DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/Open linkView original on lemmy.world748
Comments195https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
Ah yes, a classic tale...
"We're going to take this perfectly efficient and functional COBOL code base and rewrite it in Java! And we'll do it in a few months!"
So many more competent people and organizations than them have already tried this and spectacularly crashed and burned. There are literal case studies on these types of failed endeavors.
I bet they'll do it in Waterfall too.
It's interesting. If they use Grok, this could well be the deathknell for vibe programming (at least for now). It's just fucking tragic that their hubris will cause grief and pain to so many Americans - and cost the lives of more than a few.
Edit: Fixed some typos.
Jokes aside, nothing wrong with rewriting in Java. It is well-suited for this kind of thing.
Rewriting it in anything without fully understanding the original code (the fact they think 150yo are collecting benefits tells me they don't) is the biggest mistake here. I own codebases much smaller than the SSA code and there are still things I don't fully understand about it AND I've caused outages because of it.
No. Java is not suited for this. This code runs on mainframes not some x86 shitbox cluster of dell blades. They literally could not purchase the hardware needed to switch to java in the timeline given. I get what you're trying to say but in this case Java is a hard no.
Uh, Java is specifically supported by IBM in the Power and Z ISA, and they have both their own distribution, and guides for writing Java programs for mainframes in particular.
This shouldn't be a surprise, because after Cobol, Java is the most enterprise language that has ever enterprised.
How old do you think the mainframes running Social Security are?
Probably a mix of Z systems, that stuff goes back 20-odd years, and even then older code can still run on new Z systems which is something IBM brags about.
Mainframes aren't old they're just niche technology, and that includes enterprise Java software.
Think further back. Like late 80s to 90s IBM
Yeah, that's what they said, 20 years or so ago
Do you have reason to think that? Organizations that use mainframes keep them up-to-date in my experience.
Chatty government contractors. I imagine some parts are updated but at least 2 years ago there was still a load of legacy hardware kicking for them to speak of
Old enough to collect benefits themselves
Non programmer but skilled with computers type guy here: what makes Java well suited for this?
This is probably an incorrect prejudice of mine, but I always thought those old languages are simpler and thus faster. Didn’t people used to rip on Java for being inefficient and too abstracted?
Last language I had any experience with was C++ in high school programming class in the early 2000s, so I’m very ignorant of anything modern.
Java can be pretty damn efficient for long running processes because it optimizes at runtime. It also can use new hardware features (like cpu instructions) without having to compile for specific platforms so in practice it gets a boost there. Honestly, the worst thing about Java is the weird corporate ecosystem that produces factoryfactory and other overengineered esoteric weirdness. It can also do FFI with anything that can bind via c ABI so if some part of the program needed some hand optimized code like something from BLAS it could be done that way.
All that to say it doesn't matter what language they use anyway, because rewriting from scratch with a short timeline is an insane thing to do that never works.
Why is there a need to rewrite it at all? Is it because COBOL is basically ancient hieroglyphics to modern programmers thus making it hard to maintain or update?
They want to make buttloads of money from a rewrite, and it would cost buttloads to do this. They probably also want things to run like shit and cause misery for retired Americans.
Refactoring a code base is kinda like general maintenance for the application. Over time deprecated features, temp fixes, etc. start to be a lot of the code base. By cleaning things up you can make it more maintainable, efficient, etc.
That being said, for systems this large you usually fix up parts of it and iterate over time. Trying to do the whole code base is hard cause it's like replacing the engine while the car is in motion.
refactor is one thing, rewrite everything in a new language is another thing.
Yet it's the thing every junior dev wants to do as they gain more experience.
Oh yeah, definitely.
I wouldn't necessarily agree it needs to be rewritten. Hiring programmers that are willing to work in cobol would certainly be harder than other languages though, because you'll have a much smaller candidate pool and people would be unlikely to see learning cobol as a good career investment
COBOL is the career advise you hear people give for people who want to make money but don't want to deal with the VC clownshow. COBOL btw is only 13 years older than C and both language's current standard dates to 2023.
It's at its core a bog-standard procedural language, with some special builtins making it particularly suited to do mainframe stuff. Learning COBOL is no worse a career investment than learning ABAP, or any other language of the bureaucracy. Sure you'll be a career bureaucrat but that's up sufficiently many people's alley, no "move fast and break things", it's "move slowly and keep things running".
