Category Archives: Crap For Brains

People and especially governments do some incredibly stupid stuff. This is about those stupid actions.

Let’s look to the UK for healthcare

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The UK has government run health care. That’s been working out well hasn’t it?

Oh! Maybe not:

A plan to create the world’s largest single civilian computer system linking all parts of the National Health Service is to be abandoned by the Government after running up billions of pounds in bills. Ministers are expected to announce next month that they are scrapping a central part of the much-delayed and hugely controversial 10-year National Programme for IT.

…

“The department has been unable to demonstrate what benefits have been delivered from the £2.7bn spent on the project so far,” Margaret Hodge, chair of the PAC, said. “It should now urgently review whether it is worth continuing with the remaining elements of the care-records system. The £4.3bn which the department expects to spend might be better used to buy systems that are proven to work, that are good value for money and which deliver demonstrable benefits to the NHS.” A further £4.4bn was expected to be spent on other areas of the vast IT project.

H/T to Adam Baldwin.

What I don’t think most people realize is that software doesn’t scale in a linear fashion from small projects to large. I can write, debug, a deliver a program to you that prints out, “Hello world!” in a minute or two. I can easily do it in five lines of code. That figures out to about 1200 lines per day* if I were to spend the entire day coding at that rate.

Yet when you look at the number of lines of code delivered on real projects it’s about 10 lines per day per developer. On a project as large as an operating system like Windows it’s much lower.

The problem is that planning, complexity, documentation, testing effort, and difficulty goes up much faster than the number of lines of code increase. You can pump out the code at a fast rate but it’s not something that is going to work well. It will be very fragile. You can find test cases where it will work correctly but as soon as you do something a little unusual or the system is under load and the timing on something changes you can end up extremely difficult to find bugs.

As the size of the project goes up communication between teams become a problem. With a poor design a small change in one part of the system affects many other parts. Communicating and coordinating this occupies increasing amounts of time and care. A change occurred “somewhere” in the system and your code stopped working. It can take an hour or a week to find the problem and get it fixed so you can continue to add features. Even worse are “build breaks”. This is when someone changed something and you can’t even build the software into something that runs so it can be tested. This can mean every single programmer on the entire project is at a standstill. As you might imagine these are very high priority events and you can have people baying for your blood. People take them very seriously and the consequences are high but they still happen.

A former roommate working on Windows NT back in about ‘99 told me she had a bug fix ready for check-in but wasn’t allowed to for months because of concerns that it was a change that could affect other people.

How many lines of code are in the Obamacare system? I don’t know for certain but there are reports that it contains 500 million lines needs to have 5 million lines rewritten. Do the arithmetic to arrive at your estimate of how many people working for how many days is required before it will be “fixed”. My best guess is that the politicians had the U.K. model in mind and that’s what they will get (see above).

Everything I see about the Obamacare web site indicates it was thrown together by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. There are very few companies that have been able to write very large complex systems successfully. Microsoft and Google come to mind. The contractor for Obamacare isn’t on anyone’s list of successfully large scale system developers.

They claim it will be working by the end of November? Did they say which November?

* Yes. Lines of code per day is a poor way of measuring productivity. For example one can be very productive while reducing the number of lines of code in a program. Yet, it is good enough for many uses and can illustrate valid points with serious error.

Quote of the day—mikee

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People? Brownian motion with random, moving magnets arrayed in their environment, as far as I can tell.

mikee
October 24, 2013 at 11:55 am
Comment to Quote of the day—Timothy Sandefur
[This comment showed up when Barb and I were at lunch. I laughed pretty hard when I read it. I showed it to Barb but she didn’t know what Brownian motion was and it spoiled the mood some.

It’s funny because I suspect, on the scale of all humanity, the model has a positive correlation with the available data.—Joe]

One big happy family

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This ought to make you feel all warm and fuzzy.

