I so want more of my tax dollars being flushed down the toilet. Deepwater...where the boats go down. "Last fall, a disgruntled engineer at Lockheed Martin resorted to a new method of whistleblowing. He put a video of himself on YouTube. He claimed the company was allowing shoddy work to go on in a $24 billion government project called "Deepwater" to modernize the U.S. Coast Guard fleet. At the time, Lockheed Martin said there was no merit to the claims, and promptly fired the engineer. Today the Coast Guard booted Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman for, among other things, building eight cutters that had issues with seaworthiness." "Over the last couple of years, it's become more and more common for the government to hand over control of defense projects like Deepwater to the private sector. Advocates of the practice say it's a way to control the high overhead costs of developing new technologies. " It's still too early to tell how much it'll cost to fix the mistakes that were already made in the Deepwater program. Not only are the hulls buckling, but apparent there are problems with the security systems as well. Not to mention the delays and cost overruns. $24 BILLION dollars. Ah, well, it's only money.
It's things like that that make me glad I'm a submariner by trade; we have strict quality assurance controls in place to prevent things like that from going on. @$24 billion, we could have built at least 6 subs! Maybe more! Well, they're taking steps to intervene, although they could have saved us the pain of a $24 billion screw up! Unfortunately, this is nothing new with the surface fleet (Navy or Coast Guard). Because the manufacturing process is not closely controlled, there's no way to ensure that these things don't happen. After all, in the civilian sector, you just get fired. In the military, they can imprison you for work processes like that!
Ah, accountability. Not for sub prime loans. Not for imported food. Not for privatized Navy contracts. Just for school teachers I guess.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Bill Merchant @ Apr 18 2007, 02:44 AM) [snapback]425182[/snapback]</div> No Child Left a Dime. Tom
No Dollars left in the tax payers behind pocket. The best part... I bet in those facilities where this 24billion went down the drain, you could interview a huge number of contractors who spent 2, 3, 8 years on these projects and for the most part, they weren't busting their hump to get it done. Those timelines are long, the projects are well staffed and each person has months to do 10 minutes worth of work. There are a few thousand individuals who probably racked up $150/hr as contractors while sitting around playing cards all day. They built some bad boats along the way, so they were doing something... but... um.. if you're a school teacher, you were working a lot harder for about 1/10th of the pay for those same years. Welcome to our federal government, don't expect it to get better, just go get your engineering degree and go be an engineer for them. :lol:
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daronspicher @ Apr 18 2007, 10:54 AM) [snapback]425300[/snapback]</div> I'm working on it! :lol: Seriously, though, that's a pretty accurate analysis daronspicher made. Thankfully, where I'm stationed, when it becomes a problem the workers get knocked around (in an admin sense) and everyone usually falls back in line and carries on. I think a better question would be: "Have we written our Congressperson yet?"
