The Soviet Union was notorious for its endless form-filling and procrastination. Nothing much seems to have changed, as our Moscow correspondent discovered when she tried to get some dry cleaning done

a misplaced sense of priorities and the proclivity to largely ignore the indigenous development of basic, operationally vital armaments and ammunition at a time when all three services — especially the army — were wrestling with bureaucratic red tape and corruption scandals to modernise and upgrade most of their ageing assets.

Defence Minister AK Antony lamented the “shameful and dangerous” situation in which India was compelled to import 70 percent of its military equipment despite repeated governmental assertions claiming self-reliance in this regard.

Hundreds of crores were spent on the INSAS Assault rifle over 15 years and the project is a failure with the Army dissatisfied, and looking for more imports.

Each OFB-produced INSAS AR eventually cost over Rs 20,000, compared to the 1,00,000 battle-tested AK-47’s supplied by Bulgaria that cost $93 each, or Rs 2,800 at the prevailing exchange rate.

MANY ARMAMENT industry officials maintain that 65 years later, this behemoth still remains a work in progress, ill-equipped to meet the military’s most basic requirements. Its highly bureaucratic workings lead to interminable delays and inflated costs in designing and building low-to-medium level material, impinging on military efficiency.

each upgraded version of DRDO-designed and OFB-built Arjun MK II main battle tank (MBT)would cost the army an astronomical Rs 376 crore, or $7.4 million. Comparably, the Russian T90S MBTs— 647 of which the Indian Army imported as fully-assembled kits from 2001 onwards, and another 1,000 to be built locally under licence at the Heavy Vehicles Factory at Avadi near Chennai to equip the bulk of its 59 armoured formations — were acquired for $2.2-2.5 million per unit, a third of the Arjun’s price.

Your (US) tax dollars at work: $60 BILLION spent on the TSA since 9/11. 70% of weapons get past screeners.

The organizational flaw in America's schools is that they are too organized. Bureaucracy can't teach. American schools have been organized "on the totally erroneous assumption," management expert Peter Drucker observed, "that there is one right way to learn and it is the same for everyone." We must give educators freedom to be themselves. […] This requires scrapping the current system -- all of it, federal, state, and local, as well as union contracts. We must start over and rebuild an open framework in which real people can find inspiration in doing things their own way.

Das Lego-Universum ist eben wie das richtige Leben: Man sucht, findet, baut auf, reißt ein. Und es gibt hier wie dort Kreative und, naja, Bürokraten. Im Legoland waren das die, die ausschließlich nach Anleitung bauten. Und die nach Fertigstellung peinlich genau darauf achteten, dass alles zusammenblieb.

(Source: http://twitter.com/jamesallworth/status/181580782605840385)
Sent from my Mini iPad.

"If you have 10,000 regulations," Winston Churchill said, "you destroy all respect for law."

He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That's what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities have probably doubled that. We have so many rules that legal specialists can't keep up. Criminal lawyers call the rules "incomprehensible." They are. They are also "uncountable." Congress has created so many criminal offenses that the American Bar Association says it would be futile to even attempt to estimate the total.

So what do the politicians and bureaucrats of the permanent government do? They pass more rules.

Changes in security systems can be slow. Society has to implement any new security technology as a group, which implies agreement and coordination and -- in some instances -- a lengthy bureaucratic procurement process. Meanwhile, an attacker can just use the new technology.