The same company that made the healthcare.gov website (on a no-bid contract, naturally) is the same one that created the Canadian gun registry that cost roughly twenty times the original estimate and got scrapped a decade later after being found to be both useless and seriously defective.

But they want us to just trust their good intentions, ’cause they are so smart and transparent. Yeah, riiiight.

If a tree falls in the forest

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Yesterday, in reference to spying on U.S. citizens, U.S. Congressional Representative Mike Rogers and Intelligence Committee Chair insisted:

You can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated.

I can only conclude he would also insist that he hadn’t actually stolen cash from your wallet if you didn’t know it had been taken. Or that a teenage girl hadn’t been raped if she had been drugged and didn’t know what happened.

Someone should tell him that must also mean his privacy wasn’t violated if someone made of video of him having sex with a sheep and didn’t tell anyone.

The only purpose

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With as many crazy people as there are it’s surprising the world isn’t more messed up than it actually is.

And of course with a psychotic belief like that they have no reservations whatsoever about destroying your guns and you.

I tweeted back the following:

But trying to reason with the mentally ill is hopeless. I know, I’ve tried it before.

Quote of the day—Mike Konczal

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It’s important we get more sophisticated analysis of what has gone wrong with the ACA rollout to better appreciate how utilizing “the market” can be far more cumbersome and inefficient than the government just doing things itself.

Mike Konczal
October 23, 2013
What Kind of Problem is the ACA Rollout for Liberalism?
[In other words, “Our government program is such a disaster that we need a new and expanded government program to fix it.”

Monopolies are almost always a bad thing. The lack of choice creates a situation where inferior and expensive products do not get improved or replaced. Konczcal and hard-core liberals want government monopolies. The soft-core liberals want to regulate the market.

What Konczal doesn’t understand is that he, politicians, and government in general, do not have the domain knowledge to solve most problems. This includes regulating the solution providers. When I read the instruction manual for my car and it says to use a particular grade of gasoline and change the oil every 5000 miles I follow their recommendations. They know their car far better than I do. Even though I am a software engineer when a software package says it requires X megabytes of RAM Y megabytes of disk space I follow their recommendations because they know their software far better than I do.

The advocate for more government might say, “We will bring in experts and/or we will become experts.” This doesn’t work. I worked in a government lab for three years. I remember sitting in a meeting discussing how to get more research contracts. One guy said, “What we have is the ability to become experts on anything within a couple of weeks.” He was serious. I felt the blood drain out of my face. I had been working with him for over two years and I had not yet discovered anything that I considered him an expert on. They spent several years and millions of dollars coming up with a software testing and quality program for the software being developed at the lab. What they came up with was something that the industry had left behind a decade or two previously (the “waterfall model”).

The reason government cannot acquire the expertise is because they are a monopoly and expertise is like a product. It must constantly be improved and updated to remain relevant. And without the marketplace pressure it will stagnant and become obsolete.

Because of this lack of domain knowledge and the inherent inferiority of monopoly products government “doing it itself” will always be the wrong answer to a problem that doesn’t involve the use of force.—Joe]

Random thought of the day

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I find it odd that many of the people who believe they are wise enough to know the world would be a better place if the second article in the Bill of Rights were eliminated choose the people they wish to associate with according to what they believe is a proxy for penis size.

No More!

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I got this circular from some GOP Senate twerp;

“Lyle,

In 8 days, we’ll hit an important fundraising deadline. How much we raise will have a big impact on whether or not our candidates are set up to succeed, so every dollar counts. I’m so committed to helping us reach our goal that I’ll match 3 times your donation.

As the last few weeks have made crystal clear, our country desperately needs new leadership in the Senate. It’s plain to see that Harry Reid just isn’t up to the job. Under his tenure, the Senate has become a dysfunctional disaster — plagued by political games, partisan stalemate, and constant finger pointing. We can break the mold, but we’ll need your help to do it.

With 7 seats up in states Mitt Romney won, combined with the Democrats’ failure to recruit competitive candidates, the political map shows we can win in 2014. Now we’re counting on you to help us make it happen.

