Just after the election I commented in a couple of venues (I think it was a Bulwark pod and on Lawfare.) that Trump would not be President by the end of his first year in office. It happened sooner than I expected.
Trump has licensed out the only use he has, to be outrageous, to discredit expertise, to lie, to be a demagogue, to keep MAGA and the left riled up, all performative distractions, while Voight fires and demoralizes the federal workforce to resign/dismantle the Federal Government. With the guard rails gone, and no one left to say otherwise, Musk can install his own algorithm Ai in his Technocracy to run government. But AI is not capable of that, and the house will burn down.
The majority of Americans still don’t fully grasp the capabilities of big tech’s persuasion to radicalization tools that Europe has realized and begun to regulate.
We should all look beyond Project 2025 to understand what is coming. Musk is brewing a complete transformation of our government in both structure and operations….an AGI system without human or representative oversight.
These are terms for some pretty weird worldviews from Silicon Valley driving this transformation:
Technocracy ( 1930-40s Canadian Fascist Movement)
Surveillance Capitalism
Singularity
I am starting to wonder if Musk is being directly influenced by AI already. As AI’s founder warned just a few years ago. Such blatant Sociopathy, another Malignant Narcissist, Musk seems very machine like in everything he does. Even his mistakes are mechanical.
Can I ask what I fear is a profoundly stupid question? With access to the treasury and homeland security computer systems, would it be possible to crash the US banking system? Not an economic crash, a technical crash. Freeze the banking system, or at least large swaths of it?
The reporting that Musk’s teenagers have embedded backdoor code into the treasury system, and now has access to Homeland Security, is keeping me awake at 3:44 AM.
I used to - back in the early 70s - be able to program in COBOL. I think their back-door add ons were put in too quickly to see what the real consequences of them are - so yes they could crash. I think their whole attitude is 'if it breaks, we'll fix it later'. Musk has his. You know he has siphoned a huge cash/gold hoard out of his many cash streams. He thinks he can weather any apocalypse... There is a reason the French used Guillotines on their Oligarchs.
Sorry to disagree, though I wish the instigators of the fire that's consuming us would be stopped as much as anyone.
Once the rule of law and civil society is lost its very, very hard to get it back. The French revolution was 10 years of horror and then they brought back in a monarch and Emperor to restore order. People will give away any amount of freedom to avoid anarchy. Afghanistan is a good example. The Taliban isn't/wasn't loved but they imposed order so that you could drive down a road and not be stopped and killed by a 16 year old thug with an assault rifle.
Don't forget how the adage "the revolution devours its own children" was born, including the guillotine accelerators - Robespierre and his Committee of Safety. Followed by, in several years, the Napoleonic Wars.
So I admit I live in a red state and don't feel safe wearing t or sweat shirt making my political views obvious I do, however wear a guillotine on a chain around my neck. Most MAGA don't know what it means but I do. The French revolution was bad and I'm not entirely sure the government they put in place was any better than the one they deposed but they were also peasants with no education and a life span of 30 years, if they were lucky. So I think we can do a little better than that, yeah.
Yes, ex cobol programmer too. That code was extremely brittle when it was written. Nothing can make it durable, anything will break it just enough to corrupt the underlying data through the next audit cycle. Add in a corrupt backup, and you will have a system that will need to be built fe scratch. Let them eat excel!
How IRONIC that the dimwit MAGAt JD Vance told the EU today that its leaders were afraid to defend democracy when he is helping the demented Orange POS destroy ours!! Go screw a couch asshole!!!
He is a deeply disturbed human being. Not surprising, given his unstable upbringing by people who didn't know how to make him feel safe and valued -- but the terrible consequence is that he's taking out his unresolved trauma on the rest of us.
He's driven to punish his mother -- unconsciously he wants to kill her (this heavily suppressed wish is very common among abused children), but bc he can't admit that painful truth to himself, he won't undergo therapy and instead makes every woman in the nation suffer (by trying to turn us into incubators if fertile and into baby-minders if not). He told an anecdote abt getting a "You're selected" call from djt and telling his young son (who had been animatedly telling jdv abt something) to "shut up" -- without realizing that he was disclosing volumes about how he views the parenting role (bc of how badly he was parented).
He's very cruel. He's devoid of insight and empathy. He's unconsciously driven by a desire to punish everyone (just like djt). But unlike djt, he's both book-smart enough and shrewd enough to know how to accomplish his ends. I think he's even more dangerous than djt.
His hatred of women is truly something to behold, there's run-of-the-mill misogyny and then there's whatever JD is afflicted with, which exists in an entirely different dimension. Layer that with his smug elitism (to the point of comparing IQ's with critics) and you have quite the little monster.
Seems pretty Freudian of you. Doesn't make it wrong, but there may be other ways to look at these two very badly damaged people. What Freud got right is that the damage happens early and gets repressed but is still at work unless addressed, even if he was often a little off about the details.
They are both amoral graspers, getting what they want in any way necessary. And they want everything, bottomless pits for whatever reasons.
Maybe some actual shrinks can chime in. I read a psych book or two about Donald but didn't get too enlightened.
This is true of both Veep Hillbilly and his boss. King MAGA >still< won't release his transcripts - even as he continues to brag about his time at Wharton.
There is a pattern. What did Orwell call it? double-speak?
What they say is the opposite of what they mean. Hopefully, what is happening here is a giant red-flashing warning light to the Europeans who have right-wing parties trying to do the same that they've done here.
I think we've been susceptible because something on this scale of illegality and norm breaking hasn't happened before. It was like when Bush/Cheney lied to invade Iraq. No one was prepared for the outright lies.
Our collective immune system hasn't been able to detect the insidious invaders. It is also what they counted on.
However, there are two strains of the "mind virus". The Project 2025 and the Elon Musk virus. I don't think they will always be acting hand in hand. Even the Federalist Society is now seeing they've been played by the kleptocrats.
That's all part of "Bronzo the Malignant's" Gish-Gallop. He does this stream of consciousness thing, like a three year old learning new words, who just looks around the room and babbles what they see to keep attention on them. Two weeks later everyone is distracted by the next torrent of lies.
The term for when people with dementia use repetitive, stock phrases that seem like answers, even when not directly responding to a question, is called "verbal perseveration". My father was very good at that in his last months.
How ironic that the Dems and their supporters complain about "democracy in peril" and that Trump is an authoritarian. Meanwhile, Trump and company are trying to reduce the size and power of the federal government through the shrinking of the executive branch. Now why would any authoritarian do that? Make government more efficient, save taxpayer dollars and reduce wasteful spending. It's appears to be mostly the Dems who are complaining about accountability and transparency.
Your reply is simply a collection of talking points. So what does that make a person communicating in BS?
There is no efficiency being introduced. I was with SSA for 43 years and lived with "reduce to make efficient" since Reagan assembled his CEO Grace Commission that reduced staffing by 20%. It was all ideology. The true reason is that libertarian d*ckheads just think taxation is theft and that anything the government disburses is dependence even if paid for by our own accumulated taxes.
You wouldn't know if agencies are efficient or not. 45 years of Reagan quotes while living in an information silo and the Dunning Kruger effect is apparent: those that don't know don't know enough to know they don't know.
You and your buds may think you're brilliant over your morning coffee, but after Musk crippled the agency overseeing our nuclear arsenal anyone with more sense than a parrot looking for treats knows this is amateur hour.
Good luck trying to reach anyone in the big, bad government when you beed them.
Hal, shrinking the workforce opens up many vacant positions for grift and cronyism. It also decreases resistance. Not to mention that authoritarians don’t like people who know more than they do. Ego thing.
Of course...please let me know when the "brownshirts" arrive and start rounding people up for the "re-education" camps. Maybe they will be more subtle than the Biden administration who "convinced" media outlets to suppress opinions that are contrary to that of the state (Covid, a certain laptop...).
But as far as I can see right now, there has been no purging of media outlets by government. You and I are still able to post pretty much whatever we want. The Constitution has not been suspended, and martial law has not been declared. Neither Congress nor the federal judiciary have been dissolved.
"Trump is destroying the government to put in his brownshirts." is great for rhetoric but there's absolutely no substance to it. If you truly believe Trump is destroying government, be a little more specific as to the "how". Don't just tell me I have fallen for some propaganda - lay out your case.
03. hollowing out of foreign service (intelligence)
04. eliminating birthright citizenship
05. abrupt closure of USAID
06. shuttering the CFPB & deleting its records going back 12 years
07. Eric Adams
08. Kash Patel
09. Bobby Kennedy
10. Tulsi Fucking Gabbard
11. A non elected billionaire given carte blanche to 'audit' efficiencies
12. firing of 19 Inspectors General
13. firing of FEC Chair
14. firing the head of Office of Special Counsel
15. firing the chair of MSPB (Merit Systems Protection Board)
Just the last 4 are enough to demonstrate he's destroying your government. Agencies whose mandate is to protect citizens (not oligarchs). It is plain to see from afar how your democracy is being whittled away, perhaps expand your media reach for more critical perspectives?
And speaking of media, the 'purging of media outlets' will prove completely unnecessary given they were all front row center at the inauguration. A 'hmmmmm' moment if I ever saw one.
Obviously, the intent is to loot, to convert to crypto then heist the treasury away… like clean it out, enrich their associates while sticking it to everyone else….if there’s a way to scam, grift, cheat, steal, no doubt they are on it… greedy stinking crappy corrupted evil thugs, soulless psychos… ruining peoples lives and hurting every one they can, they’ve eve said they want us to suffer and that’s what the #&*$%! are doing… the cruelty is despicable, hearing that sadistic shithead miller is pumping out the cruel, illegal EOs for felon47 to sign? how fucked up is that??? Of course, they’ve fucked up so much, it’s challenging to narrow it down, cruel #&*$%!
I have no idea, but considering that Musk and Trump are both pushing Bitcoin, I could see that they might try something dramatic to make their product look legit.
Their reported plan is to crash the dollar and make bitcoin “our” currency. Bitcoin not regulated, if it disappears well tough. Allegedly, felon47 has investors who recently lost 2 billion in bitcoin while he made out with 100 million in fees.
That is how the depression happened, stock market crash + crippling tariffs, plus panic run on banks.
"What were the major causes of the Great Depression? Among the suggested causes of the Great Depression are: the stock market crash of 1929; the collapse of world trade due to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff; government policies; bank failures and panics; and the collapse of the money supply."
