Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Latest Front In The War On Women

5 Comments

Now the cruel patriarchy (if by “patriarchy,” you mean Emily Yoffe and Ruth Marcus) is suggesting that maybe getting plastered at college parties isn’t the greatest idea:

If two people rush into a lion’s den and one decided to wear a dress made out of thinly sliced prime rib, she’s probably the one who is going to get eaten. This isn’t blaming the girl… it’s teaching her not to be the one wearing the Lady Gaga meat dress. But apparently offering any sort of parental advice on risk avoidance and minimization is crossing a line for some people. Maybe it’s a tacit admission there are parents who fail to do a good enough job preparing their children for the world. Perhaps it’s viewed as depriving their young freshmen offspring their “rights” to go out for the “fun” of “having a few too many” which is a “right of passage.” (I actually saw that one in one of the comments. I couldn’t make that up if I tried.)

This is obviously even more outrageous than not forcing Catholic law schools to give their students free contraceptives.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

Ozymandias

4 Comments

Updated:

I met a traveler from a fallen land
Who said: A trashed and useless interface
Sits on a website. And linked on the page,
ne’er clicked,, a tattered image lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its artist well those passions read
Which yet survive, displayed on the useless screen,
The man that mocked us and the heart that bled:
And under the picture these words appear:
“My name is Barack Obama, President:
Look at my prices, ye insured, and despair!”
Nothing aside remains. From the decay
of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The sick and desperate souls stayed far away

As well they should.

Business, Economics, Health, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Healthcare.Gov

24 Comments

Is it a black swan event?

An IT project with a cost overrun of 150% or more is in the black swan category. Such projects seriously disrupt businesses and costs some workers their careers, he said.

“You can’t really forecast which [IT projects] are going to blow up,” said Budzier, though in hindsight reasons like too tight deadlines may become clear. A tell-tale clue of problems ahead is a categorization of a project as “unique,” he said.

“If your system integrator, if your in-house IT, if everybody tells you that this project is unique, that’s a clear sign that this is going to go massively wrong,” said Budzier.

As Bruce Webster notes in email:

Of course, the natural tendency on the part of HHS & the Administration will be to minimize [as opposed to underpromise and overdeliver] the estimates of how long it’s going to take to fix things — and those estimates will almost certainly be wrong. So what we may see is the ‘Never-Ending Story’ pattern, where for several months they’re perpetually 4-6 weeks away from having Healthcare.gov working properly.

If I were in charge? I’d pull the plug completely and give no completion date at all until the website reconstruction was at a point where I felt comfortable opening it up for public alpha testing. Based on how the alpha testing went, I might announce a subsequent date for beta testing; and if that went well, then and only then would I announce a planned date to go live.

But they’ll find it politically impossible to do that. They’ve put themselves in a box with this legislative atrocity. It’s a Rubik’s cube that someone took apart and put back together to render it unsolvable and, so far, ObamaCare has caused far more people to lose their insurance than to get it.

I hope this costs more than “some workers their careers.” It should be an asteroid slamming into an ideology.

[Update while later]

More from Bruce Webster: ObamaCare and the Project of Doom:

Let me start by saying: there is no royal road to software. Good intentions, earnest efforts, and noble causes don’t count for jack. As I told John Fund over at National Review, saying (as SecHHS Kathleen Sebelius did), “We needed five years but only had two” boggles the mind. It is an admission, inadvertent or otherwise, of profoundly irrational and childish thinking, of magical thinking, if you will. “Clap! Clap to keep Tinkerbell alive!” That type of thinking.

There’s a lot of that type of thinking going on in this administration.

[Bumped]

[Afternoon update]

Kirsten Powers isn’t in denial. The ObamaCare roll out was a disaster for “progressive” politics.

Good.