Goodbye Mitt

Donald Trump today confirmed his pick of Rex Tillerson to be his nominee for Secretary of State. I can hardly rejoice about that choice but I can find one small consolation in it. Namely: I think we're done with Mitt Romney.

Romney was governor of my adopted state of Massachusetts 2003-2007. One of the votes he got was mine. I rarely vote for a Republican for any office (although I'm not sure whether a Massachusetts Republican even counts as a "real" Republican) but in my view at the time he was the most qualified candidate running. This was coming off the 2002 Winter Olympics, which I felt he had managed pretty competently, whereas his Democratic opponent just seemed to focus on criticism of Romney as a person, with comparatively little to say about her own policy proposals.

My problem with Romney began about midway through his term as governor, when he seemingly lost interest in being governor and wanted to be president instead. Apart from spending more time out of the state campaigning than in the state governing, he also started to transform himself—outwardly, at least—into a "real" Republican, apparently having concluded that being a Massachusetts Republican was more of a liability than anything else. Mitt's peculiar transformation would continue as he traveled the road to being nominated as the 2012 Republican presidential candidate. The most irritating, yet somehow unsurprising, aspect of that for me was how he portrayed the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) as "an unconscionable abuse of power" and called for it to be repealed, because while the latter may not be identical with Romney's own signature achievement as governor, the Massachusetts state health care reform, it's pretty hard to treat them as being somehow fundamentally different with respect to their core principles; unless, of course, you don't mind being a disingenuous hypocrite.

Clearly Romney doesn't mind. It was surprising—or not?—when Romney came out and so vehemently attacked Trump during the presidential campaign, summing up thusly:

"Here's what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.

"His domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill."

Let's recall that back in 2012, after Trump endorsed Romney, Romney praised Trump for his "extraordinary ability to understand how our economy works and to create jobs". And of course now that Trump has won and was dangling the Secretary of State job before Mitt's eyes, Mitt now wanted us to know that "[W]hat I've seen through these discussions I've had with President-elect Trump, as well as what we've seen in his speech the night of his victory, as well as the people he's selected as part of his transition, all of those things combined give me increasing hope that President-elect Trump is the very man who can lead us to that better future".

So who's the sucker now?

I wondered as I watched this whole thing play out whether it was just a clever trap set by Trump and his team, baited with Romney's own opportunism and vanity. Whether it was really part of some Machiavellian plan or just lucky (for Trump) happenstance, Romney is now in a pretty poor position to criticize anything Trump or his team say or do in the next four years, and looking at how his whole transition process has been, there will be no shortage of things to criticize (to put it mildly). It's hard for me to see why anyone would take anything the man has to say seriously at this point, and although stranger things have happened in American politics, I suspect that Romney's political career is over. Goodbye, Mitt. I won't miss you.

Coming to Terms with the Aftermath

It's been nearly two weeks since the Nov. 8 election as I write this. The liberal bubble that is my Facebook newsfeed was a landscape of despair for the first several days after the election, but that has since given way to seething anger and outrage. Needless to say (for the two or three of you who read my occasional scribblings here), the election didn't end the way I wanted or expected it to. I genuinely believed (and still do) that Clinton was the most qualified of the entire field of candidates, Democrat or Republican, but I was also conscious of the baggage she brought along for the trip, some of it real, much of it fictional. One might have thought that a substantial plurality of the electorate would have considered those failures, real and imagined, to pale in comparison to Trump's manifest lack of fitness for the presidency (in case you've forgotten, a quick look at James Fallows's Trump Time Capsule series should refresh your memory); one would have been wrong.

So here we are. We had an election and Trump won. As I write this, the latest counts show that Clinton won nearly two million more popular votes, but the Electoral College result—sadly—is what counts. Like it or not, that's the system we have and we all knew the rules going in. I don't think you can excoriate Trump before the election for saying he'll only accept the results if he wins and then say after the election that the Electoral College result is not legitimate because you don't like how the Electoral College is going to vote. I personally think that institution is an obsolete anachronism and would like to see it eliminated. That would take a constitutional amendment, which is a complicated process, but I'm holding out some hope that the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact will render an amendment unnecessary in time for the 2020 election. 

Now candidate Trump is president-elect Trump; I wince every time I hear that term. In the first few days after the election he made kind of a sobered impression. To some he was looking presidential and statesman-like; to me he just looked like the dog who finally caught the car he was chasing and now has no clue what happens next. Since then he's gone to the White House for a little "Presidency 101" from Obama, for whom it must have been a profoundly bitter experience, the professor preparing to hand over the keys to the carnival barker.

I have mixed feelings about the protests that have followed the election. I won't hesitate to condemn the violence that occurred around protests in Portland, OR; it's morally unacceptable, but also just tactically stupid. As for the peaceful protests elsewhere, those people are exercising their first amendment rights, and I understand the anger, but the fact that they are essentially protesting against the result of a free election makes me uncomfortable at some level. I tend to apply the "if the shoe were on the other foot" standard—if those were Trump supporters protesting a Clinton victory, wouldn't we be sounding warnings about "Trump's brownshirts" and worse to come? At the same time I recognize that we are facing something unprecedented here, a genuine moral crisis, which makes it harder for me to say people shouldn't be out in the streets making their feelings known, as long as they can do it in a peaceful manner. I see the value in reminding Trump and his pals that while they won the election, they did not win a popular mandate for their plans.

