Only Capitalism Can Fix Obamas Socialist Website
Dec 2, 2013 19:30:20 #
Health Overhaul FloridaEvery leader has his great challenge. FDR had WW2. JFK had a trip to the moon. Ronald Reagan had the Cold War. George W. Bush had 9/11. Barack Obama has a website.
ObamaCare loyalists are calling the bid to repair the broken site a moonshot and quoting lines from Apollo 13 as if trying to fix an overgrown government website is like surviving a return to earth with a damaged spacecraft. America has gone from challenges like building 75,000 combat aircraft in a single year during WW2 and beating the Soviet Union to the moon to trying to make a website work.
Obamas two victories were widely credited to his Internet savvy. But the digital Hope and Change campaign was really more of a bait and switch. When it came to getting elected and staying popular; he outsourced the work to private sector professionals.
Obamas digital strategy campaign was handled by talent from successful companies like Facebook and Google; including a Facebook co-founder. His health care website was put together by the usual crony contractors who were adept at pulling the right political strings to win no-bid contracts despite their terrible track records.
The Obama campaign would never have turned over its political fate to a company whose only virtue was that a top executive had gone to college with Michelle Obama. But it had no objection to tuning over the health care and private information of millions of Americans to their tender digital mercies.
Obama put his political fortunes ahead of the health and welfare of Americans. It was only when the Healthcare.gov disaster dealt a severe blow to his poll numbers that he called in a tech surge of engineers from Google and other politically friendly companies who had made his campaign work.
He didnt call them in because he cared whether Americans had access to health care. If he had; he would have called them in a lot sooner. Instead he did it to bring his poll numbers back up again.
Obamas bait and switch promised private sector level sophistication for a giant Socialist boondoggle. The digital strategy that had made him seem tech savvy was worlds away from the grinding bureaucratic mess that made Healthcare.gov the disaster that, despite all the claims to the contrary, it still is today.
Healthcare.gov could never have actually run like Amazon or iTunes; no matter what Obama promised. That idea was as ridiculous as trying to graft a water buffalo onto a greyhound. The private sector and public sector are different species of technology workflow.
Government employees are not all incompetent idiots and private sector employees arent all geniuses. There are plenty of smart people who work for the government and plenty of stupid people who work in the private sector.
Its the process that is fundamentally different.
The Standish Group states that 94 percent of large federal information technology projects undertaken during the past decade were unsuccessful. These staggering numbers made the Healthcare.gov disaster inevitable.
Google and Facebook exist because small groups of students pushed themselves to accomplish ridiculously ambitious goals. If CGI, the primary Healthcare.gov contractor, had received a government contract to create Facebook to government specifications and with government oversight; there would be no Facebook today.
The issue isnt difficulty level. Its culture.
After Khrushchevs visit to the United States; he tried to reproduce the innovations in agriculture and construction that he had been shown. These efforts proved to be a miserable failure.
Khrushchev bought seed corn from the United States and unveiled a massive corn planting campaign. But the Soviet agricultural system treated corn the way that it had wheat with disastrous results. Corn planting techniques werent a great mystery; but the Soviet system was a rigid bureaucracy incapable of learning anything new or adapting its methods to the task. Instead, like all bureaucracies, it tried to adapt the task to its usual methods and its ideological armor made its ignorance into a virtue.
The same thing happened with Healthcare.gov. Instead of trying to adapt the methods to the task, the system treated the construction of a website like any other policy; with rigid guidelines emerging out of constant meetings setting up an inflexible process for getting it done without actually understanding what it was that was being done.
Like the Soviet bureaucrats planting corn where it wasnt meant to go; their American counterparts relentlessly kept spending money on a website built around their guidelines without even seeing if it worked. Like their Communist brethren, they refused to report failure up the chain of command and instead treated success as a function of their procedures rather than of the functional outcome.
Obama, like Khrushchev, was humiliated and caught by surprise when he realized that his grand project had fallen apart. Both Socialist leaders had thought that it was enough to order their subordinates to imitate a successful free market product without understanding that its the production process that makes the product. Trying to imitate the product without the production process is a recipe for disaster.
To a bureaucracy, success is not defined by how much corn you grow or how many users a website can handle; but whether every proper procedure was followed in the production of the corn or the website.
