#minus having an hour long meeting with the executive director of the company

[naritaren]

I got through my very long work day with no neck breaks and just my new med. It took until just now for my neck to start hurting.

This is good. I can work with this.

[sugaabooga]

Chance | 4

Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5

Pairing: Seokjin x Reader | Jimin x Reader

Genre: Fluff, Angst, rich!Seokjin, rich!Jimin

Word Count: 2.0k

Warnings: like one curse word, PG-13

Synopsis: Seokjin had no problem of getting girls and also had no problem of getting rid of them. One girl after the next. So why was it that you - a middle-class citizen - was an exception? You - a middle-class citizen - made Seokjin question if he really did have it all. But one thing’s for sure. He didn’t have any of your chances.

Should I?

No. You look weak.

But. . . should I still?

She’s middle class.

Seokjin groans, flopping onto his back and throwing his phone somewhere across his blankets, frustrated from his internal debate.

Why was he even contemplating whether or not to text you? Girls were always a come and go for Seokjin. As soon as he deemed a girl “boring” he would move on. 

But that was the exact thing that made him stick to you. You weren’t boring. Every moment with you was new and different. The more he talked to you, the more curious he became.

Previously, the qualifications Seokjin set for his future wife were just three things.

Appearance, reputation, and status.

Seokjin had to admit that you were quite beautiful. It is only due to the fact that you put little to no makeup, always have a messy bun, and often hide behind a pair of glasses that initially fooled Seokjin into thinking you did not meet his standards. However, he quickly saw that behind all that, your bare face was a beauty.

Your reputation was not well-known, Seokjin now realizes. His only eyewitness was the threatening statement from his brother, Jimin, who shared that you were his long-time friend. Right off the bat, Seokjin assumed you were the elite upper class of Korea due to Jimin’s habit of speaking highly of you.

The day Seokjin finally asked about your parents, he came to the shocking realization that you were indeed not of high, elite status. Due to his short, impulsive thinking, Seokjin became so consumed with the fact that you were merely middle class whom he shared months of a relationship with that he immediately called it off. Now as he looks back, Seokjin knows that you mean more to him than just a mistake or a casual fling. You were the first girl he met that he wanted to know more of, the one who made him flustered, the one he wanted to fight for.

Heck, you were the only girl that he had a relationship with for over a month.

Seokjin sits up on his bed with a slight grunt, reaching over his wide mattress to grab his tossed phone.

Seokjin: Hey. . .

Seokjin starts typing then shakes his head.

Seokjin: Can we meet at Yumi’s?

Seokjin huffs, deeming the meeting location to be a bad choice. Too many people, too many distractions. . . Yumi’s just would not be a good place to try wooing a girl back to him.

Seokjin: Meet me in front of the library near your workplace.

Seokjin’s thumb hovers over the blue arrow as he contemplates whether or not to send his message. Is it too sudden? Too demanding? Shameless?

Well, he was a pretty shameless person.

No. That’s not the concept he’s going for. 

Seokjin quickly deletes the message and rolls onto his back, hopelessly staring at his high ceiling for a solid minute before jumping up as if a light bulb lit up above his head.

He glances at the time and nods to himself, knowing it was almost for you to get off of work.

Seokjin hastily changes into a turtleneck and slacks, shoves his arms through a coat and hurries out his penthouse door.

__

Meanwhile, a loud crack resonates within your tiny cubicle as your droopy eyes lazily glance over at the bottom right corner of the desktop computer. You were working overtime.

Again.

“Take a break,” Jina, one of your fellow co-workers suggests with an encouraging smile as she gets ready to leave after working an extra two hours herself.

You shake your head in exhaustion. “I wish. But Hoseok won’t let me live.”

“Hoseok what now?”

Jina’s spine straightens as she squeaks at the sudden appearance of the said man and quickly greets both of you goodnight, leaving you to deal with your sharp, picky boss.

You gulp, eyes hesitantly skimming over his stoic face. 

You’re pretty sure you saw Hoseok laughing his heart out with Jimin one time. Needless to say, his laughter was quite the surprise but immediately after stepping out the lounge room, his professionalism came back as if he had never once cracked a smile in his twenty seven years of living.

“Miss Y/N,” Hoseok addresses in a monotonous but firm tone.

“Y-Yes?” you answer, back unintentionally straightening.

“Are you having a hard time?”

You’re slightly taken aback by the question but a shiver runs down your spine once you realize he was not asking out of concern.

It was a test.

You immediately shake your head, pulling your hands together on top of your desk to cease their slight tremble. “Not at all.”

Hoseok crosses his arms, slightly bending over your cubicle with scrutinizing eyes.

“Am I uncomfortable to be around?”

Your eyes widen, body abruptly stopping its unintentional lean back and instead lean forward into a normal position. 

“Of course not,” you smile nervously, lying straight through your teeth. Hoseok was certainly not the bad kind of uncomfortable. He was a decent male. However, he sure was intimidating which often made you wary of his presence.

Hoseok lets out a small sigh, nodding and starting to turn back around.

“That’s good. Well, sorry about the workload, Y/N,” he apologizes in a straight faced manner, making you wonder if he was even genuinely sorry for you. “I’ll make sure you get the right amount of pay.”

You merely nod in understanding as Hoseok wishes you good luck and heads home for the night.

You peek your head out from behind your divider, deflating back into your chair once you realize you were the only one left in the office.

You debate calling Jimin but immediately shake that idea out of your head. He had left earlier, claiming to have important plans for the evening. You were sure he wasn’t aware of you working overtime. Not wanting to be an unnecessary bother, you slide away your phone and instead focus on finishing up your team’s proposal.

It was tiring managing such various parts of the team. Not only did you have to finish your part and put all the slides together, but you were in charge of editing everyone’s materials. It was quite unfortunate that your other coworkers took advantage of your mercy by bull crapping their whole part and leaving you to do the whole thing by yourself.

You were very tempted to tell Hoseok about it, who would no doubt break out into another intense lecture with some possible screaming involved.

It had happened before.

Then, everyone would know you as the snitch, possibly outcasting you from all the company gatherings. But it would also mean you wouldn’t have to work these extra hours and deal with all this stress.

It’s not worth being a snitch, you nod. You might as well work hard and quit by next year without making enemies along the way.

But as your dull eyes skim over Minu’s absolute garbage bullet points, you grit your teeth. 

Yup. This is definitely the last time you’re covering for them.

You tap your phone, sighing at how you would’ve been off about three hours ago. 

No. It’s not time to mope. This is the last time you’ll be doing this. So get through it and just email Hoseok a complaint later.

You huff, taking a large gulp of your water to calm your infuriating soul and stretch out your fingers. You aggressively flip through the hardcopy of your notes and vigorously clack against the keys, words forming at an insane speed due to your newfound determination.

Another hour passes by and you’re nearly finished. All that was left was covering the effect this proposal would have on the company with its expected high consumer ratings.

As you lean back on your chair, stretching out your joints and back, you don’t notice the figure in view from your window leaving a parallel parked fancy automobile, making its way into your high-rise office building.

__

Seokjin gives a small bow to the security guard in the front lobby who smoothly opens the door for him with a bright grin.

Hm. Quite happy for working the night shift.

He hears the front desk receptionist on night-duty let out a small gasp but it doesn’t have the same effect on him as it would’ve before. Seokjin doesn’t feel the usual urge to smirk nor the surge of pride swelling in his chest. Instead, all he can think about is:

“Which floor is Y/N L/N on?”

The receptionist’s face drops at the mention of another woman’s name and thanks the business regulations for privacy. “Sorry. . . I’m afraid we can’t just give out information like that.”

Seokjin digs in his coat pocket for his business card, quickly handing it to her.

“Business,” he states.

The receptionist’s eyes double their size at his card title: 

Kim Seokjin. JJ Corporations. Executive Director.

She gasps. “JJ Corp-”

“We’re scouting,” Seokjin lies, cutting off the receptionist’s shock. “I heard Y/N L/N was on the management team?”

The young girl frantically nods, clicking away at her computer and pulling up the management team’s information.

“She should be on the thirty-fourth floor.”

Seokjin bids a quick thank you and walks over to an elevator.

The receptionist tilts her head as the man who claims he’s scouting enters the elevator, swinging around a plastic black, convenience store bag.

“Hm,” she squints her eyes in brief suspicion then shrugs. “Must be bribery.”

____

The bell dings, announcing the elevator’s arrival on the 34th floor. Seokjin’s posture is calm as he gets out the elevator but he quickly has to breathe out out of sheer nervousness, feeling the unfamiliar butterflies in his stomach. 

He had heard a black-haired male, who seemed to be some kind of manager, muttering how you were always working overtime over the phone as he walked towards the bus stop. Hearing this, Seokjin drove to the nearest convenience store, picking up some snacks and a pre-packaged dinner plate. It was his first time entering such a humble store, but Seokjin was quite satisfied by the efficiency of it. He planned to visit frequently.

That’s besides the point.

As he nears the entrance of all the cubicles, Seokjin lets out a huff, giving himself a short little pep talk as he stops in front of the doors. He didn’t debate in the car for over an hour just to turn back and go home once he got up here. 

Let’s go Kim Seokjin. What’s the worst that can happen? Rejection?

Seokjin grimaces. He shakes his head, throwing the negative thoughts out of his mind and regains his usual arrogance confidence.

Seokjin’s confident steps slow down to a stop once he spots your face peeking out from the divider, a harsh white light from the computer screen illuminating your tired face.

Just as he lets out a breath to begin walking towards you with a sweet smile, Seokjin’s gaze slowly flickers over to the male’s head popping up next to you.

His smile disappears as the said male lounges beside you on his own chair, spinning lazily.

Jimin.

Seokjin hears an incoherent conversation briefly exchanged between the two of you, heart clenching when your face lights up with a smile at Jimin’s silliness.

Seokjin is frozen, fist tightening on the plastic handles of the black bag, jaw clenching.

Unable to watch as Jimin shifts closer to you, Seokjin swiftly turns around, leaving the room like he was never there to begin with and goes unnoticed by the both of you.

Seokjin huffs, feeling a complexity of emotions as he sees flashes of red. He was angry, somewhat broken, and jealous. It was a flurry of emotions he had never felt towards a girl before. Seokjin firmly presses the elevator button, looking down as the plastic bag loudly crinkles in his clenched fist.

Seokjin grits his teeth, anger and green jealousy getting the best of him. 

What kind of lowlives eat this instant shit?

The elevators slide open. The black bag is flung at the wall. Expensive shoes clack against tiles. A designer coat is flung back by the wind.

With a soft growl of a fancy engine, Seokjin leaves.

[reversemortgagelongbeach-blog]

