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Oakland Changes License Plate Reader Policy After Filling 80GB Hard Drive
An anonymous reader writes: License plate scanners are a contentious subject, generating lots of debate over what information the government should have, how long they should have it, and what they should do with it. However, it seems policy changes are driven more by practical matters than privacy concerns. Earlier this year, Ars Technica reported that the Oakland Police Department retained millions of records going back to 2010. Now, the department has implemented a six-month retention window, with older data being thrown out. Why the change? They filled up the 80GB hard drive on the Windows XP desktop that hosted the data, and it kept crashing.
Why not just buy a cheap drive with an order of magnitude more storage space? Sgt. Dave Burke said, "We don't just buy stuff from Amazon as you suggested. You have to go to a source, i.e., HP or any reputable source where the city has a contract. And there's a purchase order that has to be submitted, and there has to be money in the budget. Whatever we put on the system, has to be certified. You don't just put anything. I think in the beginning of the program, a desktop was appropriate, but now you start increasing the volume of the camera and vehicles, you have to change, otherwise you're going to drown in the amount of data that's being stored."
Why not just buy a cheap drive with an order of magnitude more storage space? Sgt. Dave Burke said, "We don't just buy stuff from Amazon as you suggested. You have to go to a source, i.e., HP or any reputable source where the city has a contract. And there's a purchase order that has to be submitted, and there has to be money in the budget. Whatever we put on the system, has to be certified. You don't just put anything. I think in the beginning of the program, a desktop was appropriate, but now you start increasing the volume of the camera and vehicles, you have to change, otherwise you're going to drown in the amount of data that's being stored."
Sometimes it can do good...
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Just stop keeping data on average citizens for which you don't really have any justification.
Common off the shelf.
You it department needs to learn about and be authorized to use COTS for items less than $100.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So, this Sgt is being honest, and likely will get his hand slapped for it. I work with public IT. Public organizations have contracts with vendors and vendors upcharge like crazy to sell these items, and none of the technical staff can do anything about it, and that's assuming the entity's IT isn't outsourced. This is just one more place where graft exists to line the pockets of donors/supporters/whatever.
stop trying to correct this with the obvious suggestions to shell out $60. This is a good thing.
This is exactly how small gov operations work. Spend lots of money on a project. Ignore IT recommendations, or, specifically tell IT to cut costs wherever they can. IT comes back with "You could get away with doing this, but, make sure you do this". They omit to do the last part because it of course has a cost attached.
Several months later, at best, or, only a few weeks in, inevitably, not doing the 2nd this, catches up to them. After spending at least 5-figures on a project, it's scrapped, because of a 3-figure cost item. IT head rolls. Life goes on like nothing happened. New shiny project comes along...
It sounds to me like this guy knows the game. If it's not "certified" (by whom?) then it can't be used. Likely it's the vendor making that statement, making them a sole-source and padding the numbers significantly, and being unaware of the Moss Act...
So is this PC the *only* place the data's held? Really? So there's no backup, no analysis system, nothing like that?
Is Oakland twinned with Keystone?
Oh arse
It's a shame they don't live near a major technology hub. These little backwater towns just don't have the resources to lure competent IT staffers away from the cities where you have large computer-savvy people.
Where did they say this was?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I might be completely out of touch here. But are 80GB drives still being sold? If so, is the price that prohibitive for Oakland?
Don't care much for surveillance ad nauseam. But this seems to be a 3rd world problem. Which is worse? Or is the one perhaps causing the other?
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
conservatives think that government is dangerous: the idiocy that manifests itself here in this humorously benign manner too often manifests itself in other, more evil forms.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
This is why local governments should do less.
But when they absolutely must do something to serve the public (and this is not one of those times), they should probably contract it out.
Forget the idiotic complaint about the horrors of a government purchasing process: who is responsible for the security of this "system"?
If a real argument could be made for the need of this data, the system would have been quietly upgraded, and we would have even more information at risk.
he lack of the upgrade is the best evidence that there is no compelling reason to keep this information at all.
Six months? I guess I'm OK then, having not been through Oakland in the last six months. So what other municipalities are quietly using this same hopelessly lame system?
There are, however, good reasons for bureaucracy in government. If government officials can just do whatever they think makes sense, without any accountability to the people, you end up with North Korea. Efficient, but at a cost.
One reason we have processes in place is so that Sgt Blow doesn't buy a $5000, 200 GB hard drive from his brother. Another reason is that doing bad things on a wide scale costs money. With specific budget items, the citizens of Oakland could decide to cut the budget for license plate readers to $0, and end the program.
So all the red tape in government in the US is inefficient and annoying, but it's there for a good reason - a few good reasons in fact. Where we get into trouble is in when we pretend it doesn't exist. Like a few years ago, people saying "we can all have healthcare like VA provides, they do a great job". Well, the VA is a giant government bureaucracy, with all of the problems that come with a giant government bureaucracy. It's when we pretend that more government bureaucracy will make things more efficient, less costly, or faster that we get in trouble.
Finally, some good comes from pain-in-the-ass government purchasing requirements!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
"Whatever we put on the system, has to be certified. You don't just put anything."
Certified, eh?
