UPDATED! John McAfee on ObamaCare Software

Always Fails

“Central planning is a bureaucratic nightmare” ~ Hayek (get)

See Hayek, Above

Even I couldn’t log on to Healthcare.gov ~ Obamacare contractor (see)

Via Libertarian Republican:

No one even considered the scenario we are now seeing: a partially working system in which it is difficult to sign up but not impossible. This means that the most motivated consumers (the sickest) are likely to persevere in creating accounts, while the younger and healthier are more likely to skip an unpleasant process and risk a minimal fine.  “If they don’t get the necessary volume and demographic mix in the exchanges,” Yuval Levin of National Affairs told me, “it could set off a catastrophic adverse selection spiral that would not only render the exchanges inoperable but badly damage our large health care systems.”

But the failed rollout has already raised ideological issues of broader significance. It has reinforced a widely held, pre-existing belief that government-run health systems are bureaucratic nightmares. And it has added credence to the libertarian argument that some human systems are too complex to be effectively managed. Perhaps the problem with Obamacare is not failed leadership, but the whole project of putting a federal agency, 55 contractors and 500 million lines of software code in charge of a health system intended to cover millions of Americans. 

I am not a libertarian who argues against the need for programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. But Friedrich Hayek has this much going for him: He understood that the challenge of technocratic planning is always limited information. “The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”

Via NewsBusters:

MSNBC’s Chris Jansing brought software expert Luke Chung onto Thursday’s Jansing & Co. to analyze the federal government’s troubled healthcare.gov website. Chung, the founder and president of software and database programming company FMS, served up a scathing indictment of the website that left Jansing reeling at certain points during the interview. [See video below the break. MP3 audio here.]

Jansing started by asking how complicated it was to get healthcare.gov up and running. Chung was very frank with her: “I don’t know why they made it so complicated. This really shouldn’t be that difficult.” Jansing fumbled around, talking about other countries and states that have launched similar programs before playing administration advocate…

[….]

Later, Chung eviscerated CGI, the IT company hired by the government to develop healthcare.gov: “This was built, I think, by people who were never paid before to create software. I think they just got out of school or something. You know, these government contractors, they win these contracts and then they’re incentivized to deliver the cheapest people possible to meet the minimum requirements.

Chung bluntly put the website problems in perspective: “I mean, this is not rocket science. We’re not curing cancer, we’re not providing any health care, we’re not even providing health insurance. We’re filling out a paper form. Not that hard.

…read more…

Via MoonBat:

HotAir has this:

There’s a growing consensus on the mid- to late-November time frame by which the Obama administration really, really needs to have ObamaCare’s online portal running smoothly to avoid inducing more death-spiral risks and subsequent industry panic, and all of their plans for public outreach and directing people to call centers and whatnot is only going to get them so far.

“Tech surge” or no tech surge, CNN reports that still more experts and computer engineers are piling on to the suggestion that fixing HealthCare.Gov’s major problems before the end of 2013 just isn’t a feasible task, and that rebuilding the system from scratch would be the administration’s easiest and safest bet:

After assessing the website, Dave Kennedy, the CEO of information-security company Trusted Sec, estimates that about 20% of Healthcare.gov needs to be rewritten. With a whopping 500 million lines of code, according to a recent New York Times report, Kennedy believes fixing the site would probably take six months to a year.

… Nish Bhalla, CEO of information-security firm Security Compass, said it “does not sound realistic at all” that Healthcare.gov will be fully operational before that point.

“We don’t even know where all of the problems lie, so how can we solve them?” Bhalla said. “It’s like a drive-by shooting: You’re going fast and you might hit it, you might miss it. But you can’t fix what you can’t identify.” …

“Projects that are done rapidly usually have a lot of [repetitive] code,” said Arron Kallenberg, a software engineer and tech entrepreneur. “So when you have a problem, instead of debugging something in a single location, you’re tracking it down all through the code base.”

A whopping 500 million lines of code is “so excessive,” says Kennedy, and that a more normal number for a project like the ObamaCare site would lie somewhere in the range of 25 million to 50 million. Dayum.

…read more…

Blatant Bias 101

This example comes via NewsBusters:

Last Thursday and Friday, the Washington Post’s Express tabloid showed a major contrast between a GOP elephant waving a white flag, and then Vice President Joe Biden triumphantly handing out muffins at the post-shutdown EPA.

Another, even stronger contrast emerged on the news stands of DC on Tuesday and Wednesday after it became apparent to absolutely everyone that the Obamacare website was a fiasco. Obama was a cheerleader on Tuesday; on the next day, the Republican elephant was dead or dying.

On Tuesday, the cover headline was “Commander Performance: The president delivers a spirited sales pitch for Obamacare as criticism of its deeply flawed rollout mounts.” Inside, the headline was “Search for a Cure: Obama says the health-care site will be fixed, as problems mount.”

