Talking Points Memo has the article How Kentucky Built The Country’s Best Obamacare Website.

From that point forward, Kentucky’s game plan for a successful website launch could be read as a counterpoint to the mistakes that the Obama administration made in building its own website. The recipe for success in Kentucky was: A pared-down website engineered to perform the basic functions well and a concerted effort to test it as frequently as possible to work out glitches before the Oct. 1 launch.

Beshear officially created the marketplace, now named kynect, on July 17, 2012, a few weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act. In October 2012, the state hired software developers to build the technological infrastructure behind the marketplace.

Testing was undertaken throughout every step of the process, said Carrie Banahan, kynect’s executive director, and it was crucial because it allowed state officials to identify problems early in the process. She laid out the timeline like this: From January 2013 to March, they developed the system; from April to June, they built it; from July to September, they tested it.
.
.
.
From a design standpoint, Kentucky made the conscious choice to stick to the basics, rather than seeking to blow users away with a state-of-the-art consumer interface. A big part of that was knowing their demographics: A simpler site would make it easer to access for people without broadband Internet access, and the content was written at a sixth-grade reading level so it would be as easy to understand as possible.

“We wanted it to have a branded feel, but that was not the most important part,” said Gwenda Bond, an exchange spokesperson. “The most important part was that it works. I think a lot of people would say that simplicity is good website design.

I bet they used a methodology similar to what I called top-down design and implementation.  You start implementing at the very entry point to the software.  That way the part that the user will first see can start to be tested almost as soon as the first lines of code are written.  You then fill in the missing stubs as you go along.  The part that gets the most testing is the part that the user will use most often.  If the parts at the top don’t work, you fix them first before you implement the lower parts whose design may be affected by the mistakes you originally made at the top and got to recognize and fix before you were irretrievably committed to a bad design.  Furthermore, testing and implementation can go on in parallel.  You don’t wait until all the software is done to see if any of it works.

Despite the claims in part of the article that the implementation was done before the testing, I am mpre likely to believe the part that said “Testing was undertaken throughout every step of the process, said Carrie Banahan, kynect’s executive director, and it was crucial because it allowed state officials to identify problems early in the process.”

The contractors who built the federal system are fools if their complaint was that there was not enough time for testing.  If they didn’t do internal testing throughout the process, they cannot blame their failures on the the customer.  It is up to the customer (HHS and Sibelius) to blame herself for not insisting on being able to test parts of the system in parallel with its development.

When I was at Analogy, I was responsible for designing and implementing the back end of a system.  I had written a substantial piece of my part before the front end was able to supply me any data to test my part.  As part of my development, I wrote a very crude front end to provide me with enough data to test my part.  In fact there was a middle part between me and the front end.  The middle part did not get designed (let alone implemented) until I could hand a completely designed and partially working back end to the designers of the middle part.

Good old principles of software engineering.  What I used to call risk minimization was often ridiculed in comparison to what I called risk maximization of the projects that usually failed.  Of course the rewards go to the people who screw up the software and then make a heroic effort (we called it a diving catch) to rescue the project.  If the project works well when you release it, then it couldn’t have been that difficult to do, so there is no point in rewarding people for doing something simple.

Luckily  for my morale I was self motivated,  Doing a good job and having satisfied customers was enough for me, no matter what the bosses did.  Not that I am saying I was poorly paid.  Although I did learn the lesson that I would never get rich being an employee.  I needed to be an owner instead.  I didn’t get rich being a stock owner, but I was able to retire comfortably.  If I had learned the lessons of stock ownership 20 years earlier than I did, I might have been rich by now.

New Economic Perspectives has the brilliant William Black article Economics could be a Science if More Economists were Scientists.

But here is the real takeaway about economists and their pretensions to be scientists.  The Fed employs hundreds of economists who are supposed to study important economic developments.  There were no more important micro-foundational developments than the three mortgage fraud epidemics and the hyper-inflated bubble that they produced.  The Fed’s economists, according to the authors of the study I have been discussing, failed to study the four developments that were about to cause a catastrophe.  To make it worse, only the Fed had the authority under the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act of 1994 (HOEPA) to ban all liar’s loans and the Fed held a series of hearings mandated by Congress at which there was extensive testimony about liar’s loans.  The Fed’s economists, therefore, should have made studying the three mortgage fraud epidemics and the resultant bubble their highest research priority.  That’s what scientists would have done.

But those studies would have produced results that would have devastated the dogmas that rule the Fed’s economists.  The effectiveness of those ideological blinders in preventing serious research on the frauds by the Fed’s economists continues to this day.  This is a very old story.  Michael Jensen, when he was the managing editor of the Journal of Financial Economics, discovered that no proposed article could get through peer review if it challenged the efficient market hypothesis.  Jensen was a strong supporter of EMH, but he was appalled by this triumph of dogma over science.   He published an “anomalies” volume, though as he noted in the first volume each of the contributors professed belief in EMH.

The strength of Jensen’s endorsement for EMH, even when he discovered that his colleagues were ruled by their dogmas should be a cautionary tale with regard to Chetty’s claim that this time it’s different, this time economists will behave like scientists.  Jensen stated:  “I believe there is no other proposition in economics which has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis.”  If he is correct, then the costly collapse of EMH suggests that all other economic propositions rest on even shakier foundations built on friable dogma rather than bedrock facts.

