Maturity is achieved when a person postpones immediate pleasures for long-term values.
Joshua L. Liebman
Pro-Liberty Thought of the Day
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| Via LFC |
ObamaCare Roundup
I've occasionally refeorenced writings of the "Health Ranger" Mike Adams, whom has sharply criticized militarist crackdowns on raw milk producers and/or distributors and has satirized the TSA's obtrusive, intimate searches. He also rants on GMO issues and against global warming He disavows any political affiliation although a cursory look at political topics shows a libertarian tilt:he rants against the federal debt, against Massachusetts' restrictive position on Internet gambling, easy monetary policy, interventionist foreign policy and crony capitalism. I infer that he's more left- than right-libertarian; in part, that's based on his anti-corporate perspective (including Citizens United), his opposition to intellectual property, and his reference to "progressive" people in his vision of the Next Society. I don't share his anti-GMO/anti-corporate perspective, I do support the basic concept (but not excesses) of intellectual property,and am more skeptical of research in the natural foods area. (I also have an unfavorable opinion of most conspiracy theories.) Adams generally has a low opinion of government in the healthcare arena, unduly influenced by crony capitalists.
It turns out that Adams has an IT background.
As a former owner of a successful software company, I've directed many R&D projects. I wrote the content management system that powers Natural News, and I engineered the algorithms that power the entire website called SCIENCE.naturalnews.com. I know what it takes to develop a complex, multi-location, multi-database relational online application. It is ridiculously complex, and my guess is that the Obama administration simply doesn't have the R&D brainpower to pull it off.He fleshes out some technical issues which are concerns--security, data permissions, data mappings, etc. I concur these are legitimate issues for many applications, although I would need additional information on the nature and extent of errors, not all which is available at the user interface level. But I accept his tentative inference that it may be little more than a mockup (all hat and no cattle, the limited, not-ready-for-prime-time functionality behind the scene). In part, this is based on few confirmations of signups and the HHS Secretary unable to give any enrollment figures in a recent media appearance. The Miami Herald had a tongue-in-cheek headline over the weekend talking about ObamaCare enrollments being more of an urban legend, with no more than a handful of confirmations. One of the interesting things Adams discusses was a spectacular failure of an over $200M California DMV project--and a healthcare exchange is far more complex than a DMV system.
Adams published a related post where he looked at the Javascript behind the webpage, and the results would be amusing if you didn't realize this is an effort of more than $600M. The anecdotal examples include: programmer in-process notes, misspellings in error messages, the use of Latin placeholder phrases, system resources being used to pick up obscure language support for error messages.Of course, the application goes beyond the interface., but I have repeatedly pointed out, user experiences are focused on the interface, and you often don't get a second chance to make a good impression. The point is what would you think if a book was actually an image of marked-up page proofs? You would never rush this into print--it would look amateurish. Embarrassing!
The Food Stamp Weekend Kerfuffle
Yesterday, there was a glitch in the federal EBT system--essentially, the food stamp program now has a debit card payment system, and the glitch basically involved inaccessibility of remaining credit for the holder. So, naturally, some EBT holders tried to take advantage of the situation. Mike Adams quoted a Louisiana media report of one WalMart shopper whom racked up $700 of groceries with less than a dollar left on her card.
As if the universally panned ObamaCare debut wasn't enough, we have yet another example of failed Obama Administration IT leadership....
Facebook Corner
How are monopolies like Monsanto formed by the government? How were monopolies that were around in the 19th century formed by the government? Can the free market prevent all monopolies? (submitted via LFC)
Does every progressive troll get to ask a loaded question on LFC? Monsanto is a private-sector company founded early in the twentieth century, not a corrupt GSE like Fannie or Freddie Mac, which used cheap government debt and an implicit government guarantee to grow market share against private-sector competition and then got bailed out. Its remaking itself into a seed/biotech powerhouse has emerged over the past decade, in part enabled by acquisitions. The question submitter, no doubt an anti-GMO crank, is really referencing intellectual property rights, which go beyond enhancing crop production. Monsanto is not the only company to apply biotech methods to food production; it simply has been economically successful. There are other competitors with substitute products more than willing to exploit arbitrary price hikes to take market share away from Monsanto. PS I do not own shares in Mansanto. The idea of having a dominant company in an industry is not intrinsically evil; for example, WalMart dominates its competition on sales volume of discounted merchandise, facilitated by economies of scale and state-of-the-art logistics. The misguided fear is higher prices. But creative destruction can undermine the business models of government-sponsored monopolies like the USPS, where virtually free email has eroded the cash-cow first class mail business. So even dominant companies have to continue to improve productivity, drive down costs and prices, reinvent themselves.
What? No mention of banking reform? Yes, why not also blame "market" failure? It's all "progressive" hubris. Repeated, provable government failures, all based on the megalomaniac delusion that elitists can improve on the free markets. The US economy has not been a 'free' economy for a long time, especially since FDR's assault on SCOTUS and judicial surrender of economic freedom and to federal government empire-building stemming from the morally unconscionable Footnote 4 (Carolene Products). [For those whom don't know the story, in the 1920's Big Dairy used its influence in Congress to ban interstate shipments of certain canned milk products; that's right: instead of using interstate regulatory authority to promote competition between states, it abused it to protect local dairy interests. Such lunacy has also existed in banking, healthcare insurance, etc.] Regulation basically becomes a vicious circle of government incompetence.
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| Via LFC |
Did Ayn Rand collect Social Security? (progressive troll, implying Rand was a hypocrite)
Ah, yes, let's blame Ayn Rand for being responsible for FDR's signature Ponzi scheme, an ingenious scheme to capture worker pay for Statist overspending and repayment in debased currency. Forget the hypocrisy of "progressive" legislators and bureaucrats whom exploit their inner knowledge and contacts to attract cushy jobs in the parasitic lobbyist industry, corporate boards, etc.
On the distribution of social security is theft kerfuffle: there is a contract, and the government is morally obligated to honor its contracts. I think to the extent you receive more than you paid into the system, adjusted for inflation, there is redistribution/theft. Of course, I don't agree with the mandate itself; it creates a moral hazard and undue reliance on/unrealistic expectations of government.
On the recently covered story of a narc befriending an autistic boy and using him to get marijuana, only to bust him (see here):
LFC The entire point of the War on Drugs is for rent-seeking cops, prosecutors, and prison guards to gain a profit/
The Riverside cop situation is morally corrupt. I think it has more to do with noncompetitive government monopolies and a misguided attempt to save people from their bad habits. You would think, with the fixation on the overall mediocrity of our public school system, some may wonder why our supposedly free country has among the highest incarceration rates in the world. Why with public budget constraints, we continue to pursue a largely ineffective war against victimless crimes, throwing money at personnel, prisons, etc., is irrational. No private-sector manager could continue to throw good money after bad in a decades-long, money-losing effort. That some parties profit from the continuing the war on drugs goes without saying; I think it has more to do like a lack of leadership at the state and federal level: no one wants to be seen as soft on crime, including victimless crimes.
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| Via LFC |
Political Humor
Question: How many Obamacare programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: NONE. Obama simply declares darkness to be a new "energy-saving feature" of green living.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Chip Bok and Townhall |
Smokey Robinson & the Miracle, "Ooo Baby Baby"
