Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, March 29, 2025
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54 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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BlueSky.
Musk and the DOGE script kiddies have plans for the Social Security Administration software:
“Wired magazine”
For reasons it has been many decades since it was normal to write new programs in COBOL. (E.g., programmer hours, maintenance). But once it is running, COBOL software is still the most efficient at manipulating large files and databases, its target purpose.
Back when I was a working engineer, we had a saying: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” DOGE clearly disagrees with that concept.
Assembler? I am old enough to have fooled around a bit with Assembler, sounds like fun.
@charontwo: There was talk about using AI in this “little” project. I immediately wondered how AI handles dead code. As well as available documentation. And there is the little problem of how many government (and non government) interfaces SSA systems touch. Just off my imagination I can see IRS, Treasury, Medicare, Defense. Each one touching other government systems. I demand drug tests.
What it’s like to live in USA right now.
https://x.com/citizengatsby/status/1905491601667096909
Friday’s Texas measles update (last update was Tuesday):
Tuesday’s number was 327.
Vaccination status of the 400: 398 unvaccinated or unknown. Two confirmed with 2 vax doses.
@Scott: In related news:
Top FDA vaccine official forced out, cites RFK Jr.’s ‘misinformation and lies’
@Scott:
Available documentation is probably pretty minimal, as COBOL, per my vague understanding of it, is inherently pretty much self documenting.
@charontwo: If my memory serves, the standard way back when is to document by writing comments in the code.
@Scott: More related news:
The CDC Buried a Measles Forecast That Stressed the Need for Vaccinations
This country is … (fill in the blank).
@Scott:
My recollection of COBOL is it looks a lot like English language words. Like I said, self documenting.
@charontwo: These guys don’t even know the requirements, much less how to rewrite the software. I have been involved in dozens of government COBOL –> modern programming language projects, and requirements gathering alone can sometimes take a couple of years.
Most agencies employ what I call “Maintenance Developers” – meaning they are programmers capable of making small changes to the system as legislation comes through to change the rules.
For example, when the Social Security eligibility age changed a few years ago, their developers would have gone in and edited the eligibility table for people with certain birthday ranges – but would have left the rest of it alone.
Decades later nobody is around who made small changes like that in the late 1970s or early 1990s – so those changes are in place and working, but nobody knows what they are or what they intended to fix.
That’s why these projects are so difficult.
At the very least, a new system should be run parallel to the old system for at least a couple of fiscal years to assure nothing is broken in the new one.
Hegseth placed his brother in a key position at the Pentagon (tell me again about this “merit-based hiring” they are doing) and the Irish Star is reporting that Hegseth BROUGHT HIS WIFE to sensitive meetings with foreign military officers.
The Florida congressional special elections are coming up on Tuesday. It will be a source of great fascination as to the results. While Republican candidates are probably favored to win, their winning margins are likely to drop significantly from November 2024. And many Floridians have yet to recognize how much the state’s economy depends on immigrant labor.
@SC_Birdflyte: Yesterday’s Tabby Forum had a link from Axios about Stefanik’s nom to the UN getting pulled. In that there was this gem:
Special elections can be weird. It will all depend on who shows up, but it would be very nice to have an upset.
@Jen:
Hegseth’s wife is a Fox News producer.
Back in the late 80s to early 90s, we needed a customizable payroll program due to the odd way we calculated payrolls. I forget the one we got, but I recall it ran on COBOL. It worked very well until it couldn’t keep up with changing payroll tax withholding rules.
@CSK: Yep, I know. To be fair, he probably has her tag along so she can explain what’s going on to him later.
A lot depends on the complexity of the COBOL code. Old languages can have a lot of definitions of variables, or require multiple lines for an IF-THEN. The code can be long without being complex. In all likelihood the code hasn’t been updated in decades, so it may not have acquired a lot of exceptions and work-arounds. A modern system with metadata might be able to handle it easily. On the other hand, AI doesn’t always understand work-arounds, or bugs in old compilers, and the programmer will have to feed it small pieces at a time.
If someone knows what the overall system is supposed to do, it may be faster for them to write a new one than translate the old one piece by piece. But they’d need to truly understand what the old system is supposed to do, and if no one knows, there’s not much difference between learning it piece by piece and translating it piece by piece.
