Quality Control Plan: Fill & Download for Free

Ah, 1900! The culmination of the real-life steampunk era, 30 years of the maddest confusion in the history of naval architecture. When the coal-fired piston engines were so noisy, violent, and unreliable that facing battle was probably less risky than pushing the engines.HMS Ocean, one of three Canopus-class battleships commissioned by the Royal Navy in 1900. The RN was the world’s most powerful fleet by far, even if most of her ships were obsolete before commissioning thanks to rapid technological progress (true, at least, for all her rivals too). The pattern for what today we call the pre-dreadnought battleship had at least been set as an oversized flatiron with a dual big-gun turret fore and another one aft, as immortalised in the game “Monopoly.”When wooden sailing ships were covered with cast iron plating, which slowed them to a crawl, hardly ameliorated by their noisy, smoke-belching seagoing steam engines.La Triomphante, a French ironclad battleship commissioned in 1877, reveals the ambivalence of the day both toward the unreliable and short-range steam engine (note both smokestack and sails) and the lack of development of the cannon at this early date (note the gunports down the sides.) This Glassoniere-class battleship served until 1903.When word would come that an enemy had developed a larger and/or higher velocity cannon that could penetrate one’s latest armour, and they were building a new battleship using this gun. Zounds! Our entire fleet is now vulnerable because none can resist the new gun!The Italian ironclad Italia of 1880 (top) was a no-holds barred attempt to dominate the Mediterranean with just two ships, Italia and her sister Lepanto. With an extravagant six funnels and 17-inch guns - biggest guns ever mounted in a warship, except for an unsuccessful British plan for three cruisers, Furious, Glorious, and Courageous, each with single-mount 18-inch gun, but all converted to aircraft carriers after the blast from Furious’ big gun proved too great to be practical; and a more successful Japanese design 60 years later using 18.1-inch guns. Italia caused quite a stir among her rivals, even if her offset barbette arrangement (bottom) was inefficient and her slightly ridiculous guns took until November to reload.So one summoned the armour boys and lit a fire under them to find a tougher steel - which, presently, they would accomplish, and tell us how many inches thickness would repel the enemy’s wonder-gun.Germany, as a young nation unified by Otto von Bismarck only in 1871, was, like the United States, a relative weakling at sea most of this era. Oldenberg, pictured here, was the first German ironclad warship built entirely from German steel. She was commissioned in 1883, intended to sortie from German ports to break up enemy blockade of the German coast - conceding superiority, at the time, to the British, Russian, and French fleets.And we would build a battleship using this armour, a ship that was now (theoretically) invulnerable because there was no naval projectile that could pierce it!Not, that is, until another a few years later, then word would come in from Rome, or Moscow, or Toulon….….Or Berlin. The 1891 Brandenburg-class battleship SMS Kurfurst Friedrich Wilhelm, one of Germany’s first four ocean-going battleships, was also the first (along with her sister, Weissenburg) to get the new Krupp nickel-steel armour, a major improvement on the previous advance, Harvey armour. The Brandenburgs were the foundation of what would become the High Seas Fleet.Late in the 1800’s, the German Navy grew to respectable size and introduced a number of innovations that signaled the maturing of the German steel and shipbuilding industries in this fast-changing period.By the turn of the century, the German Navy had expanded greatly and battleships like the Kaiser Barbarossa (pictured), launched in 1900, were as good as those coming from foreign shipyards; and they were distinctly German.The five ships of the Kaiser Friedrich III class, follow-ons to the Brandenburgs, represented a significant variation on what had become the standardised battleship design of the day; her main armament was the conventional four large caliber guns in two twin turrets; but she carried a relatively light main armament (9.4-inch guns) in order to carry an increased secondary armament. Besides their two big turrets, the Kaisers carried a gaudy 18 5.9-inch guns - the firepower of two light cruisers - based on the observation of an Asian battle, the Japanese rapid-firing cruisers’ victory over a more heavily armed Chinese fleet at Yalu in 1894.The ideas of the French Jeune Ecole were incorporated into Japan’s ironclad navy in the late 1800’s. The Japanese could not initially afford a battleship navy so they took the radical step of purchasing a cruiser fleet instead. The French-built cruiser Matsushima, the Navy’s flagship in the Sino-Japanese