Hah!
I’ve got your extensive QA and beta testing right here:
These guys all make their primary income from people logging into their servers, and in spite of that have issues every time a new product is rolled out.
I didn’t say it guaranteed error-free rollouts. Only that it is a standard practice that reduces such errors. There couldn’t have been any beta testing of healthcare.gov, because they kept it a secret until the day it was rolled out. Further, the coders couldn’t even complete their work properly because the regulations took so long to be rolled out that they couldn’t be sure what they were creating.
Well, they’d pretty much have to be. Challenging them from the right hasn’t been an option since 1945.
As you note, an election poll in the middle of 2013 doesn’t really mean anything. Candidates are not running for office at the moment (at least not beyond the ongoing thinking about re-election). Politicians all know the election schedule and time their activities around it. Unpopular activities are timed when there’s minimal danger of them affecting the next election. If it was October of 2014, you can be sure the House wouldn’t have staged a shutdown.
Wrong again, and this only took me a quick search to find out:
But I thought the Received Wisdom was that this is impossible, government work (done for service) is always inferior than private sector work, done for the approval of the Dollar Almighty, blessings and peace be upon its Name…
You Jest, but there is a lesson for the ones that disparage government and continue to rely on iffy sources.
“It’s a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one’s safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”
-Alan Shepard
Still, as the Moonshot documentary showed, all astronauts knew the risks, and they were still willing to risk it, and even with all the setbacks, we still made it to the moon.
Of course, Fox does not think so, but you know already about the sources some continue to use. 
One of the reasons is the incentives. At my company, if a new project went live like this, people would be held accountable. In the government, not only are individuals not held accountable, but the public tends to just have a blase attitude about it.
Government doesn’t fail because it’s inherently worse, it fails because there are few incentives to succeed.
Maybe the sources some conservatives rely on need to have a punch from Buzz.
The reason why one can get this wrong is not because there is contrary information for a declaration like “Government Fails” the implication is that it fails all the time, as Aldrin would say, it is really a very short sighted position to have.
If only we had some system by which are political leaders were held up to periodic review and could be dismissed from their position and replaced with other people.
It’s sure as heck not like that in the private sector where corporations are answerable to the public and people like me can hire and fire the executives on the board when we feel they’re doing a poor job.
We theoretically have such a system. In reality though, leaders aren’t held accountable. The President is generally held blameless for failures all throughout his administration. Thus, there is no democratic accountability.
I’m not sure the ‘glitches’ are a big deal to anyone except a certain small segment of the population. All the ‘glitch stories’ are last week’s news.
It seems that every error, no matter how minor, must be pinned on the Prez.
Silliness.
So, let me get this straight: When the government releases a massive online service, and the rollout goes exactly like the rollout of every other massive online service in history, this is a mark against government?
What on Earth are you talking about?
Speaking of who would lose if the elections were held today…
http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/juan-williams/328165-opinion-independents-desert-gop
As The Hill reports, that lead is the result of the irresponsible behavior of the Republicans, particularly the Tea Partiers, and the Cooch is one of them.
You can always rely on politicians to carefully examine the topography of their toast, and determine precisely whereupon it is buttered.
He’s complaining that the mud that has been slung at Obama over the past several years (and the past two in particular) isn’t sticking in the quantities he would like. So Benghazi didn’t bring him down, the IRS thing didn’t stick, the press didn’t turn on him after AP-gate, the shutdown is actually increasing his popularity, he didn’t get any flak for making Marines hold umbrellas, etc etc… Basically, the only people buying this crap are the people who hated Obama from Day 1 anyway and so it’s not making a significant dent in his ratings. Which frustrates adaher no end.
I, OTOH, am of the view that Obama would probably take a bigger hit for his actual mistakes if we weren’t constantly being showered with fake scandals that Fox, Breitbart and fellow travellers want us to blame him for. It’s the Boy Who Cried Wolf Continuously 24 Hours A Day For Years story - with that racket going on, who can tell when an actual wolf turns up?
Well put. I am an Obama/Dems supporter, but I am genuinely interested in the mistakes, unfulfilled promises, etc. he/they have made, and would do what I could to hold him/them accountable. But it’s so hard to focus on them, and to contribute in a small way to making things better, when 99% of the media and political energy is spent on false accusations and the defenses against same.
On a related note, while I’m thrilled at the 24% Pubbie congressional approval rating, this can’t be good for the Dems in the long run. A sane, thoughtful, reality-based, constructive opposing party would be much better all around, for everyone.
Some day. Some day.
My hope is that the Republicans will collapse into a regional, Southern party, and the Democrats can hold the center-right line, while a true liberal/progressive party emerges- and we can have the choice each election of the Democrats or the Progressives, with a few southern Republican nuts thrown in.
Of course, because it proves that government is less competent - oops strike that - just as competent as free enterprise.
Sizing a system for maximum load generally means more money put into the system for capacity than you are going to need over the long term. If I were the government, I would have purposely created a system that I knew was going to give me issues the first few days while the curious poked around - I don’t NEED that capacity long term and I wouldn’t want to waste the taxpayer dollar having that capacity long term. I have a budget to work to - my guess, being the government - is that it would be somewhat smaller than was actually required to get the best possible system, and a list of requirements, and one of the requirement that I’d drop would be “keeping stability while curious people poked around the first week” in favor of requirements that were going to give me long term benefit.