PolliGaf 2012 |OT5| Big Bird, Binders, Bayonets, Bad News and Benghazi

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I wrote in myself instead of voting for Boehner. I live a block away from his local headquarters I've met him. I literally bumped into him a year or so before he became Speaker. He was a dick about it asking me if I knew who he was. At the time I didn't.

Now we all know him as the crybaby of the Hill.
 
RDreamer said:
My argument was partially that you're adding more layers on top of things. You still need to create a bureaucracy and paper trail for that regulator. It's a whole separate layer. Instead of just going through one company/group it's going through 2 (the private company and then the regulating agency that makes sure the private company does what it says it will). On top of that you have the profit layer, which the private company will want to skim off. Realistically that's a lot of padding, which we could just allocate the entire chunk to what we actually want to get done, relief.
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What layers? That bureaucracy exists now. It can be shrunk in fact. Now you're following a private contractor. Now you only have regulators that have to be highly trained and are highly scrutinized on the gov payroll.

And what's all this about profit? If they bid the contract correctly, then they'll make a profit. If not, then they'll take a bath. That's on them. Sometimes you lose money on a bid.

I need to remind you that I said that there needs to be severe repercussions for not being able to fulfill the contract. If you're bidding, then you need to take into account catastrophic incidents.
 
Trurl said:
That means that he's due to be right. Statistically speaking.
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No, there is no such law of averages. Each PhoenixDark prediction is an independent trial.

SmokeMaxX said:
The Nowcast factors in the possibility that the polls are wrong right? Assuming all of the polls are correct, would that mean Obama would have a 100% chance of winning on the Now Cast?
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Each poll is a sample proportion. We don't know what percentage of the actual voting population will vote for Obama, but we try to infer it via samples. Even with large sample sizes, there's a bit of variance between individual polls, but when we take the aggregate of polls, their distribution approaches a Normal model (basically a bell-shaped curve). The more polls, and the greater the sample sizes, the lower the variance. But even with highly accurate polls, we can't say with certainty what the true mean (% of voting population voting Obama) actually is. All we can say is that we are xx% certain that the true mean is within a certain interval. Because the race is so close, it is possible that Obama's true mean in multiple swing states is <.50 and Romney's true mean in those states is >.50, but it's highly unlikely.
 
Betting pool on how long it takes Romney to shift pivot from Benghazi to Sandy as the foremost example of Obama's incompetence?
 
RiccochetJ said:
What layers? That bureaucracy exists now. It can be shrunk in fact. Now you're following a private contractor. Now you only have regulators that have to be highly trained and are highly scrutinized on the gov payroll.

And what's all this about profit? If they bid the contract correctly, then they'll make a profit. If not, then they'll take a bath. That's on them. Sometimes you lose money on a bid.

I need to remind you that I said that there needs to be severe repercussions for not being able to fulfill the contract. If you're bidding, then you need to take into account catastrophic incidents.
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No one would ever bid this. This is classic time and materials work, too much volatility for anyone to bid it as lump sum. At least, not without charging a MASSIVE mark up to CYA.

By massive mark up I mean multiples more than what is initially expected to be needed, and even then the provision for change orders would be demanded if the scope goes too far out of the original bounds.

In other words, you'd be creating a lose/lose scenario for the gov't. Either the job stays more or less within scope and the private contractor makes a killing thanks to a fat number or the job goes way out of scope and the gov't. gets change ordered to death like it was a T&M job but with the initial overbid effectively turning into a "bonus".

Another problem: Almost no companies exist that can handle this kind of work, and those companies don't spring up overnight. There is a reason why Halliburton milks gov't. contracts so profoundly, because in a lot of cases they're the only company that truly has the supply lines and corporate resources to do a job. They know this, and they make the most of it. Hell, they're so damn big you literally can't build a TON of shit in their sector to code without buying Halliburton products.

Same with Jacobs responding to the vast majority of post-Katrina clean up. They knew they had a blank check and took full advantage.
 
Ha.

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RiccochetJ said:
What layers? That bureaucracy exists now. It can be shrunk in fact. Now you're following a private contractor. Now you only have regulators that have to be highly trained and are highly scrutinized on the gov payroll.
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Key part of this is "on the gov payroll." You're not shrinking anything, though, with regard to the entire job. That's what I'm talking about.

