me: “Hi. You may not remember me, but I called the other day to try to get some information about the exchanges –”
800 number: “– that wasn’t me.”
me: “Well, I understand you probably don’t remember — I mean, volumes have been high, and all the glitches have probably made your job very difficult — but I did call –”
800 number: “– ‘glitches‘? Sir, I’ll have you know that the program is exceeding expectations. And that, as far as our product is concerned, we offer the best, most affordable, and most comprehensive health care on the market. It’s not even close. Plus, it’s universal. And it includes, like, all you can bang condoms and shit.”
me: “Okay. Well, can I get me some of that, then?”
800 number:
800 number:
800 number: “Can you hold for a moment please?”
me: “Sure. Thanks.”
800 number: “Great. Have a pleasant day.”
me:
me:
me:
me: “Uh, is anyone there…?”
me:
me: “Hello?”
800 number: “¡Hola.”
me: “Yes, hi, you put me on hold to go see about my signing up for some of that cheaper, more comprehensive health care you were telling me about, the kind with all the free jimmies –?”
800 number: “– Ese no era yo.”
me: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I just –”
800 number: “– Yo no hablo Inglés. Usted tiene el número equivocado.”
me: “But, the affordable care. And the condoms –”
800 number: “Lo siento. Puta.”
Hannity called the hotline a few days ago and got a woman to agree to be on the air, and she was pretty candid about how hard it is to get onto the website, but hey, just persevere and you’ll get in.
Someone just called Hannity to say that he called the number and said he was Sean Hannity and the operator said she couldn’t help him.
So Hannity tried on the air to get in, and after identifying himself, the woman said she wasn’t sure she could talk to him, and put him on hold.
So the memo went out: no talking to ‘baggers on the radio.
ObamaCare “chat”
Don’t run with scissors
To be fair — these people are dealing all day, every day, with people like hellomynameissoros. To customers of that stripe, “Don’t run with scissors” is actually very good and helpful advice.
Jeff makes a funny about fake calling the exchange because if Jeff real called the exchange, he’d be on the phone with someone in 60 seconds.
Someone being a recording of a person telling you to go visit the website?
Of course not, silly. A friendly human ready to assist. Try it yourself, and quit believing everything they says on the Tee Vees.
We doesn’t have exchanges here in Florida.
It’s 1-800-D1UCKY-O
Oh wow. I thought it was just a style of comedy but farce is real and occurs naturally.
That’s why you’d call them, Slart. If you had an exchange in Florida, you would call it instead.
Oh, see my liberal friends told me that Florida was actively thwarting the exchanges and I believed them. I feel gypped.
I had a lovely 60-second chat with the robovoice menu thingy.
I wonder how the IRS is going to justify its illegal subsidizing in those 36 States…
A bill “deemed passed” (there was no actual vote, btw) by pretending that it will lower spending through front-loading income, then shoved through Congress without a single GOP vote, the Presidential signature auto-signed by a machine, then claimed to be a tax (even though the attorneys had actually claimed that it wasn’t a tax) in order to squeeze through the Supreme Court, then unilaterally amended by Executive fiat in order to benefit favored classes, then fail as an implementation (which caused a government shut-down rather than give a single year’s delay to everyone else), only to be AGAIN unilaterally amended rather than admit the entire prospect was a failure from square one.
Progress!
I don’t know which one of you jokers started sockpuppeting HMNIS, but you’re not half as funny as you think you are.
Cosmic horror is also real just like farce. You face some enigmatic senseless pulsing thing from another world, completely unlike this one, and you hear it babble and cackle strangely, and your heart skips a beat.
800 Number: My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it I can sing it for you. Daaaisy, Daaaisy, give me your answer dooo. I’m half craaazy all for the love of youuu. It won’t be a stylish marriaage, I can’t afford a carriage. But you’ll look sweeeeet upon the seeeeat of a bicycle built for twooo…..
I’m going to go waaay out on a limb here and predict that Jeff’s fourth or fifth run in with the Obamacare enrollment system is going to be the 800 number operator calling him to say knock it off
—unless he wants the medical report about that unfortunate armadillo extraction incident spread all across the internet—
digital medical records + the NSA = what could possibly go wrong
“Your call is very important to us. <click>”
digital medical records + the NSA + the IRS = what could possibly go wrong
FTFY
FTFY
Nothing much until the health care rationing and the preferential treatment and the petty corruption by a bureaucracy as avaricious as it is vindictive sets in.
