Outsourcing

Posted on July 25, 2012 by rff_blog_admin

I just finished reading and reviewing a fascinating book “The Elephant and the Dragon” by Robyn Meredith that describes the growth of the Chinese and Indian economies. The Chinese are characterized as becoming the world’s factory while India is becoming the knowledge center. The Chinese are building what Wal-Mart sells and the Indians are providing the call centers and computer development work. The problem with the book is that it was copyrighted in 2007, and a relative who is very savvy about computer work tells me things are changing. He said it is true that Indian companies theoretically could develop programs much less expensively than American companies because they pay their people a fraction of what is required in the U.S. However, he has direct experience about the often poor results. He said that deliverables often did not meet requirements despite numerous and lengthy conference calls to describe what was wanted. The work would eventually be revised by Americans who were able to communicate sufficiently to understand the requirements and develop the desired products.

I searched and found a source called the “Ashbourne College’s Business Studies Blog.” It refers to one company bringing all of its call center work back to Britain from India because of complaints about a center in Mumbai, India. “The reason for placing back the call centres to UK is that India has low quality of staffs (which) would lead to worse services…”

Another site that offers some insight into the problems with outsourcing to a foreign country is a blog by “Programmer for Hire.” The warning flags go up with the source, who I would guess would prefer to be hired to do programming. However, the content seems appropriate. Friends had hired an Indian company to do programming based on the lure of $12-14/hour rates compared to typical rates of $125/hr for a U.S. company. The author admits he wasn’t the correct choice for a project that had high hopes and a small budget. However, the project did not have a usable product after they had “…paid for something between 600-700 hours of development with a firm in India, and they should have launched 6 weeks ago.” The client asked whether they were available, since to fix the problems they decided it would take the correct person 10 hours, instead of 50 or more with these guys.”

The book “The Elephant and the Dragon” mentions that more companies began to outsource as the result of John Kerry berating CEOs of companies that had already gone that route during his presidential campaign. Politicians sometimes actually are able to inspire. The book observes that the best way for the U.S. to come out ahead is to do a better job of educating its citizens to compete in the world economy and to get our deficits under control.

The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of KGB Archives

Posted on July 18, 2012 by advocate

The Acknowledgments of this book by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev states that much of the information has not been declassified. It also states that all the photographs shown of British and Soviet agents, with the exception of the one of Kim Philby, are from the KGB archives.

The book details the Soviet espionage efforts in England beginning in the 1920s. The large numbers of well educated, upper class English citizens in sensitive government positions willing to commit espionage against Britain for the Soviet Union is remarkably similar to the situation in the United States. The Soviets obtained literally thousands of documents describing secret British foreign policy, military strength, weapons technology including development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, and details of counterintelligence (to mention a few categories). The book is not a spy thriller, but instead marches through over three hundred pages of history about how England lost the “Crown Jewels” of its secrets to the Soviets. I have picked a few items from the book that were of particular interest to me and recorded them. For example, Walter Kivitsky, was a Soviet “rezidentura” in England. Kivitsky later defected and was sent to the United States. He eventually befriended Whitaker Chambers, and advised him on how to protect himself from KGB assassins. Kivitsky later was officially ruled to have committed suicide, although those who knew him were certain he had been killed.

Anthony (Tony) Blunt was one of the key British spies in the “Cambridge-Ring-of-Five” that was immensely successful at providing the “Crown Jewels” of Britain to the Soviets. There are pictures of these five spies and Edith Hart, who recruited Philby. Blunt is described as “a typical English intellectual.” He also was the person who originally recruited Michael Straight, the son of an American millionaire close to President Roosevelt. Straight gave the Soviets a copy of the entire deception plan for Overlord, the D-Day invasion, nearly two weeks before the invasion . He provided 1771 documents to the Soviets between 1941 and 1945. Burgess provided 4605, Cairncross 5832, Philby 914, and MacClean 4593. The activities of the spy network were suspended in 1946 after a GRU cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected in Canada.

Another major asset for the Soviets in England and later while on loan to the Manhattan Project in the United States was Klaus Fuchs, the German refugee. Fuchs was exposed by the Venona project and later gave a full confession of his activities and contacts.