I'd like to speak to the "certified" moron who chose to install a Windows XP desktop with an 80GB hard drive intended for collecting massive amounts of data.
7 bytes for the number. 8 bytes each for longitude and latitude, 4 bytes for the date. allow 3 bytes for indexing. So basically 30 bytes per record. That is enough storage space for over 2.5 billion license plates or 205 records per registered vehicle in California.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
What? they upgraded from win 95 last year.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Given that they could have gotten a bigger drive for $40 from NewEgg (either out of petty cash, or just taking up a collection), shows how much they really think the data is needed.
Cops buy stuff out-of-pocket all the time to help out with their jobs; if they actually wanted more space for these logs, they would have gotten it, purchase-order or know.
I think that the whole "teh bureaucracy is teh worst" excuse was just an angle to make purchasing easier general, not because they are really upset about not keeping this gigantic mound of data, if not for a $50 part.
"You have to go to a source, i.e., HP or any reputable source where the city has a contract. And there's a purchase order that has to be submitted, and there has to be money in the budget"
The poor guy is exhausted just thinking about it. He has my sympathy.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
If you work at a large enough company, you can't just take the company credit card to shop with whenever the whim strikes you. Otherwise the IT staff would end up with their own company Lamborghini. There has to be a process. That prevents abuse, but of course it bogs things down. The more potential for abuse, the more "process" there has to be, and the more ridiculous the resulting process looks to someone used to doing their own shopping.
Back when I worked for LMC, I had one vendor who could simply not understand why the package he paid extra to "overnight" to us then took a week to get through our receiving department and to my desk. A more recent employer of mine had a process for selecting PC equipment (after we told the purchasers exactly what we wanted) that took so long that quite often the part had been obsoleted by the vendor before the process completed.
Both of those are private employers. Add in the extra regs you have to have to prevent corruption in government procurement, and yes simply buying a bigger hard drive is not so simple.
Plus, the guy actually has a good point here. The fact that they've filled up a 80GiB HD tells you that they really ought to drop back an reanalyze the whole process. Perhaps its as simple as not relying on a four year old desktop PC (can it seriously do anything useful with >80Gig of photographic data?), or perhaps something a bit different should be done with the entire process.
1) they can spy on everyone in perpetuity
2) they can't make rational buying decisions
Yay?
Government incompetence and the red tape partially mitigates government abuses. News at 11!
If you don't have a petty cash budget for these departments then you're idiots.
That doesn't mean your petty cash budget doesn't get audited. It means you can draw the money NOW do what you need to do... and then worry about it later.
What is more, I've personally bought things for my own organization out of my own money because I've felt confident that they'll reimburse me later.
I've never had a problem with that. I explain to whomever later on "hey I bought this for that reason and it cost this... here is a receipt"... and I get cut a check.
This guy says they can't go to Amazon to buy a new drive? yes you can.
Worst case... worst.. you're saying that you'd personally have to pay the 100 bucks a giant drive would cost out of pocket? Oooh... poor baby. I would do that if I were the IT guy running this shit show.
And if I made a regular practice of that... assuming my boss wasn't an assclown... he'd get me back some how. Maybe I get big fat bonus. Maybe I get a promotion. Maybe when they do one of those civil asset forfeitures I get a new car. I mean... you can't tell me they can't afford 100 dollars worth of something somewhere in that department. I refuse to believe they're THAT hard up for money that they can't afford a fucking harddrive.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Yes, and project management, properly-tracked procurements, and approval processes make sense; bidding wars and approved vendor sources don't. I'd just as soon have them start troubleshooting, identify the problem, carry out a Kepner-Tregoe decision analysis to figure on how to address it, and then buy drives on Amazon to load up an empty SAN chassis and mount storage through an HBA. If the drives meet spec--not "oh these are cheap, they'll probably explode under load," but "We were going to get WD Caviar Black drives from HP, but Amazon sells them for $80 instead of $350; we're buying them from Amazon and self-insuring because we have 400 of them"--then go for it.
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It would only be enough for that quantity of license plates if the DB developers had minimizing the amount of data per record in mind.
Also, there can be more info in each data entry, like the camera it came from, the velocity of the car, the time, and instead of longitude and latitude, each entry could have the name of the street or intersection, recorded as text, over and over again, as set up when the camera was installed.
By the way, you were allocating all of the 80GB space for license plate data, but it is more likely that same disk is where the OS is installed.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
According to TFS, this program went back to 2010. And in all that time, nobody with a modicum of IT experience looked at the growth of the dat, calculated the estimated time to fill the disk and pot a new hard drive on the department budget?
Oh yeah. Windows XP. Nobody thought to plan budget for an upgrade from an out of support system?
Have gnu, will travel.
Amazon, Google have been data mining for years. Why shouldn't the police do it too? After all, if you aren't breaking the law, what do you have to hide? Well, the fact that IT'S NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS! If you think someone is doing something wrong, GET A WARRANT!
But in this case the disk is fine, just full. A separate system partition would leave the OS with breathing room even if you filled the data partition.
Wait a second.
I don't mind paperwork.
In this case, Sergeant what's-his-name could look up prices for HDDs on Amazon, fill a form asking for 100 dollars to buy a larger HDD and 50 dollars to pay for installation services and be done with it. Paperwork's done, tracked, everyone's happy.
