If ain't broke ...

Maria Mavropoulou

If it' ain't broke ... applies to Google as yours truly, on a daily basis, depends on Android running a smart phone and Chrome for browsing and searching the web because Google's environment works without question. Is it perfect? Not a chance as Google seems to not understand interface design like Apple but that's not the issue, legal types not knowing how tech operates at deep level is because Google's a company comprised of a vast array of integrated software code sets able to work seamlessly together due to the billions of man hours and dollars spent in developing a system able the meet the needs of a significant portion of the human race presiding on planet earth. With this said, recommendations made by Herbert Hovenkamp, a prof at the Wharton School, makes a lot of sense regarding on how to properly deal with a company as important at this one.

Remember, DOD created the F35 and we all know how that's working out so ... do we want to create another boondoggle like the F35? I thought so.

A U.S. Air Force F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter from the 58th Fighter Squadron, 33rd Fighter Wing, Eglin AFB, Fla. performs an aerial refueling mission with a KC-135 Stratotanker from the 336th Air Refueling Squadron from March ARB, Calif., May 14th, 2013 off the coast of Northwest Florida. The 33rd Fighter Wing is a joint graduate flying and maintenance training wing that trains Air Force, Marine, Navy and international partner operators and maintainers of the F-35 Lightning II.

Backgrounder ...

A recent Defense Department decision to approve full rate production of the troubled F-35 raises questions about whether Congress has the required access to the information they need to effectively oversee major defense acquisition programs and to challenge those that aren’t ready for production. A highly classified report issued by the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation to assess the initial operational capabilities of the F-35 was made available only briefly to the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. Despite many deficiencies revealed in the report, DOD approved full rate production about a month after its release. The deficiencies are apparent in even the heavily redacted version of the report obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Project On Government Oversight. These deficiencies include the following: 

Failure to meet key availability and reliability requirements

Continued inaccuracy of the gun

Excessive logistics footprint, especially for the Marine Corps variant

Delays on promised improvements

The rapid approval despite serious unresolved issues highlights the need for more effective congressional oversight. Laws such as the Nunn-McCurdy Act and the Operational Test and Evaluation of Defense Acquisition Programs law are designed to guarantee Congress access to critical information about DOD acquisition programs so they can effectively oversee those programs. Unfortunately, congressional staff seem to have had limited access to and very little time with the report in which to understand the state of the F-35 program. Further, the statutes don’t explicitly provide Congress with a mechanism to object to a Pentagon decision to approve full rate production other than its power of the purse to decide how many to buy, and when.

Regarding Google ...

There’s no question that Google dominates the world of internet search. But in attempting to open up this critical industry to more competition, the government is pursuing a cure worse than the disease. If the government is successful at breaking up Google, history tells us that consumers and many enterprises tied to our vast and flourishing internet may ultimately pay a price.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of the D.C. Federal District Court ruled earlier this year that Google, which the Justice Department claims controls over 90 percent of online search, illegally maintained a monopoly by paying manufacturers such as Apple to make Google the default search engine on their products. Last week, the Justice Department and a group of states presented the judge with a plethora of proposed remedies. Not only should Google be required to stop paying others for default status, it must also sell Chrome, its popular web browser. It would also be barred from making itself the default search engine on its own products and disallowed from preferring its own products in search results.

The entire point of antitrust law is to promote competitive markets. Antitrust remedies are not designed to punish a wrongdoer but rather to correct the effects of a monopoly. The test for a successful remedy is whether the market becomes more competitive, with higher output or a better experience for consumers.

At this point, the Justice Department has not sufficiently explained why its proposed actions are an appropriate remedy. Some of the proposals were not addressed at any length in the judge’s opinion in the Google trial at all. Others would split up complementary products, which often leads to poorer quality outcomes and higher coordination costs, both of which would be passed on to consumers. If the government gets everything it wants, the result could remove some of the features that have made Google products so successful and result in a fractured system that requires greater user effort to get inferior results.

If it ain't broke ...

14 Rules to Live By

Where is Kelly Johnson when you need him? You know, the guy who created the Black Bird aka SR-71, on time and within budget, something not possible with the F35, the fubar that keeps on giving as seen by the latest factoid on this ongoing disaster, courtesy of the company the great Kelly Johnson worked for back in the day.

One $100 million Air Force plane leaks oil, another bursts into flame

The F-35 is the world’s most expensive weapons system – $400 billion and counting. The estimated lifetime cost of this military-industrial project is $1.5 trillion. The F-35 is already close to a decade behind schedule and its cost is already more than twice the original estimate. The Pentagon has lowered its performance specs and it’s still years from being operational.

On June 22, at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, an F-35A was taking off on a routine training flight when the tail of the plane burst into flame. The pilot aborted the takeoff and escaped from the cockpit. A ground crew extinguished the fire with foam. There were no injuries, but the $100 million plane was possibly destroyed, according to officials.

All twenty-six F-35s at Eglin were grounded after the fire, while the Air Force tried to figure out why the plane had ignited. Air Force spokesperson Lt. Hope Cronin called the fire “significant,” but the cause is yet unknown. F-35s at other bases continue to fly.