Ambivalence about protests at this early stage not withstanding, I accept the election results as the legitimate outcome of the system we have, stupid though it may be, but not the "now all Americans must come together behind our new president" crap I've heard from some quarters. In his acceptance speech Trump said "I will be president for all Americans". Technically that's of course true, but Trump spent the entire presidential campaign demonstrating that in practice he intends to be anything but. If he wants my support he can earn it; the last eight years of Republican obstructionism have taught me that I'm under no obligations here. The role he awarded to Steve Bannon, as one of his very first official appointments, speaks for itself as far as any claim of being "president for all Americans" goes. His appointments of Jeff Sessions and Mike Flynn are equally indicative of where this is going.

At least part of his constituency thinks it knows where it's going: back to a time when the white man ruled and everyone else knew his place. The rise in incidents of open racism following Trump's victory, many of which cite his name in one form or another, is well documented, as here or here. Trump has issued a sort of weak, half-hearted directive to his followers to "stop it", but only after he was prompted on national television, and he hasn't publicly said a word since then on the topic, even though racist incidents citing his name continue unabated. In Bannon, he's very publicly elevated to his inner circle a man who is intimately associated with the so-called "alt-right", so how can anyone take his "stop it" as anything other than an obvious ploy to establish plausible deniability? So many Trump voters deny racist inclinations and claim to be insulted to be associated with the bigotry of a few, but they've heard their candidate speak and they knew exactly who and what they were choosing when they cast their votes. If you voted for this man, you are a knowing accomplice in whatever comes next. Oh yes, I know, you were just following orders.

The Shape of Things to Come

The Monday-morning (or Wednesday morning, I guess) quarterbacks have been dissecting the election results ever since the election, amidst general finger-pointing on the Democratic side. Hardcore Sanders supporters have assured me that he would have beaten Trump if he had gotten the nomination, but let's not kid ourselves. If Sanders had been the candidate of the Democrats, all we would have heard after the convention is how he's a self-proclaimed socialist, "just like Stalin or Mao or Castro", and how he's going to take away our property and nationalize private enterprises and force us all onto collective farms and set up gulags and reeducation camps and other such nonsense. Trump would have dubbed Sanders "commie Bernie" and the same people who lapped up his "crooked Hillary" line still would have voted Trump into office.

The consensus diagnosis that has now developed goes something like this: The Democratic Party used to be the party of the working man. Then it decided to focus more on college-educated professionals as its core constituency and embraced globalization as an organizing principle for society. In the meantime, white working-class men have seen their economic and social status consistently eroded, and Democrats have done nothing to help them, preferring instead to belittle them as a bunch of stupid hicks. After eight years of Obama, things haven't gotten any better for them, they're angry as hell about it and so, looking for a radical change and also just to make a point, they've voted en masse for Trump and elevated him to the presidency.

I have no doubt that this analysis explains a lot, but it's hardly the whole story, as exit poll results (reported here, among other places) show. Yes, Trump did better among whites of all ages. But he also did better than Clinton in the upper income groups, among white college-educated voters, and in the suburbs. Downwardly mobile working-class whites may be a core Trump constituency, but they clearly have no shortage of allies among what are considered to be the better-off white elites. Demagogues always have friends in high places who are looking for a way to harness and exploit the anger of the masses for their own ends.

I took out my ancient pocket calculator and tried to dig into some of the exit poll numbers a little further. A few things I noted (apologies for all the calculations that follow, I just think I should show my work before I state my conclusions):

• The most up-to-date numbers I could find on the vote (here, as of 11/17/16—may have changed by the time you read this) indicate these results in the popular vote. These are the numbers I used for the following extrapolations: 
• Trump: 61,864,015
• Clinton: 63,541,056
• Other: 7,034,595
• Total: 132,439,666.
• Of the 24,537 respondents polled, 33% said that only Trump is qualified to be president, 46% said only Clinton is, 14% said neither is. Of the last two groups, 2% and 69%, respectively, were Trump voters. Extrapolating to the total vote count of 132.4 million voters noted above, that means that (.02 x .46) + (.69 x .14) = 10.6%, or around 14 million people, voted for Trump even though they do not consider him qualified to be president.
• Asked whether Trump has the temperament to be president, 63% said no, and 20% of those respondents were Trump voters. So .20 x .63 = 12.6% of voters, or around 16.7 million, voted for Trump but don't think he has the temperament to be president.
• 39% of all respondents said that the candidate quality that mattered most was "can bring change"; this was mostly driven by Trump voters (83% of the 39%). 21% said the most important quality was "right experience", 20% said "good judgment"; these choices were mainly driven by Clinton voters (90% and 66%, respectively).

So after all that fiddling with numbers, my brilliant conclusion is that statistically speaking, Trump voters mainly just want a change, but a substantial contingent of them don't give a damn about the qualifications or temperament of the guy they've selected to bring it. That pretty much aligns with the anecdotal evidence from multiple TV, radio or print interviews of prospective Trump voters I saw/heard/read in the weeks leading up to the election, in which this or that person expressed reservations about Trump's readiness for the presidency while at the same time pledging to vote for him nonetheless. Now there's a recipe for success (not).

Trump's voters are going to get changes, but I have no doubt that those changes are not going to make many of those Trump voters happy, especially that core constituency of working-class white men. Let's ignore for a moment (but only for a moment) things like Trump's pick of Jeff Sessions to be AG, and the impact that's going to have on civil rights actions by the DOJ, since the people who will be affected were very probably not Trump voters.

