The Naked Capitalism blog has the article Gauis Publius: The Rich – “A Class of People for Whom Humans are Disposable”.  Quoting from Chris Hedges, the article explains:

The rich are different. The cocoon of wealth and privilege permits the rich to turn those around them into compliant workers, hangers-on, servants, flatterers and sycophants. Wealth breeds, as Fitzgerald illustrated in “The Great Gatsby” and his short story “The Rich Boy,” a class of people for whom human beings are disposable commodities.

I found out about the Naked Capitalism blog from my previous post, Bill Moyers: The Corporate Plot That Obama and Corporate Lobbyists Don’t Want You to Know About.  That article mentions that the interviewee Yves Smith writes this blog.

Alternet has the article Bill Moyers: The Corporate Plot That Obama and Corporate Lobbyists Don’t Want You to Know About which includes the video below and a transcript of it. The Alternet article sums up the discussion by quoting the interviwees:

And some vigilant independent watchdogs are tracking the negotiations with sources they trust, including Dean Baker and Yves Smith, who join Moyers & Company this week. Both have written extensively about the TPP and tell Bill the pact actually has very little to do with free trade.

Instead, says Dean Baker, co-director of the  Center for Economic and Policy Research, “This really is a deal that’s being negotiated by corporations for corporations and any benefit it provides to the bulk of the population of this country will be purely incidental.” Yves Smith, an investment banking expert who runs the  Naked Capitalism blog adds: “There would be no reason to keep it so secret if it was in the interest of the public.”

This story shows how badly we have been betrayed by all of our political leaders including Barack Obama. The trouble is that if we didn’t have Obama, the betrayal would be faster and more severe. On the other hand, it might be so much more blatant that the revolt would start sooner. I must admit, I have an ulterior motive here. At my age, I can envision the end of my time here on earth. It would be nice if things did not deteriorate so fast that the revolution has to come while I am still here.

Here are some thoughts that occurred to me.  Can you economic experts out there tell me what is wrong with this thinking?

The Fed has been using Quanitative Easing monetary policy of pumping liquidity into the market place by buying bonds and keeping interest rates low.  This has had no affect on getting the economy moving again.  It only seems to be propping up stock prices until very few stocks are good values.

This behavior coincides with Keynesian economic theory, which explains that when demand for goods falls off, no amount of liquidity in the economy can get investors to want to invest money in making more goods for which there is no demand.

In this situation, they liken monetary easing like trying to push on a string.  So imagine the Fed is like a fisher rolling line of the fishing reel and having it just pile up on the beach.   When a fish strikes, that person is going to have to reel in like crazy to get rid of the slack before any pull can be exerted on the fish at the end of the line.

So what would happen if the fisher started to wind back the useless slack that is lying on the beach?  In the case of the Fed, would this merely take excess liquidity out of places like the stock market, and make it easier for the Fed to exert control, when and if the economy recovers?

McClatchy DC has the story Obama wants ‘global teams’ to create more foreign investment for U.S.

Obama said he plans to expand his SelectUSA program, the first federal effort aimed at coordinating government efforts to get more foreign companies to spend money in the U.S.

“I’m here because I want your companies to know — I want companies around the world to know — that I believe there is no better place in the world to do business than the United States of America,” Obama said.

If companies around the world wanted American goods, then they would already be buying them.  My guess is that China holds $1.3 Trillion in U.S. Treasuries because we won’t let them use that money to buy U.S. companies.  Can you imagine the uproar from the Tea Party if suddenly China were buying U.S. companies?

There isn’t enough wealth and resources in the rest of the world to replace the consumer demand that has been lost in this country.  That can only be replaced either by US government spending on investment in things this country needs or by fixing the mal-distribution of wealth into the hands of the few, or more probably both tactics.

People say that massive government spending will drive this country to the poor house, while also observing that massive government spending in China is making them rich.  Can anyone explain to me how this can be?

Jon Stewart has identified a new game that is growing across the country.  It’s called “Good Thing Or Bad Thing.”

The Raw Story has the article Jon Stewart skewers CNN and Wolf Blitzer for ‘dumbing down’ the news which features the video below.

I hope Hasbro turns this into a new board game that goes viral. (I own some Hasbro stock.)

Since I have so many friends who do work or have worked in the software industry, I’d like to get your opinion on what kinds of questions you would ask if you were given the task of finding out what went wrong with the development of the Affordable Care Act web site.

Let us see if we can make suggestions to the clueless Congressional Committees on what they should ask if their intent is really to improve the performance of future government efforts such as this one.

To seed the discussion, I have thought of a few questions I would ask.

• Since the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) already covers 100 million people successfully, who designs, creates, and supports the successful web sites you already have?
• How does the creation of the ACA web site differ from the standard practices for all your other web sites?
• How experienced in managing software contracts was the person who managed the contracts to get the ACA developed?  What was that person’s track record?
• Apparently, the web site needed to integrate web services from web sites of many government agencies.  What authority did your contractor have over developments at those other web sites?
• If the contractor had no authority over these other web sites, what steps did the CMS office that managed the contract take to insure successful integration?
• Was there a plan to do integration testing as all the different parts were being developed, or did you the manager or the contract put this testing off until the end?
• What was the risk management philosophy in the design of the web site and the letting of the contract to develop it?
• Did the chain of management of this web site development clearly understand that there is no difference between a physical server and a cloud server?  Anything served by “the cloud” must use a physical server.

Now here is a chance to put your software management skills to use to help the government.

Begin Sarcasm Danger Area

Surely private industry does this better than the government.

End Sarcasm Danger Area

The Daily Kos has the story and video clip for Another GOP representative babbles incoherently when asked to explain her criticism of Obamacare.

Before you watch the video from the Congresswoman, it might enhance your experience if you first watch the clip below from The Daily Show.

Now watch the Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn.

I was wondering when the anchor would ask Blackburn if she understood the question that the anchor was asking? Maybe she should have had Blacknurn repeat the question back to the anchor so that the anchor could find out if what the Congresswoman thought she heard is anywhere near the question that the anchor thought she had asked.

Are they sure about what committee this woman is on? I bet she is really on the House Lack Of Intelligence Committee. She doesn’t know her physical server from a cloud in the sky. She didn’t mention all the tubes in the internet, though.

In case you were wondering, Congresswoman Blackburn is not the same person as in my previous post GOP Rep Freaks Out when Confronted with Proof of ACA Success. That’s why The Daily Kos put the word “another” into their headline.

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.
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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?