War, used speed and rapid-firing small-caliber guns to decimate the crews and destroy the upper works of a heavier Chinese fleet that included two battleships with long reload times.Yalu demonstrated that many fast-loading guns could sweep the enemy decks, destroy the bridge and rake the superstructure, killing many and demoralising the crew, before a few heavy but slow-loading guns could be used effectively.While the lesson was only valid until the launching of HMS Dreadnought 12 years later, what is instructive is that French design doctrine was vindicated by its adoption by the Japanese Navy, and then influenced German design. Change was in the air, and not just coal smoke. As we know, the Japanese then turned to the British to build a battleship navy, and in a scant 11 years, put a fleet to sea that annihilated the Russians in 1905. And that was just a year before the British ordered HMS - but I’m getting ahead of myself.Not every lesson from battle was heeded. The United States Indiana-class battleship Oregon sailed 14,000 miles to take part in the American conquest of Cuba; and despite being at the back of the fleet when the Spanish cruisers emerged from harbour, Oregon outran even the US cruisers and took the lead in the victory. The obvious lessons regarding the importance of crew training, maintaining machinery, keeping the hull clean of fouling, quality control of ammunition, and so forth were inexcusably lost on the Russian Navy. Art by Jack Lynnwood.Around 1890, all the world’s navies were still fleets of samples, as the Royal Navy was discribed at the time. No two hulls were the same, no armour plate was exactly the same composition, and few ships’ main armament was identical, either in calibre, steel alloy, rifling, loading apparatus, turret shape or field of fire, or means of moving the shells from the magazine to the loading point of the naval rifle.The French battleship Carnot was as terrifying a sight as one could hope to see in 1900. The French Navy was unable to match the British in hulls, but it rivaled the other Great Powers, especially its Mediterranean rival Italy, and built innovative cruisers to serve as commerce raiders in the event of war with the British Empire.The big guns might as well have been given personal names and had horoscopes cast, so individual were they. Rates of fire were sometimes painfully slow - six or eight minutes between shots - because the fleets of the day were focused on penetrating power rather than filling the air with shells.Even with all this being true, the brief history of the era had proven that the marksmanship of the coal-fired flatiron battleships was miserable.In the Spanish-American war of 1898, the young United States spanked a European power soundly, acquired a ready-made worldwide colonial empire, and became a Great Power, all in less time than it takes to say “yellow journalism.” Pictured are the battleship USS Oregon (left) and the armoured cruiser Brooklyn (right) leading the well-engineered and well-maintained American fleet to the decisive victory at Santiago de Cuba.The basic problem is that the doctrine of the day was to voluntarily keep battleships rather small, because they were so soon obsolete; and on a small platform, there was roof for only two to four of the largest available guns; so progressively smaller calibers were mounted elsewhere on the hull, superstructure, or even atop a larger turret; and in battle, they peppered the enemy with three or even four different sizes of shells, coming at different rates of fire, and in no way coordinated.Like Japan after Yalu, America after the Spanish-American War decided it liked being a Great Power and invested massive amounts in the battleships that were the measure of a nation’s Great Power status. From 1896 to 1900, the service doubled from 10,000 to 20,000 sailors, and from five battleships active in the Spanish American War, expanded to 16 battleships by 1907 to form the famous Great White Fleet that sailed around the world in 1907–08 (pictured here entering San Francisco Bay in 1907).From the random shell splashes, it was impossible to tell which came from one’s own last shot; so there was no way to correct the next shot (apart, of course, from Dumb Luck, ever the sailor’s friend.) “Broadside” was a term that had gone out with the last of the “wooden walls” and was just now being brought up again in the writing’s of an Italian theorist named Vittorio Cuniberti.The Italian Navy has long designed the world’s most beautiful warships, as the geometric perfection of the Andrea Doria (top, commissioned 1883) and Regina Elena (bottom, laid down in 1901) demonstrate. The nation that gave the world Michelangelo, da Vinci, Ferrari, Maserati, and other masters of the Golden Mean, is not nearly well enough recognised for its naval architecture. If there was a foil to the sleek beauty of Italy’s greyhounds of the sea, it would be that they tended to sink when fired upon.But Cuniberti’s ideas were so outrageous - a massively huge kind of battleship, double the size of anything afloat, with all big guns of the same caliber, all firing at the same moment, so that the cluster of shell splashes from this… “broadside?”