July 2008 Mortgage Licensing Update

$150,000 Bond, etc: Required in which the aggregate principal Quantity of mortgage loans will be more than $10,000,000 for the previous twelve (12) weeks;Massachusetts Adopts Regulations for New home mortgage Originator Law The Massachusetts Division of Banks recently embraced implementing regulations to establish requirements and procedures for licensing under its new mortgage loan originator law. Under the new regulations, loan originator applicants have to submit documentation of their fiscal Reverse Mortgage Lenders in Long Beach California responsibility, character and health and evidence of completion of pre-licensing coursework. Moreover, under the new regulations, that loan originator must disclose his mortgage loan originator license number on paper to all prospective borrowers and residential mortgage loan applicants at once a fee is paid or when a home mortgage application is accepted. Long Beach Reverse Mortgage Direct 1322-1326 Obispo Ave #802, Long Beach, CA 90804 (562) 245-5851The executing regulations became effective on May 30, 2008. Alaska Finally Adopts Mortgage Funding Licensing Regulations The much-awaited regulations executing Alaska's Mortgage Lending Regulations Act have been adopted. Regulations implement new registration and licensing requirements for persons participated in mortgage financing tasks, requiring any non exempt person acting as a mortgage company must be licensed and any non exempt person acting being a small mortgage lender be registered with their condition. The regulation also includes proficiency, application testing, and continuing education requirements on licensees and registrants. Other obligations imposed by regulations incorporate annual coverage, record-keeping, and oversight requirements. The regulations also enumerate several clinics which can be considered deceptive or unfair advertising or mortgage financing techniques, and provide for disciplinary actions taken by the Department. Finally, the regulations provide for the establishment and operation of an originator surety fund. Please examine Chapters 7 and 8 of those 2008 Legislation of Maryland (codified at F-I § 11-508.1) for essential additional information regarding the new net worth requirements, including rules regulating the utilization of traces of charge from Licensees that lend money to meet up to 75% of their minimum net-worth requirements. Some highlights of this new law are: All mortgage brokers or lenders that make or provide mortgage loans into AK residents shall be required to get a license. This consists of all businesses that work on the internet or provide remote lending from another country via email, or telephonenumber. All of mortgage originators will likely be asked to pass a background investigation and a proficiency evaluation before providing service to AK residents. All of mortgage originators will probably be asked to complete 24 hours of continuing education every biennial certification period. All mortgage originators is going to undoubtedly be required to pay into a surety fund. The fund is used to compensate consumers for losses they may incur as a result of illegal or unethical behavior for an originator. The branch will conduct assessments of authorized entities onto a three-year cycle, or earlier if your complaint is made by a consumer. Under the AMLRA, mortgage lenders and mortgage agents must get a"mortgage license" and individual originators must obtain an"originator license" A person who's the owner or lawfully authorized manager of this applicant may submit an application for a dual license for a mortgage licensee and the single designated originator for the mortgage licensee. $25,000 Minimum Net Worth: Not more than $1,000,000 in lending secured by residential property property for the previous 12 weeks; Connecticut House Bill 5577 Becomes Effective July 1, 2008 Increases the bail requirements for lenders and brokers from $40,000 to 80,000 starting on August 1, 2009. Moves the effective date of the National Mortgage Licensing System provisions of PA 07-156 and changes the name of their system into the Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System ("NMLS").HUD Reminds Lenders of FHA Rules for managing Mortgage Agents HUD recently issued a mortgagee letter reminding creditors of various payment and service restrictions https://goo.gl/maps/2jr9Rkwv9B82 when working with all non-FHA-approved mortgage brokers for mortgage. The letter claims that even though a borrower may engage a non FHA-approved large financial company for counseling services, loan origination services may well not be performed by the broker and the FHA-approved mortgagee may well not compensate the broker for its counseling services. This kind of payment will violate RESPA's prohibition on duplicative penalties and might even be considered an illegal referral fee. To this extent a borrower receives counselling by a non-FHA-approved mortgage broker, the services must constitute"purposeful counseling" and the fees must be paid out of the borrower's own available assets and disclosed on the HUD-1. In addition, a replica of the agency contract must be within the loan record submitted for insurance acceptance. Steven Sheasby, creator of Integrity Mortgage Licensing, did together with numerous mortgage companies with licensing across the nation. He's handled multiple compliance sections for both nationally lenders and brokers. His experience in mortgage accreditation along with mortgage regulatory compliance problems has given the inside track for addressing the conditions minus the expensive price of a lawyer. Contact Integrity Mortgage Accreditation at 714-721-3963 or even ssheasby@integritymortgagelicensing.com. Or Visit their web site at http://www.integritymortgagelicensing.com/state-licensing-requirements/ There are just two new provisions of law regulating Maryland mortgage company licensees ("Licensees") which went into effect June 1, 2008. The first is an amendment to Md.. Inst. ("FI") § 11-508 which increases the quantity of the surety bond, letter of credit or trust accounts should be kept by Licensees. The 2nd is a new minimum net worth requirement that has to be kept by Licensees which is codified at F-I § 11-508.1. $100,000 Bond, respectively: Required at which the aggregate principal Quantity of mortgage loans is much more than $3,000,000 but not greater than $10,000,000 to its previous (1 2 ) weeks; These new requirements apply to applicants for branch and original location permits. In addition to a brand new branch location to an current blanket bond will probably need the blanket bond to be increased to the new $750,000 bond level or the solution to post a single bail for the brand newest branch from the newest level required bylaw enforcement. All individuals working as loan originators to get a Massachusetts licensed mortgage company or Mortgage Broker must submit an Loan Originator license application filing to Massachusetts throughout the NMLS earlier Monday, June 30th at 11pm, as a way to continue to use from the capacity of a bank mortgage originator. Take remember that all individuals who meet the definition from M.G.L. c. 255F, section 1 needs to be licensed. Get a handle on owners, persons, executive officers and directors of licensed mortgage lenders or mortgage brokers also needs to obtain licensure as home loan originators, should they meet the definition. Before becoming licensed, applicants must complete a residential mortgage financing course that's been approved by the Division of Banks. But, individuals may submit their program postings to Massachusetts through NMLS just before completing a course. Those who fill out an application before July 1 st will have until August 31, 2008 to accomplish a home mortgage financing program. If this a person does not perform a course prior to September 1, 2008, his mortgage loan originator license application will be resumed. $100,000 Minimum Net Worth: More than $5,000,000 in financing secured by residential property property for the preceding 12 weeks. Yet another brand new provision of law requires Licensees to match and retain a specified minimum net worth. A list of the Necessary numbers are as follows: $750,000 Bond, and so forth: Required blanket surety bond as soon as an offender files five (5) or even more traditional or renewal applications at precisely the same time and chooses to submit a blanket bond. If you are already operating as a mortgage company, mortgage broker, or originator, you don't need to be authorized under the AMLRA until March 1, 2009. Which usually means that if you are operating like a mortgage lender, mortgage broker, or originator in AK on June 30, 2008, then you are not required to be licensed until March 1, 2009. For instance, whenever an A K business license was issued to a mortgage company before to June 30, 2008, which would imply the company was doing business prior to July 1, 2008. If you put in the mortgage business for a lender, broker, or originator at AK after June 30, 2008, then you are subject for the AMLRA which happens on July 1, 2008. An extra net worth requirement of $250,000 by which a licensee has participated in more than $10,000,000 in financing secured by residential real property for the preceding 12 months will have effect January 1, 2009. $50,000 Bond, etc: Required where the aggregate principal Quantity of mortgage loans is $3,000,000 or less for the preceding twelve (12) months; The bill expands present"first" and"second" mortgage professional permits to the joint license on July 1, 2008. The bill calls for people licensed on that date to transition to the NMLS before October 1, 2008. All figures must be filed only through the system launching on July 1, 2008. Changes the expiration date for permits and designates licensing prices. Under PA 07-156, starting October 1, 2008, all permits must expire on December 31st of this year following issuance and most of licensees must spend the required licensing and processing fee to the federal system. For lender and broker licenses that expire on September 30, 2008, the bill expands the expiration to December 31, 2008. Starting on July 1, 2008, broker and lender licenses must expire at the end of business on December 31st of the season in which they're approved, unless the permit is revived. The bill needs a renewal application to be filed between November 1st and December 31st of the year when the permit expires, provided a licensee could file a renewal application by March 1 st of the subsequent year using an overdue fee of $100. Any filing by date with all the fee is regarded as sufficient and timely. The brand new required surety bond, letter of credit, or hope account numbers are as follows: Please make sure that the effective licensing of mortgage loan originators is July 1, 2008. Mortgage lender and mortgage broker licensees might not employ or retain any mortgage loan originator on after July 1st unless the person has an application pending by or approved by the Division of Banks. See extending deadlines for NMLS transitions starting July 1. States are finally beginning to complete off their efforts to legislate the housing issue. There continue to be lots of proposed foreclosure rescue plans at their nation and federal legislatures, but many state licensing invoices have been either passed or voted against. There is still some discussion of a federal licensing requirement of mortgage companies in the event the country have not complied with the national government minimal requirements. There is also a lot of debate about FHA re form, which might affect FHA Licensing, and RESPA and GSE Reform. Be prepared for some major alterations. Their still appears to become more to happen before the end of the session. This office will require proof from Licensees that they meet with the minimum net worth at the time of application for a new or renewal permit and at time of a compliance exam. $50,000 Minimum Net Worth: greater than $1,000,000 but not greater than $5,000,000 in financing secured by residential property property for the previous 12 months;Minimum Net Worth

[orbemnews]

Senior Trump Air Force official suggested dramatically slashing F-35 jet numbers Will Roper, who served as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics for the last three years of the Trump administration, recommended that Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown, former Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen Lord, and others reduce the number of jets purchased from 1,763 jets to about 800, the officials said. Roper questioned the cost of the jet, even after former President Donald Trump touted it as “invisible” and the greatest fighter jet in the world. Instead, Roper threw his support behind the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, a secretive, sixth-generation aircraft designed with digital engineering, the officials said. He revealed last October at the Air, Space & Cyber Conference that a full-scale prototype had flown and “broken a lot of records in the doing.” Though the plan was not accepted the revelation come as the F-35 program faces growing scrutiny, with increased skepticism from members of Congress and suggestions within the Pentagon that all is not well with the military’s prized program. “There is recognition from everyone involved in this program — from the Air Force and from everyone in Congress — that this is a challenge. This program is not working out the way we wanted it to,” said a source with direct knowledge of the F-35 program. According to the source, an Air Force official said in a closed door meeting, “At this point, we paid for ‘outstanding.’ We got ‘very good.'” In this case, “very good” comes with a staggering price tag. The total cost over the life of the F-35 program is estimated to be $1.7 trillion, according to the Defense Department’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation. The vast majority of that money — $1.27 trillion — is sustainment costs, not the cost of buying the jets, but the costs to keep them flying. Any cuts would have huge ramifications The military plans to purchase nearly 2,500 F-35s in total. A reduction in the Air Force purchase to approximately 800 jets could potentially reduce sustainment costs by some $400 billion. A cut that large would affect not only Lockheed Martin, but an industrial base across the country that supports the manufacture of the aircraft. A company executive said at a House Armed Services Committee Hearing in late-April that the US supply chain is more than 1,800 companies, of which about 1,000 are small or disadvantaged businesses. Ellen Lord, the former chief of Pentagon acquisitions under the Trump administration, said there is a debate within the Pentagon about how to prioritize the mature F-35 program against the unproven NGAD. Lord was one of those in the department to whom Roper suggested cutting the Air Force’s F-35 purchase. Speaking with CNN, she emphasized the importance of the overall F-35 program, especially its interoperability with key allies and partners. “It’s important to realize the difference between one prototype that has shown potential and the ability to guarantee a product that can generate multiple aircraft per month. We must be very careful not to discard a concept that has been built up over time,” she said. “The debate is about the degree to which you can reduce the F-35 to put money into NGAD. Right now, [the F-35] is performing very, very well for the Air Force, Navy, and the Marines. The pilots love it when they go downrange.” But Lord said the sustainment costs of the fighter must come down. Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said the service is still “fully committed” to the F-35. At the same time, she said the Air Force is working to find “the fighter force mix that best meets the challenges of the highly contested environment.” “In addition to the aircraft we are procuring now, we are looking at affordable capacity and capability for the future and determining where we should invest our R&D money, using a digital approach, so we have the right fighter mix 15-20 years from now,” Stefanek said in a statement to CNN. In its latest report on F-35 sustainment released last month, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said the program was projected to be $6 billion short in the year 2036 alone. The problem is sharpest for the Air Force, where the GAO found that the estimated cost of the F-35s was 47% higher than what the Air Force said it could afford. “The services have a plane that they cannot afford to fly the way they want to fly, at least in the long run,” Maurer said at the House Armed Services Committee hearing about the F-35 last month. F-35 program plagued by problems The program, which will mark its 20th anniversary this October, has not yet completed its testing or entered full production, despite being operational in the field, and it has been plagued by cost overruns and delays for years, including a shortage of 800 engines by 2030. Across the Air Force, Navy, and Marines, the F-35 remains well below its target full mission capable rate, which is the rate at which it can perform all of its intended missions. The Navy F-35 is fully mission capable only 7% of the time, according to the GAO. “It’s more expensive than we expected it to be. It’s taking longer than we expected it to take. The engine breaks down more quickly than we expected it to and is more expensive and time-consuming to fix than we expected it to be,” said Rep. Adam Smith, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, speaking with CNN. “We do not yet have the full capability that has been promised in terms of what the F-35 can do.” Brett Ashworth, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin, said the company still sees strong support for the F-35. “Recently the Chief of Staff of the Air Force called the F-35 the cornerstone of the U.S. Air Force fighter fleet. The importance of the F-35 to the US Air Force was highlighted by recent deployments to the CENTCOM area of responsibility in which the Air Force flew more than 1,300 sorties, completing their mission and returning the pilots home safely every time,” he said in a statement to CNN. Dramatically reducing the purchase of the country’s latest fighter aircraft is not without precedent. In 1997, the Air Force planned to purchase more than 400 Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptors. At the time, the stealth Raptor was being developed as the most advanced fighter jet in the world. But spiraling costs led to the purchase of only 187 aircraft before the production line was shut down. The Air Force acknowledged similar problems with the cost of the F-35 in response to the GAO report. “Air Force officials told us that, as a result, the only remaining options for their meeting their affordability constraints are to reduce the total number of F-35A aircraft they plan to purchase, or to reduce the aircraft’s planned flying hours,” the GAO report stated. In January, acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller called the F-35 a “piece of …” and said, “We’ve created a monster,” in comments made just days before he left office. A month later, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown referenced the F-35’s costs to operate when he likened it to a “Ferrari” and said its use should be moderated. Brown called to develop a “fifth-gen minus” aircraft. In March, Rep. Smith was far more blunt in his assessment, saying he wants to stop “throwing money down that particular rathole.” F-35 program has some staunch supporters Rep. Donald Norcross, a member of the House Armed Services committee, told CNN that it will be difficult to reduce the cost of a program that has completed much of its design and development, even as he called the jet “remarkable.” “The reality is that the more mature a platform is, the unknown areas where you could potentially bring down the cost narrow, and we’re facing that right now, that “We’re not going to be able to reduce cost on a mature program as much as we potentially will need to,” he said. “Unless we see substantial improvement or a pathway forward, then you have to look at what we’re able to do — what we can afford — and is there a better platform to do it with.” The F-35 program still has its staunch supporters in Congress and the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin supports the “critically important program,” said chief Pentagon spokesman John Kirby Monday, while adding that the problems are being worked through. “The department remains committed to the F-35 going forward, as do many of our allies and partners.” His comments echoed those of Brigadier General David Abba, director of the Air Force’s F-35 Integration Office. “The United States Air Force is absolutely committed to the F-35,” Abba said at the House Armed Services Committee hearing two weeks ago, though he acknowledged “difficult decisions” may be ahead if the sustainment costs aren’t reduced. Meanwhile, Rep. Don Bacon called the jet “the most significant and consequential military modernization for the United States, our allies, and freedom-loving nations around the world,” adding that the F-35’s performance is “unmatched.” Rep. Blake Moore, a fellow Republican, said at the hearing, “This plane can simply not be beat.” Lord, the former Pentagon chief of acquisitions, said there is a balance between the program’s critics and its advocates. She cautioned, “We need to be very thoughtful with what one prototype has demonstrated versus what one proven aircraft can do.” Source link Orbem News #Air #dramatically #F35 #force #jet #numbers #official #Politics #senior #SeniorTrumpAirForceofficialsuggesteddramaticallyslashingF-35numbers-CNNPolitics #slashing #Suggested #Trump

[gordonwilliamsweb]

To Vaccinate Veterans, Health Care Workers Must Cross Mountains, Plains and Tundra

This story also ran on Time. It can be republished for free.

A Learjet 31 took off before daybreak from Helena Regional Airport in Montana, carrying six Veterans Affairs medical providers and 250 doses of historic cargo cradled in a plug-in cooler designed to minimize breakage.

Even in a state where 80-mph speed limits are normal, ground transportation across long distances is risky for the Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine, which must be used within 12 hours of thawing.

The group’s destination was Havre, Montana, 30 miles from the Canadian border. About 500 military veterans live in and around this small town of roughly 9,800, and millions more reside in similarly rural, hard-to-reach areas across the United States.

