Currently viewing the tag: “Government”
As we noted earlier, it look like House Speaker John Boehner wants a budget deal.
The Hill reports Boehner said shutting down the federal government would be more costly than keeping it running and his party is against a shutdown.
Said Boehner: “If you shut the government down, it’ll end up costing more than
you’ll save because you interrupt contracts — there are a lot of
problems with the idea of shutting the government down — it is not the
goal.”
Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire
Why are any of us not surprised … this is just like spending $ 3000 for the ceramic cat on the Wheel of Fortune.
What is wrong with these people? The Pentagon is looking to spend $ 600,000 on this so-called art of a gurgling toad sculpture. Is this going to be the centerpiece in the main lobby of the Mark Center? NOPE. To make matter worse, only an estimated 2,500 people will see this piece of art daily. This is yet just another example of what happens when people spend others peoples money. The US Treasury is going broke and we have government folks who think its a good idea to spend $ 600K on a frog. UNREAL.
A $ 600,000 frog sculpture that lights up, gurgles “sounds of nature” and carries a 10-foot fairy girl on its back could soon be greeting Defense Department employees who plan to start working at the $ 700 million Mark Center in Alexandria, Va. this fall. That is unless a new controversy over the price tag of the public art doesn’t torpedo the idea.
Decried as wasteful spending that will be seen by just a couple thousand of daily workers who arrive on bus shuttles, foes have tried to delay the decision, expected tomorrow, April 1. But in an E-mail, an Army Corps of Engineers official said that the decision can’t be held up because it would impact completion of the huge project.
Sadly, this is not an April’s Fools joke, the only fools are those that thought this was a wise purchase. All the kisses in the world will not turn this $ 600K toad into a prince.
Written by Gregory Asmolov
Tripple monitor setup, photo by Les Howard
Russian authorities said they were interested in developing a new system for monitoring of online content. The document of the tender for the new system not only provides specifics about what the Russian government wants to monitor, but also exposes its attitude towards information technologies.
Internet Monitoring System
Last week, Roskomnadzor, Russian Federal Service for Telecoms Supervision, announced a public tender for developing Internet monitoring system. According to the tender, the budget for such system is 15 million rubles (about $ 530,000) and the job applications should be submitted by April 15, 2011. The system needs to be developed by August 15, 2011 and the testing period should end on December 15, 2011.
Michail Vorobiev, an assistant to the head of Roskomnadzor, told [ru] Russian information agency RIA Novosti that the system's purpose was to discover content recognized by the Russian law as illegal. Such system will be based on two elements: a storage that would contain illegal materials (some sort of ‘thesaurus of illegal keywords') and the search system that will scan through the online space and compare the online text with the illegal content in the storage.
The description of the tender is a long and openly published document [ru], so what exactly the system should look for is not a secret. The number and the nature of goals that the search robot should achieve are surprising. It goes ways beyond incitement of national hatred or appeals to violence. In includes not only terrorism, appeals to actions that threaten constitutional order, materials that disclose classified security information, propaganda of drugs and pornography, but also false information about federal and regional officials, as well as content that threatens the freedom and secrecy of choice during elections. Another interesting goal is to discover content with hidden embedded components that seek to influence subconsciousness. If it’s not enough, the program would monitor not only textual, but also visual content (photos and videos).
Publicist from Lenta.ru Valery Panfilov summarized [ru] the list:
“…документации до списка отслеживаемых нарушений, который оказался длиннее, чем список запрещенных язвеннику продуктов”
The documentation of the monitored irregularities turned out to be longer than the list of the meals forbidden for a ulcer patient
The major target of the monitoring, at least according to the Russian officials, is not traditional media websites or blogs, but comments at the online media outlets (it is important to note that the monitoring system is intended to be used for the content of the sites officially registered as online mass media). Since 2010, online mass media are required to remove illegal comments only following request from Roskomnadzor.
Within the first year of removal practice, Roskomnadzor had discovered and requested to remove [ru] 45 comments of “extremist content.” People at Roskomnadzor, however, admit [ru] that monitoring comments is a challenge for them because it requires additional human resources. The new system should provide solution for this. According to the tender, the system should be handled by only two operators.
