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The Pentagon's accounting system runs on COBOL, "the ancient Sumerian of computer languages". COBOL was being taught when I took comp sci 25 years ago, and it was pretty much "ancient Sumerian" back then.
Worse than the outdated computer languages is the Byzantine accountability in the accounting process:
The dysfunction stems in part from the traditional independence of the military branches. Over several decades, they have cobbled together separate processes for identical functions, resulting in the uncontrolled growth of more than 4,000 accounting, financial, and inventory systems. [...] The department's primary system for handling weapons contracts and payments dates from 1958; a costly attempt to replace it was abandoned in 2002 as a failure. The Army's notoriously inaccurate main accounting system was created in 1966.
Since McCain's budget plan long on tax cuts but his proposed "spending cuts are small and vague", perhaps he could start his spending cuts here?
Headline translated: "it took me seven years to fuck up the economy this badly - do you think I can just wave a wand and make it all better?"
(Actually, he really did say "If there was a magic wand to wave, I’d be waving it, of course [...] But there is no magic wand to wave right now. It took us a while to get to this fix.")
David Yassky has an opinion piece in today's Post that proposes some measures to bring transparency to the Council's earmark process (and perhaps even the City's budget process).
Meanwhile, more and more of his colleagues are being caught up in the muck.
[FYI, the link above to Yassky's campaign site (he's running for Comptroller); the original Post op-ed is here (in its much less readable format).]
In today's Times, a description of the concerted and coordinated effort that went into the resignation of Debbie Amontaser from the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Boerum Hill. Most interesting is the description of conservative groups that are targeting "law-abiding Muslim-Americans" who the conservatives see as "imposing their religious values in the public domain".
Among the examples cited? "Municipal pools [...] that have adopted female-only hours to accommodate Muslim women."
Anyone been to Metropolitan Pool?
Clinton has joined McCain in calling for a summer-long suspension of the federal excise tax on gasoline. Obama says he won't support this - good for him. It was a stupid idea when McCain proposed it weeks ago, and its still a stupid idea.
Suspending the gas tax would lower the cost of gasoline less than 20¢ a gallon - about 7% at current prices. Sounds good, huh? But do the math, and you figure out that it would save the average consumer $30.00 over the course of the whole summer. So the savings to the consumer is minimal, and would only encourage increased fuel consumption. On the flip side, a summer tax holiday is estimated to cost the federal government $9 billion. Since most of that money gets passed on to the states for highway construction projects, the cost would really be borne by the states. Estimates are that the holiday could result in the loss of up to 300,000 highway construction jobs, and cause the cancellation of much-needed infrastructure upgrades.
All that to save half a tank of gas?
Does anyone else remember when Bill Clinton was the voice of fiscal responsibility? His tax hikes ("the largest in history, oh my!) resulted in a balanced budget and 8 years of prosperity. How strange that Obama seems to be the only one willing to take up that mantle.
Actually, the back of the building is nowhere near the horror show that is the front. Still, a bit heavy handed on the shrubbery.
Apparently, the quality of condominium construction in NYC leaves something to be desired. Apparently, the Attorney General is kind of lax on enforcement, so owners are having to litigate on their own.
Oh, and apparently, the problem is particularly bad in Brooklyn:
Attorneys also said many complaints are surfacing in Brooklyn, where the pace of development has accelerated, especially in newly rezoned areas.
What a surprise.
WMFU is 50 years old today. Celebrate by downloading a podcast or listening to an archive show. And give them some money.
You're seeing this headline a lot today: Bush's Disapproval Rating Worst of Any President in 70 Years. Don't believe it. Bush has the worst disapproval rating ever (in the latest Gallup poll, 69% disapprove of the job he is doing). They've only been doing the poll for 70 years, and in that time, no one has a higher disapproval rating than fearless leader.
Worse still is this nugget from within the article: "the disapproval sets a new high for any president since Franklin Roosevelt". You'd be forgiven if, in reading this, you thought that Roosevelt was unpopular. In fact, prior to Bush, Truman had the highest disapproval rating (67%). The poll began in 1938, at the beginning of Roosevelt's third term. Actually, Bush holds three of the top of five places in the history of the poll (in addition to Truman (at the height of the Korean War), Nixon had a disapproval rating of 66% in August of 1974 - within a month, he had resigned).
As reported everywhere, Department of Buildings Commissioner Patricia Lancaster resigned today. I've harped repeatedly on the failings of DOB, but don't see this as much more than blaming the messenger. As many of the commenters at City Room noted, Lancaster inherited an incredibly dysfunctional agency, and did much to turn it around. Interestingly, DOB seems to finally be catching up with volume of construction - as Gowanus Lounge noted just this morning, there seems to be a marked increase in the number of Stop Work Orders appearing throughout Williamsburg and Greenpoint.
As I've said before, the real issue with DOB is that it is both an expeditor of construction and development and a public safety agency, and those two goals are often not compatible. Construction is an inherently dangerous industry, and DOB needs to do a better job of regulating construction professionals (contractors, expeditors, architects and engineers). But in order to do that effectively, DOB would probably need to make the development process less efficient - and that goes against its grain.
Lancaster's resignation does nothing to address this inherent imbalance. Hopefully her successor will be able to.
Via Brooklyn Vegan, Southpaw owner Matthew Roff is to take over the (now) former Galapagos space on North 6th Street. Good news, I hope.
Toll Brothers and L&M Equity Partners have secured $157 million in financing in order to construct a second tower on the Northside Piers site. "Two Northside Piers", as it is called, will have 270 condo units (its not clear if that includes or is in addition to affordable units) in its 30-story tower. The Real Deal also reports that residents will begin moving in to One Northside Piers in the next three weeks.