The language isn't the problem with COBOL, it's the likelihood that you will be maintaining (not adding to, but maintaining) a software system that may not have any docs and the original implementers are dead. Next, there will be nobody to verify the business rules that are specified in the code. Finally after you make a mistake about a business rule, you will be thrown under the bus.
Everything that you said is correct, except the prevalence of the career advice. I would bet most people looking for their first job out of school don't even know COBOL is a language.
The attractiveness of learning it was that you could avoid boom and bus cycles of retrenchment and clowns like Elon musk. Unfortunately that isn't true anymore so I think once the dust settles, finding people willing to specialize in tech like this is going to get real hard.
Is that true everywhere or just in the US? I know that, at least a few years ago, a bunch of banking software in the US was still in COBOL but parts of Western Europe were modernizing their banking industry. I'm probably going back to school for computer science in the fall and had been considering trying to learn COBOL in my free time, or learning more Fortran (I have actually taken a programming class with Fortran, but because it was aimed at beginners it didn't really go in depth, but I bet it'd look good on certain resumes). It's looking like my future is in Europe somewhere, so I'm keeping that in the back of my mind while making decisions.
I wouldn't assume that Java is only half as fast as C for every workload. It's probably a lot closer than you think in a lot of real world scenarios.
The way Java is practically written, most of the overhead (read: inefficient slowdown) happens on load time, rather than in the middle of execution. The amount of speedup in hardware since the early 2000s has also definitely made programmers less worried about smaller inefficiencies.
Languages like Python or JavaScript have a lot more overhead while they're running, and are less well-suited to running a server that needs to respond quickly, but certainly can do the job well enough, if a bit worse compared to something like Java/C++/Rust. I suspect this is basically what they meant by Java being well-suited.
I am a programmer but I'm not sure why people think Java is suited for anything, especially a system so sensitive to bugs. It's so hard to write high quality readable code in Java. Everything is way more clunky, and verbose than it needs to be.
Some major improvements were made with versions 17+ but still, it feels like walking through mud.
It's a language from the 1990s for the 1990s.
Btw the performance is actually pretty good in Java, the old reputation for slowness is entirely undeserved today.
It's a verbose language but I don't know if there's any real language that encourages highly readable code beyond low-level syntax. You want to create a God-class in Python with nonsensical variables and 5 levels of nesting? The language won't stop you.
If it has to be JVM, then Kotlin. Java done properly.
I wish Java was declared deprecated back in 2017 when Kotlin was adopted for Android and supported by Spring. It was the only sensible way forward for JVM. Sure with containerization there's some debate for the necessity of JVM at all but its GC and runtime optimizations are nice.
Java has still an enormous adoption, though. It'd be very self harming making it deprecated. And I don't think containerization solves majority of cases, perhaps it does it better in backend. So both GC and Java are here with us like forever 🤷♂️
Other than hardware issues, which someone else mentioned, it has a lot of enterprise-grade functionality that make it more secure and auditable than a lot of other languages. And despite, or maybe because of, its large memory footprint it's actually faster than most languages.
I totally get any hate about writing Java though. It is a verbose language. Using Kotlin instead helps with that.
I've worked on these "cost saving" government rewrites before. The problem is getting decades of domain logic and behavior down to where people can be productive. It takes a lot of care and nuance to do this well.
Since these nazi pea brains can't even secure a db properly I have my doubts they'll do this successfully.
well the new ruleset they will implement is quite simple:
IF user wants money AND user is rich THEN accept request ELSE fuck off
the tricky part is to say fuck off in a subtle enough way their maga shills think it's perfectly normal in order to save the nation blah blah blah
Not just domain logic. The implementation logic is often weird too. Cobol systems have crash/restart behaviour and other obscure semantics that often end up being used in anger; it's like using exceptions for control flow, but exceedingly obscure and unfortunately (from what I've seen of production cobol) a "common trick" in lots of real-world deployments.
screams in quality assurance
Functional, yes. But rarely are these sorts of things efficient. They’re covered in decades of cruft and workarounds.
