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Why Can't Big Government Launch a Website?
MarkWhittington writes "Glenn Reynolds, the purveyor of Instapundit, asked the pertinent question, 'If big government can put a man on the moon, why can't it put up a simple website without messing it up?' The answer, as it turns out, is a rather simple one. The Apollo program, that President John F. Kennedy mandated to put a man on the moon and return him to the Earth, was a simple idea well carried out for a number of reasons. The primary one was that Congress did not pass a 1,800 or so page bill backed up by a mind-numbing amount of regulations mandating how NASA would do it. The question of how to conduct the lunar voyages was left up to the engineers at NASA and the aerospace industry at the time. The government simply provided the resources necessary to do the job and a certain degree of oversight. Imagine if President Obama had stated, 'I believe the nation should commit itself to the goal of enabling all Americans to access affordable health insurance' but then left the how to do it to some of the best experts in health care and economics without partisan interference."
It's complicated because the insurance industry is complicated. It's complicated because we didn't have the political will to simply go for Medicare for all. That would have been simple. Instead, we have this complex cluge that has to work with an even more complex private insurance industry. It actually does make the market for private insurance simpler, but that really isn't saying much.
This is a function of the problems of doing anything with or for the federal government. The fact that a large state like California could pull off a similar system successfully demonstrates this to be true. The problem is the federal beaurocracy.
Now the question of why Apollo was successful when a seemingly simple website is not likely boils down to time. The federal government has had a long time to get worse in the 40 or so years between Apollo and today. Plus Apollo had a longer timeline.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Do you really think the government could get its act together enough to put a person on the moon again? Have you been paying attention?
The more management feels they need to say about how to do something, the harder it is and the longer it takes.
Make me a website: easy.
Make me a website using WordPress and it must use this particular plugin: hard (since it's very unlikely that particular plugin is well-suited to the job; if it made sense to use it, they wouldn't have told you that you have to use it) (and for that matter, it's vanishingly unlikely that WordPress itself is going to be suitable for the application in question, for the same reason: if it made sense, then it wouldn't be a requirement).
I've seen things' time blossom by a factor of ten, due to stupid shit like this. Seriously, that's not an exaggeration.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
The Apollo program did not have one party actively trying to sabotage it. Can you imagine a party shutting down government July 15 (day before Apollo 11 launched) unless the whole program was scrapped?
This post makes it sound like NASA is a private contractor that takes the job out of "the governments" hands, so it can be done properly and efficiently. But that is not the case, you have just provided an example that government organizations can run things efficiently.
of constant testing, refinement and a series of more complicated missions. not like the first mission went straight to the moon. a few people even died in a fire during prep for a mission. they even had multiple crews training for the same mission at the same time knowing only one crew was going up
the obamacare website the contractors had to build in a few months and code hundreds of pages of law and regulations into logical business rules and a database schema. and no time was there testing or a ramp up of opening up the site to a few people and then allowing more people access as they work out the bugs
Yes, imagine if he or anyone had had the political freedom to leave such a choice to truly non-partisan experts... but he didn't have that freedom, because there are such corporate interests vested in the outcome, with tentacles all into both parties, that such freedom to do so does not exist. If back in Kennedy's day there were numerous huge wealthy corporations with interests in the moon landing NOT happening, or happening on different timetables with different agendas, *and* the liberty to corrupt politics with money had reached the fever pitch it has today, *and* politicians had already given up the idea of even posturing to seem like they had nobility and dignity above that of a Geraldo show, THEN the moon landing might well and truly have been f*cked.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Because you have a bunch of people who have zero technical knowledge and zero REAL project management experience calling the shots. They come up with bullshit specs and a bunch of pie-in-the-sky.
Because some greedy fuck of a salesdisck at a company sees "Gubmint Fundin'", performs a cranial-rectal insertion and promises shit his techs have NO way to actually deliver.
Because the American people have gotten out of the habit of tarring, feathering and lynching civil servants that pull stupid shit like this.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It is also called graft.
They awarded a 700M$ contract without bidding to a company with ties to the Obama campaign and to people high up in the administration.
As to be expected, the company was not competent and failed.
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
Sorry, if this were all the Democrats, we'd have a single payer system. The monstrosity that exists is all Republican.
