[ExI] readers digest version of hayek

Sun Oct 27 19:06:55 UTC 2013

>. On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson
Subject: Re: [ExI] readers digest version of hayek

On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 10:47 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

You flatter me sir.  He has the TV show.  All I have is you guys.

>.Yes, but you really "have" us. At least me.

In a TOTALLY Platonic sense, with ABSOLUTELY NO expressed or implied
anything by the quotes around "have" you understand, none at all, no,
nothing like that one bit, no way Jose.

>.The thing that is horrible about her is that she's a bureaucrat. They are
all evil. Banally evil.

What they need to do is take someone already known to be non-evil, smart,
sweet, good hearted, kind and beautiful.  The face doesn't even need to know
how to run stuff; rather they would serve as the face of evil bureaucracy, a
bit like the brown-eyed splash page girl.  I have seen exactly this in a big
company; get someone who knows little but is personable, attractive, dresses
nicely, impeccable manners, to be the boss, then have some really smart guy
in the background, some nearly invisible person, perhaps a short bald shabby
guy who knows what is going on and is smart as a whip, to do the actual work
while the front person represents the effort.  

For head of Health and Human Services I would recommend the stunning Kari
Byron.  Anything she is selling, I am buying.  She is all the above, and no
matter what, I am confident even the bureaucrattest of governments could
never make that young lady evil.  Femininity just doesn't get any better
than this.

>.Well, if I don't criticize you when I think you're wrong, I'll lose what
little credibility I might have... LOL

Ja, well I don't have cable TV and don't watch Hannity.  So I claim to have
derived the poor argument independently.

{8^D

I must repeat and reinforce a previous comment: knowing what was at stake
here, I am astonished HHS would not have discovered in time the coming
catastrophe and stopped the rollout.

>.Reminds me of this TED talk...

http://bit.ly/17pECJs

Excellent!  {8^D

>.Big software projects are complex enough in the private sector. Add the
complexities of government oversight, and you have a formula for failure. It
has happened MANY times. It happens a lot in private industry too. Occam's
razor tells me the simplest answer is that software is a bitch and big
software is more of a bitch.-Kelly

Kelly  me lad, note please: this whole thing *did not need to be* big
software.  There was exactly no need for it!  That's the point of my
argument really.  It could have been as simple as just a publicly accessible
spreadsheet with fifty tabs along the bottom, one for each state, so each
tab would refer to residents of only that state.  Across the top they could
have identified the columns as benefits from each plan.  The rows could have
been filled in by all the companies competing in that state.  One of the
lines could have been the public option, offered by O-care.  Most of the
squares could have been simple checkmarks, with green tab notes if you
wanted them.  The companies could fill in what benefits they would cover, so
the companies would have filled in their squares on their spreadsheets, and
do let me assure you, they would have done it right.  This didn't need to be
complicated.  Simple not only would do, it would do better and do right.

Columns could be added for estimated government subsidies by age group,
income level etc.  They wouldn't need to know anything about who is asking,
no security, nothing.  They would provide the means for us to plan what-ifs,
which is really what spreadsheets do best, let us do what we need to do,
without asking questions that are perfectly irrelevant to the current
situation, such as the earnings on your most recent W2.  If you give them
your current salary, when you are being moved from 40 hours a week to 30 so
your company does not need to buy your health insurance, the amount on your
current W2 is irrelevant and something you may not wish to share with the
whole world in any case.  It doesn't help if you anticipate your salary is
going down very soon, as plenty of the applicants know is coming.

So they could put up that spreadsheet, which could be derived mostly by the
insurance companies (the only ones who really do know what is in the ACA,
and knew it even BEFORE it was passed) with about a dozen government
bureaucrats including the stunning Kari Byron in less than a week for
considerably less than 600 million dollars.  Failure to do it that way
demonstrates bad judgment, stunning incompetence and even more than a hint
of Simon bar Sinister-esque control-freakish power-drunken evil.

So my criticism of Ms. Sebelius has nothing to do with her being evil or
anything about the ignominious failure of the website and its subsequent
shameless rollout for all to see, in all its refulgent wretchedness.  My
criticism is that they even felt it needed to be a big software project to
begin with, when it really only required a small simple software project.
All they needed was just a big but simple spreadsheet, no more complex than
some I have created myself in my own misspent youth, and continue to create
in my misspent late youth.  That they struggled to find the very most
expensive and complicated way to do a simple project, then flubbed it
spectacularly makes HealthCare.gov a perfect textbook example of why we
don't want to hand over healthcare to the federal government.  Get
government OUT of the healing business, don't put more of it in there!
SHEESH for evolution SAKES!  What, if anything, were they thinking?

A slightly more sinister version of this is that it is perfectly clear that
HealthCare.gov is a nakedly transparent attempt at inappropriate data
harvesting by a government which has recently been caught doing that
illegitimately, but in the negative sense of the otherwise delightful word
nakedly.  

spike

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