18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Mexico

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Expand view Topic review: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Mexico

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

by NoOneImportant » Sun Nov 24, 2013 7:23 pm

The form described above has it place and purpose - not to hide stealth project per se, although it does that too. But in a system - the Federal budgeting system - that appropriates money on a yearly basis this system has its place. It permits emergency start-ups of necessary projects between budgetary cycles that can't be anticipated, or budgeted for in prior years. It usually works because of transparency, and the honesty of most people. When the corrupt obtain control it is subject to abuse, and if no one cares, or is watching the store it becomes the norm over time - and whistle-blowers get crucified, as fraud is very difficult to prove.

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

by NoOneImportant » Sun Nov 24, 2013 5:06 pm

Ok, but how does the poor SOB keep from getting his hands dirty? He get's an initial $50 Meg contract extension(CX). He acquires the hardware(HW) for the CX, from the fed's junk pool - GAO surplus pool - and really doesn't care at what cost it comes into the CX at. He gets all the old junk HW he needs, then the SOB upgrades the drives, and the vulnerable moving parts stuff - again paid for out of maintenance-and-repair as part of the CX, and transfers physical possession of the HW to the Favored-son, with whom he has contracted for engineering services in support of the CX. The HW may be accounted for in several ways - it may be held in ownership in the CX at fairy-dust cost(GAO acquisition cost) - and it really makes no difference what the HW cost is as it's acquired from the GAO, as the magic is that it doesn't have to be bought from the outside, and go through a formal bidding process - thus causing an spending of real money, not just accounting adjustments. The Favored-son will get physical possession of the HW on a $1 a year lease, or any other form of deferred payment price, as it makes little administrative difference as any lease price is going to go back to the CX as a billing plus profit anyway from the Favored-son as he is providing CX engineering services anyway. And it's no one else business how the SOB chooses to run his business, or administer the CX, so long as obvious criminal fraud isn't involved - for when the SOB runs out of cash he is fed another CX. In any case, the HW comes in at a fairy-dust cost - GAO cost has no relationship to market value - but the real expense is in the labor to cobble together the mess they're going to foist off on the public - as 500k lines of code means 100s of man-years of high-priced SW development labor. The SOB either hires the SW guys to the contract - not desired - or more probably folds them into the "buy" of the engineering services that he will buy in the form of contracted labor from the Favored-son priced on a time-and-material(T&M) no-bid basis - most desired. The SOB and the CX is a conduit for everything - the hardware, the T&M SW labor, and all the costs plus the profits for the Favored-son who appears from the outside to look like prime, but is not - and it's all accounted for under the original contract-extension. The Johnson Space Center is run almost completely by contract - as is every other major federal facility - AIMS, Kennedy, etc.... The facilities are federally owned, and operations are contracted out - first hand information.

The Favored-son has the HW, the development SW guys, and begins to create his "magic" - or mess in our case - and it's all paid for by a simple existing contract's CX; all costs go to an alread-in-place government contract - and the original contract can be for anything: a weapons system in development(not the norm), facilities operation, or more appropriately something completely expendable so that there is little of residual value to account for. So long as everything works, and no one looks all that closely, everything is good. And even if all the transactions are scrutinized, technically the only marginal item that might be considered fraud is the contract-extension, and a case might me made for that being a discretionary administrative decision caused by the exigencies of time that are warranted by the necessity for a rapid start-up. Those "exigencies" are also used as justification to award no-bid engineering-development contracts. Those exigencies or conditions are "necessary" until congressional funding can be appropriated - an appropriation that never happens - as the administration has no intention of ever telling congress how the system is being paid for. Number wise everything remains and is fed as part of the original unrelated contract, thus a new contract, completely unrelated to the original contract, is fed by stealth - only the initiated really understand what's happening. At some point all of the new costs - costs that are going into the original contract - are going to warrant scrutiny as all the contract-extension costs go toward the original contract's costs in the form or cost over-runs.