Bureaucracy is fine as long as it doesn't become ridiculous. Processes need to be streamlined and efficient. When they become cumbersome and tedious, they need to be rethought.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
You do know that Windows XP is not supported anymore? You're not getting any security updates (unless you paid a mess of taxpayer cash to extend the service contract). Please have your lazy ass IT department upgrade your operating systems so you don't get you asses handed to you by a 4-channel script kiddie.
He acts like buying a $150 hard drive will break the bank and if its not "certified" it won't work in an XP box. Any standard hard drive you buy would work. And you can now get a 5TB drive for $130. That could store 2 decades worth of data or more. I would suspect they may very well be retiring user's desktops that have 250GB+ drives in them that they could get for free, are certified, and would work just fine.
Like most people here, I don't think they need to keep this data forever, but just say that. Don't use red tape as an excuse.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Communism sucks, yes. But Communism != Socialism. Socialism certainly does allow for a reasonably free market. It just makes sure that said free market doesn't fuck over the people, and only takes control of or at least heavily regulates those things that would be detrimental to society to simply hand over to the free market, such as roads and healthcare.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favour of this particular surveillance program, but it is frustrating to see minor IT issues becoming roadblocks. I have seen similar situations to this one.
A better mode of operation is to grant individuals with local decision making power and periodically check their decisions to ensure they make sense. The $5000 hard drive you imagined would show up on the books and would be difficult to justify. Sure, it might get through one time, but eventually that kind of behaviour would be caught (and the responsible individual would be held accountable). Most people aren't interested in risking their job so their brother can make a few grand.
Always assuming that everyone is trying to screw the system just tells workers that it is better to do NOTHING than to do what's right. You will have a much more productive workforce if you operate under the assumption that people want to make good decisions.
I've seen far too much money wasted on supposedly transparent processes.
Sgt. Dave Burke said, "We don't just buy stuff from Amazon as you suggested.
But you should. Looking at the data provided by one of the largest consumers of hard drives, there is little or no difference between Consumer drives and Enterprise drives. The only thing you get with Enterprise is higher prices, used to offset warranty replacements. Replace your drives every 36 Months.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
"Whatever we put on the system, has to be certified. You don't just put anything."
I am Audience.
> If you work at a large enough company, you can't just take the company credit card to shop with whenever the whim strikes you. Otherwise the IT staff would end up with their own company Lamborghini.
That's pretty easy to avoid. Just have a purchasing limit for the employee. It's nice and simple and easily avoids the "lamborghini problem.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I also typed "know" instead of "no"...
A laissez-fair economy sucks as well. It makes the bullies and cutthroats rise to the top without any negative repercussions.
The problem is when power is in a relatively few hands. If everything is controlled by a Communist/Fascist dictator, that's a bad thing. If everything is controlled by 5 giant corporations, that is also bad.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
This right here is why the Police across the country are horribly ineffective.
Sadly, they are more interested in revenue generating than actually stopping crime.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Wait a second. I don't mind paperwork.
In this case, Sergeant what's-his-name could look up prices for HDDs on Amazon, fill a form asking for 100 dollars to buy a larger HDD and 50 dollars to pay for installation services and be done with it.
Yeah, let that non-IT guy do the procurement process. I mean, how much worse can it get than what they’ve already done (implementing a critical system to run on a desktop) anyway?
In this case, Sergeant what's-his-name could look up prices for HDDs on Amazon, fill a form asking for 100 dollars to buy a larger HDD and 50 dollars to pay for installation services and be done with it. Paperwork's done, tracked, everyone's happy.
No, in this case, Sergeant what's-his-name looked at the time he'd have to spend filling out a purchase requisition and decided the data just wasn't worth that. Five years of historical license plate location data is not as valuable to his department's investigations as a coffee break.
What are license plate scanners actually good for? The present location of stolen cars. Maybe some location data for crimes currently under investigation (ie, a few weeks). Not last year's crimes. Strangely, this is what citizen activists have been asking for a long time: why do you need to know where every car has been over the past five years? So now, when it comes down to costing the police even just the tiniest amount of effort, they find that, in fact, they probably only need a few months' worth of history.
Does it? The US got nation-wide railroad network, flush toilet, telegraph, commercial air-travel, and massively-affordable personal car under laissez-fair economy. Was that wrong?
You mean, bullies and cutthroats like Che Guevara and Stalin? Or those like Warren Buffet and the Koch brothers?
Which of the two groups I listed has actually cut a throat in your opinion?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
bidding wars and approved vendor sources don't.
You clearly are not aware of how bad a no-bid procurement process can get. Sadly I've seen it in action and let's say it would put third world countries to shame. Not that the current system eliminates the problem, but it does reduce it's magnitude.
Also, you can't do social engineering w/o approved vendors sources (not that I approve of social engineering by government, but apparently a large majority of people seem to want it). Things like minority or woman owned businesses contract/sub-contract set-asides, living wage requirements, union affinity, steering money to constituency etc, would be basically be moot. You might argue this is a good thing, but apparently that is not the current majority thinking.
There are, however, good reasons for bureaucracy in government. If government officials can just do whatever they think makes sense, without any accountability to the people, you end up with North Korea. Efficient, but at a cost.
