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schadenfreude continues
Friday, November 9 2012
I continued work installing flooring in the greenhouse upstairs today, ultimately getting to the point where about a third of the total had been installed. There was enough sun today that I had to open the windows to release some of the trapped heat (an option that isn't available to a planet suffering from the greenhouse effect). That dry heat feels good when you're inactive, but it's brutal if you're doing any work at all. Not that flooring installation is very energetic work; the reason it's mostly a job for the young is all the kneeling and stooping that goes with it, particularly when one is not using a flooring nailer.
I don't know how to say this without mixing a few metaphors, so I'll put it this way: the steady stream of schadenfreude coming out of the smoking ruins of the Romney campaign continues unabated. This evening and again when I awoke in the wee hours of the morning I found myself reading about Orca, Romney's web-based get-out-the-vote application. It was named in response to a similar application used by the Obama campaign called Narwhal. The idea was that Orca would kill Narwhal in terms of get-out-the-vote much the way orcas kill narwhals in globally-warmed arctic seas. But when actually used, Orca turned out to be a disaster. The application was never stress-tested, so when it was first used on election day, servers crashed, hosting facility (thinking a DDOS attack was under way) turned off internet access, and activists in the field weren't given proper credentials. The upshot of all this is that thirty thousand of the Republican's most committed activists were bogged down by a useless system that had completely replaced an existing system that had worked miracles back in 2004. The damage is likely to be lasting; what are the chances that those people will want to work on future get-out-the-vote efforts.
It all reflects terribly on Romney's supposed-exceptional management skills. And it's just as well. Presidential campaigns are affected by Darwinian pressures just like everything else, and truly incompetent ones that might install a truly incompetent president are typically eliminated by voter choice much as defective sperm never make it anywhere near an egg. (It is when highly-competent campaigns are mounted for imbeciles that the system breaks down.)
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?121109 feedback
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