Here's what Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post had to say about the $TRUMP token, introduced to the market just three days before Trump took office:
"Now people can bribe Donald Trump without having to pretend to stay at his hotel."
I’m saving my Topps Baseball Cards as the new US currency after Trumpfaltion ruins the dollar
and crypto is exposed as the Ponzi scheme it is .
Don’t laugh , I remember the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons where the banking system failed and Box Tops became the currency of choice- except Boris tried to counterfeit it . Maybe those cartoon characters were on to more than we ever knew ! Putin - stay away from my baseball cards ! !
I can’t criticize, because I tend to be fickle on the teams I follow. I follow the minor league OKC Dodgers on the radio quite a bit, we’ll have to compare notes after spring training on guys jumping up from the minors.
I have several diamonds that I wanted to sell. It seems like I should hold onto them instead. Gold and diamonds will get more valuable as Trump devalues the dollar.
Tracy- not likely. Most banks outsource their IT to one of a few large companies. You may have noticed how similar the customer facing screens are from one bank to another. That's because they use the same few outsources.
Dr. Krugman is mistaken about private businesses no longer using COBOL. I am responsible along with a few others for the life insurance systems for a Fortune 500 company. Most of the code is in COBOL - some 20 million lines of code. Several large life insurance companies still use COBOL and even Assembler which is older than COBOL.
I have consulted in the IT area of over 100 life insurance companies and banks and each company runs dozens of systems, most of which are vendor packages. I am unaware of a single one of these companies that doesn't still use COBOL or PL/I or RPG or BAL or FORTRAN on mainframes or large servers. Of course, all of their newer systems are service based using JAVA or other server based languages. I could list many of these companies, but I have signed NDAs with each of them and won't violate the confidentiality unlike Musk.
I get they’re using outdated languages (seriously? Written in assembly language?)? But that doesn’t address the question: with the information and access available from the Treasury and Homeland Security computer systems, could a bad actor, and I’m thinking Russian programmers, crash or freeze the system. I would love if the answer was “no.” But… is it?
COBOL is a pretty simple language to learn and use. If a user requests a report with say 10 fields say all of the payroll gross payouts for USAID, the programmer would start by determining how to select the information requested. This can be done in several different ways, but using SORT to include only the records for 2024, for USAID, and for the payroll account would select only the records for that report and sort it into a useable format.
Now that you have a very small subset of the overall Treasury transaction database, you would find a program that produces a similar report and copy the source code into your working library. At this point much of the "programming is done." Chances are there are similar reports already and it's very likely there is a 3rd generation language program like EZTRIEVE+ that is much simpler to use that already has the input file lad out. Then it's a matter of laying out the report. EZTRIEVE+ has a tally function like the SUM function in EXCEL so it is much easier than COBOL to sum columns for totals.
But, if you have a COBOL program that you can clone and modify it should only take a few hours to a few days to run it. And the sort file you create can be used over and over again to create different reports.
My fear is that somehow Musk's delinquents could change values of records in the database, add new records for which there was never a payout or delete records. And if things got really bad, backups from prior years could be deleted. Chances are that this couldn't happen because much of the old data would be stored in a secured site hundreds of miles away. And it's likely they are stored in the limestone caves that Musk calls limestone mines.
The Federal government has been using the caves around Kansas City since at least the 1960's for records backups and for keeping surplus food like cheese, dried eggs, etc.
Also these kids could download data onto flash drives or copy it onto laptops. This is the classic case of Trump stealing top secret files and lying about having them. Once the data is unsecured and leaves the Treasury, it can be hacked or used in anyway Musk and Trump want to use it or the Chinese or the Russians. It can be sold to the highest bidder. But there are no guarantees that the data hasn't been modified or corrupted to make it look like $50 million was spent on condoms for instance.
At this point, I trust none of the information Musk is saying he got from Treasury systems.
We already heard the story about the 150 year old still collecting SS. If you don't understand the format of the data, especially birthdays that cross centuries and only the last two digits of the year are saved, you can make some really bad assumptions.
came here to say this.. every large bank I've worked with still runs COBOL in their mission-critical systems. Most large corporations that have survived long enough, are still running their production COBOL also.
I was taught COBOL in 1978 in first-year computer science, when they said it was somewhat obsolete but useful to learn. No kidding, I'm about to retire and still deal with COBOL routinely..
Hi Doug. That's the year I learned COBOL as well. I answered an add for a programmer trainee at a life insurance company in Omaha. They gave me the IBM programmer aptitude test. Each question was 3 pictures and you had to select the next one in the sequence from 4 choices. To this day, I don't know how doing well on identifying sequences makes someone a good candidate to be a programmer.
Anyway, the insurance company was installing a large insurance package and converting all of their policies off of IBM's Autocoder system called CFO. The architecture of the IBM system is still the same basic architecture almost all of the life insurance systems are written in. The new system was about 98% Assembler and 2% COBOL.
I'm sure you heard over and over again how mainframes and COBOL would be obsolete by 1985 or 1990 or 2000 etc. And yet they are still around.
The server based system are incapable of handling the billions of data records that the mainframes can. Plus, it is so expensive to convert the data from one system to another. I've been involved with converting over 100,000,000 policies on dozens of conversions, but the last one was almost 20 years ago.
Well sort of off topic but I used to take tests (behind the scenes, helping people cheat so they could get a good job) for people trying to work at a Resolute Lumber mill. Ordinary stuff. Run the machinery, transform logs into boards etc and clean up. However they also were supposed to take and pass one of those "what's the next image in this series" or "which sides would be adjacent if this box were put together". Most of those people made perfect fine mill operators but they weren't good at that sort of test. Luckily it could be passed online so I could jump in for them. I swear some of that stuff was thought up by human resources geeks with no idea what skills were needed to run the business. Alas of course by helping those folks pass the test, I was reinforcing the perception that the test worked since they got a number of good employees out of it. We do have a lot of absurdities in all these systems I suppose. But I doubt Musk is the solution.
I have no doubt Musk is not the solution - he is the problem - amongst the many problems in His Orange MAGA Majesty's White House, starting with the MAGA King himself.
emptywheel has a good posting on this, particularly in the comment section. What I gathered from the commenters is that COBOL has many "dialects" depending on who wrote it and what changes, add ons were done over the decades.
I think that is exactly what they are doing. If you control the money you control the empire. And it's all illegal! Why oh why is our country allowing this to proceed?!
Because for 15 years, most Americans have spent almost every waking hour staring at a tiny screen loaded with content designed to play to their knowledge gaps and to their prejudices.
And because for 40+ years, the GOP has been economically assaulting everyone but the rich, creating massive suffering among 60% of the population while also expanding a propaganda machine (hate radio; Fox and its imitators) that has filled people's head with lies about Who Is Making Them Miserable, such that the GOP has been free to continue inflicting economic misery upon them, and evading blame for the resultant societal collapse.
We can thank Reagan, his acolytes, their ruinous economic policies, their elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, their reactionary zealotry (= "We want a white Christian patriarchal nation"), and their refusal to learn from history (= the perils of making lots of people poor, and thus ripe for radicalization) for all of the above. I also blame every American who has ever voted for any GOP, even once. The extremism, lies, and destructiveness of the party have been on full display since Nixon; no one who claims to value US democracy has any excuse for having cast even one vote for even one of them, ever.
Because most people don't pay attention to such things. In my county we had a recall election for a county commissioner. It took place a month after the general election. In the general election the voters chose the Radical Republicans because they don't pay attention to local news. In the special recall election the county commissioner went down with a 64% vote against him. That's because the people who voted in the special election were the ones who read our excellent local newspaper.
I was cheered by the recall because it was a bipartisan effort.
Their reported plan is to crash the dollar and make bitcoin “our” currency. Bitcoin is not regulated, if it disappears well tough. Allegedly, felon47 has investors who recently lost 2 billion in bitcoin while he made out with 100 million in fees.
It's a money laundering scheme. Foreign influences buy the bit coin to help drive up the price. Then the primary bitcoin holder sells at top dollar having easily gained multiple times the original price. The bitcoin may crash (look up Hawk Tuah girl bitcoin) but the Primary owner has already cashed out. The foreign investors don't care, they've paid their "mob dues". If it does crash, the small investors are the real losers.
And the crypto-douche-bros are gambling to drive the price up here, are just doing a pump and dump, those are the ones who make money by defrauding the greater fools who buy in late.
On the other hand, it might make guys like Putin quite happy. I’m not sure there’s much reason to assume that Elmo and Donny are not doing Putin’s bidding intentionally or otherwise .
I believe this massive money grab, not just the treasury, but his billionaire buddies and taking money from FEMA and God knows where else is, at least in part, to bail pukin out… look at WHAT THEY ARE DOING.
I hate to say it, but there's the adage, "Art imitates life." If you've ever watched the Die Hard movies, one of them is about grabbing the US financial systems records via a convoluted plot. fElon doesn't even need the convoluted scheme from the movie. He's already in.
Keep in mind that the US Treasury computer system has the bank account info for everyone, every business that ever made a payment to or received a payment from the US Treasury. I don't know how anyone thinks that it's OK for fElon to have access to that info! As we've already seen, he's illegally retrieved money previously disbursed. That's a crime right there.
Tracy, I just wanted to let you know that you are not alone in your concerns, I started wondering the same thing about two weeks ago so I bought a fireproof safe. It didn’t seem like a bad idea to have a little cash on hand for emergencies, plus there are many other uses!
Coincidently, a friend recently told me to put it in PVC tubing and bury it in the backyard. It seemed to be more a ploy to avoid inheritance taxes than anything else though.
Inheritance taxes? Oh, good God, at the level those kick in attorneys, insurance policies, and offshore tax havens--not PVC tubing buried in the backyard--are the methods of tax avoidance at that level of wealth.
Very glad you asked this question and your follow-ups and appreciate the information provided by those with coding expertise in response by Gary Loft and others.
I'm not an economist but I sure can understand this column which leads me to believe, like Mr. Krugman says, the Trump admin will have to cook the books which will lead to awful distortions not only in finance but in health care and other areas like the FAA and others.