Anywhere from 30 to 70% of large IT projects fail, depending on who you ask. Why would the US Government be immune?
You realize the law has a lot of things in it to make Republicans happy right (such as dropping the government option from the plan)? And Republicans decided they'd rather make Obama look bad than make sure people have health coverage right? It would be like if during the Apollo mission Republicans ran congress and kept trying to sabotage the program to make JFK/LBJ look bad.
Just for the sake of perspective, 'big government' didn't "just put a man on the moon", it was an iterative process going all the way back to the experience of the Nazi war criminals we hastily whitewashed, up through a variety of incremental improvements and test designs (along with various accidents, some fatal), until we get to the Apollo missions that everyone actually remembers (and some of those had Issues as well).
Apollo 1 didn't, exactly go so hot(well, it actually went pretty hot indeed), and at least 5 others were killed in jet-based training.
Gemini 8 almost went rather badly, Apollo 12 was struck by lighting, Apollo 13's multiple issues are well known, Apollo 15 had parachute problems.
An assortment of workers and techs have also snuffed it in ground based accidents while working on space launch hardware.
This is not to say that the healthcare.gov rolllout was a success (it wasn't); but website launch failures are pretty boring as failure goes, everyone from small-business intranets up to major web companies seems to fuck them up on occasion. The bigger question will be time-to-fix. To use TFA's own analogy, you could have written "Why can't big government launch a rocket?" when Apollo 1 rather embarassingly caught fire on the ground, reducing the entire crew to charred corpses, because it had been filled with pure oxygen and improperly passivated. As we now know, they can, just not on the first try.
This is a function of the problems of doing anything with or for the federal government. The fact that a large state like California could pull off a similar system successfully demonstrates this to be true. The problem is the federal beaurocracy.
Now the question of why Apollo was successful when a seemingly simple website is not likely boils down to time. The federal government has had a long time to get worse in the 40 or so years between Apollo and today. Plus Apollo had a longer timeline.
Eh, sort of. I'd say the problem was political, that is, the forces that are opposed to the law taking effect commanded their congress-puppets to scream bloody murder about "one penny!" being spent on "Obamacare!" before a court weighed in on constitutionality. Add to that two dozen states dragging their feet until the last minute to say "no thanks" to a Federal Exchange (to purposefully make the job more complex further down the line than it needed to be) what you have is a recipe of failure. Between stupidly kow-towing to people trying to create a failure (rather than acting despite of their complaints) and the actual active-efforts to create failure it's a small miracle it works as well as it does.
Who did what now?
This whole thing is happening because of two reasons: 1) People are afraid of a word: socialism and 2) most of our population has bought into the debate being framed as a false dilemma argument and, so if we have single payer we are therefore a socialist country.
The republicans are right about something for the wrong reasons: we didn't really have a ACA or Obamacare debate. That's because the U.S. doesn't really have *debates* anymore. We allow someone to frame the debate (usually the Republicans, but sometimes the Mass Media) and no one discusses how that frame is causing a logical fallacy.
There is also a 3) many people can't get beyond their own ideologies. Off the record many of the biggest multinationals have told reporters that they have run the numbers and single payer would help them, but they come out because of bias at the boardroom level. Small business would DEFINITELY be helped by single payer as talented people would be more inclined to accept a small business job without the healthcare fear.
Hence a major reason not to federalize a lot of power.
Everyone looking to immediately blame this on government should think about what's involved and what probably happened:
1. The contract went to the lowest bidder and/or the firm that could do the most backroom political deals to win. This is not necessarily the team you want doing the work, nor are they necessarily the most capable.
2. It's a huge, monster systems integration challenge. There are probably thousands of XML data brokers, enterprise service buses, web services libraries, and wrappers of wrappers of wrappers of abstraction layers to get the exchange, the insurance companies, the tax records systems used for eligibility verification, the authentication, etc etc etc talking to each other. This is one of the things I do for work on various big systems projects, and it's hard when you have a competent team. When you're dealing with the "offshore delivery centers" of the firm in Point #1 above, it's an absolute nightmare.
3. Every outsourcing contract, public or private sector suffers from the same problem -- it's always more expensive, and the people involved don't have any incentive beyond a paycheck to see it work. I've seen that happen all the time as an FTE in companies overrun by consultants. The consultants don't care what happens as long as they're billing time. If they deliver garbage, so be it, as long as it can be shown that it does what the contract says it does.