The story began began “President Barack Obama gave a consumer-friendly defense [?] of the health-care law Monday” and the event “had the feel of a health-care pep rally.” They cited ABC-Washington Post poll numbers that 56 percent believe the website’s tech problems reflect a larger problem with Obamacare, but “more Americans also support the law despite the enrollment issues, with 46 percent saying they support the law now, compared with 43 percent who said so last month.”

On Wednesday, the cover headline was “Free Fallin’: Who suffered the most from  the government shutdown? Poll results show the biggest loser is the Republican Party. Inside, the headline was “GOP Feels Shutdown Hangover: Poll finds major damage to the party as it wrestles with its future direction.”

As Scott Whitlock noticed in the regular paper, the Post wants readers to know “just how badly the GOP hardliners and leaders who went along with them misjudged the public mood,” while “President Obama’s overall ratings have held steady. Almost half of all Americans approve of the way he has handled his job.” It left out that more disapprove: it’s 48 percent approve to 49 percent disapprove among all adults, and among registered voters, it’s 46 percent approve to 51 percent disapprove.

…READ MORE…

I love this reporter… he ends with “I am not an advocate”! Awesome!

  • PBS Host Calls MSNBC Anchor and MSNBC Contributors ‘Advocates’ – To Their Faces

More Evidence that O-Care Killing Jobs and Hours for Working Poor!

Via Gateway Pundit:

A new report by the Federal Reserve links Obamacare to lack of job creation – ten times. The Foundry reported:

We already knew that many employers plan to cut workers’ hours to stay under the threshold of Obamacare mandates. This makes full-time jobs—much less full-time jobs with health benefits—harder to come by.

It’s more difficult to track the phantom jobs that just don’t exist today because of Obamacare’s strain on employers. But the latest report from the Federal Reserve confirms that they are all too real.

The Federal Reserve collects feedback from businesses and issues reports about the economic outlook. Its latest report directly links Obamacare to a lack of hiring. In fact, it cites Obamacare’s mandates and regulations 10 times.

Hipster Dushbag Turns Conservative ~ Gavin McInnes

“Overthrowing capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow the whole #@*! patriarch!”

~ well-known feminist author and co-founder/editor of Ms. magazine, Gloria Steinem

An excellent article by Caroline May, entitled, “‘Godfather of Hipsterdom’ Gavin McInnes: Feminism makes women miserable

Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice and often described as “The Godfather of Hipsterdom,” kicked a hornets nest this week by suggesting that modern feminism has been detrimental to women.

“We’ve trivialized childbirth and being domestic so much that women are forced to pretend to be men. They’re feigning this toughness. They’re miserable,” McInnes said in part during a contentious and expletive-laced exchange on a HuffPost Live panel on Monday.

McInnes received forceful push back from the panel, media and social media for his comments.

The founder of Street Carnage, however, explained in an interview with The Daily Caller that he has no regrets about what he said, and that his comments were in fact very pro-woman.

“I think the most interesting thing about this story is all the controversy it generated. I consider my comments pretty mundane and when I read them in context. I don’t regret anything,” he said. “Every time I see my words quoted I go ‘yeah!’

“That study that I cited was all over the news a year ago — Lou Dobbs covered it on CNN — it didn’t seem to generate that much controversy when it came out, and all I did was cite that study and say a lot of women in the workforce would be happier at home. What is wrong with that?” he asked.

McInnes said that the real reason his comments set off such a firestorm is that “deep down” women realize what he said is true.

“I think a lot of women smash through the ‘glass ceiling’ and get to where [men] are and they go, ‘wait a minute, I thought you guys had brandy and went to strip clubs, you’re going over expense reports?’ And they see their friends from their small town with 3 kids going to soccer practice and they think, ‘That looks kind of cool, actually.’

“So I think they know I am right and that is what is making everyone freak out. All I did was point to the elephant in the room, but as I made very clear in that interview — what made me fly off the handle, too — is I am not saying women should not be in the workforce. If you were meant to be there, by all means, be there, and when I work with a qualified woman who is driven, like a Barbara Corcoran type, I love it because I get the job done,” he said.

He said that overall his words have been twisted into being anti-woman, when in fact believes his comments to be empowering.

“I see a lot of women without kids, in their 40s, who are miserable and I see a lot of women after they have children saying, ‘what the fuck was I doing? Why was I doing fashion PR? I was doing seating plans for a fashion show telling what people sit in what chair. Now I’m shaping human life,’ he explained.

