Hot Swapping

Hot Swapping

By Emma X

 

If Obama can't get it up by
Thanksgiving website failure may
defund his flagship health care program.  He
claims his enrollment Blackhawk is down
temporarily due to stress.  He hopes this
 infelicitous flaccidity will be resolved by
late November, allowing celebratory holiday
penetration of participating insurance vendors
by qualified participants.

Emma X
America still leads the world in
technology and political failures.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a bureaucratic government in possession of a critically important software roll out will fail to load test.

Obamacare Death Panels turned
out to be servers that could not support the
load generated by poorly integrated software.

That being said, one has to come to the conclusion that God does indeed love Republicans.  Or maybe he hates universal health care.  Whatever the reason, we now have airways full of government appointed Luddites explaining why they didn’t understand that software components designed by multiple vendors might not work when integrated, or that multiple thousands of people trying to access a single website at one time might crash the server.  We unfortunately have come to expect these kinds of idiotic government failures, but in a twenty-first century economy where commercial systems work seamlessly to keep American commerce functioning at a world class pace, the Obamacare rollout is embarrassingly quaint.  Failure was highly avoidable.  But then the government process itself tends to collapse under stress.  The American electorate now fully understands that it has a government that cannot legislate; that it also cannot function in the technical arena should be no surprise.

Load Tested and Approved.
The NSA has proved that it can process huge
volumes of data seamlessly and efficiently.
Why not interrupt monitored domestic calls
to offer access to the health care marketplace?
They already have the basic enrollment
information for every qualifying American
citizen.  And every German citizen, for that
matter. And world-wide Yahoo and Google
users...

So now we have a Health Care Enrollment system that is limping along with daily hot swapping of code and no end-to-end system testing.  We can look forward to some serious hacking exposures, both short term and long.  And it may not be long before the loyal opposition is rightly proclaiming data security risks, and possibly some successes with illegal enrollment data acquisition.

Wetware Hot Swap
Wouldn't it be more efficient if we could change
out disfunctional politicians while the legislative
 system remained up?  Productivity and functionality
 would improve immediately.

The Obamacare rollout is working as well as the legislative process that created it.  In the victory wake of a government shutdown blamed on Republicans, the Democrats have handed them a spectacular public start-up failure that conservatives can attach to a negative public perception of the legislation itself.  They have hot swapped an historical triumph for an embarrassing technical defeat.

The Victory Lap
Republicans tried every method to
derail Obamacare.  Help finally came
from an unexpected source.

Still, one day soon people will be able to use that new-fangled system of tubes and pipes held together by electrician's tape called The Internet to shop for affordable health care.  In the meantime pick up the phone and call for assistance.  It won't get you health insurance any faster, but it will give you time on hold to consider how well your January enrollment might work, and what medical supplies you might want to stock up on, just in case.

The Bright Future Of Affordable
Health Care.
There will be seven million registered applicants
by March, 2014.  Guaranteed.

Kept in the dark and fed bullsh*t?  President Obama knew nothing about problems with the Obamacare website roll out.  He also knew nothing about controversial IRS or NSA activities.  Loyal public servants protect their President.  But if his chronic lack of awareness is real, he should be officially titled Mushroom in Chief.  21st Century politicians need to learn that the technology of the day does not allow for explainable lapses in oversight.  Either way, Angela Merkel is about to impart to him the need for high level executive accountability in all things technical.  Sadly, Obamacare does not provide insurance against political embarrassment, domestic or foreign.