4. Continuing with the "don't care" theme, there's also no incentive for the contractor to get it right the first time. Even contracts with penalties for failure or missed dates aren't a big deal because they can bill way more cleaning up the mess they made.
5. I'm sure the "outsourcing partners" weren't forthcoming when the RFP was put out and they saw red flags. Some outsourcers like to trap the customer and have them think everything's sorted, when there's really a huge problem with design/specs/whatever that will mean a very expensive rewrite later on.
6. Any project with a huge red target date on the calendar that is not flexible is doomed to failure. Problems like this lead to stupid things that PMs do like stuff more people onto a late piece of the project where it clearly doesn't help, and it leads to people taking shortcuts to rush it out the door.
7. There was probably immense cost pressure, not from the gov't itself, but from the outsourcer trying to squeeze every nickel out of the deal, and so it probably runs on half the hardware it needs, and has no DR facilities.
8. It was probably slapped together by hundreds of 24 year old new graduate business analysts, hundreds of 30 year old PMs, and thousands of offshore resources of dubious quality. Look at pretty much any bespoke line of business web application you have to use for your job. Chances are you hate it and it has maddening bugs that make it hard to live with. Now take that same code quality and put it in front of Joe Average, and I'm not surprised people are complaining.
I honestly think they should have done this in-house with supplemental hired gun contractors for the areas they needed it in. Despite the stories, I'm sure working for a government agency has its advantages. I would think that people (myself included) would welcome a more stable employment environment (at the expense of salary,) a stable retirement system, and the ability to work on a critical system that affects people's daily lives. The problem is that people see IT people getting rich at Google/Facebook/Latest Social Media Startup and think that they're going to be the next one to make the big time. Reality is that most people are mediocre coders/IT people and they're never going to get a big payday supporting the current IT employment model we have.
Also, this entire mess would have been avoided by extending Medicare benefits to everyone. Doctors would be happy because they would get paid without questions from insurers, patients would be happy because they wouldn't have to deal with insurance companies -- the only people who wouldn't be happy are insurance companies, which is why we have the system we have now. Seriously, the Medicare system processes payments for doctors with very little difficulty -- because we have the insurance companies involved, we had to build a completely new system.
Well it is worse then that. Most Politicians were Lawyers, Every once in a while you may get a Businessman, a Professor or a MD. But most come from the Legal background.
That is a big problem!
How we solve problems is often reflected in our professions.
I am a software architect, to me I see most problems can be solved them differently then an engineer, which is different then how a School teacher would...
All these Lawyers in politics is causing a problem where they don't know of other ways to solve problems and they think the only way to do this is changing the law. While that is part of the governments job, we don't have leaders anymore just a bunch of lawers
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Off the record many of the biggest multinationals have told reporters that they have run the numbers and single payer would help them
Sometimes even on the record. One time Toyota had a choice between putting a factory in the US and Canada, and flat out said they chose Canada in large part because of their health care system. And you wonder how Toyota beat GM. Hint: they think with their wallets instead of their country club buddies.
The linked article is subtitled "Medical Care Before the Welfare State, 1900-1930". In other words, medical care before even antibiotics had been developed. It was probably affordable in the 12th century too. What's your point?
"The REAL PROBLEM here is the desperate need for contract and purchasing reform in the federal government."
Yes, and paradoxically, all of those procedures exist because of efforts to control costs. (You certainly know this, but I am stating it for the other readers.) If there are no controls, then waste occurs. But with controls, other kinds of waste occur. "Quality" is a difficult balance.
Hence a major reason not to federalize a lot of power.
In this particular case, it was the states themselves that "federalized" the power -- only 14 of the 50* decided to set up their own exchanges, the rest decided it best to leave it to the feds for one reason or another. And some of them are doing a better job than the federal program.
*This number varies by source, I think because some states are setting up their own systems but not yet.
I am not a crackpot.
You're right.
I have regular work conversations with a lawyer, and she's always trying to put a law or regulatory frame on every single technology or related activity (which is where our company does business). I can understand it, to a point. People are always talking about how Technology moves in one direction and Law is always playing catch-up, and when that happens or, *gasp*, Law actually leap-frogs Tech, then things start to get really messy. They say their trying to make things fair for everyone, but in reality they're bowing down to lobbyists interests.
