Hence, why mayor Pete’s moving on victorious speech may have been a brilliant move. He snatched up the headlines and if it turns out he didn’t win, oh well. They can still claim coming in second was a victorious night for them
But we can agree that whoever did win (even if it was Pete) they kind of got fucked. Listening to Cenk Uyger (who can be a bit over the top in conspiracy theories), Bernie gets the short end either way because if he won, MSM is going to brush it off as it being so close, and if anyone else wins they’re going to make a huge deal out of it. Not sure if he’s right about that or not, but I do know Bernie always gets the short end of the stick with corporate Dems and MSM
Bureaucracies are good at doing the same thing over and over again with consistent results on a mass scale, like sending letters or distributing SS payments. Throw any sort of curve ball a them and things fall apart pretty quickly, with the people at the bottom just winging things or going fetal. They don’t handle large scale change or inconsistencies well. Elections hardly qualify because they happen so infrequently and are run by part-timers and a very flat organizational structure, and explains a lot of the chaos from last night.
This is a good post. The larger the scale is the simpler the process has to be. Complexity doesn’t scale well at all. Software allows you to scale bigger than ever before mostly because it lets you take tasks out of the hands of humans and do them the same way every time.
I am by no means an expert, but this situation reminds me of one I dealt with some years ago. My background is in tv news production and I was consulting with a station during their election night coverage. I knew how the software was supposed to work from a user standpoint, but had no clue of how to fix it when something went wrong. Of course, something went wrong, and when it did, I had no answers and not much of a plan B. Basically, the information coming in was not getting translated into the graphics as it was supposed to. Other stations were not having the same trouble. Nightmare. Break it all down and there were probably only two or three people who knew how the system was supposed to work and when it failed they were out to lunch. I fear this is what’s happening in this case, for there’s no rational explanation for the difficulties of adding up one Presidential race. Imagine if the “caucus” had multiple races for different offices.
Look, I’m not gonna say that Russia or disinformation has anything to do with the clusterfuck that seems to be going on here. Clearly Dems are incompetent enough to do that on their own. But man, this seems to be a dream outcome for the Russian narrative of lolAmericanDemocracy and the Russian bot army. What the fuck.
It’s not a narrative. It’s an accurate picture of the eDems. Just because the GOP sucks, is full of grifters, and doesn’t have a single real (meaning stuff they actually want to do IRL) popular policy position doesn’t mean the Democrats aren’t trash. They are. Especially wrt competence. There are a LOT of people in Democratic party leadership who are there because they weren’t capable enough to do something better. Tons and tons of failsons in there.
Party “insiders” are basically all just shameless grifters. You don’t have to dig very deep into the money trail of democratic politics to uncover rampant scumbaggery and amoral thievery.
We’ve all been there. This is why companies like mine are willing to in house their software development. It’s because then a partner in the business built the product and can troubleshoot it when it breaks within a few minutes. My transportation management software breaks 5-6 times a year… and the longest outage I’ve ever had is like 20 minutes. That’s because the guy who built it is a 1/4 partner in the business and saying he gives a shit about it working so the money will keep flowing is an understatement.
Honestly this is true of most well run small-mid sized businesses in 2020. SaaS vendors are fine for non critical systems… or for well established stuff like Quick Books or whatever… but for more industry specific critical systems you really want to own the whole thing.
Right but that one was ridiculous for a separate reason. Bernie’s delegate score was 2.45ish, Liz 2.1ish, Pete 1.55ish. They all got rounded to two delegates.
I see what you’re saying. Systems that have to function day-in day-out can afford a meltdown from time to time, but I see this situation as far different. This is a system that literally gets used and needs to work one day every two or four years. If we had elections every day, I’m sure all the bugs would be worked out and this would not have happened. But as it stands, under-staffing and under-training are inevitable, and the quick fix may not be so quick when the system crashes in ways that the programmers never imagined and were themselves unprepared for. Not to mention the fact that you may not have the best people working on systems like this.
