Seen on the street in Kyiv.

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck, A/K/A Dolt-45,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset., A/K/A P01135809

Monday, April 4, 2016

Can We Now Start Beating the TSA Administrator With a Wire Whip?

The TSA paid IBM $1.4 million to develop an iPad app that randomly points right or left.

The even crazier thing is that IBM was one of four bidders for the contract, so it's a reasonable guess that the other bidders wanted even more money.

The TSA says that they are "a risk-based, intelligence-driven, professional counterterrorism agency", to which I strongly object. They assume facts not in evidence.

3 comments:

Paul W said...

I have an even cheaper app to randomly assign which way a person should line up.

It's called a Lincoln copper penny. You flip it using your thumb and forefinger. It lands heads up you go left, it lands tails up you go right.

It will cost you a penny per operator to use.

It will cost about $400 for a new desk once I finish smashing the old one with my forehead.

BadTux said...

Unfortunately 99% of the costs of anything bought by the Federal government is the cost of dealing with all the vendor and contract bullshit. I remember at one company we were told we were on the short list for a government contract we'd bid on. Then the paperwork started coming in. And coming in. And coming in. At one point I, the product manager, the VP of Engineering, and the CEO were in a conference room together discussing the product. The CEO looks at one sheet of paper and says, "fuck. They want to drug test all critical people in our organization. I'm going to have to go clean for a few months." (I.e., like a lot of Silicon Valley CEO's, he smokes pot recreationally to calm down on weekends).

Once you go through all that contract bullshit, yeah, a $5,000 app costs $1.1M. Those drug tests don't come for free. Neither do the lawyers to dig through those piles of paperwork needed to even qualify to bid on a project, nevermind actually bid on it. All because prior governments were corrupt, so all this check and balance stuff was put in to add "transparency" and "honesty" to the process. Bullshit. It just became another way to corrupt the system. See: F-35.

Comrade Misfit said...

BadTux, in short, "why we can't have nice things".

Federal contracting rules and shit are why the Army's handgun RFP ran over 350 pages and why some of the gun companies refused to play.