Fortunately though that could never happen here.
The “virtual waiting room” is just like the one from “Beetlejuice,” but any resemblance to the actual healthcare seen there is just a coincidence. Or so I’ve heard.
Nothing to worry about. Sheila Jackson Lee says so.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/10/23/memo-to-dems-dont-fall-into-gops-obamacare-trap/
Of course, she also thinks that North and South Vietnam are still separate countries, and that Venezuela is our friend, and that repealing 0bamacare would be a direct violation of the Constitution, and that the Mars Pathfinder should’ve taken a picture of the flag left on Mars by Neil Armstrong, and… but noting those facts would undoubtedly be racist.
is there a virtual death panel?
the tea party should give an ultimatum: full implementation or full repeal! give baracky a red linr.
She also believes if those damn dirty
apestea-partiers hadn’t tried to get their stinkin’ paws on the debt ceiling, Obama wouldn’t have been too busy to be aware of what was(n’t) happening with the the rollout of his signature achievement, and all these glitches could have been avoided.Stupid tea-baggers, is there nothing they won’t do to make Obama look bad? Next thing you know, they’ll be trying to buy him a membership at Augusta National!
……Si desea esperar el proximo representante disponible hasta telarañas colgando de tu cara, te mueres de lo que sea salud emite o sólo de la vejez por favor presione 8
– Asta La vista baby…..
is there a virtual death panel?
– Yes, but its ponly for Zombies.
You know, it’s kind of like how the tea-party’s antecedent, the VRWC kept Bill Clinton so pre-occuppied with defending himself from charges of corruption over a failed real estate investment that he never noticed what Monica’s lips were doing.
Until it was too late for the blue dress.
Healthcare-dot-gov is a perfect replica of the federal government in general. Bloatware maximized.
– It seems that Kerry-itus is a generic disorder among Progressives and Democrats…..
“We absolutely do not need a delay, but that was before we may need a delay.”
– Of course the only reason its being considered is the Dems are scared shitless the Unions are going to flat out revolt, not because the electorate means a bucket of warm spit to them.
But if we just spend all this good money after the bad, we’ll get it right this time! SWEARSIES!!
What’s a few trillion dollars among friends?
delay was unthinkable 3 weeks ago. let’s run up repeal now!
So, how long until this debacle collapses under its own weight?
“Legacy” deemed legislation or no, it’s dead, Jim.
Jinx, nr.
jinx?
Same idea, different posts = jinx.
What the hell kind of person thinks he has a right to live as he wants and flaunt regulations carefully designed by federal government experts on social and economic issues with degrees from places like Columbia, Harvard, Yale and Berkeley?
Can we stop pretending that the rights to liberty and property are actual real things that really really exist and not bullshit ideas from a time when people wore pointy triangle hats and owned slaves? Can we stop pretending that they are superstitions which, as superstitions do, get in the way of progress toward a society where everyone can relax and not have to worry about surviving?
Are we really supposed to believe a 70-year-old tea partier named Mildred’s opinion about the debt or a guy who has an MBA in finance and an MA in economics and is a fucking senior adviser to the president of the United States?!
What the hell kind of person thinks he has a right to live as he wants and flaunt regulations carefully designed by federal government experts on social and economic issues with degrees from places like Columbia, Harvard, Yale and Berkeley?
They used to be called “Americans”.
Can we stop pretending that the rights to liberty and property are actual real things that really really exist
If you think they don’t, what the hell on you doing on MY computer? Get back to your bridge underpass and hope to survive on the scrapings of your betters. What’s that, you say? It’s your computer?
Next argument.
Are we really supposed to believe a 70-year-old tea partier named Mildred’s opinion about the debt or a guy who has an MBA in finance and an MA in economics and is a fucking senior adviser to the president of the United States?
Hey, Mildred has been able to balance her checkbook ever since she got one. How has that MBA in finance managed to do? $17 trillion in debt and counting?
>Same idea, <
what idea what jinx
Defunding the ACA.
