Pork Barrel Tech Projects On The Rise

An anonymous reader writes "News.com has a large article up exploring the increase in 'pork barrel'-style technology projects floating through government spending bills. The water-free urinals discussed on Slashdot last year are one such project, as is a 'Virtual Reality Spray Paint Simulator'." From the article: "Earmarks for favored recipients--known colloquially as pork--have become easier than ever for politicians to secure because of the rapid growth in homeland security and military spending, especially if they can find some plausible technological veneer. Exact figures are difficult to obtain, mostly because spending bills tend to be intentionally obfuscated and specifics are usually absent from legislative text. Government watchdogs, however, say earmarks ostensibly related to technology are clearly on the rise."

Re:NMCI

[NitsujTPU]

Yes, here's the timeline.

http://www.nmci.navy.mil/Press_Room/NMCI%20AT%20A% 20Glance [navy.mil]

NMCI was talked about while I had a summer job doing network support at a Navy base as an undergraduate. The contract was awarded in October, 2000. Bush wasn't even elected yet.

Here is a link

[VP]

How it works [falconwaterfree.com]

Re:I dunno...

[QuantumRiff]

Actually, social security is not part of the federal budget. That is a misleading figure from combining the Federal funds, and Federal Trust funds. Note on your paycheck stub that you pay 2 or 3 different fed accounts. Federal Income tax, which pays for military, and most other gov't stuff, is one item, usually, Social Security and medicare/medicaid come from other line items. These are paid for with trusts, not taxes. The Social Security TRUST is huge, amounting to trillions of dollars kept safe for social security, and used only to pay for social security. It does not take money from the federal taxes. NONE. However, congress keeps "borrowing" money from this trust for federal budget stuff, and promise to repay it in the indefinable "Future". So if you pull the x% that these huge budget items consume from the published "Budget" you will find that that 100Million is a heck of alot more percentage wise than it looks.

My town of 40k just spent something like 60,000 on deep diving equipment for the dive rescue team from a homeland security grant. We have 1 lake in the entire county that is deep enough to need this equipment. The counties view is "hey, its free federal money" Its not free, we are all paying for it.. Mulitply this by x number of stupid grants for stupid things, and you get a very, very large amount wasted.

Where's my pork?

[EmersonPi]

I'm a PhD student working in computer graphics, and I have to say... where's my pork? NSF funding has almost completely dried up, military and homeland security spending has all gone to corporate pockets (or savy small business pockets), and corporate funding is very, very scarce. I've been lucky enough (and had enough hustle) to just barely bring in my own funding for the last year and a half or so, but everyone I know is pretty well starving for any sort of research funding. Highly successfull professors and researchers from all over are not getting the funding they need for some very good tech research proposals.

I don't know who's supposedly getting all this tech pork, but I can pretty well assure you that it isn't universities.

Re:Down with big government!

[Anonymous Coward]

The fatal flaw in Libertarianism is it would let loose the wolves of Capitalism

True capitalism (which we don't have today in the US) is founded on the principle of voluntary association -- voluntary trade for mutual benefit. Any capitalist transaction MUST be 100% voluntary on behalf of all parties involved, or it isn't an example of capitalism. (If government is involved in any way beyond simply enforcing the principle of voluntary association, then it's not capitalism.) Say that government did nothing but enforce the principle of voluntary association: nobody has the right to employ coercion (force/fraud) to sell its product, including government.

If everything is voluntary, then what kind of wrong could you possibly come up with? Indeed, if you had a "problem" with somebody that you wanted to "fix", then YOU would be the one needing to employ coercion as your means (any argument of self-defense is void from the beginning).