“And that is another thing maybe I didn’t get across, I see the housewife as a far superior vocation to mine, and to most,” McInnes continued. “I mean I make commercials, and funny videos, and T.V. shows or whatever, film projects that people will watch for ten minutes and go ‘heh’ and get on with their day. I essentially… make comic books. You flip through it and you’re done. My wife creates life from her vagina and then — that’s just the beginning — then she shapes this human life.”

McInnes explained how much more fulfilling his wife’s day — making memories with their children — than his, working on a “fuckin’” cheese commercial.

“Who is changing the world more?” he asked.

Of his home life, McInnes said his is a “traditional family” living in New York “an exaggeration of the liberal utopia.”

“I always describe New York as an elephant’s graveyard for ovaries,” he said. “All these unhappy women, and I am talking about 100 percent of my friends waiting too long and regretting it, and I’m not saying that you have to have babies and you have to stay in the kitchen and you can’t have a life. Nobody is saying that. That is a totally unreasonable thing to say. That is a fascist, communist thing to enforce. All I am saying is: Why are you trivializing such a miracle?”

McInnes explained that his children — ages 9 months, 5 years, and 7 years — made him believe in God and become pro-life.

“It made me religious. I was an atheist most of my life and now I am a God-fearing Catholic, because of the miracle of life. And I’m pro-life,” he said, noting that he used to be pro-choice and became pro-life with the birth of his first child.

“Amongst my peers abortion is cool,” he continued. ”It’s like, empowering, and they make jokes about it. Some of my best friends go, ‘I accept that it’s murder and I am pro-choice.’ That’s the world I live in.”

He recalled a recent party he was at, in which a pregnant woman, who was planning on having an abortion the following week, was on hallucinogenic mushrooms “and everyone was laughing at it. That’s my universe.”

According to McInnes, based on his personal experience, women who have had children are significantly less likely to have an abortion.

“I think once women experience it, they change their minds pretty quick — and that is my personal experience, you know, I cannot speak for everyone. But I am probably getting myself in more shit,” McInnes said.

“I’m sick of women who haven’t experienced [child birth] trivializing it,” he added.

On the flip side, McInnes said that men have become less masculine, ironically as a means to get more women.

“I think men are becoming beta males because feminists have told them to, but you’ll notice feminists don’t fuck those guys,” he said. “I think they are doing this and being submissive…because they are trying to get laid.

“If women said men who dress in clown costumes are hot and cool, then they would fuckin’ stick a red nose on.”

McInnes continued that he sees the anti-masculinity push as intrinsically anti-capitalist.

…read more…

`Jaw Hits Floor` ~ 3.7 Trillion in 5-Years!

New research from the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee shows that over the last 5 years, the U.S. has spent about $3.7 trillion on welfare. Here’s a chart (above), showing that spending versus transportation, education, and NASA spending:

“We have just concluded the 5th fiscal year since President Obama took office. During those five years, the federal government has spent a total $3.7 trillion on approximately 80 different means-tested poverty and welfare programs. The common feature of means-tested assistance programs is that they are graduated based on a person’s income and, in contrast to programs like Social Security or Medicare, they are a free benefit and not paid into by the recipient,” says the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee.

“The enormous sum spent on means-tested assistance is nearly five times greater than the combined amount spent on NASA, education, and all federal transportation projects over that time. ($3.7 trillion is not even the entire amount spent on federal poverty support, as states contribute more than $200 billion each year to this federal nexus—primarily in the form of free low-income health care.)

“Because the welfare budget is so fragmented—food stamps are only one of 15 federal programs that provide food assistance—it makes effective oversight nearly impossible, at the same time disguising the scope of the budget from both taxpayers and lawmakers alike. For instance, it is easier for anti-reform lawmakers to oppose food stamp savings by obscuring the fact that a household receiving food stamps is often simultaneously eligible for a myriad of federal aid programs including free cash assistance, subsidized housing, free medical care, free child care, and home energy assistance.

“In the UK, six of the nation’s welfare programs have been consolidated into a single credit and total benefits have been capped at £26,000 (about $42,100 per family) in an effort to both improve standards and decrease net expenditures. A similar reform concept in the United States—combining welfare spending into a single credit—would still result in a surprisingly large welfare benefit while reducing expenditures and allowing for reforms that encourage self-sufficiency. For instance, a CATO study found that an average household in the District of Columbia currently receiving the six largest federal welfare benefits (Medicaid, TANF, SNAP, etc.) receives assistance with a converted cash value of $43,000. In Hawaii, it’s $49,000. Hypothetically, if net benefits from these myriad programs were combined into a single credit and capped at even 95 percent of that very large amount, it would save taxpayers billions while enabling reforms to promote self-sufficiency, reduce the penalty for working, and make the system fairer for taxpayers.”

(http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/report-us-spent-37-trillion-welfare-over-last-5-years_764582.html)