Back when I started contracting for environmental restoration, I was surprised to receive bids from "Beltway bandits" who had no experience in what they were proposing. 1/
Colleagues explained that this was common practice. If they won the contract, they would then subcontract to others, while retaining their percentage. 2/
The Beltway bandits knew how to work the system, how to write the proposals better than firms that actually knew how to do the work.
My preference was for the firms that actually knew how to do the work. 3/
The bandits showed up again when I was working with the Estonians. We chose a mining firm. They did a good job. 4/
That experience has resonated with what I've read of the Emergent fiasco, where a captive vaccine production firm has messed up on J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines. 5/ nytimes.com/2021/04/21/us/…
The three articles in the Times, and now one in the WaPo, are long. I need to read them more carefully. But it looks to me like a Beltway bandit play that went wrong. 7/7
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General Gustave Perna was nominated by President Trump to be COO for Operation Warp Speed on May 18. He was confirmed by the Senate on July 2. A month and a half. 1/ army.mil/article/235694… defense.gov/Newsroom/Relea…
"[H]is team did not have a clear understanding of why these delays were happening"????? 2/
Perna should have available to him project management printouts of the vaccine transport, the centers to which it is going and the plans for distribution from there, the personnel available, and the locations for vaccinations. 3/
Huh. I see this tweet has been deleted, as has the one for #85. Some good comments, so I won't delete it. Maybe I need to do screenshots from here on.
Adventures in Masculinity #87
I guess we might as well go for the obvious
Adventures in Masculinity #88
"But the messaging behind all of this is crap. It presents mask-wearing as something cool that men can individually do in order to be rugged heroes, deserving of accolades for their brave, manly choices."
Act I: Donald Trump withdraws from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in which Iran agreed to give up all work that could lead to nuclear weapons. whitehouse.gov/presidential-a…
Experts warned that this withdrawal would give up leverage on Iran.
Act II: The remaining members of the JCPOA stay with it and try to make it work. The US begins "maximum pressure," reinstating sanctions that Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo believe will make Iran bend to their will.
1. There are a hundred gazillion models out there. Few of their owners have bothered to compare their model to others to see what is working and what isn't.
2. By the standards of the models I've worked with, they are all simple - a few differential equations, a curve fit. I've worked with a hundred or more elementary reactions and then a mass- and heat-transfer model that incorporated those in. (Hint: we had to boil them down to six
3. The only model I have seen that is at all transparent about its parameters is the Imperial College model. All the others I have seen are curve fits. They mumble about social distancing as a variable, but never say which parameter it fits into.
The worst is beginning to happen in New York City. It will probably get worse over the next couple of weeks. The people who are dying now were infected two to three weeks ago. 1/
New York is the first. These scenes will wash across the United States. Some of it may be mitigated by the lockdowns now occurring. Their full effects will not be felt for two or three weeks. 2/
The President of the United States has a show every day for his underlings to praise him and to tell us what a great job he is doing. And to urge that the shutdown end.
The tv channels are beginning to think that maybe they should not be carrying The Coronavirus Show live.