Russia's Story of Content Surveillance and Removal
The Russian Internet has a long history of efforts to develop a “successful” and sustainable system for content monitoring and surveillance. First, and probably most famous, were SORM and SORM-2 systems that every Internet provider had to install. Another attempt to monitor illegal content was engagement of Internet users. About one month ago, a number of IT-hosting providers strongly affiliated with the Ministry of Communication launched a new organization “A League for Secure Internet.” According to the founders, the organization should create online brigades of Internet users that will seek and report unlawful content.
At the same time, private companies also develop systems for monitoring of online content for commercial purposes. For instance Medialogia develops [ru] solutions for the monitoring of traditional and social media. The “News Terminal Glass” has built iPhone/iPad applications that categorize information as “positive” or “negative” around particular person or issue. According to advertisement brochures of the monitoring system, among its clients you can find the Presidential Administration of Russia and the Russian Government Administration (more about media monitoring the Presidential Administration of Russia is here [ru]).
The Ambiguity of Content Removal
Obviously, after the publication of this tender, many Internet users complained about the new “Big Brother” and the government's intentions to censor the Internet. The situation, however, is more complicated and ambivalent. The major problem is not the fact the Russian government tries to develop a system for online monitoring, but how it defines and interpretes the purpose of this system. Moreover, the tender reflects a general attitude of the Russian government towards information technologies. On one hand, the state’s effort to monitor online content can be approached as legitimate.
First, if the government wants to know what its citizens say publicly, it should be welcomed. What can be better than the authorities sensitive to public opinion. What if a blogger in Vladivostok shares her problems and the president of the country wants to have tools that bring to his attention the most concerning reports? One of the ways to do it in the reality of information overload is a system that can aggregate and evaluate social media.
Second, it doesn't seem to be a problem with the state’s will to discover illegal content. For instance, the Russian Internet continues to experience significant content control problems, including a paradoxical situation when Vkontakte.ru, one of the most popular websites among school students, is also one of the major hosts of online pornography and is internationally recognized as a major copyright infringer.
Last week, a group of managers of major IT companies wrote a public address [ru] that demanded more efforts for content filtering from Vkontake administration. Michael Gurevitch, a general director of Mediamir company, pointed out that Facebook has more users than Vkontakte, but you wouldn’t see there any pornography, including child pornography, and founder of Groupon Russia Elena Maslova argued that it’s not fair that Vkontakte attracts users through illegal content. The spokesperson of Vkontakte Vladislav Tzyplukhin claimed that the situation changed radically one year ago due to the measures that reduced visibility of pornography and increased measures of moderation. Tzyplukhin's arguement, however, can hardly survive the reality check.
But What Is Illegal Content?
On the other hand, despite the general legitimacy of the effort to develop an Internet monitoring system, the tender emphasized several issues in Russian approach toward the problem of content control and using information technologies by the government in general.
The first and probably the most visible and significant problem is the way that Russian authorities define illegal content and extremism. The issue starts with the law and continues with its interpretation and enforcement. Another indication of this problem is the fact that the list of content that the system should identify is very long and includes false information about officials. Putting terrorism, threats to constitutional order, xenophobia, child pornography and accusations against government officials within the same framework not only raises many concerns, but also makes the system less effective.
There are also few institutional issues. For instance, Roskomnadzor, a Russian analogue of American FCC, is responsible for monitoring of media content. The state should demand self-responsibility from administration of major websites and media, but not actively engage in monitoring – something that is not only problematic, but also not viable.
Another institutional problem is the government's method of viewing horizontal reality through hierarchical approach. For instance, the effort to create a crowdsourced system for content monitoring through founding new hierarchical traditional organization, “League for Secure Internet,” so far has proven uneficient. Effective crowdsourcing solutions have to come from the bottom (e.g. initiative gdecasino.ru for monitoring illegal gambling sites [en]), but not being imposed through top-down hierarchy. Moreover, this type of initiatives should develop opportunities for monitoring (e.g. crowdsourcing websites) but not create new offline organizations that aim to manage online crowds. The efforts to organize brigades of monitors and fight Internet bots so far only created even more bots that attack users on behalf of the League.
Not Censorship But Another Corruption Case?