Let's focus instead on things like his tax "reform" plan, which economists think will add trillions to the national debt while benefiting almost exclusively taxpayers with very high incomes. Let's consider Trump's plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), which is likely to leave millions of formerly uninsured people once again uninsured. Let's think about how much the cost of living will rise for low-income people who depend on all those Chinese imports at Walmart and elsewhere if Trump really slaps a tariff on them. Let's look at the loss of millions of export-related jobs that could occur from a Trump-incited trade war (and are not going to be replaced by an equal or larger number of new jobs mining coal and making steel). Let's ask how those who voted the whole Republican crew into office are possibly going to come out ahead if Trump signs off on Paul Ryan's plans to "reform" Medicare and Social Security.

We should also consider the less direct impact on Trump's core supporters (and all the rest of us too). There's the environmental impact to be expected from Trump's plan to withdraw from global climate deals and destroy the EPA from within—soon we can all be living in Flint. There is the infrastructure program that I think is actually a good idea but which I also think, based on statements from Trump's guy Bannon, will be so uncoordinated and poorly thought out that it—assuming the Republican Congress will even vote for it—will probably waste a massive amount of money without delivering any real long-term benefit (and, I bet, will probably see a lot of that money siphoned off into dubious channels).

Even more generally, there are the already-apparent massive conflicts of interest that I think will make this the most scandal-plagued administration since Harding was president. And then there's the infighting within Trump's transition team that I believe is just a preview of what we will see once the Trump administration is sworn in and which will keep it more preoccupied with itself than with the good of the country.

In short, I hardly think we have grounds for optimism with a Trump administration, and I think the people who are going to get screwed over the most are the people he convinced to vote for him for the sake of "change". They have not merely cut off their metaphorical nose, they have ripped their whole head off—and mine, and my family's, and all of my friends'—to spite their face. Let none of these people complain to me a year from now that they've been negatively affected by this or that Trump administration action, because that will be a very short conversation, possibly involving a lot of yelling.

My heart tells me I should now be pushing my own solidly Democratic Massachusetts congressional delegation and all of the rest of the Democrats to fight every stupid policy the Trump White House and it's allies in the Republican-controlled Congress may cook up in any and every way possible. I should be donating to the ACLU and other such organizations. I should be out on the street demonstrating against every anti-progressive policy this administration will try to implement.

But there's also a little voice in my head that says that maybe what needs to happen here is for Trump & co. to get everything they want; let Democrats put up token, symbolic resistance but otherwise step aside and let the country have this foolish populist experiment and see it end in the disaster that I expect. It has been popular leading up to the election to draw parallels with pre-Hitler Germany. Maybe it's time to look ahead to some parallels with post-Hitler Germany, whose citizens drew certain conclusions from the self-inflicted smoking ruins of their own country and of the countries all around them, owned up to (and 70 years later continue to seek atonement for) their country's heinous crimes, and established a prosperous and relatively egalitarian society that undeniably has its problems and shortcomings, but in which even an arch-conservative leader like Merkel is perceived by many in our own country to be one of the world's remaining champions of human rights and democratic institutions.

I hate to end on a dark and cynical note, but maybe it's going to take letting the likes of Trump and Ryan and their pals fuck up the country so badly that the "government is the problem" rhetoric that has been the Republican mantra since Reagan, the stupid idea that the best way to help average people is to award the wealthiest among us an ever-larger slice of the pie, and the ridiculous notion that the best way to make the country work right is to choose an inexperienced outsider to lead it, can be thoroughly and definitively discredited. Maybe, just maybe, we can all learn something and then pick up the pieces and agree to do something a little more constructive. I don't know that that's what I truly want, because of all of the people who will be made to suffer through no fault of their own. But with a vain, ignorant and amoral man like Trump elected to the highest office in the land with the approval of nearly half of all voters, I have to wonder if the only way we're going to get out of our national addiction to stupid and short-sighted policy prescriptions is to finally hit rock bottom hard enough that we're ready to swear off the drug for good.

Health Care and Apartheid: Basically the Same Thing

As Republican politicians fight their never-ending battle to out-stupid one another, one of the more consistent front-runners is Rick Santorum. Santorum's regularly demonstrated ability to combine right-wing dogma, pseudo-Christian hypocrisy and general tone-deafness is nothing short of breathtaking. That someone with multiple university degrees is capable of saying so many profoundly dumb things (as reported previously) just goes to show that book-larnin' ain't everything, I guess.

Today's award-winning demonstration of Santorum's ignorance took place on Bill O'Reilly's show (an appropriate forum for that sort of thing). Discussing the passing of Nelson Mandela, Santorum told O'Reilly, "Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that, and that's the reason he is mourned today, because of that struggle that he performed… And I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people's lives, and Obamacare is front and center in that."

Wow! I'm impressed. And he said all that with a straight face, no less. Yes, Rick believes that a law enacted to extend the benefits of affordable health care to tens of millions of Americans, and to keep millions more from getting screwed over by their health insurance providers, is pretty much the same as a brutal government-mandated system of racial discrimination that regulated where you could live, where you could work, where you could go, whom you could associate with. The similarities are pretty obvious, no?

