[Made a few minor edits] [added an additional clip suggested by Jim Geraghty] There’s a running threat/gag in The Empire Strikes Back involving the hyperdrive of the Millennium Falcon. Various attempts are made to fix it, but it keeps not working, usually with Han Solo saying, “It’s not my fault!” Towards the very end of […]
I hardly know where to start. I just spent the last two days working on a matter involving a $100 million failed IT project, and it seems like a pleasant walk in the park compared to the news that keeps leaking out about the Healthcare.gov debacle. Let me start by saying: there is no royal […]
[This post was written several days prior to the launch of Healthcare.gov on October 1, 2013 — I’d say that most of my predictions have been borne out, particularly in Update #3] For nearly 20 years, my professional focus has been on large-scale IT projects: why they succeed and why they so often fail. One of […]
First, Megan McArdle: “Banking without risk is impossible“: The fundamental fact of a banking crisis, which is different from a crisis in any other industry, is that if people believe a financial institution to be bankrupt, it actually is bankrupt. As Arnold Kling puts it, banks exist to reconcile the desire of households to […]
…I can’t do any better than point you at Mark Steyn explaining how thoroughly Putin has punked Obama: Charles Crawford, Britain’s former ambassador in Serbia and Poland, called last Monday “the worst day for U.S. and wider Western diplomacy since records began.” Obama set it in motion at a press conference last year by drawing […]
This, on the other hand, is a much better video. Heh. ..bruce w..
My wife, age 60, has a high-deductible policy with Humana. She got a letter today from Humana outlining the exact impact of Obamacare on her insurance coverage. In essence, she has a choice of converting over to an ACA-compliant policy now, or continuing with her current policy until the end of 2014 (at which point […]
Breitbart posts this news: In what is being reported as a surprise move, the 40,000 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) announced that they have formally ended their association with the AFL-CIO, one of the nation’s largest private sector unions. The Longshoremen citied Obamacare and immigration reform as two important causes of […]
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has an editorial in USA Today, talking about the barriers to making the US government work. As someone who lived in and around Washington DC for several years, his penultimate paragraph struck home: And that gets to what I think is the real problem lying behind all of this enthusiasm for […]
George Mellon over at the New York Sun writes: How does an investor react to the news that a propped-up and thus over-priced asset may lose its props? His natural urge is to sell, of course, and that urge will soon be reflected in a decline in the asset’s price. So it is with Treasury […]