About 2.7 million veterans who use the VA health system are classified as “rural” or “highly rural” patients, residing in communities or on land with fewer services and less access to health care than those in densely populated towns and cities. An additional 2 million veterans live in remote areas who do not receive their health care from VA, according to the department. To ensure these rural vets have access to the covid vaccines, the VA is relying on a mix of tools, like charter and commercial aircraft and partnerships with civilian health organizations.

The challenges of vaccinating veterans in rural areas — which the VA considers anything outside an urban population center — and “highly rural” areas — defined as having fewer than 10% of the workforce commuting to an urban hub and with a population no greater than 2,500 — extend beyond geography, as more than 55% of them are 65 or older and at risk for serious cases of covid and just 65% are reachable via the internet.

For the Havre event, VA clinic workers called each patient served by the Merril Lundman VA Outpatient Clinic in a vast region made up of small farming and ranching communities and two Native American reservations. And for those hesitant to get the vaccine, a nurse called them back to answer questions.

“At least 10 additional veterans elected to be vaccinated once we answered their questions,” said Judy Hayman, executive director of the Montana VA Health Care System, serving all 147,000 square miles of the state.

The Havre mission was a test flight for similar efforts in other rural locations. Thirteen days later, another aircraft took off for Kalispell, Montana, carrying vaccines for 400 veterans.

In Alaska, another rural state, Anchorage Veterans Affairs Medical Center administrators finalized plans for providers to hop a commercial Alaska Airlines flight on Thursday to Kodiak Island. There, VA workers expected to administer 100 to 150 doses at a vaccine clinic conducted in partnership with the Kodiak Area Native Association.

“Our goal is to vaccinate all veterans who have not been vaccinated in and around the Kodiak community,” said Tom Steinbrunner, acting director of the Alaska VA Healthcare System.

VA began its outreach to rural veterans for the vaccine program late last year, as the Food and Drug Administration approached the dates for issuing emergency use authorizations for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, according to Dr. Richard Stone, the Veterans Health Administration’s acting undersecretary. It made sense to look to aircraft to deliver vaccines. “It just seemed logical that we would reach into rural areas that, [like] up in Montana, we had a contract with, a company that had small propeller-driven aircraft and short runway capability,” said Stone, a retired Army Reserve major general.

Veterans have responded, Stone added, with more than 50% of veterans in rural areas making appointments.

As of Wednesday, the VA had tallied 220,992 confirmed cases of covid among veterans and VA employees and 10,065 known deaths, including 128 employees. VA had administered 1,344,210 doses of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, including 329,685 second vaccines, to veterans as of Wednesday. According to the VA, roughly 25% of those veterans live in rural areas, 2.81% live in highly rural areas and 1.13% live on remote islands.

For rural areas, the VA has primarily relied on the Moderna vaccine, which requires cold storage between minus 25 degrees Centigrade (minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit) and minus 15 degrees C (5 degrees F) but not the deep freeze needed to store the Pfizer vaccine (minus 70 degrees C, or minus 94 degrees F). That, according to the VA, makes it more “transportable to rural locations.”

The VA anticipates that the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, if it receives an emergency use authorization from the FDA, will make it even easier to reach remote veterans. The vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech both require two shots, spaced a few weeks apart. “One dose will make it easier for veterans in rural locations, who often have to travel long distances, to get their full vaccination coverage,” said VA spokesperson Gina Jackson. The FDA’s vaccine advisory committee is set to meet on Feb. 26 to review J&J’s application for authorization.

Meanwhile, in places like Alaska, where hundreds of veterans live off the grid, VA officials have had to be creative. Flying out to serve individual veterans would be too costly, so the Anchorage VA Medical Center has partnered with tribal health care organizations to ensure veterans have access to a vaccine. Under these agreements, all veterans, including non-Native veterans, can be seen at tribal facilities.

“That is our primary outreach in much of Alaska because the tribal health system is the only health system in these communities,” Steinbrunner said.

In some rural areas, however, the process has proved frustrating. Army veteran John Hoefen, 73, served in Vietnam and has a 100% disability rating from the VA for Parkinson’s disease related to Agent Orange exposure. He gets his medical care from a VA location in Canandaigua, New York, 20 miles from his home, but the facility hasn’t made clear what phase of the vaccine rollout it’s in, Hoefen said.

The hospital’s website simply says a staff member will contact veterans when they become eligible — a “don’t call us, we’ll call you,” situation, he said. “I know a lot of veterans like me, 100% disabled and no word,” Hoefen said. “I went there for audiology a few weeks ago and my tech hadn’t even gotten her vaccine yet.”

VA Canandaigua referred questions about the facility’s current phase back to its website: “If you’re eligible to get a vaccine, your VA health care team will contact you by phone, text message or Secure Message (through MyHealtheVet) to schedule an appointment,” it states. A call to the special covid-19 phone number established for the Canandaigua VA, which falls under the department’s Finger Lakes Healthcare System, puts the caller into the main menu for hospital services, with no information specifically on vaccine distribution.

For the most part, the VA is using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines to determine priority groups for vaccines. Having vaccinated the bulk of its health care workers and first responders, as well as residents of VA nursing homes, it has been vaccinating those 75 and older, as well as those with chronic conditions that place them at risk for severe cases of covid. In some locations, like Anchorage and across Montana, clinics are vaccinating those 65 and older and walk-ins when extra doses are available.

According to Lori FitzGerald, chief of pharmacy at the VA hospital in Fort Harrison, Montana, providers have ended up with extra doses that went to hospitalized patients or veterans being seen at the facility. Only one dose has gone to waste in Montana, she said.

To determine eligibility for the vaccine, facilities are using the Veterans Health Administration Support Service Center databases and algorithms to help with the decision-making process. Facilities then notify veterans by mail, email or phone or through VA portals of their eligibility and when they can expect to get a shot, according to the department.

Air Force veteran Theresa Petersen, 83, was thrilled that she and her husband, an 89-year-old U.S. Navy veteran, were able to get vaccinated at the Kalispell event. She said they were notified by their primary care provider of the opportunity and jumped at the chance.

“I would do anything to give as many kudos as I can to the Veterans Affairs medical system,” Petersen said. “I’m so enamored with the concept that ‘Yes, there are people who live in rural America and they have health issues too.’”

The VA is allowed to provide vaccines only to veterans currently enrolled in VA health care. About 9 million U.S. veterans are not enrolled at the VA, including 2 million rural veterans.

After veterans were turned away from a VA clinic in West Palm Beach, Florida, in January, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) wrote to Acting VA Secretary Dat Tran, urging him to include these veterans in their covid vaccination program.

Stone said the agency does not have the authorization to provide services to these veterans. “We have been talking to Capitol Hill about how to reconcile that,” he said. “Some of these are very elderly veterans and we don’t want to turn anybody away.”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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Our love of the cloud is making a green energy future impossible

Mark Mills Contributor

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Mark Mills is the author of the book, “Digital Cathedrals: The Information Infrastructure Era,” and is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, and a partner in Cottonwood Venture Partners, an energy-tech venture fund.

An epic number of citizens are video-conferencing to work in these lockdown times. But as they trade in a gas-burning commute for digital connectivity, their personal energy use for each two hours of video is greater than the share of fuel they would have consumed on a four-mile train ride. Add to this, millions of students ‘driving’ to class on the internet instead of walking.

Meanwhile in other corners of the digital universe, scientists furiously deploy algorithms to accelerate research. Yet, the pattern-learning phase for a single artificial intelligence application can consume more compute energy than 10,000 cars do in a day.

This grand ‘experiment’ in shifting societal energy use is visible, at least indirectly, in one high-level fact set. By the first week of April, U.S. gasoline use had collapsed by 30 percent, but overall electric demand was down less than seven percent. That dynamic is in fact indicative of an underlying trend for the future. While transportation fuel use will eventually rebound, real economic growth is tied to our electrically fueled digital future.

The COVID-19 crisis highlights just how much more sophisticated and robust the 2020 internet is from what existed as recently as 2008 when the economy last collapsed, an internet ‘century’ ago. If a national lockdown had occurred back then, most of the tens of millions who now telecommute would have joined the nearly 20 million who got laid off. Nor would it have been nearly as practical for universities and schools to have tens of millions of students learning from home.

Analysts have widely documented massive increases in internet traffic from all manner of stay-at-home activities. Digital traffic measures have spiked for everything from online groceries to video games and movie streaming. So far, the system has ably handled it all, and the cloud has been continuously available, minus the occasional hiccup.

There’s more to the cloud’s role during the COVID-19 crisis than one-click teleconferencing and video chatting. Telemedicine has finally been unleashed. And we’ve seen, for example, apps quickly emerge to help self-evaluate symptoms and AI tools put to work to enhance X-ray diagnoses and to help with contact tracing. The cloud has also allowed researchers to rapidly create “data lakes” of clinical information to fuel the astronomical capacities of today’s supercomputers deployed in pursuit of therapeutics and vaccines. 

The future of AI and the cloud will bring us a lot more of the above, along with practical home diagnostics and useful VR-based telemedicine, not to mention hyper-accelerated clinical trials for new therapies. And this says nothing about what the cloud will yet enable in the 80 percent of the economy that’s not part of healthcare.

For all of the excitement that these new capabilities offer us though, the bedrock behind all of that cloud computing will remain consistent — and consistently increasing — demand for energy. Far from saving energy, our AI-enabled workplace future uses more energy than ever before, a challenge the tech industry rapidly needs to assess and consider in the years ahead.

The new information infrastructure

The cloud is vital infrastructure. That will and should reshape many priorities. Only a couple of months ago, tech titans were elbowing each other aside to issue pledges about reducing energy usage and promoting ‘green’ energy for their operations. Doubtlessly, such issues will remain important. But reliability and resilience — in short, availability — will now move to the top priority.

As Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) last month reminded his constituency, in a diplomatic understatement, about the future of wind and solar: “Today, we’re witnessing a society that has an even greater reliance on digital technology” which “highlights the need for policy makers to carefully assess the potential availability of flexibility resources under extreme conditions.” In the economically stressed times that will follow the COVID-19 crisis, the price society must pay to ensure “availability” will matter far more.

It is still prohibitively expensive to provide high reliability electricity with solar and wind technologies. Those that claim solar/wind are at “grid parity” aren’t looking at reality. The data show that overall costs of grid kilowatt-hours are roughly 200 to 300 percent higher in Europe where the share of power from wind/solar is far greater than in the U.S. It bears noting that big industrial electricity users, including tech companies, generally enjoy deep discounts from the grid average, which leaves consumers burdened with higher costs.

Put in somewhat simplistic terms: this means that consumers are paying more to power their homes so that big tech companies can pay less for power to keep smartphones lit with data. (We will see how tolerant citizens are of this asymmetry in the post-crisis climate.)

Many such realities are, in effect, hidden by the fact that the cloud’s energy dynamic is the inverse of that for personal transportation. For the latter, consumers literally see where 90 percent of energy is spent when filling up their car’s gas tank. When it comes to a “connected” smartphone though, 99 percent of energy dependencies are remote and hidden in the cloud’s sprawling but largely invisible infrastructure. 

For the uninitiated, the voracious digital engines that power the cloud are located in the thousands of out-of-sight, nondescript warehouse-scale data centers where thousands of refrigerator-sized racks of silicon machines power our applications and where the exploding volumes of data are stored. Even many of the digital cognoscenti are surprised to learn that each such rack burns more electricity annually than 50 Teslas. On top of that, these data centers are connected to markets with even more power-burning hardware that propel bytes along roughly one billion miles of information highways comprised of glass cables and through 4 million cell towers forging an even vaster invisible virtual highway system.

Thus the global information infrastructure — counting all its constituent features from networks and data centers to the astonishingly energy-intensive fabrication processes — has grown from a non-existent system several decades ago to one that now uses roughly 2,000 terawatt-hours of electricity a year. That’s over 100 times more electricity than all the world’s five million electric cars use each year.

Put in individual terms: this means the pro rata, average electricity used by each smartphone is greater than the annual energy used by a typical home refrigerator. And all such estimates are based on the state of affairs of a few years ago.

A more digital future will inevitable use more energy

Some analysts now claim that even as digital traffic has soared in recent years, efficiency gains have now muted or even flattened growth in data-centric energy use. Such claims face recent countervailing factual trends. Since 2016, there’s been a dramatic acceleration in data center spending on hardware and buildings along with a huge jump in the power density of that hardware.

Regardless of whether digital energy demand growth may or may not have slowed in recent years, a far faster expansion of the cloud is coming. Whether cloud energy demand grows commensurately will depend in large measure in just how fast data use rises, and in particular what the cloud is used for. Any significant increases in energy demand will make far more difficult the engineering and economic challenges of meeting the cloud’s central operational metric: always available.

More square feet of data centers have been built in the past five years than during the entire prior decade. There is even a new category of “hyperscale” data centers: silicon-filled buildings each of which covers over one million square feet. Think of these in real-estate terms as the equivalent to the dawn of skyscrapers a century ago. But while there are fewer than 50 hyper-tall buildings the size of the Empire State Building in the world today, there are already some 500 hyperscale data centers across the planet. And the latter have a collective energy appetite greater than 6,000 skyscrapers.

We don’t have to guess what’s propelling growth in cloud traffic. The big drivers at the top of the list are AI, more video and especially data-intense virtual reality, as well as the expansion of micro data centers on the “edge” of networks.

Until recently, most news about AI has focused on its potential as a job-killer. The truth is that AI is the latest in a long line of productivity-driving tools that will replicate what productivity growth has always done over the course of history: create net growth in employment and more wealth for more people. We will need a lot more of both for the COVID-19 recovery. But that’s a story for another time. For now, it’s already clear that AI has a role to play in everything from personal health analysis and drug delivery to medical research and job hunting. The odds are that AI will ultimately be seen as a net “good.”

In energy terms though, AI is the most data hungry and power intensive use of silicon yet created — and the world wants to use billions of such AI chips. In general, the compute power devoted to machine learning has been doubling every several months, a kind of hyper version of Moore’s Law. Last year, Facebook, for example, pointed to AI as a key reason for its data center power use doubling annually.