There is also an obvious explanation that is being suggested by many bloggers, that claim that the League as well as the new tender are another ways to steal money from the budget. According to these opinions, the tender should be investigated by anti-corruption websites. For instance, Maksim Salomatin from Park.ru says [ru] that the fact that participants of the tender should finish the work on the system in impossible 3 months means that, probably, Roskomnadzor has in mind some particular organization that has already worked on this program.
Besides, a lack of understanding of technology by governmental officials makes them to believe that those tools can solve significant problems and make their life easier. The tender demonstrates that officials approach technology as some sort of magic. Blogger Klugovich wrote [ru] that only computer illiterates or sci-fi fans would believe that technology would be able to distinguish between criticism and deliberate defamation against officials, not to speak about audio and video materials.
According to the opinion [ru] of Lev Matveev, an executive director of SearchInform, development of such system is possible on time, however it will not be effective due to a high number of false alerts. And it is doubtful that this type of system can reduce the number of people required for content monitoring. But one may also suggest that it will only increase it.
“Deus Ex iPad” Approach
The case described is an example of a “deus ex machina” approach, a belief that technology will solve Russia's governance problems. The technology will create a new “vertical of governance,” and finally reduce the country's governance task to the management of an iPad application. On the other hand, the crowdsourcing will engage people in solving the problems by themselves without the government.
I wonder when Russia will come to the idea from Asimov's “Franchise” where a super computer randomly chooses the president of the country. Why the state would need elections if a hi-tech firm can develop such system (in the case of Russia, we can even suspect who will be chosen by the computer).
One of the bloggers suggested [ru] even more futuristic scenario as a reaction to the new tender:
да чё лет через 20 и народ можно заменить роботами
and why, in 20 years one can replace the population with robots
The role of technology is brilliantly summed up [ru] by the Infowatch blog:
Как понимают все умные люди, социальную проблему невозможно решить техническими средствами. Подобное лечится подобным. А технические препоны легко и непринуждённо обходятся технически же.
As all intelligent people understand, a social problem can't be solved by technical means. The like is treated by the like. Technical barriers are very easily circumvented by technical means.
This is something that Roskomnadzor and Russian government should remember.
File the following under the category of “NO DUH”.
In a recent Rasmussen poll, only 7% of Americans believe that Government employees work harder than those in the private sector. 70% believe workers in the private sector work harder than government workers, while 23% are too busy watching reality TV and are undecided. I think we can add those that would send America to war, sorry a kinetic military operation, while on Spring Break in Brazil.
So not only do government employees get paid more and receive better retirement benefits that the private sector … they do less for it. I guess this can explain why only 16% think the US would be better off if most incumbents in Congress were reelected and why Americans have a pretty poor view of politicians in general.
Representative Mike Pence spoke with Tea Party members in a rally in Washington promising to fight for the budget cuts they want to see from the GOP.
Representative Mike Pence spoke with Tea Party members in a rally in Washington promising to fight for the budget cuts they want to see from the GOP.
Representative Mike Pence spoke with Tea Party members in a rally in Washington promising to fight for the budget cuts they want to see from the GOP.
John Cooney is a former deputy general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget, where he helped design and implement the process by which the White House manages government operations in the event of a shutdown. He’s now a lawyer at Venable LLP. We spoke this afternoon about how the plans for government shutdowns were designed to strengthen the president in negotiations, why shutdowns are harder in 2011 than they were in 1985 and why they nevertheless sometimes have to happen anyway. An edited transcript follows.
Ezra Klein: Tell me about your experience with government shutdowns.
John Cooney: From 1982 to 1987, I was in the Office of Management and Budget. There were shutdowns then. Typically short ones, only two or three days. But we designed the plans forcing the agencies to prepare for these shutdowns. We ran the exercises preparing for them. Then, when the president gave us a signal, we would call them up and tell them to direct non-exempted people not to report for work. The programs we drew up are still in place today.
EK: But your feeling is a shutdown is harder for the bureaucracy to bear in 2011 than it was in the ’80s or ’90s?
JC: Yes. The federal workforce is different today than it was then. Now you have many more contract employees carrying out functions. In an agency like the Department of Homeland Security, you might have a few civil servants and a lot of contract employees working on the same problem. The old model where we had federal employees working on things and contractors delivering is not how things work anymore.