For his tech surge, Obama has been forced to go outside the government bureaucracy and its crony capitalist clingers to private sector engineers. Like Lenins New Economy Policy or the Soviet Unions increasingly desperate attempts at enlisting American aid to fix its agriculture; Obama has implicitly acknowledged that the ideological government he runs is unfit for the task that he has set it to.
A temporary free market fix may eventually get Healthcare.gov working again but cant address the roots of its failure which are not in mere code; but in the bureaucratic DNA of government. A few engineers will eventually get the website working; but they cant fix the entire broken culture behind it.
The website doesnt matter. Healthcare.gov isnt Facebook or Google where the service is the product. Its meant to serve as a distribution gateway for products that have come out of the same dysfunctional bureaucratic process. Fixing Healthcare.gov isnt like fixing Google or Facebook. Its like fixing Amazons website without fixing its corporate culture, its warehouse distribution, its advertising and its products.
No matter how many Facebook or Google vets hack the Obama campaign or Healthcare.gov; they cant fix the underlying problem with their real product which is government bureaucracy.
Margaret Thatcher famously said that the trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money. Thats the economic trouble with Socialism. The functional trouble with Socialism is that you eventually run out of the free market talent to make its projects plod along without breaking down.
Obamas solution to everything is more government. And how is the same government process that cant make a health care website work, going to make a health care system work?
by D. Greenfield
ObamaCare loyalists are calling the bid to repair the broken site a moonshot and quoting lines from Apollo 13 as if trying to fix an overgrown government website is like surviving a return to earth with a damaged spacecraft. America has gone from challenges like building 75,000 combat aircraft in a single year during WW2 and beating the Soviet Union to the moon to trying to make a website work.
Obamas two victories were widely credited to his Internet savvy. But the digital Hope and Change campaign was really more of a bait and switch. When it came to getting elected and staying popular; he outsourced the work to private sector professionals.
Obamas digital strategy campaign was handled by talent from successful companies like Facebook and Google; including a Facebook co-founder. His health care website was put together by the usual crony contractors who were adept at pulling the right political strings to win no-bid contracts despite their terrible track records.
The Obama campaign would never have turned over its political fate to a company whose only virtue was that a top executive had gone to college with Michelle Obama. But it had no objection to tuning over the health care and private information of millions of Americans to their tender digital mercies.
Obama put his political fortunes ahead of the health and welfare of Americans. It was only when the Healthcare.gov disaster dealt a severe blow to his poll numbers that he called in a tech surge of engineers from Google and other politically friendly companies who had made his campaign work.
He didnt call them in because he cared whether Americans had access to health care. If he had; he would have called them in a lot sooner. Instead he did it to bring his poll numbers back up again.
Obamas bait and switch promised private sector level sophistication for a giant Socialist boondoggle. The digital strategy that had made him seem tech savvy was worlds away from the grinding bureaucratic mess that made Healthcare.gov the disaster that, despite all the claims to the contrary, it still is today.
Healthcare.gov could never have actually run like Amazon or iTunes; no matter what Obama promised. That idea was as ridiculous as trying to graft a water buffalo onto a greyhound. The private sector and public sector are different species of technology workflow.
Government employees are not all incompetent idiots and private sector employees arent all geniuses. There are plenty of smart people who work for the government and plenty of stupid people who work in the private sector.
Its the process that is fundamentally different.
The Standish Group states that 94 percent of large federal information technology projects undertaken during the past decade were unsuccessful. These staggering numbers made the Healthcare.gov disaster inevitable.
Google and Facebook exist because small groups of students pushed themselves to accomplish ridiculously ambitious goals. If CGI, the primary Healthcare.gov contractor, had received a government contract to create Facebook to government specifications and with government oversight; there would be no Facebook today.
The issue isnt difficulty level. Its culture.
After Khrushchevs visit to the United States; he tried to reproduce the innovations in agriculture and construction that he had been shown. These efforts proved to be a miserable failure.
Khrushchev bought seed corn from the United States and unveiled a massive corn planting campaign. But the Soviet agricultural system treated corn the way that it had wheat with disastrous results. Corn planting techniques werent a great mystery; but the Soviet system was a rigid bureaucracy incapable of learning anything new or adapting its methods to the task. Instead, like all bureaucracies, it tried to adapt the task to its usual methods and its ideological armor made its ignorance into a virtue.
