I find it ominous that consumer confidence is crashing while Trump's approval rating is modestly underwater. It makes me wonder if there is something besides economic anxiety that is at the core of his appeal.
Can he crash Social Security and still maintain a solid base of support? We may find out.
It appears that responses to US economic surveys are getting politicized the same as responses to everything else. I'll try to find a link.
We covered this in another thread recently, but the idea that some 20-something whiz kids are going to rewrite the Social Security payment system in a couple of weeks is risible and the suggestion that AI will help them do it is insulting nonsense.
You absolutely do not have to hand it to any of these people but... the fact that we have these decades-old systems written in COBOL probably means there is a priesthood of very expensive consultants who are gatekeepers for these things, and that might pop up as a foolish ongoing cost. I would guess, using very round, very fake numbers, the agencies are doing something like spending $10M/year on a few consultants to keep the lights on instead of asking for $200M to migrate to a new system that would be cheaper to maintain. That's fine in any given year and slowly becomes absurd over decades. You reach an endpoint where overconfident dickwads can't even plausibly pretend to know how to fuck with your shit.
Yawnoc - what should I say when I call my Congressional Rep? Are there Congressional oversight committees? Are there specific things we should be asking for from Congress? I know we can't stop everything, but it would be good to know what the Democrats should be calling for.
It seems to me that, although it might be inefficient and expensive and could benefit from being modernized, the thing that Social Security has managed to do is pay on time and never bounce a check. Sure they ask for money back if they overpay, but never bouncing a check is a huge accomplishment. Everything else is just gravy.
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Also, Peter Marks, the head of the vaccines group at the FDA resigned under pressure. And they are going after French companies for DEI, so I am kind of freaked out, since Tim works on chemistry for vaccines at a non-US company. I'm pretty sure they are smart enough to know that BARDA funding will not be coming if bird flu really takes off, but yikes.
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In systems like this, its really the ancient core of code that is written in COBOL. Its reliable, like a diesel engine, and doesn't really need to be fucked with. Surrounding that system I'm sure there are a ton of ancillary systems written in more modern langues that probably involve 10x or 100x as much code. The social security website is not written in COBOL, and I would guess that neither are the user interfaces that people use to interact with it.
Still, introducing behavior changes to that core at the middle of the system is going to cause bugs throughout the entire social security apparatus.
Moreover, changing that code just for the sake of updating the language is pretty dumb. The high priced consultants aren't high priced because they know COBOL, they are high priced because they understand the inner workings of a complicated system - and that doesn't really change with a move to Java. In face, translating the thing with an LLM is a pretty good way to ensure that nobody knows how it works.
If a modernization of social security systems really is necessary, then it should be an actual effort to modernize the system - reassessing needs and processors, understanding how data structures can be altered to fit those needs, and taking the time to plan on how those changes are going to affect other systems. In general, I can see a there may be case for moving from batch-based systems that are no doubt the current standard to real-time systems that make updates when new data comes in. But translating a COBOL-based batch system into a Java-based batch system isn't going to do that.
A mid-sized bank would spend years planning for this kind of transition to their core systems. This is one of the most important systems in the country - its not a great idea to YOLO the code base.
7 and 8: YES! Is there a script I should use when calling my legislators?
"WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU ALLOWING ELON FUCKING MUSK TO FUCK WITH OUR SOCIAL FUCKING SECURITY FUCKING SOFTWARE?????" is what I'd go for but maybe we can workshop a better script than that.
I'll give it some thought but right now I have to go stand out in the freezing rain for a while to make sure that other people who come out to stand in the freezing rain don't feel like they're on their own.
9 there was a site I shared here when the CR bill was up but I've forgotten it
In fact, SSA's core programmatic systems and architecture haven't been "substantially" updated since the 1980s when the agency developed its own database system called MADAM, or the Master Data Access Method, which was written in COBOL and Assembler
I think this is even scarier than the COBOL business logic. If they're planning to migrate records out of whatever insane bespoke format they're currently in, who knows what will come out the other side of the decoder ring.
I've moved from thinking that Gavin Newsom is trying to be "centrist" in preparation for a national campaign to thinking he'll pull a Zell Miller at the 2028 Republican convention where they nominate a Medvedev-style candidate as the placeholder for Trump.
