Can't keep up with your conspiracy theories.
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Oh that one isn't any conspiracy. That's straight graft.
How many companies know how to build websites that scale to national use in the U.S.? I can think of a few. I've even physically touched their server farms.
That company had zero track record of being able to accomplish such a task and won a bid to do it.
Having been involved in government contracts before, the only way that happens is someone purposefully tailors the contract "needs" such that only one company can possibly meet them.
What big websites had that company built before winning that bid? Bob's Truck Stop and Feed Store.com?
I wouldn't even have to try hard to name actual people who can and have built websites of larger traffic scale than that website, and ask you if you wanted me to look up their cell numbers in my speed dials in my cell phone.
MapQuest, Expedia, all sorts of brands you'd recognize. I've stood in front of their system cabinets when they were my customer and helped them figure out problems.
(MapQuest was totally on its ass twice and I helped fix it, once with a bad router throwing garbage into their network and once with a malfunctioning load balancer that wasn't handling DNS requests properly. Expedia just needed an entire cabinet of Windows machines rebooted simultaneously to sync the site back up with their other sites. MapQuest never was the same after AOL bought them. Expedia, I lost track of how expensive their redesign was going to be when I got out of the data center biz, but they'd learned what not to do and they were engineering a better system.)
It's cute when you play dumb, but realize some of us actually do work in that particular industry and can see through any press release crap about why a website is on its ass. We've seen our own and customer's PR people write that copy and know how deep and wide that particular crap river flows.
An example: "Building a website of this scale is hard and will take time to get right."
Bull****. It's a known quantity for most of us who actually DO it, and when they fail, there's usually an email in my outbox from months prior that detailed exactly this failure as a potential and significant risk to business operations, if I cared to re-send it. But I don't. I'm busy undoing the stupidity once that fire starts.
When you want your **** to work, you hire me. Or lots of other people that can and have done it. I'm a pretty good choice since I don't need the job, so I don't have any reason to blow smoke up your ass. And I've been there and done that.
When you want to launder donation money, and scratch political backs, you hire those guys. Blatantly clear and not a "conspiracy" at all. Just a political oligarchy.
Or if you don't like my style, I can find ya a bunch of names in my cell who will either cover up their stripes and pretend to be nicer, or who'll match your perfect political ideology... and both will know how to accomplish a large website build. A few can even do the budgeting and ordering of the gear along with the engineering.
Most of them are busy all the time. Bring cash and good perks when you call or you're wasting their time.