Quotulatiousness

October 8, 2011

Japan grounds their F-15 aircraft after external fuel tank falls off in flight

Filed under: Japan, Military, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:32

The Japanese are taking no chances after an external fuel tank fell off one of their F-15 fighters, grounding the fleet for investigation:

Japan has grounded more than 200 F-15 fighter jets after a fuel tank fell off one of the war planes during a training mission.

Flames were seen under the wing and fallen parts were scattered at sites near the western city of Komatsu.

No-one was injured in the incident and the plane landed safely.

It is the second time in three months that officials have suspended F-15 flights.

The 155-kg (340lb) tank, which was empty, and parts of a dummy missile came free and fell from the plane as it was nearing a field for landing. The debris fell on 10 locations, including a sewage plant, officials said.

October 7, 2011

When Apple stopped being the status indicator of choice for the “opinion leaders”

Filed under: China, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

In his defence of the late Steve Jobs, Brendan O’Neill pinpoints the exact moment that Apple stopped being the ne plus ultra of status signalling devices for the Guardianista set:

It is absolutely no coincidence that it became cool to hate Apple just as Apple started to make products for (whisper it) ‘the masses’. Back when Apple was largely known as the provider of smooth computers to graphic designers and Guardian columnists, there was nothing cooler than being an Applehead. But then it made the iPod and the iPhone, which you can now see everyone from paint-covered builders to Romanian au pairs tapping away on, and that meant it was just another engine of ‘mass consumerism’, the thing the chattering classes hate most. So where in the Nineties, people who used Apple products were presumed to be erudite and tasteful, now people who use Apple products are ‘iZombies’ or ‘hostages’, as one columnist calls them. In the eyes of the opinion-forming classes, Jobs’ great crime was to include the little people in his techno-revolution, to give glossy gadgets to the masses as well as the intellectuals, since that robbed these gadgets of the special symbolism that allowed their users to declare: ‘I am above the crowd.’

As to the idea that Jobs was the killer of Chinese people, this, too, is fuelled by the perverse fantasies of the uncomfortable-with-capitalism cultural elite. Following some suicides at the factories in China in which Apple stuff is put together, it became fashionable here in the West to indulge in orgies of iGuilt, to whip both yourself and everyone else for wanting gadgets so badly that we’re willing to turn a blind eye to ‘enslavement’ in China. The deaths in China were referred to as ‘The iPad suicides’, with journalists saying: ‘Should you blame yourself for all those deaths at the Chinese electronics factory? Yes.’

Yet as I argued on spiked last year, anyone who looked at the number of suicides in these vast factories, which can employ up to 400,000 people, would have realised that the suicide rate was lower in these places than it was in China as a whole. The self-flagellation of iPad-using hacks in the West merely revealed how shallow and moralistic so-called anti-capitalism is these days, where the aim is not to analyse social relations, all the better to overhaul them, but rather to partake in a borderline Catholic guilt trip about the impact of our greed on their lives. In one fell swoop, Jobs-bashers manage to criminalise the material aspirations of Western consumers, the iZombies whose desires are apparently dangerous, and to infantilise Chinese workers, who are depicted as hapless victims, in need of rescue by that super-super-cool tribe of East Coast and Shoreditch hipsters who now actually boycott Apple products. Rad, man.

October 6, 2011

What is a nontrepreneur?

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Andrew Orlowski posts some of his comments at a recent (British) Conservative Conference Fringe discussion on digital policy:

You all know what an entrepreneur is. But who has heard of the word nontrepreneur?

There were amused and bemused looks.

Well you’re going to be hearing it a lot.

We’re in an exciting time for the internet. This great wave of utopian rhetoric and getting everyone online, for the last 15 years, has come to an end. Almost everyone who wants to be online is online. Something quite new and interesting has happened in the past three years, people are beginning to pay for stuff.

The internet today lacks markets and it’s half-finished. The platforms and infrastructure that recognise and create value aren’t there.

Now words come to define political eras and philosophies, and the last ten years were defined by words like ‘beaconicity’ and ‘targets’ and all these agencies spending other people’s money. I have a horrible feeling that Cameron’s technology policy, despite being guided by people with strong classical liberal instincts, will be defined by the fluff of Silicon Roundabout.

Silicon Roundabout is, essentially, a prank on the media. Let’s see who’s involved. You’ve got what I call faux capitalists — people who want to be thought of as capitalists but are terrified of risk and don’t back ambitious high-risk ventures. You’ve got entrepreneurs who can’t run a business. And you’ve got programmers who can’t program. All looking for each other. Then there’s a vast army of hangers-on: mentors, facilitators. And they all socialise endlessly, instead of doing any work. The socialising is work.