Harry Reid and his left-wing special-interest groups are already raising millions to protect their majority. They’re desperately doing everything they can to out raise us. We simply can’t allow that to happen.

Will you please contribute $100, $50, $25, or whatever you can afford today and help us take back the Senate?

Again, donate before the deadline and I’ll personally make sure your donation is triple matched.

Thanks,

Senator Roy Blunt”

To which I replied;

“Roy,

This plea of yours reads like a joke. In fact, the GOP has become a dysfunctional disaster — plagued by political games, ideological hypocrisy, and constant finger pointing. I’ve been saying for years that we must first defeat the GOP before we can defeat the Progressive movement and the Democrats, that the GOP has been a major obstacle standing in our way.

That fact is, right now, more blatantly obvious than ever. I will be working to convince as many people as possible that it is time to defund the GOP, and stop being fooled by the pseudo conservative pap that is being fed to us as a ruse. I’m sick and tired, and I am DONE having my own money used against the principles I hold dear by the very people who have pledged to uphold them!

After the despicable performance of the Republican senate leadership these last weeks, I am insulted by your request for money. You apparently take your voter base for gibbering fools, but to some extent I can understand your confusion being that against our better judgment we have supported you so much in the past. Well, Sir; No More!

Lyle”

I don’t know Roy Blunt from Adam, and I don’t care to know him or any other GOP hack.

If you want to throw money at the problem, don;t send it to the GOP and don;t send it to any candidate– some of that money always goes to the Party even if you gave it to a candidate. Send it to Freedom Works or some other group you know for a fact doesn’t play games. At this stage I think it’s better to send no money rather than risk one dime going to game-players, “the wizards of smart” and Progressives.

Besides; money is far from being that which defines victory. There may even be an inverse relationship. If the GOP dorks want to win, all they really have to do is stand up for the principles we elect them to stand up for. In that case they wouldn’t need any money. We’d be able to see them as people we want representing us, just by their actions. It’s free.

Don’t fall for the crap anymore. We’ve tried it too many times and seen it thrown back in our faces already. The enemy (The Bloods) of my enemy (The Crips) is NOT my friend! Same goes for the Dems and Reps. I think we have yet to learn this lesson properly.

Update, 10/23/13; My reply to Senator Twerp at the NRSC was bounced, so they want your money but they don’t want to be bothered hearing from you. It seems to me I’ve gotten replies through to them in the past. I’ll look for his own e-mail address and get this to him that way.

Quote of the day—Jon Gabriel

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Math doesn’t care about fairness or good intentions. Spending vastly more than you have isn’t good when done by a Republican or a Democrat. Two plus two doesn’t equal 33.2317 after you factor in a secret “Social Justice” multiplier.

debtchartfw2

Jon Gabriel
October 21, 2013
The Reality of America’s Finances
[H/T to son James for showing me this.

Sometimes I think that part of the problem is that people think that math, even arithmetic, is subject to opinion. People will just proclaim, “I don’t agree with that”, and they believe they have refuted your numbers.

In many ways politics is faith based. The democrats have a tendency towards being economic tyrants and the republicans have a tendency towards being moral tyrants. Neither really understand principles. Or if they do their principles are to destroy the principles they can and ignore the rest.

With their policies having no principles it should come as no surprise they also believe that numbers are subject to whatever whim they have this election cycle. Numbers are just something you use to make your opinion appear valid. And everyone’s opinion is just as good as anyone else’s so that must mean that everyone’s numbers are just as good as anyone else’s.

Principles? They don’t even understand the concept of a principle.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Molly Ivins

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I used to enjoy taunting my gun-nut friends about their psycho-sexual hang-ups – always in a spirit of good cheer, you understand. But letting the noisy minority in the National Rifle Association force us to allow this carnage to continue is just plain insane.

I do think gun nuts have a power hang-up. I don’t know what is missing in their psyches that they need to feel they have to have the power to kill. But no sane society would allow this to continue.

