Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
wired.com
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You might have just lowered the bar right down beneath the grass there.
I find it disturbing that you'd actually want an OTA that only hires people that agree with you. That's not their purpose.
Disclaimer: No degree, 15 years in tech, was considered qualified.
It's actually not at all difficult to find the names of people who worked at OTA as principal staff members. All the reports are archived at http://ota.fas.org/ with names on each one. It's a bit harder to match them up with a current profile, because well, it's been 20 years, but in my 10 minutes of Googling, here's the first former OTA project lead I managed to find today (http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/jsngrp/).
The OTA was (and should still be) a group of people with the expertise to sythesize a large body of research in a topic. You don't learn those skills making Facebook's "like" button load 20% faster. You learn them by spending a good chunk of your 20s reading thousands of pages of research for your PhD.
An analogy might be 'designed an actual building - even a warehouse' when talking about an architect.
I'm not crying for the political ills of Zuckerberg or Apple or Google. Furthermore, the tech industry is far removed from blue-collar middle class America, with an average of twice the wages and relatively insulated from the ills of globalization.
Just remember: Technocrats are a political group just like any other. You and I may be part of them, but remember that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (aka: EFF) is a lobbying group funded by technocrats, with ideologies that don't necessarily match the average (non-technocrat) American.
Again, I'm a technocrat like most others in this site. I am a programmer by trade and generally agree with the issues brought up by the EFF. Just don't get trapped inside of the "bubble" that is Hacker News or even Reddit. There is a big world out there.
Honestly, I'd prefer that to the status quo. No solution is perfect but the current situation is an absurd caricature of a shitshow.
The ignorance displayed is terrifying because these people are professionals at gathering public support.
Speaking about bias ...
Now you just have different lobbyists weighing in on these issues and no one out there thinking about it who isn't already bought by someone trying to make a buck off the public. It should worry at least some of us.
It pains me to say it, but that failure is one eventuality the second amendment to the US Constitution contemplated.
I don't think "LOL the internet is a series of tubes" quite qualifies.
And the very same Congress that drafted the Bill of Rights also defined the militia in law, and basically that same definition holds to this day in 10 U.S. Code § 311 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/311, modulo modern interpretation that holds "men" equals men and women, folding in the National Guard, etc.
Note also that the Founders were hardly of a single mind on the subject, with, say, Jefferson being the most noted, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." (see e.g. http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/The_tree_of_l... ), but he had plenty of company. We've always had seriously ornery factions in the nation....
But anyways, the reasoning is just reasoning. The right is pretty clearly spelled out and stands on its own.
It certainly isn't conscripts, or people being loaned weapons to defend someone else's holdings - it's free people defending themselves with their own tools.
The main point that differed a "militia" from an "army" was that it was a part time affair, and not a standing army. The threat antifederalists cared about was a standing federal army imposing its will on the state government. It was never about random dudes getting upset at the government. Although there was plenty of that too. (The Whiskey and Shay's rebellions come to mind.) It's just that the founding fathers would send the militia in to arrest them. To romanticize the colonial and early state militias as rugged individualists ready to stand up to The Man is simply ahistorical.
[0] http://academic.udayton.edu/health/syllabi/Bioterrorism/8Mil... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Acts_of_1792
Now that I know is not true, there were (wealthy) private individuals owned canons. Heck, that the Congress has the power to "To ... grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal" acknowledges that private entities had armed ships.
Partly armed is correct, and a screwup there helped ensure that Washington, D.C. got burned in 1814 (too much bureaucracy in issuing flints etc.).
But it's also the case that, as you note, "all able bodied men 16 and older served in the militia", and as is still the law, all who are 17-44 years of age are members of it: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/311 (and in modern legal interpretation, men is generally read as men and women).
But these quibbles aside, your general thrust is correct. So much so, per Galvin's The Minute Men: The First Fight: Myths and Realities of the American Revolution http://www.amazon.com/The-Minute-Men-Realities-Revolution/dp... the British in Massachusetts were completely outclassed in war fighting experience, they'd put garrison troops there, and many of our men had gained experience in what we call the French and Indian War.
How would a governmental Militia (ie British) have proven useful to the Americans and warranted this specific clarification?
I'm not an American, but it seems pretty clear that the people on the ground at the time meant "because we won our freedom from tyranny by being able to call up an army of the people, and may need to do so again, everyone shall be able to keep arms handy".
And behind that is some politics: our Founders were supremely suspicious of standing armies (we didn't really have much of one until the Cold War) and "select militias", which were groups of armed men selected by some criteria (like being a loyal Tory) instead of "everyone" answering the call up.
Some of the Founders wanted us to depend entirely on a militia system, but others, including the supremely important George Washington, commander in chief during the Revolutionary War, said no way, Regulars are required for serious wars. And his and the other experienced commanders opinions could not be denied, so the dependent clause, very unusual in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, was a sop thrown to the pro-militia only group.
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying. This line implies you think it is not a dependent clause but later you say it is...? Also, what is the impact you're implying?
But anyways, the only actionable piece of the 2nd is "the right shall not be infringed".
> And behind that is some politics: our Founders were supremely suspicious of standing armies [...]
Rightly so. But the original reasoning behind the laws aren't the laws. For better or worse.
