Bill Gates' Malaria Mistake

Bill Gates is working very hard to directly eradicate malaria. It is a high involvement, risky strategy and he knows it. "Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you’re glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things." Gates has designed his charitable efforts to wind up 20 years after his death. If the malaria vaccine is discovered outside that time frame and the predicted backsliding happens, Gates' direct effort on malaria will be a failure.

That may, or may not be, a mistake. It's a high stakes roll of the dice and Gates is betting that the money won't run out before the crash program he's initiated pays off with that magic zero. I wish him the best of luck with that. The world would be significantly and demonstrably better off without malaria. On the issue of malaria, like Gates, I'm pro genocide.

Every single country that currently has malaria could be without it given peace and a good enough economy to fund the efforts that keep countries like the US and Taiwan, which have the climate to support malaria ridden mosquitos but little malaria, free of the disease.

Gates' malaria mistake is to denigrate other tech titans' efforts to indirectly improve lives in the poorest nations by creating the infrastructure to build the necessary economy so that they'll pay for their own malaria eradication. This indirect effort, unlike Gates', is both sustainable and builds on itself. There is no utterly predictable backsliding to what it was like before if only partial progress is made during a specific timeframe. It is a completely different approach to helping the world's poorest that allows their own priorities to inform where the money goes and which lack gets remedied first.

It is a dice throw as to which approach will do more good for the world in the end. I actually wish both sides of this philosophical difference luck on their efforts. The sniping is not helpful though. It is a mistake.

HT: Business Insider

How is Obama's 'A' team tech surge working?

A lot of things are not going to be visible in the fix of the web site.

Some things are arguable when you write a web page. Do you adopt international standards or do you go for de facto standards. Other things, there isn't a lot of argument over. They are just plain errors that never should have passed even the most basic testing before taking the site live.

I noticed yesterday that the ACA exchange website has a number of both types of errors when validated by the World Wide Web Consortium HTML validator. So today, a few details of the 46 errors on the home page. You can see the report in its entirety here.

Here's an example of an error that is just a browser specific bit of web markup.

<meta content='IE=IE7; IE=IE8; IE=IE9; IE=IE10; IE=edge; chrome=1' http-equiv='X-UA-Compatible'/>

This is put together a little funny. I would expect the http-equiv part to come before the content but that's not a big deal. It's just an Internet Explorer specific tag that doesn't exist in the actual HTML 5 specification so the keepers of the international spec mark that as an error.

This one is the second type. An outright error. The funny thing is that anybody can add a new meta name listing here. The people writing the website just didn't bother doing it. It's not entirely clear what they're trying to do here.

<meta name='search-title' content="Health Insurance Marketplace" />

Some of the errors are just quickie fixes that should have been fixed the first time somebody did a validation run, like this one which specifies alt-text, twice

<img alt='Healthcare.gov' class='print-only logo' src='/images/logo.png' alt='Healthcare.gov'/>

This sort of error leads me to believe that after spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars, nobody has ever done a validation run on healthcare.gov's home page even when the thing was falling over all the time and there were obvious problems with the site.

A month into the launch of this, obvious and easy to fix bugs should have been fixed by now. Clearly even the most visible part of this technology project has not had the simple fixes completed.

Obamacare blew it before the Republicans took the House

The CYA memos are coming out of the woodwork to demonstrate how early the healthcare.gov implementation process went wrong. The personnel implementing the program lacked startup or even business experience but had to meet tight deadlines in the law that could only be met by essentially creating a startup environment. The experts needed to handle the technology and regulatory complexity also were lacking according to the memo. Right now, the struggle is on to create a potemkin village of a site that at least fixes the front end mistakes so that the problems aren't so obvious. The back end problems can be hidden with threats to the insurance companies and too curious journalists mixed with campaigns to discredit. You don't have to be technical to know that something's wrong on the front end. You can just click on a link to the World Wide Web consortium's HTML validator. At time of writing the front page to healthcare.gov has 46 errors in coding and 2 warnings that they're doing something dubious. They can't hide that and they can't attack the W3C. The validation computer doesn't care about anything but the reality of conformance to standard. And that's something that even a low information voter can understand. They had three years to write this to spec and right now, there are still coding errors so bad that the front page won't pass basic validation. For just a bit of money, they can get the whole site validated instead of doing a page at a time for free. $280 gets you 20k page validations which is anywhere from one page 20k times to 20k pages one time. Thats $0.0014 per page. After spending hundreds of millions on this site, I hope they have the budget to run validation. I wonder how many validation errors on the front page there will be on December 1st? HT: Instapundit

Niven's law, as applied to government

Government is Magic says Sultan Knish. Wretchard chimes in that we are seeing the Return of the Sorceror. They are both right but neither goes far enough. The deeper problem is that Government has advanced so beyond our understanding that Clarke's Third Law applies, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". We do not seriously have a grasp of what it is, what it does, how it does it, and where money is being wasted in dead weight losses, fraud, and abuse. Government is a series of nested black boxes that we examine the inputs and the outputs of, sometimes unpacking the top layer or two, but never going down all the way to the last black box and across the entire enterprise. Unless you unpack it all, government is mysterious, unknown, and unexplainable in any rigorous fashion. It is effectively magic. But not only Clarke's law applies but a near converse does as well, "Any sufficiently explained magic is indistinguishable from technology." That's almost Niven's law. At present we occasionally manage to pull the curtain back to see the man behind it, demystifying the process. This should be the normal state of affairs. We should always know what the man behind the curtain is doing, if only in the form of inputs into our intelligent agents creating our business intelligence dashboards so we can keep an eye on things without devoting every waking hour to do so. Government is a technology for getting things done. Some things it does better than the free market. Other things it does worse. The libertarian's list of what it does better is very short, just like the socialist's list of what government does worse. Defining what government does, and how well it does it, is within our technical capability. It is not done because we do not demand that the government supply the information necessary for it to be done. We can and we should.

Even non-dummies like the dummies people

It really impresses me how often I will search for the solution to a topic and find that the clearest, simplest solution is coming from dummies.com . They really do a first rate job for me, including about 3 minutes ago when I was looking to get my personal blog posts up on facebook and twitter. The instructions on using hootsuite to do this were easy, simple, and clear and quicker than me running through the hootsuite menus.

Nearly nothing is yours says Jonathan Chait

Did you know that if you have employer provided health insurance, you get your coverage through the government? Jonathan Chain drops this clunker in his sub-par article in New York magazine, Why Letting Everyone Keep Their Health-Care Plan Is a Terrible Idea. The logic seems to be that if the government provides a tax break on anything, then you're getting it via the government. A little thought should make clear how wrongheaded and offensive this is. You get tax breaks for your kids. You get a tax break for being blind. In a lot of jurisdictions you get a tax break for your home. The list of tax breaks is huge and growing as liberals use these breaks to "nudge" us in the direction they want. Those nudges are bad enough, but to go further and say that if you're nudged, this is no longer yours, it comes from the government is just offensive.

Premise, a business preemie

Reading Wired Magazine's treatment of Premise I was impressed by the company but it's clear to me that they're a preemie, a company that is running ahead of its moment. Having a few hundred workers in a couple of dozen cities snap pictures on store shelves to measure prices is a mere trickle of data compared to upcoming alternatives. Body camera systems processing every item/shelf tag in the store are going to end up being created. The engineering could probably be worked out today for an outrageous price, in five years, that price might end up being reasonable, a low enough price for somebody to get free groceries after they submit their data. We're on the cusp of a data acquisition revolution but we're not quite there yet. When we arrive, look for Premise to become vastly more useful.