Using North Korea as an anti-bureaucratic example is bizarre. It's the ultimate bureaucracy. It's just that they are accountable to government higher-ups and ultimately a dictator that can have you killed on a whim.
An invasive program has been brought to a screeching halt because the folks in charge of the program didn't know what they were doing.
We should be throwing a ticker-tape parade, not giving them advice on how to get it rolling again.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
At a certain point the large sum of data is so great that studying the data becomes next to impossible. Even with programs doing the searching and compiling a report for the end user so many reports may be generated that an agency drowns in the data. For example suppose you were hunting a serial killer and you wanted to run a search of all car owners within a ten block radius of the kill site. Then you do that with two other kill sites in which the killer seems likely to be the same. Then you filter it all and find a car owner who was in all three ten block radii and discern that you have 1,000 people who parked near all three kill sites near the hour of the killings. You still have a monumental problem in investigating 1,000 possibilities and also have the possibility that the killer might have used a bus or taxi or walked to one of the kill sites. The cost of investigating all of the possibilities becomes oppressive. Yet if the killer continues his crimes and you have six or nine locations to work with you may well be able to catch the jerk. But it may be that all of the killings take place over a twenty year span. So if you have the capacity to store, long term, all of the data then you may well have a very good tool to sweep up the killer and perhaps at that point with great ease. The other more common item that might be detected is a person living well beyond their reported income for decades who has no believable explanation for where the money comes from. Crimes against the IRS or crimes against employers might be readily detected by digesting large and long lasting data compilations.
I would think the whole point of a license plate reader is to convert the photo of the plate to text, so it should be storing text, not photos.
Cheap storage VM.
Sweeden's industries that enjoy worldwide success would like to disagree with you.
There are decision systems you can use to make clean, traceable decisions. Analytical hierarchy is basically a pile of shit; pugh matrices evolve to weighted pugh matrices, which then evolve to attribute-baselined weighted pugh matrices--what Kepner-Tregoe claims as their "decision analysis" process.
Pugh matrices take a baseline alternative and rate each alternative as better, worse, or similar to it. Weighted pugh matrices specify, numerically, how important each attribute is. The KT Decision Analysis system selects, for each attribute, which alternative provides best for that feature, marking it a score of "10" to be multiplied against the weight of importance of the attribute, while marking all other alternatives proportionally less based on how incompletely they stand up to the one which best accomplishes that need.
The last decision analysis system makes for an argument about how important each attribute is, first, thus driving the bureaucratic process to determine requirements in detail. This includes "Go" and "No-Go" requirements, which an alternative must provide in full or else it is not an eligible choice. Once the requirements are set, it's a matter of discussing, technically, which best fulfill each need, and to what degree each competing alternative falls short of that model option.
There are other systems more useful for manipulating the process to favor your political leanings and backroom deals. One I've seen only a few times, pushed by its inventor, claimed to eliminate all complexities of decision making, is to ignore all negative attributes and list the advantages of each alternative. The alternative with the greatest number of bullet points is the best, because it has so many good things going for it. This decision system ignores your requirements and lets you gloss over the applicability of a selection by talking up all of its irrelevant good points, which for example may allow you to select a guitar over a piano when deciding what kind of keyboard instrument (piano, organ, synthesizer) to buy. I reject its usefulness entirely--unsurprisingly, the only person who really takes it seriously is the guy trying to make money from $4000 conferences teaching people how to make decisions.
Regardless, it is possible to structure a productive, efficient, bureaucratic process which naturally drives good decision making and creates a paper trail through which to analyze a decision and understand, in hindsight, why it was made in the first place, even identifying what information was considered, why it was considered, and how other critical information was missed.
I agree with you that no-bid contracts have their own issues, and we could not safely go to more no-bid contracts without something like these decision making processes; however, I do not believe minor purchases should fall under contract work, and so such things, where you are able and not contracted to not purchase replacements from another vendor, should not be restricted to the short list of suppliers you happen to have contracts with, all of which are in competition with each other anyway. At the very least, if you have two contracted suppliers who can both provide the same goods, there is no reason your contracts should restrict you from just grabbing shit from Newegg.
Taken to an extreme, avoiding vendor lock-in--commanding vendors to supply systems which interoperate with the applicable, *existing* standards as any off-the-shelf systems do--is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if the vendors are looking to razor-and-blade a contract with below-cost major components and high-margin maintenance parts; let them sell you an enormous SAN system at an actual profit, and then freely move between vendors for hard drives and RAM modules. It will save money.
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Ahhh...
But the Sergeant really does not want another hard drive on the existing PC
He wants to force a situation where they consider 'long term needs' and end up with multiple image processing workstations, a central server, terabytes of SAN storage and a searchable metadata database
He will only get this by killing the current system and then driving through a study on future needs, meeting current needs with an inexpensive hard drive will not procure the millions of dollars that he wants
Wherever You Go, There You Are
I was unclear about exactly what I was saying. As an entire country, North Korea isn't efficient, their economy isn't efficient, agreed. The NK government does the wrong thing quickly, compared to the US.
