How Healthcare.gov Doomed Itself By Screwing Startups | TechCrunch

The severity of the problems with the ACA Exchanges puts big government inefficiency on display. This piece argues that the nimble startup private sector may well have been in a better position to build and operate these exchanges.

Nevertheless, I suspect the most severe problems are to be found in the backend, connecting the various government legacy systems. Perhaps the exchanges are fatally flawed by the wrong systems architecture.

The fact that the CIA will spend $600 million with Amazon Web Services should be seen as a signal that big systems and big data may best be handled by smart people who can leap ahead of legacy systems many of which were designed in the last century

How Healthcare.gov Doomed Itself By Screwing Startups | TechCrunch: "These types of solutions will be entirely absent from California and New York. Ironically, the president’s chief technology officer, Todd Park, often espouses the principle of “Joy’s Law,” named for legendary founder of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, which states that “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people in the world work for somebody else.” 

For a year, Park has been reorganizing the entire federal IT system to put data in the hands of private developers, rather than have government websites be the central hub. It is bizarre that the president’s signature initiative would ignore its own principles."

From the Start, Signs of Trouble at Health Portal - NYTimes.com

This story in the NY Times, normally a strong supporter of this Administration, reveals that the the health portal rollout was and is a colossal failure. Meanwhile, TeamObama has obviously been lying to the American people about it, if we are to believe this story.

Having been associated with complex information technology systems over the years, I am not surprised.  This one is even more fragile because users are not trained in its use and had high expectations because of experience with other complex website that work.  This situation was made doubly worse because Administration officials failed to tell the truth and properly set expectations.

Thank God our military software systems are normally thoroughly tested before deployment and work as they should.

This mess is a direct result of the politics surrounding ObamaCare and the fact that so many people disapprove of it. The roll-out failure is sure to further drag down its popularity and rightly so.

Will it be soon that top Administration officials will be fired? I think it's likely that Secretary Sibelius will lose her job.

From the Start, Signs of Trouble at Health Portal - NYTimes.com: "Interviews with two dozen contractors, current and former government officials, insurance executives and consumer advocates, as well as an examination of confidential administration documents, point to a series of missteps — financial, technical and managerial — that led to the troubles."

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TINPOTI: Privacy and Anonymity Have Long Since Disappeared

For more than 10 years I have maintained there is no privacy on the Internet. When a person chooses to enter the electronic age, expectations of privacy and anonymity disappear. Yet Americans want to believe otherwise and politicians yammer and stammer, but have little or no control over metadata, thinking that passing laws to restrict access to the content of communications will insure privacy. NOT!

TINPOTI = There Is No Privacy On The Internet

From the NYTimes June 9, 2013:

"United States laws restrict wiretapping and eavesdropping on the actual content of the communications of American citizens but offer very little protection to the digital data thrown off by the telephone when a call is made. And they offer virtually no protection to other forms of non-telephone-related data like credit card transactions.
Because of smartphones, tablets, social media sites, e-mail and other forms of digital communications, the world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data daily, according to I.B.M.
The company estimates that 90 percent of the data that now exists in the world has been created in just the last two years. From now until 2020, the digital universe is expected to double every two years, according to a study by the International Data Corporation.
Accompanying that explosive growth has been rapid progress in the ability to sift through the information.
When separate streams of data are integrated into large databases — matching, for example, time and location data from cellphones with credit card purchases or E-ZPass use — intelligence analysts are given a mosaic of a person’s life that would never be available from simply listening to their conversations. Just four data points about the location and time of a mobile phone call, a study published in Nature found, make it possible to identify the caller 95 percent of the time."

A Battering Ram Becomes a Stonewall - WSJ.com

A Battering Ram Becomes a Stonewall - WSJ.com: ""I don't know." "I don't remember." "I'm not familiar with that detail." "It's not my precise area." "I'm not familiar with that letter."

These are quotes from the Internal Revenue Service officials who testified this week before the House and Senate. That is the authentic sound of stonewalling, and from the kind of people who run Washington in the modern age—smooth, highly credentialed and unaccountable."

This story may be behind the WSJ paywall, but Peggy Noonan is right on target. She recommends that an independent counsel be appointed and a full investigation of the IRS politically targeting conservative groups seeking non-profit status.

I agree this is needed. If the IRS is targeting groups , liberal or conservative, unequally for special scrutiny when they apply for non-profit status, how can we trust the IRS in other affairs, particularly now that they have additional authority under ObamaCare?

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Is Skype a Telephone Operator? France Will Investigate - NYTimes.com

Is Skype a Telephone Operator? France Will Investigate - NYTimes.com:

A fine example of the long and arduous road to governments' desire to regulate everything they can in telecom. Reminds me of the arcane debates in the '80s and '90s about defining and regulating,or not, information services and enhanced services in the U.S. The lawyers loved it!

