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Republicans back in the day: Social Security is going to collapse! We need to fix it. Not enough money for Americans when they retire.
Republicans now: Fuck Social Security! The Billionaires told us to collapse it. They informed us we don’t need it.
Oh no!! Anyways…
I’m less worried about the closure of offices than Musk thinking he can modernize the SSA administration’s computer systems in 3 months. None of his lackeys have ever worked on anything of this scale/complexity and I’m pretty sure none of them know COBOL since they’re apparently mostly around 25. (And retired COBOL experts likely don’t know more modern languages well enough to translate.)
Don’t get me wrong, the public and private sectors should modernize aging, critical systems that use code written in languages almost no one under 60 has learned, much less mastered. But 3 months probably isn’t even enough time to get through the planning and hiring stage of a project like this. If it were cheap and easy to update those systems, it’d have been done already.
How hard can it be? Import user list from DB, implement the calculate_pension method, integrate with paypall to send the money and you're done. 1 month of work, 1 month for testing and 1 month to celebrate success.
and one of them is a son/daughter of a KGB agent too.
It’s a planned disabling of ss.
The trepidation of news sources, or even most social media, to call it deliberate sabotage, gives them cover.
The majority of the American public does not deal at all with this level of tech. And the small percentage of people who understand can not influence anything.
The goal is to break it
Also, I think we are about to watch fElon and his child prodigies Whiz on the Electric Chesterton Fence to mix up two metaphors....
Even if you had the very best experts that knew COBOL and some "modern" language, along with all the right competent supporting staff (documentation, analysts, qa, ops) AND they had skilled, experienced and competent management overseeing it, doing something like that in months is just probably very, very difficult, if not impossible.
If you look back over the respected literature (which means sidestep the hot-take Youtube techfluencers going gaga over rather pedestrian things in languages and tools and frameworks and so on - these dingalings are typically so far up their own rear-ends and likely to just make the same old mistakes already documented in books like Mythical Man-Month and many probably won't read it because they think it's about older systems, therefore irrelevant.) I doubt you'd find much support for a claim that it could be done.
Surprised no one has put the "Have the day you voted for 🌈" image up yet.
This is an ad.
An ad for what?
Moneywise. There are like 5 or 6 links to it in the text, starting from halfway down the "article," and it starts to get really blatant when it starts talking directly to you, the reader. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire thing was written by AI.
Oh weird. I can't get it to load fully so I can't tell, but I don't doubt it. I was just curious what company would possibly want their product associated with this.
The framing is really gross as well. Facing a future without Social Security? Try saving for retirement with Moneywise...
They just don't say the company directly in the calls to action because it's likely intended mainly to boost their search engine rankings. Hence the number of links...
Yea, I didn't bother to futz with my settings to make it load, but just based off the headline I couldn't imagine it being a paid article, but that tracks honestly. These people have no sense of decency or propriety. What happened to tact and shame lol. It's gross.