Tens of thousands of hours

One of the dubious mantras that Dr. Dixon’s acolytes keep repeating (and they have so many mantras) is that “tens of thousands of hours” were spent analyzing the District’s facilities.

Tens means a minimum of 2 times ten thousand to qualify for the usage of the adjective “tens” plural. That would require 20,000 hours of study at a minimum (unless 10,001 now means “tens” of thousands. (Or maybe JCI rounded up to “tens” from 10,501.)

Assuming a very modest pay for the “experts” doing the analysis of $20/hr (far too little to have many competent experts actually doing the analysis) that would have cost someone $400.000. JCI’s charge (never collected) was to be $250,000. This suggests that far fewer hours were spent in investigation or that really low paid grunts did lots of work.

I got thinking about this because I’ve probably dedicated 3,000 hours of work on fighting the Red Plan – one person over a year and a half. I’ve put in a lot of forty hour weeks on this. I’d really like to see the listing of hours put in by all these high power investigators rather than have to rely on what sounds like hyperbole.

As for how good a job these experts did, well, the selection of the Ordean site strikes me as an amateur’s mistake. An engineer who radded up the JCI’s costs in their report for the Red Plan recently told us about a $2 million out of $14 million mistake in simple addition that he found. He added the JCI report’s figures up a couple times and had his girl friend do the same. $2 million off each time.

So much for the “tens of thousands of hours.” So much for JCI’s experts.

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