MADAM, or the Master Data Access Method,
Quick, spread the rumor that DOGE has gone woke and they want to tear down the system because it uses the term "master".
I don't disagree with anything in 7.
I am not a lawyer or policy person, so I don't know what to tell your representatives. "Upgrading" legacy systems is at least plausibly legal, and exactly the kind of thing the old USDS might be involved in (but, you know, carefully). 10 feels about right.
Spike, these aren't blub programmers with Java certificates. This is going to be in Rust or some shit.
I endorse Spike's 7/8. (I absolutely don't think it's going to be rewritten in Rust, although that would be very funny for meme reasons. Twitter, where a lot of these delinquents came from, is I think written in Scala? After originally being written in Ruby?)
This is going to be in Rust or some shit.
I think they specifically mentioned Java, which at least has the benefit of being a language intended for boring-ass enterprise-scale software projects.
Java, which at least has the benefit of being a language intended for boring-ass enterprise-scale software projects set-top boxes bringing the magic of the Internet to America's living rooms?
Is anybody else getting weird pop-ups asking for a statcounter login?
9 someone I know who is involved in serious Democratic activist stuff suggested to check the AARP for helpful scripts
The comments on the AARP website are kind of depressing.
As an old COBOL hack from half a century ago, I wouldn't be worried about that aspect of the thing. Any fool can read COBOL, which is basically just a form of structured English, and if there is one language a LLM might be able to translate from, that would be it. Not that I'd recommend it. Any half intelligent human being, however should have no problem.
But I hadn't realised that there was Assembler in the mix as well. That's a whole different ball game. What Assembler, and on what hardware? This is where you might need the highly paid octogenarians. Better to dig out the original specs, if they survive, and rewrite from scratch.
So this engineer who was involved with Y2K got freaked out about it before the day and let himself be cryogenically frozen, only the system gets munged up and instead of waking him up in early 2000 it doesn't thaw him until the late 9900s.
He wakes up and is amazed at the fully automated luxury space communism, etc etc wonders that never cease and all that. Soon after, he gets a message that the Prime Minister of Earth wants to talk to him.
"Hey, everything's going great, colonies to the stars, all those problems solved, what do you want to talk to me for?"
"Well," says the PM, "it seems the year 10000 is right around the corner, and your file here says you know COBOL."
(I hope that not all of you have heard that one before.)
If I knew I'd wake up in the Culture, I'd volunteer to be cryogenically frozen tomorrow. But by the time Musk has finished with education we'll be lucky if there's anybody left who can rub two sticks together to make a fire to thaw us out.
Chris y - your country is in way better shape than mine, and I say this with love for your country - why the hell did London police raid a Quaker Meeting house and arrest 6 climate activists? When I first saw Atrios post on that, I assumed it was in the US.
From the OP:
the voters who swing the elections aren't paying attention.
That's why I believe that the Trump admin will run until enough of them are hurt personally (fired, grant pulled, student loans payments hiked, car more expensive, missed social security check). They'll pay attention when they have to.
Then Trump will do something atrocious, as usual, and some critical number of people will be outraged. When that happens, I'll join in. But I'm not doing symbolic things until the mood is ready. (Although I do find myself thinking that SpaceX's supply chain is probably still vulnerable to sabotage.)
Then the issue will be finding the leverage to force him out of office and whether people are willing to grit out protests or blockades until it works.
It takes a lot of effort to get a critical mass of people outraged, and even more to get outraged people mobilized. Establishing coordination networks and setting the mood is what the symbolic stuff is good for.
I am figuring that Trump will do the outraging for us.
I listened to an amazing keynote last night which was basically, "look, math talks aren't supposed to be political but I need to be forthright about the challenges facing higher education," and then speaking truths very boldly, mixed in with good humor and calculus. (This was a general talk.)
The only problem is there's no real way to stick the landing. Like Megan says, there's no real path to change until a critical mass of low info voters feel their pain point. He went with advocating decency as an antidote to the moment, which certainly doesn't hurt but wouldn't pass muster with Unfogged or something.