So long as the original contract is for something that is not jeopardized by the cost over-runs, everything works. Congress never gets a look - or has the ability to kill the project's funding, as they don't have a clue - the Favored-son gets hundreds of millions - and the public gets drilled when the unqualified, and inept are in charge of something they are unqualified to manage with zero oversight. Only the SOB is at risk - he is doing all the heavy lifting - as he is charged ultimately with the original contract's administration, and tainted by the admin of the CX performance, and"cost over-runs," if scrutinized. Should he choose not to "go-along" he jeopardizes the entire original contract - usually in the billions, as small contracts don't provide sufficient cover for this to work.

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

by anon » Sun Nov 24, 2013 7:07 am

No, on an add on contract extension, there's literally no possible way to sort out the costs without a GAO audit. And that hasn't been done AFAIK, and you might note that there isn't any loud call for an actual audit of hours and equipment worth.

These numbers are just quotes of something some congressman said. What's he got? Contract data for an extension, I'm sure. So did they drop all other work and work only on this single little website? Believe me, that's just not how it goes. This 300 to 600 million sounds about right for an extension for a year, but what else were they doing? What did they do the year before?

It's just numbers and from my standpoint, without that audit you can just pull up any figure you like, up to the total cost of that extension, and it'll probably be supportable.

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

by anon » Sun Nov 24, 2013 7:01 am

And even the GAO will give results at odds with an engineers costing, like so. Take a Dell 1950 server, there's thousands of them in use, in clustered stacks as the basis for virtual servers connected to a SAN by a fiber channel backbone. If that server is about five years old, it will probably run for another five years, if you clean it out carefully and put in new drives. So what's the value of it? According to ebay, about 400 to 600 dollars, depending on the hardware configuration. According to the GAO, it may be worth the original server cost, unless they are requested to amortize in their calculations. Depends on how you take it, I've seen the govt try to charge someone new price for a ten year old piece of crap nobody was paying attention to, when it finally got thrown out as garbage, and the paperwork didn't get done properly.

So what's the worth to an engineer planning a new service? A five year old Dell is outside warranty and past end of service life, it's less than worthless. And there are thousands of them in use today.

Pick any number you want, somebody will tell you it's right. Believe me, I'm looking forward to retirement.

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

by John » Sun Nov 24, 2013 6:53 am

So, just to be clear, the project still cost $300-600 million. You're
talking about an internal government accounting issue, not the actual
amount of money spent. Right? And outside of the government, what
difference does it make to the average citizen how it's accounted for?

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

by anon » Sun Nov 24, 2013 6:48 am

Figured that would surprise you.

Government contracts are supposed to be let for bidding by GAO rules. It's my understanding this was not, because of zero funding. Congress has to make funding available, there's very little in the way of slush funds in the federal govt, by design. The President has access to a couple of million, the military commands have about that much each in disposable funding, and that's really about it aside from the individual funding for offices.

So what had to be done was stick an add on requirement to an existing contract that was up for renewal. And it sucks to be that guy. Contractors will take that and do it, because they want to keep that contract going, but it's usually done by a trick the govt uses often, called a contract extension. You get a one year extension, at the same rate of funding as you had before, but you don't get any more money. You just get more work piled on top of what you already had.

Technically, this had to be an E&I contract, or should have been. (Engineering and Installation) An O&M contract should not have installation and design as part of their responsibilities, but I suppose it could have happened.

Anyhow, that's the buzz I've gotten, that this was just tacked onto an existing contract, and whatever they got to do with was about what you'd expect under the circumstances. Not that you or I will ever get any accurate confirmation of this, unless you get the GAO inspectors to do an verified audit of costs. Which is probably about as likely as pigs flying, there's too much politics involved and nobody wants this contract extension business getting much publicity anyhow. Bad for all parties if that happens.

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

by John » Sun Nov 24, 2013 6:38 am

I don't understand what you're saying. I keep hearing various
consultants say that HealthCare.gov has about 500 million lines of
code, and cost $300-600 million dollars. What do you mean when you
say the cost was near zero?

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

by Anon » Sun Nov 24, 2013 6:33 am

Been working for govt contractors for most of my life, so an insight here might be useful. You can as easily say the ACA federal website cost nothing as saying it cost almost any figure you choose. And there is a reason for that. The reason is that there was no funding for such a website in the law, the law assumed that no governors would attempt to block a federal law, and obviously any attempt to pass later funding would meet the Republican stone wall of filibusters in the Senate and opposition in the House. Without funding, there is no way to issue a contract that meets GAO requirements.

