Leonard Pitts praises that thing that sometimes seems difficult to find: competence.
Some will call it unfair to compare the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina with the Obama administration’s botched rollout of healthcare reform. They will note that as Team Bush dithered and “Heckuva Job, Brownie” tried to assemble the proper wardrobe for managing a crisis, Americans were dying. By contrast, for as much as people may have wailed, “Kill me now!” as it crashed, froze and mangled their information, Healthcare.gov didn’t actually kill anyone.
But the observation misses the point. If these two debacles are unalike in impact, they are much alike in one critical regard: the people in charge saw this moment coming, had time to prepare, and failed.
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ow, as then, failure raises an obvious question: if the government was unable to handle a challenge it knew was coming and for which it had ample time to prepare, what faith can we have in its ability to handle the unexpected? Say, a terrorist attack? A chemical spill? A nuclear accident?
Let us now praise competence. While we’re at it, let us demand an explanation for incompetence — and some accountability to go along with it.
Let me say that, much as I like Leonard Pitts, I wish we'd get some commentary on Healthcare.gov from a pundit who has spent some time working to build a large ecommerce site. Does anyone remember what Amazon.com was like when it first rolled out? No? Amazon's grateful for that. How about Facebook's first roll-out on iOS, or Apple's first, second (or third) online service?
The truth is that the failures of Healthcare.gov don't represent some kind of "government can't do what business does" moment. They represent the truth that most large IT projects, most, fail to meet their deadlines or deliver the desired functionality. After all this time, most corporate software projects fail for no better reason than that companies still don't appreciate the difference between building a better web site and building a better mouse trap, and even companies that are in the software business fail at web sites when those web sites have complex interactions with other web sites.
It's not government that's screwed up. It's how we manage software projects, in government and out, sucketh royally.
Okay, let's see what else is up.
Ross Douthat like his straw men extra strawy, and bemoans the fact that health insurance just isn't as useless as it used to be.
In last week’s column, I wrote about what might happen if the new health care law’s Web site remained a festering technological sore for months to come. (The answer: Nothing good.) But it’s still more likely that HealthCare.gov will be fixed by Thanksgiving and millions of Americans will (finally) be able to get a real look at what Obamacare is selling them.
What will they find? One way to understand what is being offered is to think in terms of three “mores.” Insurance à la Obamacare will be more expensive, more subsidized and more comprehensive than what was previously available on the individual market.
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[Higher costs] bite, in part, because insurance companies now have to take customers with pre-existing conditions, which drives everyone’s rates up. But they also bite because buyers are getting more insurance than the older system’s cheapest plans offered.
Douthat's argument comes down to 1) if you buy useless, but cheap health insurance, and 2) it turns out you're healthy and never needed it, then 3) you've got extra money for the win. Only... yeah, that's the same godawful gamble that got us here.
Doyle McManus is also looking down the post-website road.
One of these weeks, now that the Obama administration has recruited a SWAT team of computer whizzes, Healthcare.gov will recover from its shambolic debut and turn into, well, just another website. After all, it's only a website, and websites can be fixed.
But that's when a far more interesting chapter in the life of Obamacare will begin. We're about to witness a massive experiment in federalism to see whether the Affordable Care Act can succeed in two very different kinds of states: those where governments are actively working to help the law succeed, and those where they're working to make it fail.
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As a logical proposition, the Affordable Care Act only has to work in one state to prove its doubters wrong. This is what inventors call "proof of concept": If Obamacare can make it in New York (or Kentucky or Washington), then it can make it anywhere.
Only it's not that simple...
Tim Kreider ponders the economics of free
luch content.
People who would consider it a bizarre breach of conduct to expect anyone to give them a haircut or a can of soda at no cost will ask you, with a straight face and a clear conscience, whether you wouldn’t be willing to write an essay or draw an illustration for them for nothing. They often start by telling you how much they admire your work, although not enough, evidently, to pay one cent for it. “Unfortunately we don’t have the budget to offer compensation to our contributors...” is how the pertinent line usually starts. But just as often, they simply omit any mention of payment.
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This is partly a side effect of our information economy, in which “paying for things” is a quaint, discredited old 20th-century custom, like calling people after having sex with them. The first time I ever heard the word “content” used in its current context, I understood that all my artist friends and I — henceforth, “content providers” — were essentially extinct. This contemptuous coinage is predicated on the assumption that it’s the delivery system that matters, relegating what used to be called “art” — writing, music, film, photography, illustration — to the status of filler, stuff to stick between banner ads.
Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again.
Kreider's essay represents a phenomena with which we are all familiar, and problem we damn well better solve since it's not going to stop spreading to other areas of work.
The New York Times says death by climate change is nothing new... which is not at all comforting.
Why do prosperous civilizations vanish? One team of scientists, studying ancient pollens in the Middle East, believes it can explain the sudden collapse of the grand cultures that flourished there some 3,200 years ago. The cause — so the pollen says — was long-term drought.
The strength of those vanished civilizations — Egyptian, Hittite, Mycenaean, a dense network of trading cultures in the eastern Mediterranean — can hardly be disputed. Until now, no one has been certain what caused them to collapse. As part of a new, comprehensive effort to reconstruct the nature of life in ancient Israel, a team of scientists in 2010 began studying core samples taken from beneath the Sea of Galilee.
They analyzed pollen samples from those cores at 40-year intervals, creating a fine-grained portrait of climatic changes during the period in question. What the pollen samples showed was a broad shift in vegetation consistent with drought at its most intense around 1250 to 1100 B.C.