This does not create wealth.

As soon as we start to “un-fetishise” this myth of two guys in a garage, and start to think more seriously about, say, payment platforms or credit systems that make buying stuff nice and easy, as easy as real life, then we’ll create markets. You won’t get this from Shoreditch.

Steve Jobs was not a world-leading philanthropist, thank goodness

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

Kevin D. Williams explains why the late Steve Jobs did more good by avoiding big-ticket philanthropy and concentrating on his business:

Mr. Jobs’s contribution to the world is Apple and its products, along with Pixar and his other enterprises, his 338 patented inventions — his work — not some Steve Jobs Memorial Foundation for Giving Stuff to Poor People in Exotic Lands and Making Me Feel Good About Myself. Because he already did that: He gave them better computers, better telephones, better music players, etc. In a lot of cases, he gave them better jobs, too. Did he do it because he was a nice guy, or because he was greedy, or because he was a maniacally single-minded competitor who got up every morning possessed by an unspeakable rage to strangle his rivals? The beauty of capitalism — the beauty of the iPhone world as opposed to the world of politics — is that that question does not matter one little bit. Whatever drove Jobs, it drove him to create superior products, better stuff at better prices. Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. Perhaps you do not think that Apple, or Goldman Sachs, or a professional sports enterprise, or an internet pornographer actually creates much social value; but markets are very democratic — everybody gets to decide for himself what he values. That is not the final answer to every question, because economic answers can only satisfy economic questions. But the range of questions requiring economic answers is very broad.

I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.

Update: An obituary from The Economist seems pretty accurate to me:

NOBODY else in the computer industry, or any other industry for that matter, could put on a show like Steve Jobs. His product launches, at which he would stand alone on a black stage and conjure up a “magical” or “incredible” new electronic gadget in front of an awed crowd, were the performances of a master showman. All computers do is fetch and shuffle numbers, he once explained, but do it fast enough and “the results appear to be magic”. He spent his life packaging that magic into elegantly designed, easy to use products.

[. . .]

His on-stage persona as a Zen-like mystic notwithstanding, Mr Jobs was an autocratic manager with a fierce temper. But his egomania was largely justified. He eschewed market researchers and focus groups, preferring to trust his own instincts when evaluating potential new products. “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” he said. His judgment proved uncannily accurate: by the end of his career the hits far outweighed the misses. Mr Jobs was said by an engineer in the early years of Apple to emit a “reality distortion field”, such were his powers of persuasion. But in the end he changed reality, channelling the magic of computing into products that reshaped music, telecoms and media. The man who said in his youth that he wanted to “put a ding in the universe” did just that.

Update, the second: “Death is very likely the single best invention of life.” Steve Jobs, 2005.

October 5, 2011

The irony of Bletchley Park’s funding windfall

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

Cory Doctorow has the good news about Bletchley Park’s recent grant:

Bletchley Park, the birthplace of modern crypto and the home of the WWII codebreaking effort, has received a £4.6m Heritage Lottery Fund grant to fund restoration efforts and new exhibits. Bletchley was broken up after the war and its work was literally buried as part of the Cold War climate of secrecy that prevailed. In the years that followed, neglect and time led to the near-destruction of many of the historic sites. The Bletchley Park trust has since done amazing work on a shoestring budget to restore and preserve Bletchley, creating a fabulous museum and rebuilding some of the most beautiful electromechanical computers I’ve ever seen.

[. . .]

Ironically, the money to restore Bletchley has come from the lottery, a government-run system designed to reinforce and exploit statistical innumeracy of the sort that Bletchley’s cryptographers overcame in order to help win the war.

Apple’s new iPhone

Filed under: Europe, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

I’ve been following the lead-up to yesterday’s Apple iPhone announcement, as I’m just out of contract on my original iPhone 3G (yes, Canadian carriers only offered 3-year contracts, unlike US carriers who offered 2-year deals). My iPhone 3G still works well: I’m still happy with it overall, but I’m starting to suffer from “aging hardware syndrome”. More and more of the apps I’ve been using are being updated to use the newer capabilities of more recent iPhones and no longer run on my phone. So far, it’s just been trivial stuff (games and non-critical apps) that I miss but didn’t depend on. It’s only a matter of time before one of the applications I depend on (like my time-tracking and billing software or my personal finance app) is no longer supported on the 3G. At that point, I’ll have to either jump to a newer iPhone or find equivalent apps that work on Android phones.

