Re:Catching a Flight? Budget Hours, Not Minutes, for Security
by JupiterMoon on Monday May 02, 2016 @02:37PM
(#11614168)
Contracts for private sector companies doing work for the public sector tend to protect the private sector company from being fired. Also you may want to check who sits on the boards of some of the private contractors working for your government (or you might not want to - the results might make you more cynical).
Re:Catching a Flight? Budget Hours, Not Minutes, for Security
by drzaiusapelord on Monday May 02, 2016 @02:57PM
(#11614388)
Obviously we can't have a perfect world, but vendors get fired all the time. Contracts go up for renewel, a new administration fires old vendors, etc. Public sector unions are eternal and only get worse over time.
As far as "connections" go, Theranos is imploding right now even with its deep government and military connections.
Re:Catching a Flight? Budget Hours, Not Minutes, for Security
by themartorana on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @12:02AM
(#11617826)
Those connections likely made money and are also very likely immune from the current shit storm.
Re:Catching a Flight? Budget Hours, Not Minutes, for Security
by drzaiusapelord on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @10:01AM
(#11620717)
That's opinion not fact. Fact is no federal public sector union has ever eliminated itself, yet there's a long history of the government firing vendors.
Everything about security and law enforcement has some level of perverse incentives. People learn to game the system and their supervisors don't care as long as there's a benefit to them. I'm certain this guy knew it was a toy, but he wanted that gold star and his supervisor wanted a report showing all the gold stars that month were from his guys.
This is a classic problem in management. The real question is who can fix this? In government, perverse incentives eventually become the norm, not the exception, as everyone eventually gets in the game and there's no reason for anyone to upset the cart. Especially when the higher ups are riding the pension/public sector union bus and anything that could risk that or cause a political issue is just ignored. They're not going to be the fall guy here. The shitheads outnumber them vasty. More than likely these managers are just ex-shitheads who played the game better than the other shitheads in the past and got promoted.
If airport security was run by a private company, the government could fire these guys and go with a different vendor if there was enough political pressure (or threaten to to get needed reforms), but because the TSA is the government, we're stuck with them.