Wednesday 23 October 2013

The largest Software project in the history of the universe?

I recently read that Healthcare.gov consisted of 500 million lines of code. As a person educated in software development this report got my attention. The reason this grabbed my attention is the shear size of a project of that magnitude would easily make this the largest project ever in the history of computing. To put this in perspective, if you add up major Microsoft OS releases between 1993 - 2003* you get around 149 million lines of code. The only projects that come close to this are some OpenSource projects, but these are exceptions because they are typically layers of code that are accumulated over decades, involving tens of thousands of individual programmers. The point of this article was to point out how rediculis this claim by the administration is and the best way to do this is with math, yeay.

1000 Avg SLOC 1 programmer produces per month.
/
500,000,000 SLOC
=
5,000,000
/
36 months
=
13,888.889 programmers needed to complete project.
*
$70,000 Web developer median wage
=
$9,722,222,222.2 total labor cost.

Please note that this is only dealing with the labor cost of SLOC (source lines of code) This doesn't include Project cost which would be effectively 33% more.

Let us also consider that 13,888 web developers would be around 7% of the workforce. I was hoping to track median wage statistics over the years in which this project was in development, but unfortunately the BLS didn't track web programmers specifically until 2012. A fluctuation this large in the available labor would have resulted in a significant supply reduction which could have been verified independently. That is if the BLS was tracking those stats. I also searched all of the major industry publications for mentions of Obamacare the ACA or healthcare.gov during the time period between Jan 2009 - Oct 2013 Nothing was mentioned. This has to be the most information secure project ever. You don't simply hire and employ over 20K people and no one notices.

Now all of this supposition is based on accepting that the stories are accurate as reported. Obviously this is not the case. There is no way that this website dose contain 500 million unique lines of source code. That is to say that it may contain 500 million lines of reused code. this is much more conceivable. If this is the case however this project was run by an idiot who has no concept of software development or technology in general. I can just imagine that this was some half hazard attempt to hack several CMS's together to make a system that some how routed information between several databases. I haven't personally professionally programmed a Back-end in years but I can tell you this much there is no way this project should have $400+ million, nor should it have required 500 M-LOC. The reason I can safely say this is because the software requirement is simply not there to require that much data management. Oh yes I know there are several databases and so on blah blah. Debian 5.0 the largest code base I could find is 324 M-LOC. Debian is multiple magnitudes greater in complexity than a website of any complexity. I would say that Google search wouldn't contain much more than 1-5 million. I doubt it contains that much.

In conclusion I have to say that this whole story about the amount of code involved is pure fiction. It also tells me that there were like 4 guys in a conference room for like 6 months merging 2 or three OpenSource CMS systems together attempting to meet the system specifications. That is the real story of Healtcare.gov.



Thursday 10 October 2013

Mass behavioral modification via the ACA

Right now there is a huge fight over the ACA because it is a huge entitlement that takes over 1/6th of the U.S. economy. The conservatives really don't like this because of the ramifications of a heavy slow moving bureaucracy that is prone to lose money taking over a large portion of the economic power of the country. This is a reasonable objection. As a former soldier in the ARMY I can tell you all first hand that the government is incapable of doing anything at a reasonable efficiency.

The liberal claim is that the ACA is all about helping those people who cannot find affordable health care. The root of the plan is to make the cost of health care weighted so that those who are generally healthy and young off set the cost to those who are Old and sick. This is why the individual mandate is so very important. If people can opt out of the system than they cannot soak the healthy for the money they need to pay for the sick. Another intention is to insure people who did not have the means to buy health care on the private market. It is expected to accomplish this by subsidizing the cost to those in need. Helping people is a good cause and I can agree with it. Do not forget your sick, your poor, your widows and orphans. These words I hold in the highest regard.

I could pick apart both these arguments and explain why they are both flawed. The intention here, however, is to bring attention to the subtext that is largely ignored. There is a large portion of the liberal left that contends this law dose not go far enough because it is not a single payer system. A single payer system is a traditional socialized healthcare system in which the government pays for all of health care with revenue from taxation. From the perspective of the socialist the intention of the system is to take the gains from those who are more productive and redistribute it to those who are less productive because of perceived disadvantage. The ACA contains the mechanism to accomplish this. Making this argument moot.

The true intention of this system is multifaceted and occurs on several levels. The obvious intention is to force everyone to participate in the system. By making participation an imperative it allows the collection of vast amounts of data on peoples habits and life style. Almost anything you do or think has some impact on your health. If a person worries about things a lot they have an increased amount of stress which over the long term could impact your health in various ways such as heart disease or high blood pressure. If one likes to eat fast food, this results in obesity and various other disorders. If a person is affected by these causes than the logical step is to penalize these behaviors. If a person smokes they are penalized, If a person eats more than there allowance of Big Macs than they are assessed a penalty.  The justification for punitive measures against undesirable behavior will be that this behavior hurt the community. Every persons information will be stored in the Federal Data Services Hub. The reasonable use for this kind of information is to form a behavioral profile on each individual and then of course modify that persons behavior to fit into the preferred model. In this way a population can be controlled by a central authority. This is the real danger of the ACA.

Perhaps you think I'm some sort of conspiracy nut job or whatever.  But human implanted RFID chips was one of the parts of the original ACA text.

Sunday 6 October 2013

Default not so much

It is distasteful that all of the media outlets a mischaracterizing the debt limit implications. Every time I hear a talking head on TV discuss the debt limit they use the term default as a synonymous with not raising the debt limit. This is simply inaccurate, and grossly misleading.

Let's take our own finances as a starting point for perposes of simplification. Let just say John here makes $5000 per month. John isn't comfortable with the life style that his pay check provides. John applies for a credit card with a $2000 limit and goes shopping. He got a credit limit that is roughly 40% of his income. The question is simply is it wise for John to raise his credit limit or to pay off his debt?

This is the same position our government is in. Not raising the debt limit dose not preclude the ability of the federal government to collect revenue. The government currently collects $260 billion per month. The payments on the barrowed money is about $30 billion. The government will hardly default on its debt if they do not raids the debt limit. The only real consequence would be that the government will have to live with in its means just like John.