Yes, but without the use of a magic wand, FTL seems to be ruled out. Seriously, read some of that. I've got more, if need be. It simply isn't that feasible to do even the mostly easy bits anytime in the foreseeable future, and just about anything more complicated than that can be ruled right out.

If you're going to spend 10+ years in school, you're a specialist, and belong in an institution. Lets the RNs and PAs run the boxes, that's what they're there for.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Don't be obtuse. Brain tumors do not constitute "the bulk of our medical care".

Plus, when anyone except an American gets a brain tumor, they don't come around to playwrite's assumption, either. Or if they did, it would likely be looked at by their doctor as a likely symptom of the tumor. Doctors in civilized places with functioning medical care paradigms don't make, nor do they expect or need to make, even remotely that kind of money.

Eh, I'm happy with people making that kind of revenue if they're bringing the goods, ie a world-class brain surgeon, poached from God knows where. Should everone? Nah.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Eh, I'm happy with people making that kind of revenue if they're bringing the goods, ie a world-class brain surgeon, poached from God knows where.

Oh, so am I. But you and I both know that playwrite is trying to take the unique exceptions and treat them as if they were indicative of a Law of Nature.

http://www.slate.com/articles/busine...er_talked.html

Of all the terrible websites I’ve seen, healthcare.gov ranks somewhere in the middle. It has been difficult if not impossible to sign up, and customer service has been inadequate. But it’s certainly better than the NYC Department of Education site that I attempted to help a friend navigate two years ago, in hopes of her getting paid her actual salary instead of a default salary; the blatantly inept Web code got the best of us. And it’s better than the evanescent Web encyclopedia Cpedia, which rolled out with pages that literally consisted of nonsense (such as “Clickbooth Cuil but not avail due to flooding traffics and making their servers ‘too hot’ to handle”). The problems plaguing healthcare.gov aren’t due to a unique coding failure or a unique government failure—plenty of products have had similar early deficits, such as the Electronic Arts server bugs that rendered SimCity unplayable by most for more than a week after it was released this March. So healthcare.gov’s failures are not uncommon—they’re just exceptionally high-profile.


The Redditors picking apart the client code have found some genuine issues with it, but healthcare.gov’s biggest problems are most likely not in the front-end code of the site’s Web pages, but in the back-end, server-side code that handles—or doesn’t handle—the registration process, which no one can see. Consequently, I would be skeptical of any outside claim to have identified the problem with the site. Bugs rarely manifest in obvious forms, often cascading and metamorphizing into seemingly different issues entirely, and one visible bug usually masks others.

There are a few clues, however. The site’s front end (the actual Web pages and bits of script) doesn’t look too bad, but it is not coping well with whatever scaling issues the back end (account storage, database lookups, etc.) is having. I tried to sign up for the federal marketplace six days after rollout. The site claimed to be working, but after I started the registration process, I sat on a “Please Wait” page for 10 minutes before being redirected to an error page:

Advertisement



“Sorry, we can't find that page on HealthCare.gov.”

Except that wasn’t the problem, since the error message immediately below read:

“Error from: https%3A//www.healthcare.gov/oberr.cgi%3Fstatus%253D500%2520errmsg%253DErrEngin eDown%23signUpStepOne.”

To translate, that’s an Oracle database complaining that it can’t do a signup because its “engine” server is down. So you can see Web pages with text and pictures, but the actual meat-and-potatoes account signup “engine” of the site was offline. A good site would have translated that error into a more helpful error message, such as “The system is temporarily down,” or “President Obama personally apologizes to you for this engine failure.” But it didn’t.

This failure points to the fundamental causeof the larger failure, which is the end-to-end process. That is, the front-end static website and the back-end servers (and possibly some dynamic components of the Web pages) were developed by two different contractors. Coordination between them appears to have been nonexistent, or else front-end architect Development Seed never would have given this interview to the Atlantic a few months back, in which they embrace open-source and envision a new world of government agencies sharing code with one another. (It didn’t work out, apparently.) Development Seed now seems to be struggling to distance themselves from the site’s problems, having realized that however good their work was, the site will be judged in its totality, not piecemeal. Back-end developers CGI Federal, who were awarded a much larger contract in 2010 for federal health care tech, have made themselves rather scarce, providing no spokespeople at all to reporters. Their source code isn’t available anywhere, though I would dearly love to take a gander (and so would Reddit). I fear the worst, given that CGI is also being accused of screwing up Vermont’s health care website.