You're right, this does remind me of Obamacare

I think that with this pronouncement, Santorum has secured himself a comfortable lead in the stupid sweepstakes, ahead of perpetual challengers Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Not that they aren't putting up a fight, mind you. Palin's recent statement about the federal debt and slavery come to mind (helpful hint: when someone prefaces a statement with, "and this isn't racist, but…", you can safely assume that whatever comes next will be pretty offensive). Bachmann has since countered with claims that Barack Obama "has rewritten the Constitution for himself as a part of his effort to fundamentally transform the United States of America"—golly, I didn't learn in my high school civics class—the one in which I scored 100% on every test but only got a "B" because the teacher said I "had a bad attitude"—that the president gets to rewrite the Constitution. But I think Santorum, with his "ACA=apartheid" equation, once again leaves Sarah and Michele in the dust.

What is it about these right-wing Republicans that enables them to make these pronouncements that attain an almost magical level of stupid? I am simultaneously fascinated and repulsed; I guess it's the same thing some people get out of watching those "Saw" movies. I don't need to watch that stuff—I can just watch Republicans being interviewed on Fox News to get the same kind of sick thrill.

Turn that thing off! It's frightening the children.

Nelson Mandela was, and I'm sure will remain, an inspirational figure to people the world over. He was a man who fought against outrageous injustice, suffered his punishment for that with dignity and ultimately emerged triumphant. Where others might have sought retribution, he worked for reconciliation. He was a respected statesman who was elected to lead his country and, unlike so many of his peers among African leaders, when his term was up, he went. I cannot for the life of me imagine a Santorum or a Palin or a Bachmann (or a Cruz or a Paul or practically any of the more vocal Republicans) ever rising to even a small fraction of that level of moral authority. That Rick Santorum, the supposed champion of Catholic teachings, would somehow link this figure, who for the good of his country truly turned the other cheek to seek rapprochement with his former tormentors, to his own immoral crusade to deprive America's least privileged citizens of a little bit of progress toward health care security tells me everything about him (and his fan base) that I would ever care to know.

Wait… Jesus said what??!!

HealthCare.gov: DOA

The President came up to Boston last week to tell us that his ACA (Affordable Care Act, aka "Obamacare") really is going to work. Maybe the eyes of the rest of America were upon him, but I think that greater Boston was more preoccupied with the impending game six of the World Series, in which the Red Sox might win the series in Fenway Park for the first time since 1918 (which did in fact come to pass). Giving a speech at the historic but unpronounceable Faneuil Hall ("FAN-ee-ull" in case you were wondering), on roughly the same spot where Mitt Romney (remember him?) signed the Massachusetts health care act into law in 2006, Mr. Obama apologized for the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov and assured us all that things will get better soon, reminding us that the debut of Massachusetts' own revamped health insurance framework was also pretty shaky, although it has ultimately worked out well.

Of all the things I pontificate about in these (electronic) pages, here, at last, is something I actually feel professionally qualified to ramble on and on about. I make my living as a project manager for information technology (IT) projects. I've been doing this now for 20+ years as my primary or secondary role in a number of different companies. I have run a lot of projects, many that were big successes, and a few that, well, gave me an opportunity to learn from my mistakes. When I first heard about the problems at the launch of the HealthCare.gov web site, the words that immediately sprang to mind were the ones that no project manager ever wants to hear from the users of the system of which he or she has just led the delivery: Didn't anybody test this thing?

Well, sort of open. And sort of not.

IT projects generally follow about the same lifecycle, or sequence of activities. First you define requirements: what exactly is this system supposed to do, what technical and organizational constraints need to be addressed and so forth. Then you create the design that will deliver on those requirements. Then you actually build the system and test it to make sure that what you built follows the design and meets the requirements. If testing shows that things aren't working right, you fix those things and then test again, and keep doing that until testing confirms that the system performs as it is supposed to. Then you roll out the finished product by training the people who will operate the system, maybe training end users as well, making sure that you have some kind of helpdesk function in place to field any user issues, loading the system with whatever data is needed to initialize it, making any other logistical preparations that are needed and then finally turning users loose on it ("going live", in IT jargon).

Variants of the "classical" project execution approach (the "waterfall approach") may devote months to each of these major steps, and there are rigid rules about when you can exit each phase and enter the next. Some projects follow approaches such as the "Agile" method in which you define a basic framework of intended capabilities and then develop the details by rapidly iterating through requirements, design etc. in multiple cycles. There's a lot more to either approach than what I've hinted at here, but I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that the different approaches each work best for different kinds of IT projects, although as in any profession, there are adherents to each approach who will argue with religious fervor that one or the other is the only true path to IT nirvana. Here, for example, is a writer who blames the problems with HealthCare.gov on the use of the waterfall approach instead of Agile. To this I say only, beware of anyone who preaches the one-size-fits-all solution. I have seen Agile projects that were quite successful, and others that devolved into complete chaos and wasted a lot of time and money delivering a Frankenstein-like whatchamacallit that was rejected by users. You have to match the methodology to the circumstances of the project, and consider that often the problem is less in the methodology than in its execution.

