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Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor

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Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor

#31
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You (and Boing Boing) are mischaracterizing what OTA said about the Star Wars program. They never claimed it would be impossible to shoot down a missile or that any of the technologies involved could not be made to work. Instead, OTA found it was unlikely a program that would be effective against a large scale Soviet first stike could be deployed within the desired timeline. History has proven them correct. You can r…

You can read the actual reports here: http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/ Actually, I can't, for all the links are dead. So I don't know how they scored success. I score it: Integral to winning the Cold War, which we did. Deterring a first strike, because the Soviets couldn't choose which of their warheads would get intercepted. This is very important because the triad made a successful first strike, that is, one with m…

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Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor

#32
post #3

An OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers. It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM, etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified." You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot-button issues like copyright, patents, etc?

This isn't my experience from going through the USDS hiring process, although that's a branch of the White House's Executive Office, not congress. Disclaimer: No degree, 15 years in tech, was considered qualified.

I know plenty of non-PhD technology people in government who are well-respected. They aren't paid nearly as highly as Silicon Valley ($50-70k would be typical salaries) but they're often just as smart, and the government will fund their education.

Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor

#33
post #21

> The problem was that the OTA was reality-based and reality has a well-known liberal bias. Speaking about bias ...

Thats a satirical line from Stephen Colbert.

And Colbert said it right to George W. Bush's face in a speech at a White House Correspondents' dinner.

Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor

#34
post #3

An OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers. It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM, etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified." You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot-button issues like copyright, patents, etc?

It's also what the government can afford. :-)

Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor

#35
post #29
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can read the actual reports here: http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/ Actually, I can't, for all the links are dead. So I don't know how they scored success. I score it: Integral to winning the Cold War, which we did. Deterring a first strike, because the Soviets couldn't choose which of their warheads would get intercepted. This is very important because the triad made a successful first strike, that is, one with m…

Just delete wws from the links, they will start working fine after that.

Thanks.

From http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1985/8504/850403.PDF, the Executive Findings (all of which I skimmed), the OTA Findings section (all of which I read):

At the end of 1: While it is certainly possible that defensive technological development could outpace the development of offensive weapons and countermeasures to defenses, this does not appear very likely.

Ignores the economic issues, the Soviets, especially with our successful campaign of economic warfare focused on energy, could not afford to build a new BM fleet (we can quibble about mid- and terminal ranges, but boost phase intercept (by far the highest payoff) counter measures tended to require new boosters).

2 is not in conflict with the Reagan Administration (you indeed need Civil Defense, and we still need it).

3 is very speculative, but, in the end, that's actually what happened. Before the decisions about deployment that SDI proposed to be able to answer in the '90s could be made, the USSR was no more, as was much of its BM fleet (besides the draw-downs, it was a shame about how a solid third of the most dangerous RS-36/SS-18 Satan missiles were exiled outside of the Russian Federation).

4 likewise negated, USSR collapsed, we didn't deploy.

5-6 and 8 are not particularly controversial.

Pretty much the same for 7, which doesn't say much to begin with.

Nowhere do I see the combination of "OTA found it was unlikely a program that would be effective against a large scale Soviet first stike could be deployed within the desired timeline.

And History has proven them correct., and it couldn't be, since the proposed decisions in the '90s were mooted by the USSR's end in 1991, which we could see coming in 1988-9 (e.g. Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall, and note how widely derided G. H. W. Bush's 1991 Chicken Kiev speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Kiev_speech was; talk about being on the wrong side of history!).

Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor

#36
post #35
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just delete wws from the links, they will start working fine after that.

Thanks. From http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1985/8504/850403.PDF , the Executive Findings (all of which I skimmed), the OTA Findings section (all of which I read): At the end of 1: While it is certainly possible that defensive technological development could outpace the development of offensive weapons and countermeasures to defenses, this does not appear very likely. Ignores the economic issues, the Soviets, es…

"While it is certainly possible that defensive technological development could outpace the development of offensive weapons and countermeasures to defenses, this does not appear very likely."

This is sort of what I was getting at: this is no longer a technical assessment, but also (or even primarily) a geopolitical and economic one. A technical assessment would consist of "a defensive technological development that accomplishes X goal can be completed in estimated Y time." Anything beyond that is garbage.

Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor

#37
post #35
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just delete wws from the links, they will start working fine after that.

Thanks. From http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1985/8504/850403.PDF , the Executive Findings (all of which I skimmed), the OTA Findings section (all of which I read): At the end of 1: While it is certainly possible that defensive technological development could outpace the development of offensive weapons and countermeasures to defenses, this does not appear very likely. Ignores the economic issues, the Soviets, es…

The Union of Concerned Scientists report was probably the most effective one in my mind; Panofsky and Bethe among others showed that SDI was not cost effective at the margins, meaning that the marginal Soviet costs of more missiles was lesser than our marginal cost to scale SDI up to deal with them.
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