Review: Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

The book follows the construction of the John F Kennedy aircraft carrier at Newport News beginning in 2011. At the time of the book’s release in 2021, the ship remained to be completed (the completion date has been announced as 2024 – it was christened in 2019 - and now is scheduled to be delivered in 2025). The Kennedy is the 2nd in the Ford class which had suffered spectacular cost overruns and delays as they tried to initiate new technologies for launching aircraft (EMALS) and to operate the ship with fewer sailors. At the same time, new techniques were being tried to speed up construction ordered by Robert Gates as a way to reduce costs and to complete the proposed 10 ship class as a replacement for the current Nimitz class of carriers. 

 

These ships are extraordinarily expensive, the Ford costing north of $12 billion. The Navy hoped to recover some of these costs with reduced manpower through the use of new technologies. The assumptions behind these predictions have been challenged by numerous officials. But it was also the first to be designed digitally, a system that was supposed to bring new efficiencies to the process. No more did workers have to carry around heavy rolls of blueprints. The simply looked at their tablets, scanned the wire bundle bar codes and it was revealed exactly where the cables should go and what they should be connected to. The amount of wiring was staggering. There was four million feet of fiber-optic cabling alone since the ship was to have all the communications interconnected. No more eyeballing or guessing where things went.  The tablets laid out everything instantly and corrected, saving dreaded and expensive rework.

At least that’s the way it was supposed to work, but sometimes, because those driving the computers didn’t have the historical knowledge and experience of building ships, they might not allow enough room to weld some pipes together, for example.  The idea was to create a “system” one that could be duplicated and save money and time building these dinosaurs.

I question whether the current trend to build extremely complex weapons systems like the F-35, the new class of carriers, and other systems, making them far more expensive thus reducing the number that can be built and requiring far more maintenance, is an intelligent use of taxpayer money, not to mention reducing the effectiveness of the smaller forces. The scandals of the Seventh Fleet revealed after the collisions showed poor training and deferred maintenance because of cost that can only hurt the country’s defense.  In a changing environment where drones do battle and are really cheap and expendable, I wonder whether carriers will not pass the way of the battleships.   I recommend any of a number of recent books on drone warfare.

A really interesting book.

Problem with "Journalism" Today.

The recent debacle at the Washington Post and LA Times regarding endorsements has got me thinking. John Dickerson is one of the most astute and smart analysts out there today, so I was dismayed when he became the anchor of the CBS News.  Instead of writing terrific books, he'll now be focusing on reading the news script and introducing Beth from Poduck IA on improvements to her layer cake.  Journalism is now about becoming a celebrity.  Where is IF Stone when we need him? Spinning in his grave, no doubt.  The NYTimes and mainstream media just don't ask pertinent questions any more.

Two excellent summaries of the problem.  James Fallows nailed it in the nineties; and Jeff Jarvis more recently:

https://buzzmachine.com/2024/09/19/how-they-have-failed-us/

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/02/why-americans-hate-the-media/305060/

         For those who can't get past the paywall:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vYwhjbk4IpSE1pCmWxkhj-wZB6yL8Xeo/view?usp=sharing

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

 I swear this book reads more like a spy novel than accurate events surrounding the tracking down and arrest of cryptocurrency crooks. One of the attractions of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies was their supposed impenetrability to law enforcement. But as with anything digital, there’s always a way, and this is also a story of how clever researchers and cops discovered ways to track transactions by using the very device, the blockchain, that was supposed to guarantee both anonymity and security.

But a more basic and skeptical thought immediately struck Gambaryan about this new form of currency. “Participants can be anonymous,” he had read. But if this blockchain truly recorded every transaction in the entire Bitcoin economy, then it sounded like the precise opposite of anonymity: a trail of bread crumbs left behind by every single payment. A forensic accountant’s dream...Gambaryan had always had his doubts about Bitcoin’s untraceability. From the very first time he’d read about Bitcoin, back in 2010, his accountant’s brain had wondered how it could truly provide anonymity when the records of every transaction were shared with so many thousands of machines around the world—even if those transactions were to addresses rather than names

The blockchain is a form of public ledger that is duplicated across millions of computers and involves solving a mathematical algorithm that requires increasing amounts of computer power. Because it is public and always duplicated, it’s trusted, but it also provides an enormous amount of data for analysis.  

When someone moves a sum of bitcoins, their wallet software broadcasts the transaction over the internet to Bitcoin’s network of “nodes,” the thousands of servers around the world that store copies of the blockchain. Whichever node first receives the announcement of the new transaction then passes it on to other nodes, which in turn broadcast it out further, so that the record of the payment is confirmed and copied into the blockchain’s global ledger of all transactions. The system is a bit like a crowd of people who each whisper a rumor to their immediate neighbors, so that the information spreads virally through the crowd in ripples—but at digital speeds designed to inform the entire network in minutes or even seconds.

