Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

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Reference: CRS Understanding Defense Acquisition

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, Military, Uncategorized
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Click on Image to Enlarge

PDF (20 Pages):  2012 CRS Understanding Defense Acquisition

Phi Beta Iota:  This CRS report comes at a very important time.  As with all CRS reports, its describes the process without being starkly prejudicial. The report addresses the attempts to shift from a threat-based requirements system to a capabilities system.  What the report does not do–and perhaps another report is needed–is point out that the acquisition is totally disconnected from a national Whole of Government and national military strategy — neither exist (what we have is political fluff, not real strategy).

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Search: directory of online budget simulators / games

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Important search.  Something OMB should have created decades ago.  A priority item within the Open Source Agency (OSA) concept of service to Whole of Government and unscrewing the DoD acquisition process which is corrupt to the bone (front-loading, false assumptions, etcetera).  Warning notice: the big money is focused on reducing the deficit as a financial play that benefits Wall Street speculation.  An honest budget simulator would also include true cost economics (cradle to grave internal and externalized costs) and would strive to eradicate fraud, waste, and abuse that is roughly 50% of every federal dollar at this time.  Such a game or simulator does not exist because it would be in the public interest and expose the intiimate details of what Matt Taibbi calls Griftopia.

BackSeat Budgeter

Budget Simulator (Citizen Focus)

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget

EconEdLink National Budget Simulation

Federal Budget Challenge

National Budget Simulation

Participatory Budgeting Practices, Games, Resources

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Tom Engelhardt: Tough Love Indictment of the US Intelligence Community — Global Trends 2030 as Poster Child for Expensive Idiocy

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, IO Impotency

engelhardt_photoBOTTOM LINE ON GLOBAL TRENDS 2030:

“As a portrait of American power gone remarkably blind, deaf, and dumb in a world roaring toward 2030, it provides the rest of us with the functional definition of the group of people least likely to offer long-term security to Americans.”

Part I:  The Visible Government [Supersizing Secrecy]

How the U.S. Intelligence Community Came Out of the Shadows

Part II:  The U.S. Intelligence Community’s New Year’s Wish

Megatrends, Game-Changers, Black Swans, Tectonic Shifts, and a World Not That Different From 2012

Think of it as a simple formula: if you’ve been hired (and paid handsomely) to protect what is, you’re going to be congenitally ill-equipped to imagine what might be.  And yet the urge not just to know the contours of the future, but to plant the Stars and Stripes in that future has had the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) in its grip since the mid-1990s.  That was the moment when it first occurred to some in Washington that U.S. power might be capable of controlling just about everything worth the bother globally for, if not an eternity, then long enough to make the future American property.

Ever since, every few years the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the IC’s “center for long-term strategic analysis,” has been intent on producing a document it calls serially Global Trends [fill in the future year].  The latest edition, out just in time for Barack Obama’s second term, is Global Trends 2030.  Here’s one utterly predictable thing about it: it’s bigger and more elaborate than Global Trends 2025.  And here’s a prediction that, hard as it is to get anything right about the future, has a 99.9% chance of being accurate: when Global Trends 2035 comes out, it’ll be bigger and more elaborate yet.  It’ll cost more and still, like its predecessor, offer a hem for every haw, a hedge for every faintly bold possibility, a trap-door escape from any prediction that might not stick.

Continue reading “Tom Engelhardt: Tough Love Indictment of the US Intelligence Community — Global Trends 2030 as Poster Child for Expensive Idiocy”

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Berto Jongman: Biases in Judgment and Decision-Making

IO Impotency
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Worth a look.

Wikipedia / List of biases in judgment and decision making

Many biases in judgment and decision making have been demonstrated by research in psychology and behavioral economics. These are systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment.

. . . . . . . . .

