#cobol

"I'm HiRing sUPer HiGh LeVel peOPle foR doGe"

One of Musk's young tech minions is said to have read/write access to major payment systems.

This means they can change and delete things.

Women pulling Lever on a Drilling Machine, 1978 Lee, Howl & Company Ltd., Tipton, Staffordshire, England photograph by Nick Hedges image credit: Nick Hedges Photography

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Tim Boudreau 

About the whole DOGE-will-rewrite Social Security's COBOL code in some new language thing, since this is a subject I have a whole lot of expertise in, a few anecdotes and thoughts.

Some time in the early 2000s I was doing some work with the real-time Java team at Sun, and there was a huge defense contractor with a peculiar query: Could we document how much memory an instance of every object type in the JDK uses? And could we guarantee that that number would never change, and definitely never grow, in any future Java version?

I remember discussing this with a few colleagues in a pub after work, and talking it through, and we all arrived at the conclusion that the only appropriate answer to this question as "Hell no." and that it was actually kind of idiotic.

Say you've written the code, in Java 5 or whatever, that launches nuclear missiles. You've tested it thoroughly, it's been reviewed six ways to Sunday because you do that with code like this (or you really, really, really should). It launches missiles and it works.

A new version of Java comes out. Do you upgrade? No, of course you don't upgrade. It works. Upgrading buys you nothing but risk. Why on earth would you? Because you could blow up the world 10 milliseconds sooner after someone pushes the button?

It launches fucking missiles. Of COURSE you don't do that.

There is zero reason to ever do that, and to anyone managing such a project who's a grownup, that's obvious. You don't fuck with things that work just to be one of the cool kids. Especially not when the thing that works is life-or-death (well, in this case, just death).

Another case: In the mid 2000s I trained some developers at Boeing. They had all this Fortran materials analysis code from the 70s - really fussy stuff, so you could do calculations like, if you have a sheet of composite material that is 2mm of this grade of aluminum bonded to that variety of fiberglass with this type of resin, and you drill a 1/2" hole in it, what is the effect on the strength of that airplane wing part when this amount of torque is applied at this angle. Really fussy, hard-to-do but when-it's-right-it's-right-forever stuff.

They were taking a very sane, smart approach to it: Leave the Fortran code as-is - it works, don't fuck with it - just build a nice, friendly graphical UI in Java on top of it that *calls* the code as-is.

We are used to broken software. The public has been trained to expect low quality as a fact of life - and the industry is rife with "agile" methodologies *designed* to churn out crappy software, because crappy guarantees a permanent ongoing revenue stream. It's an article of faith that everything is buggy (and if it isn't, we've got a process or two to sell you that will make it that way).

It's ironic. Every other form of engineering involves moving parts and things that wear and decay and break. Software has no moving parts. Done well, it should need *vastly* less maintenance than your car or the bridges it drives on. Software can actually be *finished* - it is heresy to say it, but given a well-defined problem, it is possible to actually *solve* it and move on, and not need to babysit or revisit it. In fact, most of our modern technological world is possible because of such solved problems. But we're trained to ignore that.

Yeah, COBOL is really long-in-the-tooth, and few people on earth want to code in it. But they have a working system with decades invested in addressing bugs and corner-cases.

Rewriting stuff - especially things that are life-and-death - in a fit of pique, or because of an emotional reaction to the technology used, or because you want to use the toys all the cool kids use - is idiotic. It's immaturity on display to the world.

Doing it with AI that's going to read COBOL code and churn something out in another language - so now you have code no human has read, written and understands - is simply insane. And the best software translators plus AI out there, is going to get things wrong - grievously wrong. And the odds of anyone figuring out what or where before it leads to disaster are low, never mind tracing that back to the original code and figuring out what that was supposed to do.

They probably should find their way off COBOL simply because people who know it and want to endure using it are hard to find and expensive. But you do that gradually, walling off parts of the system that work already and calling them from your language-du-jour, not building any new parts of the system in COBOL, and when you do need to make a change in one of those walled off sections, you migrate just that part.

We're basically talking about something like replacing the engine of a plane while it's flying. Now, do you do that a part-at-a-time with the ability to put back any piece where the new version fails? Or does it sound like a fine idea to vaporize the existing engine and beam in an object which a next-word-prediction software *says* is a contraption that does all the things the old engine did, and hope you don't crash?