Which just makes them that much harder to port to a different language. Especially by some 19 year old who goes by “Big Balls”
My company actually wrote their flagship software in COBOL starting in the 80s, and we're only now six years into rewriting everything in a more modern language with probably four years to go.
I can't imagine trying to start such a project like rewriting all of Social Security and thinking it will take months. You have to be a special kind of fatuous to unironically think that.
I was briefly employed at a firm that maintained the sales commission software for a large telecom firm.
It was 1.5 million lines of VB6, though VB8 was already three years old. Nobody knew all of it, so they couldn’t possibly rewrite it to handle all the edge cases and special incentives we kept having to add.
Except maybe the lone QA person, who would frequently begin sobbing at her desk. And we could all hear it because it was an open plan office and we weren’t allowed to wear headphones.
That job was so bad I quit and began freelancing.
Similarly, my company are 4 years into a rewrite of a cobol mainframe system much simpler than Social Security. Which was going to "take a year" there's at least 5 years left.
I know the UK benefits system took well over 12 years to build with an programming workforce of over 2000 and I imagine it's simpler having to support a population one fifth the size of the US.
The kind that thinks full self driving is two years away, perhaps?
AGI is definitely just around the corner! We just need to throw more money and the energy produced by half the country at it!
And work 60hrs a week!
He can't be this delusional, right? It is almost like he is just trying to inflict damage?
He's not delusional (with regard to what he's doing). He wins either way. The government crumbles, he gets to remake it in his image. He fails, he gets to claim he made the government more efficient, and the fact that it's limping along is just the result of "necessary" pruning.
This is all theater. He doesn't actually care about the outcome or the American people.
He's not dellusional, he just don't have a clue of whathe's talking about and just throw around keywords and try to look smart.
As longas you're not familiar with the subject it works well.
remember when he told programers to print some code they wrote previous weeks ? Or when he tried to impress people with his knowledge of PoE2 and Diablo 4 ? Qe has done the same for decades, at spacex and tesla as well.
It's a known fact that SpaceX have an entire eam of full time people whose job is listening to elon bullshit and being the yesmen so he feels validated, then actual engineers take decisions.
IIRC there were the same with tesla and for some reason the system stopped working. And then, the cybertruck happened.
The kind that thinks all those edge cases don't matter and if they don't get payments it's just another example of "waste, fraud, and abuse."
It's worth noting that one of those organizations is IBM. Mostly relevant because they're the ones that originally built a lot of that cobol, the mainframes it runs on, and even the compilers that compiled it.
They're basically the people you would expect to be able to do it, and they pretty quickly determined that the cost of a rewrite and handling all the downstream bugs and quirks would exceed the ongoing maintenance cost of just training new cobol developers.
My dad was a cobol developer (rather, a pascal developer using a compiler that transpiled to cobol which was then linked with the cobol libraries and recompiled for the mainframe), and before he retired they decided to try to replace everything with c#. Evidently a year later their system still took a week to run the nightly reports and they had rehired his former coworkers at exorbitant contractor rates.
Nah B. This will be Extreme Agile XP with testing exclusively in Prod. Xitter will be the code repository.
Pair programming with Grok.
Spotty DOGE intern developer: "what's a for loop?"
Grok: "Look it up yourself, noob! Holy shit do I hate Elon Musk in every fucking way!"
What's "vibe programming"?
Stupid term for when people who don't know how to program ask AI to generate code for them which they have no expertise to actually validate.
Edit: It took 20 minutes, but I finally found the poster child for vibe coding (time well spent):
Of course Leo has a fish in his PFP
The best commercial models did dumb stuff yesterday and I bet they'll still do dumb stuff tomorrow
It's when people try to have LLM's generate code and then try to assemble the pieces produced into semi-functional, usually really bad, software I think.
And I think "vibe" means that they have no experience with programming so they can't read the code they copy.
It's understanding code like chatgpt helps me understand Hungarian.
Bold of you to assume they'll use Java and not some obscure language picked based on the need to pad their resumes.
We all know it's going to be nodejs, backed up by mongodb. This is because LOC on the commits can be maximized for minimal effort, and it will need to be rewritten every 2-3 years.
They're not going to use Java, it's going to be typescript.
Or Rust
You think those script kiddies know Rust?