I’m just satirizing the world I live in, Drumwaster. The tragedy and farce of it is driving me nuts. It’s tragedy and farce as one. Idiotic slapstick of fools who run their heads straight into a brick wall at full speed at the behest of sociopaths and for a shot a comfy lifestyle.
It’s tragedy and farce as one.
Fiction as prophecy
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
I think in years to come people will be astonished at the extreme foolishness of our time. Some of us recognize that the scope of the senselessness, sloth, vainglory and envy is too big to wrap one’s mind around at the moment. But in the future, people will be able to do so in awe.
We don’t have a spending problem. Pass the bill so we can find out what’s in it. Recent economic downturns prove that the free market doesn’t work. We can’t afford to make our debt payments without borrowing money. He has no accomplishments on his resume but he will be a great president.
Delay the Mandate? What Mandate?
It is astonishing, Jim.
I keep waiting for one of the acolytes to stop in mid-blather and announce “I can’t do this anymore The plan SUX!!!! YOU HEARD ME!!! IT SUXXXX!!!!!!!!!!
>Defunding the ACA<
at this point it is the moral/ethical thing to do
Either it is repealed; or insurance companies go bankrupt or refuse to participate further; or socialized medicine is achieved via the back door, i.e., taxpayers subsidize pretty much everyone so that the government inevitably takes control. Barack Obama is on video explaining that this is the real purpose of Obamacare; if you search our archives, you should find it.
link
repeal now grows!
yo leigh the only dude with a “jinx” is bho
at this point it is the moral/ethical thing to do
It always has been, but the conception requires an active moral imagination in order to understand the harms involved in passing the goddamn thing in the first place . . . and this — an active moral imagination — is precisely the one human characteristic least to be found in ordinary politicians, by definition.
Newrouter, that is good news.
let the baracky leave the field with his tail between his legs
quite nice a “bipartisan repeal”. unlike aca’s adoption
we be cruzing
BHO has certainly been a jinx on the country.
Geeks say ‘nuke it from orbit‘…
so repeal is on the table to save “the 1st black precedent”
Jinx!
But you can’t fix what you can’t identify.”
– Something like what happened in electing the ahole in the WH, the UFO, Unidentified Fake Obama.
Posted 25 May 2012 – 01:48 PM
Salaams All,
I have a question in regards to the blue eye that some people hang for protection.
People say that this is protection against the evil-eye or jinx. I was wondering where this tradition stems from, and whether it has strong grounds in the Quran or Hadith.
I know that the Qur’an talks about magic and the evil of envy, but does it explicitly say that the envy of others can curse us or cause bad things to happen to us?
And if there is such a thing as jinx, should we really be hanging ornaments as a means of protection? Isn’t this a form of shirk, because we are believing in the power of an ornament or symbol as opposed to putting out trust in Allah to protect us?
link
That’s the script you were given today?
Pitiful.
serr8d, I don’t know about you, but I cannot wait for the first security breach. From what I’ve read, the exchanges have access to information about citizens that used to be spread across several discreet systems.
I’m quite sure the security built into the site is every bit as efficient as everything else on the exchanges.
Nothing like single point of entry when it comes to data theft.
In other news Dick Durbin lies, that’s not the news, that Jay Carney said that he did is.
he’d be on the phone with someone in 60 seconds.
– If that actually happens, and up til now the rate of success is something less than 1%, but if it does that “person” will either be a recording delivering a canned “we’re sorry for the inconveinience” or a stressed out operator who thinks you mis-dialed 9-11.
500 million lines, 300 million dollars, 60 cents a line.
So what is that? 5 cents a word? That’s right in the ballpark to pay for Science Fiction. But it has to be reasonably good Sci-Fi or the magazine editors don’t buy it. Unlike the WH suckers who will buy anything if the right buzzwords are waved around it.
Obama to go on post-shutdown fundraising blitz for Democrats
By Amie Parnes – 10/23/13 08:19 PM ET
cue
Suicide Is Painless (MASH Theme) with lyrics
1 effin trick commie
– When Carney walked out of the presser the other day, refusing to face the withering barrage of “OCare – the massive fuckup edition -” questions he signaled that the gestoppo and Jug ears has finally reached a sort of critical mass in dealing with the total breakdown of leadership and accountability in the WH.