The efficiency (but not goodness) of a GOVERNMENT organization can be measured by how quickly and inexpensively they do whatever it is they are told to do. In other words, we can compare:
Kim Jong-un decides that sun tanning salons be illegal. How much time and money does it take before the tanning salons are shut down? Lil Kim tells his goons to go handle it and they probably have the tanning salons gone within a day or a week.
Barak Obama decides that tanning salons should be illegal. How much time and money does it take before the tanning salons are shut down? First Obama mentions the idea to Pelosi ... a year later a bill is actually drafted ... congressional committees have hearings .... etc. Hillarycare was a priority of the Democrats in 1993. It was passed in 2010, with most provisions going into effect between 2014 and 2020. So 17 years to pass it, then another 10 years to put it into effect.
For some reason I find that hilarious.
But other than the nation-wide railroad network, the flush toilet, the telegraph, commercial air-travel, and the massively-affordable personal car, what has the laissez-faire economy done for us?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
That was my first thought too. However, simple text is not enough, because multiple states (or other license-plate issuing authorities) might reuse the same plate ID. So you have to have that information too.
I remember seeing an article several years back about the trouble police (and people reporting crimes to police) were having identifying plates, due to all the vanity plate styles available. People have to resort to describing the design of the plate to the cops. My own state has so many different styles available today that I can't even come up with a good number of them. Multiply that by 50, + various possesions you see around occasionally like Guam and Puerto Rico. On top of that, tribes can issue plates as well, and many of those have specialty plate options, and everyone's options are constantly changing. Trying to reliably OCR that info down to text seems like it would be a nightmare.
Let's see:
Nation-wide railroad network: To incentivize its' constrcution, the US government gave away huge land grants (much of it land of various Indian tribes) to corporations. The US maintains a federal bureaucracy to support rail transportation.
Flush toilets: Flush toilets existed for hundreds of years before the US did. Improved designs became popular and mass produced as governments built water supplies and sewers run to each house.
Telegraph: Before it was commercially built in the US, a demonstration line between Washington and Baltimore funded by Congress was built by Morse. Early commercialization was protected by patents.
Commercial air travel: Early commercial air travel was supported by US mail delivery. Massive government investments in airports, air traffic control, and safety bureaucracy support it now.
Massively-affordable personal car: Useful for travel because of the government construction and control of roads and bridges.
Somebody should try out a license plate with an SQL inject code to crash the system.
Shouldn't be hard.
Those things happened with a regulated economy. The government was significantly involved in the railroad network in particular.
Moving to laissez-fair gave us Enron and the forced banking bail-out of 2007.
And that is why I don't work for the gubbermint. Never managed to become that corrupted.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I see where you're going and in some sense I agree. I had to laugh at this, though:
> approval processes make sense; bidding wars and approved vendor sources don't. I'd just as soon have them start troubleshooting, identify the problem, carry out a Kepner-Tregoe decision analysis to figure on how to address it,
The problem is that the 80 GB drive in a PC is full. Super Walmart (an approved supplier) sells Western Digital 1 TB replacement drives for $100. They could either:
A) Stop at Walmart while they're out picking up donuts.
B) Carry out a Bulshet-Hokey determination analysis process, with the help of a consultant.
There is something to be said for "if the local Walmart sells it, you can just pick it there rather than going through a month-long procurement process", aka having Walmart as an approved vendor.
If there is a hardware failure on that desktop PC, the whole programme will be cancelled? It's all going to be out of warranty, they'll need a purchase order and budget...
I called the _government_ of NK more efficient (but worse) than the US process and bureaucracy. When Kim Jong-un decides that tanning salons shall be illegal, the tanning salons are shut down within a few days. If Obama wanted tanning salons to be illegal, it would take six years to get the law passed, then another several years before the Supreme Court overruled the law. A billions of dollars would be spent on all of this process.
All of that process, mostly designed to encourage fairness, isn't a bad thing. Public participation is good, making decisions carefully and with due deliberation is a good thing. It's not a fast thing, nor is it cheap. Good government is slow and costly.
We don't necessarily want to get rid of the processes, procedures, and precautions. We SHOULD keep in mind that if you want plastic forks, Walmart will get them to you from 99 cents per pack of 100; if you want _government_ to provide you with plastic forks, it's going to cost a lot more and take a lot longer. So if you want plastic forks, go to Walmart, not Congress.
Of the second group, the Koch Brothers are responsible - through corporate means - of plenty of deaths: to be fair, not in the same league as Stalin, though.
Of particular note are the many oil-related 'deaths' in Africa: you try and organize a union, or oppose Koch (or Koch-Glitsch), and a bad case of lead poisoning seems to occur with great regularity.
That's not mentioning the increase in deaths in the good ol' US or A, caused by lung problems ... attributable to fossil fuel emissions, and sustained gutting of EPA laws, and enforcement of those they can't get repealed.
Also wonder how many deaths can be attributed to the John Birch Society? Their father was a co-founder, and both brothers were members. A group that has had laid at its door, over the years, lynchings, preaching hatred (and the resulting violence), and funding of many other Patriotic, Anti-government, Anti-Immigrant groups (e.g. KKK, White Patriot).