I have been reading Paul Krugman for some twenty years and I always found both solace and information - and typically brilliant analysis and synthesis, in not so many words. I am a renowned theoretical physicist, and I know very well how hard it is to catch the essence and then explain it to others. Moreover, I particularly valued his constant warning us that the GOP is slowly but surely turning into a fascist movement.
Not that I did not know that - I saw it literally the day after Reagan took office, starting from the outset a politics of lies, ignoring of facts, and frontal attack on social programs that are the core of democracy. I learned my craft in the States in the seventies, in that great era when the US was leading research in high energy physics, but I was to witness an almost total destruction of my field, the closing of our accelerator in Brookhaven National Laboratory where I worked, and again the cancellation of the Supercollider project, after more than billion dollars were spent. I felt I had no choice but to go back to Europe, where now my American colleagues do their experiments, at CERN in Geneva, not in the States. The rest is tragic history, we could say, and one was to witness, day after day, the US falling behind Europe in almost every aspect of the quality of life - not even having basic health insurance, guaranteed to all citizens, to us something unimaginable.
And so, just as Krugman kept predicting, it took us here - fascism has opened the door into American democracy. It was Krugman who kept arguing, as a great economist, what I knew from my own vision of history: that unsustainable social differences lead, almost inevitably, to fascism. We all know how crazy these differences today are in the US. They led to the richest person in the world, an insane white supremacist, becoming a deciding figure in policy shaping, without being elected to any office. His positive image was being built for years, even by the NYT where Krugman was writing, and the Washington Post, to mention some of the every best newspapers in the country, if not in the world.
I kept being troubled, deeply worried, and could not comprehend how Krugman could keep writing in the NYT, especially when in the last two years all my polite, thoughtful, careful attempts to defend the Palestinians that are threatened to be eradicated or expelled from their land, were censored. We talk of what could, and I for one believe should, be argued to be a genocide, directly supported and encouraged by the US. It was Biden who created Netanyahu, not Trump, it was Biden who made sure to save a Trump-like criminal with nazi politics from ending up in jail, after losing one process after another. Even after witnessing hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv desperately trying to save their democracy and coexistence with the Palestinians. Israel was under total attack from inside, far worse than the US today, and almost nobody in the States moved a finger to help them. To me that signalled the beginning of the end of democracy in the US - democracy is about solidarity as much as the rule of law.
But Krugman finally left the NYT, and I felt relief and finally some hope. And so I am here, and again I see a beautiful analysis of his, as clear and coherent as ever. However, for the life of me, I cannot understand what purpose it serves now. We know, us here, that Musk and Trump are leading the US, with their insanity, evil, stupidity, whatever, towards fascism. The time for subtle analysis is gone.
To continue with it is to pretend that this is still a question of political disagreement within a democratic process. I saw this in my country, Yugoslavia, when people kept ignoring reality, pretending the war was not going to happen. I do not claim that the situation is the same as there and then, and I do not pretend to have a magic solution, but all my experience, my knowledge of history, a sense of logic, and my instincts, tell me that it is high time to affront the fascism that is threatening the very core of democracy. And if you wish to have any hope of succeeding, I believe from the bottom of my heart that you must include, in your daily worries, writings, care, solidarity, empathy, the plight of Palestinians that have been persecuted in front of our eyes. This has been happening for almost 80 years, when in 1948 three quarters of million of them were expelled from their land, never to be allowed to come back, and now it has reached the unimaginable: the complete destruction of a people and its country. If we believe in humanity and humanism, then you and I have to find time, every day of our lives, to pause and reflect on their tragedy, and fight for their bodies and souls, as we do for ours.
Americans have to accept the fact that thieves and idiots (aka fElon and Felon) have taken over the government. Other countries have legislation that prevents convicted felons from running for office, and ban politicians or candidates from taking enormous payments from private parties. We just happily went along assuming this would never happen. Welp... two critical pieces of legislation that dems need to introduce concern exactly banning those two things.
It would take a Constitutional Amendment. If we survive, it is going to take a raft of them. We have seen just how fast people unconcerned by the Constitution and the concept of a Nation of Laws, could overrun and put down a 249 year old republic.
You can amend the Constitution to work around Citizens United. Overlook the name- this is a great idea and may be the only thing to save us from too much money in politics. American Promise.
Except the way the states are configured, any Constitutional convention would probably just usher in MAGAtLand, written according to Musk's and Cheeto's specifications.
Always. Those who understand the importance of prayer have been doing it. Those who disbelieve in prayer are unlikely to change their minds at this moment.
LOL, for those who believe in prayer, I'd say that current events are definitely showing that belief to be nothing more than a triumph of hope over experience.
Musk and Trump behave like people on the sociopath/psychopath spectrum, Trump more to the latter. As such they lie, have always lied and will never admit they were wrong. This is behavior they have exhibited throughout their lives but because of luck, wealth, and power have never been held to account for their misdeeds. What I'm saying is don't expect rational responses, honesty or mea culpas from either of them. Anything good will be because of their brilliance and anything bad will be because of someone else...... in that they are similar politicians, but much worse.
Every person associated with the Trump/Musk crime syndicate needs to be frog-marched through thr streets of DC and pelted with excrement...for starters
Med school textbook pictures always show the worst cases, particularly for dermatology. If one could take a photo of mental disease, these guys are definitely textbook material. They're like the 5sqin herpes breakout.
I have a bumper sticker that says: they want 1939 Germany, let’s give them 1789 France. I haven’t had any backlash because 1) it’s too much reading for MAGA and 2) none of them have a clue of world history.
Can anyone explain to me what happens when these geniuses start to "invest" our tax dollars in Bitcoin? It seems relevant to Paul's line of thinking in this blog post.
Of course inflation will be zero % as will unemployment. The deficit will shrink due to tax cuts and life expectancy will hit 90. All because of the economic brilliance of the orange felon. /s
When you control the numbers, anything is possible.
COBOL — obsolete in the business world but still used in government
I assume the IBM marketing department will be along shortly to point out that there are still millions of lines of COBOL code still running on mainframes owned by Fortune 500 companies (banks, airlines, insurance companies, etc). For example, mainframes handle 90% of all credit card transactions. I'm guessing that most if not all of that is COBOL code (running in CICS, the original application server).
COBOL is a compiled language: a first step in the process, the step that interacts with the programer. So it actually does not run on computers, it is compiled and further processed into code that controls the computer.
No sorry, I was replying to G Taylor's comment, but it landed under yours. I am actually curious as to how COBOL is handled these days. Are there still compilers (when programs need changes), or does one translate to a modern language and compile from there? I hope the method adopted is the one providing the best security.
Still compilers, just like there are compilers for C, C++, and Fortran. Going straight to assembly rather than running intermediate code (like C#) or interpreted code (like JavaScript, GACK!) is still the fastest way to run code on a computer.
Us actual "hackers" resent that remark. In our world of computer engineering a "Hacker" is a skilled, hard-working engineer that works with discipline and persistence. This role existed long before the typical family discovered personal computers and AOL. The criminals that public media call "hackers" are not, they are criminals.
No we don't. We only started >calling ourselves hackers< long after the term was applied to the criminals.
In fact, hacking didn't even begin with criminals. It was just kids sitting in mom's basement breaking into systems for fun. Someone figured out there could be a profit in it, and so it turned criminal.
Your letting your age show - I can assure you that the honorary title of "Hacker" existed long before the media associated it with computer criminals. The idea that it was "just kids in Mom's basement" is such a time-based concept from the Nineties because prior to the Nineties Mom did not have a computer. But those of us who operated or owned computers in the Seventies already used that title of respect. And will still use it with the original intended meaning. But do go on enjoying modern culture if it suits you.
Letting my age show? Vintage '63. Damn few people owned and operated computers back then, most of them Radio Shack's Tandy (insanely expensive and pathetically weak - especially by today's standards).
The whole Y2K initiative made a lot of COBOL programmers rich. I'm sure a ton of that code is still chugging along at banks and insurance companies to this day.
BS The mainframes are optimized for data processing. Have you ever seen a performance comparison between VISANET and Bitcoin? VISANET clocks in at 0.00358 kw h/tx. Bitcoin clocks in at (depending on how long it takes a miner to add a txn to the blockchain) 360.4 to 3691.4 kW h/tx. And no, I didn't leave a decimal point in the wrong place somewhere.
I have stopped debating this for a long time. But I will bite this time.
Any programming language can produce spaghetti codes. It is the the fault of a programmer, not the language. Recently, I wrote a python program and it is only about a thousand lines or so to access a large database. It took my program 4 hours to run. Another less experienced program wrote the same program, his program caused thrashing and never finish running. In the mid-80, when Information Engineering was the in-thing, people introduced program generators. Many COBOL programs were recoded with these program generators and the end results were spaghetti codes that were not readable. Over time, without documentation and experienced business area experts, it will be difficult to understands the logic of those programs. I do not know the US Treasury used those generator or not. If they do, it will take a lot of time to reverse engineering them. In addition, there are assembler codes. It will make it even harder. Therefore, I will not believe these kids will understand these systems.
These kids are coming from a different computing world, they will not know much about the IBM operating environment like, RACF, LPAR, Subsystems etc. If you quiz them on these, they will not know the answer.
As G Taylor said, IBM mainframes are optimized for data processing. Its hardware design is actually very advanced and end-to-end transaction throughput is very fast. One aspect that distributed computing can never beat mainframe is the network latency. A distributed applications that traverses multiple hops will slow it down. My latest customer had their mainframe system migrated to a distributed environment. Performance of the mainframe system beat that of the distributed system handily. But talking about performance is at times irrelevant What is relevant is (1) what type of application is running. An accounting clerk may not matter that much if it is slow by a few milli-seconds. But if it is an ATM, a long wait will be unacceptable. And therefore (2) what is acceptable from the point of view of an end users is a better measure and it varies from application to application.
In actual fact, one reason that bitcoin has difficulty to be used in real life is the performance of the bitcoin verification process. It took 10 minutes or longer to finish a verification. Imagine that you have to wait more than 10 minutes to pay for a coffee. I downloaded the bitcoin source codes which is in C/C++, It is just unreadable in certain parts. Interestingly, no one thinks that bitcoin is backward in spite of its using an old language, performance and comprehensibility.
True, COBOL has a bad reputation because of its age and misinformation. But the real issue is that no young computing programmer is willing to work with it. It is extremely hard to find programmers to maintain these systems.