In our near future we should also expect that, after weeks of lockdowns experiencing the deficiencies of video conferencing on small planar screens, consumers are ready for the age of VR-based video. VR entails as much as a 1000x increase in image density and will drive data traffic up roughly 20-fold. Despite fits and starts, the technology is ready, and the coming wave of high-speed 5G networks have the capacity to handle all those extra pixels. It requires repeating though: since all bits are electrons, this means more virtual reality leads to more power demands than are in today’s forecasts.

Add to all this the recent trend of building micro-data centers closer to customers on “the edge.” Light speed is too slow to deliver AI-driven intelligence from remote data centers to real-time applications such as VR for conferences and games, autonomous vehicles, automated manufacturing, or “smart” physical infrastructures, including smart hospitals and diagnostic systems. (The digital and energy intensity of healthcare is itself already high and rising: a square foot of a hospital already uses some five-fold more energy than a square foot in other commercial buildings.)

Edge data centers are now forecast to add 100,000 MW of power demand before a decade is out. For perspective, that’s far more than the power capacity of the entire California electric grid. Again, none of this was on any energy forecaster’s roadmap in recent years.

Will digital energy priorities shift?

Which brings us to a related question: Will cloud companies in the post-coronavirus era continue to focus spending on energy indulgences or on availability? By indulgences, I mean those corporate investments made in wind/solar generation somewhere else (including overseas) other than to directly power one’s own facility. Those remote investments are ‘credited’ to a local facility to claim it is green powered, even though it doesn’t actually power the facility.

Nothing prevents any green-seeking firm from physically disconnecting from the conventional grid and building their own local wind/solar generation – except that to do so and ensure 24/7 availability would result in a roughly 400 percent increase in that facility’s electricity costs.

As it stands today regarding the prospects for purchased indulgences, it’s useful to know that the global information infrastructure already consumes more electricity than is produced by all of the world’s solar and wind farms combined. Thus there isn’t enough wind/solar power on the planet for tech companies — much less anyone else — to buy as ‘credits’ to offset all digital energy use.

The handful of researchers who are studying digital energy trends expect that cloud fuel use could rise at least 300 percent in the coming decade, and that was before our global pandemic. Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency forecasts a ‘mere’ doubling in global renewable electricity over that timeframe. That forecast was also made in the pre-coronavirus economy. The IEA now worries that the recession will drain fiscal enthusiasm for expensive green plans.

Regardless of the issues and debates around the technologies used to make electricity, the priority for operators of the information infrastructure will increasingly, and necessarily, shift to its availability. That’s because the cloud is rapidly becoming even more inextricably linked to our economic health, as well as our mental and physical health.

All this should make us optimistic about what comes on the other side of the recovery from the pandemic and unprecedented shutdown of our economy. Credit Microsoft, in its pre-COVID 19 energy manifesto, for observing that “advances in human prosperity … are inextricably tied to the use of energy.” Our cloud-centric 21st century infrastructure will be no different. And that will turn out to be a good thing.

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Opinion: Piece by piece, a factory-made answer for a housing squeeze

VALLEJO, Calif. — California is in the middle of an affordable-housing crisis that cities across the state are struggling to solve.

Here, in a football-field-size warehouse where workers used to make submarines, Holliday recently opened Factory OS, a factory that manufactures homes.

In one end go wood, pipes, tile, sinks and toilets; out another come individual apartments that can be trucked to a construction site and bolted together in months.

“If we don’t build housing differently, then no one can have any housing,” Holliday said during a recent tour as he passed assembly-line workstations and stacks of raw materials like windows, pipes and rolls of pink insulation.

Almost a decade after the recession flattened the housing industry, causing waves of contractors to go bankrupt and laid-off construction workers to leave the business for other jobs, builders have yet to regain their previous form. Today the pace of new apartment and housing construction sits at a little over half the 2006 peak.

The United States needs new housing, but its building industry isn’t big enough to provide it. The number of residential construction workers is 23 percent lower than in 2006, while higher-skill trades like plumbers, carpenters and electricians are down close to 17 percent. With demand for housing high and the supply of workers short, builders are bidding up prices for the limited number of contractors.

Construction prices nationwide have risen about 5 percent a year for the past three years, according to the Turner Building Cost Index. Costs have gone up even faster in big cities and across California, according to RSMeans, a unit of Gordian, which compiles construction data. In the Bay Area, builders say construction prices are up 30 percent over the past three years — so much that even luxury projects are being stalled by rising costs.

“It’s reached the point where you cannot get enough rent or you cannot sell enough units to make it a viable deal,” said Lou Vasquez, a founding partner and managing director of Build, a real estate developer in San Francisco.

The surge in construction prices is coming at the worst possible time for booming cities like New York, Seattle and San Francisco, already dealing with an affordable-housing crunch that has increased the homeless populations and stoked acrimonious debates about growth and gentrification. City and state legislators have tried to tackle their housing problems with proposals to increase subsidized affordable housing, reduce building regulations and make it legal to build taller.

But even if every overpriced city suddenly overcame the thicket of zoning rules and neighborhood opposition that make it difficult to build new housing in the first place — which seems doubtful — today’s diminished building industry would lack the capacity to build at the needed pace. This affects the rich as well as the poor, because it raises the cost of high-end condos and affordable housing alike.

This year, Californians will vote on a proposed $4 billion bond to build more subsidized affordable housing. In San Francisco, where developers say the per-unit construction cost is edging toward $800,000, that would buy about 5,000 units, a relative blip. “Costs have risen so much that it is not possible to build homes where people want to live at the prices and rents they can afford,” said John Burns, founder of John Burns Real Estate Consulting.

All this has prompted developers like Holliday to go scrambling for cheaper and less labor-intensive construction methods — and investors to pour money into startups that promise to do just that. Katerra, a 3-year-old prefabricated building company in the Silicon Valley city of Menlo Park, has raised $1.1 billion in venture capital. A number of other building startups including Blokable, based in Seattle; Kasita, based in Austin, Texas; and RAD Urban, based in Oakland, California, have all popped up over the past five years.

“The current system can’t meet demand and that’s resulting in a lack of opportunity for some folks and a major hit to the economy,” said Stonly Baptiste, a co-founder of Urban Us, a Brooklyn-based venture capital firm that invested in Blokable. “These aren’t small problems, and they aren’t small markets.”

The technologies vary but generally involve simplifying construction through prefabricated panels that can be assembled like Ikea furniture and modular apartments that can be stacked together like Lego bricks. A recent survey by FMI, a management-consulting and investment banking company focused on the engineering and construction industry, found a third of respondents said they were looking at some form of off-site construction, a steep rise from 2010. The interest extends from housing to hotels to medical facilities, industrial companies and even fast-food restaurants.

“It’s one of those things that looks like an overnight success but it’s taken 10 years and hundreds of people toiling,” said Chris Giattina, chief executive of BLOX, a Birmingham, Alabama, company that builds hospitals with modular components.

Brokers of Risk

The global construction industry is a $10 trillion behemoth whose structures determine where people live, how they get to work and what cities look like. It is also one of the world’s least efficient businesses. The construction productivity rate — how much building workers do for each hour of labor they put in — has been flat since 1945, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. Over that period, sectors like agriculture, manufacturing and retail saw their productivity rates surge by as much as 1,500 percent. In other words, while the rest of the economy has been supercharged by machines, computers and robots, construction companies are about as efficient as they were in World War II.

To understand this, consider how buildings are actually built. It all starts with the developer, who doesn’t actually build anything but instead secures a piece of land and a loan, and gets the project approved by the government. At that point the money is passed to the general contractor that made a successful bid to build the project, who passes it to subcontractors that won the bidding for things like plumbing and sheet metal work, which often pass it to even more subcontractors.

Contractors describe this handoff as “brokering risk.” What they mean is that while everyone in the chain has agreed to build a certain piece of the project for a set amount of money and in a given amount of time, none of them are sure they can do so as cheaply or quickly as they’ve promised. They broker that risk by paying someone else to do it for them, minus a small fee.

“Say you’re a general contractor and your subcontractor agrees to do a job. Once we have a contract I don’t care how many man hours you put into it because that’s your problem now,” said Randy Miller, chief executive of RAD Urban, describing the thinking behind the process.

The goal of prefabricated building companies is to turn this model on its head. Instead of offloading risk, the contractor assumes all of it. Instead of sending jobs to subcontractors, they hire their own factory workers. “The general contractor says, ‘Oh my God, construction is scary, let me broker all that risk,'” Miller said. “I’m saying, ‘Oh my God, construction is scary, let me plan and control it.”

The basic concept isn’t new. In 1624, Massachusetts settlers built homes out of prefabricated materials shipped from England. The pattern was repeated in Australia, Africa and India as the British Empire shipped colonists and structures wide across the globe, according to “Prefab Architecture,” by Ryan E. Smith, a professor at the University of Utah.

Over the next few centuries, new versions of the idea seemed to pop up anywhere people needed to build lots of homes in a hurry — during the California Gold Rush, after the Chicago fire, and through America’s westward expansion. In the early part of the 20th century, Sears sold tens of thousands of kits for Sears Modern Homes, which consisted of prefabricated parts and panels that buyers assembled.

Along the way, the construction industry absorbed manufacturing concepts such as the assembly-line techniques that were utilized by Levitt & Sons, the pioneer of mass-built subdivisions. But the idea of factory-built housing was never adopted long enough or widely enough to make an impact, at least in the United States.

One reason the United States has lagged behind Europe, Australia and Asia — which all have well-established companies doing modular and prefabricated building — is that it is a predominantly suburban nation, and the vast supply of open land has kept the cost of single-family-home building relatively low. Another is that the construction industry has slim profit margins and invests little in research and development.

The chances of being burned are high, and each high-profile failure leads to a furlough of the concept. In the mid-2000s housing boom, Pulte Homes, one of the country’s largest builders, opened a prefabrication plant that aimed to revolutionize how homes were built. The company closed it with the onset of the housing bust in 2007.

Now, instead of single-family homes, companies doing prefab building are focusing on higher-density condominiums and apartments. That’s because, while single-family home construction remains well below its level before the recession, multifamily condominium and apartment buildings have rebounded strongly. “Our goal is to be able to do a 40-story tower in 12 months, at half the cost of traditional construction,” said Randy Miller of RAD Urban.

Still, even if builders are able to reduce construction costs, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will be successful. Behind each of these companies is a bet that they can build far more efficiently than current methods. That bet has yet to be proven, at least on a large scale.

Efficiency vs. Workers

Holliday of Factory OS started thinking about modular housing about four years ago, when he was struggling to build a project in Truckee, California. The idea was to build 800 to 1,000 high-density apartments and condominiums, but “the numbers wouldn’t work,” he said. “You couldn’t get the construction costs down enough.”

Holliday floated the idea of modular building to his longtime contractor, Larry Pace, from Cannon Constructors, who over the past four decades has built various projects from one-off homes to office towers. “I said ‘modular jobs have been a fiasco — we don’t need that in our lives,'” Pace recalled, adding an expletive for emphasis.

But Holliday persisted, and he and Pace used modular technology from two manufacturers to build four projects in the Bay Area. They are planning to do the same with the original Truckee development. Pace became so comfortable with modular that he suggested that they find some investors and build their own factory.

On a recent afternoon, Pace laid out the factory’s process. At the first station, just past the door, four workers toiled above and below a raised platform to build what would eventually become the floor. The two men up top laid down flooring while a man and woman stood below simultaneously installing pipes.

From there the unit would move steadily down the line, and, over 21 additional stations, would acquire toilets, indoor walls, outdoor walls, a roof, electric outlets, windows, sinks, countertops and tiling. It takes about a week to finish a unit, Pace said. The goal is to churn out about 2,000 apartments a year, which would be turned into four- and five-story buildings with 80 to 150 units each.

For workers, factory building seems to mean lower wages but steadier work. Factory OS pays about $30 an hour with medical insurance and two weeks of vacation. That’s about half what workers can make on a construction site, but the work is more regular and, for many, requires less commuting.

Tony Vandewark, a 51-year-old foreman at Factory OS, is OK with the trade-off. He lives a few minutes from the factory in Vallejo, where homes cost less than half what they do closer to San Francisco. Contrast that with a job he once had in the Silicon Valley city of Sunnyvale. He drove two hours to work and three hours home before deciding to rent a room so he could stay closer to work on weekdays.

“On a job site, you can go do piece work and make really big money, but then the job is gone,” he said.

In addition to not being rained on, one of the key differences between a construction site and Factory OS is that any worker can be trained to do any job. And for old-school trade unions, that is a declaration of war. “The business model is ‘Hooray for me,'” without regard for anyone else, said Larry Mazzola Jr., business manager of UA Local 38, a San Francisco plumbers union with about 2,500 members across Northern California.

Factory OS is not anti-union: It has a contract with the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council, which has organized other modular factories and is banking on the technology’s continued growth. The issue is that builders are laid out like a Detroit auto factory, where one union represents all of the workers, and workers can be trained to do any job within the company walls.

That is a huge departure from construction sites, where unions representing plumbers, electricians, carpenters and various other trades each control their piece of the building process. Last year Mazzola wrote a letter to San Francisco’s mayor, Ed Lee, a month before he died, urging him to deny any city business — such as contracts for subsidized housing — to Factory OS.

“Any decision to use Factory OS shows a blatant disregard for the other craft unions,” he wrote. He asked the mayor to refrain from contracting with the company unless it allowed craft unions to do their pieces of the work. “We realize modular is coming and we want to be part of it, but not at the expense of our workers, which is what’s happening right now,” Mazzola said.

Jay Bradshaw, director of organizing for the carpenters council representing Factory OS workers, said that would be impractical. Think back to that first station, where four people worked above and below the floor. In Mazzola’s world, a plumbers union would represent the workers installing pipes, while other unions would represent the workers up top.

“It would never work to have upward of 10 or 15 labor organizations at a single employer in a factory setting,” Bradshaw said.

