We Need a Do Over

Posted on 08/10/2013 by Grumpa Joe
Cray X-MP/24 (serial no. 115) used by NSA

Cray X-MP/24 (serial no. 115) used by NSA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The National Security Agency

The National Security Agency (Photo credit: @mjb)

The Edison bulb lit up over my head again while Peg and I were having our pork chop. I think the Smoking Loon Merlot had something to do with it. The Obama Care sign up website has been bothering me ever since it became clear that the site is worse than any hurricane that has hit North America. One question keeps coming into mind, how can the world’s most powerful country be so stupid as to allow a software program bring them down? We are the world’s software experts. Our computer scientists are known worldwide for their ability, yet we introduce software that will control one sixth of the US economy that is a pile of cow dung. “A few glitches” O said. It is becoming apparent as the days roll by that the glitches are major screw ups in the architecture. He will never admit it but he owns this one. There is no way to blame it on Bush or the Republicans.

The engineer in me has been working overtime to figure out what I would have done differently. The problem with this type of analysis is that I have the benefit of the Monday morning quarter back. Nevertheless, I began analyzing what I would do. The first thing is I’d hire my brainiac son who is a computer scientist. He works on huge financial analysis software and is known for his ability to test the living crap out of his programs before they go on-line. The problem is that he won’t take the job because he is more conservative than I am, and he would rather see the big O flushed down the toilet.

Any software needed to do this job has to perform fast, and must handle terabytes of information. Hmmmn, where have I heard that before? Yes, the NSA does exactly that. They monitor billions of phone call, e-mails, and video cameras daily. They respond quickly at the command of the Big O. They have a complex of buildings in Utah to house their new computers designed to handle the load with capacity for the future. Those are the guys, I will call to consult on this problem.

How is it possible that the huge government of over educated liberals failed to see the NSA as a contractor for the health care program? They would most likely handle it like a kiddy game compared to the work they do spying on us.

All I can come up with is that the NSA is the NSA, and Health Care is Health Care and never shall the two bureaucrat organizations meet to coöperate with each other and make synergy happen. The number one problem we have is a government that is too large, second, we give the government too much money, and three, we propagate bureaucratic empires.

After World War II the Japanese government was broke; their economy starved for cash. We didn’t help them because we didn’t want them to rebuild their war machine. Yet, by the nineteen eighties the Japanese auto industry started a war against the US big three and they won commercially. How did they do it? They didn’t have cash to invest extravagantly like GM, Ford, and Chrysler, in fact they had but a shoe string budget to invest. Today, the Japs make the best cars in the world.

Necessity made the Japs think outside the box, they worked with their government in a positive way. Japanese engineers came up with ingenious ways to make things with limited stamping presses and tooling. The government handled a plan to protect their markets while attacking the US market. The engineers stole an idea from the progressive die makers and applied it to making auto body parts. Our guys in America thought it was a stupid idea and laughed them off. The result was a car body made in Japan with superior fit and minimal assembly. They were also smart enough to hire an US quality control consultant who taught them the basics of just in time manufacturing. The US auto industry controlled by the UAW unions were too stupid to see the value of the process.

What does this have to do with Obama Care? The point I am making is that attacking the problem with a team and a very specific well-defined goal would have resulted in a superior roll out experience and Obama would have signed up 2.5 million people on day one.  The health care software didn’t need tons of money to reach the goal, but it will to fix it. We need a do over.

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Trigger Happy Shooters

Posted on 07/10/2013 by Grumpa Joe
US-POLITICS-SHOOTING

One Lady with a Baby Against The Firepower of the US Government

Why is the shooting in the Capitol not being given more coverage than it is? A couple of weeks ago we experienced a 24/7 coverage of a shooter in the Naval Yards. Why all of a sudden is this shooting so quiet? Why is this shooting being so quickly blamed on mental health issues?

It seems to me that a bunch of trigger happy cops who like the sound of their guns going off are responsible for an unjustified shooting  of a  woman armed with only her baby.

Twice within a month we saw a surge of overwhelming firepower being showered on single suspects. The Navy yard shooting was against a single shooter outnumbered by a battalion to one. The latest shooting involves a mother, suffering from something, who is not even a chance for capture, but dispensed with by police who are good at shooting, not good at diagnosing mental health, and not wanting to go to court to testify against a perpetrator.

I am all for having good police departments to protect me, but I am against having a bunch of nervous, trigger happy shooters who have but one mission i.e. “to kill.”

Yes, there are a great number of reasons flying through an officer’s mind in that flash of an opportunity. The time to call for a Obama like debate and analysis is measured in nano-seconds and not in Obama decision making months. Police make instantaneous decisions based on the information they have in that flash, and most times they make good ones, but this time they screwed up big time.

By the way, where is Al Sharpton and his buddy Jessie Jackson on this one? Where is their defense of this poor woman? Why are they not shouting from the roof tops about the cops who filled this poor woman with bullets. The problem I see with them doing that is they have to choose between speaking up for a fellow black person, or answering to the supreme half-black person.

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22 Pens Per

Posted on 07/10/2013 by Grumpa Joe

The wine fueled Edison light bulb turned on over my tired brain this evening as I processed a TV interview with a Tea Party Senator. The idea flashed into my mind about why Obama is so adamant about holding his no-compromise position on Bills presented to fund the government.  Obama is left-handed, I’m sure nature made him left-handed to keep him in perfect alignment with his political ideology. Lefties have trouble writing in cursive. Our writing system runs from left to right unlike the Muslim way which runs right to left. For a righty this is a normal comfortable way to write. For a lefty it presents problems. The lefty has to contort his hand in a way as to mimic the right hand to see what he is writing. Another way is to write with a severe left-handed slant which still covers what it being written as one traverses the page. When it come to cursive writing righties have a genetic advantage.