In an interesting twist, Captain Harry Crookshank, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, selected John Caincross, one of the “Cambridge Five, “to be his personal secretary based on his performance and the fact that he was an ardent vegetarian. Virtually all classified information eventually reached Crookshank’s desk, since his department funded all war efforts. In 1941 he provided the first information on Enormoz, the Soviet code word for the development of atomic weapons by Britain, the USA and Canada. Vladimir Barkovsky, “the best informed KGB officer on the history of the Soviet bomb”, said “In the USA we obtained information on how the bomb was made and in Britain of what it was made.” Klaus Fuchs participated in revealing both aspects, since he worked in both Britain and the US before British intelligence arrested him in 1950. As an example of the information Fuchs provided the Soviets, in 1946 he “…handed over a sketch of the hydrogen bomb’s mechanism and explained that the Americans had abandoned the electromagnetic method of separating the isotopes of Uranium-235 because it had proved ineffective. However, they had achieved considerable success with the diffusion method, and the process was continuing. He revealed that Canadian factories produced about a kilo of plutonium while American sources produces about 16-18 kilos a year and about 36 kilos of U-235. The Americans had exhausted their stock after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The current programme envisaged the production of fifty bombs a year, but the uranium installations in Henford (sic) occasionally broke down, slowing the work of the chemical facilities at Los Alamos, so Fuchs estimated the American stockpile of bombs at approximately 125 units.”

Soviet counterintelligence tried to convert the exposure of Fuchs to their advantage by planning to cast doubt on key scientists working on Enormoz. The book incorrectly states, “Ironically Hoover and Senator Joe McCarthy together accomplished much of what had been planned by the Soviets by dragging the most outstanding scientists before the UnAmerican Activities Committee.” (Evidently the English author did not realize this was a House Committee, and McCarthy was a Senator.)

One of the most interesting parts of the book is the Postscript, which details why Communism and espionage for the Soviet Union was attractive to young intellectuals in Britain. Soviet recruiters could choose between “150 in Oxford, 200 in Cambridge, 300 in London University…” One of the Soviet recruiters observed, “British intellectuals, especially the young among them, do not find satisfactory ideals in the decomposing capitalist society of Britain and are naturally drawn towards the USSR.” It is not explained how these “intellectuals” overlooked the tens of millions of people executed and imprisoned in Russia during the horrors of the Stalin dictatorship to be “drawn towards the USSR.”

Knock, Knock Jokes

Posted on July 18, 2012 by advocate

O.K., so this isn’t an expression, but I found it interesting. The English.stackexchange.com says that some claim the origin was “…in the Middle Ages as a call-and-answer password format.” The only rule for the jokes seem to be that they be nonsense or at least silly. The Pittsburgh Press published several jokes in August of 1936 saying that a “new mid-summer game is going the rounds in place of monopoly.” One example given was, “Knock, knock! Who’s there? Landon. Landon who? Landon bridge is falling down.” Wikipedia reports that Fred Allen included a segment in his December 30, 1936 radio broadcast about “…the year’s least important events, including a supposed interview…” with “Ramrod Dank,” the man who was said to be the first to coin a knock, knock joke on the first of April. That is, of course “April Fools Day.”

Syria, the Spanish Civil War, and NATO

Posted on July 18, 2012 by rff_blog_admin

I’ve read two separate warnings about Syria that make that civil war even more frightening. The first by Patrick J. Buchanan observes that the Spanish Civil War was “…the Great Rehearsal for World War II. He asks in his title whether the Syrian conflict is a “Dress Rehearsal for a Mideast War?” The other warning is that NATO might be drawn into the conflict if Turkey pursues retaliation against Syria for shooting down one of its planes.

The brutal Spanish Civil War began in 1936 and lasted three years. It pitted Franco’s Fascists against an agglomeration of Socialists, Anarchists, and both Stalinist and Trotskyite Communists. Stalin sent emissaries and officers to command the Nationalists (while he emptied the Spanish treasury of gold as payment for the help). Mussolini sent troops to fight with Franco and Hitler sent his Condor Legion. The planes of the Condor Legion gave air support to Franco and also firebombed the non-military town of Guernica.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt publically claimed neutrality about the war, primarily because he did not want to lose the Catholic vote. Some factions of the Nationalists were persecuting, torturing, and murdering Catholic priests. FDR said, “We shun commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars…” FDR did approve shipments of military supplies to France and understood that they would be sent to the Spanish Nationalists.

The NATO connection is the source of the other recent warning that history could be in the process of repeating. Politicians had established vast national alliances in the early 1900s in what was thought to be a counterbalance against the threat of war. The alliances instead caused the domino effect leading to World War I when Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. I’ve always had trouble mentally following the complicated series of events that followed. The assassination led to the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia and Serbia appealed to its Russian ally for help. Russia began mobilizing its army. Germany took the mobilization to be a threat and declared war on Russia. They attacked France through neutral Belgium because France was Russia’s ally. The violation of Belgian neutrality brought Great Britain into the war. The United States joined the war a bit later.