For Bradshaw, the real fight isn’t defending job titles but making sure construction workers remain part of a union at all. A short drive from Factory OS, at a carpenters training center, the union is developing a program to train housing-factory workers — something that, it hopes, will prepare more people for an industry that it has come to see as inevitable.

“It sure blows the hell out of building in China,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

CONOR DOUGHERTY © 2018 The New York Times

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/06/opinion-piece-by-piece-factory-made.html

[localsbusinessseo-blog]

4 Tough Questions to Ask a Marketing Agency before Hiring Them

Whether you are large enterprise or a small business, you sometimes question your marketing decisions. Regardless of the number of agencies I have worked with or the campaigns I have run, I question myself right up until the first few leads come in, or articles get written or the first time I have to present the success or failure of a campaign. In the end, I rely greatly on my team and my partner agencies to help assure I have effectively spent my budget and am getting the most from it. That’s why it is important to make sure you do have the right team working with you.

So, what I thought would be helpful is to share some of my learning’s related to choosing the right partner marketing agency to help you through those times when you have questions or need to outsource your entire project to an agency.

Tough Question #1: Who will really be working on my account and will I have direct access to all assigned agency staff?

Well, that depends. Some agencies have a hierarchical process structure that requires a single point of contact between the client and the agency itself. It makes life easier on the agency’s end. From the client perspective, you would ideally have direct access (phone, email etc.) to all individuals working on your account. This includes everybody from the Production Artist up to the person ultimately responsible for your business (usually an Account Executive or agency principal). Ultimately though, that overhead can cost you time and money, which can make smaller projects more costly.

My personal preference is to work with agencies that have a more senior person connected to my account. One that knows the ins and outs of getting things done or is even doing the project themselves. It’s kind of like when I go to a restaurant and order my food. I want a waitress that will listen, identify costs for ala cart items that may or may not be needed, and know that special orders take longer or will cost more. The same works for an agency. What has generally worked for me is to either work with a smaller agency where you get access to more senior staff, or make sure you have an experienced account executive that understands your processes, your business, and their own firm’s cost structure (no ala cart, surprise invoices).

Tough question #2: How will the agency measure marketing success?

That’s an easy question to answer, but only if you ask it. There are many ways to track results via software and systems…quality of campaign responses, number of new customers, media coverage, internet conversions, web traffic, email clicks, etc. But, the first question you need to ask is, what is most important to me as the client, and is that what is important to my “boss”?

Before moving forward on a project, ask yourself, what is most important to measure, and then what results would be adequate to justify the time and cost involved. Be realistic though, and look to your marketing agency to be a partner, not a vendor. For example, you may have the goal of generating 100 qualified opportunities, but have only a limited budget, a small market, or don’t have the sales resources to follow up on leads generated. This is also why an experienced Account Executive and marketing team is essential. They help you set your goals so that you can meet them as a team. Once you have set your goals and objectives, you can then build a plan to address the cause and-effect relationship between your marketing program and your results. Lastly, I cannot stress enough that you communicate them often to your sales team, executives, and marketing partners as each will play a role in their success.

Tough Question #3: Should I market to sell or educate?

Let me answer this question with a question. Do you like sales pressure? I don’t. If you are looking to build a long term relationship with a customer, then without question, the better method to use is Education-Based Marketing. People are tired of selling and sales pressure. Trust needs to be built. You do this through demonstrating that you are a leader in your field and have solved the problem for others who are similar to themselves. Prospective customers want information and advice, which is the foundation of Education-Based Marketing. And until business owners realize what customers want — and give it to them — many companies will continue to get a poor response to their marketing.

Look to multiple techniques to get your message across. Training videos on YouTube may work for some clients, where white papers on the same topic, delivered via email may work better for others. Today, common educational techniques include blogs, white papers, case studies, articles and videos…and most can be produced at a fairly low cost. Just make sure you are giving people what they want in the medium they want it in.

In looking for marketing support, look for people who specialize in education as well as selling. It will help your reputation, your relationship and your SEO results.

Tough Question #4: Is it better to work with a marketing person/team on an hourly rate, project rate or retainer?

A project may take 10 minutes or 10 weeks. That being the case, if I were to charge clients by the hour, I’d have to know exactly how long the project will take and that there would be no surprises. An hourly rate means you will be billed exactly on the time it takes me to do the job.

In the end, some agencies have to charge for additional time, so must recoup it in other areas. I am not as big a proponent of an hourly quote because

#1, different skill sets have different rates (ie a Production Artist will not be billed at the same rate as the Creative Director), #2, I have to track hours tied to specific projects. An administrative hassle.

Now of course, for larger agencies, clients may have an advantage in that clients can selectively bypass the higher-tiered employees for ones with a lower billing rate but you don’t want to ask a Production Artist about overall marketing strategy.

For small projects, ask to be billed in increments that are smaller than 1 hour. For larger projects, many smaller customers like to be quoted on a project basis. Together we develop the plan, I provide a quote, and the project is then completed and paid in stages. It is a good balance when you want to test an agency for performance and build a longer term working relationship between client and agency. It does, however, mean the agency is less likely to negotiate terms of an agreement since the long term relationship may be uncertain.

As an agency owner, I personally prefer a retainer. Why? Because it allows me to allocate costs and hours appropriately. And for the client, he/she can count on me for X number of hours allocated to them. This allows for some negotiating room with both parties. For example, when using a retainer, my discussion with the client would be that I would usually charge X for this amount of work but in the interest of developing a long-term relationship, I’ll charge X minus Y%. Furthermore, in the spirit of fairness, I wouldn’t quibble if the amount of work in a given month went a little over (and I wouldn’t expect that the client would complain if a month was a little light. In the end, it works out even.

One alternative in how I offer projects versus other agencies, is that I bundle my services into larger projects with a set price structure. This allows the client to get the advantage of a retainer model (a cost reduced set of integrated deliverables) with a set quote for completion of the project.

The Tough Conclusion

I know this is article may be a bit controversial for some of my agency friends. Some may not agree with me at all. Regardless, I want to hear from you. Are these the tough questions you would ask? Send me more.

[noramoya]

by Denise Petski Michael Jackson’s Halloween, a new, hourlong animated special, featuring the King of Pop’s music as its soundtrack, will premiere this fall on CBS. Created and produced by Optimum Productions, the Michael Jackson company now owned by his estate, the special will feature the voices of actors Christine Baranski, Kiersey Clemons, Alan Cumming, George Eads, Brad Garrett, Lucy Liu, Jim Parsons and Lucas Till. The special follows millennials Vincent (Till) and Victoria (Clemons), who meet “accidentally” on Halloween night and find themselves, along with Ichabod the dog, at a mysterious hotel located at 777 Jackson Street called This Place Hotel. Once inside, Vincent and Victoria are sent on an unexpected, magical adventure of personal discovery, culminating in a spectacular dance finale featuring an animated Michael Jackson. John Branca and John McClain, co-executors of the Estate of Michael Jackson, serve as executive producers. Daniel Chuba is the producer and Mark A.Z. Dippé is the director. ****************************************** Many, including myself, presumed we were finally building up for the official announcement of the long promised Thriller 3D film project. Alas, although that was not to be for this go-round, we still have a project that is centered around a Halloween theme. (Update: Thriller 3D has been scheduled to premiere at the Vienna Film Festival August 30-September 9). However, the announcement had no sooner been made than a barrage of negative reactions swiftly engulfed social media. That’s really no surprise. These days, the announcement of any major MJ-related project is usually a polarizing affair, but this project, in particular, seems to have elicited a lot of strongly negative reactions-somewhat inexplicable, I think, given the overall benign nature of this project. Sure, it’s not Thriller 3D or Dangerous25 (a project that many were hoping to see come to light) but what could possibly be so wrong with an hour long animated special on a major network, featuring Michael Jackson’s best known dark themed works? Well, the answer to that question is quite complex, and to fully understand it, one must take into account how deeply divided the fan base has become over the estate executors and how deeply that issue of trust vs. mistrust has become, especially when it comes to A: Projects that profit off of his legacy, and B: How that legacy is being handled. As I have emphasized many times, I have always been and remain neutral when it comes to the politics surrounding the fandom and estate. Overall, I believe the estate has made some smart moves when it comes to preserving Michael Jackson’s legacy (This Is It, the Cirque du Soleil Immortal show and One) but also some major missteps. The controversy over the Michael album has forever tainted any posthumous music releases, and the insistence on “contemporizing” Michael’s music (rather than simply allowing the tracks to stand on their own merit) has not helped matters. True, they did manage to wrangle a Top Ten hit with the updated “Love Never Felt So Good” but, for the most part, there have been far more misses than hits with the estate’s attempts to ignite interest in a posthumous musical career for Michael Jackson. In a recent article, in fact, it was stated that there were no future plans to release anymore music from the vaults. That is a downright shame, as they are still sitting on a ton of unreleased gems that many fans want to hear. There is certainly still a market for unreleased MJ tracks; it’s just that fans want these tracks, for the most part, in their raw but pristine state, not over produced by a Timbaland or L.A. Reid to try to mimic everything else on the radio these days. I think it may be safe to assume, then, that the estate has not had a very good track record for its management of Michael Jackson’s posthumous musical output. I’ve said many times, if they had simply combined the best of the unreleased tracks on Michael (minus the controversial Cascio tracks) and the best of the demos that made it onto Xscape, they could have had a great posthumous MJ album. The tragedy is that, between the insistence on including debatable tracks (which weren’t exactly great tracks to begin with) and the insistence that every MJ track must somehow be “updated” to compete in today’s market, the estate has pretty much blown any confidence that fans may have once had in their ability to successfully market a musical career for Michael Jackson beyond the grave. And here we can certainly add that this shaky confidence has not been helped by the loss of the Sony/ATV catalog, nor the little matter of that 750 million dollar debt with Uncle Sam (which I will still be addressing in due time). However, when it comes to the musical legacy that Michael created in his lifetime-those seven adult solo albums and the many classic tracks they yielded-the outlook has been much brighter. Clearly, public demand for those songs isn’t apt to disappear any time soon, and it is in the continued public demand for those songs-as well as the continued popularity of Michael’s brand and image-that largely keeps the estate’s bread buttered. The estate’s marketing of Michael Jackson’s known works has been for the most part successful, though still occasionally marred by some questionable choices (for example, licensing the use of “Bad” for Angry Birds, a move that many felt reduced the track’s powerful political message to a silly rumble between cartoon birds). Indeed, these are the kinds of arguments and debates that continue to drive the polarization of the fandom over most estate decisions. Inevitably, some are going to argue that these decisions cheapen the message of his songs and will ultimately water down the impact of his legacy, while others argue-just as vehemently-that this is exactly the kind of exposure that will keep his music, image, and memory alive for future generations. Both arguments have their validity, and this brings me to today’s topic. Michael Jackson himself was an artist who constantly balanced the often polarizing extremes of artistic purity on the one hand, and commercialism on the other (Michael did love sales, and anyone who would wish to argue that sales did not matter to him is sadly deluded). This fact is partly what makes the posthumous marketing of Michael Jackson product a particularly challenging affair. The balance between “what Michael would have wanted,” “how Michael would have done it” and what is going to keep fans and consumers happy is a constant challenge. Even this aspect raises another interesting question: With the wealth of material and projects left behind by Michael Jackson that were completed-but have yet to receive their due-do we really need new projects that have nothing to do with him other than the lending of his name? Here in particular (especially since we are talking a Halloween special) I am referring to the short film Ghosts, a film whose re-release fans, including myself, have spent years clamoring for. As far as the general public is concerned, many are still unaware of this 1997 closet classic, which given the right promotional push and a little updated HD magic, could certainly still captivate a modern audience. Personally, I would love, love love to see Ghosts re-released as a major broadcast special. However, I do think that in all fairness, we have to consider the uphill battle that the estate is against. There are some factions simply waiting to tear down and rip to shreds anything the estate does, regardless of rhyme or reason. As soon as the announcement hit, many of the reactions across social media were viscerally over the top. Granted, I think much of the negative reaction has stemmed from a long series of gradually building disappointments over estate projects, but I’m just not sure that there is anything in the idea of a Halloween cartoon special to warrant so many hostile reactions, even if, granted, the announcement of the project may not have warranted such a major buildup. This post is not intended as an outright defense of the project-which, granted, could still turn out to be a disaster-but I would like to directly address some of the criticisms that the project has raised, and why I don’t necessarily agree with all of them. For starters, a point to consider is that this is going to be a major network broadcast, which in itself speaks volumes about the renewed faith in the Michael Jackson brand. Obviously, its target audience is going to be kids, and the plan seems to be that this might develop into one of those perennial seasonal projects that returns year after year. That will depend, of course, on ratings and the overall quality of the program, all things that have yet to be proven, but the fact that CBS is willing to take its chances and broadcast a Michael Jackson themed special geared towards children speaks volumes about how far the healing process has come in the re-branding of Michael Jackson. "

[viralhottopics]

Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web

Chrome development team from left, Mark Larson, Brian Rakowski, Darin Fisher, and Ben Goodger Photo:Joe Pugliese