It's been acknowledged that people have this right (to keep and bear arms) and you cannot take rights away.
For instance, we can't reinstate slavery, even with another amendment. It's not like the 13th amendment made it illegal; the amendment forced the government to acknowledge that it does not have that power and cannot enact slavery - those orders would be illegal.
A vote to repeal the 13th would be unconstitutional in its very nature because it recognizes a right. Unlike repealing the 18th establishing prohibition, for example.
But I think long before violently overthrowing the government, people would first try electing different people.
[0]outside forums where such things are on topic, I guess.
That's cute.
No, actually, it's bureaucrats that have a liberal bias. Meanwhile, in the absence of the OTA, we've been busy building laser weapons and missile interceptors.
It's really fun watching scientists and engineers, real experts, build all these things the OTA and its allies assured us was either impossible or beyond the foreseeable future state of the art.
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 read the actual reports here:
http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/
There's a reflexive tendency on HN to dismiss government-directed technology efforts. But a quick look at the advisory panel on the September 1985 OTA ABM report should convince anyone the report authors really did consult with experts in the field:
Guyford Steve, Chairman President, Universities Research Associates
Solomon Buchsbaum Executive Vice President AT&T Bell Labs
Ashton Carter Kennedy School of Government Harvard University
Robert Clem Director of Systems Sciences Sandia National Laboratories
Sidney D. Drell Deputy Director Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
Daniel J. Fink President D. J. Fink Associates, Inc.
Richard Garwin IBM Fellow Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Noel Gayler, Admiral, USN (Ret.) American Committee on East-West Accord
Colin Gray President National Institute for Public Policy
George Jeffs President North American Space Operations, Rockwell International
General David Jones, USAF (Ret.) Former Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff
Robert S. McNamara Former President of the World Bank
Michael M. May Associate Director-at-Large Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
H. Alan Pike Program Manager, Space Stations Lockheed Missiles & Space Co.
Frederick Seitz President Emeritus The Rockefeller University
Robert Selden Associate Director for Theoretical and Computational Physics Los Alamos National Laboratory
Marshall D. Shulman Director Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union
Columbia University Ambassador Gerard C. Smith President Consultants International Group, Inc.
Sayre Stevens Vice President System Planning Corp. Maj. General John Toomay, USAF (Ret.) Consultant
Seymour Zeiberg Vice President Research and Engineering Operations Martin Marietta Aerospace
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 minimum retaliation, extraordinarily difficult in the first place.
Preventing maximal damage to cities and infrastructure while civilians huddle in their shelters (which we could have built, and stocked with a years worth of food, for 1/3 of the annual DoD budget of the period).
Failing our building shelters, preventing all civilians in their cities and such from getting nuked. That one is iffy, especially since:
At the other end, you could define it as none of the 40,000 warheads in their inventory hitting us, but I know that's not what the proponents of SDI claimed it was capable of.
Note, I was something of a player in this arena during the period in question, including editing the Arpanet ARMS-D mailing list in the 1982-3 period, debating it with the best anti-s MIT had, you're not going to convince me by a raw appeal to authority, especially as filtered through such a notorious organization as the OTA.
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!).
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.
It postulated that the entire battle would have to be fought by a single space battle station (ignoring for example that the Earth revolves), and therefore a huge number of huge stations would have to be built, and that we could only loft them into space at current Space Shuttle costs (as opposed to spending a fraction of the cost on building some cost effective rockets), all of this costing "hundreds of billions of dollars" (that's the key phrase to look for, and note the dollar has lost about half its value since then).
Bottom line would be that no one denied that the UCS could design an entirely impossible strategic defense system, but the construction and destruction of such strawmen are entirely uninteresting to those who care about the truth.
Marginal cost analysis are entirely irrelevant to a discussion of the real Cold War as I noted above, the Soviets simply didn't have the money to do it, even if it would have been cheaper for them.
They'd spent several fortunes in equipping North Vietnam with three complete mechanized armies (1st used up piecemeal, 2nd crushed in their first invasion, when only 40,000 of the 150,000 men committed even made it back to the north, and of course the 3rd succeeded after the Congress stopped supplying ammo to South Vietnam), building their Strategic Rocket Forces, all their other military expenses, vast armies and air forces to invade Western Europe (including maintaining up to date lists of "future war criminals", about 10,000 for France), their vast borders guarded to keep their people in and us out, in such a way that even the rather distant and not precisely strategic territory KAL 007 overflew generated a massacre, the money they had to spend to buy grain every year they had "a bad harvest", etc. etc. etc. etc.
Combine that with things like our support of the mujahideen, our economic warfare, our moral warfare including capturing Grenada (our denial of the Brezhnev Doctrine was a shock to the system), and it was game over. Funny how after the US President to decide to actually end the Soviet Union started the effort, it went poof in one decade....
Grenada was moral warfare? I am at a loss to understand you here.
Grenada as moral warfare: it was the first time the West had ever taken back any Communist territory since the Korean War (which was ultimately unsuccessful), and by force of arms at that. Many then living in the Soviet Union attested to it being a shocking action.
In general, you could say that Reagan himself was "moral warfare". There's a huge difference between an opponent who's merely trying to delay your victory, and one who's determined to end you. One of the things that made George Washington such an effective and feared leader in our Revolutionary War.