English: President Barack Obama's signature on...

English: President Barack Obama’s signature on the health insurance reform bill at the White House, March 23, 2010. The President signed the bill with 22 different pens. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In my last post, I added a photo of Obama’s signature on the PPACA bill. The caption explains that he used twenty-two pens to sign the bill. That is what turned on the Edison light bulb. How many pens would he have to use to sign all the bills the House of Representatives is passing to fund the government. It is obvious to all that the sequester limited the White House supply of pens just as it limits the amount of toilet paper they can use. God forbid the President spend any of his personal fortune to buy a few pens to sign bills. I just don’t know why Congress hasn’t figured this out yet. All they have to do is send him a gross or two of his favorite pen along with each bill they send to him for signature.

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True Hero

Posted on 06/10/2013 by Grumpa Joe

North-Heroes_Proved_horiz

The name Oliver North came to my attention when he was implicated in the Iran-Contra affair during the Reagan presidency and forced to resign. Tho He came across like a true marine, tough, honest, and dedicated to America. North was among the first to name radical Islamist terrorists.  Oliver North is a decorated Marine and recipient of the SIlver Star, Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts. In addition to being so decorated as a military man he is also a novelist. I was not aware of that until a fellow blogger recommended this book.

The story of Heroes Proved takes place in the year 2032, just twenty years from now. The transformation begun in 2008 by Barack Obama has evolved more completely. The current president, a woman from the Progressive movement, is a real bitch. Her number one aim as the most powerful leader on earth is not the state of the country but rather winning the next election. Her focus is on getting to fund-raisers.

The story opens when a terrorist group pulls off a successful bombing, and kidnapping in Houston. I would have thought in twenty years the Transformed USA would have eliminated terrorism in the world. It is not so, in fact, terrorism has spread into many new groups and countries. The world is somewhat ruled by the United Nations, but rather weakly at best. Oil is still in big demand and the Houston attack has sent oil soaring toward five hundred dollars a barrel. Gasoline at the pumps is six dollars a gallon.

North’s story covers terrorism, the twisted administration of a woman president, drug cartels, a nuclear Iran, and some very dedicated ordinary people who become the main characters. Technology has progressed to supreme states in identifying and tracking us no matter where we are. People have tiny electronic id’s implanted in them. You know, like those used by Veterinarians to track a lost pet. Facial recognition identifies anyone captured on corner cameras posted everywhere within minutes. In other words, the Progressive Transformation of the USA has made us into a total spy state, all under the guise of keeping us secure.

The story switches between the search for the perpetrators of the attack on Houston to finding the kidnapped scientist, to the citizens who plot to find and rescue the scientist, and the sinister woman president on her quest for re-election.

North lost me a bit with his use of military acronyms, but the characters are mostly ex-military and government employees who tend to speak that way. At the end of book, I found a fifteen page glossary of terms which he used to tell the story. Had I known it was there, I would still be reading because of the many times I would have referred to the Glossary. Instead, I formed a picture in my mind of what the devices were and continued reading.

As is usual I found the first fifty pages very slow as the characters developed I also found it confusing as the acronyms overwhelmed me. After that, the read went into high gear and it became a “I can’t put it down” story. I did just that, I spent two nights reading instead of playing solitaire in front of the TV. I got to the point where all was going well, and I began to feel the warm glow of a happy ending coming, and then it happened. Oliver North delivers a last chapter that will take your breath away, and change any opinion you may have of about who the real enemy is.

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Arrogance Kills

Posted on 05/10/2013 by Grumpa Joe
English: President Barack Obama's signature on...

English: President Barack Obama’s signature on the health insurance reform bill at the White House, March 23, 2010. The President signed the bill with 22 different pens. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Imagine the New York Stock Exchange rolling out a software system loaded with trouble like the Affordable Care Act did this week. I think the NSE would allow the program about ten seconds to exist before it shut down, restarted their previous program, and told the developer to not come back. In ten seconds any stock exchange can make millions of trades worth billions of dollars, In fact, traders program automatic trades be made based on algorithms designed to buy or sell based on trends and instantaneous data. Ten seconds of mal-functioning software causes billions of dollars of loss and millions of angry customers.

Obama has accused Apple of having a glitch in the i-phone, but claims Apple didn’t give up because it had a glitch. He is correct for once, but he failed to tell you that Apple fixed the glitch within days after its discovery, and that 99% of the iPhone worked during the glitch period. Imagine having to wait hours to get your IPhone to work, mine would be smashed into the nearest wall and I would be headed to buy a Samsung, Motorola, or Sony. I venture to guess that the Obama Care software will need months if not years to fix, and guess what? There is no competition you are stuck with it. The software is not ready for prime time, it is not even ready for a beta test.

It is my prediction that Obama will have to extend the sign-up because there is no way in hell his people will be able to fix the problems in time to allow us to enroll within the 180 day deadline spelled out in the law. It is also my prediction that the disastrous rollout gives us a glimpse of the service we will get from government controlled healthcare.

The Republicans threw Obama a lifeline by proposing a bill that would delay the individual mandate by a year. If he were smart, like all his lovers claim, he would have jumped at the opportunity to buy time. Instead he has to live with a software system that will kill his legacy bill.

Who do you think will fix a problem like this faster, the government or the private sector?

Remember this debacle?

100531-BP-Fix0025

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