In the grand scheme of things, replacing the systems that are running COBOL would be a very, very good thing. In the SSA and elsewhere. For instance, the IRS has systems that run on COBOL as well. I have heard from my cousin who works in the IRS about how hard it has been to do this replacement.
Why is replacing them good? Because they are very, very expensive to modify, since nobody alive knows COBOL any more. Also, those few people who do aren’t necessarily top-tier otherwise.
So, at that level, replacing the COBOL machines will be fine. It’s the details that matter here.
I can believe that the teams that have attempted this in the past maybe were not the best, and maybe had managment more concerned with getting paid, and covering their asses than getting things right. The tales coming out of the US Digital Service when it was created confirm that.
AND, I am doubtful that this can be done by a small team, no matter how smart they are, that act like bulls in a china shop. I bet none of them know anything about COBOL. Right now, they think they don’t have to.
I think they might be able to pull it off in a year or two, IF they were allowed to break everything in the meantime. I have zero confidence that this group will not break things, though, and that has a huge impact.
I don’t want them to fail, that hurts too many people. I won’t be surprised if they do, though.
@Jen:
What does Hegseth do if he doesn’t like her explanation? Beat her up?
TIL (from Tim Snyder):
The US is the only NATO member that has invoked Article 5 (after 9/11). I didn’t know/remember that. There were Danish military forces as part of the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. More Danes per capita died in that operation than US soldiers. The Danes pay about 4x per capita in aid to Ukraine than US citizens.
Democrats, Republicans, Libtards, Never-Trumpers —- we’re all “socialists” now.
Recommend reading the entire piece.
It’s been said a million times, but man, our press is just a massive fail. So tired of headlines like, Embolded Trump Suggests Takeover of Canada instead of WTF is this guy saying. He wants to do what, and how exactly? Aren’t the free press at least supposed to write from a perspective of being pro-democracy, and not just, Here’s what it would cost to buy Greenland. Not, that’s absolutely insane in our country to think to do that. And JD yesterday said we would “protect” Greenland, no mention in the article of the fact that we just abandoned the whole of western europe, including Denmark, so is it just that one place in europe we’ll protect. It’s so fucking stupid how they report this stuff. The don’t even brother to both sides it anymore by bringing up the fact that, you know, what he’s saying is just out of this world crazy and antithetical to American value. Drives me nuts.
@Rob1:
DOGE was never about saving money or efficiency, the goal is wrecking stuff.
@Jen: ” the Irish Star is reporting that Hegseth BROUGHT HIS WIFE to sensitive meetings with foreign military officers.”
He was probably hoping the other officers would, too, so they could do some swapping.
@SC_Birdflyte: “And many Floridians have yet to recognize how much the state’s economy depends on immigrant labor.”
Sure, but DeSantis is fixing all that by attempting to legalize child labor.
@SC_Birdflyte:
And on Canadian tourists. And on Social Security.
Via Water Girl at Balloon Juice,
I think a part of what’s happening is that social pressure has always been used to enforce the status quo. Conservatives long used it against minorities, gays, liberals, and non-conformists generally. Society moved on and conservatives find themselves the targets of social pressure. They can’t stand it.
@charontwo:
It’s in the name: Department of Government Elimination.
Like their slogan, MAGA: Make America Go Away.
And they say linguistics and semantics are mere academic disciplines.
@charontwo: Sorry, but just using familiar English words in a programming language does not make it self documenting, including when it comes to architecture and interfaces to other systems.
There’s no way that the DOGE script kiddies’ overhaul of the SSA’s systems won’t be a disaster.
Do these people ever listen to themselves?
1) If Russia is a threat to Greenland and thereby a threat to our United States, how is Russia not a threat to Ukraine, Europe and thereby the USA? I mean Trump and Putin being such good pals and all. Pals don’t threaten pals, right?
2) The only country taking a menacing stance towards Greenland and Denmark at this moment is the United States at the hands of Trump and Vance? The Orwellian-speak nonsense coming out of this administration is meant for consumption by the uninformed, low-engagement American voter, who needs to be convinced that a “holy crusade” of potentially violent imperialism is justified.
