Month: October 2013

Left, Right, Center, Wingnut, Moonbat, Teh Crazy: take comfort in this…

…at least you’re not in charge of the New York Comic Con.

Fans, celebrities and press attending New York Comic Con on Thursday sent out laudatory tweets expressing excitement to be at the annual convention — or at least it looked like they did, as the tweets were published entirely without their permission or knowledge.

The tweets were tied to attendees’ NYCC badges. This year, conference organizers Reedpop allowed people to pre-register their badges online. The badges have radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips that are tied to a user’s identity in order to curb counterfeits. (RFID chips use radio frequencies to transfer information between the chip and a receiver.) Continue reading Left, Right, Center, Wingnut, Moonbat, Teh Crazy: take comfort in this…

RIP, Scott Carpenter (1925-2103[*]).

Sad news: my condolences to his family and loved ones.

Malcolm Scott Carpenter, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts who was forced to take manual control of his Aurora 7 capsule after running low on fuel in one of the scarier moments of the early space program, died early Thursday. He was 88.

As many, many people have noted: it takes a certain type of person to calmly sit on top of a pile of explosives and trust that the person who is about to light the match has done everything right.

Moe Lane

[*Clearly wishful thinking on my part.)

Daily Mail: 51K completed #Obamacare applications first week, 6.2K first day. #oops

Here’s the funny thing about sweeping things under the rug: the rug doesn’t actually, like, eat them or anything. They’re still there. Or, if this Daily Mail article is correct*, they’re not there:

Just 51,000 people completed Obamacare applications during the first week the Healthcare.gov website was online, according to two sources inside the Department of Health and Human Services who gave MailOnline an exclusive look at the earliest enrollment numbers.

The career civil servants, who process data inside the agency, confirmed independently that just 6,200 Americans applied for health insurance through the problem-plagued website on October 1, the day it first opened to the public.

Continue reading Daily Mail: 51K completed #Obamacare applications first week, 6.2K first day. #oops

Yet another post on the structural problems of #Obamacare (Language warning).

You can tell that it’s bad for the Obamacare exchanges.  No, not because more people are ripping it apart*…

Bugs can be fixed. Systems can even be rearchitected remarkably quickly. So nothing currently the matter with healthcare.gov is fatal. But the ability to fix it will be affected by organizational and communication structures.

…or that they’re forced to come up solutions that are politically infeasible**:

People are no doubt scrambling to get healthcare.gov into some semblance of working condition; the fastest way would be to appoint a person with impeccable engineering and site delivery credentials to a government position. Give this person wide authority to assign work and reshuffle people across the entire project and all contractors, and keep his schedule clean. If you found the right person—often called the “schedule asshole” on large software projects—things will come together quickly. Sufficient public pressure will result in things getting fixed, but the underlying problems will most likely remain, due to the ossified corporatist structure of governmental contracts.

No, you know that it’s bad when Slate references George W Bush without visibly sneering. Continue reading Yet another post on the structural problems of #Obamacare (Language warning).

Some FOOLS threw a bag of money on the Senate floor*!

That’s like throwing a bucket of chum into piranha-infested waters!

Not seen: the immediate appearance a writhing sea of legislators and lobbyists, each determined to snatch away that sweet, sweet free money that doesn’t even come with a vote obligation.

Moe Lane

*Shh. It’s a better title this way.

This is probably going to be a story in 2014.

It’s more on the epic blowup between local DC Democrats and national ones, and Darrell Issa is more than happy to pick a side:

Continue reading This is probably going to be a story in 2014.

Quote of the Day, Embrace The Healing Power Of “And,” Brother @charlescwcooke edition.

Charles C.W. Cooke, in the process of pointing out that Obamacare was sold to us as a money-saver – and that the Left is now apparently stupid enough to think that we’re stupid enough not to have noticed – writes:

[Barack Obama’s] central claim [in 2008] — that premiums would drop for the typical family by $2,500 — could literally have been taken from the back of an envelope. As the New York Times explained back in 2008, the $2,500 number came from economist David Cutler, who predicted that Obamacare would reduce all health-care spending by $200 billion a year. Candidate Obama, looking for a good sound bite, simply divided this number by the number of families in the United States; then, calculating inexplicably that total health-care spending and family health-insurance premiums were exactly the same thing, he concluded that all money saved would be returned to the people. That Obama considered this a reasonable way of selling a plan that reorganized one-sixth of the economy betrays either a fundamental economic illiteracy or a deeply troubling readiness to mislead.

Continue reading Quote of the Day, Embrace The Healing Power Of “And,” Brother @charlescwcooke edition.