There's a very weird situation developing at the [sic?] Indiana University... A highly regarded professor of computer science and cryptography named Xiaofeng Wang seems to have disappeared and his home was searched and swarmed over this morning by FBI agents and DHS police. On its face this sounds like some sort espionage investigation. I don't know whether [Wang] is a U.S. citizen or not or a Chinese national. But I understand that he's been at UI for about 20 years.
What raises a different kind of red flag is that he was apparently also fired by the Indiana University, after which the university erased records of him from its website. That's very, very strange. Even in a case where a faculty member was charged with espionage, you would not expect to see anything like that, at least not right away. Further, from what I can tell, people in the university community don't seem to know what happened to [Wang].
This seems to be the guy's former faculty page.
Not by any means the actually important thing to focus on, obviously, but I can provide usage notes : yeah, there's no "the" in Indiana University. Bonus note: the abbreviation is IU, not UI.
Looks like he was publishing tools for exposing security breaches. That is a rather in-demand skill set, I would think.
OT: Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are doing Waiting for Godot on Broadway. Because it's too easy to tell what is real anymore.
I was wondering which one was going to play the Wallace Shawn roll, then I remembered that My Dinner with Andre was something different.
Any word yet on casting Corey Feldman as Pozzo and Chris Elliott as Lucky?
I think at least one of those people is dead.
37: I considered correcting UI but then decided it was all too ridiculous. (I couldn't let Xiaofeng as surname stand, though. Must have been an overcorrection on TPM's part? "Last name first for Chinese names," therefore...?) Also, how the hell are you doing????
hello!! I would say: moderately overwhelmed on pretty much every front available, but treading water with reasonable success so far -- apparently with at least a little capacity for some drive-by TPM copy edit snarking, even. Maybe sometime, someday, I'll make forward progress of some sort again? Who can say!
It all depends on how you define "forward progress"! But I'm glad things are holding up.
35: Disappearing people seems to be fashionable.
19: Twitter is half Scala and half Java. Not many people who were into Scala for Scala's sake stayed after the takeover and I don't think any survived the purges.
When my wife and I began collecting Social Security, the initial payments came in a fairly idiosyncratic manner that led me at the time to speculate a bit about the systems behind the payments. The basic observation was that in both cases for the first few months we got multiple deposits at odd times for amounts that were not obviously linked to the amount I calculated that we were owed. However, in both cases a few months in we received a final "non-standard" payment which by my calculations made us square; and then subsequently began receiving one payment per month in the expected amount, and that has continued like clockwork with several expected changes in amount due to COLA and changes in withholding we requested.
There are some nuances about coming into Social Security depending on precisely when benefits start (and final earnings being reported) and the timing of transitioning Medicare being paid by us to it being deducted from the Social Security payment. As I said, in the end it all came out OK, but via a series of non-obvious payments, and I wondered how much of this was due to constraints/idiosyncrasies of the back-end computer systems. It had the feel of some batched process that cut a check for the amount owed based on the information it had at the time (and probably for partial months). Whether or not it was constrained by the actual physical computer systems or not, it was certainly a product of the broader people + computers processes (more on this in a comment to follow).
At the time I was coming into the system (several years before my wife) I considered calling in for clarification during the confusing period, but decided to wait, and sloth won out and it worked. For my wife's we just waited and it followed the same course (and I have advised others to do the same). This is in contrast to my general experience with banks, etc, where if something looks like it is going awry midstream it almost always *is* going awry and requires painful intervention.
My thinking is that the quickest (and probably) best improvement they could do to the process would be some clearer communications on what to expect, not some inevitably complex fix to computer systems and well-established processes.
Update this morning: colleagues were notified that Wang had been placed on administrative leave a few weeks ago.
For Social Security there are considerations of the technical aspects of the back-end systems which appear not only be fairly old but also not necessarily even industry-standard for their time (MADAM for instance). But this is not at all dissimilar to many significant back-end systems in private industry, although probably on a larger scale than most.
But the most productive framing always needs to include the broader "information factory" of computer and people processes at a place like Social Security. There theoretically could be a replacement of a back-end system that just treats it as a black box with something new replacing the back end but maintaining the same inputs and outputs, but in practice this is not done for a number of reasons and prone to failure if it is attempted. For starters the cost/benefit of just switching out the back is hard to make work (maybe in the *very* long run, but most don't plan to those horizons). So the projects to replace these systems tend to be larger in scale and incorporate changes to the broader information factory--although many notoriously give short shrift to the people part often leading to costly embarrassing failures* some of which end up just aiding a new layer of cruft to incompletely replaced legacy systems. There is actually a whole universe of failure modes for these large projects as well; a universe that has been fairly well-explored both in government and private industry.