So we had (at least) two sets of contracted developers, apparently in isolation from each other, working on two pieces of a system that had to run together perfectly. Anyone in software engineering will tell you that cross-group coordination is one of the hardest things to get right, and also one of the most crucial, because while programmers are great at testing their own code, testing that their code works with everybody else’s code is much more difficult.

Look at it another way: Even if scale testing is done, that involves seeing what happens when a site is overrun. The poor, confusing error handling indicates that there was no ownership of the end-to-end experience—no one tasked with making sure everything worked togetherand at full capacity, not just in isolated tests. (I can’t even figure out who was supposed to own it.) No end-to-end ownership means that questions like “What is the user experience if the back-end gets overloaded or has such-and-such an error?” are never asked, because they cannot be answered by either group in isolation. Writing in Medium in defense of Development Seed, technologist and contractor CTO Adam Becker complains of “layers upon layers of contractors, a high ratio of project managers to programmers, and a severe lack of technical ownership.” Sounds right to me.

Likewise, the bugs around username and password standards—for example, the fact that the username required a number but the user interface didn’t tell the user about it—are not problems of scale. They’re problems of poor cross-group communication. I’d bet that plenty of people knew what was going to happen when the site rolled out, but none of them were in a position to mitigate the damage.

I imagine there was a dialogue last Monday afternoon that went something like this:

FRONT-END DEVELOPER: Why does the username have to have a number in it?

BACK-END DEVELOPER: It’s in the government username regulations. Didn’t you read them?

FRONT-END DEVELOPER: No, we don’t do accounts, we just hand the input to you.

BACK-END DEVELOPER: And we told you your front-end the input was no good! See the ErrEngineDown in the URL?

FRONT-END DEVELOPER: Fine, fine. Sigh. Nice to finally talk to you, by the way.

BACK-END DEVELOPER: Yeah, you too. Are you in D.C.?

FRONT-END DEVELOPER: San Francisco.

BACK-END DEVELOPER: Know any good jobs in D.C.? I hate this place and they’re furloughing me as soon as we fix this mess.

Each group got its piece “working” in isolation and prayed that when they hooked them together, things would be okay. When they didn’t, it was too late. It is entirely possible that back-end developer CGI is primarily at fault here, but no one will care because they just see that the whole thing doesn’t work. As you learn early on in software development, there is no partial credit in programming. A site that half-works is worse than one that doesn’t work at all, which is why the bad error handling is so egregious. You always handle errors.

There’s also evidence that the problems go beyond technical considerations. The “Please Wait” page source had this line in it:

<!--- <p>In a hurry? You might be able to apply faster at our Marketplace call center. Call 1-800-318-2596 to talk with one of our trained representatives about applying over the phone.</p> --->

Most userswill never see this message, because it was commented out—i.e., marked to be ignored by the browser instead of displayed in the HTML, forcing you to wait the full 10 minutes to get the error before they even give you the phone number. Again, this sort of problem was clearly not anticipated.

Bugs can be fixed. Systems can even be rearchitected remarkably quickly. So nothing currently the matter with healthcare.gov is fatal. But the ability to fix it will be affected by organizational and communication structures. People are no doubt scrambling to get healthcare.gov into some semblance of working condition; the fastest way would be to appoint a person with impeccable engineering and site delivery credentials to a government position. Give this person wide authority to assign work and reshuffle people across the entire project and all contractors, and keep his schedule clean. If you found the right person—often called the “schedule asshole” on large software projects—things will come together quickly. Sufficient public pressure will result in things getting fixed, but the underlying problems will most likely remain, due to the ossified corporatist structure of governmental contracts.

We live in a world that embodies the paradox of George W. Bush’s responsibility society (aka the “ownership society”), where authority and accountability are increasingly separated. Keep an eye out to see if CGI suffers any consequences whatsoever. Vermont just decided to double CGI’s contract pay, so I’m not optimistic. Power flows upward while responsibility flows downward, which is why you couldn’t pay me to work as a government contractor. It’d be like going back to Microsoft.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Yes, but without the use of a magic wand, FTL seems to be ruled out. Seriously, read some of that. I've got more, if need be. It simply isn't that feasible to do even the mostly easy bits anytime in the foreseeable future, and just about anything more complicated than that can be ruled right out.