… could be spotted, and one spotter could correct with each new salvo, and “walk” successive salvoes efficiently onto the target.The mighty Royal Navy had the most to lose if someone were to test Cuniberti’s ideas, which would immediately render the existing RN obsolete. Pictured: HMS Jupiter leading HMS Illustrious in line-ahead formation.Like anyone had the money to put into this untested theory, which required putting all one’s eggs into a single, super-expensive basket that could be sunk by a single torpedo (that is, a stationary mine.)The concept Cuniberti proposed for an all-big-gun battleship carrying 12 12-inch guns (top), some in single turrets; and the British layout for such a ship with 10 12-inch guns all in twin turrets, to be named Dreadnought.Who would build such a white elephant? Well, several vied for the honour of the first launch….The Japanese began design work on a ship called Satsuma in 1904 that was supposed to carry 12 12-inch guns; but a shortage of guns led to her much-delayed completion with four 12-inch guns and twelve 10-inch guns in three turrets down each side of the bridge. But as the first battleship built in Japan, she took until 1910 to complete.The first American dreadnought, USS South Carolina (bottom) was built to the same tonnage as her immediate predecessor, the pre-dreadnought USS Connecticut (top), a limitation imposed by Congress. To get the extra big guns at the same tonnage, Connecticut’s deck works were truncated to fit extra turrets at each end, and the new ship’s proposed speed was reduced from 21 to 18.5 knots. Both ships used the same 12-inch guns and same basic layout.An ocean away, the American Navy’s Homer Poundstone was independently proposing an American big-gun battleship even prior to Cuniberti’s seminal article in Jane’s Fighting Ships; and after conducting tests of the concept, the Navy ordered plans in October 1903 for what would become the two-ship South Carolina class. Bureaucratic resistance, however, would stall the appropriation of funds for the ships until March 1905; they were laid down in 1906 and both completed, at a leisurely pace, in 1910.Meet HMS Dreadnought, just a twinkle in many eyes in 1903, but by 1906, well… tah dah!!! Babies have taken longer than Dreadnought to go from twinkle to first smack on the newborn bum - well, maybe not quite, but nearly.The Japanese, Americans, and all other comers were, however, smoked by the British, thanks to the determination of First Sea Lord Admiral Sir John ‘Jacky’ Fisher. Once Fisher got rolling, he had the keel for Dreadnought laid five months after the Japanese Satsuma, and five months before the Americans ordered South Carolina.HMS Dreadnought was completed in the world’s fastest-building shipyard, HM Dockyard, Portsmouth, in a single year.

The details can be found here in the original PDF of the complaint: http://www.doj.state.or.us/releases/pdf/FINAL_Complaint_8_22_14.pdfI've excerpted the main complaint here:Oracle America, Inc. ("Oracle") fraudulently induced the State of Oregon (the "State") and the Oregon Health Insurance Exchange Corporation ("Cover Oregon") to enter into contracts for the purchase of hundreds of millions of dollars of Oracle products and services that failed to perform as promised. Oracle then repeatedly breached those contracts by failing to deliver on its obligations, overcharging for poorly trained Oracle personnel to provide incompetent work, hiding from the State the true extent of Oracle's shoddy performance, continuing to promise what it could not deliver, and wilfully refusing to honor its warranty to fix its errors without charge. Over the last three years, Oracle has presented the State and Cover Oregon with some $240,280,008 in false claims under those contracts. Oracle’s conduct amounts to a pattern of racketeering activity that has cost the State and Cover Oregon hundreds of millions of dollars. Accordingly, plaintiff Ellen Rosenblum, the Attorney General for the State of Oregon, along with the State and Cover Oregon, brings this lawsuit to recover losses to the State and Cover Oregon caused by Oracle’s fraud, racketeering, false claims, and broken contracts.In 2011, the State of Oregon had two needs. One was to build a State-run health insurance exchange that met the requirements of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ACA”). The other was to modernize its aging social services computer systems. Oracle claimed it had the answer, the so-called “Oracle Solution for Oregon.”Oracle lied to the State about the “Oracle Solution.” Oracle lied when it said the “Oracle Solution” could meet both of the State’s needs with Oracle products that worked “out-of-the-box.” Oracle