Some of the agencies involved in the hunt are unknown to the vast majority of people.  The IRS-CI, for example, an arm of the IRS had some very sophisticated analysts who loved the challenge of breaking the unbreakable and beating a new cipher. 

“Every Bitcoin user has access to the public Bitcoin blockchain and can see every Bitcoin address and its respective transfers. Due to this publicity, it is possible to determine the identities of Bitcoin address owners by analyzing the blockchain,” the ruling read. “There is no intrusion into a constitutionally protected area because there is no constitutional privacy interest in the information on the blockchain.The HSI agent wasn’t caught in the Welcome to Video dragnet because IRS agents had violated his privacy. He was caught, the judges concluded, because he had mistakenly believed his Bitcoin transactions to have ever been private in the first place.”

As the Berkeley researcher Nick Weaver had warned, and as cryptocurrency users around the world were finally learning, “The blockchain is forever.” 

Very interesting book that should cause those wanting to transact criminally in cryptocurrency to tremble.

Note that Tigran Gambaryan, one of the principal IRS investigators working on tracing bitcoin blockchain  transactions has been imprisoned in Nigeria. “Gambaryan was detained alongside a colleague in mid-March on the grounds that Binance had devalued the country’s fiat currency and enabled the “illicit” transfer of funds. While his colleague was able to escape, Gambaryan remains imprisoned on financial crimes charges—even as a growing number of US lawmakers pressure the Biden administration to facilitate his release.”  Wired Magazine

Some Debate Thoughts

 I usually don't comment much on debates, usually because they aren't, but it has become clear that Trump has nothing new, he relies on immigration (immigrants are Hannibal Lecters coming to eat you and your dogs and cats) and personal insults. He has yet to address why, during his four years as president, he failed to fix immigration nor build his infamous wall, perhaps because he couldn't get Mexico to pay for it. 

Getting others to pay for his mistakes seems to be a recurrent theme in his life. And it takes real talent to bankrupt some of his efforts. How do you run a casino into bankruptcy;  they are a license to print money. His steak and university businesses went bust in a swirl of fraud.  His major claim to fame after squandering his father's $413 million is a reality show where he gets to fire people. (Harris's line about him getting fired in the last election by 81 million Americans was priceless.) Since then his major asset appears to be his name which he wildly over inflates in value along with everything else (including the square footage of his apartment) as we learned from his 34 counts of fraud conviction in NY.  In each of his business bankruptcies it was others who got left holding the bag and paying for his mismanagement.

He's offering the same plan as solutions:  get Mexico to pay for the wall, get China to pay for our debt and trade imbalance through tariffs.  It's like he never learned anything at Wharton (perhaps his dad paid them off, too) about Smoot-Hawley and the damage that did to the world economy.

Let's face it:  he's just an old man, desperately clinging to reality show laurels and needing to win the presidency so he can stay out of jail.

A New Idea for Supreme Court Oversight

 Those of you who read this blog know that I have made several proposals that I believe would provide for a  better Supreme Court structure. 1 President  has proposed a number recently. 2 All of those suggestions would appear to be doomed to failure given the current political Congress. Dean Chemerinsky, in a letter to me, suggested my idea for a rotating panel of appellate justices to decide cert would simply be adding another layer of courts that we don't need. 3

 

I have a new proposal that I believe would address some of those issues.

Article III Section 2 of the Constitution reads as follows: In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.  [my emphasis]

 

This section has to do with Court jurisdiction and implies that Congress can make adjustments to that jurisdictional oversight.  So why not act a section that Congress could assign itself the role of appellate for those cases where the Supreme Court has overruled standing precedent, e.g. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) (overturned Roe v Wade) and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024) (overturned Chevron); or, in cases where evidence exists showing a justice should have recused him/herself because of a conflict of interest.

 

I don't believe a constitutional amendment would be required under Article III as it seems Congress already has that power.  I have deliberately limited the Congressional appeal possibility to those two types of cases to avoid massive impact on Court decisions. In order to review a case (and possibly overturn the decision that would simply eliminate the decision reverting to preexisting law) Congress would need only a simple majority.  To overturn a decision would also need but a simple majority of the House and Senate. Nothing would preclude a new appeal to the Court, perhaps even on similar grounds, and if warranted a new Congress could validate a new decision. Such a reversal by Congress might make the Supreme Court revisit its thinking. This process also addresses the current failure of Court members to recuse themselves when there exists clear reasons why they should

Of course one might argue that Congress need only pass ethics rules covering such situations or new legislation to validate something like Chevron deference, for example. This process is much more complicated as it leads to irrelevant amendment additions and slow downs whereas a quicker decision of up or down on a precedent overturning decision would be far cleaner and quicker.

1. https://rarebits.blogspot.com/2020/10/fixing-supreme-court-conundrum.html

2. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/07/29/fact-sheet-president-biden-announces-bold-plan-to-reform-the-supreme-court-and-ensure-no-president-is-above-the-law/  While interesting, some of the proposals would require a Constitutional Amendment, currently an impossibility.

3. Personal email to the author.