Ban the damn things. Ban them all.

You want protection? Get a dog.

Molly Ivins
Columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram
March 15, 1993
Taking A Stab At Our Infatuation With Guns
[She also says, “As a civil libertarian, I of course support the Second Amendment.”

Note that this is someone who lives in Fort Worth Texas in 1993. Those were very, very dark days for gun owners.

I could spend several paragraphs picking apart the quote above but I really don’t have the time or interest. I just want to address one point.

If you “get a dog” for your protection keep in mind that it has a mind of it’s own. It isn’t under your full control. A gun does not have a mind of it’s own. You can lock up the gun in a safe and leave it there when you are at work without worrying it will get cranky and bite the neighbor kid that is poking a stick at it if you left it in your yard. When you decide your life is in immediate danger of termination or permanent injury you can pull the trigger and be nearly certain your persuasive forces have been significantly increased when the dog could be thinking of begging for a treat.

If your dog is a weapon big and determined enough to pull down a large attacker do you really want that weapon to have a brain with that much independence, and that much less judgment controlling it’s actions?

If Ivins has evaluated the judgment of dogs versus her own and decided in favor of the dog I’m certainly not going to dispute her conclusion on the basis of the evidence I have seen so far. But she has no business making a similar decision for me or anyone else.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Alan Gottlieb

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You simply have to love Piers Morgan. Trying to have a rational conversation with him about guns is like filming a recruiting commercial for the gun rights movement.

Alan Gottlieb
Founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation
October 16, 2013
PIERS MORGAN ‘DOESN’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE SECOND AMENDMENT IS,’ SAYS GOTTLIEB
[This was in response to what happened here:

In this video Piers calls Alan “stupid”. Alan has a degree in nuclear engineering. Piers “studied journalism”. I have spent hours talking to Alan and he’s very smart. I haven’t talked with Piers but my bet is that Alan is a lot smarter than Piers.

Further evidence of this is that this is the first time I have known someone to find a use for Piers. Piers makes a good recruiting tool.—Joe]

Why Republicans are not cowards

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You must have principles before you can fail to stand up for them.

Quote of the day—aallison

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There is no possible necessity for a private citizen the need a reloadable semi-automatic weapon.

aallison
October 11, 2013
Comment to Brown misfires on gun control legislation.
[Such ignorance is absolutely staggering.—Joe]

“If I were in charge!”

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I get these emotional appeal type e-mail forwards every day. I usually delete them without reading them (just so all you forwarders know, and besides; I get the same information, if it’s even real, days to weeks, to sometimes years, before you apparently did). This one caught me eye as something that needs to be addressed though;

“PUT ME IN CHARGE . . .

Put me in charge of food stamps. I’d get rid of Lone Star cards; no cash for Ding Dongs or Ho Ho’s, just money for 50-pound bags of rice and beans, blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul away. If you want steak and frozen pizza, then get a job.

Put me in charge of Medicaid. The first thing I’d do is to get women Norplant birth control implants or tubal ligations. Then, we’ll test recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine. If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, or smoke, then get a job.

Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks? You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair. Your home” will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions will be inventoried. If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360, then get a job and your own place.

In addition, you will either present a check stub from a job each week or you will report to a “government” job. It may be cleaning the roadways of trash, painting and repairing public housing, whatever we find for you. We will sell your 22 inch rims and low profile tires and your blasting stereo and speakers and put that money toward the “common good..”

Before you write that I’ve violated someone’s rights, realize that all of the above is voluntary. If you want our money, accept our rules. Before you say that this would be “demeaning” and ruin their “self esteem,” consider that it wasn’t that long ago that taking someone else’s money for doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered self esteem.

If we are expected to pay for other people’s mistakes we should at least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices.

AND While you are on Gov’t subsistence, you no longer can VOTE! Yes, that is correct. For you to vote would be a conflict of interest. You will voluntarily remove yourself from voting while you are receiving a Gov’t welfare check. If you want to vote, then get a job.”

