Operative BG, a.k.a. The Official Copy Editor of the Gormogons™ writes in response to today’s post by Dr. J.:

Dear Dr. J. 

Never ascribe to malice that which can be easily explained by stupidity. 

Attempting to take over the nation’s health insurance market isn’t the stupid part. After all, it’s been done, in Britain and Canada. 

The stupid part was trying to do it all in one fell swoop. 

Look at what amazon.com’s web page looked at launch. Didn’t look much like it does today, did it? That’s because Jeff Bezos wasn’t so stupid as to try to incorporate everything he eventually wanted to do all at once. In fact, Jeff Bezos is a pretty smart guy, I’m told. 

You start with modest goals. That makes the debugging of inevitable problems a lot easier. Once everything is running smoothly, add another component. Make sure it’s properly integrated with everything that came before. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually, you become the world’s biggest online retailer. 

But Obama’s clowns decided they could do the whole thing in one gigantic stroke by outsourcing the work to a Canadian company with an uneven track record of delivering working web sites. From scratch, build an enterprise that runs 16% of the entire U.S. economy. The fact that the thing collapsed should surprise no one; what would have been surprising – nay, shocking – would have been if the thing actually worked at all. 

And that’s just the registration/login part of the thing. What’s running behind it is a major data security catastrophe waiting to happen. Registration and login is child’s play compared to data integration and data security. Get HHS and IRS and SSA to efficiently exchange information? Good luck with that. I worked for 35 years for Uncle Sam, the last 23 of them in IT, and our nationally famous agency couldn’t even exchange information smoothly between its own divisions, let alone with another agency. “Share OUR data? Are you MAD???”. 

And even when they do get the registration and login part semi-functional, does any sane person have any confidence at all that this data is secure? The same clowns who couldn’t log you on have designed a system that’s going to be safe from legions of hackers just trembling with the desire to get inside and roll around naked in it? It’s a shame our all-protective government shut down Intrade; I’m sure there would have been a wildly popular bet on the over/under for when the government would announce the first massive data breach. What happens then? 

Another of your minions has written on this far more cogently than I. If you haven’t already read NightShiftPolitic’s excellent piece, I strongly recommend it. Then ask yourself if any sane person would put his personal data into the clumsy, stupid hands of Obamacare. 

— Operative BG

Science is the process of crash testing ideas; the scientist does not coddle an idea, or design tests to make it work. The scientist rams the idea into a brick wall head-on at 60 mph, and knowledge is gained by examining the pieces. If the theory is solid, the pieces are from the wall.

Dr. J.