Brian Rakowski walks to the whiteboard in a small conference room in Building 41 on Google’s Mountain View campus. A lanky, gregarious man in his twenties, Rakowski is the product manager of a top-secret project that’s been under way for more than two years. The weekly Monday meeting of managers or “leads,” as Google puts it in its nonhierarchical way will be one of the last before the upcoming launch. Rakowski writes 12 items on the board with a black dry-erase marker. The first is “State of the Release.” It’s late August, and the release in question is called Chrome, Google’s first Web browser. Since a browser is the linchpin of Web activity the framework for our searching, reading, buying, banking, Facebooking, chatting, video watching, music appreciation, and porn consumption this is huge for Google, a step that needed to wait until the company had, essentially, come of age. It is an explicit attempt to accelerate the movement of computing off the desktop and into the cloud where Google holds advantage. And it’s an aggressive move destined to put the company even more squarely in the crosshairs of its rival Microsoft, which long ago crushed the most fabled browser of all, Netscape Navigator. A Google browser has been rumored for so long that most people have stopped talking about it. But the folks in this room know that the talking will soon begin again. Chrome is due to rock the Web just 16 days from this meeting. It turns out the state of the release is … not so bad. At Release Build Minus One ideally, the last version before the public beta hits the streets there are only five “blocking” bugs, all of which Rakowski and team deem fixable. “Things are looking good,” says Mark Larson, one of the tech leads. “What are we missing?” asks Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management. “What’s keeping you up at night?” “It’s not Chrome,” says Darin Fisher, an engineer who coauthored the first prototype. That gets a laugh because everyone knows he’s got a 10-week-old at home. Rakowski takes a red marker and puts an X next to the State of the Release item. The Google browser is one step closer to reality. Why is Google building a browser? A better question is, why did it take so long for Google to build a browser? After all, as Pichai says, “our entire business is people using a browser to access us and the Web.” “The browser matters,” CEO Eric Schmidt says. He should know, because he was CTO of Sun Microsystems during the great browser wars of the 1990s. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know it, too. “When I joined Google in 2001, Larry and Sergey immediately said, ‘We should build our own browser,’” Schmidt says. “And I said no.” It wasn’t the right time, Schmidt told them. “I did not believe that the company was strong enough to withstand a browser war,” he says. “It was important that our strategic aspirations be relatively under the radar.” Nonetheless, the idea persisted and rumors percolated. After a 2004 New York Times article quoted “a person who has detailed knowledge of the company’s business” saying a browser was in the works, Schmidt had to publicly deny it. But behind the scenes, the subject remained a running argument between Schmidt and the founders. As a kind of compromise, Google assembled a team to work on improvements for the open source browser Firefox, spearheaded by browser wizards Ben Goodger and Fisher. (Both had worked with Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind Firefox.) Another hiring coup came when Linus Upson, a 37-year-old engineer whose pedigree includes a stint at NeXT, signed up as a director of engineering. “This was very clever on Larry and Sergey’s part,” Schmidt says, “because, of course, these people doing Firefox extensions are perfectly capable of doing a great browser.” Sure enough, in the spring of 2006, the Firefox group began talking among themselves about designing a new app. They loved Firefox but they recognized a flaw in all current browsers. When Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and the codebase at the heart of Firefox were originally conceived, browsing was less complex. Now, however, functions that previously could be performed only on the desktop email, spreadsheets, database management are increasingly handled online. In the coming era of cloud computing, the Web will be much more than just a means of delivering content it will be a platform in its own right. The problem with revamping existing browsers to accommodate this concept is that they have developed an ecology of add-on extensions (toolbars, RSS readers, etc.) that would be hopelessly disrupted by a radical upgrade. “As a Firefox developer, you love to innovate, but you’re always worried that it means in the next version all the extensions will be broken,” Fisher says. “And indeed, that’s what happens.” The conclusion was obvious: Only by building its own software could Google bring the browser into the cloud age and potentially trigger a spiral of innovation not seen since Microsoft and Netscape one-upped each other almost monthly.

Chrome: Here’s What Shines

Google wanted a browser optimized for cloud computing, with a design emphasis on simplicity and speed. Key features:

Speed Blazing fast JavaScript engine opens the door to more advanced Web applications.

Navigation The “omnibox” combines the search and address boxes, and pop-up thumbnails show your most-visited destinations.

Availability The open source software was launched in over 40 languages, but Windows only; Mac and Linux versions are in the works.

Reliability Tabs run in isolation, so if one crashes, no others are affected. Also, you can drag tabs to create new windows.

Privacy Browsing history is now searchable and editable; incognito mode offers private surfing.

One key change they had in mind was something called a multiprocess architecture, the system that helps the computer keep going when an application crashes or freezes. Why not extend that idea to browsers, so if something crashes in a tab, the other tabs are unperturbed? Also, for that matter, why not set things up so that you can drag an existing tab to create a new window? Starting from scratch had other advantages. You could design it to look cleaner and run faster, the twin dogmas of the Google corporate religion. Around June 2006, Goodger, Fisher, and another former Mozillan named Brian Ryner cooked up a small prototype. Their first big decision involved the choice of a rendering engine, the software that processes the HTML code of a Web page into the stuff that appears on your screen. The two major open source options were Gecko, used by Firefox, and WebKit, which powers Apple’s Safari browser. The word was that WebKit (which had already been adopted by the group developing Google’s Android mobile operating system) could be nasty fast three times as fast as Gecko, in one example. In a few weeks, they had a simple application running WebKit on Windows that kept going even when a Web page crashed a tab. Early on, Goodger recalls, “our prototypes had a picture of a little tab that was unhappy, and if a tab died you’d see that. It was the first piece of personality in the product.” Not long after that, Brin and Page came by to check in on the furtive beginnings of their browser. “I remember sitting at my desk, which at the time had a stuffed snake running along the back of it,” says Pam Greene, an engineer on the team. “Sergey was bouncing on one of those exercise balls, watching Darin give a demo, and petting the snake.” No one will say exactly when the browser project got the official green light. Pichai recalls an executive meeting when Schmidt no longer seemed as opposed as he had been. If Google did go for it, the CEO said, the team had to produce something very different from Explorer and Firefox. In addition, a Google browser would have to be fast, and it would have to be open source. Which, of course, was exactly what the team already had in mind. In any case, by the autumn of 2006 the line between unofficial concept and formal project had been crossed. “One Friday, there was a meeting called with like an hour’s notice,” engineer Brett Wilson says. “We were told, ‘The management is thinking about doing our own browser what do you think about that?’ Everybody was a combination of excited and freaked out.” Part of the freak-out was they knew full well that building a competitive browser was a massive undertaking. There were also mixed feelings because of the group’s attachment to Firefox, an icon of open source development and a hedge against Microsoft’s dominance. “The fear was that people were going to read this as sabotaging Firefox,” says Erik Kay, an engineer who joined the team in October 2006. The Googlers were mollified by the fact that their browser would be 100 percent open source: Google’s innovations could potentially find their way into the Mozilla codebase. “We really want to make Firefox successful, as well as other open source browsers,” Upson says. As part of Google’s Firefox effort, Pichai had been meeting with Mozilla head Mitchell Baker, and at some point he told her about Google’s project. Baker now says a Google browser is a mixed bag for Mozilla and Firefox. She sees the effort as a vindication of Mozilla’s belief that browser choice is essential. “If Google comes up with some good new ideas, that’s really great for users,” she says. “Competition spurs the best in us.” But she also understands that many of her users will download Google’s app. “We expect people will try it and come back,” she says. “Mozilla exists because independence is important.”

The Illustrated History: To introduce Chrome and its development team, Google asked noted artist Scott McCloud to create a 32-page comic (available online) that depicts the browser’s two-year gestation and special features.

A less weighty issue was what to dub the product. After considering some ridiculous codenames (Upson says they were so awful that he took the un-Googly step of a top-down veto), the project borrowed its moniker from the term used to describe the frame, toolbars, and menus bordering a browser window: chrome. One more hire was key. Because Chrome was supposed to be optimized to run Web applications, a crucial element would be the JavaScript engine, a “virtual machine” that runs Web application code. The ideal person to construct this was a Danish computer scientist named Lars Bak. In September 2006, after more than 20 years of nonstop labor designing virtual machines, Bak had been planning to take some time off to work on his farm outside rhus. Then Google called. Bak set up a small team that originally worked from the farm, then moved to some offices at the local university. He understood that his mission was to provide a faster engine than in any previous browser. He called his team’s part of the project “V8.” “We decided we wanted to speed up JavaScript by a factor of 10, and we gave ourselves four months to do it,” he says. A typical day for the Denmark team began between 7 and 8 am; they programmed constantly until 6 or 7 at night. The only break was for lunch, when they would wolf down food in five minutes and spend 20 minutes at the game console. “We are pretty damn good at Wii Tennis,” Bak says. They were also pretty good at writing a JavaScript engine. “We just did some benchmark runs today,” Bak says a couple of weeks before the launch. Indeed, V8 processes JavaScript 10 times faster than Firefox or Safari. And how does it compare in those same benchmarks to the market-share leader, Microsoft’s IE 7? Fifty-six times faster. “We sort of underestimated what we could do,” Bak says. Speed may be Chrome’s most significant advance. When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven’t made something better you’ve made something new. “As soon as developers get the taste for this kind of speed, they’ll start doing more amazing new Web applications and be more creative in doing them,” Bak says. Google hopes to kick-start a new generation of Web-based applications that will truly make Microsoft’s worst nightmare a reality: The browser will become the equivalent of an operating system. Google also brought in reinforcements to implement the multiprocess architecture that allowed each open tab to run like a separate, self-contained program. In May 2007, it acquired GreenBorder Technologies, a software security firm whose technology was designed to isolate IE and Firefox activities into virtual sessions, or “sandboxes,” where malware intrusions couldn’t mess with other activities or data on your computer. When the deal was announced publicly, tech pundits wondered whether it meant that Google was going into the antivirus business. Only after the acquisition did GreenBorder’s engineers learn that their job was to construct sandboxes for the tabs of a new browser. “It was confusing,” says Carlos Pizano, one of the GreenBorder hires. “They would not say what they wanted to sandbox.” The team was growing, but the process never got bogged down in bureaucracy. In the project’s early stages, Chromers would all have lunch together at a table in one of the Google cafs. Soon even the largest table couldn’t accommodate them all. Working in an open source spirit, every engineer was free to check out any piece of code and tweak or improve it. Rakowski always tried to keep things light, one day awarding tins of chrome polish to the best bug catchers. As the plumbing aspects of the product fell into place, activity focused on user interface. From the beginning, the Chrome team hoped that its visual presentation would be so understated that people wouldn’t even think they were using a browser. The mantra became “Content, not chrome,” which is sort of weird given the name of the browser. (“We’ve learned to live with the irony,” Mark Larson says.) The clearest expression of this comes when you drag a tab containing a Web application like Gmail to its own separate window and specify that you want an “app shortcut.” At that point, the tabs, buttons, and address bars fall away and the Web app looks pretty much like a desktop app. Welcome to the cloud era.

Any tab in Chrome can be dragged out to start a new window.

When deciding what buttons and features to include, the team began with the mental exercise of eliminating everything, then figuring out what to restore. The back button? No-brainer. The forward button? Less essential, but it survived. But if you’re a big fan of the browser status bar that meter that tells you what percent of a page has loaded you’re out of luck with Chrome. And then there was the bookmarks bar. At first, engineers thought they could kill it. Chrome introduces several new navigation methods, including one where the browser figures out where you want to go next with no typing required. And when you do type something in, you use the “omnibox,” a combination of address bar and search box: Just tell it what you’re thinking and it delivers a Web address, search results, or popular destinations that fit your query, all in non-intrusive text underneath the box. It’s a bulked-up version of “I’m Feeling Lucky.” Still, user tests showed that some people just love to navigate by clicking on the bookmark bar. The compromise: If the user has previously configured the bar in IE or Firefox, Chrome will import the setup. Otherwise, users won’t have a bookmark bar unless they choose to. It’s incredible that something as potentially game-changing as a Google browser has stayed under wraps for two years. It wasn’t until mid-2007, about a year into the project, that the team let employees outside the group even see what they were doing. At the first of a series of Tech Talks featuring the current prototype (events designed, in part, as a way of recruiting internally for the ever-growing team) the reaction was volcanic. Googlers broke into spontaneous applause when various features, like dragging a tab into a new window, were demo’d. As the number of people who knew about Chrome increased, the inevitable occurred word did leak out to a blog or two, yet nothing came of those stray items. No reporter put it all together. “I think it was because rumors about Google browsers have been around so long it’s like sightings of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster,” Upson says. On the eve of the launch, Pichai shares some of his ambitions for Chrome. How many people will use it? “Many millions,” he says. “I want my mom to use it. I want my dad to use it.” The Google imprimatur doesn’t assure success, but Pichai believes that even if Chrome doesn’t snare huge market share, its innovations will improve the landscape. “We benefit directly if the Web gets better,” he says. As launch approaches, the team has just moved into new space in a freshly renovated building on the Google campus, and there’s another all-hands gathering in the biggest conference room available. It’s standing room only. Milk and cookies are provided. After some initial business, Rakowski hands the floor over to Goodger. The rumpled engineer talks about the benefits of making Chrome an open source product the code will be publicly released and a community will emerge to determine the browser’s evolution. “We’ll be able to scale our testing efforts,” he says. “It’ll enable people to do things we haven’t thought of. And it’ll generate trust that we’re not doing something evil.” As the meeting breaks up, the energy level is over the top, and not just because of the sugar rush. The Chrome team is close to unleashing the product that Google was destined to create. First, though, there are five bugs to swat. Senior writer Steven Levy (steven_levy@wired.com) also writes about Jay Walker’s in the October issue of Wired.

Infographic: Chrome Enters the Battleground of Browser Development

This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue.