So what happens? At that point, you pick some unlucky bastard and do an add on without funding. I've been that unlucky bastard in the past, and to cut to the chase, you get handed all the junk equipment, usually Dell crap that's out of date, out of warranty and past end of service life, a link to the government website for volume software, and you get told "build something". Without funding, without proper tools, without equipment that's reliable enough to even make a game server. Would you believe that for several years every movement order for the US Navy was processed on such an unfunded network? I watched that being built. Zero cost to the Navy, save for labor. Of course, it crashed every few days as hardware failed, but hey, that's the idiot contractors fault, right?

Not that the Navy has much of a record to brag about on the funded side. The reason that network was built was because their hugely funded (multiple billions) NMCI network "engineers" didn't have the ability to actually make bulk data transfer work on their piece of crap. Go read the GAO review of the NMCI project, it's "interesting" to say the least.

All this yammer about costs is just that, yammer. Pull any figure out of your butt that pleases you, I can pretty much guarantee you can find some way to twist the accounting around to make it fit, just like that Navy network I referenced above. Without a detailed examination of the books to determine hours spent and actual costs, you can NOT know what that site cost to build. I'd bet heavily on it being near zero, after amortizing the junk to market value.

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

by NoOneImportant » Tue Nov 19, 2013 11:45 pm

The female infanticide problem is much larger than just China, if you've got a moment view the trailer - http://www.itsagirlmovie.com/

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

by NoOneImportant » Mon Nov 18, 2013 3:12 pm

Cholera - diarrhea on steroids -, untreated has a mortality rate of >50%. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factshee ... index.html Cholera is one of the world's greatest killers of children under 5 years of age. The strange part about Cholera is that when treated with rehydration salts dissolved in clean water - usu. boiled - Cholera will resolve itself after 7 - 14 days. The difficulty is that Cholera can deplete the body of water and salt to >10% of body weight in just a few hours thus causing death - so most who contract cholera die long before the body resolves the Cholera bacterium. Cholera is effectively treated using Unicef formulated Oral Rehydration Salts dissolved in safe, clean water. ORS are a specific combination of: sugar, sodium chloride - table salt, potassium chloride, and sodium citrate. Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) begun early reduces Chlolera's mortality rate to <1%.

As John noted, Cholera is caused by either water, or food tainted with bacterium from human waste. The prevention for cholera is: appropriate human hygiene - washing of hands, suitable human waste disposal, and effective water treatment (tainted water is the most common means of Cholera transmission). Once contracted, however, Oral Rehydration Salts solutions are the difference between life and death.

Unicef (World Health Organization - WHO) created ORS in roughly 1980, and produces millions of ORS packets yearly. The packets, when dissolved into a liter of clean water and consumed, will replace bodily fluids, and electrolytes that would unreplaced lead to death in as little as one day - 3 liters/day of ORS for adults; for children, as much as a young child will consume while the diarrhea/vomiting continues. While the WHO packets are nice and highly effective, and cheap $.50 per packet, they are not raadily available in the domestic US. Fortunately a home-made recipe, shown in the TED video below, recommended by Unicef of 1/2 teaspoon of table salt, and five teaspoons of sugar mixed with a quart (liter) of water is almost as effective as the Unicef packets. Unicef identifies 25 pathogens that may cause diarrhea, some more virulent than others - the most common type being traveler's diarrhea - ORS may be used to treat the dehydration experienced from all of these sources of diarrhea - and is especially important in children under five, as they have so little mass. While normal table salt doesn't contain potassium Morton Salt company manufactures a product that contains both sodium chloride and potassium chloride in almost the correct proportions to emulate the Unicef ORS packets.

Lancet statement:
http://www.rehydrate.org/ors/ort.htm

TED Cholera ORS video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOdAkufkAFk

Mixing ORS packets video:
http://rehydrate.org/ors/flv/how-to-mix-ors.htm

Home recipe for ORS:
http://www.rehydrate.org/solutions/homemade-ors.pdf

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