Daily Archives: September 3, 2005

Steve Ballmer unexpurgated

Posted on by

Delicate souls, avert your gaze now. And do not under any circumstances read this report of what Microsoft CEO said about Google.

Those made of sterner stuff may read on…

Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer vowed to “kill” internet search leader Google Inc. in an obscenity-laced tirade, and Google chased a prized Microsoft executive “like wolves,” according to documents filed in an increasingly bitter legal battle between the rivals.

The allegations, filed in a Washington state court, represent the latest salvos in a showdown triggered by Google’s July hiring of former Microsoft executive Kai Fu-Lee to oversee a research and development centre that Google plans to open in China. Lee started at Google the day after he resigned from Microsoft.

The tug-of-war over Lee – known for his work on computer recognition of language – has exposed the behind-the-scenes animosity that has been brewing between two of high-tech’s best-known companies.

Ballmer’s threat last November was recounted in a sworn declaration by a former Microsoft engineer, Mark Lucovsky, who said he met with Microsoft’s chief executive 10 months ago to discuss his decision to leave the company after six years. After learning Lucovsky was leaving to take a job at Google, Ballmer picked up his chair and hurled it across his office, according to the declaration.

Ballmer then pejoratively berated Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Lucovsky recalled.

“I’m going to f—ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again,” the declaration quotes Ballmer. “I’m going to f—ing kill Google.”

In a statement, Ballmer described Lucovsky’s recollection as a “gross exaggeration.

Mark’s decision to leave was disappointing and I urged him strongly to change his mind. But his characterization of that meeting is not accurate.”

Editor’s Note: chair-throwing is a recognised and respected therapeutic procedure at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wa. Please do not be alarmed, or conclude that the man in charge of the company that makes your software is deranged. On the other hand, if you do use his software, perhaps the time has come to make an appointment with a therapist.

Thanks to Chris Walker for the link.

The big disconnect on New Orleans

Posted on by

If you want to see the chasm between the Federal government and what’s going on on the ground, just read this digest put together by CNN yesterday. Here’s a sample on conditions in the Convention Centre:

FEMA chief Brown: We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need. (See here for the lowdown on friend Brown.)

Mayor Nagin: The convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for the 15,000 to 20,000 people.

CNN Producer Kim Segal: It was chaos. There was nobody there, nobody in charge. And there was nobody giving even water. The children, you should see them, they’re all just in tears. There are sick people. We saw… people who are dying in front of you.

Evacuee Raymond Cooper: Sir, you’ve got about 3,000 people here in this — in the Convention Center right now. They’re hungry. Don’t have any food. We were told two-and-a-half days ago to make our way to the Superdome or the Convention Center by our mayor. And which when we got here, was no one to tell us what to do, no one to direct us, no authority figure.

Homeland insecurity

Posted on by

Over and above the horror and the tragedy and the devastation of the Katrina disaster hangs a bigger question: about the ability of an advanced industrial nation to cope with large-scale disasters that are man-made rather than orchestrated by nature.

FEMA — the US federal agency that is supposed to deal with what happened in New Orleans — has been rolled into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the super-department created to make the US secure after the 9/11 attacks. (This may explain, by the way, why Bush & Co apparently knew so little about the impending threat to the Southern states. It’s clear that FEMA had always ranked the flooding of New Orleans as one of the three biggest disasters that could befall the US. In the old days, the head of FEMA had a seat at the Cabinet table and might even have had the ear of the President. But now, advice and information from FEMA has to be filtered through another layer of bureaucracy — the Homeland Security Secretary, who is probably obsessed with terrorism. It would be interesting to know when the impending hurricane made it onto the agenda for the President’s daily security briefing — if indeed there were such briefings during Dubya’s five-week summer vacation.)

But I digress. There is a connection between New Orleans and the kind of global terrorism that obsesses the Homeland Security boys. The connection exists because one accepted scenario involves Al-Qaeda getting hold of a nuclear weapon — either as a Russian army-surplus item, or as a homemade ‘dirty’ bomb made by mixing conventional explosives with some radioactive materials — and setting it off in a major Western city. In such an event, an entire city would have to be evacuated and effectively sealed off — much as Chernobyl was over a decade ago.

What the New Orleans case suggests is that such an evacuation is currently beyond the competence of the US authorities. There was clearly no plan for getting people out of the threatened city — just exhortations and injunctions and advice to people to get the hell out of it. But those in charge must have known that something like 100,000 of the city’s poorest residents possessed neither the means nor the vehicles to flee. The police service clearly did not have the resources to nudge or force them into action. There was no serious provision of free public transport for these people. And so on.

Which leaves me with the thought that despite all the hoo-hah about ‘Homeland Security’, despite all the border checks and fingerprinting and watch lists, despite the DHS’s $41 billion budget, the US would be unable to do what would need to be done in the event of an Al-Qaeda ‘spectacular’ along the lines suggested above.

I’m sure that there are lots of people in Washington — in the civil service and the Congress – who are thinking about this. But I doubt that the Bush regime will be much moved by such thoughts. As Paul Krugman pointed out, this is a regime that lives in a reality-distortion field, uninterested in the real responsibilities of governing, and hijacking the resources of the state to pursue private obsessions (stopping stem cell research, outlawing abortion, toppling Saddam, ignoring global warming and looking after the oil and aerospace industries). This is a regime that believes you can invade a country without doing any planning for the aftermath, that you can wage war without killing American soldiers, that you can treat the global environment with contempt, and that you can do all this while reducing taxes.

How do you pay for a house that no longer exists?

Posted on by

Er, helpful advice for New Orleans residents from Avi Zenilman. The bottom line is

Those who can’t get insurance coverage or federal help in time to pay their mortgage are personally liable for their homes and are possibly vulnerable to foreclosure. Some banks have already begun to assuage these fears by granting borrowers at least a 90-day extension for their payments.

Wow! 90 whole days! Who says bankers have no hearts?

Summer-House Lit

Posted on by

Timothy Noah has two lovely essays in Slate, taking the mickey out of what he calls Summer-House Lit. In England we would call it Second-Home Lit. Part 1 – “On not owning a vacation home” is here. Part 2 is here.

And the guy in charge of disaster management is…

Posted on by

Surprise, surprise: a Republican zombie. Splendid Boston Herald story by Brett Arends:

The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.

And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position.

The Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA.

Brett goes on to record that

Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders’ and horse-show organization based in Colorado.

“We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records,” explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner’s office. “This was his full-time job … for 11 years,” she added.

Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.

“He was asked to resign,” Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night.

Soon after, Brown was invited to join the administration by his old Oklahoma college roommate Joseph Allbaugh, the previous head of FEMA until he quit in 2003 to work for the president’s re-election campaign.

Lovely stuff! Pity there isn’t more of it in the US media.

The Katrina disaster

Posted on by

Here’s an interesting quote:

The boxes are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. “As the water recedes,” says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, “we expect to find a lot of dead bodies.”

Q: Where did this appear?

A: in an article in Scientific American — published in October 2001.

Here’s another interesting quote:

It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV “storm teams” warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.

But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

Q: Where and when was this published?

A: In National Geographic Magazine, last October. Thanks to Dave Winer and Doc Searls for the links.

America’s Can’t-Do Government

Posted on by

Terrific NYT column by Paul Krugman. Sample:

I don’t think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn’t rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn’t get adequate armor.

At a fundamental level, I’d argue, our current leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don’t like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.

Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.

So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can’t-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.