As technology continues upending traditional business and regulatory models, governments will run to catch up and tax/manage/control/subsidize various aspects of it. Infrastructure and services no longer comply with neat definitions of the past so government's job becomes more difficult.

The time will come, though, when the Internet will eventually and unfortunately be 'regulated.' But who will do it? NTU or some other international entity? Shudders abound at the thought. The good news is it will take a very long time.

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Facts and Bias in a Social Media News World

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/world/europe/20iht-letter20.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y&_r=0

Spin vs. facts in a Twitter and Facebook era. Yes, electronic media complicates the traditional journalist's, editor's and government roles, but governments have always spun the facts into propaganda when they thought they could and the news media have always held biases. I believe a very important bias is what is chosen NOT to be reported by traditional media, either through deliberate choice or lack of resources. Social media, though often tough to fact-check, allow little to go unreported.

The burden is on us, the consumers of news, often ill-equipped to sort and sift often clouded by our own biases.

Vermont is #1. Not Desirable

http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/30/highest-state-taxes-lifestyle-real-estate-state-taxes.html

Vermont is the state with the highest taxes. But we already knew that. We have many apologists for this situation but the responsibility rests solely on the the liberal government establishment and those who elect them.

The Renewal of Civic Capitalism - NPQ – Nonprofit Quarterly - Promoting an active and engaged democracy.

Scott Harshbarger, Former Attorney General in Massachusetts, has it right in this graduation speech.

 "Civic capitalism is all about a robust business community, an engaged citizenry and a government that actively promotes your ability to provide a check on large institutions, from banks to corporations, and on government itself. It is about ensuring that democratic values endure, even as politicians and movements come and go. It is about rooting out corruption and insisting on honesty, opportunity, and full information, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because markets and civil society cannot function otherwise. Civic capitalism takes the long view, and teaches us that the government has a role in minimizing risks to the system—financial and otherwise—because that civil society is the base from which entrepreneurs and firms operate."

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True North Reports — Vermont's Cloud Tax Controversy

http://truenorthreports.com/clouds-continue-to-gather-over-tax


Rob Roper, in an interview with Mike Wasser, [a state tax attorney with State Tax Services, LLC, and who served in the Vermont Tax department at the time the legislation in question regarding the cloud tax was implemented] provides an excellent overview of the issue that flared up in Vermont recently.


I think the issue should be addressed head on by the Legislature. The technical bulletin issued by the Vermont Tax Department in 2010 should be rescinded. and no further back taxes should be levied. Any already paid should be refunded.


The issue is enormously important because so much functionality will be living in the cloud that jurisdictional issues become very complex. The whole issue should be given serious thought about whether a tax should be levied and who should be responsible for collecting it.

"...I want to clarify that when this bulletin first came out, I don’t believe it was done with any malicious intent by the tax department. It’s a complicated issue as we’ve discussed… and they just got it wrong…. It’s really in how you address a mistake like that that makes a difference. What concerns me is in larger part, to my knowledge, nobody that’s looking at how to resolve this issue has even bothered to consult the former tax commissioners who actually administered this policy. Why aren’t they asking commissioner Pelham and commissioner Westman what the department’s official policy was on cloud services?...”"

The Quest for Creating Jobs - Wrong Thinking

When Jim Clifton,  Chairman and CEO of Gallup (the polling people) author of The Coming Jobs War, was asked: What obstacles do leaders have when trying to create more jobs?"

"There are no real obstacles. Just wrong thinking, bad assumptions. When you build strategies and policies on wrong assumptions, the more you execute, the worse you make everything, which is what we are doing now. There are three wrong assumptions that cause all the current job creation attempts to not work.

1. "Innovation is not scarce. Entrepreneurship is scarce. We are spending billions and wasting years of conversations on innovation and it isn't paying off. Great business people are more valuable and rarer than great ideas.

2. "America has about six million active businesses. Ninety-nine percent of them are small businesses. An incalculably huge mistake leaders are making now is spending time, money, strategies, and especially policies for those who need 'help' getting a job. A useful way to look at any citizen is this, 'Can she herself create jobs or does she need a job created for her?' We are spending all our time on the cart and doing little or nothing on the horse. We have our assumptions and futurism that backward. 'The horse (small and medium business) stopped, so we fix the cart (jobs).' If we change all our strategies and policies to favor the job creators (small and medium businesses) the horse and cart will get moving again. We have our compassion right, but the logic is staggeringly stupid.

