Funding nukes to eliminate them

Interesting view from The Strategic and International studies



http://csis.org/blog/selling-counterintuitive-funding-nukes-eliminate-them

Invisible costs!

Anonymously contributed:

Read this George:

Warren Buffet writes in the Berkshire-Hathaway annual letter to shareholders this year that:

"We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly – or not at all – because of a stifling bureaucracy."

Compare this to the DOE/NNSA/LLNS and LANS, who would rather suffer the many invisible costs from decisions made too slowly--or not at all--because of a stifling bureaucracy than incur the visible costs of a few bad decisions.

This in a nutshell is what has gone so wrong at the Labs and their owning agencies, by Congressional demand.

Vehicle safety

Here is a message from the PAO: read second sentence: does it make sense?
You cannot be wearing yyour seat belt when exiting your vehicle!

E-LINE: MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR: VEHICLE SAFETY ISSUES CONTINUE

Laboratory colleagues:

Last year we had the first and only fatality on site in the history
of the Lab. You will remember that one of our colleagues was not
wearing his seat belt when exiting the running vehicle he was driving
onsite.

We continue to hear about situations where employees are involved
with dangerous moving vehicular situations. There have been several
recent incidents of employees exiting running vehicles. Thankfully,
no one was injured but there were near misses.

I have made the error of exiting running vehicles myself. I can say
from my own personal experience that changing 40-plus-years of
ingrained habits requires constant attention and vigilance. It takes
great self-awareness to break bad habits. Personal and work safety
includes an enormous spectrum of activities and discipline. But it
can be the difference between life and death.

How was your raise?

Anonymously contributed:

I'd like to hear about the raises again. Did anyone quit over the poor raises, or are they taking it in stride? Are people working less, or putting in resumes to other corporations? Anyone file an administrative review over a zero raise? Any luck?

Where was LLNL?

Where was the LLNL when it came to this?


http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-news/ci_14461347?source=rss

Looks like we missed the boat again people. We've basically done nothing good for the immediate needs of the country since Starwars, and we most certainly could never accomplish what we did then in the same period of time. I’m so disgusted with this place it’s unreal.

Strange posting:

ANonymously contributed:
This is posted on L-hire. Can someone tell me whta a 10% Group Leader is?
Is that the same as asking a judge, mayor, Captain, etc.. to work part-time?

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) Computing (NIFC) Division within the Computing Applications and Research (CAR) Department has an opening for a 10% Group Leader in the Test Group. The successful candidate will manage NIFC computer scientists and technicians supporting software and/or hardware controls verification and validation for the NIF. The candidate will participate in NIFC Division hiring, performance evaluations, peer grouping and salary management. Candidate must currently have a technical assignment in support of the NIF Project. Candidate will report to the NIFC Division Leader.

Does the Secretary of Energy have a bit too much free time?

Anonymously contributed:

Does the Secretary of Energy have a bit too much free time?

Cal physicist helps confirm Einstein theory
David Perlman, San Francisco Chronicle Science Editor
Monday, February 22, 2010

A UC Berkeley physicist and a Nobel prize-winning colleague now in President Obama's Cabinet report they have confirmed one of Albert Einstein's most revolutionary theories 10,000 times more accurately than ever before.

Einstein's theory of general relativity has already been tested and confirmed to a degree as a true picture of reality by scores of experimenters, ever since he proposed it to the world nearly a century ago.

In the immediate decades after the theory's publication, legend had it that only 12 people in the world could understand it, although physicists have long revered it. Even today, relativity remains an arcane subject for most of us, but it does have relevance to all science and even to everyday life - for meticulous timekeepers, for space explorers, for astronomers studying black holes and even for anyone driving a car with a Global Positioning System device navigating around the Bay Area's tricky freeway mazes.

One basic prediction from Einstein's theory is that the tug of gravity makes clocks slow down.

Now Holger Müller, a physicist at UC Berkeley, together with Steven Chu, former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and now Obama's energy secretary, as well as Achim Peters of Humboldt University in Berlin, report they have developed what is by far the best confirmation yet of Einstein's monumental achievement.

Details of their work are published in the current issue of the journal Nature…

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/22/BA9U1C2BMF.DTL