China preparations

I read that the largest military command center in the world.

That's not encouraging--or on the other hand, perhaps it is after all. I hoped to get an idea of bloat by looking at the number of Chinese high naval officers divided by the number of ships, as a function of time, but apparently those numbers aren't easy to obtain (and therefore may be dubious). On the third hand, if you've got a facility, its denizens may want to justify their existence.

How the mighty are fallen

Fermilab has had some issues with performance and meeting goals recently. Evaluations ranked it as the second worst in the country.

I recognize very few of the names. It has been quite a few years since I spent much time there, and even then I hung out with colleagues and not the administrators, or even the staff. I just didn't stay long enough each time. (and the names I recognize are some of the good guys)

Apparently they centralized Safety, which then lost close contact with the Divisions.

Fermilab's leadership is accused of cronyism and allowing a "toxic work environment." The incidents documented were certainly toxic; perhaps this was widespread, perhaps not.

Giorgio should have run the paper by a proofreader before submitting it; in one case the text reads the exact opposite of his obvious intent.

One of their problems is the ratio of administrators/auxilliary staff to actual workers and scientists. Part of what causes that imbalance is the regulations--even something like purchasing differs so much from ordinary business practice thanks to the many extra rules(*) that it constitutes a specialty of its own, and one scarce enough to demand high salaries that cause dissatisfaction among the already-working staff--assuming they are permitted to pay the high salaries. (If not, positions don't get filled.)

And they've made it harder and harder for the public to visit. The cited reason was security, but the lab does no secret research. Safety I could believe--you could kill yourself if you got into one of the labs and started monkeying with some high voltage or gas systems, and if you broke into a source cabinet you'd get the newspapers freaking out, though the danger was objectively less.

(*) When I was there, a colleague employed by Fermilab instead of a university had extra hoops to jump through in order to get travel approved; e.g. prove that American carriers didn't fly to the location, get extra layers of approval--starting long enough in advance that the conference date wasn't always fixed yet.

The unofficial DMV

in California: rely on your tribe to survive.

Ready for Reports!

A little after mastadons stopped wandering the earth I was working on a proposed tracking chamber for the Superconducting SuperCollider (SSC), and I went to a detector simulation workship in Waxahachie. Inside a warehouse was a cube farm. I learned that a firm's worth of administrators and secretaries had been hired to manage the reports (environmental impact statements just the simplest of these), and that of the several hundred employees only about 1 1/2 were scientists. But volumes of the mandatory reports and plans and purchasing schedules were on the way.

I should have taken warning from that. From the chapter "Plans and Plants" in Parkinson's Law:

Examples abound of new institutions coming into existence with a full establishment of deputy directors, consultants and executives, all these coming together in a building specially designed for their purpose. And experience proves that such an institution will die. It is choked by its own perfection. It cannot take root for lack of soil. It cannot grow naturally for it is already grown.

Why? Parkinson explained: ‘A perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse… Perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is not time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done."

And we know the rest of the story. In its infinite wisdom our legislators decreed that all business be done with American firms, at which point the French and Russians and Germans and every other potential partner said "adios." The auditors in Washington decided to experiment with honest cost projections instead of the usual military cost estimators, and got sticker shock from the result. We arm-twisted the Japanese to come on board anyway, and at the banquet at which the announcement of Japanese support was to be made, Bush lost his dinner on the Japanese Prime Minister. Last I heard the tunnels were being used to grow mushrooms.

---

The design I was working on wouldn't have worked, as was made quite clear during the workshop.

CIA

Via comments at Chicago Boyz: a CIA-written parody of The Hunt for Red October. No doubt I missed a number of in-jokes, but I got the gist.

Fees

I chuckled when I read about the Visions decision, but on reflection I wonder: are the rules so byzantine that you can overlook fees for a core feature of your business? (They'd not paid their adult entertainment license for half a year.)

The same committee also rejected an alcohol license for a hotel: "the hotel’s license is void because the company is not registered with the state, so there was no license to renew."

The hotel also owes more than \$200,000 to the city in room tax fees, is delinquent in property taxes and has not honored payment plans, Zilavy said.

Verveer said Howard Johnson is one of the hotels that is partnering with the city and Dane county to provide housing for the homeless during the COVID-19 crisis. He said that partnership shouldn’t be impacted if the council decides not to renew the hotel’s alcohol license.

If the bit about unpaid fees and taxes is true, I wonder what that conversation was like in which the hotel agreed to "partner with the city."

Facelessness

On BBC: "An advert designed to run on the London Underground was rejected because it contained bacon, butter, eggs and jam, an online supermarket said."

Have a look at that picture. Unless you've religious objections to pork (I'm tempted to include vegans in that category), nothing screams "unhealthy!" Just the opposite--it is a collection of foods with which to make other things. The food collection and poses of the people suggest that a home-made family dinner will soon appear.

Somebody decided that the advertisement violated a rule that "Foods found to be high in fat, sugar and salt are now not allowed to feature in advertisements on public transport." Somebody not only decided that this spread was unhealthy, somebody else had to approve it for publication.

We'll never know who. A bureaucrat.

There's good reason for protecting bureaucrats from outside pressure. If you knew who made the decisions about toy safety, you could bribe or intimidate them into going after your competitors' products. (From time to time I wonder if this does happen. The FBI hasn't proved immune to influence.)

On the other hand, some things are so egregiously stupid (I'm thinking of several school boards that got themselves in the news this last year), that some kind of unveiling or impeachment seems appropriate.

Of course such a process could be abused in its turn when something happens that the deep pocketed or well-connected don't care for.

So perhaps it is best to leave things as they are. Though the prospect of consigning the idiots (Hanlon's Razor) to a harmless post counting sand is a pleasant one.