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from Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web

[orbemnews]

How the Relief Bill Will Help Struggling Americans: Live Updates Here’s what you need to know: The American Rescue Plan, which was passed by the Senate over the weekend and is now back before the House of Representatives, would put pump $1.9 trillion into the economy. The New York Times’s personal finance experts, Ron Lieber and Tara Siegel Bernard, combed through the bill to explain what it means in real terms to real people. Here are some of the questions they answer: Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank. The bank’s policymakers begin a two-day meeting on Wednesday where they may discuss increasing the pace of its bond purchases.Credit…Pool photo by Olivier Matthys U.S. stock futures fluctuated on Wednesday while most European stock indexes rose. Ten-year Treasury bond yields rose before the latest inflation data is published. Investors and policymakers have been closely watching inflation and expectations about where it will go next. After years of very low inflation, some economists and investors argue that too much fiscal stimulus during the recovery from the pandemic could cause the economy to overheat and send prices surging. But many central bankers say there are long-term disinflationary forces and an increase in inflation is likely to be temporary. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg forecast the February inflation data will show that prices rose at an annual rate of 1.7 percent, from 1.4 percent the month before. U.S. stocks, especially shares of tech companies, have been rattled by higher bond yields for various reasons, including the fact that higher interest rates increase borrowing costs and eat into the value of a company’s future earnings. The S&P 500 index rose 1.4 percent on Tuesday. It has risen on only seven trading days over the past four weeks. Nasdaq futures declined on Wednesday. Europe Just Eat Takeaway, the online food-delivery service, was one of the biggest gainers in the FTSE 100 index in Britain, with its shares rising as much as 5 percent after the company said revenue increased 54 percent last year. It also said it expected to keep gaining market share this year, even as restaurants reopen, and expects its acquisition of Grubhub to be completed in the first half of the year. The European Central Bank begins its two-day policy meeting on Wednesday. Like in the United States, bond yields are rising in Europe. German 10-year yields are at minus 0.3 percent. Policymakers have been debating whether they will need to take action to stop yields rising too high. Some analysts say the central bank on Thursday could announce a plan to pick up the pace of its bond purchases in order to push down yields. Asia The Hang Seng index in Hong Kong closed 0.5 percent higher and the Nikkei 225 in Japan ended the day little changed. Cathay Pacific shares fell after the Hong Kong-based airline reported a $2.8 billion loss for 2020. The company’s share price has dropped about 30 percent since the end of 2019. Last year, the airline cut 8,500 jobs. Patrick Healy, the chairman, said it had been the most challenging year in the airline’s seven-decade history. “Market conditions remain challenging and dynamic,” he added. “It is by no means clear how the pandemic and its impact will develop over the coming months.” Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston last week. Some experts have raised concerns about intensifying the spread of the virus while the vaccination process is underway.Credit…Mark Felix for The New York Times HOUSTON — Orders requiring masks and limiting the occupancy of restaurants and other businesses were lifted across Texas on Wednesday, a move that some medical experts said was premature while the state was still in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic. Businesses are still allowed to require employees and customers to cover their faces and limit the number of people they allow inside. Cities can choose to keep limits in place in municipal facilities, and they remain on federal property. When Gov. Greg Abbott announced the changes last week, he argued that he was pushing back against the economic devastation wrought by months of limitations on movement and commerce. In a news conference at a restaurant in Lubbock, Mr. Abbott, a Republican, noted the hindrances for workers and small businesses. “This must end,” he said. “It is now time to open Texas 100 percent.” Moments after Mr. Abbott’s announcement, patrons at Barflys in San Antonio removed the plexiglass dividers separating themselves from the bartenders. At Barflys on Tuesday, an hour before the mask mandate was to expire, Amber Jowers, 32, was the bartender on duty. She welcomed the policy change. From now on, she will no longer wear a mask at work, she said. “And we’re taking the sign down at midnight,” she added. “We have to get back to normal now.” Barflys is a softly lit pub with a pool table, dartboard, and a slot machine. Metallica, Salt-N-Pepa, and the Texas Tornados play from the sound system. On the smokey back patio, Sophie Bojorquez, 47, sat at a table with friends. She is a vaccinated nurse and a self-proclaimed anti-masker. “I’m happy about the governor’s decision. The masks impeded the herd immunity we need. Now they want to vax so fast,” she said, shaking her head. The patio bartender, Britt Harasmisz, 24, said that most of her customers didn’t wear a mask even before the mandate ended. And though her employer decided that Barflys would no longer require face covers, she said that she would continue to wear one while working. “A lot of people have been vaccinated, Governor Abbott was vaccinated, but a lot of us on the front lines have not,” she said. “I’m going to wear a mask everywhere I go.” The move to open Texas has faced intense resistance. The governor’s medical advisers have said that they were not involved in the decision. And some experts have raised concerns about intensifying the spread of the virus while the vaccination process is underway. Texas, which is averaging about 5,500 new cases a day, has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country. Lina Hidalgo, the county judge in Harris County, which includes Houston, has argued that lifting the mask mandate means workers must be the ones to enforce rules in retail establishments and restaurants. “We know better than to let our guard down simply because a level of government selected an arbitrary date to issue an all-clear,” Ms. Hidalgo, a Democrat and a persistent critic of Mr. Abbott, said in an op-ed column published this week by Time magazine. “I am working to clearly explain to the residents of my county that we will spare ourselves unnecessary death and suffering if we just stick with it for a little bit longer.” Bert Rossel, 39, stopped in for a drink at Barflys on Tuesday evening. He said he had known the pub’s owner for many years and worked for him at one time. Mr. Rossel is in the insurance business nowadays. He said he believed that the pandemic had been hyped on social media as another distraction, or as he calls it, “the latest hot topic.” “It’s survival of the fittest,” Mr. Rossel said. “My B.M.I. is higher than normal. Obese people are more susceptible to corona, but it’s been over a year. I would have gotten it already.” As the evening advanced, the patrons at Barflys drank beer and downed shots, smoked and gossiped, enjoying each other’s company. No one paid attention when, at midnight, Ms. Jowers pulled the sign from the front door that read, “MASKS REQUIRED UPON ENTRY.” — Rick Rojas, James Dobbins and Dave Montgomery Joe Donlon interviews President Donald J. Trump in September on “NewsNation.” The show has since grown into a network. The highest ranking editor at NewsNation, a newcomer to cable news that markets itself as delivering “straight-ahead, unbiased news reporting,” has resigned. She is the third top editor to quit in recent months as some staff have complained of a rightward shift at the network. Jennifer Lyons, NewsNation’s vice president of news, had decided to depart the channel, effective immediately, the company’s staff were told at a meeting on Tuesday. Sandy Pudar, the news director, left on Feb. 2, and Richard Maginn, the managing editor, resigned on March 1. Ms. Lyons did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the Texas-based Nexstar Media, which owns NewsNation, said in a statement that it was Ms. Lyons’s decision to leave and that the search for her replacement was underway. At Tuesday’s staff meeting in Chicago, Perry A. Sook, the chief executive of Nexstar, sought to reassure staff of his commitment to NewsNation after several employees raised concerns about its editorial direction and the involvement of Bill Shine, a former Fox News co-president who was hired to lead communications for the Trump White House. The concerns among employees were detailed in a New York Times article earlier this week. “Despite reports to the contrary that you may read, we’re committed to the vision of unbiased reporting,” he said during the meeting, according to a recording of the comments obtained by The New York Times. “But obviously along the way there will be growing pains. In order for us to establish our product and to grow our viewership we’re going to have to try new things to gain some traction.” Mr. Sook, asked by a staff member about Mr. Shine, said he had not been in the NewsNation building and did not dictate content. “This guy was in the room where it happened 25 years ago and helped to build the channel to where it is,” Mr. Sook said of Mr. Shine’s experience at Fox News. “Why would we not avail ourselves of his expertise?” “NewsNation” launched on Sept. 1 as a prime-time national newscast on the cable channel WGN America. It promised an antidote to the more partisan programming of CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. On March 1, WGN America was rebranded as NewsNation and more news shows were introduced. Lina Khan, an associate professor at Columbia Law School, wrote an influential 2016 paper accusing Amazon of abusing its power.Credit…Lexey Swall for The New York Times WASHINGTON — President Biden is expected to name Lina Khan, a law professor and leading critic of the tech industry’s power, to a seat on the Federal Trade Commission, a person with knowledge of the decision said on Tuesday. An appointment of Ms. Khan, the author of a breakthrough Yale Law Journal paper in 2016 that accused Amazon of abusing its monopoly power, would be the latest sign that the Biden administration planned to take an aggressive posture toward tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. Last week, the administration said Tim Wu, another top critic of the industry, would join the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy. Ms. Khan recently served as legal counsel for the House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee and was among aides who conducted a 19-month investigation into the tech giants’ monopoly power. The committee produced a report advocating major changes to antitrust laws. Before that, she served as an aide to a member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rohit Chopra, a champion of her ideas on antitrust policy. Ms. Khan, an associate professor at Columbia Law School, would fill one of three Democratic seats on the five-member F.T.C. In December, the commission sued Facebook, accusing it of antitrust violations, and called for breaking up the company. The agency is also investing Amazon for antitrust violations. Rumors of Ms. Khan’s appointment, which were reported earlier by Politico, immediately sparked strong reactions on Tuesday. Public Citizen, a left-leaning nonprofit public advocacy group, cheered the possibility. The organization and many progressive groups have denounced the F.T.C.’s history — particularly during the Obama administration — for lax enforcement of technology companies. They argue that the federal government’s permissive attitude toward mergers by the tech giants, including Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, helped the Silicon Valley companies grow quickly and dominate their rivals. “The F.T.C. has failed to take on corporate abuses of power including rampant antitrust violations, privacy intrusions, data security breaches and mergers, and Khan’s appointment as a commissioner at the agency hopefully will herald a new day,” Public Citizen said in a statement. Senator Mike Lee of Utah, the ranking Republican on the Senate antitrust subcommittee, said Ms. Khan would be a bad fit for the job, however. “Her views on antitrust enforcement are also wildly out of step with a prudent approach to the law,” Mr. Lee said in a statement. “Nominating Ms. Khan would signal that President Biden intends to put ideology and politics ahead of competent antitrust enforcement, which would be gravely disappointing at a time when it is absolutely critical that we have strong and effective leadership at the enforcement agencies.” Source link Orbem News #Americans #Bill #Live #relief #struggling #Updates

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To Vaccinate Veterans, Health Care Workers Must Cross Mountains, Plains and Tundra

This story also ran on Time. It can be republished for free.

A Learjet 31 took off before daybreak from Helena Regional Airport in Montana, carrying six Veterans Affairs medical providers and 250 doses of historic cargo cradled in a plug-in cooler designed to minimize breakage.

Even in a state where 80-mph speed limits are normal, ground transportation across long distances is risky for the Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine, which must be used within 12 hours of thawing.

The group’s destination was Havre, Montana, 30 miles from the Canadian border. About 500 military veterans live in and around this small town of roughly 9,800, and millions more reside in similarly rural, hard-to-reach areas across the United States.

About 2.7 million veterans who use the VA health system are classified as “rural” or “highly rural” patients, residing in communities or on land with fewer services and less access to health care than those in densely populated towns and cities. An additional 2 million veterans live in remote areas who do not receive their health care from VA, according to the department. To ensure these rural vets have access to the covid vaccines, the VA is relying on a mix of tools, like charter and commercial aircraft and partnerships with civilian health organizations.

The challenges of vaccinating veterans in rural areas — which the VA considers anything outside an urban population center — and “highly rural” areas — defined as having fewer than 10% of the workforce commuting to an urban hub and with a population no greater than 2,500 — extend beyond geography, as more than 55% of them are 65 or older and at risk for serious cases of covid and just 65% are reachable via the internet.

For the Havre event, VA clinic workers called each patient served by the Merril Lundman VA Outpatient Clinic in a vast region made up of small farming and ranching communities and two Native American reservations. And for those hesitant to get the vaccine, a nurse called them back to answer questions.

“At least 10 additional veterans elected to be vaccinated once we answered their questions,” said Judy Hayman, executive director of the Montana VA Health Care System, serving all 147,000 square miles of the state.

The Havre mission was a test flight for similar efforts in other rural locations. Thirteen days later, another aircraft took off for Kalispell, Montana, carrying vaccines for 400 veterans.

In Alaska, another rural state, Anchorage Veterans Affairs Medical Center administrators finalized plans for providers to hop a commercial Alaska Airlines flight on Thursday to Kodiak Island. There, VA workers expected to administer 100 to 150 doses at a vaccine clinic conducted in partnership with the Kodiak Area Native Association.

“Our goal is to vaccinate all veterans who have not been vaccinated in and around the Kodiak community,” said Tom Steinbrunner, acting director of the Alaska VA Healthcare System.

VA began its outreach to rural veterans for the vaccine program late last year, as the Food and Drug Administration approached the dates for issuing emergency use authorizations for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, according to Dr. Richard Stone, the Veterans Health Administration’s acting undersecretary. It made sense to look to aircraft to deliver vaccines. “It just seemed logical that we would reach into rural areas that, [like] up in Montana, we had a contract with, a company that had small propeller-driven aircraft and short runway capability,” said Stone, a retired Army Reserve major general.

Veterans have responded, Stone added, with more than 50% of veterans in rural areas making appointments.

As of Wednesday, the VA had tallied 220,992 confirmed cases of covid among veterans and VA employees and 10,065 known deaths, including 128 employees. VA had administered 1,344,210 doses of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, including 329,685 second vaccines, to veterans as of Wednesday. According to the VA, roughly 25% of those veterans live in rural areas, 2.81% live in highly rural areas and 1.13% live on remote islands.

For rural areas, the VA has primarily relied on the Moderna vaccine, which requires cold storage between minus 25 degrees Centigrade (minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit) and minus 15 degrees C (5 degrees F) but not the deep freeze needed to store the Pfizer vaccine (minus 70 degrees C, or minus 94 degrees F). That, according to the VA, makes it more “transportable to rural locations.”

The VA anticipates that the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, if it receives an emergency use authorization from the FDA, will make it even easier to reach remote veterans. The vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech both require two shots, spaced a few weeks apart. “One dose will make it easier for veterans in rural locations, who often have to travel long distances, to get their full vaccination coverage,” said VA spokesperson Gina Jackson. The FDA’s vaccine advisory committee is set to meet on Feb. 26 to review J&J’s application for authorization.

Meanwhile, in places like Alaska, where hundreds of veterans live off the grid, VA officials have had to be creative. Flying out to serve individual veterans would be too costly, so the Anchorage VA Medical Center has partnered with tribal health care organizations to ensure veterans have access to a vaccine. Under these agreements, all veterans, including non-Native veterans, can be seen at tribal facilities.

“That is our primary outreach in much of Alaska because the tribal health system is the only health system in these communities,” Steinbrunner said.