It's totally off topic, and probably not relevant to our lifetimes, but we could probably rig up a dirty Orion ship with current technology (but ignoring costs) that could deliver people to local stars in their lifetimes. Of course, thanks to time dilation, thousands of years would have passed on earth, but we could still theoretically send living people to nearby solar systems. I mean, they'd probably miss the target and die drifting out in to space, but, whatever.

Also: warp might actually be a thing. Some crazy mathematicians ran some numbers which may or may not actually resemble reality, and they concluded a warp-style engine would use dramatically less energy than more conventional propulsion once you get to relativistic speeds. It's still like, Dyson Sphere amounts of energy, but it isn't quite so energy-restrictive as normal FTL travel.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Don't be obtuse. Brain tumors do not constitute "the bulk of our medical care".

The point was not limited to brain tumors, but to all illnesses and injuries. It's a matter of degree; brain tumors just represent one end of the spectrum.

The key word in your statement was "relying" - I assumed you meant that of the patient rather than the doctor. The doctor doesn't really 'rely' on any individual; they can just wait for the next one that comes along - the doctor relies on a market composed of desperate people of varying degrees. The patient's varying desperation is merely a reflection of the human condition; it is hard to fault them for their reliance.

As I said, I'm interested in shining a light of reality onto this preoccupation of blaming. I just want to shut the door on blaming those relying on the system, the patient, because of their varying degrees of desperation. As much as some here would like to turn them into just date points, they are not.

Alcubierre Warp Drive.

Yeah, ignoring costs when we'd be talking about consuming a large fraction of the Earth's GDP to do something that might theoretically be feasible for NO POSSIBLE economic benefit doesn't really constitute realism. Plus, you know, what are you going to do when you get there? Seriously, Charles Stross talked about that aspect of it in depth in one of the links I posted above. We're at a point when even middle-aged SF authors are denigrating it.

The point was not limited to brain tumors, but to all illnesses and injuries. It's a matter of degree; brain tumors just represent one end of the spectrum.

The key word in your statement was "relying" - I assumed you meant that of the patient rather than the doctor. The doctor doesn't really 'rely' on any individual; they can just wait for the next one that comes along - the doctor relies on a market composed of desperate people of varying degrees. The patient's varying desperation is merely a reflection of the human condition; it is hard to fault them for their reliance.

As I said, I'm interested in shining a light of reality onto this preoccupation of blaming. I just want to shut the door on blaming those relying on the system, the patient, because of their varying degrees of desperation. As much as some here would like to turn them into just date points, they are not.

By relying I meant "We the People", who collectively if unconsciously make the system what it is today. My point was that most medical problems could be solved much more cheaply at a local level by somebody with a BS and a medicine cabinet, like my aforementioned skin tag. Doing so frees up scarce resources to devote to people with serious problems.

We've already established that you agree with me on this so I don't really know what where you're going with this. Is it the patient's fault if they're poor, sick, or both? Maybe, but I don't really see how that is all that relevant to a policy debate, unless we want to start denying people, say, cancer treatment if they smoked. But, if you like, sure, fuck people who blame the patient.

You happy?

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Alcubierre Warp Drive.

Yeah, ignoring costs when we'd be talking about consuming a large fraction of the Earth's GDP to do something that might theoretically be feasible for NO POSSIBLE economic benefit doesn't really constitute realism. Plus, you know, what are you going to do when you get there? Seriously, Charles Stross talked about that aspect of it in depth in one of the links I posted above. We're at a point when even middle-aged SF authors are denigrating it.

Well yeah, that's a lot of steps ahead of where we are. Over the next few decades, we should to figure out the economic potential of near earth objects and solar energy.

Already mentioned. Look, it's seriously kind of a hostile place. Also, from the same site, a neat little comparative survey of the difference between undergrad's, grad's, and professor's of physics estimation of likely future technological progress.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

...

There's a significant and meaningful difference between 'a person' and the concept of "Person"

Yea, you keep telling yourself that, and maybe your magic pony will poop you a gold nugget.

Do you recall that I was re-stating your rather verbose horseshit into a simple statement and asking if it was what you were trying to convey? That is what you call "lying." And you think I have difficulty with the English language??? Too funny.

Let's try again. Your "Person," as a concept, existing only in a social context - that is meaningless to me and I'm pretty sure I am not the only one scratching his head. Can you convey it simply and perhaps elegantly - for now, it sure looks la lot like the typical Justin verbose hooey you like to spout.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

So you're going to use your magic pony dodge.

