They just want to watch us die - LudditeCare: A Federal Agency That Still Uses Floppy Disks

At first I thought this might be a joke cover on the New Yorker. It is hard to get the right side reality out of them except in their cartoons. But the cover is a cartoon that reflects the reality of it all. Even the leftist ideology for socialized medicine has gone the way of the floppy disk. Too bad its adherents haven't gone as well.

On one hand we have the NSA, FBI, Dept. of Homeland Security and the rest of America's Gestapos and SS's tracking our each and every move and communication, then on the other, we have Socialized Medicine, aka Obamacare, that can't track itself or even find an outlet to plug itself in.

The only answer, based on the data so far, is that our government wants to kill us off and watch us die. Then they can take all our assets. The joke would be on them. The assets were gone about the time Obama took office. m/r

Ed Driscoll » LudditeCare: A Federal Agency That Still Uses Floppy Disks
By Ed Driscoll On December 7, 2013

Last month, the New Yorker made rare sport of its fellow leftists, by featuring on its cover Kathleen Sebelius crossing her fingers, a pensive looking Barack Obama with Gordon Gekko’s giant mid-’80s brick of a cell phone, and a pocket protector-wearing young nerd (Jay Carney?) inserting into a White House computer equipped with a sclerotic CRT monitor, yet another piece of technology from the early pioneering days of personal computers, a floppy disk.

As Malcolm Muggeridge noted a half century ago, there is no way for any satirist to improve upon real life for its pure absurdity. Yesterday, the New York Times* ran a story titled, “Slowly They Modernize: A Federal Agency That Still Uses Floppy Disks”:

The technology troubles that plagued the HealthCare.gov website rollout may not have come as a shock to people who work for certain agencies of the government — especially those who still use floppy disks, the cutting-edge technology of the 1980s.

Every day, The Federal Register, the daily journal of the United States government, publishes on its website and in a thick booklet around 100 executive orders, proclamations, proposed rule changes and other government notices that federal agencies are mandated to submit for public inspection.

So far, so good.

It turns out, however, that the Federal Register employees who take in the information for publication from across the government still receive some of it on the 3.5-inch plastic storage squares that have become all but obsolete in the United States.

Now government infrastructure experts are hoping that public embarrassments like the HealthCare.gov debacle will prompt a closer look at the government’s technological prowess, especially if it might mean getting rid of floppy disks.

“You’ve got this antiquated system that still works but is not nearly as efficient as it could be,” said Stan Soloway, chief executive of the Professional Services Council, which represents more than 370 government contractors. “Companies that work with the government, whether longstanding or newcomers, are all hamstrung by the same limitations.”

The use of floppy disks peaked in American homes and offices in the mid-1990s, and modern computers do not even accommodate them anymore. But The Federal Register continues to accept them, in part because legal and security requirements have yet to be updated, but mostly because the wheels of government grind ever slowly.

The mid-1990s you say?

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