Well, FIFA has once again moved ahead in the battle to be recognized as the most-corrupt sporting organization. The irony here is that FIFA set itself up to fail, both with its "rules" regarding appeals (note: for all practical purposes, there are none… in particular, there are none regarding non-sporting-origin pressure tactics by oligarchical assholes) and the "rules" regarding the VAR review that led to the problem in the first place ("zero tolerance" and "death-penalty-equivalent only" systems just don't work to actually control behavior — ask any third-grade teacher). I'm sure the IOC will make this competitive in the next two years, but I'm afraid that just trying harder isn't going to help the NCAA.
- Somewhat more mundanely and more importantly, the illusion of privacy on the 'net appears to be getting more attention, if not more actual effective control. (Which still beats intimidation by DHS consistent with its internal culture.) Meanwhile, even the "technologically challenged" Supreme Court seems to be waking up a little.
The thread connecting all of these incidents is simple to state in the abstract and horrendously complicated to confront in any practical sense: Lawyers' (and politicians') ignorance of both the actual methodology used and its means of (and potential for) abuse by nonofficial actors. It's all well and good to establish a prohibition on "the gummint" establishing policies and procedures to invade privacy. When "the gummint" — indirectly, via third-party privacy invasions epitomized by the location-data items in the preceding paragraph, or directly, via wink-wink-nudge-nudge "unauthorized exceeding of authority" by officials as in the last one — that's not sufficient when everything about how privacy is at issue is masked. At the moment, the most-obvious example of this is the underlying rationale for Google's "analytics": The purported benefit to advertisers (not incidentally enabling them to charge excessive rents). Leaving aside whether that benefit is to society as a whole for another time, it's a castle largely built on sand that is most emphatically not linearly scaleable: The relationship between overall, fully-extended costs per transaction achieved, commercial or otherwise, and the failure/success rate of communications seeking those transactions. Worse, the sand is being undermined to make more memory chips for enhanced-Eliza systems calling themselves "AI" without displaying the fundamental characteristic of true intelligence: Judgment.
- And now, ignorance on display. A purportedly esteemed commentator Over There inadvertently exposes his utter ignorance of preparing for contingencies. Perhaps this statement epitomizes the ignorance of someone who proudly proclaims that he was a member of Blair's strategic-review commission:
When I served as a lay member of Tony Blair’s strategy defence review in 1998, we were bombarded with unquantified abstractions. We were told not to query or quantify concepts such as menace, aggression, force or “nuclear threat”. As for the last, it was said to be “like the Virgin birth”, axiomatic to the concept of deterrence. Today’s case for spending £63bn on renewing Britain’s nuclear deterrent must be close to slight. Yet it receives no peep of debate.
What part of "You have no f*cking clue how long it takes to establish, or reestablish, a discrete contingency-response program, do you?" did you not understand? Leaving aside the amount of time it takes to actually acquire the tools, there's a serious issue with training personnel — and, more to the point, their supervisors, up to three or four levels above the workers. Elsewhere in that ignorant screed, there's an implicit claim that the UK will have three years' accurate, clear notice of immediately-impending military action by Russia against the UK… which, even if true, begs the question of how long it would take the UK to build a full system to respond. Not just buy the guns off the street — recruit, train, promote, support, and deploy counterforce.
There's quite a bit to be said for keeping things less wasteful in military, and all other contingency-based, programs. (That's not at all the same thing as "improving efficiency" — by definition, "contingency preparation" is not and cannot be "efficient.") It's always easy to pick on obvious, easily-defined-and-denigrated programs like "independent nuclear deterrent" and extend that reasoning to all else. The same for "hurricane preparedness" and "vaccine/antibiotic stockpile" and… well, I won't go on. The real point is that "the hardware" is the easy part of any contingency-response system — and even the hardware is almost always specialized and not fit for any other purpose. Conservatively (and historically), it takes ten to twelve years to establish a self-sustaining discrete contingency-response system where there is none, whether it's a new creation or complete reactivation after dismantling a prior program. That's due primarily to human factors, not hardware issues easily waved away with a finance-industry-provided magic wand… presuming that the hardware being specified and purchased (and usually not maintained because that's even more expensive!) is actually fit for purpose. Particular to this issue, do I hear any echoes of "How long did it take the UK to bring the obsolete-even-then Typhoon Eurofighter into operational readiness?" anywhere? Buehler? Buehler?
Absolutely there must be a guns-versus-butter debate, and no partisan for any aspect is going to get everything desired. "Lack of immediate threat means ignore long-term threat because we can deal with it later if it's ever necessary," though, is not a valid part of that debate… as demonstrated by global warming, etc. And that's before considering the difficulty of changing resource allocation later, both politically and practicably.
- CNN demonstrates that arguing against someone's high statements of principle justifying a rebellion — specifically, the preamble of the Declaration of Independence — is seldom very persuasive and merely distracts from actually confronting the grievances — the rationale — behind those high principles. But I probably shouldn't be surprised: Civilians seldom learn how to run a checklist…
- Odious art, and "labor relations" in the arts, and educational directives, and even wealth all have their places. Preferably well away from me, as I can make few assurances about minimizing the collateral damage if they get too close.