NATO was originally established to oppose the now defunct Warsaw Pact. Turkey, a member of NATO has called for a full meeting to discuss the Syrian downing of a Turkish fighter jet and claims that another was fired on by the Syrians. Syria has a formal defense pact with Iran and is heavily supplied and supported by Russia. The Russians and Chinese have blocked all UN efforts to take action against Syria.

The news out of Syria today does not encourage that the situation will improve. Three senior government officials have been killed in a bombing, creating speculation that others will probably now chose to join the defectors in Turkey. There is a prediction that Assad will go into hiding or to a country that would harbor him “within 36 hours.”Russia is thought to believe a collapse of the Assad regime would be an opening for the U.S. to gain power in the Mideast. I don’t know that I agree. Iran, al Qaeda, and Hezbollah are probably ready to fill any vacuum.

The Syrian army recently was reported to have pulled chemical weapons out of storage. An escalation of hostilities has the ominous possibility of some desperate Syrian commander deciding Saddam Hussein was justified in using chemical weapons against Kurdish villages.

I won’t speculate about the outcome, but I have this disturbing image of someone intentionally carelessly smoking inside an ammunition bunker.

Full Body Burden

Posted on July 11, 2012 by advocate

This book by Kristen Iversen was a challenge for me to review The book is mixture of the author’s autobiography and negative stories and rumors about the Rocky Flats nuclear weapon plant. Those familiar with this web site know I have a very positive opinion of what the people of Rocky Flats accomplished and won’t be surprised I have many disagreements with what is written in the book.  A review of “Full Body Burden” by Hank Lamport in the July 1, 2012 Denver Post contains a passage that explains the anti-Rocky Flats tone of the book. He writes about “…the profoundly shocking history of the Rocky Flats site that few bothered to inform themselves about even as it actively spewed and dripped a toxic compote of chemicals and elements into Denver’s environment over the course of more than 30 years.”

I’m using that statement to bend my commitment to write about a book without editorial comments. I’ll try to reserve those for the blog link. The full body of evidence developed by the State of Colorado and other governmental agencies found that the plant had a remarkable history of controlling the dangerous and toxic materials involved in the operations. The blog posting has a more complete description of at least a few disagreements with what is written in the book and links to references. I won’t say much more about the Rocky Flats half of the book here. The often sudden transitions from the autobiography to complaints about was or might have been going on at Rocky Flats was distracting from the parts of the book I found interesting.

I was interested in the descriptions of the author and her love of her many pets, although pets often didn’t last that long. The author describes her shyness and preference to be with her animals in general and her horses in particular. There is a much too brief reference to the author and her sister being in the horse riding organization called “Westernaires.” The daughter of some good friends became one of the “star riders” for Westernaire shows before she “graduated” to college. I would have enjoyed reading more about how far the two sisters advanced.

The book recounts the author’s lonely life during school years and the difficulty she had making friends because she preferred books and horses over people. She also had a difficult family life with a father who drank himself from being a successful lawyer to making a living driving a cab, a mother who maintained a state of denial with pills, and siblings who struggled to either deal with the parents or rebel against them. There is a particularly sad account of the young man who had proposed marriage to the author dying in a climbing accident fall. There are also several references to illnesses of family, friends, neighbors, and animals that are suggestive of growing up in a toxic environment.

I enjoyed the descriptions of the family drives to Golden Gate Canyon or Rocky Mountain National Park. There is one particularly memorable traumatic description of the family car hitting a deer on the return from Estes Park. There is another story of a wreck that injured the author while the father was probably too drunk to drive.

There are interesting descriptions of the neighborhoods, businesses, and landmarks around Rocky Flats, and Standley Lake has a central role in the lives of the author and other children growing up in the area. There are long periods of financial struggles for the author’s family when she was a youngster and into her adult life. Those descriptions made me wish for her book to be a financial success, although I’m disturbed at how many people will form their opinions from this one source. I suggest that you read my free book titled “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats,” or, as I suggest in the blog posting, Chapter 25 might make you less fearful. My book It is available for sale on Amazon in paperback or Kindle for those who prefer paying for books, although the cost is a bit less than “Full Body Burden.”

There is much more about a few of the many inaccuracies and misinterpretations in “Full Body Burden” in my blog posting where I also suggest reading my book for another point of view. Enjoy the human interest parts of the book and be at least skeptical about the rest.

Until the Cows Come Home