Posts from — October 2013

No treats for me today.

I’m back on my laptop because the big box died this morning. I suspect it is the power supply because of the way it happened and a change in fan noise over the last couple of days, more precisely a fan becoming audible, where silence once reigned.

Then there was the Not-Halloween, Definitely-Not-Samhain, Fall Harvest Festival at the fundie recording studio and school, occasionally acting like a place of worship, down the block. They fill their parking lot up with activities and people feel free to park on other people’s lawns, because it is a ‘church event’.

The nastiest trick is the one that Congress is playing on the economy by reducing the food stamp funding by $5 billion. That money is pure ‘demand’, it was going to get spent on food because that’s all it can be used for, and a major chunk of it is spent at MalWart.

Together with the uncertainty because of the possibility of another shutdown in December, retailers can just write off Christmas, people are going to hoard whatever they have. We are looking at another recession, while the Fed is inflating a stock market bubble with its monetary policy.

Whether you celebrate Celtic New Year’s Eve [Samhain], the evening before All Saints Day [Halloween], or the posting of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 [Reformation Day], have a happy one.

Wikipedia does its normally thorough job of covering all of the bases on the holidays that share October 31^st.

These are my remembrances of a traditional American Halloween.

… Or not, depending on your attitude.

The BBC reports Dell users: Latitude 6430u laptops ‘smell of cat urine’. Actually ‘cat urine’ isn’t quite strong enough as several users were of the opinion that their tomcats had ‘sprayed’ their computer. If you have ever owned a tomcat and were foolish enough not to have them neutered before they could even dream of marking, you know that the resulting odor is urine on steroids and growth hormones. Trust me, better a skunk than a tomcat.

It turns out that the odor was the result of the process used in manufacturing the keyboard surround, and, in a break with former Dell tradition, they will replace the offending slab of plastic.

On a more serious note, I heard someone opining on the radio that the government has to out-source its IT projects because IT graduates don’t want to work for the low salaries that the government offers. Sorry, but the government should advertize for job openings in the tech world and prepare for the flood of applications from experienced IT professionals who have been replaced by H1B slaves from Asia.

They might not make what they were making at their last job, but it would be a job with health insurance that paid better than clerking at convenience stores or big box retailers. It would be a wonderful idea to have some people who were on the government’s payroll reviewing the IT contracts. It would be extremely difficult to hire away senior people who have already been screwed over by ‘the private sector’.

I’m having a hard time believing this piece from CNN: Small plane crashes at big airport; no one notices.

This happened at the Nashville International Airport, which is suppose to have a tower manned 24/7/365, but a Cessna crashes and burns and no one notices until the next morning? Yes, it occurred in the early morning hours and it was foggy, but the aircraft burned!

The plane came down in the median between parallel runways, and those medians tend to be drainage ditches, often with pipe/conduit running across them between the runways.

The pilot died in the crash… unnoticed

Charlie Pierce, along with a lot of other people are talking about what’s happening in the individual health insurance market.

OK, given the track record of the heath insurance corporations, who didn’t expect them to use the cover of the ACA to screw people over. The individual market has a huge churn every year because it is expensive and there are only a limited number of insurance companies willing to write the policies.

The ACA requires minimum standards for policies, and most individual policies are eliminated by the ‘pre-existing condition’ requirements. They are going to jack up prices if they have to cover pre-existing conditions, so this should not have come as a surprise.

This is one of the many reasons that ‘Medicare for All’ would have been a better choice.

Deal With It…

The BBC magazine asks the burning question: Why is broadband more expensive in the US? Yes, why doesn’t the ‘free market’ provide reasonable service, at a reasonable price? Because without regulation corporations do their best to eliminate all competition and gouge people.

BTW, don’t look at the charts of what is available in the rest of the world, they will just depress you.

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So Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is hoping that a hissy fit over Benghazi will dull the knives of the Tea Party and put off a primary fight for his seat. He says he will put a hold on all administration nominations until the survivors of the incident are available for a Senate dog-and-pony show. I have no idea why he thinks that the survivors want to talk to anyone in Congress – the people who slashed the State Department’s security budget and made it impossible to improve the consulate in Libya. Given that the majority of the people were CIA employees, I doubt they want to appear in public, even to help Ol’ Lindsey get re-elected.

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Alexander the Geek and his deputy are leaving. You can’t help but wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the White House probably didn’t know the level of the data hoovering that was taking place in Europe. Having both the Director and the Assistant Director leave is not the normal way that things are done for reasons of continuity.

The BBC reports on Travel warnings as UK braced for severe storm and rain.

We would call this a Nor’easter with all of the nastiness of a powerful tropical storm – heavy rain, flooding, wind gusts to 80mph on the coast – with the temperature just above freezing.

Sunday night and Monday morning will be miserable with the transportation network brought to a standstill as the storm moves across southwest Britain. The country will wake up to a soggy Monday with debris all over and the lights out in some areas.