Stalin was an abomination: Ché was a direct response to the de facto slavery situation in Cuba, including immunity to any criminal charges by 'The Masters', perpetuated by American capitalists run rampant; the Koch Brothers are a near-perfect example of American capitalists run rampant, merely with years of evolution of how to give themselves plausible deniability, and hordes of corporate lawyers to prevent anything ever being pinned on them.
Gotta love tricks like funding the anti-anti-XL-pipeline group, in Canada. Supplying transport and signs. And taking a page from another "By whatever means necessary" paragon, Roger Stone, regarding mounting protest signs being mounted on a solid piece of wood. Oddly, most of the Koch funding of groups that support their goals use Structuring (a.k.a. Smurfing), which is a technique primarily used by larger criminal groups to hide where money is coming from and going to. Really, a corporate entity using the same strategy as criminal entities? You can draw your own conclusions about that.
B) Carry out a Bulshet-Hokey determination analysis process, with the help of a consultant.
Actually, those decisions were made when they selected their contracts. They now have these endless procurement processes which they should probably shorten.
The concept of no-bid contracts versus endless bidding wars is separate from this bureaucratic procurement process. You've conflated the spot purchase of a hard drive, which doesn't need any sort of contract bid, with a comment made about contract bidding. Your argument is thus ridiculous and unfounded.
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Like a few years ago, people saying "we can all have healthcare like VA provides, they do a great job". Well, the VA is a giant government bureaucracy, with all of the problems that come with a giant government bureaucracy. It's when we pretend that more government bureaucracy will make things more efficient, less costly, or faster that we get in trouble.
And yet, the multiple giant private bureaucracies we have in the US health insurance system seem to perform so much worse (by cost, outcomes, pretty much anything you want to measure) than the big government bureaucracies managing the healthcare systems of just about every other modern industrialized democracy.
It sounds like a classic setup where they wanted a function the vendor could provide, but didn't bother to follow the proper IT processes to get it implemented. So they ended up with a consumer grade desktop running XP(!) on their network storing this junk on probably a single sata disk. His exposition about bureaucracy sounds like equal parts exasperation and penitence.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
I remember being a lab manager for my college mentor when I was fresh out of undergrad school. The hoops we had to jump through for the most inane purchases were so obscene that we usually just worked to find a way around it. For example, we needed some electronic components. Oh but neither Digikey nor Newark are approved suppliers. They had looked into it before, but the school didn't buy enough from them for it to make sense. Oh but Allied Electrical and CDW are approved, see of you can use them. No, they don't sell the kind of crap we are always buying. So, you needed to show evidence of searching for each item at at least three approved sources to be approved to buy from an unapproved supplier, which usually amounted to printing internet search results. If there were a lot of components and it didn't coat that much, we would say screw it, buy it on our own dime and submit a reimbursement claim. Otherwise I would literally spend a whole day putting together the order and then wait a whole week for the office to process it.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
So for anyone who has worked for the government I've seen this scenario play out dozens of times. So what happens when the IT department can't or simply won't keep up with customer demands? Customers outsource those demands - and these days you really can run all of your essential IT services from various cloud providers. There's even a Gartner term for this - "Shadow IT". So the money gets spent anyhow, without any oversight or governance that their central IT department has mandated as a policy. Worse - when the guy who setup said system moves on - the central IT dept often has to take over and manage this now essential system.
Windows XP working as a file server for license plate cameras? Please - that has shadow IT written all over it. Guy needed a file server, the IT guys told him to fuck off (because they have no money or staff), so he rummaged around for whatever piece of shit would power up and used that. And now thats its a national news article - guess what central IT's next project is? If he really cared about IT governance the file server wouldn't be a single XP box, with internal storage. This could have been a VM using some network storage system for FAR less.
These days any IT dept really needs to do what it takes (and that means having a CIO with the political willpower) to make IT keep pace or at least placate these requests in some way. One thing we would do is go ok - your budget, your servers, but we spec them to our standards, they live in our data center, use our storage systems, our backups and our physical/endpoint security.
If the data isn't critical then why are they bothering to collect it in the first place? Why pay for license plate scanners, OCR systems, wireless network connections/bandwidth bills, etc if the data doesn't have value? If it does have value then placing it on a desktop system probably isn't the right answer.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
> Your argument is thus ridiculous and unfounded.
It's not really an argument, it just struck me as funny. Like a Dilbert comic. I used to work for the government, so I'm familiar with ridiculousness in procurement.
> The concept of no-bid contracts versus endless bidding wars is separate from this bureaucratic procurement process. You've conflated the spot purchase of a hard drive, which doesn't need any sort of contract bid, with a comment made about contract bidding.
Well if it's a contract to provide PC parts, or specifically hard drives, it's precisely the same thing. Where I worked, for Macs we had a contract with a local vendor to provide all Mac computers, parts, and accessories. For "other PCs" (Windows), we had a contract with a large national company. For a Mac, I'd say "I need a docking station" and a few minutes later the the boss would say "Ray, stop by Mac ***** and pic up a docking station." For Windows machines, it took a couple months.
insecure (XP.) outdated and unsupportable. no policies. what the heck good is knowing that 666-EVIL was parked at the courthouse 10 years ago, when the plate has been dead for 6 years?
junk the whole operation.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
> And yet, the multiple giant private bureaucracies we have in the US health insurance system seem to perform so much worse (by cost, outcomes, pretty much anything you want to measure) than the big government bureaucracies managing the healthcare systems of just about every other modern industrialized democracy.