Take the IT departments. I’m sure no one considered whether those positions were shutdown-exempt or not when the contracts were written. Do you have to keep Web sites up to date? A lot of the way the public communicates with the government is online now. Do you put up an intercept page informing the public the Web site is unavailable and there’s no place to leave a message? And what about for the workers? The government is prohibited by statute from accepting voluntary services from workers whose function is shut down. But since so many people can work from home, will the government actually decide to block access to servers so they don’t violate the statute? All this makes it much more difficult.
EK: This seems like a waste of not only time and preparation, but ultimately money. There’ll be confusion, missed services, lots of paperwork for reimbursement and back pay. Is there a good estimate of what a shutdown ends up costing the government?
JC: The best estimate of the shutdown in 1995 came from the GAO, and they estimated it cost $ 200 million or so. You reduce those costs by having good planning, which is why the White House is so adamant on planning.
EK: If they’re so adamant about planning, though, then they’ve presumably thought through these contractor issues and figured out how to handle them. So why should we worry about it?
JC: Yes, I’m 100 percent certain the White House has been thinking about these issues. But the shutdown plan was designed for two purposes: to make sure the president continued to carry out his constitutional duties and to make sure the president could run the government effectively during a shutdown, which would in turn strengthen his hand with Congress. Notice that each time there’s been a shutdown the public has supported his position and he’s come out in better shape. The plan was designed to make sure the executive branch looked competent and to help attract support for his position. I’m sure the people in Congress thinking about shutdowns will know that every other time there was a shutdown, the executive branch came out looking relatively better than Congress. Part of that is a function of careful planning.
EK: Shutdowns aren’t that common, but they’re also not that rare. This seems, however, like a terrible way to run things. Do you think there’s a better way to resolve these disputes?
JC: Having a shutdown is a terrible way to resolve public policy disputes, but sometimes it’s the only way if the executive branch and legislative branch are at an impasse. And sometimes, despite all efforts to the contrary, there are impasses.
According to a Rasmussen Reports poll released today, just seven percent of Americans believe that government employees work harder than their counterparts in private sector. The same poll finds that 44 percent of government workers agree.
As we’ve learned recently, not only do public-sector workers get paid more than private industry employees doing comparable tasks, they get better benefits, they can retire earlier, and are much harder to fire.
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Democrats government democrat politics economy news labor unions
According to the liberal version of events, the ongoing fight in Wisconsin between Gov. Scott Walker (R) and government unions centered on the unions’ “right” to collective bargain for wages and benefits. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, there simply is no “right” to collective bargaining. And just what are the “benefits” that government unions use their collective bargaining privileges to take from taxpayers? Today, The Washington Post reports on Montgomery County, Maryland’s very similar budget troubles:
At a time when public employees unions are fighting for their lives elsewhere in the United States, the munificence of Montgomery’s benefits package was captured in an e-mail this month notifying workers, in the understated prose of a Q&A fact sheet, that “the County will no longer cover the cost of purchasing medications used to treat erectile dysfunction (ED).” … Officials said ending the ED benefit for county government employees, retirees and their families would save $ 400,000 a year.
Forcing taxpayers to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for government union Viagra is not unique to Montgomery County. In fact, the very same government unions that were demanding their “right” to collective bargaining in Wisconsin have repeatedly fought for their “right” to Viagra as well:
In 2002, through collective bargaining, Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association won the inclusion of Viagra in its members’ health plans, and by 2004, 10% of union membership (which isn’t a male-dominated set) was subscribing to the benefit — at a cost of more than $ 200,000 per year to the Milwaukee school district. Not until 2005 was the school district finally able to convince an arbitrator to drop the coverage.
Last year, while the school district faced a $ 10 million budget shortfall, the MTEA decided it was time to revisit those drug benefits and filed a lawsuit demanding their reintroduction to union health plans—at a projected cost of $ 786,000 in 2010.
It may look like the union trying to raise costs for taxpayers, but MTEA spokeswoman Kristin Collett insists that it’s really a matter of fundamental rights: “this is an issue of discrimination, of equal rights for all our members.”