– The Durbin thing would have played well a few months ago, but now people in the admin are actually scared the whole fucking mess is going to collapse in disgrace, so they’re probably fact checking everything to death and squelching anything that could possibly backfire on an already cornered rat.
“or a stressed out operator who thinks you mis-dialed 9-11.”
Of course, even if you do get through all the person on the other end can do is try to enter your data in the same broken web site.
Slaphead didn’t bother to mention that, I see. Nor did 0bama.
Only at the fairy tale version of our times Jim.
There’s security flaws they can’t even begin to identify. I guarantee Anons have written in doors not even Jim Morrison on a week-long ‘shroom and peyote bender could’ve imagined.
geoffb – just to take your side on something, there is NO WAY that healthcare.gov is 500 million lines of code. It’s a relatively simple e-commerce site. One of the whole points of the ACA is that there’s a relatively small number of criteria upon which an insurer can price a policy. I would consider the site to be hugely bloated if it was 1 million lines of code. For reference, some very large complex code bases that have been worked on for decades rarely reach 100 million lines of code:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_lines_of_code
If it’s truly 500 million lines of code, that’s 99% of the problem. As much as I’m a fan of the ACA in general, I can do naught but hang my head in shame at “my team’s” rollout of the thing.
More rats leaving the sinking ship: Colorado and New Jersey.
http://www.conservativeblog.org/amyridenour/2013/10/23/dems-breaking-rank-on-obamacare-delay.html
From Instapundit.
“It’s a relatively simple e-commerce site.”
You don’t have a friggin’ clue, Steve. That’s another lie 0bama told you. This thing has to interface with everything from the IRS to your local bank, all running different systems.
You do realize how stupid 0bama is going to look when he winds up having to delay the mandate after his little breath-holding snit during the shutdown, don’t you?
Cruz has a big grin on his face right now. Bank on it.
If it’s truly 500 million lines of code, that’s 99% of the problem.
No, that’s just the public demonstration of the problem, to wit, governmental ineptitude and bureaucratic incompetence, and the utter failure of “top-down policy affecting hundreds of millions of people, each with their thousands of variables, and thousands of interactions” (because who would know better about the day-to-day needs of every citizen than some faceless bureaucrat a few thousand miles away?).
This is not the problem, merely the high fever that helps mask the other symptoms.
The code bloat is bad programming combined with trying to code something which can and does change minute to minute since the “law” places almost infinite discretion in the hands of the Sec. of HHS to change things at anytime. Plus the added factor that Obama has decided on his own to change anything he wants to whether he truly has the power or not to do so.
Spaghetti is inevitable, and may be a feature.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/24/dems-join-call-to-delay-obamacare-mandate-amid-website-failures/
Begich (D-Alaska) has left the ship.
Landrieu (D-Louisiana) has left the ship.
Hagan (D-North Carolina) has left the ship.
That’s six by my count. Shaheen, Pryor, and Manchin were already on unauthorized shore leave.
Thirteen D Senators would needed by the time it comes up again in January — then 0bama would be forced to veto.
Veto would be farce.
500 million lines of code tells me that the programmers were working under an insane set of requirements which were constantly, unreasonably, and hastily changed by policy makers. They copied and pasted lots of code as a way to save time – which is a dead-end practice in programming done under fight-or-flight panic conditions. When a good programmer is reduced to that it’s misery. It would have been absolute hell for the programmers. But, you know what? Serves them right for working on that project. Anyone working on a federal contract better be very sure its not pork or worse; otherwise he needs to quit his job.
Or what geoff said.
Someone who thinks that his own life, and that of his children, is more important to him than that of some random stranger. Someone who thinks that the demands of the many don’t outweigh the demands of the few, except for by choice.
Spock didn’t sacrifice himself for the rest of the people in the Enterprise because they took a vote and decided it would be him that died. There are other analogues, but we’re not permitted to refer to those.
I know: write “rhetorical questions should not be answered” 500 times on the blackboard.
I’m trying to figure out what happened. I think the lion’s share of us have always been comfortable with rule by aristocracy. It’s just that over the last hundred years the totalitarians have figured out how to use them to do an end run around the system the Founding Fathers set up.
Anybody that wants totalitarianism should check themselves into a hospital for the criminally insane. They’ll get all the totalitarianism they could possibly crave in there.
Oh, wait — they want to be the administrators, not the inmates. Never mind.