Wow. There's a lot to unpack there. You raise some really good points there, although I think network latency has reached negligible levels with the advent of fiber optics. Distributed computing's advantage is data access from any source from anywhere in the world - or even space for that matter. Of course, sometimes those data sources aren't themselves up to speed, thus creating a bottleneck.
The main reason youngsters (or even oldsters like me) aren't interested in COBOL is because there aren't a helluva lot of jobs available in that language. And you're right, spaghetti can be written in any language - I've had to suffer through debugging my share of it, that's for sure. In all honesty though, C/C++ (and their derivations - Java, Javascript, Perl, PHP, even Python etc.) is less prone to it because, thanks to it's compact syntax, you can write a routine in 5 lines that would take 30 in COBOL.
You are all WAY above my head, but I've read (Wired magazine?)that one of the Muskrats is studying COBOL now, probably for this very reason. It is encouraging that you say Bitcoin or crypto in general would take too long to process for daily transactions.
Sorry if I make any one confused. It is easy to learn a language. The difficult part is to understand an application system's business rules and logics (say a ledger system. You have to understand the journal entries and some accounting rules). That, in turn, will require a understanding of the relationship between entities (objects, in some language) and the roles they play. Learning the infrastructure involved may also be required for more complicated issues. Giving time, most people will figure out the systems. It may take a shorter time if you get help from some subject area experts and good documentation. Otherwise, how can these system be maintained? In addition, it also depends on what they try to change. One scary part is that one person among the muskrats tried to make change in the development environment and put it into production right away without serious testing. It shows their ignorance and inexperience. It may crash the system and require backout (that posts a risk sometimes).
Bitcoin or many crypto can take a long time to be verified and put the transaction involved into the distributed ledger. But not all applications require sub-second response. One of the idea of crypto is to debank /DeFI, for instance, making loans or injecting capital into a company (say IPO) That will not need fast response. Trust/legalility (a lot of scam is going on) are the challenges. But that can also be solved if say an investment banker like Goldman Sachs become the trustee. Many of the crypto people (I think they are mostly anarchists) are pushing for deregulation and that, I believe, can be risky without some serious deliberation. Look at what the orange clown did.
Sorry, just one last comment on this topic. In mainframe, when an application, such as a CICS transaction or a TSO batch job, accesses data in a DBMS, it is subsystem to subsystem call via control blocks. There is no wiring, no router/switches, and no IP/MAC address resolution. Therefore no network latency for this part. A multi-tiers distributed application is different.
There are mainframe jobs but most often, it is through networking (confusing word here ) :-). Management gives up looking and programmers are mostly not interested.
"It is now unclear to co-authors of the bird flu research outside the agency when the research will ever be published, weeks after it was ready to go."
It is hard to believe that the malfeasance and incompetence of government agents with power is regretted by top leaders of the present administration.
My doctoral work in the 1990s was on immigration and nationality as a comparative law subject.
A query on ChatGPT just now, relating to bias, discrimination, racial prejudice against Puerto Ricans yielded an interesting answer. Note that over a decade ago all prior PR birth certificates were invalidated and reissued in a secure format because of forgery and fraud. And that PR is not a party to the Interstate Driving License Compact and its driving licenses can’t be exchanged and may be valid only for tourists in many states. How many Puerto Ricans (and other Americans) travel with passports?
“There have been multiple reports of Puerto Ricans being wrongfully detained by ICE and law enforcement in the U.S., despite their status as U.S. citizens. Some of these cases occurred in Newark, New Jersey, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and other areas.
“For example, ICE agents in Newark detained a Puerto Rican military veteran without a warrant, even after he showed his veteran ID. In Milwaukee, a Puerto Rican mother, her child, and her grandmother were taken to an immigration detention center after being overheard speaking “Spanish. Additionally, ICE agents reportedly raided a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia without a warrant, simply because it was Puerto Rican-owned .
“These incidents have sparked concerns among lawmakers, with U.S. representatives calling for investigations into ICE’s actions. Many believe these cases stem from racial profiling and a lack of proper procedural oversight.”
Racial profiling is the foundation of current Republican policies, and it isn’t affecting just Puerto Ricans. Arizona news media have reported Navajo Nation members garnering ICE attention, especially if living off the reservation. Unfortunately this was completely predictable. Judging people by their appearance doesn’t work, just look at Ted Bundy.
Yes, I noticed on right wing sites that some seemed to think that oil and gasoline prices could fall to what they were in the pandemic under Trump (probably because Trump told them so).
However, this ignores the fact that at these low prices, driven down by plummeting demand as people were shut in, forced oil companies to cut production because they were losing money, and this was a global phenomenon of roughly 10 million + BPD less in production.
In fact, some smaller domestic oil companies even went bankrupt.
When vaccines suddenly went out with speed, demand surged under Biden, so since production had declined in the pandemic, prices rose.
It can take quite a while for production to ramp back up and oil companies (like most businesses) were concerned about new covid variants causing another collapse.
So, it took awhile, but under Biden, production has only increased and is now at record highs, because private companies do what is in their own best interest.
There is no incentive right now to produce more when OPEC has excess capacity of something like 5 million BPD and EVs are being sold globally, especially in large nations like India and China and as Krugman points out, prices are approaching the break-even points for new drilling.
Thus, no oil company would willingly have prices fall that low again, like they were in the pandemic, it was simply caused by falling demand from the pandemic itself, an anomaly. Too much production would be the same flip side of supply and demand pressure on prices.
The sheer stupidity of our current president (especially in all matters regarding business) is astounding.
Clearly, this man has had others do things for him his whole life and does not actually know how anything works.
Musk does not seem to know how economies or the federal budget works, or he would not be taking a hacksaw to agencies. It seems all for show. By supporting Trump and what he wants to do, he actually puts his own future businesses in jeopardy. One wonders if he is really that clueless or if he has another objective regarding power.
The government's role in our economy is nothing like a business. It is not intended to be. Its role is part of a whole circular economic system and not a single point of reference in an economy, like a business is.
As a large part of a circular system of millions of interconnecting gears, putting cogs in the works can have impacts far beyond that first disrupted gear, thus one needs to proceed with caution and realize what one does impacts the whole economy and also the well being of our nation and those in it and can shrink GDP.
It makes one wonder if Musk has always delegated to experts, as well. If you delegate you need experienced people who know what they are actually doing. It seems he had perhaps been a good delegator in the past, hiring good people and engineers for his businesses or he had good people hiring them. However, Trump and Musk clearly do not know how an economy works as a system, or they intentionally are out to do damage.
Sadly, the false notion of a business model for the federal government is popular among many in the public who do not know how our economy works as a system and who may not realize that doing things this way, does not work and can cause massive damage to our economy and our nation.
Comparing the federal government to a business is like comparing apples to oranges.
Actually, comparing 2 similarly sized mostly round fruit examples, is way too generous.
It is more like comparing a pond to the entire water cycle.
Oh, and tariffs on Canadian natural gas and power exports will also cause wholesale gas and power prices to rise and lead to higher utility bills. The orange malignancy will continue. But who cares if we all die of bird flu, right?
The Musk/Trump Oval Office shots make it clear that Trump is now PRINO, President in Name Only.
aka the PINOTUS
PINO-cchio-TUS
A puppet and a liar
Just after the election I commented in a couple of venues (I think it was a Bulwark pod and on Lawfare.) that Trump would not be President by the end of his first year in office. It happened sooner than I expected.
Many have been referring to #PresidentMusk and PINO Trump.
PINO Orange!
Trump has licensed out the only use he has, to be outrageous, to discredit expertise, to lie, to be a demagogue, to keep MAGA and the left riled up, all performative distractions, while Voight fires and demoralizes the federal workforce to resign/dismantle the Federal Government. With the guard rails gone, and no one left to say otherwise, Musk can install his own algorithm Ai in his Technocracy to run government. But AI is not capable of that, and the house will burn down.
The majority of Americans still don’t fully grasp the capabilities of big tech’s persuasion to radicalization tools that Europe has realized and begun to regulate.
We should all look beyond Project 2025 to understand what is coming. Musk is brewing a complete transformation of our government in both structure and operations….an AGI system without human or representative oversight.
These are terms for some pretty weird worldviews from Silicon Valley driving this transformation:
Technocracy ( 1930-40s Canadian Fascist Movement)
Surveillance Capitalism
Singularity
I am starting to wonder if Musk is being directly influenced by AI already. As AI’s founder warned just a few years ago. Such blatant Sociopathy, another Malignant Narcissist, Musk seems very machine like in everything he does. Even his mistakes are mechanical.
Only so so, Malice is very much the name of the game, eg Kennedy Center, tariffs against major allies, such as Canada.
Can I ask what I fear is a profoundly stupid question? With access to the treasury and homeland security computer systems, would it be possible to crash the US banking system? Not an economic crash, a technical crash. Freeze the banking system, or at least large swaths of it?
The reporting that Musk’s teenagers have embedded backdoor code into the treasury system, and now has access to Homeland Security, is keeping me awake at 3:44 AM.
I used to - back in the early 70s - be able to program in COBOL. I think their back-door add ons were put in too quickly to see what the real consequences of them are - so yes they could crash. I think their whole attitude is 'if it breaks, we'll fix it later'. Musk has his. You know he has siphoned a huge cash/gold hoard out of his many cash streams. He thinks he can weather any apocalypse... There is a reason the French used Guillotines on their Oligarchs.
My thought exactly, the French about 250 years ago had a very effective method to deal with their 1% assholes!!!
Sorry to disagree, though I wish the instigators of the fire that's consuming us would be stopped as much as anyone.
Once the rule of law and civil society is lost its very, very hard to get it back. The French revolution was 10 years of horror and then they brought back in a monarch and Emperor to restore order. People will give away any amount of freedom to avoid anarchy. Afghanistan is a good example. The Taliban isn't/wasn't loved but they imposed order so that you could drive down a road and not be stopped and killed by a 16 year old thug with an assault rifle.
The guillotine was the French cure for
“ affluenza “
Don't forget how the adage "the revolution devours its own children" was born, including the guillotine accelerators - Robespierre and his Committee of Safety. Followed by, in several years, the Napoleonic Wars.