Earlier this month, on June 13, the entire F-35 fleet (more then 100 planes at this point) was grounded because an F-35 was leaking oil in flight. The Air Force, the Marines, and the Navy each have a variation of the F-35 that range in estimated cost from $98 million (Air Force) to $104 million (Marines) to $124 million (Navy).

Seen below is the SR-71, the greatest airplane ever designed.

Johnson had 14 rules to live by, they are:

1. The Skunk Works manager must be delegated practically complete control of his program in all aspects. He should report to a division president or higher.

2. Strong but small project offices must be provided both by the military and industry.

3. The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people (10% to 25% compared to the so-called normal systems).

4. A very simple drawing and drawing release system with great flexibility for making changes must be provided.

5. There must be a minimum number of reports required, but important work must be recorded thoroughly.

6. There must be a monthly cost review covering not only what has been spent and committed but also projected costs to the conclusion of the program.

7. The contractor must be delegated and must assume more than normal responsibility to get good vendor bids for subcontract on the project. Commercial bid procedures are very often better than military ones.

8. The inspection system as currently used by the Skunk Works, which has been approved by both the Air Force and Navy, meets the intent of existing military requirements and should be used on new projects. Push more basic inspection responsibility back to subcontractors and vendors. Don't duplicate so much inspection.

9. The contractor must be delegated the authority to test his final product in flight. He can and must test it in the initial stages. If he doesn't, he rapidly loses his competency to design other vehicles.

10. The specifications applying to the hardware must be agreed to well in advance of contracting. The Skunk Works practice of having a specification section stating clearly which important military specification items will not knowingly be complied with and reasons therefore is highly recommended.

11. Funding a program must be timely so that the contractor doesn't have to keep running to the bank to support government projects.

12. There must be mutual trust between the military project organization and the contractor, the very close cooperation and liaison on a day-to-day basis. This cuts down misunderstanding and correspondence to an absolute minimum.

13. Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled by appropriate security measures.

14. Because only a few people will be used in engineering and most other areas, ways must be provided to reward good performance by pay not based on the number of personnel supervised.

Mythical Man Month anyone? For more info on the F35, The Art of Invention post comes to mind. :)

The video's not bad either. :)

Reality Check

Armata T-14 - The most advanced tank in the world.

Whenever I think about the NeoCons, including Hillary, and their really stupid notions about war,  especially with Russia, something these people have never been a part of, let alone military service, images like this come to mind, really powerful tech backed by a real country more than willing to defend itself, who knows how to build weapons designed to handle the vagaries of the real world  AK47 vs. the F35. better then the US. Adding to this blinding stupidity is the notion war is an affair that can be controlled, a notion completely at odds with reality, something the MICC  

Military/Industrial/Congressional/Complex seems utterly incapable of understanding in any way shape or fashion.

A point that the tofu ferocities of New York might bear in mind is that wars seldom turn out as expected, usually with godawful results. We do not know what would happen in a war with Russia. Permit me a tedious catalog to make this point. It is very worth making.

When Washington pushed the South into the Civil War, it expected a conflict that might be over in twenty-four hours, not four years with as least 650,000 dead. When Germany began WWI, it expected a swift lunge into Paris, not four years of hideously bloody static war followed by unconditional surrender. When the Japanese Army pushed for attacking Pearl, it did not foresee GIs marching in Tokyo and a couple of cities glowing at night. When Hitler invaded Poland, utter defeat, and occupation of Germany was not among his war aims. When the US invaded Vietnam, it did not expect to be outfought and outsmarted by a bush-world country. When Russia invaded Afghanistan it did not expect…nor when America invaded Afghanistan, nor when it attacked Iraq, nor….

Is there a pattern here?

The standard American approach to war is to underestimate the enemy, overestimate American capacities, and misunderstand the kind of war it enters. This is particularly true when the war is a manhood ritual for masculine inadequates–think Kristol, Podhoretz, Sanders, the whole Neocon milk bar, and that mendacious wreck, Hillary, who has the military grasp of a Shetland pony. If you don’t think weak egos and perpetual adolescence have a part in deciding policy, read up on Kaiser Wilhelm

As an aside, yours truly did two years in the the Army with a stint in Korea instead of Nam, thank god.

Addendum:

Retired General Anthony Zinni displayed little confidence in Bush and his aides. He said that their Iraq endeavor has landed the United States into the middle of assorted “culture wars” in the Middle East. “We don’t understand that culture,” he remarked. “I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life in this part of the world. And I’ll tell you, every time I hear…one of the dilettantes back here speak about this region of the world, they don’t have a clue. They don’t understand what makes them tick. They don’t understand where they are in their own history. They don’t understand what our role is….We are great at dealing with the tactical problems–the killing and the breaking. We are lousy at solving the strategic problems; having a strategic plan, understanding about regional and global security and what it takes to weld that and to shape it and to move forward.”