Both of these reports are good news for the development of the waterfront, and the eventual creation of new public space along the East River.
The Dermot Company, which most famously is the developer of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank condo conversion, has been buying up rental properties throughout Brooklyn. Most of their purchases have been in the downtown and Fort Greene areas, but they have ventured up north on occasion. Today, the Eagle is reporting that Dermot has bought the building at 326 South 1st Street from TreeTop Development. The Triangulum, as it is (most unfortunately) called, was mostly renovated into high end rentals by TreeTop. The building, which sits across the street from the Getty Station on Borinquen Place/Keap Street, has 30 units plus a vacant ground-floor retail. According to the Eagle, Dermot paid just shy of $8 million for the property.
I had an email from Flatbush Gardener chiding me for my earlier post on the geography of South Brooklyn. Mr. Gardener says I was a bit harsh in my assessment of his original objection to Ms. Heather's description of the boundaries of South Brooklyn. Point taken. He also explains his South Brooklyn position in a comment to the NYShitty post that I linked to originally. And a valid position it is - as Mr. Gardener notes, Flatbush was for many years a separate town from the City of Brooklyn (it was, with Brooklyn and Bushwick, one of the six original towns dating to the Dutch era of Brooklyn).
[Ed note: As Xris found out, I keep comments off on these quick link posts. But you can always email comments to 11211[at]brooklyn11211.com.]
Flatbush Gardener has taken NYShitty to task for her geography. But Heather has it right (even if she doesn't know it).
Historically, the area from roughly Atlantic Avenue south to Red Hook (including current Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill and Cobble Hill) were called "South Brooklyn". This was back when Brooklyn Heights and downtown were just plain "Brooklyn", and North Brooklyn (Williamsburg, Bushwick and Greenpoint) were the "Eastern District." I'm not sure where Park Slope, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy fit into all of this. But from 1855 to 1898, these areas were "Brooklyn", and everything else was a separate township. And South Brooklyn continued to be called South Brooklyn through most of the 20th Century.
The name alone is worthy of a link, but today is also the 202nd birthday of one the great engineers of the 19th century. As detailed in this Wired article, Brunel designed a number of early suspension bridges, some of which are still in use today, as well as the first transatlantic steamship and the Great Britain, the first trans-Atlantic screw-propeller iron steamship (and the world's largest ship). His Great Eastern steamship, launched in 1858, was the largest ship in the world until the construction of the Lusitania in 1906.
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, one of the three most powerful men in Albany, apparently supported congestion pricing. He just couldn't convince anyone else to go along with him.
[Silver said] he favored some kind of congestion proposal but that the mayor’s plan simply lacked enough support to pass. “Let me be clear: If I were making the decision alone, I might have made a different decision,” Mr. Silver said.
Right.
No one goes there, its too crowded.
Seriously, we drove by on our way through Fort Greene yesterday, but there was no parking anywhere (it was also prime church-going time). From what we saw, and have seen posted (20,000 people!), it sounds like it was a rousing success.
An interesting infographic from yesterday's Times on the extent of the subprime foreclosure situation (aka, the shitpile) across the country (there is no direct link to the chart, you need to click on the "Multimedia" link on the left). The big map tells us that the NYC metro area has a an above average number of subprime foreclosures, but that the ratio of subprime loans to total loans in lower in our region than in most. The smaller maps at the bottom are more interesting, though (and more of a silver lining): on a per capita basis, the construction boom in the NYC metro area has seen a below average number of new housing units, and, the area has a below average unemployment rate. Hopefully those numbers mean that there will be a little bit less shit in the shitpile in our area.
(Be careful of the chart junk in the big map. The perspective skews in favor of the southern states, and the area of the extrusions has no meaning. Rather than relying on arbitrary geographical boundaries, it would have been more useful to adjust the area of each bar to indicate the volume of troubled (or total) loans. Then we could better compare, say, St. Louis to New York to Las Vegas, or Barnstable to Minneapolis to Sacramento.)
Assemblyman James Brennan thinks the DOB should do a better job policing site safety. According to the Voice, the current system is rigged against the public:
Essentially, current buildings-department regulations create a race between aggrieved citizens and corner-cutting developers: Neighbors have to muster all their energy to stop illegal work, while builders try to outrun them, getting foundations in the ground and walls up before anyone throws a red flag. Then the developers' lawyers go to work, arguing that so much money has already been expended that civic decency should allow them to continue.
According to PropertyShark (via the Real Deal), first-quarter foreclosures are way up in NYC. The distribution is interesting - Queens leads with a whopping 508 (in one three-month period), and Staten Island is second with 174. Brooklyn had 140, the Bronx 73 and Manhattan only 23.
In the Times' Cityroom blog today, a story about Kennedy Rivera, "a housing specialist with Bushwick Housing Independence, a nonprofit group that by its own account takes on 30 clients a month fighting eviction by landlords eager to rent to younger, hipper and better-off tenants".
This morning, a tractor trailer crashed into a building at 51 Kent Avenue, at the corner of north 11th Street. As Gothamist has already noted, Williamsburg starts at North 14th Street. I'd add that Kent Avenue is in Wiliamsburg, Kent Street is Greenpoint.
Yet another crony resigns. Of course not for his work presiding over the largest housing meltdown in over 70 years; nor for politicizing his office. Just run of the mill corruption and cronyism.
Nice job, Al.
(In related news, the Mine Safety and Health Agency is apparently a little too cozy with the mine companies it regulates:
The federal agency charged with overseeing mine safety was negligent in protecting workers at the Crandall Canyon Mine, the Labor Department's own Inspector General says in a new report.