[ExI] readers digest version of hayek

[Kelly Anderson]

On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 1:06 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> 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.
>

You've really got a thing for Ms. Byron... LOL


> >…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.
>

Does it frighten you to think like Hannity?? LOL


> ****
>
> {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…****
>
>
>
> >…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!
>

If you're putting up a web site that hundreds of thousands of people are
going to hit, it is big software.


> 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.
>

I'm a big fan of Craig's List for this reason. But putting lipstick on the
pig that is Obamacare is important political theater.


> ****
>
> ** 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.
>

I would say that your spreadsheet idea would be fine if everyone were as
smart as you are. However, that sadly isn't the case. It does need to be
usable. I finally went on the site today and it did seem to mostly work for
what I was doing. Though being 49 going on 50 very soon, it wasn't clear
whether I'd be charged a lower or higher rate. It's a big jump that
upcoming birthday.


> 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.
>

The $600 million dollars is incredibly stupid. I heard that the two guys
who ran the winning bid for building the web site each walked away with $80
million dollars a piece in pure profits.

I'm pretty sure I could have gotten the whole site built for less than $20
million, and still had $10 million in profit.


> 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?
>

I'm assuming they must have done more than create the signup website. They
must also be writing software to deal with other parts of the monster.
Which means there is more of this to come.


> 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.
>

Naked is also one of my favorite words... Saw a lovely game of spin the
bottle last night... LOL... Anyway I digress. I don't think a government
that is incapable of creating a simple web site is capable of covering up a
functioning data harvesting operation via that same site.

-Kelly
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