I was wondering where in the Obamacare law people were exempted from the mandate if they lived in one of the many parts of the US where there is no health care. Why require people to spend money on something that is impossible for them to use.

Maybe it would have been a better idea to see what could be done about making health care available before you decided to make it ‘Affordable’. The same goes for signing up on the Internet or over the phone – that presupposed the availability of Internet and/or phone service. There are a lot of areas in the US where there is no ‘grid’, but there are citizens.

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When it comes to spying on your friends, most nations have the good sense not to talk about it outside of a very limited group in very secret places. When you start doing it wholesale, the governments of those friends can’t ignore it, and it creates major problems.

The use of contractors by the US creates another major concern for foreign governments because their business communities are going to be raising hell about it. It isn’t just the US government spying on them, it is their competitors.

Frankly it looks like we aren’t interested in anything but gathering as much data as we possibly can. There is no purpose to it because there is no way we have the people to actually analyze it. We are hoarding data, but no one is actually clear as to why. The ‘reasons’ offered sound more like excuses for a compulsive mental disorder. It is time for an intervention.

Lambert at Corrente covers a significant problem with the web site: some of the 834 forms that are sent to insurance companies for enrollment in plans are corrupted.

The format for the 834 form was specified by the HIPAA law passed in the mid-1990s. They are one of the few things that really are an industry-wide standard. If this web site can’t consistently produce useable 834s, it is worthless.

What the form amounts to is a text file which contains all of the information that the insurance company needs to issue you a policy. If the file is corrupted and their software can’t read the data or the codes identifying the data, you don’t get insurance and have wasted your time on the web site.

This part of the process should have been an exercise in loading existing code on the server. All of the specifications are known. The only things missing were the web addresses for the insurance companies.

This sounds like a problem with verifying the data that is received to ensure it is ASCII text, and that is a front end problem. The other possibility is database corruption, but a problem with input is more likely.

Weasel ‘Rabbits’

Zzz…Brrr…Zzz

[Editor: The weather is cool, and Weasel came out in the front yard hoping for sun. He assumed the ‘rabbit’ pose to conserve body heat.]

Friday Ark

The Republicans are really pathetic. A new web site failed, so someone must be nuked.

They have apparently forgotten about their roll out of Medicare Part D. That is just as big a disaster, and it took months to make it even moderately useable. I had to navigate that sucker for a friend of Mother’s and it was the most user-hostile piece of garbage on the ‘Net. Now, of course, we have a lot more tools to confuse and confound people, so it has since been eclipsed.

Microsoft has had multiple disasters with upgrades in the last year. Updates to IOS occasionally break equipment, and Apple’s map app still isn’t useable. It’s the nature of the beast – it worked great in testing and dies on roll out.

Apparently Republicans will be shocked to find out that on occasion Amazon and Google crash. It’s annoying, but it happens.

One of the problems is that the law wasn’t certain until the Supreme Court ruled on it, and the Court altered the law by changing the Medicare expansion from mandatory to voluntary. They needed parameters from multiple insurance companies and multiple states, and I assume those were behind many of the change orders.

States like Kentucky are working fine, because they started as soon as possible to implement the law. They knew what they needed early on and had time for testing.

It is reportedly getting better every day, so it will be fixed in time, but there were a lot people besides the Federal government and the coders involved in these problems. A large number of states haven’t been cooperating, and some insurance companies have been slow to respond.

If this this had worked from the first day I would have been certain that it had major problems that would be discovered months down the road. Having the problems up front at least means that people are suspicious and really will be checking the entire system for defects.

If they had gone with ‘Medicare for All’. of course, we wouldn’t have any of these problems, and significantly reduced the cost of health care in this country.

After only a few months at Fallenmonk Farm Betty the Beagle has headed to the Rainbow Bridge.

It doesn’t take very long to become attached to a critter.

Mike Konczal at New Deal 2.0 looks at the roll-out problems and their effect on liberalism. He knows that this is not a liberal program, and has a little chart that highlights the differences.

He also provided me with confirmation of my guesses at possible problems of going ahead during the government shutdown. There is no way that the Social Security System, IRS, and Homeland Security were going to have all of their servers up during the government shutdown, and that would be an obvious choke point.

Fallenmonk has been trying to get on for a while and discovered that the site prefers IE over Firefox. I can believe that in a push to get the thing out the door, they would test only with IE on Windows.

The Republicans in the House are obviously going to hold hearings on the roll-out, but this NBC report is a bit odd:

The House committee responsible for Obamacare oversight asked for expert guidance last week about the troubled launch of the federal Healthcare.gov site from John McAfee, the tech legend once suspected in the murder of his neighbor in Central America, CNBC has learned.

McAfee’s company wrote anti-virus programs, what qualifies him as an expert in web site development?