I Don’t know if this is any comfort, but this was in Krugman’s substack this morning.
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The federal payments system is immensely complex, and like most government infrastructure has been financially squeezed for decades. So it’s cobbled together, much of it running on old hardware and even older software, kept functioning thanks to old hands and institutional memory. The 20-somethings Musk is deploying to take over, locking out those old hands and pushing aside the people who know how the system works, almost surely don’t understand enough to politicize payments right away.
As Nathan Tankus, the go-to expert on these matters, says,
"I 100% believe that the primary barrier to Elon Musk gaining control of the Treasury payments system is COBOL."
For readers mystified by the reference, COBOL is a very old programming language that was once pervasive in the business world but in which hardly anyone under 60 knows how to program — yet is still widely used in government. (During Covid, the state of New Jersey put out a frantic call for people who knew COBOL to implement expanded unemployment benefits.)
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If by that he means “joking” I said yesterday if Trump says he outlawed some country forever, the bombing begins in five minutes" that there absolutely would be B-2’s and B-52’s five minutes away from some place. BBC just had two GOP critters of some sort on who didn’t quite have the infos but said it’d be all sorted tomorrow.
Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy wrote on X: “He’s totally lost it.”“I have news for you - we aren’t taking over Gaza,” he went on to say in a follow up post.
The USA just put a lot of “credibility” on the line. Gaza either happens and lots of jobs and sunshine and lollipops or nothing happens and the Dems will not have a say either way.
And let’s keep ignoring the Iranians. Jordan will take care of their aggressiveness.
The United States has no credibility now. Felon45 flushed what we did have down the toilet and now Felon47 is pissing on what a real president managed to regain for us.
I believe he just offered Canada as a place for the “Gazans” to go… It followed him saying “We’ll resettle them in places where the leaders will say ‘No’”
Now he’s said Iran was weak four years ao - now they are still weak? They’re not weak, they’re strong. Assuming Iran does not have a nuke - they are not weak and they did not sell oil to China to raise a really big standing army. Has Israel committed to nuking a widespread Iranian army with the nukes they supposedly do not have?
Also everything was just great between Ukraine and Russia four years ago. Maybe the USA can resettle the “Gazans” in Crimea where the leader will certainly say “No”. It’s a peaceful peninsula, always has been.
I know places have had to pay COBOL programmers plenty to not retire since they all tend to be up there. And there are a lot of these long in the tooth mainframe enterprise applications out there. It costs a fortune to modernize and they’ve put it off. Deloitte, and others, are happy to help you migrate to modern systems but prepared to pay a fortune to them and whatever system you move to (Workday, Netsuite, SAP, etc).
COBOL is a somewhat archaic “language” in that it doesn’t have objects and classes (trying not to get technical).
It is a very good language for dealing with money as everything is done in decimal. Database support is fairly limited and replication was unknown then. Amazon could have sold books in the 1990’s just fine with it, yet as I said it’s archaic but so is Latin. The notion that using it for those under 60 is a fallacy. It is entirely reliable for math.
It iis not at all complex (unless you are counting blood diamonds) and Herr Elon is full of shit if he’s blaming not taking over the Treasury because of a perfectly nice old programming language.
If you want to pilot a spacecraft to The Moon, better off with Fortran (as archaic as slide-rules and pocket protectors). which does Fourier Transforms and has inherently too much round-off error to run a bank with.
I have often wondered why they didn’t train up new CS students in COBOL. I know at one place I worked, they had replaced their big blue mainframe with a much more compact version (still cost a fortune) and then finally moved it to some version of the IBM cloud. Still running those old applications, but mostly at that point as an archive as they moved to WorkdayNetsuiteSAP.
I assume that the “they” who make those decisions figured there was no way COBOL would still be in use by now, much like how nobody in the early '70s thought they’d need to worry about UNIX handling dates after 2037.
A friend of mine, who was a programmer in the '70s and '80s, and who worked in COBOL extensively, suddenly found himself to be in-demand in the late '90s, as companies scrambled to find people who knew how to re-program their legacy systems to fix the Y2K bug.
So, even by that time, COBOL knowledge was becoming rare.
I worked a lot on Y2K and yeah, there was stuff to do yet nothing Financial was really threatened after mid-1999 (I worked at Reuters).
The Y-2037 - let’s call it an “issue” is literally embedded//“hardcode” into devices (chips and such). So if we survive the next four years, the world will end in 2037. It won’t just be humorous things like your age is -107 or your bank account is $59,424,455,692. In fact, it’s not really known how bad that is and of course it’s 12 years plus from now. Maybe Airbus and Boeing will have it covered to prevent planes falling out of the sky, yet is all cool with ATC? NORAD? Every country, everywhere?
When UNIX was created and used the 1970 epoch nobody imagined it’d still be used and embedded in devices that are in use 67 years later.
The good news is Microsoft used the 1980 epoch so they can relax and see if it’s even worth fixing anything if the world has ended.
Feb 4 (Reuters) - The Central Intelligence Agency offered buyouts to its entire workforce Tuesday, citing an aim to bring the agency in line with U.S. President Donald Trump’s priorities, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The U.S. spy agency is also freezing the hiring of job applicants already given a conditional offer, the WSJ reported, quoting an aide to CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
And what will be the primary qualification for the new hires (Monty asks rhetorically)?
The report of buyout offers is in line with a massive makeover of the U.S. government embarked on by the Trump administration, which has fired and sidelined hundreds of civil servants in first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.
The bolding above is mine. The treason is Trusk’s.
In case it’s not obvious, that last word is a portmanteau of Trump & Musk.
Spoilsports! This is Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows
Don’t antagonize Trump during his imagined moment of triumph and glory. First, can he explain how selling oil to China made Iran strong in the last four years? Will they fight on the beaches, the hills, the mountains? Jerusalem?
You’ve just made Iran a super-power in the Middle East, Trump, and a laughingstock of the USA.
You’re not wrong about COBOL. Back when The Computer Museum was in Boston’s Fort Point Channel, next to where The Children’s Museum still is, they had The Cobol Tombstone on exhibit there – a marble effigy created long before and meant to declare the language dead.