Decision-making, belief and behavioral biases

Many of these biases affect belief formation, business and economic decisions, and human behavior in general. They arise as a replicable result to a specific condition: when confronted with a specific situation, the deviation from what is normatively expected can be characterized by:

  • Ambiguity effect – the tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem “unknown.”[8]
  • Anchoring or focalism – the tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor,” on a past reference or on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
  • Attentional bias – the tendency to pay attention to emotionally dominant stimuli in one's environment and to neglect relevant data, when making judgments of a correlation or association.
  • Availability heuristic – the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater “availability” in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are, or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be.
  • Availability cascade – a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or “repeat something long enough and it will become true”).
  • Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Biases in Judgment and Decision-Making”
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Theophillis Goodyear: Tsunami Bombs – Symptom of a World Gone Mad

Cultural Intelligence
Theophillis Goodyear
Theophillis Goodyear

Tsunami Bombs: A Symptom of a World Gone Mad

From the article:

“A New Zealand author has rediscovered evidence of top secret tests carried out by the United States and New Zealand during World War II. The tests explored the creation of a ‘tsunami bomb' capable of flooding coastal cities of the Allies' enemies [and] according to the Telegraph, 3,700 bombs were detonated during testing that took place between 1944 and 1945 off the coast of New Caledonia and Auckland.”

Psychiatrist R. R. Laing was perhaps the most influential psychiatrist of the 20th century, after Freud. And although he was very controversial, he was also brilliant and enlightened and far ahead of his times in virtually every way. Laing came to the conclusion that what is wrong with human society is that it has gone mad, systemically. But it happened so long ago in human history that we don't see the madness today; we accept it as “just the way things are.” And it can be very hard to get people to see this, because madness has become the norm; and how can anything that's the norm be considered madness? Normally (no pun intended) we think of madness as being abnormal. But that's just it: it is sanity that has become abnormal in contemporary society. That's why it can be so hard to see the madness. It's like the old expression, “you can't get there from here.” As long as we see the madness as normal we can't get to sanity. In fact there's no reason to think we should even go there if we knew where it was.

Continue reading “Theophillis Goodyear: Tsunami Bombs – Symptom of a World Gone Mad”

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John Robb: DRONENET for Useful Services

Drones & UAVs
John Robb
John Robb

DRONENET The next BIG thing.

Here's the next BIG thing. Something that has the potential to be as big as the Internet.

It's one of those ideas that hits you like a ton of bricks once you figure it out.

Given the rise in the entrepreneurial backchatter I'm getting on it, I supect it's going to roll out very quickly.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

More quickly than most people think once it gets going, since most of the infrastructure required to put it into motion is already in place.

What is it?

It's an Internet of drones.

A short distance drone delivery service built on an open protocol.  Think short haul logistics.

It's a system that will explode in a way that is very similar to the way the Internet grew up — where connections were bought by individuals and installed one modem and IP address at a time, and where the early providers are local geeks with shelves full of modems and an expensive T-1 lines.

It's an approach that uses “uncontrolled airspace” and incremental purchases of cheap, standards compliant pads/drones to roll itself out (very similar to the way the Internet was able to piggy back on the old telephone system).

As a result of this open approach and decentralization, it's something that could grow VERY fast.

Here's a simplified version of what I'm talking about:

Read full article.

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Jon Lebkowsky: Bruce Sterling on Robots and Humanity

IO Impotency
Jon Lebkowsky
Jon Lebkowsky

Robots and Humanity

 

My favorite-so-far Bruce Sterling post in the State of the World conversation:

“Following on from John Payne’s comments in <76>, are the robots coming for our jobs? Is a certain amount of unemployment going to end
up as part of the system and, if so, what happens next?”

*It’s so interesting to see this perennial question coming into vogue once again. When I was a pre-teen first discovering “science fiction,”
that automation dystopia story was all over the place. Even on the cover of TIME magazine. See this Artzybasheff computer monster, all
busy stealing guy’s jobs? Looks oddly familiar, doesn’t it?

Read full commentary.

noble gold