Bottom line: If Trump&Co were truly concerned with the security
of the United States they’d work with NATO, send aid to Ukraine, keep counter-intel operations + sanctions against Russia in place, stop defunding R&D, stop blowing up the economy with their petty politics, stop blowing up our strategic relationships, give the boot to flyweights Hegseth and Gabbert —- among other things.
Right now, it is in fact (and deed), the Trump Administration that is threatening the security of this nation with its Project 2025 vision quest.
Missed the Trumponomics thread yesterday.
But like a few here, I got completely out of the US Stock Market on Jan. 7th of this year. 100% cash for a few weeks, then put about 20% in South African bonds, which are yielding about 10%, then 20% in a few high yield English banking stocks, spread out between HSBC, STB, and TBCG – which spit out about 5,3%-5.9% dividend yields. The rest is in California State Muni bonds and US Treasuries, but I might swap out 10% of the Treasury Bonds and take a flyer on a few Mexican, Colombian, or Brazilian Bonds. Some are yielding 9%-13%
I think there is a whole leg down still to come in the US Market. Also, I expect widespread fraud in the US Stock Market, now that Trump and Biondi had decided that fraud is no longer a crime to be prosecuted – given the widespread pardon of recently convicted fraudsters.
So glad I left. Not regretting it one bit yet.
Interesting, just tried to go out to the LawFare blog and got a 404 error and the certificate has expired warning.
edit: guess I have an old addy and they’ve changed and have now abandoned the old.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/
@Rob1:
Not to mention the reason Greenland is claimed to be more strategic is loss of sea ice, making Arctic shipping possible. Why are we losing sea ice? Global warming, which according to the MAGAts isn’t really happening.
Does anyone know if someone is running a spreadsheet on Trump’s EOs and their legal status? I’m having trouble keeping up with the judicial holds and the like.
(another aspect of “flood the zone”)
@Jen: She is the designated sober one of the two.
Steve
@Bobert:..Trump’s EOs and their legal status…
I found this. Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions.
I have not read all of it so I don’t know how comprehensive it is.
@Bobert:…
There is also this.
Collection: Just Security’s Coverage of Trump Administration Executive Actions
And this:
Trump’s 2025 Executive Orders: Updates and Summaries
@Rob1: Russia is not a threat to Ukraine because Ukraine is the threat in this case by seeking autonomous status rather than its historic position as part of the Russian Empire.* It’s sort of like those various upstart nations in the New World who, finding themselves with the opportunity and ability to do home rule, petitioned and fought for their freedom from the empires they were parts of. The nerve of such people. Harumph!
*This thinking is not unique to Murkan conservatives, either, one of my eiugook friends in Korea, who considers himself a progressive, has made this exact argument to me on several occasions.
@charontwo: Assembly is still used quite a lot today and is still taught. It’s unlikely to ever truly be outdated as low level coding is critical for a variety of things from device drivers to fly/drive by wire applications.
@Jay L Gischer:
Is this supposed to be sarcasm or something? Because I know some cobol from the 90s when I was a kid. The average salary of a cobol programmer is about $87,000. It’s not like COBOL is some kind of mysterious arcane language that we cannot understand anymore. Feel free to head on over to r/Cobol to see for yourself.
@Jay L Gischer:
In addition to the nontrivial requirements problem that Fortune pointed out, there is an even more fundamental barrier to IRS systems modernization: Congress won’t let them.
The usual pattern goes something like this: Congress demands that the IRS come up with a tax systems modernization plan. The IRS does so. The plan calls for $X billion over five years to implement. Congress tells them to do this. Two or three years into execution of the plan, Congress (by which of course I mean the GOP) expresses shock and outrage that the work isn’t done yet, and cancels further funding, wasting the effort to that point (or worse).
Lather, rinse, repeat.
@Scott: And across the way in New Mexico, we only had one new case in the past week. The trend:
Week 1 (2/9-2/15): 14
Week 2 (2/16-2/22): 6
Week 3 (2/23-3/1): 8
Week 4 (3/2-3/8): 6
Week 5 (3/9-15): 6
Week 6 (3/16-22): 3
Week 7 (3/23-29): 1
No new deaths or hospitalizations in at least two weeks. And no additional cases outside of Lea County, which is the one on the SE corner surrounded by Texas on two sides.