Followed of course with the obligatory;

“Now, if you have the guts – PASS IT ON…”

Oy. I guess we’re supposed to respond with a hearty; “YEAH! You Tell ’em!” and then go back to our search for other emotional stimulants, such that by the end of each day we’ll need to get drunk or bury our faces in the television to calm down.

Uh, no. I responded to the forwarder thusly;
“This is all assuming that the government is rightly and should forever be in charge of “charity” by way of coercive redistribution, which of course is the problem from the start. It shouldn’t.

‘Put me in charge’ she says….

No, Young Grasshopper; PUT THE CONSTITUTION BACK IN CHARGE. PUT THE FOUNDING PRINCIPLES BACK IN CHARGE and then we won’t have those in government usurping the very concept of charity and turning it into something horrible.”

Oh, and just as a side note; If you can’t vote as long as you’re on government subsistence? Heh! No problem; we’ll just make sure everyone is forced onto government subsistence. The Progressives are working on that right now anyway, and so long as you’re dependent on them, vote or not, you’ll have to do what they tell you.

This is the difference between Democrats and Republicans on one side, and libertarians/objectivists and Christians on the other. The former see the problem as an issue of WHO is in charge, while the latter see the issue as being whether or not the guiding principles are in charge. Whoever wrote the forwarded e-mail is every bit as clueless as any card-carrying, ideological Marxist, and most likely is a die hard Republican; take all of the leftist assumptions, make them your own, and wish you were in charge of administering them so you really SHOW THEM, BY GOSH AND BY GOLLY, GEE WHIZ!!!. I’d tell such people to go to hell, but they’re almost certainly already there, so even if they were genuinely inclined to take my advice it would make zero difference.

I’ve tried to say this in several different ways already, but we’ll give it another try;
That which irritates you owns you. It has converted you over to its purpose. This e-mail forward is a PERFECT example of that, and think how many cultures have been trading one tyrant for another, for another, for yet another… Get it?

Quote of the day—Luke Chitwood

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Whether or not Barack Obama actually has plans to personally invade the homes of America’s 100 million gun owners and forcibly remove their firearms is irrelevant. The NRA has achieved great success in making this event seem possible to the Americans who fear it the most. The NRA has perfected the use of slippery-slope arguments and doomsday predictions to activate a passionate, idealistic, and focused base.

Luke Chitwood
October 8, 2013
Here’s How the NRA is So Freakishly Effective in the Gun Control Debate
[Chitwood has a problem with the truth. This is just one of many examples in the article. Obama would never personally do this and the NRA would never suggest he might. And as usual, if someone starts out with false data and assumptions whatever follows is almost certain to be in error.

What Chitwood apparently doesn’t understand is that NRA members drive the NRA rather than the NRA driving it’s members. People join the NRA to, among other things, encourage them to protect gun owner rights. I know a few people that have quit or refused to join the NRA but all of them did this because the NRA compromised or were to soft of supporters of gun owner rights. Not that they were too “extreme”.

The NRA is a grassroots organization. Our opponents cannot seem to understand that. Their model appears to be that the NRA recruits members and turns them into some sort of mindless minion that does the bidding of the evil NRA overlord. As is usual, anytime an anti-gun person says something you can be fairly certain it’s crazy talk.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Conor Higgins

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The only way to go is complete, national disarmament. That way there is no chance that criminals could raid government storehouses, or that military weapons could make it to the hands of violent gangs. There would be no chance of corrupt government officials selling firearms to cartels or other organized crime groups. If we do not push complete disarmament by removing guns entirely from the situation and not just from the hands of civilians, then we are simply promoting the disarmament of the American people who would be left without means to defend themselves, while doing nothing about the very people that the 2nd Amendment afford them the right from which to protect themselves.