They posed as expert technocrats who knew how to create a comfortable and secure society attractive to those who do not prefer liberty to aristocracy. And they promised to take the mickey out of the rich fat cats. They kept doing this for a century and now they have won. Instead of just going along for the American ride and not getting in the way, those who prefer aristocracy have been made able and willing to choose it in preference to what the Founding Fathers set up.
Their aristocrat is someone who is naturally better, smarter, and more skilled than the masses. At what? At most everything, but particularly at creating a comfortable, secure society. They think their aristocrats deserve to be rich, just as the millions of serfs throughout history believed. It doesn’t bother them when an Al Gore rakes in tens of millions for being an aristocrat.
But the sheeple didn’t mind Reagan, of course. If comfort and security can be brought about by liberty and prosperity, then that’s fine with them; all they care about is the result. So, this avenue had to be blocked by the totalitarians. And they have done that. The crushing load of the state has blocked it and the slanders against liberty-minded reformers have made it hard to unblock.
So, what the totalitarians have done is to use the sloth, envy and preference for aristocracy of the lion’s share of us very skillfully to gain power and appropriate wealth. America was never going to work for the long run. It was always only a matter of time. Even winning the republic at first back in Washington’s time was a shocker, given all the loyalists and fence-sitters.
Yes, they want to live as comfortable serfs in an aristocracy. What they’re going to get is poverty and totalitarianism.
They kept doing this for a century and now they have won.
And for how long do you think they’ll enjoy their victory? I’m thinking that the bottom drops out in — what? — maybe ten years? Twenty if they’re lucky? The foundation of our economy has already been demolished, so at this point we’re just waiting for the walls and roof to come down.
Just one more reason to make certain that you’re standing well outside the building, if you ask me.
The buck always lands somewhere else.
NYT.
Meanwhile the search for the “wreckers” and “kulaks” is being funded. The search is not to find them as their identities are already known but to find a way to dummy up the “evidence” to where it can be seen as barely possible.
omigod the administration is chockablock with counterrevolutionaries!
Or is it enemies of the Czar?
The pigs and the farmers are hard to tell apart these days.
Hold the phone. Mr. Slavitt, one of the contractors, just said this wasn’t unique software.
What exactly was all that money spent on?
It’s funny when Fascists try to design/implement massive computer systems, as computers are inherently “rule of law”-based entites – which is completely at odds with the entire “The Secretary of HHS shall determine” arbitariness of the ACA.
When the overlords can’t say “in this case, this is what should happen, always” for all possible cases – and not only can’t they do that, being in entirely over their heads, but they don’t want to do that, being power-mad – the ‘system’ is completely unimplementable.
Short of writing a hundred lines of code that takes people’s pertinent info and just forwards it to the appropriate Political Officer for a decision. But where’s the fun and profit in that, for any of the concerned parties.
How strange is it that a govt. that loses money delivering the mail cant come up with a solution “as easy as buying a tv on amazon” that involves several hundred variables. Politicians up on Cap. hill as I type are claiming that the ACA is working. Because the govt. claims some folks are…”covered” it is “working”?
Patrick Henry saw this coming a couple years ago:
“Your President may easily become king. Your Senate is so imperfectly constructed that your dearest rights may be sacrificed by what may be a small minority; and a very small minority may continue forever unchangeably this government, although horridly defective. Where are your checks in this government? Your strongholds will be in the hands of your enemies. It is on a supposition that your American governors shall be honest, that all the good qualities of this government are founded; but its defective and imperfect construction puts it in their power to perpetrate the worst of mischiefs, should they be bad men; and, sir, would not all the world, from the eastern to the western hemisphere, blame our distracted folly in resting our rights upon the contingency of our rulers being good or bad?
“Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty! I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed, with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt.”
more at:
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/5minute_arguments/patrick_henry_this_consti.php
Yea, we’re foched. For one, the argument for the last thirty years (especially since Clinton) has been that our leaders don’t have to be “good men.” From Marion Barry to Kwame Kilpatrick – and hundreds of other cases – we’ve been told that our leaders made 1) a mistake and needs 2) another chance.
So our leaders are decidedly NOT “good men.”
But then the question becomes, “Why would we hire someone to protect our interests that we wouldn’t hire to babysit our kids?”