@Matt: I am not young. And you are the first COBOL programmer I have ever met. I am quite serious.
Good for you. Why do you think that the government systems running on COBOL are so hard (and thus expensive) to fix?
@DrDaveT: Yep, that’s pretty much the story I’ve heard, too.
So, if DOGE successfully modernizes these computer systems, I will take that as a win.
If DOGE breaks them so badly that they are forced to modernize under some other authority, that’s not a win, but it would be a silver lining.
@gVOR10:
No, the latest delusional right thing is “Global warming is real, but it’s got nothing to do with human CO2 emissions. Because reasons.”
@Jen: The Wall Street Journal did a nice piece on Hegseth’s wife being at these meetings. How’d they get the story? I suspect that he’s going to get the equivalent of a fragging (via leaks) for being a grossly incompetent CO. I’m sure there will be plenty of material to work from.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/hegseth-brought-his-wife-to-sensitive-meetings-with-foreign-military-officials-c16db0ea?st=bLzkmc&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
@Jay L Gischer: Just to be clear I am NOT a programmer. My early experience consists of a turbo pascal book and some simple programs in the 90s (turbo pascal, BASIC). I read some on cobol because of the impending Y2K ‘bug’ issue. I decided I wasn’t going to be able to fake it till I make it as a cobol programmer in time to profit off the mass hiring. I mean really who’s going to hire a 16 year old to fix their ancient huge mission critical mainframe system? Frankly I would consider my knowledge of COBOL to be very low. Anyway I will attempt to list what difficulties I see as an amateur C++ writer for embedded systems.
I have no idea what standard of COBOL the code base is written in. So really the first big problem would be determining what version of COBOL is being used. Post 2002 COBOL standards have object oriented capabilities. Soo the code could look radically different depending on the standard in use. Hell I wouldn’t even be surprised if there’s different versions of COBOL being used due to physical additions in mainframes/systems and/or tasks. So really the hardest task is probably just figuring out the big picture of the different programs involved and their interactions. Old COBOL can be quite a different experience compared to more modern programming languages.
Once the standard being used is determined then the next big problem is essentially sketching out +20 million lines of code in a manner that is understandable and reproducible in a different language.
Implementation of the plan would of course be a struggle. Just figuring out the code will take months of effort with a good team. Rewriting the codebase would add a whole lot more time. Then you’d want to deploy it in parallel with the old system for at least a year so you can get through all the days/events. Then the new system breaks because of a leap year and the lack of a real world test.
AI can be fairly effective at writing small batches of code. I’m pretty sure it’s going to freak out when trying to reproduce COBOL source code with millions of lines. With Musk being at the helm you can pretty much be assured it’s going to be stupid/bad.
Because it’s a clucking huge code base of well over 10 million lines most likely written in a manner that hasn’t been in style for +20 years. The government probably wants to be cheap on the labor and as mentioned prior congress loves to play games with funding.
@DrDaveT: That’s the first post by fortune I’ve seen that was actually helpful and productive for the conversation at hand. It left me confused for a couple seconds. I upvoted them in the hope of encouraging more such interactions here.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
This.
Ukraine as a state not under an autocratic/kleptocratic system is what Putin cannot abide.
Restoring the Russian imperium is a bonus.
There is actually a sort of parallel with the Americas in the 1800’s.
Which makes a lot of Americans itch, but here it is: the British actually adjusted quite readily to US independence.
And were rather pleased about Latin American independence.
The Monroe Doctrine may have sounded nice in Washington.
It was actually enforced by London.
Russia is making the mistake of thinking it can enforce dominion, when other powerful actors refuse to accept that.
It’s as stupid as if the UK attempted a reconquest of the US around 1800.
Or Spain regarding, say, Argentina.
Trump says “Don’t freak out about poorly thought through tariffs affecting car prices. Just buy American.”
Dude literally bought two Slavic wives.
@Matt:
In the late 90s / early aughts I used to work in the same pod as the COBOL guy. I was the SQL and UI guy. We got along fine. A good friend.
I needed him to provide data, I needed DBMs to store it, I needed DBAs to structure it. I needed SAs to move it. I needed NAs to host it. Etc. I could not deliver anything unless with a series of folks doing their work before me.
