Democrats have been complaining - loudly and repeatedly - that Republican opposition tactics on the Affordable Care Act are unprecedented. This is true, but not for the reasons that Democrats are telling themselves. No political party was ever foolhardy enough to pass such a big bill, with such sweeping consequences for so many people, without the support of a majority of their countrymen and at least a few members of the opposite party. Once they had done this unprecedented thing, the unprecedented reaction was predictable - and indeed predicted by myself and others.
I certainly hope the author is correct and we'll find out in the 2014 midterms. But this week's results - in NYC and Virginia - were not encouraging.
Posted by: Bobby ||
11/07/2013 8:15 Comments ||
Top||
#5
..subtract out the DC burbs in VA, and you get another round of urbanist vs non-urbanist electorate mentalities.
#6
we'll find out in the 2014 midterms. It looks like a permanent Democratic supermajority aka "The Free Lunch Party" is in the works. Maybe 2014 will be a speedbump in that process.
#7
Krauthammer commented: However, if you were wealthier and you lose it and you end up on Medicaid, I dont think youll vote Democratic.
People in that situation count (and will count) for nothing, nor does (nor will) their vote.
#8
I certainly hope the author is correct and we'll find out in the 2014 midterms. But this week's results - in NYC and Virginia - were not encouraging. I don't think Virginia and NYC tell us much either. The Pubs are trying to turn Virginia into a victory because the race was so close. It might have been closer if the Pubs had put some money into the race earlier. The closeness might be because of the intense dislike of ObamaCare and the fact that Obama is a habitual liar. The field of candidates in NYC sucked. Also NYC has traditionally been a liberal stronghold. The new mayor is really far out there in left field somewhere. We won't know until 2014 election results are in.
#9
A smart leader knows that big strategic thinking and giving orders are the smallest parts of her job. The biggest is persuading people who are not invested in her agenda to carry out her grand plans -- and, equally important, figuring out which plans to abandon because they can never get enough support to work.
Which pretty much what the President has not been over the past 5-plus years.
#5
Normally, during Quality Assurance tests during alpha, well before beta, a site like this will not have hundreds of errors. It will have thousands. Depending on how large the QA test team is.
After a few hundred bugs are fixed, those fixes open up more functionality on down the line of code that has not been tested yet until the first bugs were fixed, which adds hundreds more.
If the development team consists of more than one person, which usually a project of this size has many developers, copies of code must be controlled through source control programs such as Visual Source Safe, or a developer working with an old set of code for several days that does not include bug fixes rolled out since he got his copy, can overwrite the new bug fixes when he submits his old stuff.
Democrats don't know this. But common practice in the Evil private sector enterprise.
#6
My guess is that the specs were never nailed down until just before the go-live. Designed by multiple committees and rampart feature creep as things get added, and added, and added, oh and this well-connected interest group wants this little feature so you have to re-write whole sections of code.
So the development window shifts right radically toward the go-live date and QA and Release management gets squeezed tight. What was originally a few months of QA gets squeezed to a couple of weeks. QA and Source control gets very sloppy with little or no controls and soon they are simply throwing changes into production practically directly from development with little or no QA (we can catch up on that later... besides, it compiles and the prima-donna developers tested it right? We *must* make this date!)
#10
My guess is that the specs were never nailed down until just before the go-live.
Uhhhhhh, yeahhhhhh. Like I said before, imagine the likes of Hilary Clinton, Kathleen Sebelius and Nancy Pelosi putting a software specification together. And just for kicks, throw in Harry Reid and Moochelle. C'mon, it'll be fun!
#11
Administration officials say they are committed to having the website fixed by the end of November, but the timeline leaves little room for error given the list of problems.
"It's a pretty aggressive schedule," Mrs. Sebelius told the Senate Finance Committee at a hearing Wednesday.
"Aggressive schedule" is management speak for "the programmers are on a death march". Let's put it this way, they won't be seeing much of their families for the next few weeks.
Posted by: Bobby ||
11/07/2013 12:47 Comments ||
Top||
#14
Pro-Obamacare team trains reporters on covering Obamacare website problems
The vital quote from that article:
"What is surprising is that an organization claiming to represent professional journalists would endorse 'training' delivered by advocates for the program they are covering, which would violate SABEW's code of ethics. That code encourages journalists to 'avoid any practice that might compromise or appear to compromise objectivity or fairness.'"
So we'll see "hundreds of errors" become "dozens of minor problems," to then become "a few feature enhancement issues?"
#17
#15 Any sting those journalists feel will be their pride...if they have any. Maybe the trainers can buy them some drinks afterwards. It might help.
Bill Clinton: "put some ice on that"
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/07/2013 14:33 Comments ||
Top||
#18
You can do all the BS propaganda actions, but the thing that you cannot cover up the fact that people are getting notices that their insurance is cancelled.
Some people will submit and buy health insurance that does not pay anything and is more of a tax. Some people will not submit.
The bottom line is mean olde Mr. Arithmetic. There is not enough money to pay for those that don't contribute by those that do.
The system is dead. It just does not know it yet.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
11/07/2013 14:58 Comments ||
Top||
#19
Sebilius says healthcare website has hundreds of errors.
Same could be said for the stones in Hadrian's Wall, from a supine view.
#22
The thing is, in software there are many kinds of errors. There can be simple formatting errors - you expected dates to be printed out as month/day/year, and they came out as day/month/year. These sorts of errors should show up in initial testing, and should be fairly easy to fix.
Then there are simple coding errors, where the programmer meant to add two numbers together, but instead multiplied them. These errors might not be easy to find, but they are usually easy to fix - just correct the code.
Then there are design errors, where you tell the programmer to do something, but s/he was supposed to do something different. These are much harder to find, and can be a real bitch to fix.
Next you have the connection errors, where you need to get information from another system, say the IRS. You expect the IRS to send you the data in XML, but they send it in their own private binary code. These should show up when you do your connection tests - if you do them. Fixing these errors could take a long time - somebody needs to decree a common format, and then everybody has to code to it.
Add to these the numerous other places where things go wrong - you call a subroutine, and send the parameters in a certain order, but the subroutine expects them in a different order. Again, these sorts of issues should be settled in a design conference - if you have them. Sometimes you need the system integrator to establish the protocols between systems. If no one with experience is in charge, you get chaos. If you don't test, you find out only when the system goes live.
So there are hundreds of errors - but that doesn't address what kind of errors they are, where they are, how critical they are, how hard they are going to be to fix. That is the real challenge.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
11/07/2013 22:02 Comments ||
Top||
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