Ah, so now I'm not only the one doing the 'lying' by asking you to clarify your own statements, but now I'm also the one doing the 'dodging' by asking you where on this planet your magic pony land of kumbaya property determinations actually exist (I can only imagine the twisted English lessons this sets off!).

And you are going to persist in trying to convince us that you are different that a Randian nightmare!

This is getting funnier with each post! Thanks!

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

So life will be good on Pitcarin Island, and a life of bliss will be enjoyed by all. OK.

Oh goodness no, who said anything about bliss? I would never promise so subjective a thing as "bliss" to a person.

No, rather it's about the conscious choice of an individual to live a life by their own determination or to be nothing more than a possession with a marked up back.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Just remember to divide the women up fairly the first time, and don't try and steal anybody else's afterwards. Most of the Pitcairn guys ended up killing each other.

Indeed. A great many folks do end up confusing the land of do-as-you-please with the land of take-what-you-want. Consider it an artifact of the system that happens when the children of stifling and overbearing parents finally realize there is a huge world just outside the door. Such children are often ill-equipped to deal with the responsibilities of thinking for themselves. Good decision making, like everything else, takes practice and many mistakes to master.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Already mentioned. Look, it's seriously kind of a hostile place. Also, from the same site, a neat little comparative survey of the difference between undergrad's, grad's, and professor's of physics estimation of likely future technological progress.

Thanks for that comparative article, I've had some axes to grind for a long time regarding a lot of that jazz, and that goes a long way to proving it.

A number of the supposed technologies have been science fiction tropes. Plot devices, actually. What about other developments? Could there be possibilities in the real world that weren't considered in the survey? Nanotechnology? Programmable matter? Muons? Perhaps there will be basic breakthroughs that will send society off on paths very different from what was envisioned in science fiction.

Originally Posted by Copperfield

Indeed. A great many folks do end up confusing the land of do-as-you-please with the land of take-what-you-want. Consider it an artifact of the system that happens when the children of stifling and overbearing parents finally realize there is a huge world just outside the door. Such children are often ill-equipped to deal with the responsibilities of thinking for themselves. Good decision making, like everything else, takes practice and many mistakes to master.

Indeed. Alan Moore can write 'em, can't he? The movie was alright, but the book itself is a masterpiece.

While you work on your communication skills regarding your "Person" concept, let's highlight what has been revealed regarding the original question of you somehow being fundamentally different than the Randian nightmares, like Rand Paul, that currently blight the halls of Congress.

Here again are two of the three elements of your belief system (we have to await your masterpiece on the third) -

Originally Posted by Justin '77

[list][*]a monopoly on the rightful initiation of force is neither necessary nor desirable (arguably, there's no such thing as a rightful initiation of force, but that's a bit of a tangential issue)[*]The concept of "property" is meaningless without some context for exclusion

And again, my raising the question -

http://www.fourthturning.com/forum/s...601#post484601

- what happens when one disagrees with your exclusion (i.e. property claim) - either its ownership or it being defined as "property" (e.g. your slave may disagree with your claim)?

Your answer is that the parties will work it out or both will use a mutually trusted arbitrator (just like the plantation owners and slaves did when they mutually decided to bring in Abraham Lincoln! :rolleyes)

While yours may be amplified by steroid use, you share with the Randian/Libertarians not only the exact same fallacy of the lack of need of the "big bully" (i.e. govt) to mitigate the "many little bullies" (e.g. monopolies, warlords, drug king pins, the bully around the corner that keeps giving you wedges), but also the same exact inability to identify any place on earth, past or present, where such a place actually practice this viewpoint on any scale without it being essentially a shithole. This brings us to the third characteristic you share - being absolutely clueless about how the real world works. That elicits the exact same fourth characteristic of lashing out (e.g. liar!) at those who bring these inconvenient facts to your attention.

You've been confronted with this many a time; most nearly all of you have. It is clearly evident in your little disguised plead not to bring up the fact of the absence of your magic pony land on the face of this earth. That's about all you guys have left (the other being just ignore reality and plod on ceaselessly).

This lack of reality is exactly what I meant when stating that it is people like you that explains why we got people like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and the rest of the t-baggers running around in Congress right now attempting to force us all into some magic pony land.

Now explain to me again exactly how that is lie.

Originally Posted by playwrite

Originally Posted by Justin

There's a significant and meaningful difference between 'a person' and the concept of "Person"

Yea, you keep telling yourself that, and maybe your magic pony will poop you a gold nugget.