Hey! The USA needs to spend some money! Let’s change the Marines’ hats! Brilliant!
But too narrow a vision . . .
Better yet, and more fitting with the new beginnings in “Hope and Change”: let’s just rename all the streets in Washington D.C.! Think of all the revenue that’ll generate! Heck, we can take on every street in every city in America, one after another! We can keep the Federal Reserve going for centuries this way! Fantastic!
The secret of the founders’ success was…
Lean in close, I can’t say this very loud or it’ll send up all kinds of red flags…
The secret of the founders’ success was, they didn’t listen to the loyalists and fence-sitters. Just flat out overruled ’em.
Crazy, huh? Maybe that’s what we need to do to our statists and “no labels” types.
Nah, forget it. That’s just crazy talk.
But then the question becomes, “Why would we hire someone to protect our interests that we wouldn’t hire to babysit our kids?” –
No, see it’s BOTH. Our leaders MUST be good men, but government, and man’s flaw, is that power is going to attract BAD men so there better be safeguards.
No. Our leaders should be good, moral people. Cheating and stealing from strangers (the public) is nothing if you 1) cheat on your wife or 2) cheat in business.
It’s all the same.
The secret of the founders’ success was, they didn’t listen to the loyalists and fence-sitters. Just flat out overruled ‘em. –
We’re never going to win an election with that attitude mister.
No, the Republishment knows what’s best.
There’s a lot of that going on these days.
Venezuela Seizes Toilet Paper Factory Amid Fears Of US Sabotage
Better yet, and more fitting with the new beginnings in “Hope and Change”: let’s just rename all the streets in Washington D.C.!
That could be a money-saving venture if we continue with the trend of naming all streets either 1) Rosa Parks Blvd 2) Martin Luther King Blvd and 3) Barack Obama Way.
I had to cross “John Conyers Blvd” on my way to the 1/2 marathon in Detroit on Sunday. I laughed and laughed and laughed.
Speaking of which, Detroit has a Ben Carson HS of science and tech. This was obviously named before he went off the plantation. Over the weekend, I also saw they did a movie of his life (pre, again) with Cuba Gooding Jr.
These things amuse me.
Sabatoge!
Does foched intentionally pivot on the French Marshal of that famous name? That is, we’re stuck in some sort of trench warfare? Or ok, trench isn’t the usual term for that particular bit of anatomy, but, y’know.
Their wooden shoes would have to be blamed sooner than later.
I think in years to come people will be astonished at the extreme foolishness of our time. Some of us recognize that the scope of the senselessness, sloth, vainglory and envy is too big to wrap one’s mind around at the moment. But in the future, people will be able to do so in awe
No they won’t. A group of humans who had to endure what we’re enduring now (and will endure when it gets worse) may feel that way, but then they’ll fix the problem, then pro-create, make their kids’ lives as easy as possible, and that generation will do the same, and after that, we’ll have a complete repeat.
Humans do NOT learn from their history; never have, never will. Even the worst instances (Nazi Germany) are being slowly forgotten – note the increase in attacks on Jews in Europe, and not all are from Muslims.
What we’re seeing now is the fall of the Roman Empire all over again. We’re just unlucky enough to be alive during it. But it will happen again a few hundred years after this coming fall.
“I had to cross “John Conyers Blvd” on my way to the 1/2 marathon in Detroit on Sunday.”
You fucked up, Bertolt. You trusted them.
Sorry if this has already been posted:
http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2013/what-will-obamacare-cost-you-map.html
Note that the average rate for a 40 year old man in Oregon is going up by 24%.
Even if one grants, for the sake of argument, that he’s telling the truth, we have a guy making $250K — making him one of the “1%” — saving money on his insurance at the expense of the 99%.
How Slaphead reconciles this with “helping the poor” or “making health care affordable” would make an interesting study in abnormal psychology.
Hey Steve, how’s your COBOL?
Because half the gubmint systems are written in COBOL, and their databases are veritable kludges of barely retrievable data that is usually out-of-date or just plain wrong.
The main reason the contractors are dodging blame is that they had to endure three years of the gubmint side effing up absolutely everything the contractors did, from providing shifting requirements to giving erroneous data to screwing with their heads six ways ’til Sunday.