No, but they want to seem cool
And they’ll use Grok to write the code anyway 😂
There are only two reasons softwares goes for decades without being replaced:
Also : it's very complex and it happens to work fine for decades.
If one day i write a code project and manage to make it work without any major issues for several decades, there is no way i attemptto rewrite it.
Yeah, there's almost 100 years of law, case law and agency regulations built into how this software works. And they fired all the people that knew anything about it.
But dude, bro, we could put the entire system on the blockchain man, and make it super efficient with an AI backend that will remove all errors bro.
Dude it's not even written in Rust bro. WTF is this dinosaur shit?
I don't think Rust is a bad language for doing same things people do with C++, but with a smaller standard and less legacy.
But yep, that's the kind of people.
About dinosaur things - I've started learning Tcl/Tk and it's just wonderful.
Oh Rust is great, and it's on my learning to do list...but its evangelists are annoying as shit.
Agree, one of the reasons I haven't even started trying
I know devs like everything to be perfect, but if your business can work around it for 15 years without fixing the bug or replacing the system, I dare say it doesn’t qualify as a major bug.
How this will go:
DOGE: "Okay Grok. Convert this COBOL code into Python."
Dumb AI: "Certainly! Here you go."
System crashes and exposes all Americans' SSNs
DOGE: "Fuckin' DEI hires...!"
Australian here.
They are robbing you
We know. Those of us who are paying attention, anyway.
🌍🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
Therapist: Stop being silly, you can't hear emojis.
^ the emojis
Wait, emojis are audible?
This has the stench of junior engineer all over it. This rewrite will go way over budget and come limping across the finish line late, with more bugs and less features than the system it replaces. I guarantee it.
AI is going to write it.
1000% percent. If they can't even figure out how dates work in COBOL we are getting a vibe coded SSA. Let's hope they trained LLMs on COBOL or we are cooked.
"ROFL"
Signed, everyone who has been involved in migrating a codebase before.
Yep, months is a joke, doubly so when talking about tens of millions of lines of code and also COBOL specifically.
This is going to be a hilarious disaster but not so hilarious when people who need the benefits need them and won't be able to get them.
I'm on SSDI (and Medicaid and HUD housing) and have been having insane anxiety the last month and a half to the point that I'm wondering if I'll even get paid in April. I regularly check my SSA account online to make sure my direct deposit is still freaking scheduled. Missing a payment could mess up all of my other benefits as well.
I know the fuck up is coming, but I don't know if I can handle another few months hoping they don't fuck up the migration if they don't fuck up just paying people first with all that's been going on.
I'm pretty sure Im not the only one in this situation who can't handle the stress of this bullshit.
To be fair. We assume "months" means less than 2 years. But 10 years can also be "months", and is probably a more realistic timeline.
Nobody is referring to 10 years as "months".
When you're talking about multiples of years, it's going to be called years, not months. They were obviously talking about a short timeline, less than 2 years, likely less than 1 year.
They have no idea what they're talking about.
Like I said, months is a joke.
So was what I said. I was presenting a hypothetical way they justify their ridiculous claims by doing something else ridiculous.
But conveying tone in text is difficult, so I'm not surprised you missed what I was going for.
Okay but have you ever tried just throwing genAI at the problem and not caring about the consequences?
With Grok looking more and more like the only one working for Musk with enough (digital) balls to stand up to his boss, that might be better than the alternative of "Big Balls" and the rest of the Digital Oblivous Goons of Elon
They'll have it lobotomized in a few days.
They have an experienced team of teenagers don't worry.
That is the mother load of all code bases. Probably still some COBOL if not mostly cobol.
I mean this is a great example of what happens when you put conservative men in power who think they know what they are doing but are just going to loudly, incompetently and incorrectly re-invent the wheel while everyone else suffers from not having an actual practical solution.
By rebuild I don't think they mean it's going to function the same. ...just torn apart and replaced.
It has to function the same. It has to follow the same laws as before.
Bur more likely, they know this and it's all part of privatizing social security.
Yep, this is it. Show how “broken” it is by breaking it, and enough of the population won’t even notice when it’s “fixed” and they’re only getting 2/3 of what they were before (and are entitled to). Plus grift, etc.