So for Social Security, given what appears to be the DOGE mindset towards computing, but even more critically what appears to be their mindset about people, there are many, many, many red flags. And stepping back, I'm not sure they actually want to "fix" anything in a way that leaves the current Social Security program intact. Their mindset seems to be that of "disruptors." Of course a large part of what makes "disruption" possible in the private sector is the bloated and inefficient "information factories" of legacy players and the ability of new players to start fresh. But "disruption" of government systems is whole different kettle of fish, and I believe will tend to lead to some dystopian Peter Thiel wet dream. Which, yeah.
*In my experience the most egregious projects are what I came to label "Way-of-life" plays; initiatives that hinged on the target audience all agreeing to change their way of life to accommodate the new system. The most laughable were ones only pushed by just the technical folk but which had the advantage of usually failing quickly before fucking up anything too badly other than the careers of some tech folks(and sometimes a few gullible functional people).
Brain drain ahead, very obviously.
A piece originally in Fortune that has some further info on the current state of play at SSA.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/social-security-employee-warns-people-153300562.html
To be fair much of is quotes from worried insiders which may be overstated.
I guess a "disrupted" SSA would probably look like a new parallel thing coming online; maybe some kind of expansion of IRAs/401Ks. So you potentially have a transition like private industry going from pensions to 401Ks.
But in that scenario you leave SS alone, just change the incentives or cut off new participation.
I JUST started Social Security (I know, fantastic timing) and the only oddities were:
1. You can say "I want to start my benefits in January 2025", in which case your first check is in...February, because benefits are paid a month in arrears.
2. I had been paying for Medicare quarterly (which is normal), but if you draw SS benefits and Medicare they take the Medicare out of the SS. This resulted in an overlap, and so I got an unasked-for physical check for one month's Medicare overpayment.
Aside from that, both months so far I got a direct deposit overnight into the 2nd Wednesday, which is "my day" based on my date of birth. So as of now, things are working.
How is the posted-on time 50 minutes slow? (And in West Coast time, but I'm used to that here.)
29. That's bad. Apparently the people arrested had announced publicly that they intended to seriously disrupt London, which is what brought them to the attention of the police. It doesn't justify raiding a place of worship IMHO, but I can see why the cops wanted to talk to them. Apparently the upshot has been a massive boost in recruitment to the organisation responsible.
This seems worse. If the school wanted to get the law involved they should have brought a civil suit, and so the cops should have told them.
57: The unfogged clock is it's own time zone. I think it used to be Mountain But Not Quite.
Everyone post their timezone and cup size.
I just did the most central Pennsylvania thing ever. I helped lift an ATV back into the bed of the pickup from which it had fall. This was right after I did the 2nd most central PA thing ever, stopped very quickly to avoid an ATV falling out of the bed of the pickup in front of me.
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I guess in yhe estimation of the CDC we know all the health stuff already. [emphasis added]
Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts' assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.
In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show.
ACDC spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that the agency decided against releasing the assessment "because it does not say anything that the public doesn't already know." She added that the CDC continues to recommend vaccines as "the best way to protect against measles."
62: I think running into it might have been even more on point.
That would have been cultural appropriation.
So, what do I need to ask my congress critter to demand. Is there an oversight committee that has jurisdiction and the Republican are preventing it from doing its job. What?
I'm impressed that "Borehamwood, Hertfordshire" is a real place name.
They're going to use the same plan for sex education.
"ACDC spokesperson told ProPublica"
He added, "If you don't get vaccinated, you're on the highway to hell."
We didn't fax the thing on MMR vaccines, cause it was data that the public had already seen.
This is interesting on COBOL
https://logicmag.io/care/built-to-last/
Apparently the people arrested had announced publicly that they intended to seriously disrupt London, which is what brought them to the attention of the police. It doesn't justify raiding a place of worship IMHO, but I can see why the cops wanted to talk to them.