I’ve already been a gubmint contractor in IT, and I can assure you that the gubmint-side efforts (always upstream of your work, so you can’t dodge them) ranged from insane to malicious. When they weren’t failing to provide you with needed data, they were actively sabotaging the work you’d already done.
“Incompetence” doesn’t even begin to describe what happened.
how’s your COBOL?
Admittedly, mine is pretty rusty, but it was the language I used in my first job after school – 30+ years ago. I was the first programmer hired in the group (of ~10) that actually went to school for computer science – most schools didn’t have degree programs for it then. There is so much legacy crap that 404care has to deal with, I’ll be amazed if it ever works well.
I’m just surprised the shit isn’t written in ADA.
Which conditions of government, or impositions rather, make all the greater the miracle of successfully shooting men to the moon on rockets. Wasn’t any different back then. Same deal with the International Space station. Utterly insane. But hey, let’s take over and run (top-down) 1/6th of the economy! What joy!
COBOL? I thought I left that nightmare behind 35 years ago.
It figures the government would rest its platforms on that beast.
I’m just surprised the shit isn’t written in ADA.
Ten bux says at least one of the systems is. When I was working on the Air Force contract in 1997, it was still a living language. I think the F-16s were still using it.
Those legacy databases just don’t go away. Porting them to an updated system is such a nightmare that they don’t even bother.
Yes, COBOL. In government, intertia is everything.
Furthermore, the 1999 USAF project involved creating a Web interface for the legacy database, written in COBOL. A good chunk of the project involved programmers parsing the UNDOCUMENTED code to tweeze out variables and to map the modules — what calls what and why.
Even back then they were having a hard time finding people who could read the COBOL. And as with all gubmint work, they had done only the bare minimum: little if any commenting to guide the programmers, who had to manually figure out what the modules even did.
It was beyond insane.
And then they uprooted the whole thing and moved it to Wright-Patterson, because they could. All the work we did was essentially lost, all that money wasted. Some of it was wasted into my pockets, but the taxpayer got exactly nothing out of it.
Our local library’s
pornacceptable use filter blocks the .gov site as “sexual violence or offensive”. Which is true, but still funny.the “or” made me giggle
sdferr, we (America) sometimes succeed even in spite of our government.
There is a Challenger disaster docudrama on Discovery this weekend. I wonder how truthful it will really be.
Think they can blame THAT on the Tea Party?
My pop was a programmer (so they were called back in the day) with IBM Federal Systems div. (and subsequently other contractors) from ’60 on Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, to numerous satellite shots (from Echo onward), Space Shuttle communications systems, the Space Station, TDRSS, among others. So I got an earful of “in spite ofs” periodically, as absurdities arose, from the 60s through the 90s.
I could probably do passable COBOL. Basic I taught myself, and I have a mountain-sized memory bank full of FORTRAN coding experience that I hardly remember that I have anymore.
If it were running on a military computer, I would expect it to be programmed in JOVIAL.
a scapegoat has been found
Obamacare Operator May Have Liked Her Job, But After Talking to Sean Hannity, She Can’t Keep It
Nigerian Ambassador Calls on Cruz to Apologize for Comment
Next headline: US Senate calls on Nigerian Ambassador to STFU — “Start tracking down those Princes!” sez Top Dem
Both Udalls have left the ship.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/t/story/now-democrats-obamacare-delayed-20673164
They don’t mention Landrieu, but she’s apparently off the ship too, per the earlier report.
That’s seven. Six more and things are going to get interesting come January.
lying liars what lies
Harry Reid, Barack Obama fingered as sources for Dick Durbin lie about GOP.
of course
Ted Cruz Called Racist for Saying ObamaCare Website Run by Nigerian Email Scammers
A faint within a feint within a feint. That makes se7en.
800 Number Mushi mushi!
comrade stalin would be so proud
Razing of Sandy Hook school massacre site begins Friday
So Obamacare is trying to be implemented in computer code that was invented by “a committee of researchers from private industry, universities, and government” in 1959, 5 years before Obama was born.
FUBAR and SNAFU got together and had a kid and OBAMACARE was his name O!
Not that I have anything against old things, being one myself. A school I went to when I was in my early twenties offered 3 computer language courses. FORTRAN, COBOL, and RPG. Unfortunately I wasn’t interested in any of them then.