This is my 1983 Nevada Cobol for Commodore 64 CP/M. It requires the CP/M for Commodore 64 Z80 cartridge featured in a previous post.

Nevada Cobol will also run on the Commodore 128, which has 3 internal CPUs: a Z80 CPU for running CP/M, a Commodore 128 BASIC CPU, and a Commodore 64 BASIC CPU.

Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo:

Just when you think the DOGE infection of our financial payments and other government systems can’t get worse, it just did. The New York Times reported that Elon Musk has embedded one of his teams inside the Social Security Administration, with all our personal financial information in its databases now likely available to them. It’s so bad that a top Social Security official resigned on Monday after DOGE sought access to personal data for millions of Americans. That sounds a lot like what happened inside of the Fiscal Services Bureau and USAID. Once inside our Social Security systems, Musk wasted no time spreading outright lies about 150-year old recipients and millions of dead people in the system—unsupported claims that were repeated by the White House and amplified by right-wing media outlets. We need to get him out, that much is clear to all sane persons. But to do this, we also need to call him out. Specifically, we need to expose his lies and why he’s making them. Musk made three big false claims about Social Security fraud, both online and during that bizarre Oval Office presser where he acted like the president, with his toddler seated at the desk beside him the whole time. (Musk also brought his child X.) Today, let’s look at each, then talk about why he’s lying so openly and brazenly about non-existent fraud. [...]

No, there aren’t millions of 150-year old fraudulent Social Security recipients

Musk made a startling claim during his Oval Office press conference last Wednesday. He told the nation that there were 150-year olds in the system who were still receiving Social Security payments. “It’s just common sense. It’s not draconian, or radical,” Musk began. “Just a cursory examination of Social Security,” he continued, sounding very much like a guy who thinks he knows everything but actually understands nothing, “you know, we’ve got people in there who are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone who’s 150? I don’t. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records.” Here’s the thing. The system was written decades ago using COBOL, a language that none of his teenage plus programmers likely know much about. Older, experienced programmers would know, however, that finding 150-year olds in the system isn’t evidence of fraud. In COBOL, dates are referenced to May 20, 1875, when the world set the international metric standard. If a recipient’s birthdate is missing or incomplete, the system defaults to that date, meaning 150 years ago. The reason there are so many “150-year olds” is because there are many people, especially older, rural citizens, whose exact birthday isn’t known.

No, there aren’t millions of dead centenarians receiving Social Security checks

Second, Musk claimed that millions of checks are paid out to people over 100. Here is his post on Twitter that had some 69 million views as of this writing: His conclusion looking at these numbers is that tens of millions of people over the age of 100 are receiving Social Security payments from the government, when most of them are dead. My goodness, that sounds terrible! How could this be happening?! The thing is, it isn’t. Yes, there are millions of people in the database well over the possible lifespan of a human. But no, they are not being paid anything. [...]

No, undocumented migrants are not receiving Social Security

As a topper to all this, Musk pushed a false and racist “great replacement” theory about migrants being lured to the U.S. with the promise of benefits like Social Security. He tweeted that the “real reason” Democrats are upset with fraud investigations is that “they are using your taxpayer money as handouts to attract and retain ILLEGAL immigrants. Their future voters. That’s what it’s all about. Truth.” Musk wouldn’t know the “Truth” if it bit him in the X. Undocumented migrants are not entitled to Social Security benefits or federal medical benefits such as Medicare and Medicaid. They have no real Social Security numbers because they were never issued them. Far more often than not, they pay into a system that they have no ability later to be paid out from. And to the extent they have fake Social Security numbers, they use these so they can get jobs, without any expectation that they will ever see that money again.

[...] Musk is lying to the American public in order to justify deep cuts to Social Security, all in the name of eliminating fraud. It’s a smokescreen for what he is really after. He also wants to claim credit for purging deceased recipients, even though the government already does this routinely, in order to justify his continued access to the systems he is rapidly taking over.

Elon Musk and his crack DOGE team have pushed the myth that there are millions of 150-year old fraudulent Social Security recipients and millions of dead people obtaining Social Security benefits. Also, Musk pushed the lie that undocumented immigrants come to our country for SS benefits (Undocumented migrants are not entitled to Social Security benefits or federal medical benefits such as Medicare and Medicaid).

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