So I admit I live in a red state and don't feel safe wearing t or sweat shirt making my political views obvious I do, however wear a guillotine on a chain around my neck. Most MAGA don't know what it means but I do. The French revolution was bad and I'm not entirely sure the government they put in place was any better than the one they deposed but they were also peasants with no education and a life span of 30 years, if they were lucky. So I think we can do a little better than that, yeah.
The National Razor
He got the wrong guy!
Let's call this French solution the FUGOTO.
OMFG! ROFLMFAO!
I have a nice, sharp cleaver (literally Cleaver Magazine) but maybe I need a guillotine.
Or 'if it breaks, LOLOLOLOL!!!!!'
Yes, ex cobol programmer too. That code was extremely brittle when it was written. Nothing can make it durable, anything will break it just enough to corrupt the underlying data through the next audit cycle. Add in a corrupt backup, and you will have a system that will need to be built fe scratch. Let them eat excel!
"Make Guillotines great again!"
How IRONIC that the dimwit MAGAt JD Vance told the EU today that its leaders were afraid to defend democracy when he is helping the demented Orange POS destroy ours!! Go screw a couch asshole!!!
He is a deeply disturbed human being. Not surprising, given his unstable upbringing by people who didn't know how to make him feel safe and valued -- but the terrible consequence is that he's taking out his unresolved trauma on the rest of us.
He's driven to punish his mother -- unconsciously he wants to kill her (this heavily suppressed wish is very common among abused children), but bc he can't admit that painful truth to himself, he won't undergo therapy and instead makes every woman in the nation suffer (by trying to turn us into incubators if fertile and into baby-minders if not). He told an anecdote abt getting a "You're selected" call from djt and telling his young son (who had been animatedly telling jdv abt something) to "shut up" -- without realizing that he was disclosing volumes about how he views the parenting role (bc of how badly he was parented).
He's very cruel. He's devoid of insight and empathy. He's unconsciously driven by a desire to punish everyone (just like djt). But unlike djt, he's both book-smart enough and shrewd enough to know how to accomplish his ends. I think he's even more dangerous than djt.
His hatred of women is truly something to behold, there's run-of-the-mill misogyny and then there's whatever JD is afflicted with, which exists in an entirely different dimension. Layer that with his smug elitism (to the point of comparing IQ's with critics) and you have quite the little monster.
Seems pretty Freudian of you. Doesn't make it wrong, but there may be other ways to look at these two very badly damaged people. What Freud got right is that the damage happens early and gets repressed but is still at work unless addressed, even if he was often a little off about the details.
They are both amoral graspers, getting what they want in any way necessary. And they want everything, bottomless pits for whatever reasons.
Maybe some actual shrinks can chime in. I read a psych book or two about Donald but didn't get too enlightened.
No shrinks needed here. It's pretty obvious really, they're all blatant psychopaths!
He also isn't very intelligent, despite the Ivy League pedigree.
This is true of both Veep Hillbilly and his boss. King MAGA >still< won't release his transcripts - even as he continues to brag about his time at Wharton.
100% agree
There is a pattern. What did Orwell call it? double-speak?
What they say is the opposite of what they mean. Hopefully, what is happening here is a giant red-flashing warning light to the Europeans who have right-wing parties trying to do the same that they've done here.
I think we've been susceptible because something on this scale of illegality and norm breaking hasn't happened before. It was like when Bush/Cheney lied to invade Iraq. No one was prepared for the outright lies.
Our collective immune system hasn't been able to detect the insidious invaders. It is also what they counted on.
However, there are two strains of the "mind virus". The Project 2025 and the Elon Musk virus. I don't think they will always be acting hand in hand. Even the Federalist Society is now seeing they've been played by the kleptocrats.
I'd like to hear more about your Federalist Society comment.
Speaking as someone living outside the US, I think Vance is helping Trump in his hybrid war to acquire Greenland and Canada and perhaps the EU
That's all part of "Bronzo the Malignant's" Gish-Gallop. He does this stream of consciousness thing, like a three year old learning new words, who just looks around the room and babbles what they see to keep attention on them. Two weeks later everyone is distracted by the next torrent of lies.
A lot of that is just a symptom of dementia
Yes. He knows just enough to pretend it means something.
The term for when people with dementia use repetitive, stock phrases that seem like answers, even when not directly responding to a question, is called "verbal perseveration". My father was very good at that in his last months.
"How IRONIC that the dimwit..."
How ironic that the Dems and their supporters complain about "democracy in peril" and that Trump is an authoritarian. Meanwhile, Trump and company are trying to reduce the size and power of the federal government through the shrinking of the executive branch. Now why would any authoritarian do that? Make government more efficient, save taxpayer dollars and reduce wasteful spending. It's appears to be mostly the Dems who are complaining about accountability and transparency.
Your reply is simply a collection of talking points. So what does that make a person communicating in BS?
There is no efficiency being introduced. I was with SSA for 43 years and lived with "reduce to make efficient" since Reagan assembled his CEO Grace Commission that reduced staffing by 20%. It was all ideology. The true reason is that libertarian d*ckheads just think taxation is theft and that anything the government disburses is dependence even if paid for by our own accumulated taxes.
You wouldn't know if agencies are efficient or not. 45 years of Reagan quotes while living in an information silo and the Dunning Kruger effect is apparent: those that don't know don't know enough to know they don't know.
You and your buds may think you're brilliant over your morning coffee, but after Musk crippled the agency overseeing our nuclear arsenal anyone with more sense than a parrot looking for treats knows this is amateur hour.
Good luck trying to reach anyone in the big, bad government when you beed them.
Hal, shrinking the workforce opens up many vacant positions for grift and cronyism. It also decreases resistance. Not to mention that authoritarians don’t like people who know more than they do. Ego thing.
You have fallen for the propaganda. Trump is destroying the government to put in his brownshirts.
Probably, since his comment does not reflect reality.
Methinks he's just trolling.
Of course...please let me know when the "brownshirts" arrive and start rounding people up for the "re-education" camps. Maybe they will be more subtle than the Biden administration who "convinced" media outlets to suppress opinions that are contrary to that of the state (Covid, a certain laptop...).
But as far as I can see right now, there has been no purging of media outlets by government. You and I are still able to post pretty much whatever we want. The Constitution has not been suspended, and martial law has not been declared. Neither Congress nor the federal judiciary have been dissolved.
"Trump is destroying the government to put in his brownshirts." is great for rhetoric but there's absolutely no substance to it. If you truly believe Trump is destroying government, be a little more specific as to the "how". Don't just tell me I have fallen for some propaganda - lay out your case.
01. hollowing out of DOJ including prosecutors
02. hollowing out of FBI
03. hollowing out of foreign service (intelligence)
04. eliminating birthright citizenship
05. abrupt closure of USAID
06. shuttering the CFPB & deleting its records going back 12 years
07. Eric Adams
08. Kash Patel
09. Bobby Kennedy
10. Tulsi Fucking Gabbard
11. A non elected billionaire given carte blanche to 'audit' efficiencies
12. firing of 19 Inspectors General
13. firing of FEC Chair
14. firing the head of Office of Special Counsel
15. firing the chair of MSPB (Merit Systems Protection Board)
Just the last 4 are enough to demonstrate he's destroying your government. Agencies whose mandate is to protect citizens (not oligarchs). It is plain to see from afar how your democracy is being whittled away, perhaps expand your media reach for more critical perspectives?
And speaking of media, the 'purging of media outlets' will prove completely unnecessary given they were all front row center at the inauguration. A 'hmmmmm' moment if I ever saw one.
You could have listed over 100 EOs and a few more agencies, like the FAA, the CIA, etc. But that's a really good start off the top of your head.
You are clearly lost in the right wing propaganda world.
When reality hits you won't know where to turn. I'll be watching it with amusement.
He’s “shrinking” only the parts that can check him, like the independent inspectors general. Exactly how an authoritarian would consolidate power.
Not so much. How can the FAA check him? Or the Department of Education?
Obviously, the intent is to loot, to convert to crypto then heist the treasury away… like clean it out, enrich their associates while sticking it to everyone else….if there’s a way to scam, grift, cheat, steal, no doubt they are on it… greedy stinking crappy corrupted evil thugs, soulless psychos… ruining peoples lives and hurting every one they can, they’ve eve said they want us to suffer and that’s what the #&*$%! are doing… the cruelty is despicable, hearing that sadistic shithead miller is pumping out the cruel, illegal EOs for felon47 to sign? how fucked up is that??? Of course, they’ve fucked up so much, it’s challenging to narrow it down, cruel #&*$%!
I have no idea, but considering that Musk and Trump are both pushing Bitcoin, I could see that they might try something dramatic to make their product look legit.
Their reported plan is to crash the dollar and make bitcoin “our” currency. Bitcoin not regulated, if it disappears well tough. Allegedly, felon47 has investors who recently lost 2 billion in bitcoin while he made out with 100 million in fees.
And he's going to rake in even more with the $KingMAGAcoin and $QueenMAGAcoin.
Sovereign Wealth Fund laundry service for UHNWI w/o Congress approval of purpose (public hopefully ?) or even oversight…
Maybe there needs to be a run on the banks?
Careful what you wish for - it could happen, and it won't be pretty for any of us.
That is how the depression happened, stock market crash + crippling tariffs, plus panic run on banks.
"What were the major causes of the Great Depression? Among the suggested causes of the Great Depression are: the stock market crash of 1929; the collapse of world trade due to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff; government policies; bank failures and panics; and the collapse of the money supply."
https://www.stlouisfed.org/the-great-depression/curriculum/economic-episodes-in-american-history-part-5
Exactly. Not to mention 2007-2008. Wasn't Glass-Steagall supposed to prevent that? Oh, wait, it was repealed. Never mind. Carry on.
It's even worse than that. They've introduced their own cryptocurrency - you could call them $KingTrump and $QueenTrump.
Here's what Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post had to say about the $TRUMP token, introduced to the market just three days before Trump took office:
"Now people can bribe Donald Trump without having to pretend to stay at his hotel."
I’m saving my Topps Baseball Cards as the new US currency after Trumpfaltion ruins the dollar
and crypto is exposed as the Ponzi scheme it is .
Don’t laugh , I remember the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons where the banking system failed and Box Tops became the currency of choice- except Boris tried to counterfeit it . Maybe those cartoon characters were on to more than we ever knew ! Putin - stay away from my baseball cards ! !