Yesterday’s announcement seems to have caused a lot of wailing in certain iPhone communities — as far as I can tell, mainly because Apple chose to call the new phone the “iPhone 4S” instead of “iPhone 5”. Yes, some people are upset because of nomenclature, even if the updated features are otherwise a nice upgrade over the existing iPhone 4. I’m sure there’s a term in psychology to describe that phenomenon.

Here’s an overview of the new iPhone and its headline software feature, Siri:

Siri really works, and it’s quite clever
I got some time to test it hands-on, in a booth in a fairly busy room of journalists. “What’s the weather like outside?” I asked. It came back with the weather in London (where I was). “What’s my father’s email address?” It came back with two email addresses for the person designated in the address book as “father”. Not what you’d call a comprehensive test, but it shows that it’s location-aware, context-aware, and works without training. (By contrast, I just tried “Siri app” on voice search on my Google Nexus S running Gingerbread: it took me to the web page for Syria.)

Siri is integrated through the whole phone
You press the home button and the interface comes up. Then ask it anything. It’s very neat. It uses Siri’s servers, so you’ll need a working connection.

I don’t know that I’d get much use of the Siri features, but I’m sure it will move a lot of phones for the “coolness” factor.

The iPhone 4S really does look and feel exactly like the iPhone 4
There’s no difference at all, externally. Apparently the iPhone 4S is very slightly heavier — 139g (4.9oz) v 136g (4.8oz) — but you’d need a very sensitive hand to detect it.

This is probably a good move on Apple’s part (aside from the well-publicized complaints about the iPhone 4’s antenna issues), as it keeps all the companies that produced accessories for the iPhone 4 happy — they don’t need to create a whole new line of things for the iPhone 4S. The push for mobile phones to standardize on mini-USB connectors is why Apple will be selling dongles to convert from the current 30-pin connector on the iPhone to mini-USB. Again, it meets the expectations of both regulators and third-party manufacturers. I suspect Apple will be pushed to provide the dongles as standard equipment for European markets.

The camera in the iPhone 4S is now an 8MP (up from 5MP in the last model), and is claimed to be much faster:

Taking pictures on the 4S is much quicker, and taking extra pictures is too
I tried the camera on taking pictures, and the setup is really fast. It takes more pictures quickly too — almost like firing the motordrive on an SLR camera. Apple says it takes 1.1 second to get to the “click” part — faster than any in a list it provided — and that it’s then just 0.5 second to take another one. It’s impressive: camera setup delay is one of the niggles of modern life (especially smartphone life) that has crept up on us without anyone doing very much.

Overall, the 4S looks to be a nice, incremental upgrade over the iPhone 4, but Siri is the most interesting new development.

In other news, however, Apple’s recent resort to “lawfare” against Samsung in Europe may rebound badly:

Apple’s new iPhone 4S faces the prospect of court injunctions in France and Italy from the Korean electronics firm Samsung, which says the phones breach patents it owns on wireless communications.

It is an escalation of the struggle between Samsung and Apple, who are fighting a number of increasingly bitter court battles in various territories around the world. Samsung, which is challenging Apple for the title of the world’s biggest maker of smartphones, says it plans to file preliminary injunctions in Paris and Milan on the basis that the iPhone 4S, announced in California on Tuesday night and expected in a number of countries including the UK from 14 October, infringes its patents on WCDMA technology.

Update: Speaking of Android phones, here’s Alun Taylor with a list of ten smartphone alternatives to the iPhone 4S:

Yes folks, it’s that time again when across the land otherwise rational and even sensible adults feel the need to whip themselves into a frenzy over the pending arrival of the latest iPhone.

To be honest, I find the whole charade rather entertaining and have taken to sauntering over to the Trafford Centre come launch day, grabbing a cup of coffee and a sticky bun, pulling up a chair and making fun of the twerps lined up outside the Apple Store opposite.

Yes, I know it’s wrong, but just like laughing at Daily Mail readers or at anyone who voted Liberal Democrat in the last general election, I simply can’t help it.

With Android devices now outselling iOS phones by two-to-one there are many, many alternatives if you want a good smartphone with access to a shed-load of apps but don’t want to take the Apple shilling.

So here are ten of the best Android-powered alternatives. In case you’re wondering why I’ve avoided any of the recent 3D phones like HTC’s Evo 3D or LG’s Optimus 3D, that would be because it’s a stupid technology bereft of point or purpose.

