Archive for February 26th, 2013

Ah, boondoggle.

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

Ever hear of the “Broadband Technologies Opportunities Program”? BTOP “passed out several billion dollars to help upgrade broadband networks across America as part of President Obama’s initial stimulus package in 2009”.

Let’s set aside the question of where the government’s constitutional authority to pass out that kind of money for that purpose comes from. Some of that money went to West Virginia.

West Virginia’s cash was meant to wire up the many “community anchor institutions” such as libraries, schools, police, and hospitals across the state with Internet access delivered over fiber-optic lines. As part of the project, the state also had to purchase some sort of router for each institution.

So they needed routers. Not a problem, right? Except the State of West Virginia and Cisco decided that, instead of purchasing routers for each location that were appropriate for current and projected needs, they’d buy one specific Cisco router for everyone.

Consider, for instance, how routers were purchased for the state police. When the West Virginia State Police purchased their own routers a few years earlier, they chose Cisco model 2xxx machines at a cost of only $5,000 or so apiece, with only a single Cisco 3xxx model purchased for the largest deployment. In 2010, when the state received its grant money, no one asked the State Police what they wanted or needed; indeed, the police were “never contacted” at all by the Grant Implementation Team. (This was a widespread problem; the report notes no capacity or user needs surveys were ever done before the money was spent). Instead, the team simply ordered 77 Cisco 3945 routers at a cost of $20,661 apiece—that’s one $20,000 router for every 13.7 state police employees—and sent them off to the police. (Each router can handle several hundred concurrent users.)

But, hey, they can use these routers to run VOIP, right?

…the legislative auditor notes that each of the 3945 routers can handle 700 to 1,200 VoIP lines, which means that the 1,164 routers purchased by the state could support up to 1.39 million lines. As the auditor’s report dryly notes, only a single library in the entire state has more than eight phone lines; most have one or two. (None use a VoIP system anyway.)

And those $20,000 Cisco routers didn’t “come with ‘the appropriate Cisco VoIP modules’ to work with the system.”

The state now has to spend another $84,768 to purchase those modules; without them, the state police can’t use the routers, only two of which are actually installed and operating. (For those keeping score at home, this means that 75 $20,000 routers are depreciating in a state police warehouse somewhere in West Virginia.)

And it isn’t just the state police. There’s a one-room library in Marmet (population 1,500), open three days a week, with one internet connection. And they run it through a Cisco 3945.

The small town of Clay received seven of them to serve a total population of 491 people… and all seven routers were installed within only .44 miles of each other at a total cost of more than $100,000.

But how bad could it be? Surely Cisco was the low bidder, right?

In total, $24 million was spent on the routers through a not-very-open bidding process under which non-Cisco router manufacturers such as Juniper and Alcatel-Lucent were not “given notice or any opportunity to bid.” As for Cisco, which helped put the massive package together, the legislative auditor concluded that the company “had a moral responsibility to propose a plan which reasonably complied with Cisco’s own engineering standards” but that instead “Cisco representatives showed a wanton indifference to the interests of the public in recommending using $24 million of public funds to purchase 1,164 Cisco model 3945 branch routers.”

I hate to say “I saw this coming” when the Feds first started talking about expanding broadband access. But then again, Hellen Keller would have seen this coming.

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Random notes: February 26, 2013.

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

Obit watch: C. Everett Koop. (True story: I used to live a stone’s throw away from the DrKoop.com headquarters. I didn’t move; DrKoop.com did.)

The NYT has discovered NFA trusts.

But because of a loophole in federal regulations

Ever notice how the NYT, LAT, and other media outlets refer to things they don’t like as a “loophole”?

…buying restricted firearms through a trust also exempts the trust’s members from requirements that apply to individual buyers, including being fingerprinted, obtaining the approval of a chief local law enforcement officer and undergoing a background check.
Lawyers who handle the trusts and gun owners who have used them say that a majority of customers who buy restricted firearms through trusts do not do so to avoid such requirements. And most gun dealers continue to require background checks for the representative of the trust who picks up the firearm. But not all do.

Frankly, I don’t believe the NYT‘s claims here. I suspect they’re being dishonest with the readers. However, I haven’t looked into NFA trusts; I’m not at the point in my life where I’m ready to purchase automatic weapons. (However, my brother and I had a discussion last night, prompted by the existence of “The Sliencer Store” near the movie theater I went to. A silencer for some of my .22LR guns is becoming more tempting.) Are there any readers out there who know more about NFA trusts and are willing to comment?

The LAT, meanwhile, is pre-occupied with the non-existant “gun show loophole”.

Speaking of movies, I considered live-blogging the Oscars on Sunday, but I figured my live blog would go something like this:

7:30 PM: Ceremony finally starts.
7.45 PM: First call by a celebrity for “reasonable gun control”. Sod this for a game of soldiers, I’m going to bed.

The one nice thing to come out of the Oscars, in my humble opinion, was that “Argo” started playing at the Alamo Drafthouses again, and at reasonable times. I ended up seeing a matinee showing yesterday.

Yes, it is very much a “Hollywood saves the world” movie, as well as a “heroic Federal employees” movie. Yes, “based on a true story” means that some of the facts have been fudged.

And I don’t care: “Argo” is a good story, well acted, well directed, and just the right length. Of the nominees I’ve seen, I liked it more than “Django Unchained” and (sorry, Mom) “Lincoln”. (I still want to see “Zero Dark Thirty”, but haven’t gotten to it yet. The other movie from last year I was excited about and didn’t get to see is “The Master”, which I think is going to have to wait for DVD.)

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