Only those with Need to Know/Read into the program will know the details, beyond what's being reported. So lots of Goole employees who might object to this will remain ignorant of what management is actually up to.

I suspect a lot here see that as a significant problem. (But in the grand scheme of things, I'm not losing sleep over this one.)

Thanks... The thing about this case, though, is we're not talking about individuals, but about companies, both small and large. So the pockets are deeper, the ability to coordinate is better, and the motivation to reach a settlement is stronger.

In a Class Action Lawsuit, the law firms cash out big-time if they win. The law firm gets a percentage (often 1/3) of the total settlement, so that's a strong incentive to bring these suits and make them as broad as possible.

BUT, I don't know if arbitration proceedings have the same financial advantages for the arbitrator. That could be a Very Important distinction. I strongly suspect the reason this is in arbitration is the contract terms between the advertisers and Google force arbitration to settle contract disputes.

(IANAL)

Would -you- be able to distinguish the actual Mark Zuckerberg from an AI simulacrum?

The New Yorker Asks: Can Sam Altman Be Trusted?
"No." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I routinely get 8+ years from my Mac laptops (over the last nearly 30 years!), and there's no compromises in the Neo's build quality. How many of those $600 laptops will you buy in 8 years? That's part of what would make these attractive for schools.

Apple makes a superior product from 'spare parts' that has the low end PC community worrying how they'll match it at that price and now they can't make enough of them to meet demand. And they do this when other vendors are worrying about where they'll find memory chips. Yup, Apple is Doomed!

I noticed when our income (we're DINKs, double income, no kids) got us to the point where we could easily make capital expenditures, take significant vacations, or put aside/invest reasonably significant money. That was probably when we hit $100k in 1995, and that's $215k now (https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1995?amount=100000 ) As DINKs, we were pretty much always able to contribute 401k money to the amount matched by our employer. And we owned a house (albeit with a significant mortgage). Within 20 years, our retirement savings had grown substantially, our house appreciated and mortgage payments produced substantial equity, and our savings and investments were doing well. We had one relatively expensive car and one cheaper car, that we'd keep for 8-9 years before replacing. Wife had some employee stock grants, I had larger retirement matches from my (generous) employer.

All this is to say that, once you're over the hump and on the upper half of the K in our K-shaped economy, things are good. Stock market returns have been great IF you could put money in the markets. The huge challenge is reaching that point. I'm sure there are economists out there calculating the income that represents 'the middle of the K'.

I can imagine a lot of expletives in response to blatant hallucinations...

All trained to secure Microsoft products. Hopefully that's enough...

That's the challenge for the source selection/proposal evaluation. It's tough to write independent criteria that allow you to throw out a bid as "implausible". (I remember one where the total travel budget for the 3 year period of performance was 2 people, 1 week, 1 trip per year. This was on the same project where I was on 75% travel. I asked, 'How do we mark this as bullshit?' and was told, "Well, that goes into the overall evaluation criterion for 'cost realism'. That group won the bid, by the way.)

The hope is to lock in the contract with totally unrealistic cost/schedule, and then make up the financial risks through Engineering Change Proposals. Those ECPs reflect both requirements instability and cost/schedule "rebaselining" instability. I think managing ECPs is what separates the really good Program Managers/System Program Officers from the merely competent PM/SPO.

Acquisition people have a 3 year block from working for their contractors. I don't know if the same rule applies to requirements people. For the large primes, that can entail a set of duties and a firewall between the part of the company that worked for the acquisition guy. Usually that works pretty well, but there are, of course, significant exceptions (and some people have gone to jail over that, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )

In defense of the 'revolving door': Companies really do need an understanding of how the government system works, not just the formal rules but also the 'grease that lubes the gears'. So that can be "What does this requirement really mean?" or "What are the ramifications of this contracting approach? How much delivery risk are we expected to take on to meet requirements?" or "how should this system work with other systems?"

That being said, I've also seen retired generals being hired solely for the use of their rolodex. Nothing pissed us off more (both government employees and support contractors) than having to answer a rocket from some general (or Congresscritter) of the form, "Why aren't you using this product (that my friend/constituent sells)?" Palantir plays that game particularly well, from what I remember back when I was working.

Failing audits is frankly independent from failing programs. The audits usually have problems tracking money flows and then property within the government. The contractor's expenditures are closely monitored. That doesn't mean they're in-line, but they're auditable. And when the audit discovers problems, there are ways for the government to respond. I've seen those applied rather frequently.

One common pattern is a program starts down the wrong path, and blows initial cost/schedule/performance. But that capability is needed badly (often because its predecessor program didn't deliver). So the Service piles on more requirements and 'readjusts the baseline' for additional funding, because "if we don't get it in this Program of Record, it'll be at least a decade before we can start a new Program of Record to get what we need." That just adds requirements to something that is already behind. If I had to guess what happened here, I bet there's some of that flavor over the execution. In my experience, most programs started with the combination of unachievable or under-specified requirements AND unachievable/unrealistic schedule.

(A 'Program of Record', by the way, consists of an approved requirements document, an approved POM budget for the next 5 years showing the RDTE money, the OPA purchasing money, and the OMA maintenance money FOR EACH FISCAL YEAR. If you run out of RDTE money but haven't finished the design, you're in trouble. The third element is the approved procurement strategy, that says how you'll buy it. That includes the kind of contract, firm fixed price or cost plus, the kinds of oversight, when and how prototypes will be delivered and tested, etc.)

Aerospace (and other FFRDCs like MITRE) exist to prevent massive failures like this. I wonder what the Aerospace corporate explanation is. I know from working at another FFRDC that often the worker-bees know the program is heading to disaster, but the managers won't carry the bad news to the customer. Other times, the bad news is delivered, but the government manager decides to carry on anyway. That can be due to pressure within the Service ("Don't f**k this up!, Colonel!"), or pressure from the contractor ("Trust us, these problems are temporary.")

The causes are often requirements instability, overly ambitious/unimplementable/unrealistic requirements, impossible initial schedule ("1 month to make the baby with 9 women"), technology problems (immature technology, vendors can't deliver as promised), and occasionally manufacturing/assembly/integration problems. And of course, substantial amounts of the functionality is in software, and this community knows the ways software projects can go south.

It's no consolation to this project,, its leadership, prime contractors, and customer community, but the last major project I worked on failed at 2 1/2 times the sunk cost of this one.