I did the pointy end of the spear bit, but the spear does not exist without the effort of a very long string of a series of professionals before me.
I would do mock-ups early on for approval and get negative feedback because it wasn’t live data. Well, duh!
A dashboard without data is just a pointless pointy bit that stabs you
nihilistically with its utter uselessness.
Many project sponsors do not appreciate that there must be a series of professionals doing their jobs well to get their desired outcome. That they will need to get sign off from their direct managers to do and support this new process on top of their current workload. To hire new people to support this new process, to run this. To manage this.
It’s like they don’t believe in the pretty basic law of conservation of energy.
People who desperately want customers to pay for their goods or services want their bare-bones, overworked workforce to produce new products by magic for free. Are you insane?
I felt really okay and good by going the contract consultant route and socking those dumb-ass folks with frankly outrageous hourly rates.
Your lack of planning and preparing properly is not my problem. My rate is my rate.
Best reason for documenting code: when you review what you did a few years later and think:
“What the hell was I doing with a variable n-dimension array at this point anyway?”
Lol
@Matt:
My Dad was car plant production manager, who learnt COBOL (and some FORTRAN) out of necessity back in the early 1970’s.
Due to the need to set up a system to handle the car body and parts flow.
A whole team did the work, while the production line was live, due to senior management being foolish, and time was BIG money.
It worked, but apparently no one could later disentangle the code.
And purple painted Austins were assigned 2 litre engines henceforth, lol.
@Matt: “I mean really who’s going to hire a 16 year old to fix their ancient huge mission critical mainframe system?”
You mean aside from Elon Musk?
@Rob1: People (like Dr Joyner and other right-center moderates) need to take this seriously. Had I not had the experiences I had in the military, I would believe there is a happy middle to be be reached in the political sphere.
But, I saw firsthand, factions that are no shit: “All Power is ours or bust.” Trump and the Republican party are using the same tactics, strategy, and messaging–which people in my military specialty would immediately recognize.
They will not moderate, they will yield NOTHING, they will not be inconvenienced by rules and laws–yet will extoll and enforce rules and laws that inconvenience their rivals. You are either with these people or against them. The currency they understand is mutually assured destruction, or, said a different way, if you put me at risk…YOU are at risk. Have you noticed that Trump targets NO ONE that can threaten him? If you understand the mentality of an alligator you can understand Trump. An Alligator only considers 3 things: 1. Can it eat me? 2. Can I eat it? 3. Can I mate with it? That’s Trump in a nutshell.
The United States is not immune from malignant forces we see around the world that impact civil governance and society. Those forces are here–NOW.
There are only 2 choices when these types of people have massed a base and money. Capitulation or Confrontation. They will only operate in a way that allows these 2 choices–THEY SEEK THEM. For the record, I count running to other countries in the capitulation category. That is not a value judgement. There are times when capitulation is the greater good.
Right now it’s too early to evaluate which is the better choice today, because, heretofore, Republicans and Trump have not operated in an environment of confrontation in it’s various (and non-violent) forms. Their gameplan assumes capitulation from their own faction and diplomacy from Democrats (i.e ‘Bi-Partisan solutions). The window is still open. I don’t believe the Administration and the GOP are intelligent enough to adjust to a new factor of confrontation introduced into the environment.
Democrats need to accept that they must temporarily adopt some tactics they are not comfortable with. Yes, Greg Abbott is ‘Gov Hotwheels’. Humiliation is a hack for these people and makes them do stupid things in the name of revenge. We need them doing stupid things. Why does Gov Hotwheels get to hide behind decency and civility as long as he’s a uncivil, unyielding, POS? This guy tricked desperate people into boarding charter flights to Martha’s Vineyard. Women are hemorrhaging to death in Texas–THIS PARTICULAR man doesn’t get the same civility as normal disabled people. He’s making direct decisions that’s costing people their lives and livelihoods for something as worthless as political points and positioning.
Gavin Newson, weak tea that he is, is at least building a confrontation structure–and all weak liberals can scream is about “normalizing”. NEWSFLASH: these ideas and people are ALREADY NORMAL outside the Liberal legacy media bubble. The only way to moderate them in the minds of the mob is to challenge them in-person and publicly.