AT BEST it's gonna be some ridiculous npm svalbard worth of projects in one tree, require all new hardware, and declare bankruptcy on the way. Canada did this with the Phoenix Pay System, except didn't have 'efficient' funding so it only sucked but didn't die.
This is like a new programmer coming in to their new job, seeing the code isn't perfect and saying they could rebuild the entire thing and do it better in a month.
It's not a case of "seeing the code isn't perfect" but rather, not understanding the myriad problems the code is solving or mitigating.
I'm reminded of this shitshow:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Queensland_Health_payroll_system_implementation
Queensland is a state of about 3m people in Australia. Their health service employs about 100k people. They ended up spending about 900m USD to develop their payroll software and fix the fuck ups it caused.
I'm an accountant by trade, there's a classic "techbro does accounting" style of development we see a lot. Like if you hadn't spent a career learning how complex accounting can be, it would be easy to look at a payroll system and conclude "it's just a database with some rules".
Oh hey, we had one of those disasters in Canada! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system
Made by IBM. We chose one of the worst company to do it.
Hah. It was IBM that was running the shitshow in Queensland too.
I've always known your world is complex, working closely with accountants and actuaries the last 4 years doing data applications further confirmed that, there's some legitimately complex math that shows up, and it's a lot of work to model that correctly.
"It's just a ..." Is a redflag to me, project's going to be a gongshow.
I find that mentality of not trying to understand the problem and its context totally counter to the engineering method.
Yeah, as you've said it's not the complexity that's the problem, it's that dunning Kruger style overconfidence that you're smarter than everyone else and can manage data better than these silly accountants.
Yea, that's a mich better way of putting it.
I'm sure the doge boys are expert grock vibe coders, it will be fine, they've got big ballz on the team, what could possibly go wrong? /s
I did such a thing, but I had a big advantage: the codebase had been done by people who had never really learned to code, and I was a seasoned programmer with 20 years of experience.
Yeah, this is going to end in disaster.
That happens. Even if said new programmer had seen before that IRL the important part of that codebase consists of specific domain area quirks, scarcely documented and understood. They have an advantage in doing something good for the specific stage of that system's evolution, but a huge disadvantage in knowing what the hell it really does.
These comments are completely missing the truth.
They have zero intention of rebuilding anything, this is just an excuse to destroy SSA ...
This is my suspicion as well.
I've worked on teams converting legacy code for most of my life. The planning for something like this would take longer than six months.
If this proceeds in Trump's corrupt government, Elon will get the contract, will claim it is too broken to salvage, and will privatize it. The only way this goes anywhere is if Trump and musk stand to gain money, and they stand to gain a lot.
Just determining the requirements would be a nightmare.
Oh no, he wants to “rebuild the stack” from the ground up again.
This is just another step down "I honestly just can't comprehend the stupidity of what is going on in the American government"-alley...
Like... what do they even expect to come of this? Why are they even interested in doing it? Is it just to stir up shit?
They are trying to break the government beyond all repair. At that point they'll say it's the Democrats that broke it.
Their cult members will swallow the lie hook line and sinker, and continue to keep them in power. (Side note, this will be made easier by gutting all election oversight as part of the package.)
Meanwhile, all that tax money we paid into Social Security, SNAP, Medicaid and Medicare, Unemployment insurance... basically any program meant to help people, will flow directly into billionaire's pockets.
Idk I think these old people will riot tbh
i hope elon and the entire "doge" team dies. i really do.
I hope they all fly around in Boeing aircraft together.
I'm on SSDI and VA disability. I can't work. I'm terrified every time they even breath in the direction of either place. I'd be super fucked. Even losing SSDI would destroy us. That's about 3/4 of our mortgage payment. So many other vets are in the same boat.
how do you do this? probably good for all of us to know
thank you!
They're really playing with fire here.
So many MAGA supporters are seniors who are entirely dependent on OASDI. If Trump's minions break this, we're going to see torches and pitchforks strapped to electric scooters and golf carts coming out of Florida retirement communities in droves.
No they’d just blame the liberals and maintain 100% loyalty lol.
Nah, they'll just say the Democrats are still worse because reasons
The reason is that it takes a lot of emotional intelligence and strength to admit that you have been scammed. These people will find it less emotionally painful to deny reality then admit their mistakes.