It's like in that HHGTTG book (I forget which one) where those people hadn't invented the wheel yet because they couldn't decide what colour it should be.
I also had a conversation recently with a banker (actually a manager of a local branch office). She said that they were having problems giving out loans to businesses. One one hand, the businesses they could give a loan, don't need it; and those that do need it are in no condition to be given a loan. Well, fuck, who made up the terms and conditions for giving out loans? I thought it was the banks (followed by gov't law and regs), they ought to be able to change the rules...one would think.
the government does have an Apollo program for health care - Medicare. And guess what, it works great.
It works great if you ignore all the waste and fraud, increased taxes on the young, and the massive inflation in health care prices that resulted from government subsidizing medical care.
They have three plants in Canada and six in the U.S.
Here's an inconvenient "fact" for your rhetoric:
Canada has 1/10th of the population of the United States, all other things being equal, if there's three plants in Canada, there should be THIRTY in the US. Yet there are only 6? So, by population you have 1/5th of the number of plants as Canada; go ahead and reconcile THAT...
-AC
Recently a bunch of political hacks have started trolling slashdot. We desperately need an option for moderating the articles. Look at this one. Just reading the title should have given the editors big enough clue. "Why can't big government launch a website?". Really? Unless you lived on Mars in the past 30 years, you should be well aware of large number of government web sites. And what is it with the "Big" qualifier. Big relative to what? The size of the country? Do you have a specific branch of the government that you think is too big? Say for example is the parks service sucking the life blood of the economy (I will give you the defense department though). May be the original article should have privoded some more detail on this particular website. For example how the website has to implement all the requirements of a law that has become increasingly byzantine due to bickering from one particular party and the insurance industry. How it requires interfacing with databases which may or may not have suitable API (IRS for example to determine eligibility). How there was not enough time to properly plan in part because of the delays in passing the law and defending it in court, in part due to its complexity and in part because of the desire of the current administration to prevent future repeal by having it implementing and running before its term is over.
ACA was passed by Democrats without a single vote from the Republicans which has politically doomed it from the start. Other large government programs were passed with significant bi-partisan majorities, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The ACA was passed without any Republican support and with lots of back room deals as well as the famous use of "reconciliation" to get it passed in the Senate after Massachusetts voted in someone to the Senate who opposed it and upset the filibuster proof majority.
In that light, why would you be surprised that there was a lot of political fallout?
No matter where you go, there you are.
Well it is worse then that. Most Politicians were Lawyers, Every once in a while you may get a Businessman, a Professor or a MD. But most come from the Legal background.
And even worse, those few politicians who were businessmen or doctors are the ones most reviled during economic or healthcare related debates... I mean, we can't trust people who have actual experience in the issue being debated, that might show the rest of the politicians in a bad light!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Another bullshit headline designed to gather hits. Big government launches websites all the time. Why doesn't "big news" cover it? Because it isn't sexy. How many times has the slashdot effect crashed or rendered a site otherwise unreachable. So what do you think the effect of millions upon millions of hits to a site wouldn't cause problems? Everybody who seems to "know" what the problem is should reach out and help fix it. Otherwise keep it to yourself.
But doesn't this just show that there are very many people against the bill as passed?
(And before I'm modded down for stating a personal opinion, I'm not saying that we shouldn't have healthcare reform. Quite the contrary. I'm saying that many people like me believe the ACA did little to help. And because the political atmosphere at the time was ignored, now the partisanship has been ignited like never before and we have little chance for real, good change to occur.)
Frankly, that's hogwash.
The "political atmosphere" at the time was created for the purpose of blocking this reform. It didn't "pre-date" the reform effort. The propaganda efforts kicked into high gear to "break" this Presidency--to undo the public's will by neutering a popular President so as to limit his ability to do the people's work. They started screaming he was a communist because a bill modeled largely on their own response to Hilarycare in the 90's had been proposed by a Democratic congress and administration,
And I recognize that "being against the ACA" isn't automatically a guarantee you're "against all reform," but the problem is that the brigade of dumbshits leading the charge against "Obamacare" have injected so many poisonous lies into the debate that they salted the earth for any chance of compromising on anything. They called this tyranny, and some of them called Obama "Hitler" over this: That's not the debate tactic of somebody looking to "compromise" on common ground, that's an opponent who wants to politically destroy you to prevent you from acting with a mandate the public gave you.