To parse it out a company has the people actually doing the grunt work, then managers and other people to make sure that what they're doing is up to whatever quality the company wants it to be. On top of this stuff they'll then have to answer to people in the government making sure things are up to code. On top of that, then, not doing anything you have the owner(s) siphoning money off the top.

To do things more efficient you can combine the two "managerial" roles of making sure everything is up to snuff within the company and up to regulations by just having the government do both. They then get the grunt work done, too. And on top of that, then, the owners are the tax payers, and they're not trying to extract a profit on it.

The system of government doing it can theoretically be more efficient.

RiccochetJ said:
And what's all this about profit? If they bid the contract correctly, then they'll make a profit. If not, then they'll take a bath. That's on them. Sometimes you lose money on a bid.
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So, your system is relying on the private sector fucking up and making a bad bid on a contract? They're really not going to do that too often. They're going to make a profit. They're not doing this shit for free.


But most of this is abstract and kind of beside the point in the example we're talking about. Have you responded to that other post that I put into my reply?
 
Drek said:
No one would ever bid this. This is classic time and materials work, too much volatility for anyone to bid it as lump sum. At least, not without charging a MASSIVE mark up to CYA.

By massive mark up I mean multiples more than what is initially expected to be needed, and even then the provision for change orders would be demanded if the scope goes too far out of the original bounds.

In other words, you'd be creating a lose/lose scenario for the gov't. Either the job stays more or less within scope and the private contractor makes a killing thanks to a fat number or the job goes way out of scope and the gov't. gets change ordered to death like it was a T&M job but with the initial overbid effectively turning into a "bonus".

Another problem: Almost no companies exist that can handle this kind of work, and those companies don't spring up overnight. There is a reason why Halliburton milks gov't. contracts so profoundly, because in a lot of cases they're the only company that truly has the supply lines and corporate resources to do a job. They know this, and they make the most of it. Hell, they're so damn big you literally can't build a TON of shit in their sector to code without buying Halliburton products.

Same with Jacobs responding to the vast majority of post-Katrina clean up. They knew they had a blank check and took full advantage.
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Hmm, you make a good point. How does someone create a business catered to this for just such an issue? There has to be a huge influx of cash from somewhere to start this whole thing up.
 
watershed said:
Mitt Romney supports privatizing FEMA. If Obama manages to lose this campaign I will have lost all faith in our political process.
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Given his plans in Ohio tomorrow, sounds like he's getting started with this early.
 
watershed said:
Mitt Romney supports privatizing FEMA. If Obama manages to lose this campaign I will have lost all faith in our political process.
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The fact that Romney of all people has been able to bring the national numbers so close is a sign to me that: a) much of the populous literally doesn't care about reality or the truth b) journalists have done a fantastic job with the horse race narrative c) Fox News and other conservative news sources are incredible good at swaying public opinion against Obama and the Democratic party.
 
Bowdz said:
The fact that Romney of all people has been able to bring the national numbers so close is a sign to me that: a) much of the populous literally doesn't care about reality or the truth b) journalists have done a fantastic job with the horse race narrative c) Fox News and other conservative news sources are incredible good at swaying public opinion against Obama and the Democratic party.
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Everyone is dumb except you.
 
RiccochetJ said:
Hmm, you make a good point. How does someone create a business catered to this for just such an issue? There has to be a huge influx of cash from somewhere to start this whole thing up.
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Sounds like an exciting opportunity for a successful, capital rich entrepreneur with a lot of time on his hands after a failed presidential bid.
 
Bowdz said:
The fact that Romney of all people has been able to bring the national numbers so close is a sign to me that: a) much of the populous literally doesn't care about reality or the truth b) journalists have done a fantastic job with the horse race narrative c) Fox News and other conservative news sources are incredible good at swaying public opinion against Obama and the Democratic party.
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And don't forget:
d) voters in the South really, really hate Obama, and their lopsided regional numbers are skewing national numbers (as has been demonstrated multiple times by multiple polling outfits).
 
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