lied when it said its products were “flexible,” “integrated,” worked “easily” with other programs, required little customization and could be set up quickly. Oracle lied when it claimed it had “the most comprehensive and secure solution with regards to the total functionality necessary for Oregon.”Initially, long before Oracle’s fraud was revealed, the State was impressed with Oracle — and with reason. The Oregon Department of Human Services (“DHS”) and the Oregon Health Authority (“OHA”) held a series of meetings with Oracle throughout 2010 and 2011. Oracle made presentations, provided demonstrations, and answered questions that convincingly addressed all of the State’s concerns about the ability of Oracle to meet its needs. Independent outside evaluators agreed. They reviewed Oracle’s claims and recommended that the State purchase the “Oracle Solution.” Oracle’s fraudulent representations induced DHS and OHA to sign the first contract in June 2011 for Oracle to build a single platform for both a health insurance exchange (the “HIX-IT Project”) and to modernize the State’s social services technology (the “Modernization Project”).As soon as the first contract was signed, Oracle took control of both Projects. DHS and OHA initially planned to hire an independent “Systems Integrator” to manage the Projects and implement the “Oracle Solution.” Oracle was dead set against the State hiring an independent Systems Integrator. According to a former Oracle employee, Oracle advanced a “planned * * * behind-the-scenes effort” to convince the State “that a Systems Integrator would just cause * * * delay.” The former employee explained that “the message was we’ve got to make sure that [the State] doesn’t bring [a Systems Integrator] in because it’s * * * just going to cause us trouble.” Oracle recommended to the State that it hire Oracle’s own internal consulting unit, Oracle Consulting Services, to play the same role. Oracle also offered to provide training services to State employees, enabling the State to believe that it, along with Oracle, could co-manage the Projects without hiring an independent Systems Integrator. Oracle continued to support the State’s decision through the life of the project.Oracle’s behind-the-scene scheme paid off, for Oracle. Oracle convinced the State to spend millions of dollars more to use Oracle Consulting Services to design, plan, integrate and manage the Projects. Oracle became, in effect, the Systems Integrator, bringing on project managers and taking the lead in proposing system architecture, selecting software and hardware, and managing the Projects. From 2011 on, Oracle was the technical lead on both Projects and was responsible for the development of the technology. Oracle not only was responsible for all technology, it tightly controlled access to the software development environments, so that the State had to rely on Oracle’s demonstrations and reports to learn about Oracle’s progress on the Projects.In 2013, the State transitioned the HIX-IT Project to Cover Oregon, a State-created public corporation responsible for running Oregon’s health insurance exchange. Cover Oregon needed to launch the exchange to the public on October 1, 2013, to ensure that Oregonians would be able to enroll in health insurance online in time to meet federal deadlines. Oracle assured Cover Oregon that the exchange would be ready to launch on October 1. Oracle presented Cover Oregon detailed spreadsheets showing that the HIX-IT Project was nearly 80% complete. Cover Oregon relied on Oracle’s statements and entered contracts with Oracle to complete the HIX-IT Project.In the spring, summer, and fall of 2013, Oracle failed to deliver. At first, Oracle asked Cover Oregon to reduce the scope of the HIX-IT Project. In order to meet its October 1 launch date, Cover Oregon had no choice but to agree. But even with a reduced scope, Oracle fell far behind schedule. By the summer of 2013, it was evident that, despite its assurances, Oracle would fail to complete by October 1 a key element of the exchange—a website portal for small employers and their employees to shop for and purchase insurance. Nonetheless, Oracle employees assured Cover Oregon that the centerpiece of the HIX-IT Project—a website portal for individual Oregonians to review, compare, and purchase health insurance—would be ready to launch on schedule. By late September, however, when Oracle was unable to demonstrate a working website, Cover Oregon realized that Oracle’s assurances were worthless. On October 1, Oregon’s health insurance exchange was not ready for public launch.Despite Oracle’s failure, its executives continued to demand full payment, while promising the exchange would be ready to launch, first by mid-October 2013, then by the end of October, then in December, then January 2014, then February. Again and again, Oracle broke its promises, missing every promised date. Without the website portal that