[FRIAM] I am accepting wagers

[Barry MacKichan]

With the understanding that I am not talking about any specific project 
but rather about generalities, I can point out how much effort you could 
save with shared code — kill 50 (55 including territories) birds with 
one stone. Especially if that code is built with tinker toy modules.

I think the real problem is the interface between the project (clean, 
modern, elegant) and the world of data it is trying to unify (diverse, 
some clean and elegant, some not). Remember the 20-80 rule. We try to 
hire the 20%; the 80% go off to write portals to state taxation and data 
sites. (Don’t get my wife started on this; she handles the various 
state taxes such as sales tax, unemployment, etc. for two states. The 
web portals are frequently incomprehensible	and changing.)

A few months ago I read that one of the problems with gathering Covid 
statistics is that in some hospitals, the data was being sent by having 
a person print out a report from the hospital’s system and re-key the 
information in the central system. The clean and elegant solution would 
require a standard format for the input data, but that breaks when it 
meets the real world. Assuming Biden’s system will have records for 
each vaccination appointment, the amount of data is orders of magnitude 
greater than in the Covid case.

I’ll take the wager (I’d prefer a microbrew) but the likelihood	of 
the two of us being in the same place at the same time is probably 
pretty low. We could probably have a drink on vFriam, but it *is* a bit 
early in the day for that. That said, I’m not clear on what the 
criteria	for determining who wins the bet are.

—Barry





On 15 Mar 2021, at 17:50, Prof David West wrote:

> I am pretty sure that 50 $1 million sites would be far superior to one 
> $100 million Federal site. Probably all of them could be up and 
> running in a couple of weeks — parallel development.
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