"…but sir, we only know Node.js…"
Node.js is a fantastic tool for web servers. Its event loop allows it to rival much lower-level languages in performance while remaining easy to write and maintain. JavaScript has been the most popular programming language for nearly a decade.
Just no man.
Yes, JavaScript has been the most popular language but it is exclusively because of the front-end. Many companies do not want to pay for separate back-end devs and ask their front-end devs to do it instead. These people (ab)use JS because they're most comfortable with it and are under crunch; so we end up with the abomination that is back-end JS.
It is NOT rivaling much lower-level languages; it can't even rival C#.
First off, it is interpreted. You are never going to be faster than competently written C, C++, Go, nor Rust. Secondly, the resources it takes to exist makes in a non-option for embedded machines - which Social-Security facilities are all but guaranteed to use.
Not to mention the horrendous (and insecure) package infrastructure, and under-powered core libraries - it would be the fullest extent disaster.
The saddest part? The larpers at DOG(shit)E are all but guaranteed to pick the worst tools for the job, over-engineer, and have extremely poor management. Meaning whatever they ship WILL collaspe the system day 1; and all of the people refusing to pay attention will be like "hOw CouLd THis HaPPen"
I was only responding to the idea that no one should ever use NodeJS, as it's good as a web server.
A Honda Civic is a great car for what it's built for and people know how to drive it. But I wouldn't use it to haul gravel or drive the Indy 500.
Well you need static types I assume, for code safety and all that.
Months? I don't k ow how to code, and even I know that's impossible.
they will make chatGPT do it and then not verify.
Vibe Coding. I can't see a way for this to go wrong...
They will cross-check with Grok.
step 1. rewrite into spaghetti code
step 2. nobody understands the new code, so the govt has to contract elon musk for code maintenance forever
step 3. profit
So the way things already were?
If it fails spectaculairly who will take the blame? Will there be any repercussions at all?
Or will Musk and Trump shrug their shoulders? Halfheartedly blame Biden for badly programming the original database then go play some golf/videogaminges?
I think the hope is that it fails, they don’t want social security to work.
"Whoops, we pushed to prod and have no backups. Sorrryyyy!"
If Trump is smart, he'll let Musk do all the unpopular project 2025 stuff, then throw him in prison at the end and escape the blame personally. This way he gets to keep popularity with his base while telling his donors they got everything they asked for. It's what all dictators do, really.
This clusterfck has me seriously considering whether taxes are quite as certain as death anymore.
In theory, it wouldn't be a necessarily bad idea to port the COBOL code to something more modern, but I cannot trust Muskrat and a few vibe coder youngsters with this task.
Bro. Check it out bro, we're gonna like make it this dope Electron app, bro. It'll interface with X, bro and everyone will have to login there to get their money, bro. Don't worry tho, you'll get paid in recession-proof Trumpbux crypto currency as long as you claim it in time. But X gets a fee of 60% bro.
Seriously bro we like hired a bunch of grads that took a one week X created code boot camp that like you know revolved around a language big balls created called "cyber coin purse++". On second thought bro we're rewriting it in that. Should be like 2 weeks to rewrite it cuz old people wrote the current code and they're like old or whatever bro. Like I live in an old person's basement and they're just like old, bro.
In theory it is a horrible idea. No port like this ever works out. An incremental approach has much higher chance of success but will take long.
in theory yeah it's not a bad idea but it's also 60 million lines of a cobol
If these people are good enough to redo federal codebases I should apply for a coding job already
if (!=white) {benefits=false}
Nah I think it will just be
In Javascript, no less
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Ow, my sides.
This idea is terrifying in the most insidious ways. Who has access to the code? Who is auditing the code? Are they putting in code that may disenfranchise "the right people". How long will it take to come to light? When found out, provided 'Adults' are running the country again, how much and how long would it take to fix it? And what backdoors are in the code?
This is bad news all around.
How many bugs? How will they secretly siphon money to their accounts? How much access will the Russians have? Who's gonna get discriminated against?
It rounds to the nearest penny and the fractions of pennies that get cut off are used to buy Bitcoin for Big Balls.
No one will even notice.
Gonna blow up the database as many times as they blow up SpaceX rockets.