the State and Cover Oregon had already paid Oracle more than $100,000,000 to build, Cover Oregon and the State each hired hundreds of additional employees and expedited their training, in order to manually enroll Oregonians in health insurance, Medicaid, and other programs by hand processing paper applications.In the spring of 2014, Oracle’s president claimed that the exchange had been ready to launch in February 2014. Her self-serving claim was belied by assessments performed by independent experts. In January, a review conducted on behalf of the federal government reported that “there are still significant performance issues with the system such that, while the core functionality exists, the end user experience would be significantly diminished.” In April, Cover Oregon staff identified 1,198 errors that required repair before the system could be considered for a public launch. That same month, an independent assessment concluded that it would cost tens of millions of dollars and take more than a year to fix Oracle’s abysmal and incomplete work.Oracle willfully refused to fix its defective work under its warranty, continually demanded to be paid, and threatened to walk off the job if it were not paid, jeopardizing Cover Oregon’s ability to meet the needs of Oregonians during open enrollment for health care. Realizing Oracle would never live up to its obligations, Cover Oregon began work to transition to a federally run system. The State and Cover Oregon are unable to use most of Oracle’s shoddy and incomplete work.Oracle sold the State of Oregon a lie. According to a former Oracle employee, “There was no solution.” The cobbled together collection of products that Oracle called the “Oracle Solution” was not flexible, was not integrated, and most importantly, did not work “out-of-the-box.” Oracle’s 2010 and 2011 claims to DHS and OHA were patently and categorically false.Not only were Oracle’s claims lies, Oracle’s work was abysmal. One developer experienced in Oracle products called Oracle’s programming “atrocious.” He added that “they broke every single best practice that Oracle themselves have defined. It is one of the worst assessments I have performed * * *.” The same developer wrote to Oracle, “You are Oracle people, working on an Oracle hardware platform, with Oracle technology products, on an Oracle solution. * * * Oracle should be delivering these environments and products as a solution, like they actually understood the products and owned the solution which has not been the case by a long shot.” According to an independent quality assessment conducted in October 2013, Oracle’s “processes do not meet industry standards. Impact analysis, code review, coding standards and proper parallel development techniques are ad hoc and inconsistently applied or understood.” Another assessment stated simply that “Oracle’s performance is clearly lacking.” A former Oracle employee was more direct saying Oracle’s products were seemingly configured “by a kindergartner.”The cost of Oracle’s lies and appalling work is extraordinary. The State and Cover Oregon paid Oracle approximately $240,280,008 for a health insurance exchange that never worked as promised and a modernization program that never got off the ground. The State has and will spend tens of millions more fixing or compensating for Oracle’s failures, including millions of dollars to process paper applications, to create a manual enrollment and insurance eligibility determination process, to transition to the federal health insurance exchange, to fix Medicaid enrollment, to independently assess and repair Oracle’s failures, and to connect to the federal exchange.In short, Oracle employed false statements to induce the State, and later Cover Oregon, to employ Oracle and related defendants to undertake Projects that were central to the social programs and healthcare needs of hundreds of thousands of Oregonians. In addition, Oracle employed false statements to expand Oracle's role in the Projects and, thus, increase its profits. The result was that Oracle had nearly unfettered control of the Modernization and HIX- IT projects. Then, when problems arose and plaintiffs were in a terrible bind due to the looming deadlines related to the health exchange, Oracle made further false statements to induce the State and Cover Oregon to stay the course. In effect, Oracle used its purported superior expertise, coupled with lies and pressing deadlines, to trap the State and Cover Oregon in a deadly spiral: at each juncture Oracle charged more and Oregon got less.Oracle has never offered to return a penny of $240,280,008 it fraudulently obtained or to pay for any of the millions its failures cost the State. On the contrary, on August 8, 2014, Oracle filed a lawsuit riddled with false and irrelevant allegations against Cover Oregon, claiming that Cover Oregon owes Oracle an additional $23,000,000 for the “Oracle Solution” that never worked.