Interesting survival of the mediaeval concept of sanctuary here.
63 actually reads like exasperation - "look, if you morons haven't got the message about vaccination in the last 260 years of public health campaigning, then frankly it's on you. Best of luck with your blinded suffering children, maybe RFK will give you a hand changing their dressings."
The first paragraph is certainly not true now and was probably not true even in July 2020:
"At the time of this writing, in July 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has killed over 133,000 people in the United States. The dead are disproportionately Black and Latinx people and those who were unable, or not allowed by their employers, to work remotely."
Non-Hispanic white people made up a higher proportion of COVID deaths than they do of the population. Black people were slightly over-represented in the deaths vs the population; Hispanic people were under-represented.
This disparity reverses itself when you adjust for age - the whitx population is older on average - but of course that also gives you a clue why the other statement is wrong. COVID deaths were not disproportionately in-person workers, they were, vastly disproportionately, old people who weren't working at all. Less than a fifth of COVID deaths in the US were under 65 years old.
78: The hardest hit were people in nursing homes. I think what people mean is that among the working-age population.
And I bet that there are local variations in the data. In my area Chelsea, MA (which unlike the neighborhood in London) is not a well-heeled area. Latin families live in overcrowded multi-generational households, and they were hit hard by covid in the first wave.
But here is some more granular data. https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2022/racial-disparities-in-mass-covid-deaths-are-widest-among-you
Indeed deaths among blacks were higher than Latinos.
79: agreed* - we had the same thing over here in the Midlands with Midlands Asian families (in the UK sense = South Asian, subcontinental, not East Asian) - multigenerational households, often not well off. But by far the biggest indicator of COVID risk was age, and then gender. Looking at other demographics first is missing the point.
*People in care homes are overwhelmingly old and tend to have other medical conditions as well which make them more vulnerable. Also in both the US and the UK there were very serious early mistakes about discharging people back to care homes which increased their risk further, at least in the first wave. By the second wave either we'd learned not to do that or we were getting better at vaccination or all the most vulnerable residents had died in the first wave, or all of the above, take your pick https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/deathsinvolvingcovid19inthecaresectorenglandandwales/deathsregisteredbetweenweekending20march2020andweekending21january2022#pre-existing-conditions-of-care-home-residents-whose-death-was-recorded-with-an-underlying-cause-of-coronavirus-covid-19-
My friend lost his father in one of the care homes that made the news.
The care home issue was horrendous over here as well, and it seems like such an easy thing not to have got wrong. I guess we'll know more in June - that's when the inquiry gets to that issue.
What I found particularly infuriating is the news that COVID clusters in Midlands cities had been traced to sweatshops. Bloody sweatshops in Britain in this day and age.
My grear aunt died from covid when they brought her home from a care home to protect her.
NMM to Marine Le Pen's chances of being president of France before 2032 at the earliest. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/31/marine-le-pen-barred-from-running-for-french-presidency-in-2027
The Missus has had Covid for four days, the first two of which we hung out in close proximity. I tested this morning and am OK. I'm thinking it's probably because I get lots of Vitamin A.
Be careful not to od on vitamin A. Apparently it's a very nasty way to die. Never eat bear liver.
85 is the best only good news I've seen this year.
87.1: indeed. One of the many lessons you learn from doing a dissertation on nineteenth-century polar exploration. The lethal dose is quite high - about half a kilo of polar bear liver - but you really don't want even the non-lethal effects. Douglas Mawson's memoir, "The Home of the Blizzard", tells you more than you would ever want to know on the subject.
OT, but this is a hard but ultimately cheering read. PJ O'Rourke wrote a piece about visiting Communist Poland which compared it to being in a shitty summer camp with horrible counsellors for eternity, because your parents are never coming to get you, they're here too.
The real-life equivalent in this story from three Ukrainian teenagers who escaped a Russian re-education camp:
https://www.politico.eu/article/save-ukraine-children-russia-war-camps-return-home/
This - this mass kidnapping of children - is an actual instance of genocide, for which the woman responsible has been indicted by the International Criminal Court, and the US government is helping to cover it up.
Fuck, I'm in danger of being elected to the county dem party committee. Really hoping someone else steps forward.