesn't mean they won't still use the wrong poles and save a hundred thousand on camera costs, they'll just try to hack some solution like putting a frame stabilizer black box on the back of the camera, because that should work, right?
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It was set up to fail from the very beginning. Its no secret that every power in the American government wants more illegals. The republicans want more cheap labor. The democrats want more poor voters. This fence was never more than distraction. Just a way for government to pretend they are doing something, while actually doing nothing.
It can be go tiem now plees?
It actually didn't work all that well. Certainly didn't keep invaders from invading. It would have been far more effective (and cheaper) to just have a better military.
How much money are you willing to sink into putting a goddamn WALL around the country? I frankly don't think it will ever work, and sure if we put as much money into it as we put into Iraq, I bet we could stop the immigration across the land, but I don't think that would be sufficient in the long run. If people want in, they'll get in.
It never ceases to make me laugh how hard people fight to keep immigrants from doing jobs that they would never do, not in a million years. If you're worried about their treatment, then make it legal, give them the right to sue over poor conditions and workplace injuries. Tax their salaries to help pay for the demographic hellhole that will be this country for the next 30 or so years...Worried about your job? In 10 years, as the boomers retire en masse the workforce is literally going to shrink. That means we will need those people; we will need their labor, and we will need the tax revenue to pay for services for the huge chunk of society that's going to be retired.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Ahh... so the best option for everyone is to ensure illegal aliens arrive en mass. If they complain about low wages, hazardous working conditions or exploitive management ( see: Company Store ) then we deport them.
Right. Nice way to maintain a permanent underclass.
After all, it's not like if we required proof of citizenship and forced the agricultural industry to pay decent wages those workers would spend any money here in the US, right?
Or if we permitted those workers to come to the US on visas and bring their families with them the practice of sending remittances to their home country might dry up or significantly decrease thus keeping more money in the US?
A Human Right
"Lived legally for 8 years" is the key part here.
What Germans are doing is penalizing children born to illegal immigrants.
These kids become criminals from birth, but you Enlightened Europeans probably see no problem with that either (since the kids should have chosen better parents, right?)
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
The U.S. for one.
/.'rs...
The NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, etc all have physically demanding jobs that pay very well, thank you.
And I know what you meant. 'physically demanding jobs' would mean 'manual labor'.
Somehow, oil rigs are a good place to find physically demanding work that pays well. The key is that the product or output is valuable...
We don't want to spend as much on our landscaping as we do on our SAP implementation, because the 'product' of our landscaper is not as valuable. That never will change. And productivity of landscapers is not the issue. The value of the product is.
So answer me this,
In Downeast Maine, blueberries used to be picked by the Mic Mac Indians from Canada and Maine. recently, however, the growers started importing migrant and illegal workers from 'wherever', and most were indeed Mexican. Other workes such as high school kids and a fair amount of regulars used to pick as well. I could make $600 a week back in the 60s, which was a darned good sumemr job save for the literally backbreaking work of raking berries out of bushes a foot high at most. bending over, carrying the boxes to the truck, etc was hard, but damn the money was good for a few weeks. But no more, the growers claimed a labor shortage. Truth is, the illegals are even cheaper than the Mic Macs, which is cheap indeed.
This is not about our 'value' of labor, so much as it is the profit to be gained by reducing cost further.
Remember Sen. John McCain, also known down here in Arizona as "Senator Lettuce"? He spouted off a couple of years ago (2006?) about how we 'couldn't' do the jobs Mexican immigrants did. In particular he made this statement:
"If I offered you a job picking lettuce in Yuma for fifty dollars an hour, you couldn't do it, my friend".
The next day, more than a handful of people showed up with resumes in hand, looking for the $50 an hour lettuce picking job. They were ready. Of course there are no jobs like that. Lettuce isn't worth that much.
One of the lies is that this is about wages. It is about profits.
Nobody has a dog in this immigraiton fight except the ordinary citizen:
- Big Business likes cheaper labor, it equals both profits and lower costs of healthcare and such.
- Federal government doesn't want to rile Business.
- Democrats see Mexican immigrants as future Democrats.
- Republicans dare not offend them, lest they become Democrats.
- Labor unions see them as future members. Sooner or later.
- State governments don't want Business to move to another state or overseas, which they will do anyways.
