Comment of the Week

150 comments this week, and the signal/noise ratio seemed a bit better than usual, leaving some good stuff to pick from. Here are this week's categories from which COW entries were selected:

• Reality Check
• Too Little, Too Late
  
• Three-Martini Posting
• Hot gold (?!)
• I'm More Bitter Than You Are
  

Reality Check

A couple of pointed comments made the cut in this category. The first one comes from the Pushing Frontiers post, in which the wonders of LANL are extolled.

The video forgot to mention that (a) DARHT is down, yet again, due to problems with the 2nd beam, (b) Roadrunner won't be needed for much longer because NNSA has decided to kill off the ASC program, (c) Congress is unlikely to allow for any more construction funding to go to CMRR, and (d) every bright scientist who can is attempting to somehow flee this lab due to the crushingly low morale.

Other than that, everything at LANL is going just swell.

The other one was left on last week's Comment of the Week post, in which LANL and SNL's WFO portfolios were being compared.

4:45 pm: "Somehow SNL has managed to overcome all of these problems."

Sandia has done this by demonstrating that it will survive with or without NNSA, and that NNSA's need for Sandia is greater than Sandia's need for NNSA. Contrast this to LANL, where LANS only exists as a company in the context of the NNSA contract It was created out of thin air for the only purpose of bidding on the LANL NNSA contract). No NNSA contract, no LANS, no LANL. It's that simple.

Too Little, Too Late

From the U.S. Agency Readies Controversial Shift of Nuclear... post, one astute reader noted the following:

""In the spirit of Complex Transformation, what we're trying to do is set up centers of excellence," Smolen explained. "We want Los Alamos to stay focused on its primary mission, which is plutonium. "

Got it now everyone. Pits. RF:2.0
No ASC, no science, no computers.
Pits.

To which another reader pointed out,

"All laboratories support the decision."

A little late for a fight.
Old news & a done deal

Three-Martini Posting

I confess, this next candidate is one of my favorites for the week. From the same post as the previous contris, we have this gem in which the obviously sincerely-felt content is somewhat spoiled by a failed delivery. Suggestion: blog first, then drink.

To 5'33, Its not the misinformation that has gooten us here, it the incompetence that caused all of the "misinformation", that was never cleared up. But thats only the tip, Congress has not been content with LANLs operation since the Nanos days. We had a chance some time ago to show the (Congress and the American people) that we could function as a Lab, in unison and work as part of a team (with other Labs and NNSA) but the whinning and incompetence contined. Individual employees complaining directly to their sponsors claiming that their project were more important than so and so. The Congress and DOE consider LANL the cry-babies of the complex, and along with their (our)certian misteps we are going down fast. Smolen stated "We are setting up Centers of Exellence" Does LANL fit this new senerio?

Hot Gold

While I was reading the Los Alamos' security flaws exposed post the other night, first this comment came in

anyone wanna buy some hot gold?

Followed about 15 minutes later by this one:

post the gold comment it will be relevant!!!!!!

Well, ok. We're all waiting for the relevance.

I'm More Bitter Than You Are

Plenty to choose from in this category, as usual. These were the "best of the bitter" for this week, also from the "security flaws" post:

3/26/09 6:30 PM, you trot these stories out at least once a month to prove how incompetent LANL is. I finally took a second to google "neutral particle beam" on the LANL website. It showed up in a bio on Dick Burick, about three layers deep in the "and before that, he worked on..." section. For crying out loud, the US was still doing underground testing in those days.

Go back to your shuffleboard game, old man. You don't know dick about today's LANL.

Followed of course by

7:02 pm: "Go back to your shuffleboard game, old man. You don't know dick about today's LANL."

"Today's LANL" is full of arrogant, yet poignantly ignorant, young assholes. Which is why LANL has the problems it has today. That's right, the past means nothing, is unimportant and irrelevant. OK then. Your future awaits you. Glad I won't be part of it. I'll be enjoying my very comfortable, even lucrative, UC retirement, treasuring my memories of the LANL that once was, while you run it into the ground and struggle to keep your worthless LANS 401k. Good luck. Hint: read some LANL history. The Archivist can help.

We'll conclude on that note. Until next week,

--Doug