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Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Freedom Tower
OK, at least one more before I head for the airport. Lileks hates it.
Monster Rocket Alternatives
Clark Lindsey has a roundup.
It’s funny to read this old post from almost a decade ago (in which I first proposed the Astronaut Glove Challenge), and see how little has changed.
The ObamaCare Train Wreck
Thoughts from Richard Epstein.
Even its supporters are having trouble excusing it. Read this from Ezra Klein.
Hey, it’s not like this wasn’t perfectly predictable, and predicted.
[Update a while later]
Was the site crash caused by rate shock?
[Update a few minutes later]
Wow, even the New York Times is becoming racist:
“These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.’ ”
Interviews with two dozen contractors, current and former government officials, insurance executives and consumer advocates, as well as an examination of confidential administration documents, point to a series of missteps — financial, technical and managerial — that led to the troubles.
It’s almost like these people think politics is more important than actually competently running the government.
The Expensive ObamaCare Web Site
There is no good excuse for it:
From the evidence, it’s clear that the Obamacare exchange servers saw errors of all different kinds. They weren’t prepared for the load, even though this was never very heavy. California reported about 600,000 unique visitors, and Colorado reported about 55,000 unique visitors.
There were screen captures of database errors, not because the data was bad, but because the structure that holds the data was misdesigned.
There were 404 errors, which are totally design errors, meaning that the web sever was trying to get to a page that didn’t exist. (This led to the best hashtag of the day, #404care.)
There were non-descript server errors like the one I got from the California server.
There were user-interface errors. At about 10:00 AM, Colorado suspended new accounts on its site (it’s one of the ones using its own site, not the main exchange site), and didn’t get around to allowing new accounts again until 3:00 PM. At that point, the “New Account” button sent you to the login page for existing accounts. If you chose to enter your childhood phone number for a secret question, it wouldn’t take it, no matter what format (certainly not the format it used when asking for your current phone number).
This is why I say it was clear that this wasn’t just one of those things. The volume of inquiries wasn’t high by large-system standards, and the rest of the errors were in the control of the programmers.
These were design and execution errors, pure and simple. They were all catchable, with proper beta and load testing.
Yup.
Marginal Success In Delaying Aging
Even that is better than cancer or heart-disease research.
But that’s still not where the funding priority is.
[Update a few minutes later]
A simple pill to cure Alzheimers?
Faster please. Though it looks like it would only prevent further damage, not necessarily reverse it. But even that would be a huge breakthrough.
Healthcare.Gov
What went wrong?
I imagine there was a dialogue last Monday afternoon that went something like this:
FRONT-END DEVELOPER: Why does the username have to have a number in it?
BACK-END DEVELOPER: It’s in the government username regulations. Didn’t you read them?
FRONT-END DEVELOPER: No, we don’t do accounts, we just hand the input to you.
BACK-END DEVELOPER: And we told you your front-end the input was no good! See the ErrEngineDown in the URL?
FRONT-END DEVELOPER: Fine, fine. Sigh. Nice to finally talk to you, by the way.
BACK-END DEVELOPER: Yeah, you too. Are you in D.C.?
FRONT-END DEVELOPER: San Francisco.
BACK-END DEVELOPER: Know any good jobs in D.C.? I hate this place and they’re furloughing me as soon as we fix this mess.
Each group got its piece “working” in isolation and prayed that when they hooked them together, things would be okay. When they didn’t, it was too late. It is entirely possible that back-end developer CGI is primarily at fault here, but no one will care because they just see that the whole thing doesn’t work. As you learn early on in software development, there is no partial credit in programming. A site that half-works is worse than one that doesn’t work at all, which is why the bad error handling is so egregious. You always handle errors.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
[Update a few minutes later]
The roll out was nothing short of disastrous:
The left likes to flatter itself as thinking in terms of reason, facts, expertise, openness to doubt, and scorn of dogma and magical thinking.
Is this anywhere close to true?
When experts told the Obama Administration it was a fact the website was not ready, did they take seriously this advisement?
Nope! They simply said there was no cause for alarm; the strange gods of the left would just sort everything out.
Oddly enough, they didn’t.
It’s almost like they’re not quite as brilliant and rational as they’re always telling us they are.
And then there’s this. That’s right, Sheila Jackson Lee, who thinks that the Apollo astronauts went to Mars, thinks that the solution to the government shutdown is martial law. Meanwhile, the good lefties over at The Atlantic are more measured. They just want to have the Speaker of the House arrested.
It’s almost like they have a will to power, or something. And of course, as always with the left, when they accuse the “right” of this sort of thing, it’s projection.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, so just what are CGI Federal’s ties to the administration? You’d be a fool to think there are none.
SLS Is Not “Viable” Or “Sustainable”
Former Shuttle manager Wayne Hale speaks truth to people who don’t want to hear it:
“The current plan is fragile in the political and financial maelstrom that is Washington,” Hale said. “Planning to fly large rockets once every three or four years does not make a viable program. It is not sustainable.
“Continuing to develop programs in the same old ways, from my observations, will certainly lead to cancellation as government budgets are stretched thin. It is time to try new strategies.”
I’m sure a lot of folks in Madison County weren’t happy.
The ObamaCare Contractors
OK, call me crazy, and I haven’t looked into this at all. But would anyone be at all surprised if they were selected on how much they filled Democrat campaign coffers rather than track record or competence?
The Train Wreck
Why is ObamaCare such a hot steaming mess? Because Obama cares more about campaigning than governing (though he does like the part of governing where he can push his political enemies around).
[Update a while later]
The Republicans didn’t sabotage the health exchanges. Obama did.
This train wreck was perfectly predictable, and many predicted it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
It’s ObamaCar.
[Update a while later]
USA Today: “…an inexcusable mess.”
[Bumped]