The irony of this article is that on this very web site, New Economic Perspectives, there is a contingent that adamantly refuses to understand the content of this article.

Look at the discussion of the article Why Understanding Fiat Currency Matters For Scientists: We Are Being Pitted Against Public Health.

I repeatedly refer to the writings of William Black to urge caution in the proposals put forth by the New Currency Theory proponents.  The person most often responding to my comments refuses to recognize the relevance of the possibility of fraud in talking about the theory.

I discussed this “conversation” in my previous post MMT, NCT, or Reality?

The Daily Ticker has the story One Man Is Putting the U.S. Economy & Markets At Risk, Says David Kotok.

David Kotok, co-founder and chief investment officer of Cumberland Advisors, had been expecting further gains in stocks, but now he tells The Daily Ticker that the market and the economy are vulnerable because of one man — Senator Rand Paul.

Can you imagine putting something as important as the Fed under the oversight of this dysfunctional Congress? It is not that Rand Paul wants to have oversight of the Fed. The problem is that he wants the Fed to go back to the same policy that even Milton Friedman said made the great depression worse.

The fiscal irresponsibility of the Congress is in not allowing enough stimulus so that the Fed is forced to use its only policy tool, monetary easing, as ineffective as it might be.

The Fed has made liquidity flow freely enough so that monetary policy is no longer a drag on the economy. Beyond that, only a strong dose of fiscal stimulus can help. Given that we need trillions of dollars in investment in our infrastructure regardless of the economic conditions, wouldn’t doing this investment when the costs are low and the economy needs stimulus be the best time to do it?

We certainly don’t need massive infrastructure investment when the economy is roaring along and such investment would compete for non-monetary resources that can be productively used in the private sphere.

Admittedly there is no logic I can use to dissuade people who think that Ron and Rand Paul are geniuses when it comes to their ideas about the Fed and the economy in general.

Alternet has the article Meet 3 Master Manipulators of America’s Oligarchy: Financiers Stanley Druckenmiller, Pete Peterson and John Arnold form a trifecta of treachery.

We bring you profiles of three financiers who never made a useful thing in their lives, including one who helped bring you the Enron disaster. They are united in their efforts to blame ordinary people for Wall Street-driven economic woes and carve out another pound of your flesh for the rich. Money is no object in their quest.

I have known about Pete Peterson for quite a while, but I had not heard of the other two until now. What confuses the heck out of me is that I have a lot of respect for Simon Johnson, even though his resume shows a stint at the Peterson Foundation. Could it be that Johnson escaped that job unscathed?

Warning: Under no circumstances should relatives of Steve Greenberg read any further.

The Real News Network has the video Max Blumenthal’s Goliath, Life and Loathing in Greater Israel – Pt1.

On Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay, author Max Blumenthal discusses his new book and traces the rise of Avigdor Lieberman and current policies of ethnic cleansing in Israel

As they get published, I’ll add upcoming parts of this series to this blog post.

October 30. 2013

Ethnic Cleansing and the Israeli “Center ” – Blumenthal Pt2

In this episode of Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay, Max Blumenthal author of Goliath – Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, looks at Tzipi Livni who’s support for expelling Israeli Palestinians even surprised Condoleezza Rice

Compare Blumenthal’s description of Nakba (much more in the video)

BLUMENTHAL: Well, there is the–the most remarkable of these laws was the Nakba Law, which–you know, the Nakba is a reference to the Palestinian catastrophe, the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from what became the state of Israel in 1948. It’s a continuous process. And there are Palestinian citizens of Israel who go out during what is known as Israeli Independence Day, May 15, 1948, which also happens to be the date of that marks their catastrophe, and they’ll observe the tragedy of this moment for them.

to the mythology upon which I was raised.

I was told that when Israel was created, the leaders of the Palestinians unnecessarily frightened the Palestinians into leaving voluntarily. There was no need for this fear, because the Israelis would have been glad to live peacefully with the Palestinians. In fact the leaders just wanted their followers to leave so that they could get the war over quickly and drive the Israelis out of the middle east. After not winning the war, the Palestinians wanted to return. The Israelis rightfully told them that they had forfeited their right of return because of their disloyalty and their voluntary abandonment of their property. (See Myths & Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict)

As an adult, I used to have discussions with a Palestinian with whom I worked and with whom I became a friend. I thought I was being reasonable in saying, “You may not agree with the story I grew up with, but can you admit that if a people believed this story, they would have a reason for the anti-Palestinian feelings that they do?” And I thought he was just being unreasonable for not conceding my point. I have learned a lot since those days in the 1980s.

Netanyahu’s Greater Israel Based on Expulsion and Annexation

October 3, 2013

Architect of Apartheid in Israel: “If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist” – Blumenthal Pt4

In this episode of Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay, Max Blumenthal looks at Arnon Sofer, one of Israel’s most important strategic thinkers, who developed plans to defend Jewish demographics

Racism, Occupier and the Occupied – Blumenthal Pt5

In the final episode of this Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay, Max Blumenthal responds to critics who say he has not dealt with the effect of terrorist attacks and anti-Jewish propaganda in the Arab world in strengthening racist and apartheid opinion in Israel