[ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine"

[Kelly Anderson]

On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 11:40 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> *>…* *On Behalf Of *Kelly Anderson
>
> **
>
>
> http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/23/technology/obamacare-website-fix/index.html?iid=EL
>
> ** **
>
> They mention a number I think must be in error, 500 million lines of
> code.  Indeed?  No one has yet offered us a reasonable explanation for what
> the hell all those lines of code think they are doing in there.  Why did
> they need all that?  Software gurus please, does that tell you what they
> could have had in mind?  With half a billion lines of code, there is just
> no possible way they could secure the data.  With that much code they can’t
> even really debug it all, no way!  Surely there must be a mistake, or I am
> failing to understand something fundamental.  With all that code, I am
> naturally suspicious as all get out, never mind the recent revelations.
>

I think the answer lies in redundant code. If you divide that by 50 states,
you'll find that there are 10 million lines of code per state. Since each
state is doing it's own thing independently, this becomes much more
understandable. Nevertheless, 10 million lines of code is a boatload of
code for what they are doing. Suppose that half the code is the Fed's side,
now it's 5 million lines per state. Still a huge amount, but it doesn't
sound QUITE so bad.

Then again, the Linux kernel is around 15 million lines of code. 50 million
in Microsoft Windows 7. And that's bloated.

In any case, it has some seriously bad architecture going on there. I
suspect many of the lines of code are linked in legacy code, which is not
optimized or set up to do the sorts of things that it's being asked to do
now. It is likely a complete cluster f**k.

****
>
> Suppose they do start over.  Why not go with that big spreadsheet idea?
> The user would just download the whole thing, compare costs at their
> leisure, or if Kelly is right and they can’t do that, just have someone
> with actual brains help them, figure out what they want, find the company
> which offers the closest to that, then see if the price is within reality,
> or opt out, not all that different from buying a car.
>

More like figuring out what to pay on your taxes, I'm afraid. But then you
have to have a system that they can use. Try getting the price of an asprin
in the hospital BEFORE you take it, and you start to see the problem here.


> Really simple for most people who don’t get employer health insurance: I
> am betting most will opt out, at least at first when it doesn’t cost much,
> and really doesn’t cost anything, since the ACA doesn’t specifically
> empower the IRS to collect, and after the way they treated the Republicans
> in the house this month, goooood luck getting them to pass a law to empower
> collection.  The Republicans are likely to tell them to go to hell and take
> their ACA law with them.
>

I'll opt out unless I have an employer providing insurance by then.


> All they need is a big downloadable spreadsheet, with every company’s deal
> in there, simple.
>
> ** **
>
> >…Omar, America will soon enough have a system similar to Canada's.
> Obamacare is an enormous cluster fuck designed to implode so that we have
> to go to a single payer system. Just wait for the boom. –Kelly****
>
> ** **
>
> Here’s the real kicker: I and plenty of others would likely go for a
> single payer system under one condition: that it be done on a state level.
> We don’t have enough control over the Fed to do this, so no way I could go
> along with it.  We see corruption spilling out more every day, IRS chief
> taking the fifth, another IRS chief sharing taxpayer data with the
> government, now we hear the NSA is spying on Angela Merkel.  Clearly this
> bunch is corrupt to the bone.
>

I see NOTHING wrong with the NSA spying on Angela Merkel. The only thing
they did wrong was allowing themselves to get caught.


> ****
>
> Actually states are free to set up a single payer system now, and have
> always been free to do that.  That none of them are doing it should be some
> kind of hint that it might not work as well as it sounds.
>

Well, if you count other nations, lots of people are under single payer
systems. It's just uniquely un-American.

I thought of something else. All this time and oxygen spent on Obamacare
guarantees that we aren't doing anything to reform Social Security,
Medicare and Medicaid. Since those are the REAL problem areas in the
federal budget, Obamacare is like the magician making us look away from
where the real action is. I can't believe I didn't see the trick before
now! Even talk radio is ignoring that stuff for the moment.

-Kelly
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