[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 […]
Via Slashdot comes this slap-your-forehead story over at TechDirt: As you may have heard, Boulder, Colorado has been hit by massive flooding over the past week, and it’s been something of a mess. A local company, Falcon UAV, makers of special drones which are built for the government, approved by the FAA, and specialize in […]
…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 […]
Via Michael Swaine (on Facebook) comes this Guardian story about the NSA apparently trying to silence a computer science professor blogging about possible encryption compromises: This actually happened yesterday: A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university’s […]
This, on the other hand, is a much better video. Heh. ..bruce w..
Once again, I link to the excellent Diplomad, a retired Foreign Service official, who makes the comparison: Obama is going for another Bay of Pigs, to wit, a half-baked operation lacking in the essential resources needed to produce a favorable outcome for the United States. JFK sabotaged Eisenhower’s stright-forward plan for eliminating Castro in favor […]
It’s pretty sad that we have to rely upon the British press for the news that the US mainstream media doesn’t want to touch, but there you have it. Latest example: an article by Patrick Cockburn in the UK Independent on just how wretched things have gotten in Libya since our “humanitarian intervention” there: Libyans […]
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 […]
I am a member of a special-interest national security e-mail discussion group (long story); one of the other members today posted a link to an article in Foreign Affairs by David Kaye entitled “The Legal Consequences of Illegal Wars”: So what is the law? The black-letter law on the use of force is quite simple: […]
