Bet the R's that if sea level is above x meters in 20 years, then single-payer health insurance is implemented and taxes go up 5% on the rich. Let's see if they want to put their money where their mouth is. You can only lie about the future until it comes.

Careful, NC has a high pun tax

It's only here-say that I said heresy

We literally had civilian employees who were mentally ill and completely unstable working on the project. You never knew from hour to hour if you were going to get the sweet and smiling personality, or the bipolar crazy screaming personality.

The private sector also has such. Donald Trump, Steve Jobs & chair-launcher Ballmer, for example.

They faked it well; it passed MythBusters. Thus, the fakage money was well-spent. Better than the private market: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_autopsy

Part of the problem is that a government agency is encouraged to "reign in costs" by having fixed-price contracts. However, for a large systems it's very difficult to define a sufficient system up front because of the complexity involved.

The Extreme Programming movement is partly a result of a backlash against "big design up-front", by the way.

So when it's ordered as a fixed-price contract, unforeseen needs are inevitably going to pop up. Well, these result in cost overruns.

I don't know of any easy fix for this kind of problem. It's hard to codify and quantify the unknown. It's possible to include a rate-per-hour of additional work in the contract, but then the boundary of what's part of the "original" product is usually fuzzy.

If the rate is not profitable for the vendor, they will complain that the new requests were not part of the original project and that the customer is just mooching to get subsidized add-ons.
   

It's not just government, most large bureaucracies are like that in my experience: not rocking the boat is more important than productivity and logic.

Is "anal-retentive" supposed to have a dash?

Let me kill 1/10th of your body's cells, and tell me you are not "decimated". (Well, I suppose liposuction is an exception.)

A smart judge? Well pinch me and wake me up! I'm going to patent him before somebody else does!