In some rural areas, however, the process has proved frustrating. Army veteran John Hoefen, 73, served in Vietnam and has a 100% disability rating from the VA for Parkinson’s disease related to Agent Orange exposure. He gets his medical care from a VA location in Canandaigua, New York, 20 miles from his home, but the facility hasn’t made clear what phase of the vaccine rollout it’s in, Hoefen said.

The hospital’s website simply says a staff member will contact veterans when they become eligible — a “don’t call us, we’ll call you,” situation, he said. “I know a lot of veterans like me, 100% disabled and no word,” Hoefen said. “I went there for audiology a few weeks ago and my tech hadn’t even gotten her vaccine yet.”

VA Canandaigua referred questions about the facility’s current phase back to its website: “If you’re eligible to get a vaccine, your VA health care team will contact you by phone, text message or Secure Message (through MyHealtheVet) to schedule an appointment,” it states. A call to the special covid-19 phone number established for the Canandaigua VA, which falls under the department’s Finger Lakes Healthcare System, puts the caller into the main menu for hospital services, with no information specifically on vaccine distribution.

For the most part, the VA is using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines to determine priority groups for vaccines. Having vaccinated the bulk of its health care workers and first responders, as well as residents of VA nursing homes, it has been vaccinating those 75 and older, as well as those with chronic conditions that place them at risk for severe cases of covid. In some locations, like Anchorage and across Montana, clinics are vaccinating those 65 and older and walk-ins when extra doses are available.

According to Lori FitzGerald, chief of pharmacy at the VA hospital in Fort Harrison, Montana, providers have ended up with extra doses that went to hospitalized patients or veterans being seen at the facility. Only one dose has gone to waste in Montana, she said.

To determine eligibility for the vaccine, facilities are using the Veterans Health Administration Support Service Center databases and algorithms to help with the decision-making process. Facilities then notify veterans by mail, email or phone or through VA portals of their eligibility and when they can expect to get a shot, according to the department.

Air Force veteran Theresa Petersen, 83, was thrilled that she and her husband, an 89-year-old U.S. Navy veteran, were able to get vaccinated at the Kalispell event. She said they were notified by their primary care provider of the opportunity and jumped at the chance.

“I would do anything to give as many kudos as I can to the Veterans Affairs medical system,” Petersen said. “I’m so enamored with the concept that ‘Yes, there are people who live in rural America and they have health issues too.’”

The VA is allowed to provide vaccines only to veterans currently enrolled in VA health care. About 9 million U.S. veterans are not enrolled at the VA, including 2 million rural veterans.

After veterans were turned away from a VA clinic in West Palm Beach, Florida, in January, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) wrote to Acting VA Secretary Dat Tran, urging him to include these veterans in their covid vaccination program.

Stone said the agency does not have the authorization to provide services to these veterans. “We have been talking to Capitol Hill about how to reconcile that,” he said. “Some of these are very elderly veterans and we don’t want to turn anybody away.”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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VALLEJO, Calif. — California is in the middle of an affordable-housing crisis that cities across the state are struggling to solve.

Here, in a football-field-size warehouse where workers used to make submarines, Holliday recently opened Factory OS, a factory that manufactures homes.

In one end go wood, pipes, tile, sinks and toilets; out another come individual apartments that can be trucked to a construction site and bolted together in months.

“If we don’t build housing differently, then no one can have any housing,” Holliday said during a recent tour as he passed assembly-line workstations and stacks of raw materials like windows, pipes and rolls of pink insulation.

Almost a decade after the recession flattened the housing industry, causing waves of contractors to go bankrupt and laid-off construction workers to leave the business for other jobs, builders have yet to regain their previous form. Today the pace of new apartment and housing construction sits at a little over half the 2006 peak.

The United States needs new housing, but its building industry isn’t big enough to provide it. The number of residential construction workers is 23 percent lower than in 2006, while higher-skill trades like plumbers, carpenters and electricians are down close to 17 percent. With demand for housing high and the supply of workers short, builders are bidding up prices for the limited number of contractors.

Construction prices nationwide have risen about 5 percent a year for the past three years, according to the Turner Building Cost Index. Costs have gone up even faster in big cities and across California, according to RSMeans, a unit of Gordian, which compiles construction data. In the Bay Area, builders say construction prices are up 30 percent over the past three years — so much that even luxury projects are being stalled by rising costs.

“It’s reached the point where you cannot get enough rent or you cannot sell enough units to make it a viable deal,” said Lou Vasquez, a founding partner and managing director of Build, a real estate developer in San Francisco.

The surge in construction prices is coming at the worst possible time for booming cities like New York, Seattle and San Francisco, already dealing with an affordable-housing crunch that has increased the homeless populations and stoked acrimonious debates about growth and gentrification. City and state legislators have tried to tackle their housing problems with proposals to increase subsidized affordable housing, reduce building regulations and make it legal to build taller.

But even if every overpriced city suddenly overcame the thicket of zoning rules and neighborhood opposition that make it difficult to build new housing in the first place — which seems doubtful — today’s diminished building industry would lack the capacity to build at the needed pace. This affects the rich as well as the poor, because it raises the cost of high-end condos and affordable housing alike.

This year, Californians will vote on a proposed $4 billion bond to build more subsidized affordable housing. In San Francisco, where developers say the per-unit construction cost is edging toward $800,000, that would buy about 5,000 units, a relative blip. “Costs have risen so much that it is not possible to build homes where people want to live at the prices and rents they can afford,” said John Burns, founder of John Burns Real Estate Consulting.

All this has prompted developers like Holliday to go scrambling for cheaper and less labor-intensive construction methods — and investors to pour money into startups that promise to do just that. Katerra, a 3-year-old prefabricated building company in the Silicon Valley city of Menlo Park, has raised $1.1 billion in venture capital. A number of other building startups including Blokable, based in Seattle; Kasita, based in Austin, Texas; and RAD Urban, based in Oakland, California, have all popped up over the past five years.

“The current system can’t meet demand and that’s resulting in a lack of opportunity for some folks and a major hit to the economy,” said Stonly Baptiste, a co-founder of Urban Us, a Brooklyn-based venture capital firm that invested in Blokable. “These aren’t small problems, and they aren’t small markets.”

The technologies vary but generally involve simplifying construction through prefabricated panels that can be assembled like Ikea furniture and modular apartments that can be stacked together like Lego bricks. A recent survey by FMI, a management-consulting and investment banking company focused on the engineering and construction industry, found a third of respondents said they were looking at some form of off-site construction, a steep rise from 2010. The interest extends from housing to hotels to medical facilities, industrial companies and even fast-food restaurants.

“It’s one of those things that looks like an overnight success but it’s taken 10 years and hundreds of people toiling,” said Chris Giattina, chief executive of BLOX, a Birmingham, Alabama, company that builds hospitals with modular components.

Brokers of Risk

The global construction industry is a $10 trillion behemoth whose structures determine where people live, how they get to work and what cities look like. It is also one of the world’s least efficient businesses. The construction productivity rate — how much building workers do for each hour of labor they put in — has been flat since 1945, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. Over that period, sectors like agriculture, manufacturing and retail saw their productivity rates surge by as much as 1,500 percent. In other words, while the rest of the economy has been supercharged by machines, computers and robots, construction companies are about as efficient as they were in World War II.

To understand this, consider how buildings are actually built. It all starts with the developer, who doesn’t actually build anything but instead secures a piece of land and a loan, and gets the project approved by the government. At that point the money is passed to the general contractor that made a successful bid to build the project, who passes it to subcontractors that won the bidding for things like plumbing and sheet metal work, which often pass it to even more subcontractors.

Contractors describe this handoff as “brokering risk.” What they mean is that while everyone in the chain has agreed to build a certain piece of the project for a set amount of money and in a given amount of time, none of them are sure they can do so as cheaply or quickly as they’ve promised. They broker that risk by paying someone else to do it for them, minus a small fee.

“Say you’re a general contractor and your subcontractor agrees to do a job. Once we have a contract I don’t care how many man hours you put into it because that’s your problem now,” said Randy Miller, chief executive of RAD Urban, describing the thinking behind the process.

The goal of prefabricated building companies is to turn this model on its head. Instead of offloading risk, the contractor assumes all of it. Instead of sending jobs to subcontractors, they hire their own factory workers. “The general contractor says, ‘Oh my God, construction is scary, let me broker all that risk,'” Miller said. “I’m saying, ‘Oh my God, construction is scary, let me plan and control it.”

The basic concept isn’t new. In 1624, Massachusetts settlers built homes out of prefabricated materials shipped from England. The pattern was repeated in Australia, Africa and India as the British Empire shipped colonists and structures wide across the globe, according to “Prefab Architecture,” by Ryan E. Smith, a professor at the University of Utah.

Over the next few centuries, new versions of the idea seemed to pop up anywhere people needed to build lots of homes in a hurry — during the California Gold Rush, after the Chicago fire, and through America’s westward expansion. In the early part of the 20th century, Sears sold tens of thousands of kits for Sears Modern Homes, which consisted of prefabricated parts and panels that buyers assembled.

Along the way, the construction industry absorbed manufacturing concepts such as the assembly-line techniques that were utilized by Levitt & Sons, the pioneer of mass-built subdivisions. But the idea of factory-built housing was never adopted long enough or widely enough to make an impact, at least in the United States.

One reason the United States has lagged behind Europe, Australia and Asia — which all have well-established companies doing modular and prefabricated building — is that it is a predominantly suburban nation, and the vast supply of open land has kept the cost of single-family-home building relatively low. Another is that the construction industry has slim profit margins and invests little in research and development.

The chances of being burned are high, and each high-profile failure leads to a furlough of the concept. In the mid-2000s housing boom, Pulte Homes, one of the country’s largest builders, opened a prefabrication plant that aimed to revolutionize how homes were built. The company closed it with the onset of the housing bust in 2007.

Now, instead of single-family homes, companies doing prefab building are focusing on higher-density condominiums and apartments. That’s because, while single-family home construction remains well below its level before the recession, multifamily condominium and apartment buildings have rebounded strongly. “Our goal is to be able to do a 40-story tower in 12 months, at half the cost of traditional construction,” said Randy Miller of RAD Urban.

Still, even if builders are able to reduce construction costs, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will be successful. Behind each of these companies is a bet that they can build far more efficiently than current methods. That bet has yet to be proven, at least on a large scale.

Efficiency vs. Workers

Holliday of Factory OS started thinking about modular housing about four years ago, when he was struggling to build a project in Truckee, California. The idea was to build 800 to 1,000 high-density apartments and condominiums, but “the numbers wouldn’t work,” he said. “You couldn’t get the construction costs down enough.”

Holliday floated the idea of modular building to his longtime contractor, Larry Pace, from Cannon Constructors, who over the past four decades has built various projects from one-off homes to office towers. “I said ‘modular jobs have been a fiasco — we don’t need that in our lives,'” Pace recalled, adding an expletive for emphasis.

But Holliday persisted, and he and Pace used modular technology from two manufacturers to build four projects in the Bay Area. They are planning to do the same with the original Truckee development. Pace became so comfortable with modular that he suggested that they find some investors and build their own factory.

On a recent afternoon, Pace laid out the factory’s process. At the first station, just past the door, four workers toiled above and below a raised platform to build what would eventually become the floor. The two men up top laid down flooring while a man and woman stood below simultaneously installing pipes.

From there the unit would move steadily down the line, and, over 21 additional stations, would acquire toilets, indoor walls, outdoor walls, a roof, electric outlets, windows, sinks, countertops and tiling. It takes about a week to finish a unit, Pace said. The goal is to churn out about 2,000 apartments a year, which would be turned into four- and five-story buildings with 80 to 150 units each.

For workers, factory building seems to mean lower wages but steadier work. Factory OS pays about $30 an hour with medical insurance and two weeks of vacation. That’s about half what workers can make on a construction site, but the work is more regular and, for many, requires less commuting.

Tony Vandewark, a 51-year-old foreman at Factory OS, is OK with the trade-off. He lives a few minutes from the factory in Vallejo, where homes cost less than half what they do closer to San Francisco. Contrast that with a job he once had in the Silicon Valley city of Sunnyvale. He drove two hours to work and three hours home before deciding to rent a room so he could stay closer to work on weekdays.

“On a job site, you can go do piece work and make really big money, but then the job is gone,” he said.

In addition to not being rained on, one of the key differences between a construction site and Factory OS is that any worker can be trained to do any job. And for old-school trade unions, that is a declaration of war. “The business model is ‘Hooray for me,'” without regard for anyone else, said Larry Mazzola Jr., business manager of UA Local 38, a San Francisco plumbers union with about 2,500 members across Northern California.

Factory OS is not anti-union: It has a contract with the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council, which has organized other modular factories and is banking on the technology’s continued growth. The issue is that builders are laid out like a Detroit auto factory, where one union represents all of the workers, and workers can be trained to do any job within the company walls.

That is a huge departure from construction sites, where unions representing plumbers, electricians, carpenters and various other trades each control their piece of the building process. Last year Mazzola wrote a letter to San Francisco’s mayor, Ed Lee, a month before he died, urging him to deny any city business — such as contracts for subsidized housing — to Factory OS.

“Any decision to use Factory OS shows a blatant disregard for the other craft unions,” he wrote. He asked the mayor to refrain from contracting with the company unless it allowed craft unions to do their pieces of the work. “We realize modular is coming and we want to be part of it, but not at the expense of our workers, which is what’s happening right now,” Mazzola said.

Jay Bradshaw, director of organizing for the carpenters council representing Factory OS workers, said that would be impractical. Think back to that first station, where four people worked above and below the floor. In Mazzola’s world, a plumbers union would represent the workers installing pipes, while other unions would represent the workers up top.

“It would never work to have upward of 10 or 15 labor organizations at a single employer in a factory setting,” Bradshaw said.

For Bradshaw, the real fight isn’t defending job titles but making sure construction workers remain part of a union at all. A short drive from Factory OS, at a carpenters training center, the union is developing a program to train housing-factory workers — something that, it hopes, will prepare more people for an industry that it has come to see as inevitable.

“It sure blows the hell out of building in China,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

CONOR DOUGHERTY © 2018 The New York Times

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