This should be required reading for everyone of junior high/high school age. It's basically a brief introduction to statistics, focusing on all the ways they are often misused. It's short, funny, and permanently changed the way I view news and politics. Once you know this stuff, you'll see examples everywhere, especially when partisans have an ax to grind. E.g., years ago I saw a group's study that purported to "prove" that California's taxes and regulations had no negative effects on businesses. Further investigation revealed that they studied only existing California businesses, not businesses that had closed down, or moved out of state, or never got off the ground. Um, sample bias?

Am I "the above poster" you are referring to? I can't tell. Sure, there are lots of lessons there for IT and project management types that are purely non-political, but as I said elsewhere, the Healthcare.gov mess in inextricably entwined with politics. Whether you care about politics or not, it's not off-topic to talk about how it make this disaster.

In this case, the contractor had a bad track record, but they had crony connections with the White House.

No, it's all connected. The entire "health care reform" project was a top-down, centrally-planned attempt to remake a huge portion of the economy. It was assembled into a massive bill that no one read, and forced through Congress on partisan lines. The website had to manifest this confused, partisan mess of idealistic hopes, economic fallacies, and outright lies, and it couldn't. It still can't. As originally conceived, it had to query existing databases at the IRS, HHS, Homeland Security, and Treasury. It had to check 50 state Medicaid systems. It had to communicate with all the insurers. But they haven't been able to make it work. When you hear about the "back-end" not being done, that's what they mean. Applicants are on the honor system, because the planned automated verification checks aren't working yet. And all of that verification is needed because of the political requirements for subsidies.

On top of that, there were delays in giving website requirements to the contractors because the administration wanted to hide things before the 2012 elections, for fear of giving ammunition to Republicans.

The politics of the whole thing is central to the failure of the website.

Those "millions of enrollments" include:

• – people signing up for Medicaid (which was already going broke and suffering from doctor shortages)
• – people who have a plan in their shopping cart but haven't paid for it.
• – people who think they have signed up, but their information never got to the insurer in usable form.

The number not in those categories is still unknown. Let's see what the real numbers are when the administration decides to release them.

I don't think the contractor deserves all the blame. They screwed up big-time, true, but they had a very difficult task, perhaps an impossible one. Communicating in real time with dozens of pre-existing government and insurance company databases is hard. They also had to dance to the tune of their political masters, so they got requirements late because the administration didn't want Republicans to know the gory details before the 2012 elections, and because the website flowchart was complicated by the fact that the administration didn't want visitors to see plan costs before subsidies, to reduce sticker shock.

But the 2% tax applies to all health plans (except Medicaid, I believe). Obamacare was sold as reducing the the cost of insurance for the average person. You don't lower the cost of anything by taxing it. And note that it was also sold as reducing the deficit, or at least not adding to it. That's another claim since exposed as untrue.

No contest. It's got everything: hubris, cronyism, bureaucratic bungling, political idiocy, numerous huge IT errors, hundreds of millions of dollars. Once all the details come out, this massive fail will be studied in universities. Books will be written. The political consequences will last for years. Coming soon: the doctor shortages. And does everyone know that in 2014, the health plan tax kicks in? I don't mean the "Cadillac plan" tax, or the tax if you don't have insurance. I mean the 2% tax on every health plan. Yes, in order to make health insurance more "affordable," they are taxing health insurance! Words fail.

OK, point taken, but it's a lot more common than that, making the question seem naive. The government also requires you to have non-bald tires on your car, car insurance, wear clothing when you're out in public, and a hundred other things that you get from for-profit companies. And, trust me, you wouldn't enjoy a society in which everything mandated by the government was actually produced by the government.

Of course, the core issue is whether CMMI does what it's supposed to. I have no idea, but will note that governments tend to love all sorts of mandatory "certification," despite their often spotty track record and the negative economic consequences.

And I'm sure all those dealers carefully screened that pre-loaded content for malware, right? Depending on how cynical one is about Apple, this sort of thing is either the #1 or #2 reason they are so tight-assed about the App Store and about jailbreaking.

Put away your red flag. All of the products formulated by Life Extension are produced in accordance with Good Manufacturing Practice (or GMP) as set forth in 21 CFR Part 111 of the Food Drug and Cosmetics act.

Not all "vitamins" are equal. For one thing, Recommended Daily Allowances are set to prevent known diseases: e.g., if you don't have scurvy, establishment medicine says you must be getting enough vitamin C. Rarely is research done to discover an optimum level of supplementation. So studies that involve giving people the RDA or a little more aren't as dispositive as they might be.

Second, vitamins vary in quality. Cheapo supermarket multivitamins might have the same quantities listed on the label as something from a high-quality source like LEF, but they won't use the highest-quality sources, the most bio-available kinds, etc.

So my guess is that these "debunking" studies involved people taking Centrum multivitamins or whatever and they didn't see much in the way of results. I'd like to see a study done with LEF multivitamins, which I've taken for years and been happy with.

True. In fact, by the traditional definition of the term, this aircraft isn't a "drone," a term that used to be reserved for "target drones" and other relatively unsophisticated aircraft. But "drone" is easy to say and remember, compared to UAV etc. For the media, that's close enough. It's like calling a DSL box a "modem" even though it doesn't actually modulate and demodulate.