Sooo only gonna blow up the test databases?
If SS payments stop, there will be hundreds of thousands of people with nothing left to lose.
Over 70 million including many retirees, orphans, and disabled workers. The people most in need of help and the reason that trying to run a government like a capitalist business is one of the dumbest forms of government organization ever. A quick way to radicalize someone against you is to harm their family or take their money.
My mom is over 80. Little old suburban white lady. She already volunteered - "Just get me close." She'd be super-thrilled to have her shot with a suicide vest.
COBOL is perfectly suitable for financial purposes for which it was designed. The SSA code has gone through decades worth of changes and improvements that cannot be replicated even in 10 years.
I bet is cheaper to teach it to new programmers than to rewrite old software. Just because a language is old doesn’t mean it is unlearnable or that software written in it needs to be rewritten.
Agreed. But those that do know COBOL make BANK maintaining the old financial systems!
The code is already in production, there is no point in rewriting it. It can be maintained for decades to come. New features can be implemented in other languages and over time.
This is how you know Musk is a fraud. This far into his career and he’s leading teams into rookie mistakes.
Or, he knows this will break it and that’s the goal. I’m just not sure how he avoids the blame.
DARVO is all you need to avoid blame. Deny. Reverse Victim and Offender. Incredibly effective with everyone except the genuinely principled.
I'm sure having a corrupt non-government narcissist rewrite the code for SS will be fine. It's not like he could leave any code hidden in there for his own purposes, like controlling or redirecting payments or anything.
riskingguaranteeingIs it a “risk” if it’s the desired outcome?
Hey asshole - it works - don't fix it.
Bring back lotus notes and the command line!
When I started at my workplace a few years back, I had to login to lotus notes to obtain some sort of ID code. I'd never heard or seen the software before, but after opening it, I let out an audible "what the fuck is this shit". Luckily they got rid of it completely a couple of years ago.
Lotus Notes ??!? So expensive. I'm keeping my Notepad from Windows 2000.
:D
Just adding. This and all the bad things that will happen if they get the green light, is not how this is done or should be done.
'But all the waste and ineficciency!' Hog wash.
From the system that is working? and serves thousands of people what they needed every day of every year.
They have to say it's horribly broken. Its a lie, but they have to justify why.
There are standards, procurement contracts, entire agency's to make sure --- Make sure what?
March 28, 2025 - Make sure that what will happen, doesn't.
coda: The trick this cabal is using is simple - take a thing most folk don't understand. Say it's broken. Open it. Rob it. Say its fixed. Collect profits and praise, leave town.
That’s the idea. Then they say anyone who complains about not receiving benefits is a fraud.
Wont happen legacy systems more complicated than expected, well it wont happen functionally....
Won't happen functionally, as it's designed to. I feel for the US citizens, they'll break it all. From Canada where they had a new system, Phoenix or something for payroll I think, it caused a lot of hassle and was probably well intentioned, unlike this, but I never read much on it.
The MuskRat should get Big Ballz and the boys to program a video game, so he can have a new revenue stream to replace Tesla when it goes bankrupt, which sure looks like the future of that company.
Reminds me of that thing Lex Luthor did where he sponged off rounding errors in financial transactions
Office Space. PCLOADLTR
Do you remember that one song from the sound track. Get Off My Elevator. That song kicks ass
You're thinking of discount Gene Hackman from Superman III: 2 bad 2 crazy
Right movie, wrong character. Gus Gorman, played by Richard Pryor, skimmed the money from discount Gene Hackman (Ross Webster, played by Robert Vaughn).
No you're thinking of magneto
As long as Big Ballz is running things, I’m sure it will all be fine!
/s
GitHub Copilot about to be clocking some overtime on COBOL conversions.
You mean Grok, right?
Grok has said disparaging things about Elon Musk so I’m assuming it’s going to be disappeared to El Salvador soon.
If you want the source of any future "technical glitches", it's this wilfully negligent act. Courts, take note.
Better shrubs than them have tried and failed. Same as with the ATC system.
Rewrite it in Rust has gone too far 😆
Putin loves this but I suspect he's not directly planning every dumb thing the trump team is behind. Trying to get Musk and Trump to follow instructions is challenging