Remember, if none of these handsets put their hands up your dress, the next few months we will see the arrival of Samsung’s phenomenal 5.3in Galaxy Note; Sony Ericsson’s 1.4GHz powerhouse the Xperia S; Google’s Android 4.0-packing Nexus Prime; and LG’s LU6200 with its 4.5in, 1280 x 720 IPS screen. Choice — by gum, it’s a wonderful thing.

Update, the second: Joey deVilla explains the prospective iPhone 4S customer dilemma:

October 1, 2011

The inspirational power of science fiction

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:36

Neal Stephenson on the ability of science fiction to inspire:

In early 2011, I participated in a conference called Future Tense, where I lamented the decline of the manned space program, then pivoted to energy, indicating that the real issue isn’t about rockets. It’s our far broader inability as a society to execute on the big stuff. I had, through some kind of blind luck, struck a nerve. The audience at Future Tense was more confident than I that science fiction [SF] had relevance — even utility — in addressing the problem. I heard two theories as to why:

1. The Inspiration Theory. SF inspires people to choose science and engineering as careers. This much is undoubtedly true, and somewhat obvious.

2. The Hieroglyph Theory. Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place. A good SF universe has a coherence and internal logic that makes sense to scientists and engineers. Examples include Isaac Asimov’s robots, Robert Heinlein’s rocket ships, and William Gibson’s cyberspace. As Jim Karkanias of Microsoft Research puts it, such icons serve as hieroglyphs — simple, recognizable symbols on whose significance everyone agrees.

Researchers and engineers have found themselves concentrating on more and more narrowly focused topics as science and technology have become more complex. A large technology company or lab might employ hundreds or thousands of persons, each of whom can address only a thin slice of the overall problem. Communication among them can become a mare’s nest of email threads and Powerpoints. The fondness that many such people have for SF reflects, in part, the usefulness of an over-arching narrative that supplies them and their colleagues with a shared vision. Coordinating their efforts through a command-and-control management system is a little like trying to run a modern economy out of a Politburo. Letting them work toward an agreed-on goal is something more like a free and largely self-coordinated market of ideas.

More on Assange’s “unauthorized” autobiography

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:26

Patrick Hayes reviews the autobiography (draft) recently published against the wishes of the author:

The folks at publishing house Canongate must have thought they’d hit the jackpot when they secured the rights to the memoirs of the person whom the Guardian had compared to Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa. The so-called ‘spectral’ Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, apparently living the life of Jason Bourne, was to give an unprecedented glimpse into his formative years as a freedom fighter and the events that led him to found Wikileaks, the whistleblowers’ website. Hollywood wanted in, as did dozens of leading publishers around the world. Even better, Assange’s book was to be ‘part memoir, part manifesto’ — something like A Long Walk to Freedom and the Communist Manifesto rolled into one. What could go wrong?

Pretty much everything, that’s what. In a matter of months, the liberal commentariat fell out of love with the silver-haired whistleblower extraordinaire. The oft-dubbed Silver Fox had proved to be a skunk and the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, which had all secured deals to publish Wikileaks material, couldn’t distance themselves fast enough from him. Fevered speculation about who would play Assange in an upcoming movie — Neil Patrick Harris? Paul Bettany? Bill Hader? Tilda Swinton? — abruptly stopped. Not only that, but Assange, who seemed to have only reluctantly agreed to pen the book in order to cover legal fees, bolted midway through the project, declaring ‘All memoir is prostitution’.

However, Assange no longer had his advance, so he couldn’t break the contract and, to recoup costs, Canongate went ahead and published a draft anyway, billing it as an ‘Unauthorised Autobiography’. On publication day last week, Assange revealed that the title itself was a half-truth, announcing that he had not written a word of the book himself. Instead, it had been ghost-written by novelist Andrew O’Hagan, who was reportedly given £100,000 to write up 50 hours of interviews that he’d conducted with Assange. Many biographers spend a lot more time interviewing their subjects.

September 30, 2011

Another science fiction device may be on the way to reality

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

Ever read some of those late-60s or early-70s SF stories that assumed that computers that ran using non-binary logic would replace the binary logic machines of the day? Welcome to the future:

In 2007, Hewlett-Packard’s labs demonstrated the first memristor recognized as such. A portmanteau of “memory” and “resistor,” “memristance” was the theoretical fourth circuit variable first described in 1971. While HP stock will probably not yield the sort of profits we’re looking for here, it will help generate them indirectly.