3. "It is wrong thinking to imagine that Washington has solutions. Job creation is a city problem. There is great variation in job creation by city in the United States. San Francisco and the greater Valley keep pumping away while Detroit isn't. Austin's cart works while Albany's doesn't. Cities need to look inwardly and say, 'What can I do to create great economic energy, to bring new customers for all existing companies and start-ups?'"

Guess Who?

Guess who said this?

"We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.
We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.
By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few."

Guessed yet? Read more here. Even more here. Will you invest your money? Better read this first.

Nobody Understands Debt - NYTimes.com

Nobody Understands Debt - NYTimes.com

Krugman is the ultimate Keynesian, even winning a Noble prize for his work. He seems also to posess a massive ego because he's so certain that he's right! But what if he and the Keynesians are wrong?

I'm no economist, but I think he's wrong about government spending and debt because today's and tomorrow's economy is unlike that of the past where the theory arguably worked fairly well.

I believe accelerating technological change makes for a very different economic reality than in the past. I am persuaded that we are entering a future where jobs will continue to disappear because human work, even complex human work, will increasingly be done by powerful computing networks and robotic systems. As this change accelerates, the need for workers with the "middle skills" (the middle-class) will continue to diminish while the population grows.

Of course, people will continue to be needed in certain service work such as plumbers, technical service, equipment and infrastructure maintenance and health care. Lower paying work like food service, agricultural labor, gardening, etc. that aren't yet adaptable to automation will certainly be required.

Higher skilled jobs designing and servicing these complex digital and robotic systems will be in short supply, because people are changing and re-skilling more slowly than technology is advancing. Our institutions and education have inertia that is unequal to the momentum of society's adoption of advancing technology. The economy seems to be much more capital than labor intensive for the same output.

More than likely, so-called structural unemployment will not disappear quickly, but may become worse. This means fewer taxpayers and increasing burdens on society's productive people to support those who receive ever-increasing benefits provided by government spending which now requires borrowing about 40 cents for every dollar spent.

Krugman's approach may have worked for yesterday's economy, but will likely fail tomorrow's reality. He offers scant evidence that increasing government spending and debt will produce the kind of skills and jobs that will be essential to success in tomorrow's economy. Presumably, he's not advocating 'make-work' jobs with debt spending. Or is he?

If his theory and advocacy is wrong, we face government growth and costs that we cannot afford.

"...So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way."

The Anti-Entitlement Strategy - NYTimes.com

Romney has set out his ideas about the role of government in our lives. Should Romney be the Republican candidate facing Obama, his stance of the proper role of (big) government will be a key element in the ideological battle to be waged.

With Romney as the Candidate, it'll be Wall Street Baron vs. Community Organizer and all the baggage those terms carry.

Already the liberal opinionators are setting out the opposite view which Obama is certain to include in his campaign. Here's the view of a professor at the Columbia Jounalism School, a liberal bastion. 


Here's another view, Beyond the Welfare State, by Yuval Levin

A Gloomy New Year and Beyond

Much of my current reading promotes little optimism for the future of the United States economy, at least as it is defined by job creation and employment. The viability of our present political system, long term, is doubtful. We seem to be dysfunctional in many domains including economic, political, and cultural aggravated by a leadership vacuum that portends little positive change for the foreseeable future.

Some of my reading:

http://econintersect.com/b2evolution/blog2.php/2011/12/20/usa-in-2012-2016-an-insolvent-and-ungovernable-country

Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy

...and of course the daily slurp from the Times, the Journal, the TV talking heads and other online sources.

I believe we are in the midst of a substantial economic dislocation driven by the rapid and pervasive creation and adoption of technology by businesses, large and small. This accelerating trend means that fewer workers are required to deliver higher productivity in our economy. The resulting systemic upheaval means that not only ours, but the world's economy can produce goods and services with far less human capital than has been required historically. The result of a declining need for workers and increases in output creates societal and political strains that may lead to massive changes that we are ill-prepared to cope with. Government aid and backstops may be insufficient to deal with the magnitude of this change.

I hope to write more on this topic before the start of the new year.

Secret Fed Loans Helped Banks Net $13B - Bloomberg

A fascinating, well researched story by Bloomberg of the massive bailout of banks during the 2008-2009 financial crisis and the secrecy surrounding it. Kudos to Bloomberg and their authors and editors for doing this. Clearly, the financial system was in jeopardy at the time and bold action was necessary. It's the secrecy that surrounded it that we find so egregious along with the fact that far too many bankers and the industry in general benefited to an unwarranted degree.