Standard IT Project Lifecycle

Whatever the methodology, things can go wrong at any step in an IT project. If requirements are incomplete, or vague, or weren't reviewed and approved by whomever is the sponsor of the project and/or the ultimate owner of the system that will be delivered, you run a very high risk of expending a lot of effort, only to be told, "this isn't what we wanted; go back and build what we wanted, and don't expect us to pay for this other thing you built." If the design is poorly thought out, the final product won't deliver the intended functionality, or it will deliver it in a way that is incomplete, or runs too slowly, or is confusing to users, or crashes frequently, or otherwise renders it essentially unusable. If the individual components and the overall system aren't properly tested at each stage of development, you are pretty much closing your eyes and hoping for a miracle when you put it in front of end users as a supposedly finished product. And if the necessary preparations are not made as part of rollout, taking the system live with actual users can be pretty stressful.

Of all of these parts of the process, in my experience at least, testing is probably the most neglected. Requirements gathering is interesting because you get to talk to a lot of people and drink a lot of coffee and then write everything up in professional-looking documents. In design you produce cool-looking diagrams and have more meetings in which you can show off all of your technical knowledge and tell your war stories about how you cleverly solved this same problem back when you worked for General Electric or Sears or Bank of America. In development you do all the coding and configuration work and experience the satisfaction of having made some conglomeration of hard- and software bend to your will.

But testing is anything but glamorous; on the contrary, it can be mind-numbingly tedious. Testing consists of poring over all of the requirements and design documentation and boiling the intended functionality of the entire system down to a mass of test cases, each of which basically consists of this: If I do A, B is supposed to happen. Now I will do A. Did B happen? Yes? Test passed, move on to the next one. Did B not happen? Test failed, give it back to the developers and let them figure out how to fix it, then run the same test again when they claim it's fixed.

There are lots of different kinds of testing that need to be performed in a typical IT project. At the most basic level, you need to test each individual component of the system to verify that it functions correctly. Then you need to verify that components that interact with other components in some way do that as intended. Then you need to verify that the overall system functions the way it is supposed to in an "end-to-end" test wherein you simulate each of the intended "use cases", that is, specific scenarios or operations that the system is supposed to perform, expecting to see all of its individual components working together in harmony. 

At each of these levels you need to do not only "positive testing", in which you simulate ideal conditions to see how the system behaves, but also "negative testing" in which you verify that errors and unexpected events of whatever kind are properly handled. For instance, if a user enters his or her name in the field that is meant for a driver's license number, does the system return a message like "this is not a valid license number—please correct your entry"? Or does it just fill the user's screen with incomprehensible warnings, or crash the user's web browser, or maybe just do nothing, leaving the user wondering what to do next?

As already noted, if tests fail, the offending component needs to be fixed, and then the fix needs to be tested. However, it's usually not enough to just test the one item that was fixed; in principle, you need to retest the whole system. The reason for this is that fixes to software can introduce "regression errors", which is a fancy way of saying that you may have fixed one thing, but in a way that broke some other part of the system; you do "regression testing" to verify that you didn't fix one defect and inadvertently introduce a new one in the process. In principle, the system should not be declared ready for users until every individual test case has been performed on the final version of the system (i.e., after all fixes are deployed) and no test case has failed.

Other things need to be tested besides the pure "when I do A, I want B to happen" functionality of the system. Among other things, there is usability testing, in which you basically put test users in front of the system and verify that things like the way screens are laid out or the way you progress from one step of some process to the next makes sense to them. There's also performance testing, in which you verify that your system can meet the volumes of users and transactions that it is likely to encounter in real life; if you expect to have a thousand users accessing the system at any given point in time, you want to simulate that in testing before you turn users loose on the system and discover that it bogs down to the point of being unusable beyond fifty concurrent users.

Am I boring you yet? I guess not, if you've read this far. I did warn you that testing is about the dullest part of any IT project. But unfortunately, it's inescapable if you hope to deliver a reliable, working system. No shortcuts allowed! Something I see again and again is that some IT project is progressing toward the end of the testing stage, at which point the prospective owners think of a half dozen new features they want to add, and maybe a few things they want to change. When this happens, you really need to redo the testing of the whole system (remember the risk of regression errors we talked about). But more often than not, these changes get bolted on toward the end of a project; nobody feels like going back and redoing all that tedious testing, everybody just wants to finish the project and let it go live. So in the end, any defects introduced by those last-minute changes get discovered not by the project's testing team, but by the system's (increasingly irate) end users., and there's a mad scramble by the project team to fix everything under massive time and cost pressure.

So, why am I telling you all this? Well, as I read all the news reports about the mess that is HealthCare.gov, it appears to me that practically every one of the principles I've outlined above has been largely ignored. I'm exaggerating a little for effect here, but I think the thing speaks for itself. Reading the various analyses that have come out recently, experts who have looked at the technical design of the system think some pretty poor design decisions were made. Among other things, you can't just go onto the site to answer the simple question, "what kind of insurance is available and what does it cost?", like you would if you were shopping for, say, car insurance or a home loan or just a pair of pants of a certain size and color. Before you can get an answer to that question, you have to provide a large quantity of personal information that will be verified by the web site through a series of data look-ups in other systems. Besides giving a crappy user experience, the convoluted process requires a lot of communications between systems, and if any of these don't execute perfectly, the user is left sitting and wondering what's happening. 

Shortcomings in the design of the system no doubt are partly a function of just plain poor design decisions, but also a result of the underlying system requirements being changed repeatedly, as recently as a month before the system was to go live (as reported here, among other places). And as for testing? Testimony in the recent congressional hearings on HealthCare.gov's rocky rollout imply that testing was at best an afterthought. Hey, let's build a massively complex IT system that's going to provide a vital service for millions of users and only spend two weeks testing before we shove it out the door—what could possibly go wrong?