Of course, there is no “right” to Viagra, just as there is no “right” to collective bargaining. All Americans do have a First Amendment right of freedom of association. But that does not mean that unions have any right to force their government employers to sign exclusive contracts benefiting their members at the cost of taxpayers. And those costs are real. Government unions are so powerful in Montgomery County that politicians give campaign contributions to the union, not the other way around. The result? Montgomery Country faces a $ 608 million deficit this year and structural deficits looking far into the future. And what is the driving force of Montgomery County’s structural deficits? Government union benefits like Viagra. According to the Montgomery County Office of Legislative Oversight:
Between FY02 and FY11, the primary driver behind higher personnel costs was not an increase in the size of the workforce but rather the increase in average costs per employee. Across the four agencies, employee salaries grew by 50% in the aggregate and by higher amounts (up to 80%) for individual employees, while the costs of health and retirement/pension benefits increased upwards of 120%. In FY11, the combined agency cost of employee benefits is almost $ 740 million, or 22% of all spending.
And remember, that 22% of all spending is just for employee benefits. According to the same report, 82% of all tax supported Montgomery County spending goes to employee compensation.
Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed
On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Rory Cooper to discus a possible deal in the House to avoid a government shutdown. Then Pejman Yousefzadeh talks about what a shutdown could mean politically.
We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.
Related Links:
Budget Negotiators Reach Tentative Deal To Avert Government Shutdown
Heritage: Freshman Lawmakers Make the Case for Government Spending Cuts
Understanding the numbers in budget talks
Lots of Talk, But Shutdown Still Looming
Howard Dean: Democrats Should Be ‘Quietly Rooting’ for Shutdown
Follow Brad on Twitter
Follow Rory on Twitter
Follow Pej on Twitter
Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed
On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Rory Cooper to discus a possible deal in the House to avoid a government shutdown. Then Pejman Yousefzadeh talks about what a shutdown could mean politically.
We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.
Related Links:
Budget Negotiators Reach Tentative Deal To Avert Government Shutdown
Heritage: Freshman Lawmakers Make the Case for Government Spending Cuts
Understanding the numbers in budget talks
Lots of Talk, But Shutdown Still Looming
Howard Dean: Democrats Should Be ‘Quietly Rooting’ for Shutdown
Follow Brad on Twitter
Follow Rory on Twitter
Follow Pej on Twitter
Lydia DePillis has a fascinating piece in the City Paper about why developers cluster their projects in specific neighborhoods. A lot of it just seems like basic good business sense, but some of it is an adaptation to regulatory dysfunction:
Developers who go big in a certain neighborhood follow a certain calculus. One major factor: D.C.’s ultra-empowered Advisory Neighborhood Commission system. While these hyperlocal bodies can’t directly kill a project, they can certainly slow it down. In a business where investors get spooked when things drag on too long, that’s often the same thing—which is why a long record of working with the locals is especially helpful. “The more time it takes to do anything, potentially the worse off the developer is,” says Calvin Gladney, of the development consulting group Mosaic Urban Partners. “You have to get the ANC to weigh in, so the more you can leverage previous relationships, the better.” […]
ANCs can leverage concessions from large landowners, knowing that the company will have to come back looking for support for their next project. In Shaw, for instance, Douglas Development scatters tens of thousands of dollars every year in donations to local organizations, like a manor lord might spread charitable donations around the adjacent village.
If you look at this in a partial equilibrium framework, it may sound nice. The developer-ANC interaction is iterated, so the developers play nice with the ANCs, and that boosts allocations to local organizations.
But a big problem comes in the “investors get spooked” phase. The spookiness of investing in DC means the cost of capital is higher than it would otherwise be and the total quantity of investment is lower. That’s good for incumbent landlords, and it also particularly disadvantages potential start-up firms which helps shelter large developers from competition. What’s more, the ANC uncertainty factors also deters outside firms from coming into the city with projects, thus further sheltering DC’s developers from competition. The upshot is that while I think ANC members think they’re being “tough on developers,” a large amount of what they’re doing is creating monopoly rents for developers and then very partially splitting the proceeds with neighborhood nonprofits.
“I’m from the government and I want to sell you a new car” is proving to be a pretty bad sales pitch.
American Thinker Blog