That may not be your personal point of view, but the wider "Anti-ACA" movement is not nearly as enlightened as you. And because the "antis" who went overboard have gone so insanely-far that they've made a compromise now into appear as if it were the same as caving to anti-government extremists. At this point there's no way he'll give in.
Who did what now?
The partisanship is the cause of the ACA's problems, not the other way around. Obama could have entirely ignored his base who wanted a single payer system and taken a Republican plan as the basis of his health care reform and the Republicans still would have opposed it because of who he was. We know this is true because that's in fact what happened.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Of course "Obamacare" looks almost exactly like "Romneycare" which was a Republican invention.
The problem is that the Republicans and the Democrats are, to a first and second approximation, exactly the same thing. Their minor differences and simply talking points that the media uses to get everybody all riled up. They are both fully capable of taking a good idea and grinding it to death under the weight of confusing mandates, pork, pandering to special groups and general malfeasance.
The devil, of course, is in the details. And the devil is a pretty active fellow these days.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's not the lawyers or the developers, it's the fact that Obama was trying to sell insurance instead of telling the experts to figure out a way to provide universal coverage. Obama is a president, he should act presidential, assign the task to the experts and let them do it. Instead Obama tried to take total control and screwed it up bad. At least if he assigned it to someone and they screwed it up he could blame someone, but Obamacare literally has his name all over it
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
... it turns the government does have an Apollo program for health care - Medicare. And guess what, it works great.
You should talk to Doctors. They seem to have a quite different opinion of Medicare.
The answer is simple: Wernher von Braun
You need somebody in charge that knows what it looks like when it's finished.
I'm not sure why you received a troll mod, but this is one of those rare cases where Facts != Truth. You absolutely stated facts, but your statements are an incomplete picture which misportrays the truth. The democrats did not have a filibuster-proof 2/3 majority which means they wanted a bill that at least a fraction of the Republicans would support. They thought that by taking Romney's Massachusetts health care plan and using it as the base for a national plan, they would win over Republican support. Of course that was short sighted, because to a politician the politics are far more important than the project. But the point is the ACA was not what the majority of the Democrats wanted - it's simply what they (at least the majority) were willing to compromise for.
You do know that medicare is a government program.
You have just confirmed everything I was saying. There was a political atmosphere against the ACA, and the Democrats pushed it anyway despite the fact that the result was completely predictable.
Just remember that those same people who pushed against the ACA in the first place were elected by real people who care about these issues. And they were reelected after the fact. And reelected again. Agree with them or not, they were elected (and FWIW, the same argument can be used about Obama).
Just because the public will was to put Obama in office, that doesn't mean the public will was health insurance reform that just makes everything worse for the majority of people. Obama should have made it abundantly clear during the campaign that his presidency was going to push single payer, and then he should have done so. At least then he would be doing things that have the backing of the people and not something that few really like, all in the name of compromising with a group that was sure to never compromise.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Obama was trying to sell insurance instead of telling the experts to figure out a way to provide access to healthcare.
FTFY.
You don't neccesarily need insurance to have healthcare. You do not need to foot the bill for those who can afford insurance on their own. Over 85% of the population already had insurance so all that was needed was a few tweaks to existing plans like no lifetime limits and make sure those 15% remaining have access when they need it.
This entire ordeal could have been simpler.
Romneycare is a *failed* republican invention. That's the real problem with Obama the sockpuppet and Biden(D-MBNA)
The frustrating thing - and this is specific to the website - is there are already other websites doing functionally similar tasks.
Every evening you will see Flo and Prudential Auto Insurance commercials. Or the green muppet telling you how you can shop for mortgages while wearing your underwear. There are many websites that act as one stop shops for other services, shopping for health insurance. They collect a few basic facts and then provide you with a handful of companies to suit your needs. A gov't insurance website should not be re-inventing the wheel.
I'm quite certain the commercial services helping you shop for loans, mortgages, insurance and other services didn't have $600m startup costs either.