Because of its unique properties, memristors will enable far more powerful circuitry. Unlike transistor-based circuits that form the core of modern electronics, memristive circuits retain their state after losing power. Theoretically, you could power on a memristor-based computer and have all the data in memory that it had when you powered off. Memristor memory could replace hard drives and transistor-based RAM.

Memristors, however, can do more than act as memory. They can replace existing processing components. This means that much more functionality can be implemented in a single component. Instead of busing data back and forth between separate memory and processing locations on a circuit board, memristors do it all. Data, then, are available for processing with shorter wait times. Memristors reduce total hardware size, cost and energy consumption. Yet memristors can multitask in other ways, opening up a whole range of exciting possibilities.

September 23, 2011

Solyndra: “They doubled down, just like some chump who lost his stake at the Vegas blackjack tables”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Megan McArdle tries to figure out how Solyndra managed to spend nearly a billion dollars in two years:

By my count, Since September 2009, they borrowed $535 million from us to get their second fab up and running, raised $219 million in a private equity offering, got $175 million from issuing convertible promissory notes after their IPO was pulled, received $75 million in the last-ditch round where the DOE allowed their seniority to be subordinated, and maybe got a loan from a different bank. By the time they filed bankruptcy in August, my understanding is that they were basically out of cash.

The Washington Post‘s rather scathing new account, full of employees saying that post-loan, Solyndra started spending money like it was about to be discontinued, says the new facility for which we loaned them all that money cost $344 million to build. So it seems that in the space of two years, Solyndra managed to spend $344 million building a factory and $660 million . . . doing what?

September 22, 2011

BT is worth negative £30bn

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

The British telecoms firm is actually worth much less than the scrap value of its copper wire network:

British Telecom is, as a telecoms company, worth minus £30bn. Yes, that’s a negative number there. And yet it is literally sitting on top of billions in assets.

[. . .]

Ten pairs of copper cabling weighs around 132kg per mile. Which by the miracle of multiplication can be seen to be about 10 million tonnes of copper. Which, at current LME prices of just over £5,000 a tonne, is £50bn.

BT’s current market capitalisation is just north of £20bn. So, as an operating telecoms company they’re worth £30bn less than the mountain of copper they’re sitting upon: that is, they’re worth less than the physical assets or they have, as a telecoms company not a mountain of scrap copper, a negative value.

September 21, 2011

Tories drop “lawful access” provisions from omnibus crime bill

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

That’s a bit of good news on the civil liberties front:

A controversial Internet surveillance bill has been omitted from the federal Conservative party’s proposed crime legislation.

Today, Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General Rob Nicholson held a press conference to introduce the Conservatives’ promised omnibus crime act, titled The Safe Streets and Communities Act, which focuses on crime and terrorism. However, an expected component of the act regarding Internet surveillance known as “Lawful Access” legislation was nowhere to be found.

The set of Lawful Access bills would have warranted Canadian law enforcement and intelligence agencies the power to acquire the personal information and activity of web users from internet service providers (ISPs). ISPs would also be required by an additional provision to install surveillance equipment on their networks.

The legislation would essentially give law enforcement the ability to track people online without having to obtain a warrant. The federal NDP and Green parties, and civil liberties groups among others decried the bill as overly-invasive, dangerous and potentially costly for internet users.

That’s the good news. The rest of the bill, as Grace Scott points out, is awash with “tough on crime” noises:

The Safe Streets and Communities Act will increase penalties for sex offenders, those caught with possession or producing illicit drugs for the purposes of trafficking, and intends to implement tougher sentencing on violent and repeat youth crime. It also plans to eliminate the use of conditional sentences, or house arrest, for serious and violent crimes.

F-22 flies again

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:21

The months-long grounding is over:

On September 21st, the U.S. Air Force will allow its F-22 fighters to fly again. The aircraft had been grounded for 140 days because of problems with the pilot’s oxygen system. The air force is not giving out many details on exactly what the problems is, although they say a report on the F-22 oxygen system will be out by the end of the year. Each F-22 will undergo a detailed inspection before it is cleared to fly. This may have something to do with earlier remarks about toxins somehow getting into the pilot’s air supply. The problem was always about something bad in the air supply. This has kept all 168 F-22s grounded since May. The only exception was a squadron based on the Virginia coast, that was given permission to fly out of the way of hurricane Karina. Those F-22s encountered no problems with their air supply.

[. . .]