So… let me finally come to my point, which was… oh, yes: IT projects are hard. Lots of them fail abysmally and the bigger they are, the more spectacularly they fail. But this is not some new revelation, it's an established phenomenon you can read about here or here or here, or many other places. The President himself has tried to make the point that the ACA is more than a web site, but that's really missing the point. For those people who want to, or have to, sign up for insurance, HealthCare.gov is the ACA, or at least the primary manifestation of it in their own lives. It's also the most visible part of the ACA for the media; surely the Obama administration understood that if this web site was not working smoothly from day one, the administration was going to be pilloried in the press and it would be—fairly or unfairly—a major I-told-you-so moment for the Republicans. From what I'm reading now, for anyone on the inside of this project it must have been pretty clear, for a pretty long time, that it wasn't going to end well, and yet there are few or no indications that any sort of measures were taken to address that. This is not a technical failure so much as a management failure of the first order.

The administration's attempts at damage control have also been fairly laughable. First they tried to downplay the problems as "glitches", a cute word that sort of implies this is just a temporary and minor inconvenience; but it's not a "glitch" when the only reliable thing about the system is that the damned thing won't work when you try to use it. And trying to put things in perspective by talking about how the Massachusetts healthcare program got off to a slow and rocky start, or about how IT projects in general often have problems, is just making excuses—if you knew about these potential pitfalls, why didn't you take measures to keep from getting tripped up by them instead of just making the same mistakes as everyone else?

Then there were apologies and expressions of frustration from on high, and assurances that the whole thing will be working fine by the end of November—we shall see, but I'm not holding my breath because I think it will take a few months to do all the testing and rework that should have been done before the thing went live. We also heard that even if the web site isn't working, one can sign up by phone or mail, but what goes unmentioned is that the people who then do the processing  for you use basically the same unreliable system to do so.

Compounding the trouble with HealthCare.gov are the many reports that people who were repeatedly assured by the President that "if you like your insurance, you can keep it" are finding out that isn't true. It is true that most of the people affected are getting their coverage dropped because that coverage doesn't meet ACA standards, and what they can get to replace it is probably going to be a far better plan than the one they lost. But strictly speaking, what the President said simply wasn't true and so that becomes one more unnecessary black mark against the program in the eyes of so many.

I really want to see the ACA succeed. I suspect, or at least hope, that a year or two from now, things will be running reasonably smoothly, people who could not previously get decent, affordable health insurance will be quite happy, and like Social Security or Medicare, the ACA will be just another part of the social services landscape that nobody seriously questions. But for now, I'm just appalled at the amateurish way this thing was rolled out.

A Lose-Lose Proposition

So, we're back from the brink. At least for another three months, then the whole cycle of madness starts again. I am, of course, talking about the debacle that was the Republican attempt to destroy the Affordable Care Act and threatening to wreck the economy if they didn't get their way. I don't know what I can say about it that hasn't already been said by someone somewhere, but I just have to vent because keeping all that impotent rage bottled up always messes up my digestive system, which can prove embarrassing to everyone around me.

I don't know that I should expect any better of them, but I can't help but be utterly repulsed by things like John Boehner, shortly after the vote, going on some stupid radio program to babble nonsense about how Republicans fought the good fight but didn't win, then going on to say, "We did everything we could to get them to the table to negotiate… They just kept saying no. No, no, no." 

Of course the Democrats said no! Is Boehner too stupid to understand why? Actually, he probably isn't. But he clearly thinks you are. And he may be right. I went to get my hair cut today, and one of the barbers was going on and on about how bad it's going to be for everyone when the ACA kicks in fully on Jan. 1, though he wasn't able to articulate any specifics. Ironically, this is a guy who had a quadruple bypass a couple years ago and might be facing a cap on benefits and an inability to get different insurance elsewhere, were it not for the provisions of ACA that now prohibit such insurance company practices. But that's just the way we think in this country, especially if we rely on sources like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News for "information". (As an example of the latter, see this article exposing Sean Hannity's extremely misleading "reporting" on the ACA on Fox News.)

Let's replay what happened here. In a nutshell: Obama put his Affordable Care Act before Congress. Congress approved it. Obama signed it into law. The Supreme Court confirmed it, with a few exceptions. A minority of House Republicans, egged on by the idiot Senator Ted Cruz, demanded that the ACA be defunded before the House would approve a continuing resolution on the budget and approve an increase in the debt ceiling. Boehner, fearing that it would cost him his job as Speaker if he did, refused to let the CR come to a vote, even though it was clear that enough Republicans would vote with the Democrats to pass it without any problem. The Democrats, following the principle that one should not negotiate with terrorists, refused to budge, and Boehner & Co. ultimately had to back down. So what do the Republicans have to show for this whole circus?

Well, they got a couple of very small face-saving concessions, like a requirement that the Department of Health and Human Services report to Congress on procedures to verify income of people who would get subsidies for health insurance. There was a guarantee to pay back pay to federal employees who were forced to work without pay while the government was partially shut down. Oh, and some pork. Who doesn't like pork? The Republicans can be glad they got anything, since at some point they themselves apparently didn't even know what they wanted any more, as illustrated by Representative Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind., with Tea Party backing), who famously told the Washington Examiner, “We’re not going to be disrespected… We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

And what did the rest of us get? Well, we eventually got the government reopened. Also, according to Standard & Poors we got a reduction in GDP equivalent to around a $24 billion cost to the US economy—exactly the sort of thing we need right now. Remember when Boehner said this?