Do you think Zinni is angry over the war? He did get worked up as he ended his speech:

“We should be…extremely proud of what our people did out there….It kills me when I hear of the continuing casualties and the sacrifice that’s being made. It also kills me when I hear someone say that, well, each one of those is a personal tragedy, but in the overall scheme of things, they’re insignificant statistically.” (Perhaps he had in mind the comment Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made in June, when he played down attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq by saying, “You’ve got to remember that if Washington, D.C., were the size of Baghdad, we would be having something like 215 murders a month; there’s going to be violence in a big city.”) Zinni continued: “When we put [our enlisted men and women] in harm’s way, it had better count for something, It can’t be because some policy wonk back here has a brain fart of an idea of a strategy that isn’t thought out.”

 Brain fart? That’s not quite a military term. But those are fighting words. And Zinni practically counseled his audience to rebel against the Bush administration. U.S. troops, he said, “should never be put on a battlefield without a strategic plan, not only for the fighting–our generals will take care of that–but for the aftermath and winning that war. Where are we, the American people, if we accept this, if we accept this level of sacrifice without that level of planning? Almost everyone in this room, of my contemporaries–our feelings and our sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and lies, and we saw the sacrifice. We swore never again would we do that. We swore never again would we allow it to happen. And I ask you, is it happening again? And you’re going to have to answer that question, just like the American people are.”

If you're dead ...

F35 - Combat ready/just like congress

On Monday, the House Armed Services Committee, in what Politico described as “a clear win for defense contractors,” unveiled legislation to boost defense spending to “$117 billion — $3 billion higher than the Pentagon’s fiscal 2016 budget request.” Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., a member of the committee, has demanded increased military spending, telling Reuters earlier this year, “It doesn’t do any good to be financially responsible if you’re dead, so I’m going to vote for it to protect national security.”

I wonder how many of the rubes in congress should be recipients of the Darwin Awards. I know I have one candidate in mind.

"Life is hard. It's harder when you're stupid."

Enshittification ...

Illustration: Petra Péterffy

Tech is the perfect petri dish for greed, take Apple charging $999 for a monitor stand used to mount a $5000 monitor. Something wrong here? As per American Beauty, It's just a couch! comes to mind here and we won't talk about the F35 as yours truly beat that bad boy to death in terms of cost overruns and maintenance/performance issues dogging that aircraft beginning day one. 

Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too.

People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. When American allies buy advanced military technologies such as F-35 fighter jets, they’re getting not just a plane but the associated suite of communications technologies, parts supply, and technological support. When businesses engage in global finance and trade, they regularly route their transactions through a platform called the dollar clearing system, administered by just a handful of US-regulated institutions. And when nations need to establish internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places, chances are they’ll rely on a constellation of satellites—Starlink—run by a single company with deep ties to the American state, Elon Musk’s SpaceX. As with Facebook and Amazon, American hegemony is sustained by network logic, which makes all these platforms difficult and expensive to break away from.

Think NT and Microsoft in the 90's. Works for me, right???

The $1,000 stand in question. Apple/Dave Leeo.

Semi Fired

Elon Musk participated in a fireside chat with the TV host Rob Finnerty during the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., last week.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

Ready, Fire, Aim sums up this CF of an administration totally clueless on how to do anything with any degree of competency, something similar to how the other "stable genius" in the White House designed the Cybertruck, the only entity capable of surpassing the F35 in terms of how to do something stupendously wrong in the most efficient way possible. 

To whit.

Federal Personnel Office Tells Agencies That Musk’s Directive Is ‘Voluntary’

President Trump said employees would be “sort of semi-fired” or fired if they didn’t comply with an Elon Musk order to detail their work. Some agencies told staff members to ignore it. Federal workers said they didn’t know what to do.

Question, would you know what to do?

It's no secret that we here at Jalopnik have been critical of Elon Musk's stainless steel middle finger to the automotive industry. In fact, we wrote over 60 Tesla Cybertruck blogs in its first year as a real car in the real world.

In the past year the Cybertruck has faced a total of seven recalls, plus a litany of customer complaints and ample bad press from owner crashes and breakdowns. Even many die-hard Tesla stans ended up questioning their loyalty to Musk's vision. Given the vast array of blunders we figured it might be nice to bring some of the Cybertruck's highlights together in one place. Tap or click the title of each fail to read the original blog.

This was one of the most dangerous design flaws that afflicted the Cybertruck in 2024; an accelerator pedal with poorly glued trim that would slide and trap the pedal against the floor, turning the Cybertruck into a 7,000-pound runaway stainless steel death trap. The fix? Rivet the trim piece to the pedal.

How many recalls faced the Cybertruck this year? Seven? Damn. Here's a brief overview of each recall issued throughout the triangular pickup's first year of existence. Click each recall to read the full stories.

Dashboard warning lights that were too small

Unintended acceleration due to throttle pedal issues

Windshield wiper motor failures

Bed trim that kept flying off while driving

Rear-view camera image that took too long to load

Faulty inverter can cause total loss of power

Tire pressure monitor warning failure

Last but not least, the fireside chat with another stable genius.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Rev II