When you encounter
your own ignorance,
don't consider it a weakness
to be defended,
but rather an opportunity
to educate yourself.

This is high school-level stuff, but it's no shame to admit that you haven't developed to that point yet. In dialogue, enlightenment.

Do you recall that I was re-stating your rather verbose horseshit into a simple statement and asking if it was what you were trying to convey?

Except that, rather than simply paraphrasing, your re-statements changed the meaning. Either you did it because you're insufficiently competent in the English language to know any better, or you did it deliberately, hoping (one must assume) that your changes would go un-caught and through my tacit acceptance of your modified versions as being "what I had said", you would be able to run me through some sort of preconceived demolition.
Unfortunately for you, I pay attention to the words that are used, and insist that my ideas be expressed clearly, precisely, accurately, and deliberately. So you got caught in your lie. And now you're trying to weasel out of it. But... the Archives Above. Try as you might, you cannot hide or evade them.

Let's try again. Your "Person," as a concept, existing only in a social context - that is meaningless to me and I'm pretty sure I am not the only one scratching his head.

Possibly. If I recall correctly, we've got at least one or two middle-schoolers here who might be right there with you. Start out by at least glancing through the basic fundamental articles I linked above. Maybe even click-through to some pages they reference. Once you comprehend the very basic Platonic concept of Forms (note the capitalization -- again, critical to communicating precise and correct meaning), come back and look again at my statement that Person (not the concept 'Person'... the phenomenon; my above reference to "the concept of 'Person'" touched purely on the use of precise language, not on the Randian/Justin worldview differences that we're back to here) only exists in a social context. If it's still confusing or seems incorrect to you, then at least you'll have the basic concept-set we need to discuss the question. It was enjoyable and enlightening (I like to think, mutually ) to talk worldviews with Brian back in the day. I hold out in the hopes that, under the posturing, you might be at least nearly as worthy a partner.

Can you convey it simply and perhaps elegantly - for now, it sure looks la lot like the typical Justin verbose hooey you like to spout.

Your benightedness is your downfall here. Were you at all well-read, you'd have little problem distinguishing deliberate, precise language from 'verbose hooey' (ask your wife sometime when she's in a good mood why that second word in english cracks me and my kids up every time we see it -- it's hard for me to even type without a bit of a grin). Maybe, once you're able to see the difference, you can even start to engage in some of the former yourself.

Hope springs eternal.

Ah, so now I'm not only the one doing the 'lying' by asking you to clarify your own statements

Another lie. What you are doing is not asking clarification, but creating revised versions of what I wrote; calling them clarification, as opposed to modification; and then asserting that my efforts to correct the errors you introduced are incoherent and/or misleading and/or me 'changing what I'm saying'. While the modification might be chalked up to simple unletteredness on your part, the assertions that you're exposing some sort of attempt at deception most can be nothing but lying outright.

Or, par for playwrite's course.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Indeed. Alan Moore can write 'em, can't he? The movie was alright, but the book itself is a masterpiece.

He most certainly can. The movie had some good moments, some powerful imagery and included some very powerful sections from the book. Unfortunately the film was far too watered down and strayed too far from Moore's ideologies (assumingly to make a few Hollywood execs more comfortable with the content).

Originally Posted by Justin '77

....

blubber blubber.....

500+ words of your supposed superiority, all ending with a claim I'm lying about something in that morass of yours.

Not one attempt to provide a concise description of one element of your belief system.

Justin, the only person you're fooling here is yourself.

--------------------------------------------------------

No matter, I already hooked the worm - have you located your paradise on anyone's map? If so, please send it to your bed fellow, Rand Paul, he's been looking for it at least as long as you have.

Originally Posted by playwrite

500+ words of your supposed superiority, all ending with a claim I'm lying about something in that morass of yours.

Not one attempt to provide a concise description of one element of your belief system.

Justin, the only person you're fooling here is yourself.

--------------------------------------------------------

No matter, I already hooked the worm - have you located your paradise on anyone's map? If so, please send it to your bed fellow, Rand Paul, he's been looking for it at least as long as you have.

I see. My hope for a potential productive dialogue was misplaced; all you have is lies and name-calling.

Point taken.

Judging by the extent of the latest boxing match, it may be time to reopen Da Rubber Room.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

I see. My hope for a potential productive dialogue was misplaced; all you have is lies and name-calling.

Point taken.

But can you put that point on somebody's map?