Not really. There ARE many things that could be improved, certainly. Outcomes are among the best in the world, however. Costs are high. People point to Canada as a "better" system. There are _some_ advantages, but people very frequently travel from Canada to get healthcare in the US. Those who live in the Canadian system would rather pay US prices and get the US level of care than wait a couple of years and then get the Canadian level of care "for free".
Part of the higher cost is that "you get what you pay for". The other part of high costs is various inefficiencies. Unfortunately, there truly are many different problems, which will require many different solutions. You can't identify THE problem with healthcare in the US, and propose THE solution. To make real progress rather than just scoring political points, you have to identify a problem, fix it, identify another problem, fix it, identify another problem ...
So, when any employee of any company sits down on their desktop (for this context, laptop is equivalent to desktop) computer and writes up a memo or white paper or some guidance to a group in word_processor_here> have they A) done nothing valuable for the company or B) violated your rule?
Let me guess, you sell mainframes for a living.
I don't sell mainframes but I do tell users never to save their documents on their local computer as they're not backed up.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Not really any more corrupted than the for-profit space, where the proponent would build out a cost-benefit scenario that would have to demonstrate how they would leverage some advantageous market position to gain control over some consumer desire and... $profit$
In the non-profit space yo have to demonstrate that there is some unbelievably horrible outcome if the organization does not spend horrendous amounts of money on your project. In my last job the bad outcome was usually "widespread death and disease", so the BOD would pony up the dough
It is hard to call any of these interactions corrupt unless you are willing to indict most of humanity
Wherever You Go, There You Are
I think there is one part that you are not considering in your socialist vs non socialist calculations. And that is what are the non-direct costs on society of those people that fail in both the socialist and non countries. On one hand you will have wellfare and benefits payments, on the other side you have prison populations, crime and loss of potential.
Oh and the US govt spending is around the 35% mark of GDP.
Are you seriously going to argue, the US was more laissez-fair in 2007, than in 1907? Please, confirm — make my day...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Serious accusations — got any citations handy to back them up?
Khm, you are posting in HTML. Do you not know, how to embed links with it, or do you just have nothing to support your accusations?
Ah, but you know better and can see straight through those hordes. I get it.
The rest of your post is just unparsable, sorry.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Those costs are imposed on society not by the failures themselves, but by the folks, who — out of greatness of their hearts — want to help them. And not just help them, but compel everybody else to help them as well.
You are right that this is a problem in any regime. Free market Capitalist ones are just much wealthier and thus can afford to take better care of the losers. The hobos in New York have cell phones and are otherwise better off, than North Korea's "middle class"...
That enormous figure includes only the Federal government. Once you add the State and local government spending, you'll come to over 40% and up to 50%.(depending on the method used).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Only it was not the government's to give away in the first place. It was unsettled land and the government merely approved a claim. When you say "gave away" you lead the reader to believe, there was a monetary loss — an expense — to the taxpayer from the action. There was not, and your leading to that incorrect believe thus qualifies as a lie. Congratulations.
Yes. I referred exactly to that creation of popular designs — and their mass-production.
Except neither was government-provided in the 19th century. In fact, many houses use artesian water supplies even today. And many still use septic tanks to treat sewage. Yet another attempt to portray government as somehow necessary for running water debunked.
Are you saying, commercial telegraph would never have gotten built, were it not for that $30000 appropriation?
Another lie. US mail used the commercial air-travel to deliver "air-mail" faster. It was not necessary for the air-lines' survival — although, characteristically, the government's involvement produced its share of corruption.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I think you have missed my point. By indirect costs I mean things like the costs of crime and the prevention of crime. When people have nothing they are more likely to turn to crime to meet their needs. The main stream society then has to spend money on preventing crime and protecting their own assets. They also have to have some kind of system that handles criminals. Are you saying that these cost are imposed out of the greatness of people's hearts?
Having a wellfare state won't prevent crime by any stretch of the imagination. But if you have less desperate people you will have less people who are motivated by that desperation to turn to crime.
Then there are the people who would have been net contributors to the economy over their lifetime but are removed from being productive because they suffered an illness or injury at a point in their life when they were unable to afford the healthcare. If you suffer something in your 20s you will have had less time to build an asset and skill base than if you suffered the same thing in your 50s. Without affordable access to healthcare you will lose productive people as a result. People whose economic value would have far exceeded the medical cost.
And while the hobos in New York may be better off than North Korea's middle class the average middle class American is significantly worse off than the average middle class Australian on pretty much every measure (disposable income, health, life expectancy, house size, education). The American upper upper class however has more than the Australian equivalent however but the Australian poor are also a lot better off.
What does 1907 have to do with the flush toilet, the telegraph, airlines, and the railroad network?
The government was all over regulating all of those but the flush toilet. You don't think the railroads and Western Union negotiated right of way with each individual land owner, do you? A special government agency was formed specifically to deal with aviation. Does that really sound like laissez-fair to you?
Of course, the flush toilet pre-dated the U.S. by a fair amount anyway, so I'm not sure what that had to do with anything.
