How Kentucky Built the Country's Best Obamacare Website

But I was more thinking of the shoestring startup shooting initially for ramen profitability, where every unnecessary, can't instantly scale dollar spent is one too many.

This is an effort with a serious budget, where today's back end costs of all sorts are I'm pretty a very small part of it all, probably even bandwidth.

You mean, set national standards and leave the implementation to the states within those standards, with feds only stepping in if the states refuse or fail?

That's exactly what PPACA does for most things -- including the exchanges.

However, you do have to be somewhat blind to see that a large segment of the population, it's the Republican platform for instance, genuinely believe the government can do nothing right. Every failure, no matter how small, supports that position. No amount of facts change that position.

In a more general way, less and less peoples views seem to be swayed by any facts that disagree with their worldview. Everything has become an us vs them, my team is better, right and perfect view of the world.

Mercury through Apollo were political stunts. The sequence goes like this: Eisenhower let the Soviets orbit the earth first to let them establish an "Open Space" president; prior to that they were saying any satellites orbiting over their territory were illegitimate.

However at the same time we were competing for allies among the Third World, and our claims of technological superiority took a big hit. So the "space race" began. First was of course Mercury, put a man in orbit, then a couple of years later JFK committed us to "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth"

But it was just a stunt, leaving no infrastructure in place, heck, even finished Saturn Vs were left outside to rot (due to the inevitable delays, Nixon had to cancel the last planned Moon missions because of the sunspot cycle making them too dangerous).

The Interstate system was based on the German Autobahns, and President Eisenhower's experience trying to move on troops on our old system. However we've had a long and very mixed history of Federal involvement in transportation systems, such as the transcontinental railroad scams (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9dit_Mobilier_of_America... or which went bankrupt (hint: the land grants were the real prize)).

The Internet was developed by/for/with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to allow the sharing of the then very expensive computers.

I trust we all know what pushed the initial development of atomic energy in the US, and as I understand it our first reactors developed to specifically produce power were for submarines, where they made a massive qualitative difference.