I'm no financial expert, but it seems to me that the finance industry and the Fed were in cahoots to keep Congress in the dark and, for the most part, impotent during this crisis. One could argue that haste was necessary and a dysfunctional Congress could not be trusted to do the right thing in a speedy fashion. Yet, what does it say about the resiliency of our democracy in time of crisis?


Sadly, these world-rattling events have further relegated Congress to irrelevancy in a time of financial crisis. We continue to see more of it with failure of the Super Committee to rationally rein in the deficits and debt, part of which arose from the frantic efforts to save the big banks and the financial system from collapse.

 "The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.
The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue."

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Growing-Gap-Between-Contributions-and-Benefits-for-Social-Security-and-Medicare-August-2011.jpg (809×452)

Despite the facts shown on the chart below, our Vermont Senator Bernie ('Outrageous') Sanders makes outlandish statements like this: "...The truth is that the Social Security Trust Fund has run surpluses for the last quarter century. Today’s $2.5 trillion cushion is projected to grow to $4 trillion in 2023. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, experts in this area, say Social Security will be able to pay every nickel owed to every eligible beneficiary until 2039...."

He implies that the 'Trust Fund' is in good shape neglecting to say that the assets have been loaned to the Government and used for other purposes. The assets are mostly IOUs from the Government. Unless spending is controlled in all areas of Government, the risk increases that these IOUs may not be paid in full because the country may not be able to meet all its obligations. The 'full faith and credit' of the U.S. is not as rock-solid as it was.

Much more here. Sen. Sanders' rhetoric does a disservice to reality.

Here's a link to a great chart on SS prospects in the years ahead from the Washington Post.

The Divider vs. the Thinker - WSJ.com

Sounds like a statement that thoughtful Occupy Wall Street folks could buy into and adopt as their own. But it comes from a conservative Republican who understands our national disease and speaks openly about it.

"Rather than raise taxes on individuals, we should "lower the amount of government spending the wealthy now receive." The "true sources of inequity in this country," he continued, are "corporate welfare that enriches the powerful, and empty promises that betray the powerless." The real class warfare that threatens us is "a class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society.""


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Poll: Washington to blame more than Wall Street for economy | Burlington Free Press | burlingtonfreepress.com

Congress , even more that Presidents, deserves the reproach for spending America into deep debt. That means we, the people have ourselves to blame since we elect them. The Constitution gives only Congress the purse strings of government, and they have far too freely opened that purse to 'provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare...'

"Most Americans blame Wall Street for the nation's economic predicament — but they blame Washington more.


And in the democracy that fancies itself the capital of capitalism, more than four in 10 people describe the U.S. economic system as personally unfair to them. A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken last weekend, as the Occupy Wall Street protest movement completed its first month, found that:


•When asked whom they blame more for the poor economy, 64% of Americans name the federal government and 30% say big financial institutions.


•Only 54% say the economic system is personally fair to them; 44% say it is not.


•78% say Wall Street bears a great deal or a fair amount of blame for the economy; 87% say the same about Washington."

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The Planning Fallacy - David Brooks NYT 09/16/11

David Brooks delivers an unwelcome but thoughtful message about the ability of government to manage and move a system as complex as the economy and the resulting disappointments of the governed. We are subjected to far too much political rhetoric these days that is based on the quest for power and control ignoring the reality of the economy's complexity. Brooks argues that, at its best, government is effective on discrete problems, but quick fixes to systemic issues with a myriad of influencing factors cannot be assured.

"...The key to wisdom in these circumstances is to make the distinction between discrete good and systemic good. When you are in the grip of a big, complex mess, you have the power to do discrete good but probably not systemic good.

When you are the president in a financial crisis, you have the power to pave roads and hire teachers. That will reduce the suffering of real people who would otherwise be jobless. You have the power to streamline regulations and reduce tax burdens. That will induce a bit more hiring and activity. These are real contributions.

But you don’t have the power to transform the whole situation. Your discrete goods might contribute to an overall turnaround, but that turnaround will be beyond your comprehension and control.

Over the past decades, Americans have developed an absurd view of the power of government. Many voters seem to think that government has the power to protect them from the consequences of their sins. Then they get angry and cynical when it turns out that it can’t." [emphasis added]

Passport Control at JFK

We returned to the U.S. on Monday, September 12 and were greeted very warmly by an officer who checked our passports. He asked how long we had been out of the country and when we told him three weeks, he replied: "Welcome back home. Well, you were lucky to have missed those Vermont floods." Yes, we were fortunate that Irene caused only minor damage at our home (one small tree down in the yard).

It was gratifying and refreshing that this officer (I didn't get his name) was warm, friendly and chatty. His attitude and demeanor reflected well on Homeland Security, unlike so many customs and immigration officials we have encountered here and abroad.