“Helping Americans get back to work is our number one priority, and we’re going to do everything we can to help create jobs and to boost our economy."

That was back in May, 2011. It's good to know that Boehner's job creation plan includes temporarily putting thousands of people out of work, threatening all the small businesses that depend on their patronage, creating the threat of a global financial crisis, and generally shoring up international investors' faith in US Treasury Bonds by demonstrating to the rest of the world that our government is capable of financial management on par with the governments of Greece or Cypress. It's a novel strategy. Good work, John.

Why didn't you just smack him with that thing while you had the chance?

Numbers Don't Lie (But They Sure Do Prevaricate)

My email inbox is the repository for a steady stream of messages forwarded to me by friends and relatives; stuff I clearly need to know about. Sometimes there are jokes, which I mostly enjoy and occasionally pass on to others. Sometimes there are inspirational or religious messages of one kind or another, which I could mostly live without; at this point in life, probably at (if not well beyond) the half-way point, I am about as inspired and/or religious as I am going to get.

There are also the "amazing facts" messages, such as the one claiming that Bob Keeshan (known better to me and millions of others who watched TV as small children in the early 1960's as Captain Kangaroo) and Lee Marvin (the actor) fought together during the battle for Iwo Jima in WWII, or the one stating that Fred Rogers ("Mr. Rogers", he of the sweater and hand puppets) was a former Navy Seal who had killed a couple dozen people in Vietnam. Actually, maybe that was all in the same email; I don't remember. But it doesn't matter, since all of those "facts" are basically anything but.

A variant of the "amazing facts" genre are the political messages. As far as I can recall, these are always from a conservative/Republican point of view. I would think there would be similar liberal/Democratic chain emails circulating on the net, but I don't think I've ever received one, if they are out there. A few of the political messages I get are of the "throw the bastards out" variety, more or less targeted at politicians in general and not at any particular party, or, once in a great while, at entities such as "Wall Street" or "big business". But the vast majority of them are attacks on Democratic policies and/or leaders that are based on some very creative interpretations of facts.

It kind of pains me to get these messages from intelligent adults. I would be embarrassed to pass on some outlandish-sounding piece of information without first checking and double-checking it. When I get one of these "amazing facts" messages (political or non-political) my standard response is to head for Google to see what I can find out, preferably from as many sources as possible. I look at the standard sites for that sort of thing, like Snopes.com and Factcheck.org, but if it's a political message, I also try to find mention of it at conservative-leaning sites like Foxnews.com as well (I'm a "fair and balanced" kind of guy). But I do so knowing what I'm probably going to find. There is the old adage, "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." The corollary to that is that if it sounds too outrageous to be true, you are probably a fool to take it at face value.

The biggest alarm bell goes off in my head when I get a message describing how the axis of evil (Pelosi/Reid/Obama) is plotting some wickedness that will cause a world of pain to senior citizens. Anyone who follows politics even a little must surely be aware that the one segment of the electorate that consistently heads to the polls in large numbers on election day is (drum roll, cymbal crash)… senior citizens. So why would a politician of any political persuasion specifically single out older people to bear the brunt of the negative effects of some new policy? It just makes no sense.

In the past couple of days I received two forwarded political messages of the sort that is just screaming for fact-checking. What sort of sets them apart is that they use a lot of numbers to make their case. There they are, in black and white, the numbers, and they don't lie, right?

Well, maybe that's not exactly the case, on either count. First of all, I don't know what it is about these political chain emails, but they're often in anything but black and white. The text is very often in two or three different colors, in multiple typefaces and sizes. They look like they were composed by someone who only just discovered that his PC can do this and wants to exploit that capability to the fullest; if "less is more" then I guess that more must be waaaaaaaaaaay more. Even the ones that don't contain a random mix of formatting often insist on presenting their case in gigantic type, for some reason. I guess it's the written equivalent of shouting at someone who doesn't speak your language on the theory that this will somehow make him understand you better.

But second, and more importantly, numbers often do lie. Or to be more precise, they only tell part of the story or get misquoted. I give you therefore the aforementioned two email messages that arrived this week.

Message number one is reproduced below approximately as it arrived in my inbox.

It looks like someone actually read the “Change” in store for all of us??? Maybe 2012 will get us back on the right track??

Did you know that if you sell your house after 2012 you will pay a 3.8% sales tax on it?  That's $3,800 on a $100,000 home etc.

When did this happen? It's in the health care bill. Just thought you should know.

SALES TAX TO GO INTO EFFECT 2013 (Part of HC Bill)

 REAL ESTATE SALES TAX

So, this is "change you can believe in"?

Under the new health care bill - did you know that all real estate transactions will be subject to a 3.8% Sales Tax?  The bulk of these new taxes don't kick in until 2013 if you sell your $400,000 home, there will be a $15,200 tax.  This bill is set toscrew the retiring generation who often downsize their homes. Does this stuff make your November 2012 vote more important?

Oh, you weren't aware this was in the ObamaCare bill? Guess what, you aren't alone. There are more than a few members of Congress that aren't aware of it either. 

http://www.gop.gov/blog/10/04/08/obamacare-flatlines-obamacare-taxes-home 

Why am I sending you this?  The same reason I hope you forward this to every single person in your address bookbecause you can make a difference.