$Boriscoin and $Natashacoin! You know, there's something strangely appropriate about that considering that King MAGA is a Russian asset.
Mahst keel Moose and Sqwerrel!
I'm with you brother. Which MLB team you follow??
I grew up a Milwaukee Braves fan, after they went to Atlanta- and I moved to California- I became a Dodger fan . Don’t hate me for that !
I can’t criticize, because I tend to be fickle on the teams I follow. I follow the minor league OKC Dodgers on the radio quite a bit, we’ll have to compare notes after spring training on guys jumping up from the minors.
I'm a Brooklyn boy, but the Brooklyn Bums left before I was born. I'm pretty old now but I'm not >that< old.
I have several diamonds that I wanted to sell. It seems like I should hold onto them instead. Gold and diamonds will get more valuable as Trump devalues the dollar.
Tracy- not likely. Most banks outsource their IT to one of a few large companies. You may have noticed how similar the customer facing screens are from one bank to another. That's because they use the same few outsources.
Dr. Krugman is mistaken about private businesses no longer using COBOL. I am responsible along with a few others for the life insurance systems for a Fortune 500 company. Most of the code is in COBOL - some 20 million lines of code. Several large life insurance companies still use COBOL and even Assembler which is older than COBOL.
I have consulted in the IT area of over 100 life insurance companies and banks and each company runs dozens of systems, most of which are vendor packages. I am unaware of a single one of these companies that doesn't still use COBOL or PL/I or RPG or BAL or FORTRAN on mainframes or large servers. Of course, all of their newer systems are service based using JAVA or other server based languages. I could list many of these companies, but I have signed NDAs with each of them and won't violate the confidentiality unlike Musk.
I get they’re using outdated languages (seriously? Written in assembly language?)? But that doesn’t address the question: with the information and access available from the Treasury and Homeland Security computer systems, could a bad actor, and I’m thinking Russian programmers, crash or freeze the system. I would love if the answer was “no.” But… is it?
COBOL is a pretty simple language to learn and use. If a user requests a report with say 10 fields say all of the payroll gross payouts for USAID, the programmer would start by determining how to select the information requested. This can be done in several different ways, but using SORT to include only the records for 2024, for USAID, and for the payroll account would select only the records for that report and sort it into a useable format.
Now that you have a very small subset of the overall Treasury transaction database, you would find a program that produces a similar report and copy the source code into your working library. At this point much of the "programming is done." Chances are there are similar reports already and it's very likely there is a 3rd generation language program like EZTRIEVE+ that is much simpler to use that already has the input file lad out. Then it's a matter of laying out the report. EZTRIEVE+ has a tally function like the SUM function in EXCEL so it is much easier than COBOL to sum columns for totals.
But, if you have a COBOL program that you can clone and modify it should only take a few hours to a few days to run it. And the sort file you create can be used over and over again to create different reports.
My fear is that somehow Musk's delinquents could change values of records in the database, add new records for which there was never a payout or delete records. And if things got really bad, backups from prior years could be deleted. Chances are that this couldn't happen because much of the old data would be stored in a secured site hundreds of miles away. And it's likely they are stored in the limestone caves that Musk calls limestone mines.
The Federal government has been using the caves around Kansas City since at least the 1960's for records backups and for keeping surplus food like cheese, dried eggs, etc.
Also these kids could download data onto flash drives or copy it onto laptops. This is the classic case of Trump stealing top secret files and lying about having them. Once the data is unsecured and leaves the Treasury, it can be hacked or used in anyway Musk and Trump want to use it or the Chinese or the Russians. It can be sold to the highest bidder. But there are no guarantees that the data hasn't been modified or corrupted to make it look like $50 million was spent on condoms for instance.
At this point, I trust none of the information Musk is saying he got from Treasury systems.
We already heard the story about the 150 year old still collecting SS. If you don't understand the format of the data, especially birthdays that cross centuries and only the last two digits of the year are saved, you can make some really bad assumptions.
came here to say this.. every large bank I've worked with still runs COBOL in their mission-critical systems. Most large corporations that have survived long enough, are still running their production COBOL also.
I was taught COBOL in 1978 in first-year computer science, when they said it was somewhat obsolete but useful to learn. No kidding, I'm about to retire and still deal with COBOL routinely..
Hi Doug. That's the year I learned COBOL as well. I answered an add for a programmer trainee at a life insurance company in Omaha. They gave me the IBM programmer aptitude test. Each question was 3 pictures and you had to select the next one in the sequence from 4 choices. To this day, I don't know how doing well on identifying sequences makes someone a good candidate to be a programmer.
Anyway, the insurance company was installing a large insurance package and converting all of their policies off of IBM's Autocoder system called CFO. The architecture of the IBM system is still the same basic architecture almost all of the life insurance systems are written in. The new system was about 98% Assembler and 2% COBOL.
I'm sure you heard over and over again how mainframes and COBOL would be obsolete by 1985 or 1990 or 2000 etc. And yet they are still around.
The server based system are incapable of handling the billions of data records that the mainframes can. Plus, it is so expensive to convert the data from one system to another. I've been involved with converting over 100,000,000 policies on dozens of conversions, but the last one was almost 20 years ago.
Well sort of off topic but I used to take tests (behind the scenes, helping people cheat so they could get a good job) for people trying to work at a Resolute Lumber mill. Ordinary stuff. Run the machinery, transform logs into boards etc and clean up. However they also were supposed to take and pass one of those "what's the next image in this series" or "which sides would be adjacent if this box were put together". Most of those people made perfect fine mill operators but they weren't good at that sort of test. Luckily it could be passed online so I could jump in for them. I swear some of that stuff was thought up by human resources geeks with no idea what skills were needed to run the business. Alas of course by helping those folks pass the test, I was reinforcing the perception that the test worked since they got a number of good employees out of it. We do have a lot of absurdities in all these systems I suppose. But I doubt Musk is the solution.
I have no doubt Musk is not the solution - he is the problem - amongst the many problems in His Orange MAGA Majesty's White House, starting with the MAGA King himself.
emptywheel has a good posting on this, particularly in the comment section. What I gathered from the commenters is that COBOL has many "dialects" depending on who wrote it and what changes, add ons were done over the decades.
That's true of a lot of high level languages, especially nowadays.
Anything you have to add about what Leon and his teenaged hacker friends are up to would be welcome.
I think that is exactly what they are doing. If you control the money you control the empire. And it's all illegal! Why oh why is our country allowing this to proceed?!
Because for 15 years, most Americans have spent almost every waking hour staring at a tiny screen loaded with content designed to play to their knowledge gaps and to their prejudices.
And because for 40+ years, the GOP has been economically assaulting everyone but the rich, creating massive suffering among 60% of the population while also expanding a propaganda machine (hate radio; Fox and its imitators) that has filled people's head with lies about Who Is Making Them Miserable, such that the GOP has been free to continue inflicting economic misery upon them, and evading blame for the resultant societal collapse.
We can thank Reagan, his acolytes, their ruinous economic policies, their elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, their reactionary zealotry (= "We want a white Christian patriarchal nation"), and their refusal to learn from history (= the perils of making lots of people poor, and thus ripe for radicalization) for all of the above. I also blame every American who has ever voted for any GOP, even once. The extremism, lies, and destructiveness of the party have been on full display since Nixon; no one who claims to value US democracy has any excuse for having cast even one vote for even one of them, ever.
Dee: thank you for posting this and I agree with you 100%.
Because most people don't pay attention to such things. In my county we had a recall election for a county commissioner. It took place a month after the general election. In the general election the voters chose the Radical Republicans because they don't pay attention to local news. In the special recall election the county commissioner went down with a 64% vote against him. That's because the people who voted in the special election were the ones who read our excellent local newspaper.
I was cheered by the recall because it was a bipartisan effort.
Their reported plan is to crash the dollar and make bitcoin “our” currency. Bitcoin is not regulated, if it disappears well tough. Allegedly, felon47 has investors who recently lost 2 billion in bitcoin while he made out with 100 million in fees.
It's a money laundering scheme. Foreign influences buy the bit coin to help drive up the price. Then the primary bitcoin holder sells at top dollar having easily gained multiple times the original price. The bitcoin may crash (look up Hawk Tuah girl bitcoin) but the Primary owner has already cashed out. The foreign investors don't care, they've paid their "mob dues". If it does crash, the small investors are the real losers.
Don't bother "investing" in bitcoins. EVER.
And the crypto-douche-bros are gambling to drive the price up here, are just doing a pump and dump, those are the ones who make money by defrauding the greater fools who buy in late.
Yep
I'm sure it's possible but the question is whom would that benefit? Doesn't seem like Muskov or Trumpov would gain anything from this.
On the other hand, it might make guys like Putin quite happy. I’m not sure there’s much reason to assume that Elmo and Donny are not doing Putin’s bidding intentionally or otherwise .
I believe this massive money grab, not just the treasury, but his billionaire buddies and taking money from FEMA and God knows where else is, at least in part, to bail pukin out… look at WHAT THEY ARE DOING.
IT's entirely possible
Probably not, but the hackers (literally) working for Muskrat might.
I hate to say it, but there's the adage, "Art imitates life." If you've ever watched the Die Hard movies, one of them is about grabbing the US financial systems records via a convoluted plot. fElon doesn't even need the convoluted scheme from the movie. He's already in.
Keep in mind that the US Treasury computer system has the bank account info for everyone, every business that ever made a payment to or received a payment from the US Treasury. I don't know how anyone thinks that it's OK for fElon to have access to that info! As we've already seen, he's illegally retrieved money previously disbursed. That's a crime right there.
The only one's who think it's ok are Fox watching, Schlitz swilling, trailer dwellers.
There is one upthread, a CN.
Tracy, I just wanted to let you know that you are not alone in your concerns, I started wondering the same thing about two weeks ago so I bought a fireproof safe. It didn’t seem like a bad idea to have a little cash on hand for emergencies, plus there are many other uses!
I’m looking up how to convert my 401k to gold. But the cash-on-hand idea is also prudent.
Coincidently, a friend recently told me to put it in PVC tubing and bury it in the backyard. It seemed to be more a ploy to avoid inheritance taxes than anything else though.
Inheritance taxes? Oh, good God, at the level those kick in attorneys, insurance policies, and offshore tax havens--not PVC tubing buried in the backyard--are the methods of tax avoidance at that level of wealth.
