I'm slightly bemused by the low polling numbers around Obamacare.
I've spent decades in the computer industry, so to me a crappy software release just smells like pizza. It means being summoned back to work from my vacation for a marathon debugging session to find some elusive deadlocking bug hiding in multithreaded mutexing. It means, or used to mean, a decent-sized paycheck.
In short, it's all very meh -- and hard to understand why people would get so excited about it. It's software. Releases are usually a circus (I mean that in a bad way). But this too shall pass -- it always does. So why the hysteria?
To me, the opaque part is why the Obama admin didn't expect this sort of thing. Obviously, they didn't. Obviously, they were lied to. Apparently -- and this is the part that worries me -- they believed the lies.
Obama seems kind of... naive... when it comes to tech hype. When people ask about this, his response is that he hobnobs and lunches with CEOs of tech industries. They tell him things like "we have to bring in lots of H1Bs because we can't find Americans with these skills". And he believes them. He doesn't investigate to see whether they are telling him the truth.
Consequently when, at a town hall, the wife of a senior engineer who was laid off and replaced with cheaper H1B people tells Obama that they are struggling, Obama is amazed and repeats that the tech CEOs are telling him that they can't find people like her husband. Something like a million tech jobs in this country were offshored or replaced with H1Bs during the Shrub era and Obama is oblivious about it -- because it's not what Mark Zuckerberg and Marissa Mayer tell him at lunch. And he believes them, apparently.
So there may be a real problem there in Obama's credulity when it comes to tech execs -- but as to the website itself... meh. It will be fixed. This too shall pass.
Now give me a slice of that pizza.