The same thing happened with Healthcare.gov. Instead of trying to adapt the methods to the task, the system treated the construction of a website like any other policy; with rigid guidelines emerging out of constant meetings setting up an inflexible process for getting it done without actually understanding what it was that was being done.
Like the Soviet bureaucrats planting corn where it wasnt meant to go; their American counterparts relentlessly kept spending money on a website built around their guidelines without even seeing if it worked. Like their Communist brethren, they refused to report failure up the chain of command and instead treated success as a function of their procedures rather than of the functional outcome.
Obama, like Khrushchev, was humiliated and caught by surprise when he realized that his grand project had fallen apart. Both Socialist leaders had thought that it was enough to order their subordinates to imitate a successful free market product without understanding that its the production process that makes the product. Trying to imitate the product without the production process is a recipe for disaster.
To a bureaucracy, success is not defined by how much corn you grow or how many users a website can handle; but whether every proper procedure was followed in the production of the corn or the website.
For his tech surge, Obama has been forced to go outside the government bureaucracy and its crony capitalist clingers to private sector engineers. Like Lenins New Economy Policy or the Soviet Unions increasingly desperate attempts at enlisting American aid to fix its agriculture; Obama has implicitly acknowledged that the ideological government he runs is unfit for the task that he has set it to.
A temporary free market fix may eventually get Healthcare.gov working again but cant address the roots of its failure which are not in mere code; but in the bureaucratic DNA of government. A few engineers will eventually get the website working; but they cant fix the entire broken culture behind it.
The website doesnt matter. Healthcare.gov isnt Facebook or Google where the service is the product. Its meant to serve as a distribution gateway for products that have come out of the same dysfunctional bureaucratic process. Fixing Healthcare.gov isnt like fixing Google or Facebook. Its like fixing Amazons website without fixing its corporate culture, its warehouse distribution, its advertising and its products.
No matter how many Facebook or Google vets hack the Obama campaign or Healthcare.gov; they cant fix the underlying problem with their real product which is government bureaucracy.
Margaret Thatcher famously said that the trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money. Thats the economic trouble with Socialism. The functional trouble with Socialism is that you eventually run out of the free market talent to make its projects plod along without breaking down.
Obamas solution to everything is more government. And how is the same government process that cant make a health care website work, going to make a health care system work?
by D. Greenfield
Dec 2, 2013 20:29:45 #
Boo_Boo
Loc: Jellystone
ldsuttonjr wrote:
Health Overhaul FloridaEvery leader has his great ... (show quote)
Very good post. Thank you. :thumbup: :thumbup: I was a government employee; project manager for a computer group. We would have had our pink slips personally handed out by our Chief had we rolled out such a failure! I retired soon after Obama took office. We went from demanding perfection to "close enough for government work." I refused to put my name on inferior designs or roll outs.
Dec 2, 2013 21:25:31 #
ginnyt wrote:
Very good post. Thank you. :thumbup: :thumbup: I was a government employee; project manager for a computer group. We would have had our pink slips personally handed out by our Chief had we rolled out such a failure! I retired soon after Obama took office. We went from demanding perfection to "close enough for government work." I refused to put my name on inferior designs or roll outs.
Thank you ginny: I too was a government employee - flew for 20+ years and if I put my name on an inferior procedure - someone could have easily died!
Dec 2, 2013 21:35:40 #
Boo_Boo
Loc: Jellystone
ldsuttonjr wrote:
Thank you ginny: I too was a government employee - flew for 20+ years and if I put my name on an inferior procedure - someone could have easily died!
You were a civilian and flew for the government. How cool is that! I worked in DC (right off Columbia Pike, in Falls Church) and each week I had to go to the WH to brief the JCS. I flew in a helicopter piloted by a Marine. Sometimes I miss those days, and at others I am happy to have days to sleep in and not to worry over work things. Back to you, I trusted my Marine and I knew that if he made a bad choice, it was into the drink for us. What did you fly? Where were you stationed. If you prefer not to answer, I will not be offended. I just find it nice to talk with another GM on this site.