North Korea is not efficient.
Nation-wide railroad network: To incentivize its' construction, the US government gave away huge land grants (much of it land of various Indian tribes) to corporations. The US maintains a federal bureaucracy to support rail transportation.
The rail companies kind of cheated this idea, too. If you've ever explored the American West, you probably came across various and sundry ancient rail sections inexplicably placed haphazardly all over the place. These rails were never connected to the rail network system, and were certianly ever useful to anyone in any meaningful way. Want to know why? Railroad land grants. You see, the rail companies initially would got an odd section of land on each side of the track for every mile of track built, resulting in a kind of checkerboard pattern if you looked at it on the survey.
The idea being the rail companies would subsidize track building through selling real estate near the track. Seemed sensible enough, right? What happened was this: in any place that was reasonably habitable (water, fertile land, the usual things that make life nice), the rail companies would build track alongside the main track such that the checkerboard was filled in, giving them 20 miles on either side of the main rail. They received the deed to the land, and often came along and recuperated their materials to use on yet another section of track, repeating the process. This allowed them to quickly and cheaply become the legal owners of huge swaths of land.
Eventually, they'd sell the granted land, making a tidy profit. They'd usually retain the mineral rights, however. Interestingly, the several rail companies to this day retain more mineral-acres than anyone, and still make insane amounts of cash on mineral leases to this day.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
If the Government hadn't granted that land to railroads, it could grant it to other people, or sell it, or something. If it wasn't the government's to give away (some of it wasn't, after all, which didn't stop the government), how could they give it to the railroads?
Wells and septic tanks work in rural areas. In urban areas, the demand for water and the supply of sewage demand a centralized system, which will be at least regulated by the government.
Commercial telegraph service was indeed coming, at least as long as it had government providing the rights-of-way. If the government can speed up a desirable technology with subsidies, that can be a win for everyone.
I think you seriously underestimate the effect of Air Mail on the development of airlines. It was a guarantee of steady income, which is very useful for a company trying to start up in an experimental market.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Socialism is an economic system where the people own the means of production, directly or indirectly. This can be through government ownership or regulation, or by having workers as ex officio stockholders, or something like that. A socialist country doesn't have to have large amounts of government spending. It isn't nearly as good as capitalism for generating wealth, but it's far better in making sure people can get a reasonable wage and some dignity.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You clearly are not aware of how bad a no-bid procurement process can get. Sadly I've seen it in action and let's say it would put third world countries to shame.
Then again, there are rare times when no-bid contracts work just fine.
Start at http://www.schlockmercenary.co..., and read the next 6 pages...
At the very least, if you have two contracted suppliers who can both provide the same goods, there is no reason your contracts should restrict you from just grabbing shit from Newegg.
Although that theoretically could be made part of a IT hardware support contract, you can bet that will affect the cost of a support contract (if a support contract can't make money on the hw side, they will simply charge more elsewhere). At the end of the day, the highly bundled contracts tend to come in with overall lower cost (and the inevitable lower service) than the unbundled contracts.
If nothing else, for a business, it's generally cheaper to sell more shit to your current customer than pay customer acquisition costs to find new customers, so contracts that bundle more will generally reflect this cost savings.
This is true for IT, construction, to food services, etc. The reason is generally because reducing the uncertainty in the amount of the total dollars to the vendor and reduction of the overhead of a single provider allows them to reduce the gross margin needed to cover the uncertainty and maintain a certain aggregate profit ratio (e.g., if random chance causes you can lose some money somewhere you make it back somewhere else in the contract).
Sure the marginal performance of that contract suffers relative to someone cherry picking cost savings, but at the end of the day, everyone needs to eat, so it is kind of a zero-sum game. Your savings is the contracting companies loss, so they have to make it up somewhere (new customers, charging you more for the rest of it, etc).
Government doesn't spend money on IT.
Oh, come on. I'm sure Clinton spent at least $5/mo on her bathroom-closet co-lo email server.
You're not getting this. They already have a non-exclusive contract. They have a choice between multiple vendors. They can go CDW, or off the HP contract, or from Dell, for the same part. They have an account with each of these, so you just requisition and go.
They don't have an account with Amazon or Newegg, so there's 18 layers of bureaucracy to go through to buy a $40 hard drive.
Although that theoretically could be made part of a IT hardware support contract, you can bet that will affect the cost of a support contract
This does not apply because nothing in the existing contract--in the contract that was actually negotiated in the real, non-hypothetical world--says you can't go to Newegg for parts. It's just a pain in the ass because you have to file a bunch of forms with your boss and purchasing.
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So they reduced their violation of citizen privacy because they are too incompetent to do it properly?
They are stupid enough to store potentially sensitive information on a desktop---nevermind that it's also unsupported and obsolete. What the hell?
With that in mind, I'm confident they have reasonable access controls and auditing in place to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of this data. Surely, the low-rent operation was due to an abundance of effort and expense on security.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Most likely you could get Windows 95 to talk to a modern hard drive. You wouldn't have SATA drivers, but Windows 95 could fall back on talking to the drive through the BIOS, MS-DOS style. It might be slow, but it would work. Now try to get Windows NT to talk to a SATA drive.