Don't be surprised that the 'virtual fence' doesn't work. Ineffective measures will be a key component in the federal government's war on immigration. Reagan's '86 (or was it '87?) immigration reform had three main features:
- Amnesty. This worked, mostly.
- Securing the borders. No money, no securing the borders. This worked famously.
- Deportation of undesirables and future illegals. No money. This also worked famously.
The current plans will be more of the same. Amnesty is crucial, as it bring the Democratic Party new members, aids the labor unions, and gives Business the same workers at pretty much the same pay. Failing to secure the borders ensures continuing supplies of cheaper labor. Deportation is of course pointless if the border isn't secured. In fact, deportation is a free trip home to visit family and educate others on how to 'do it' in the U.S.
We need change, alright. Arizona's employer law is a start. But I'm not hopeful. We need to vote out the scoundrels. Sadly, all of our Presidential candidates seem to be drinking the same Kool-aid on this issue.
We also need to stop rewarding moving jobs offshore. We don't need to offer incentives for keeping jobs here, just not incentives for sending them overseas...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
an illegal immigrant brings in her 1 year old daughter to the US. The child grows up there, but remains illegal. Ok, so she isn't a criminal from birth, just a criminal from age 1. That doesn't strike me as a huge improvement.
I want to preface this statement by saying that we continually poop on Mexico and so the situation is inherently unbalanced, but the idea is to motivate people to fix the problems in their own countries instead of just coming here. But again, to be fair, in the case of Mexico (and some other countries, really) we have created their situation and so it's not fair to tell them to go and fix it. Just need that disclaimer there to complete my statement :P
consider some poor guy in his twenties - he flees from his homeland because he'd starve otherwise. His only viable choice is to enter a developed country illegally.
In some countries which are now desert largely due to human activities (deforestation, irrigation) people really can starve because there is no food and no means to support food. But in many other countries, people are starving because they won't work the land. In most countries there is land out in the boonies that no one wants where you can live as a farmer. Boring life, but it's a living.
People fleeing themselves, I have little compassion for (I need to apply the attitude to myself on occasion as well.) People fleeing someone else, okay, I feel sorry for them and am inclined to give them aid.
I can't feel bad about Mexicans etc. running up here to the US to get health care and education because let's face it, between NAFTA and the War On Some Drugs and supporting or preventing this or that coup we have crapped up Central America beyond belief. By the same token, anyone who comes over here from the mid-east (for peaceful reasons, anyway) is well-justified in my book. But immigration creates real social problems and it's unfortunate when that happens to people who don't deserve it. (Life, of course, is not fair.)
I my mind it makes a lot more sense to try and help that country they are trying to escape from, rather than handing out citizenship to a few of it's inhabitants, or it's inhabitants' children.
I agree wholeheartedly. But that's not the way to make money, so you're not going to convince any capitalistic society to get on board.
About the only country I think you might potentially get really interested in helping the world would be China - but they'd want to do it their way. And I don't think the results would be pretty. It's really never all that good when a whole country is on the same page, to be honest. (This is where I invoke Godwin's law, right?)
Really though it would probably be enough for the various industrialized nations of the world to stop defecating on everyone else.
For Americans it's very important to think that being born within a country constitutes a right to be there - because they know that they've immigrated a few generations back, at best. Europeans are more likely think of their country as something which belongs to their people.
Yeah well, they're both wrong. The "native" Americans (who migrated to the northwestern part of the area now known as the Estados Unidos Norteamericanos about 12,000 years ago) had it right; the land does not belong to us, we belong to the land. Not all of them felt that nobly about it of course but frankly, the idea of drawing lines on a map and suggesting that they have significance is folly. The only regions that make sense are ones with natural boundaries -- Or as they are sometimes called today, "bioregions."
Humans are destroying the land's ability to support humanity. I don't want to get in a full-on debate over the "noble savage" but around here people built temporary homes and burned them, starting fires that truly did manage the forests of the area. Suggesting that people with a strong oral tradition who lived here for 10
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That and we have PLENTY of able bodied people on welfare, that could be put to work....if you want welfare help, get out and work some jobs like this too.
If we didn't have illegals driving down wages in manual labor markets, our welfare folks might could get off welfare and make living wages.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........