Very glad you asked this question and your follow-ups and appreciate the information provided by those with coding expertise in response by Gary Loft and others.
Ok I'll bite, what's going on with the dollar this morning?
I'm not an economist but I sure can understand this column which leads me to believe, like Mr. Krugman says, the Trump admin will have to cook the books which will lead to awful distortions not only in finance but in health care and other areas like the FAA and others.
Welcome to the United Kakistocracy of America.
Cooking the books is a Trump specialty. He's been doing it for decades.
I have been reading Paul Krugman for some twenty years and I always found both solace and information - and typically brilliant analysis and synthesis, in not so many words. I am a renowned theoretical physicist, and I know very well how hard it is to catch the essence and then explain it to others. Moreover, I particularly valued his constant warning us that the GOP is slowly but surely turning into a fascist movement.
Not that I did not know that - I saw it literally the day after Reagan took office, starting from the outset a politics of lies, ignoring of facts, and frontal attack on social programs that are the core of democracy. I learned my craft in the States in the seventies, in that great era when the US was leading research in high energy physics, but I was to witness an almost total destruction of my field, the closing of our accelerator in Brookhaven National Laboratory where I worked, and again the cancellation of the Supercollider project, after more than billion dollars were spent. I felt I had no choice but to go back to Europe, where now my American colleagues do their experiments, at CERN in Geneva, not in the States. The rest is tragic history, we could say, and one was to witness, day after day, the US falling behind Europe in almost every aspect of the quality of life - not even having basic health insurance, guaranteed to all citizens, to us something unimaginable.
And so, just as Krugman kept predicting, it took us here - fascism has opened the door into American democracy. It was Krugman who kept arguing, as a great economist, what I knew from my own vision of history: that unsustainable social differences lead, almost inevitably, to fascism. We all know how crazy these differences today are in the US. They led to the richest person in the world, an insane white supremacist, becoming a deciding figure in policy shaping, without being elected to any office. His positive image was being built for years, even by the NYT where Krugman was writing, and the Washington Post, to mention some of the every best newspapers in the country, if not in the world.
I kept being troubled, deeply worried, and could not comprehend how Krugman could keep writing in the NYT, especially when in the last two years all my polite, thoughtful, careful attempts to defend the Palestinians that are threatened to be eradicated or expelled from their land, were censored. We talk of what could, and I for one believe should, be argued to be a genocide, directly supported and encouraged by the US. It was Biden who created Netanyahu, not Trump, it was Biden who made sure to save a Trump-like criminal with nazi politics from ending up in jail, after losing one process after another. Even after witnessing hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv desperately trying to save their democracy and coexistence with the Palestinians. Israel was under total attack from inside, far worse than the US today, and almost nobody in the States moved a finger to help them. To me that signalled the beginning of the end of democracy in the US - democracy is about solidarity as much as the rule of law.
But Krugman finally left the NYT, and I felt relief and finally some hope. And so I am here, and again I see a beautiful analysis of his, as clear and coherent as ever. However, for the life of me, I cannot understand what purpose it serves now. We know, us here, that Musk and Trump are leading the US, with their insanity, evil, stupidity, whatever, towards fascism. The time for subtle analysis is gone.
To continue with it is to pretend that this is still a question of political disagreement within a democratic process. I saw this in my country, Yugoslavia, when people kept ignoring reality, pretending the war was not going to happen. I do not claim that the situation is the same as there and then, and I do not pretend to have a magic solution, but all my experience, my knowledge of history, a sense of logic, and my instincts, tell me that it is high time to affront the fascism that is threatening the very core of democracy. And if you wish to have any hope of succeeding, I believe from the bottom of my heart that you must include, in your daily worries, writings, care, solidarity, empathy, the plight of Palestinians that have been persecuted in front of our eyes. This has been happening for almost 80 years, when in 1948 three quarters of million of them were expelled from their land, never to be allowed to come back, and now it has reached the unimaginable: the complete destruction of a people and its country. If we believe in humanity and humanism, then you and I have to find time, every day of our lives, to pause and reflect on their tragedy, and fight for their bodies and souls, as we do for ours.
Here are two good resources for keeping up with over 60 lawsuits against the Trump coup.
https://kathleenweber.substack.com/p/update-no-2
Excellent work.
Americans have to accept the fact that thieves and idiots (aka fElon and Felon) have taken over the government. Other countries have legislation that prevents convicted felons from running for office, and ban politicians or candidates from taking enormous payments from private parties. We just happily went along assuming this would never happen. Welp... two critical pieces of legislation that dems need to introduce concern exactly banning those two things.
It would take a Constitutional Amendment. If we survive, it is going to take a raft of them. We have seen just how fast people unconcerned by the Constitution and the concept of a Nation of Laws, could overrun and put down a 249 year old republic.
Not for citizens united.
You can amend the Constitution to work around Citizens United. Overlook the name- this is a great idea and may be the only thing to save us from too much money in politics. American Promise.
https://americanpromise.net
Except the way the states are configured, any Constitutional convention would probably just usher in MAGAtLand, written according to Musk's and Cheeto's specifications.
It is time to include Prayer
Always. Those who understand the importance of prayer have been doing it. Those who disbelieve in prayer are unlikely to change their minds at this moment.
LOL, for those who believe in prayer, I'd say that current events are definitely showing that belief to be nothing more than a triumph of hope over experience.
Thank you so much.
Musk and Trump behave like people on the sociopath/psychopath spectrum, Trump more to the latter. As such they lie, have always lied and will never admit they were wrong. This is behavior they have exhibited throughout their lives but because of luck, wealth, and power have never been held to account for their misdeeds. What I'm saying is don't expect rational responses, honesty or mea culpas from either of them. Anything good will be because of their brilliance and anything bad will be because of someone else...... in that they are similar politicians, but much worse.
Every person associated with the Trump/Musk crime syndicate needs to be frog-marched through thr streets of DC and pelted with excrement...for starters
"the walk of shame!"
They're both pegged at the furthest end of the spectrum. Textbook cases.
Med school textbook pictures always show the worst cases, particularly for dermatology. If one could take a photo of mental disease, these guys are definitely textbook material. They're like the 5sqin herpes breakout.
That's why they will need to get their time in court.
Or into a guillotine. Or a noose. Or "the chair". I'll even settle for a firing squad.
I have a bumper sticker that says: they want 1939 Germany, let’s give them 1789 France. I haven’t had any backlash because 1) it’s too much reading for MAGA and 2) none of them have a clue of world history.
"Let them eat cake!" Chop!
Marie Antoinette would be head over heals
for someone like t-rump
I would think she'd be more into Muskrat. tRump is just too leveraged :D
Yep, pretty sure the average MAGAt knows nothing about either of those historical periods.
Muskrump!
Paul, I agree. Now add dementia into the mix and….what?! No longer just an evil conman, he is now a raving blathering psychopath.
Can anyone explain to me what happens when these geniuses start to "invest" our tax dollars in Bitcoin? It seems relevant to Paul's line of thinking in this blog post.
They get rich and we get poor. Bonus: we will accrue a lot of sovereign debt, that our children's children will work their asses off to cover.
Assuming we're not extinct by then.
Thanks for telling us the truth, Prof.
Of course inflation will be zero % as will unemployment. The deficit will shrink due to tax cuts and life expectancy will hit 90. All because of the economic brilliance of the orange felon. /s
When you control the numbers, anything is possible.
Why do I have this sudden urge to barf?
Probably b/c you're a rational and decent human being. :(
GMTA!
Because you are sane, and paying attention.
COBOL — obsolete in the business world but still used in government
I assume the IBM marketing department will be along shortly to point out that there are still millions of lines of COBOL code still running on mainframes owned by Fortune 500 companies (banks, airlines, insurance companies, etc). For example, mainframes handle 90% of all credit card transactions. I'm guessing that most if not all of that is COBOL code (running in CICS, the original application server).
It doesn't really matter if it's COBOL or C++. the doge incels have no business touching any of it.
COBOL is a compiled language: a first step in the process, the step that interacts with the programer. So it actually does not run on computers, it is compiled and further processed into code that controls the computer.
I am well aware of that. I think you missed the point I was trying to make.
No sorry, I was replying to G Taylor's comment, but it landed under yours. I am actually curious as to how COBOL is handled these days. Are there still compilers (when programs need changes), or does one translate to a modern language and compile from there? I hope the method adopted is the one providing the best security.
Still compilers, just like there are compilers for C, C++, and Fortran. Going straight to assembly rather than running intermediate code (like C#) or interpreted code (like JavaScript, GACK!) is still the fastest way to run code on a computer.
Amen to that! They're no better than hackers.
Us actual "hackers" resent that remark. In our world of computer engineering a "Hacker" is a skilled, hard-working engineer that works with discipline and persistence. This role existed long before the typical family discovered personal computers and AOL. The criminals that public media call "hackers" are not, they are criminals.
No we don't. We only started >calling ourselves hackers< long after the term was applied to the criminals.
In fact, hacking didn't even begin with criminals. It was just kids sitting in mom's basement breaking into systems for fun. Someone figured out there could be a profit in it, and so it turned criminal.
Your letting your age show - I can assure you that the honorary title of "Hacker" existed long before the media associated it with computer criminals. The idea that it was "just kids in Mom's basement" is such a time-based concept from the Nineties because prior to the Nineties Mom did not have a computer. But those of us who operated or owned computers in the Seventies already used that title of respect. And will still use it with the original intended meaning. But do go on enjoying modern culture if it suits you.
Letting my age show? Vintage '63. Damn few people owned and operated computers back then, most of them Radio Shack's Tandy (insanely expensive and pathetically weak - especially by today's standards).
And a "hack" is a "kludge".
They are not hackers. They are hassholes.
The whole Y2K initiative made a lot of COBOL programmers rich. I'm sure a ton of that code is still chugging along at banks and insurance companies to this day.
That's why it's so slow.
BS The mainframes are optimized for data processing. Have you ever seen a performance comparison between VISANET and Bitcoin? VISANET clocks in at 0.00358 kw h/tx. Bitcoin clocks in at (depending on how long it takes a miner to add a txn to the blockchain) 360.4 to 3691.4 kW h/tx. And no, I didn't leave a decimal point in the wrong place somewhere.