Huh! Obama is going toscrew <sic> the retiring generation! That doesn't seem like a good move for such a wily politician. I must know more. It sure would be helpful if that message referred to the part of the health care bill that imposes this outrageous burden on the elderly, but it doesn't, which is par for the course with this genre of messages. So I looked at various web sites to see what I could find.

What I learned is that first of all, there is a 3.8% tax imposed by the bill, but it's not a sales tax on real estate, it's an amendment to the tax code that creates a new Medicare tax on capital gains. A capital gain is the difference between what you paid for a capital asset (e.g. a share of stock, or a piece of real estate) and what you later receive when you sell it, i.e., it's the profit on the sale. The part of the bill that imposes this new tax is section 1402. I read it and I will be the first to admit that it is massively confusing to a mere mortal such as myself, but I can at least assure you that neither the term "sales tax" nor any reference to "real estate" appear anywhere in the text, meaning that whoever wrote that message didn't spend a whole lot of effort on research.

Let's dissect some of that. Note that this is a Medicare tax. Previously, capital gains were not even subject to Medicare taxes. Now they are. But they are only subject to the tax if your income exceeds $200,000 per year (individuals) or $250,000 (couples filing jointly). That's about 5% of all taxpayers, according to this article. And in the event you do fall into that category, you're going to give Uncle Sam 3.8% of the profit on the sale, not the total sale amount. Suppose you sold that house mentioned in the message for $400,000, but you paid $300,000 for it; your tax would be $3,800, not $15,200. But that's only if that house was not your primary residence, e.g. it was a vacation home. If it was your primary residence, the profit would fall under an additional exemption of $250,000 (individuals) or $500,000 (couples filing jointly), so you wouldn't owe anything at all.

Disclaimer: I am not a CPA, tax attorney or anything like that, so don't take my analysis at face value; do your own research (here's one good place to start). I'm just a guy who can read. And I can tell you that what I'm reading says that there's a gigantic gap between what's in that message and what the law really says. 

Let's look at that second message. This one's not as colorful, but I sure don't need to put on my glasses to read it.

CLUNKER MATH
The person who calculated this bit of information has been a professor at The University of West Virginia in Morgantown,  West Virginia for the last forty some years.
A clunker that travels  12,000 miles a year at 15 mpg uses 800 gallons of gas a year.
A vehicle  that travels 12,000 miles a year at 25 mpg uses 480 gallons of gas a  year.
So, the average Cash for Clunkers transaction will reduce gasoline  consumption by 320 gallons per year.
The government claims 700,000 clunkers  have been replaced so that’s 224 million gallons saved per year.
That  equates to a bit over 5 million barrels of oil.  5 million barrels is  about 5 hours worth of US consumption.
More importantly, 5 million barrels  of oil at $70 per barrel costs about $350 million dollars.
So, the  government paid $3 billion of our tax dollars to save $350 million.
We  spent $8.57 for every $1.00 we saved.

I’m pretty sure they will  do a better job with our health care, though......

This thing is an exercise in misinformation and fallacious reasoning. It applies a technique that I see in a lot of these messages, i.e., naming some authority figure that I guess is supposed to impress me (here it's a gen-u-wine perfesser—I wonder if he also has a name, and what he is a professor of—presumably it's not accounting). But let's do the math ourselves.

To produce one gallon of gasoline, the amount of crude oil you need varies depending on things like the grade of oil you are starting out with and the efficiency of the refining equipment and process you are using. According to the US Energy Information Administration, one barrel of oil (=42 US gallons) produces 19-21 gallons of gasoline. So let's be generous and say that we can get 21 gallons of gas from a barrel of oil, which is equivalent to saying that producing a gallon of gas requires two gallons of oil. If we saved 224 million gallons of gas per year, that means we saved 448 million gallons or about 10,666,667 barrels of oil (not "a bit over 5 million"—our anonymous professor doesn't seem to know the difference between gasoline and petroleum, so I guess he's not a professor of chemistry or geology, either). So if oil is $70/barrel, we saved $746,666,690 in the first year.

Notice that I said "in the first year". Our professor apparently assumes that all of those cars are going to be on the road for exactly one more year. Well, I drive a car that would have qualified for "Cash for Clunkers", and I'm still driving it, and I will probably continue driving it until it more or less falls apart. So I'll bet those cars that did get traded in under the program would have been on the road for another 3-5 years, meaning the total reduction in oil consumption is on the order of 32.0–53.3 million barrels or, at $70 barrel, $2.24–$3.73 billion.

But why use $70/barrel? As I write this, the price of a barrel of "light sweet" crude oil (the kind that's especially good for making gasoline) is around $90/barrel. That values our savings at about $2.88–$4.80 billion. Now, I'm ignoring adjustments for things like the "time value of money" and other such book-lernin' I got in that thar fancy college I went to, but suddenly this doesn't look like such a bad return on the $3 billion investment after all, especially when I consider that forecasts like this one don't foresee falling oil prices any time soon.

That "Cash for Clunkers" message also ignores the other beneficial effects of the program. The reduction in oil consumption implies a reduction in pollution, which in turn means a reduction in costs associated therewith (costs of pollution-related health problems, for example). And the program probably also kept one or two jobs in the automotive industry going longer than they otherwise would have. Those benefits play no role in our professor's analysis.

So what do we learn from this? Caveat lector, I guess. Believe what you want, but at least do the math first.