The only way to ensure that no guns fall into the hands of criminals, and to ensure the safety of Americas civilians, is to make sure that all guns are removed from the equation.

Because if disarmament does not take place on a national, state, and civilian level, and no one has guns, it is not “gun-control” it is “civilian control.” 

Conor Higgins
October 3, 2013
A modest proposal: On gun control
[I read the entire article thinking there was a good chance this guy was serious. Only the last sentence gave me hope he was sane.

In this article he advocates complete disarmament. This includes the police and the military with naïve, half-baked, plans to collect all the guns and rationale for why neither the military nor law enforcement require firearms. I actually had to go looking for other stuff he has written to convince myself this was satire.

There are people out there that naïve and half-baked but Higgins isn’t one of them.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Matthew May

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I will not submit to a cabal who read George Orwell’s 1984 not as a terrifying warning, but as an instruction manual. Nor will I submit to the dictates of those who attempt to trample the right of free speech of others in the halls of government who are warning us about the looming tyranny. I refer to those sons of liberty who, as Camus wrote, “are not all legitimate or to be admired. Those who applaud it only when it justifies their privileges and shout nothing but censorship when it threatens them are not on our side.”

Matthew May
September 30, 2013
I Will Not Comply
[H/T Tyler Durden.

With the NSA listening to and recording every phone conversation, reading and storing every email message, the post office taking pictures of every envelope, and the government mandating the details of relationships (with insurance companies), police officers told to not wear their uniform and gun onto school campuses (H/T Ry), and people seriously advocating absolutely crazy stuff, how can we not think we are in a Orwellian dystopian universe? The Jews in 1939 Germany couldn’t really believe it was happening. It was crazy to believe people would do the things they were doing. It just couldn’t be real. But it was real. And it’s real now. Believe it.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Paul Barrett

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The Times did not help matters by illustrating its article with a large photo of a grieving mother accompanied by a prominently displayed quote: “There are no accidents. There are simply irresponsible, stubborn, cowardly adults unwilling to stand up against the gun lobby and those who support it.” In my view, this woman’s pain gives her a pass to say pretty much whatever she wants. Making her anger a central message of such a sizable journalistic undertaking, though, raises questions about whether gun-control backers are just as prone to invective and conspiracy talk as their least responsible foes. Dispassionate analysis would serve everyone better.

Paul Barrett
September 30, 2013
Guns, Children and Accidents: Four Blunt Points
[Yes. Dispassionate analysis would serve everyone better. But that would have near zero chance of resulting in more gun control. And the people at the New York Times almost certainly realize this. Therefore, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. They are so committed to more gun control it is an extremely difficult psychological burden to reverse course. They would rather tens of thousands would die and the rights of millions of people be infringed than risk having to admit they were wrong.

Draw your own conclusions about their moral character and capability for rational thought.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Barack Obama

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As long as there are those who fight to make it as easy as possible for dangerous people to get their hands on guns, then we’ve got to work as hard as possible for the sake of our children … to do more work to make it harder.

Barack Obama
President of the United States
September 21, 2013
Citing shootings, Obama says must ‘go back at’ gun-control push
[One of the criminals that supposedly prompted this renewed push to make the exercise of a specific enumerated right more difficult via enhanced background checked had a military security clearance. How much more thorough of a background check does this guy think one should have before they can exercise their rights?

The only conclusions I can come up with are that he, and others like him who advocate for more rigorous background checks in response to the Washington Navy Yard shooting, are either totally irrational and/or evil. Regardless of the conclusion there is no point in “conversation”, “compromise”, or “debate” with people who are insane and/or evil. There is nothing to be gained from talking with crazy and/or evil people. I’ve been there and done that. It will only drive you crazy. Your only option is to get them out of your lives.—Joe]

Say WHAT?

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They just keep coming.

I’m still wondering about Fast and Furious, and we’re what, a couple dozen scandals removed from that now, each one taking the former one off the main headlines? You couldn’t make this stuff up– It would be taken as way too far beyond believability.