Dec 2, 2013 21:49:07 #
ginnyt wrote:
You were a civilian and flew for the government. ... (show quote)
The Marine who flew you was in the military - I was in the Air Force! LOL
Dec 2, 2013 21:54:41 #
Boo_Boo
Loc: Jellystone
ldsuttonjr wrote:
The Marine who flew you was in the military - I was in the Air Force! LOL
I was also in the Air Force and so was my late husband. I still have my old uniform. I was enlisted, worked personnel and my husband was flight line. After retirement, I went silly service. Back in the day with mainframes. Worked my way up from a GS to GM. Now I am retired again. Where were you stationed?
Dec 2, 2013 22:13:18 #
ginnyt wrote:
I was also in the Air Force and so was my late husband. I still have my old uniform. I was enlisted, worked personnel and my husband was flight line. After retirement, I went silly service. Back in the day with mainframes. Worked my way up from a GS to GM. Now I am retired again. Where were you stationed?
Every where! Europe, South East Asia etc. Eventually retired from UPS as well! 40 + years! Wouldn't trade it for anything but there comes a time you must step aside and let someone else enjoy the fun! I eventually retired from the AF at Nellis AFB.
Dec 2, 2013 22:40:15 #
Boo_Boo
Loc: Jellystone
ldsuttonjr wrote:
Every where! Europe, South East Asia etc. Eventually retired from UPS as well! 40 + years! Wouldn't trade it for anything but there comes a time you must step aside and let someone else enjoy the fun! I eventually retired from the AF at Nellis AFB.
I spent most of my time in Turkey, Egypt, and the Med. I wound up as a 208XXX. If you remember the AFSCs. Linguist -- Russian, German, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. BTW, I adore my UPS guys. Super hard job and they do it so much better than USPS! At the "Strange Squadron" or you would know it better as 99th Comptroller Squadron I was a silly servant, this was right after my husband retired. Office Manager, what can I say I had to start someplace.
Dec 2, 2013 22:56:41 #
ginnyt wrote:
I spent most of my time in Turkey, Egypt, and the Med. I wound up as a 208XXX. If you remember the AFSCs. Linguist -- Russian, German, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. BTW, I adore my UPS guys. Super hard job and they do it so much better than USPS! At the "Strange Squadron" or you would know it better as 99th Comptroller Squadron I was a silly servant, this was right after my husband retired. Office Manager, what can I say I had to start someplace.
They say I would have to kill you if I told you where I worked!
UPS is crammed -packed full of fine hard working Americans!
Dec 2, 2013 23:47:13 #
Boo_Boo
Loc: Jellystone
ldsuttonjr wrote:
They say I would have to kill you if I told you where I worked!
UPS is crammed -packed full of fine hard working Americans!
UPS is crammed -packed full of fine hard working Americans!
I have heard that before. Okay. You are right about UPS.
Dec 3, 2013 14:14:57 #
USpatriot77
Loc: USA
Ginny, Suttonjr;
Thank you for your long and helpful service-I also spent over 20 in the Army, in Investigations and we'll leave it at that(LOL). Thank you again for your service and also for your many posts filled with wisdom and clarity.
GOD bless the USA!
"si vis pakem, para bellum!"
Pray for peace, prepare for war!
Thank you for your long and helpful service-I also spent over 20 in the Army, in Investigations and we'll leave it at that(LOL). Thank you again for your service and also for your many posts filled with wisdom and clarity.
GOD bless the USA!
"si vis pakem, para bellum!"
Pray for peace, prepare for war!
Check out topic: Joe Concha on CNN debate: "As trustworthy as gas station sushi!!!!"
Dec 3, 2013 17:06:42 #
Boo_Boo
Loc: Jellystone
USpatriot77 wrote:
Ginny, Suttonjr;
Thank you for your long and helpful service-I also spent over 20 in the Army, in Investigations and we'll leave it at that(LOL). Thank you again for your service and also for your many posts filled with wisdom and clarity.
GOD bless the USA!
"si vis pakem, para bellum!"
Pray for peace, prepare for war!
Thank you for your long and helpful service-I also spent over 20 in the Army, in Investigations and we'll leave it at that(LOL). Thank you again for your service and also for your many posts filled with wisdom and clarity.
GOD bless the USA!
"si vis pakem, para bellum!"
Pray for peace, prepare for war!
And my sincere appreciation for you, my brother! You worked hand in hand with my parent, NSA. Small world. enough said. Happy Holidays and I look forward to seeing you again! Yes, let us all pray for peace (but always be prepared) God Bless the USA! :thumbup:
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