Your Half a Billion Dollar Website

How do you spend over a half a billion dollars on a website, take over three years to build it, and still have a disastrous completely disastrous launch? You get the government to do it for you. The taxpayers, seem to have forked up well over $500 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.

from Digital Trends

"The exact cost to build Healthcare.gov, according to U.S. government records, appears to have been $634,320,919, which we paid to a company you probably never heard of: CGI Federal. The company originally won the contract back in 2011, but at that time, the cost was expected to run “up to” $93.7 million – still a chunk of change, but nothing near where it apparently ended up.

Given the complicated nature of federal contracts, it’s difficult to make a direct comparison between the cost to develop Healthcare.gov and the amount of money spent building private online businesses. But for the sake of putting the monstrous amount of money into perspective, here are a few figures to chew on: Facebook, which received its first investment in June 2004, operated for a full six years before surpassing the $600 million mark in June 2010. Twitter, created in 2006, managed to get by with only $360.17 million in total funding until a $400 million boost in 2011. Instagram ginned up just $57.5 million in funding before Facebook bought it for (a staggering) $1 billion last year. And LinkedIn and Spotify, meanwhile, have only raised, respectively, $200 million and $288 million."

Read the Rest

You don’t have to be a programmer to understand that code like this is complete nonsense. The site is so poorly coded that it has essentially been attacking itself since its launch over a week ago.

And these people are supposed to provide us with “affordable healthcare”? They can’t even build a functioning website on budget. 

They expected 50,000 people to come to the site per day.  THAT is what these morons are trying to spin now.