During the grounding, pilots and ground crews used simulators and (for the ground crews) maintenance exercises on the grounded aircraft to keep their skills sharp. In addition, everyone helped checking out a growing list of aircraft components in support of the search for the breathing problem). The air force was also under time pressure to fix the problem. That’s because after 210 days on the ground, aircrew have to undergo extensive retraining to regain combat flying status. This added a little more urgency to fixing the problem quickly. The grounding also left a dozen F-22s stranded at a training base, where they were for live weapons exercises. At least six new F-22s could not be delivered because of the grounding.

September 19, 2011

How spendy will those whizzy F-35 aircraft end up being?

Filed under: Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:31

Strategy Page has a state-of-play report on the escalating cost of the F-35:

The U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force are trying to agree on what the new F-35 fighter will cost. The air force insists that it is $65 million each, while the Department of Defense says when all costs are included; it will be more like $111 million each. Another number being debated is how many F-35s will actually be produced. The air force assumes 3,162, but the Department of Defense is not so sure that many will eventually be built. Total development cost is now put at $65 billion, which comes to over $20 million per aircraft if 3,162 are built. Development costs for the new U.S. F-35 fighter-bomber has grown by more than a third over the last few years. The additional development costs are accompanied by additional delays. Current estimates are that the F-35 will enter service in another 6-7 years. The Department of Defense believes production and development costs will continue to rise, and that the number to be built will decline. Both trends increase the average aircraft cost. Based on past experience, the higher Department of Defense estimates are more likely to be accurate.

And then there are operating costs. Earlier this year, after months of contentious disagreement, the U.S. Air Force came around to agreeing with U.S. Navy claims that the F-35 will cost much more to maintain, rather than (as the F-35 promoters assert) less. It was over a year ago that the U.S. Navy, after nervously watching as the manufacturing costs of the new F-35C and F-35B carrier aircraft increase, concluded that these aircraft would also be a lot more expensive to maintain. It comes down to this. Currently, it costs the navy, on average, $19,000 an hour to operate its AV-8 vertical takeoff or F-18C fighter aircraft. The navy calculated that it would cost 63 percent more to operate the F-35C (which will replace the F-18C) and the F-35B (which will replace the AV-8). These costs include buying the aircraft, training and maintaining the pilots, the aircraft and purchasing expendable items (fuel, spare parts, munitions.) The navy concluded that maintenance alone would be about a third more.

In a vicious circle, the higher the cost per plane, the fewer planes will be built, which increases the cost of the planes that do get built. At some point, the costs will get so high that foreign buyers (who are expected to buy more than half of the planned production) will reduce their orders or even back out altogether. The F-35 was supposed to be cheaper to operate than the aircraft it will be replacing, but that appears to be a badly mistaken estimate. That will also tend to ratchet down the foreign interest in purchasing the aircraft.

September 18, 2011

Solyndra: not just crony capitalism as usual

Filed under: Environment, Government, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:28

Andrew C. McCarthy shows the difference between the collapse of Solyndra and ordinary crony capitalist use of government funds:

Homing in on one of the several shocking aspects of the Solyndra scandal, lawmakers noted that, a few months before the “clean energy” enterprise went belly-up last week, the Obama Energy Department signed off on a sweetheart deal. In the event of bankruptcy — the destination to which it was screamingly obvious Solyndra was headed despite the president’s injection of $535 million in federal loans — the cozily connected private investors would be given priority over American taxpayers. In other words, when the busted company’s assets were sold off, Obama pals would recoup some of their losses, while you would be left holding the half-billion-dollar bag.

As Andrew Stiles reported here at NRO, Republicans on the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee say this arrangement ran afoul of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This law — compassionate conservatism in green bunting — is a monstrosity, under which Leviathan, which can’t run a post office, uses your money to pick winners and losers in the economy’s energy sector. The idea is cockamamie, but Congress did at least write in a mandate that taxpayers who fund these “investments” must be prioritized over other stakeholders. The idea is to prevent cronies from pushing ahead of the public if things go awry — as they are wont to do when pols fancy themselves venture capitalists.

[. . .]

The criminal law, by contrast, is not content to assume the good faith of government officials. It targets anyone — from low-level swindlers to top elective officeholders — who attempts to influence the issuance of government loans by making false statements; who engages in schemes to defraud the United States; or who conspires “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof, in any manner or for any purpose.” The penalties are steep: Fraud in connection with government loans, for example, can be punished by up to 30 years in the slammer.

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