Exactly. The Republicans have done a lot of screwed up things over the years, but this isn't one of them. The Republicans were not even allowed in the room when it was written and didn't have a clue on what was in it when it was passed since they were not allowed to read it. All the blame for this goes to the Democrats and especially the president.
The premise of the question is wrong in the first place (considering the source, not terribly surprising). The ACA website is not a "simple website". In fact, it's extremely complex, and has to interface with many other disparate federal IT systems. The federal government puts up "simple" websites all the time.
And if you're looking for a reason why this fiasco happened in the first place, look no farther than the GOP-run states who, in a deliberate attempt to obstruct the law (likely an extension of their explicitly-stated intent to obstruct anything President Obama did), chose not to meet their responsibility under the law and put up state-run exchanges.
Funny -- usually conservatives LIKE it when things are left up to the states. I guess that premise goes out the window when a chance to undermine President Obama presents itself.
Kythe
Maybe if insurance agencies didn't play games with denying coverage or actually created affordable products that cover everyone including those with pre-existing conditions, this wouldn't have come to government stepping in and guaranteeing universal coverage and minimum products.
I'm sorry you have to live in a society that demands individual responsibility or doing things for others than yourself. Maybe all you Galts can move to Belieze like Mcafee tried.
Spoken like someone who has never worked on a government contract. Ill formed and constantly changing requirements. Unrealistic schedules. Funding profile tied to the government fiscal calendar instead of project needs. Leadership shuffle. It is sad that many who work in that industry, myself included, expect this sort of thing and are pleasantly surprised when the program goes right.
That's what happened: Obama's experts wrote down their rules and regulations as laws and that's what he passed. "Partisans" didn't have a chance to "interfere" with it, they just voted against it. They voted against it because they thought it was going to be an utter failure. ACA is Obama's baby: he and his economic and health experts designed it. If it fails, it's entirely his fault.
What were the states thinking when they chose to not follow the parts of Obamacare that the supreme court struck down. Or maybe this is what happens when you write laws in secret, aided by extreme special interest groups and don't include the opposition in any part of the process.
"If you search you will find that Obama and his people delayed the rules for Obamacare so they would not come out before the 2012 elections. That delayed the writing of the code for the website and they continued to issue changes right before the site was about to be released. "
That's a good excuse... and might even be part of the reason. But it's sure not the whole reason.
I downloaded some of the JavaScript code directly from the site, and it was truly awful. I'm talking chock-full of first-day-in-javascript-class level errors. I simply have a hard time believing that anybody got paid for doing that. And let's be clear: I'm not talking about "Oh, no, I'm on a tight deadline so I goofed" kind of errors. I am literally saying somebody-who-doesn't-know-shit-about-javascript errors.
Of course, the Senior VP of CGI used to be a classmate of Michelle Obama. I suppose that just maybe that could have had something to do with it.
---
The other problem with lawyers is that they come from an adversarial profession. They tend to think in terms of winning and losing, rather than mutual benefit. Courts are in the business of slicing up the pie, not making the pie bigger, and certainly not planting some wheat and apple trees so more pies can be made in the future.
Exactly. Someone once said that the whole trouble with having lawyers in charge is that lawyers are paid to arbitrarily pick a position, then argue for that position come hell, highwater, or new information. They don't typically have any incentive (or even the opportunity) to pick the right position -- they go with the view they've been paid to represent.
Scientists, engineers, and practically everyone else are instead expected to come to the right answer based on the objectively best evidence available. And if that evidence changes, so should the position. The lawyer-approach wouldn't cure a patient or get an airplane off the ground, why does anyone expect it to be suited to running a government?
Hey mate, spare a sig?
Only two or three contracting companies can actually be bothered to jump through the hoops required to do business with the Fed, and they all suck. So you can go in there and pitch a Citrix/Winframe solution that was all the rage in 1993 and they'll just eat that shit up! And the thing about the Fed is they're so damn easy! No matter how many times they get burned, they never tie payment to any sort of acceptance criteria! You can just tell them your 14 Indian subcontractors implemented a shining beacon of code that reads your mind and does exactly what you want! And they'll believe you every time! So you take your 6 billion dollars and retire to the Bahamas, leaving behind huge shit sandwich for everyone else to eat!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think it is fascinating how everyone's suddenly a fucking expert on web design these days.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on