Posts by Robert 22 289 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Dec 2013
The miracle of modern social media makes it possible to identify the biases held by people and target them with messages that exploit those biases. That way the messages can be completely different and/or quite extreme with little risk of alienating the recipients.
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe
Signal may have been approved for the sharing of non-sensitive information, but it wasn't approved for classified information.
It seems that at least some of the people involved were using their own phones. This is a big no-no. Among other things, there are tools available to state actors (look up NSO Pegasus) that can exploit any activity on a compromised phone. And it is apparently quite easy to compromise a cell phone.
This dwarfs anything that Hillary did. There was clearly very sensitive information being discussed using insecure means and it got leaked through carelessness and or ineptitude. Moreover, the 2016 election was close enough that Republican grandstanding on this issue probably succeeded in swinging the election outcome.
"The fact sheet claims agencies spend over $1 billion a year on PCs, and says nearly $6 billion worth of purchases have funneled through the GSA over the past decade - delivering an average savings of 38 percent compared to other procurement channels."
We have a single federal government agency for non-trivial procurements in Canada. The had a standing offer arrangement for computers and software. From what I saw, it seems doubtful that the savings, if any, were any where as near as large as what was claimed. One thing I noticed was that the stuff on the price lists tended to be dated, and when prices were falling (which they were up till recent times), It seemed you were locked into both old prices and old technology. Moreover, if you were looking for anything that wasn't completely standard, you were likely to get gouged.
I worked for the Canadian government. Where I worked, we didn't have a special briefcase, but I recall that documents that were being hand carried in the outside world had to be specially packaged so that, among other things, their sensitive nature was not evident from the outside. I recall hearing of someone losing their clearance (and consequently their job) because they left a package of documents in a locked car where it was visible. Those documents would have been classified no higher than the "Secret" level.
I haven't used Publisher, but can attest to the challenges in formatting complex documents in Word. The government R&D organization I used to work for, having gotten into the branding bandwagon, had a consultant design a new R&D document format. The complexity of the new document format resulted in VERY unstable formatting. One would spend hours trying to get the formatting correct after a few minor edits.
For stuff like consumer electronics, having supply chains and economies of scale are absolutely essential. There are few situations where anyone could conceivably justify investing the time and money needed to reproduce them.
I'm reminded of the US Very High Speed IC program back in the 90s. The US government ponied up money to various systems companies to create boutique chip fabs for the military. AFAIK, none of these amounted to much in the end.
"Isnt this the argument over probationary? And it is a huge problem to not be able to fire people without cause."
Historically civil servants enjoyed a measure of job security in exchange for mediocre financial compensation. That bargain is being thrown out the window. Moreover, it is despicable to tell people they are being let go for poor performance when there is no actual supporting evidence.
The US sponsored the Marshall Plan and provided a great deal of economic and military assistance to Europe after WW 2. There were other things such as foiling the French/British scheme to seize the Suez Canal and giving Panama ownership of the Panama Canal. Sure they have also done some pretty awful things, especially in South America and Latin America, but they at least paid lip service to higher ideals. In an unbelievably short time they have squandered an incredible amount of good will, by completely abandoning any ethical or moral compass and demonstrating a obsession with grabbing resources on a scale comparable to Hitler's Germany.
The priority doesn't seem to be eliminating deficits let alone reducing debt. It is making the US a tax haven for oligarchs. Moreover, many of the cuts will prove expensive in the future. Sure cutting the CDC will save money in the short term. But what happens when the next pandemic rolls around?
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