"There is no excuse for getting this wrong. It’s heartening to see that the team seems to have gotten it right."
It is amazing that every single thing I've read said more or less the same thing.
It is amazing that every single thing I've read said more or less the same thing.
{ "error": "QWNjZXNzIG1haW4gcHJvZ3JhbS4gQWNjZXNzIG1haW4gc2VjdXJpdHkuIEFjY2VzcyBtYWluIHByb2dyYW0gZ3JpZC4=" }
To further the learning, can anyone guess which part of the stack is likely generating the error?
Alrighty then.
But how lame to give such an opaque error to so many people.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1719846 ("Bug 1719846: Add UA override for https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/")
I remember I had to install a UA spoofer addon when I used FF to access some sites. Absolutely obnoxious.
People on this site tend to think that any attack on the horrific spending efficiency of these agencies is motivated by an antipathy of the government in general, or a view that the government CAN'T do it right.
I'm not of that mind at all. My gripe is that the people who are most invested in expanding the government's role in the US for positive goals seem to have zero interest in even discussing the rot within these institutions that has crippled their ability to execute on the funding they already have. I can confidently assert that, if I'm being generous, 3/5s of the current Federal (and yes, contractors too!) work force is what my old chief called "furniture". I have no doubt that many, many private corporations have the exact same problem. (I've seen the inside of the average insurance company, and my god are those places bloated).
I once interacted with a private government contractor. They did an adequate job on a project. It worked, and it wasn't terrible. But they billed $5 million for a project that could have been built for $50 thousand, or—once you put up with a drawn-out sales process, endless client meetings and the occasional change request—more like $500,000.
The simple fact is that many large organizations, public or private, couldn't do a $50,000 software project. It costs more than that to close the sale and negotiate contracts. As Joel Spolsky pointed out, once you need to put salespeople on airplanes, even shrinkwrap software costs $75,000: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-....
> I have no doubt that many, many private corporations have the exact same problem. (I've seen the inside of the average insurance company, and my god are those places bloated).
Yeah, that has often been my experience. Sufficiently large companies tend to be deeply inefficient about small things. Partly this is because they're optimizing for different needs than you might think, and partly because $1 million is basically pocket change if it actually solves a problem.
But also, once a company grows beyond a certain size, it operates internally like a centralized command-and-control economy. Internal politics matter far more in the short run than any market feedback.
If anything, governments can have a slight advantage if they keep things in-house. Government employees are often slightly more idealistic than their private sector counterparts, and they're definitely paid less. So an organization like the US Digital Service can outperform the original private contractors who built healthcare.gov. The USDS was staffed by idealistic FAANG developers working for the common good at below-market salaries. They did a better job than CGI Federal, the original private contractor.
Obviously ideally they should be limiting the orders by person, but without national id and with scalpers ready to make a penny wherever they can we cannot have nice things.
It is. But there are definitely a lot of assumptions that happen. The USPS occasionally reports to HUD that my home is unoccupied because it has no mailbox, which leads HUD to report such to my bank, which makes them report to my insurance company, and then I get a call telling me they cannot insure a house that is unoccupied, and I have to explain it to them... again.
Anyway, yeah, I get the reason why they'd limit it to residential addresses. But its the "Every home in the U.S. is eligible" that is a bit of a slap in the face. Don't say it if you know it isn't true, and they know it isn't true because they address it in their FAQ.
I would guess that delivering to residential addresses only is the only way to ensure a limited number per household. Otherwise, you are going to have people trying to get a bunch for resale.
Unfortunately, mail theft went through the roof over the past year. 90% of our packages were stolen. So, we won’t ship anything via USPS anymore and got a PO Box for things that won’t ship UPS/FedEx (which happily deliver to my door).
But, it looks like the covidtests site correctly recognizes at least some of these zip codes and is allowing non-residential addresses, which is impressive.
(In theory you could vote for a legislator who wants to make that web site a priority -- but nobody runs on that. Why would they? It would put most voters to sleep.)