Partially yes. At the same time, it is far more complex than that.California is the king of Blue states and their cities have a whole host of issues. Let’s see who is to blame.#1: High cost of housingIt is really expensive to live in California. Buying and renting homes is way too expensive and it means that most people that live on a middle-class income struggle to afford to house.So what causes this?California is not building enough homes to keep up with demand.Breaking it down further you see whyBureaucracy. Democratic leaders love their regulations. In order to build new developments, there are multiple layers of bureaucracy to go through and this creates a large time delay and adds to the expense of building new homes. For instance, to build a new neighborhood you have to get approval and jump through hoops for all of the following agenciesThe planning departmentCity CouncilHealth departmentFire departmentBuilding departmentStrong environmental regulations. CEQA or The California Environmental Quality Act is a law that requires the government to consider the environmental impact of new housing construction. As noble as this sounds according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office local officials abuse this law and prevent environmentally friendly housing developments and delay new projects for over 2 years.Shortage of construction workers and expensive materials. According to the same nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office building costs 20% more in California compared to the rest of America.Growth controls. This is a popular thing in Cali as limits are set on the growth of the community. If the population booms the local government will often refuse to allow new construction leading to housing shortages.You can see that when it comes to the housing problems of California government regulations play a huge role in preventing the necessary construction of new housing developmentsCalifornia’s housing crisis is also really bad.Keep this in mind. Every one of California’s cities are in the 15 list (according to data collected by Zillow).Now housing affordability can be a real problem in every city and most urban centers are Democrat. This could explain a lot of it. There are cities that don’t have such terrible housing crises.#2: HomelessnessHomelessness is a really complex topic. It causes can be really variedDrug addiction/Alcohol addictionMental illness and local response to itEnvironment (is it warm)How locals accept homeless peopleHousing shortages/Housing pricesSo it is really hard to trace exactly what causes homelessness.California, Oregon, Nevada, Hawaii, and Washington all have the highest rates of homelessness.Note that all of these states are Democrat (blue) states. It is also worth noting that the climate of Washington and Oregon is not very kind to the homeless so it is interesting there are so many there.Now according to the Nation Law Center, the chief factor causing homelessness in California is housing affordability followed by the other factors I listed.So as outlined the housing crisis partially caused by local governments is at least partially to blame for the high numbers of Homeless people.https://nlchp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Homeless_Stats_Fact_Sheet.pdfNote though how much this impacts cities.Typhus and Tuberculosis are plaguing the homeless population and causing a minor health crisis. Medieval Diseases Are Infecting California’s HomelessThe homeless poop in the streets, causing a serious human waste problem in the major cities. Opinion | California’s Biggest Cities Confront a ‘Defecation Crisis’California’s response to this has been pretty awful. They painted some murals of heroic homeless people and are constructing really nice apartments to give to the homeless but neither are working.People who have a job but can't afford rent will not be able to get one of these free apartments and the apartments are so expensive to build that they cannot be built in large enough number to actually solve the crisis.#3: CrimeThe crime rate in California is actually not that terrible as has trended downward for years.For this, I am going to focus on NYC.The crime rate in NYC has spiked recently- and drastically.Murder is up 23%Shootings up 130% in June compared to June last yearBurglary is up 118%Rape and hate crimes are down though which is goodWhat’s Fueling New York City’s Rise in Violent Crime? There Are Several TheoriesCity of bullets: Shootings across NYC surge by 177% in July 2020, NYPD reports - amNewYorkNYPD Announces Citywide Crime Statistics for June 2020.Now there are several theories on what is causing the rise in crime.I will posit that decisions made by NYC officials caused the rise in crime. Decisions likeThe protests turned violent and NYC officials were slow to try and stop them N.Y.C. Protests Turn ViolentBail was set to 0$Thousands were released from jail due to COVIDCops were told not to respond to theft under 1000$I think these factors clearly cause a rise in crime. Though there is some debate here.When COVID originally hit early in 2020 there was no spike in crime, it all came after these bad decisions. They were progressive decisions but they were poor decisions. 0$ bail failed in Cali and it will fail in NYC California ending controversial 'zero bail' policy that led to quick release of suspectsNYC grocers alarmed by uptick in theft, quality of life crimesSummaryI think decisions made by local officials can absolutely contribute to the decline of a city. I think decisions made by many officials in Cali and NYC have caused a decline in the cities they serve.But again there are many factors at play here. A poor state with few resources is going to struggle regardless of who is in charge. If Republicans took over California they may not do any better. California is the size of a nation and it is a struggle to govern such a massive state effectively.