LOL. Those mainframes are dinosaurs. And the code running on them is spaghetti.
I have stopped debating this for a long time. But I will bite this time.
Any programming language can produce spaghetti codes. It is the the fault of a programmer, not the language. Recently, I wrote a python program and it is only about a thousand lines or so to access a large database. It took my program 4 hours to run. Another less experienced program wrote the same program, his program caused thrashing and never finish running. In the mid-80, when Information Engineering was the in-thing, people introduced program generators. Many COBOL programs were recoded with these program generators and the end results were spaghetti codes that were not readable. Over time, without documentation and experienced business area experts, it will be difficult to understands the logic of those programs. I do not know the US Treasury used those generator or not. If they do, it will take a lot of time to reverse engineering them. In addition, there are assembler codes. It will make it even harder. Therefore, I will not believe these kids will understand these systems.
These kids are coming from a different computing world, they will not know much about the IBM operating environment like, RACF, LPAR, Subsystems etc. If you quiz them on these, they will not know the answer.
As G Taylor said, IBM mainframes are optimized for data processing. Its hardware design is actually very advanced and end-to-end transaction throughput is very fast. One aspect that distributed computing can never beat mainframe is the network latency. A distributed applications that traverses multiple hops will slow it down. My latest customer had their mainframe system migrated to a distributed environment. Performance of the mainframe system beat that of the distributed system handily. But talking about performance is at times irrelevant What is relevant is (1) what type of application is running. An accounting clerk may not matter that much if it is slow by a few milli-seconds. But if it is an ATM, a long wait will be unacceptable. And therefore (2) what is acceptable from the point of view of an end users is a better measure and it varies from application to application.
In actual fact, one reason that bitcoin has difficulty to be used in real life is the performance of the bitcoin verification process. It took 10 minutes or longer to finish a verification. Imagine that you have to wait more than 10 minutes to pay for a coffee. I downloaded the bitcoin source codes which is in C/C++, It is just unreadable in certain parts. Interestingly, no one thinks that bitcoin is backward in spite of its using an old language, performance and comprehensibility.
True, COBOL has a bad reputation because of its age and misinformation. But the real issue is that no young computing programmer is willing to work with it. It is extremely hard to find programmers to maintain these systems.
Wow. There's a lot to unpack there. You raise some really good points there, although I think network latency has reached negligible levels with the advent of fiber optics. Distributed computing's advantage is data access from any source from anywhere in the world - or even space for that matter. Of course, sometimes those data sources aren't themselves up to speed, thus creating a bottleneck.
The main reason youngsters (or even oldsters like me) aren't interested in COBOL is because there aren't a helluva lot of jobs available in that language. And you're right, spaghetti can be written in any language - I've had to suffer through debugging my share of it, that's for sure. In all honesty though, C/C++ (and their derivations - Java, Javascript, Perl, PHP, even Python etc.) is less prone to it because, thanks to it's compact syntax, you can write a routine in 5 lines that would take 30 in COBOL.
You are all WAY above my head, but I've read (Wired magazine?)that one of the Muskrats is studying COBOL now, probably for this very reason. It is encouraging that you say Bitcoin or crypto in general would take too long to process for daily transactions.
Sorry if I make any one confused. It is easy to learn a language. The difficult part is to understand an application system's business rules and logics (say a ledger system. You have to understand the journal entries and some accounting rules). That, in turn, will require a understanding of the relationship between entities (objects, in some language) and the roles they play. Learning the infrastructure involved may also be required for more complicated issues. Giving time, most people will figure out the systems. It may take a shorter time if you get help from some subject area experts and good documentation. Otherwise, how can these system be maintained? In addition, it also depends on what they try to change. One scary part is that one person among the muskrats tried to make change in the development environment and put it into production right away without serious testing. It shows their ignorance and inexperience. It may crash the system and require backout (that posts a risk sometimes).
Bitcoin or many crypto can take a long time to be verified and put the transaction involved into the distributed ledger. But not all applications require sub-second response. One of the idea of crypto is to debank /DeFI, for instance, making loans or injecting capital into a company (say IPO) That will not need fast response. Trust/legalility (a lot of scam is going on) are the challenges. But that can also be solved if say an investment banker like Goldman Sachs become the trustee. Many of the crypto people (I think they are mostly anarchists) are pushing for deregulation and that, I believe, can be risky without some serious deliberation. Look at what the orange clown did.
Well said Sir
Sorry, just one last comment on this topic. In mainframe, when an application, such as a CICS transaction or a TSO batch job, accesses data in a DBMS, it is subsystem to subsystem call via control blocks. There is no wiring, no router/switches, and no IP/MAC address resolution. Therefore no network latency for this part. A multi-tiers distributed application is different.
There are mainframe jobs but most often, it is through networking (confusing word here ) :-). Management gives up looking and programmers are mostly not interested.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
Also from the CBS article:
"It is now unclear to co-authors of the bird flu research outside the agency when the research will ever be published, weeks after it was ready to go."
Three words - LEAK THE REPORT.
I feel the same about part 2 of Jack Smith's report
Thank God for the music!
I'll take that ride.
It is hard to believe that the malfeasance and incompetence of government agents with power is regretted by top leaders of the present administration.
My doctoral work in the 1990s was on immigration and nationality as a comparative law subject.
A query on ChatGPT just now, relating to bias, discrimination, racial prejudice against Puerto Ricans yielded an interesting answer. Note that over a decade ago all prior PR birth certificates were invalidated and reissued in a secure format because of forgery and fraud. And that PR is not a party to the Interstate Driving License Compact and its driving licenses can’t be exchanged and may be valid only for tourists in many states. How many Puerto Ricans (and other Americans) travel with passports?
“There have been multiple reports of Puerto Ricans being wrongfully detained by ICE and law enforcement in the U.S., despite their status as U.S. citizens. Some of these cases occurred in Newark, New Jersey, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and other areas.
“For example, ICE agents in Newark detained a Puerto Rican military veteran without a warrant, even after he showed his veteran ID. In Milwaukee, a Puerto Rican mother, her child, and her grandmother were taken to an immigration detention center after being overheard speaking “Spanish. Additionally, ICE agents reportedly raided a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia without a warrant, simply because it was Puerto Rican-owned .
“These incidents have sparked concerns among lawmakers, with U.S. representatives calling for investigations into ICE’s actions. Many believe these cases stem from racial profiling and a lack of proper procedural oversight.”
Is it just me..or does this smell like Germany 1937? Everything is JUST too close for any kind of comfort...
We're in the Fourth Reich now, with Herr Trump aiming to be der Führer, und Herr Muskrat aiming to play the role of Adolf Eichmann. Achtung!
Musk actually is casting himself as Wotan.
Do you think Muskrat is a Wagner fan? Considering his "salute" at Trumps [strikeout] coronation [/strikeout] inauguration, it wouldn't be surprising.
Probably, but I don’t know anything about Musk’s musical tastes.
Racial profiling is the foundation of current Republican policies, and it isn’t affecting just Puerto Ricans. Arizona news media have reported Navajo Nation members garnering ICE attention, especially if living off the reservation. Unfortunately this was completely predictable. Judging people by their appearance doesn’t work, just look at Ted Bundy.
The MAGA wing has a solid track record of implementing the accusations they make against the Democrats.
Eg weaponizing the Justice Department, lying about scientific research, monetizing foreign policy.
For a long time they have been claiming the BLS statistics are manipulated.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Yes, I noticed on right wing sites that some seemed to think that oil and gasoline prices could fall to what they were in the pandemic under Trump (probably because Trump told them so).
However, this ignores the fact that at these low prices, driven down by plummeting demand as people were shut in, forced oil companies to cut production because they were losing money, and this was a global phenomenon of roughly 10 million + BPD less in production.
In fact, some smaller domestic oil companies even went bankrupt.
When vaccines suddenly went out with speed, demand surged under Biden, so since production had declined in the pandemic, prices rose.
It can take quite a while for production to ramp back up and oil companies (like most businesses) were concerned about new covid variants causing another collapse.
So, it took awhile, but under Biden, production has only increased and is now at record highs, because private companies do what is in their own best interest.
There is no incentive right now to produce more when OPEC has excess capacity of something like 5 million BPD and EVs are being sold globally, especially in large nations like India and China and as Krugman points out, prices are approaching the break-even points for new drilling.
Thus, no oil company would willingly have prices fall that low again, like they were in the pandemic, it was simply caused by falling demand from the pandemic itself, an anomaly. Too much production would be the same flip side of supply and demand pressure on prices.
The sheer stupidity of our current president (especially in all matters regarding business) is astounding.
Clearly, this man has had others do things for him his whole life and does not actually know how anything works.
Musk does not seem to know how economies or the federal budget works, or he would not be taking a hacksaw to agencies. It seems all for show. By supporting Trump and what he wants to do, he actually puts his own future businesses in jeopardy. One wonders if he is really that clueless or if he has another objective regarding power.
The government's role in our economy is nothing like a business. It is not intended to be. Its role is part of a whole circular economic system and not a single point of reference in an economy, like a business is.
As a large part of a circular system of millions of interconnecting gears, putting cogs in the works can have impacts far beyond that first disrupted gear, thus one needs to proceed with caution and realize what one does impacts the whole economy and also the well being of our nation and those in it and can shrink GDP.
It makes one wonder if Musk has always delegated to experts, as well. If you delegate you need experienced people who know what they are actually doing. It seems he had perhaps been a good delegator in the past, hiring good people and engineers for his businesses or he had good people hiring them. However, Trump and Musk clearly do not know how an economy works as a system, or they intentionally are out to do damage.
Sadly, the false notion of a business model for the federal government is popular among many in the public who do not know how our economy works as a system and who may not realize that doing things this way, does not work and can cause massive damage to our economy and our nation.
Comparing the federal government to a business is like comparing apples to oranges.
Actually, comparing 2 similarly sized mostly round fruit examples, is way too generous.
It is more like comparing a pond to the entire water cycle.
Oh, and tariffs on Canadian natural gas and power exports will also cause wholesale gas and power prices to rise and lead to higher utility bills. The orange malignancy will continue. But who cares if we all die of bird flu, right?
Or covid, or the slow moving cataclysm of global warming, or antibiotic [strikeout] resistant [/strikeout] impervious bacteria, or nukes, etc.