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.
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.
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.
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.
No need to be alarmist about it. They can just apply for SNAP benef- oh wait nevermind. But there's still plenty of support for food banks which will- oh, right. But... uh, I'm sure they'll be fine if they have 401k or something, stocks are up and food prices are down again.... right?
I'm paying 80 cents per can and like $40 per bag. i would mostly stick with the crunchies. Maybe shreds fried rice on the weekend if i could afford veggies and an egg to go in it.
Yeah, lots of folks don’t realize that cat and dog food are required to be fit for human consumption… Not because of accidental “toddler found the bag of dog food” scenarios, but because of the “destitute people on social security can’t afford anything better” scenarios.
I don't understand the cat food thing. A can of cat food is usually the same cost or higher as a can of cheap tuna or other canned meat. You're eating cat food for no reason!
Alright I'm just gonna say it. Yes I know a lot of people who voted for Kamala will be hurt to. It will hurt my parents, my grandparents, etc.
But it is a goddamn lie if I say I'm not excited about these people having their faces eaten. This is what stupidity gets you. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Fuck around and find out.
You fuckers all thought you were better than LGBTQ+, Black people, immigrants, union members, etc. Now you learn that nope, all of your teeth are just a cheap source of aquarium gravel.
I realize you're worked up, and I hope those who voted for the 🐆 🐆 🐆 suffer the most (very possible given that food bank users are mostly white etc) and actually turn their politics to the left (sadly much less likely, as they are idiots).
But it's Kamala not Kalama, and that sentence ends with too, not to.
I'll fix the name, but I refuse to fix a typo in "to".
In-fact, i like to Imagine that using the wrong grammer and spelling tends to cause phsychical pain to grammer nazis. Your wasting you're time correcting someones mistakes for no good reason
Delays could be disastrous for many Americans. In one study, 42% of Americans aged 65-plus said they wouldn’t be able to afford basic necessities like food without their monthly check.
There are approximately 60 million Americans aged 65 and over.
42% of that is about 25 million people.
... And thats not counting those on Disability, SSDI, like myself.
Thats another roughly 11 million people, under 65, disabled and unable to work due to serious, debilitating injuries or medical conditions.
If these idiots actually do this, and fuck it up as much as they are likely to, we're looking at something approximating 5% to 10% of the country becoming homeless within months ... and then likely starve to death or die of exposure, we're talking about the eldery and disabled here.
... This would effectively be somewhere between, or comparable to, the varying estimates of avoidable deaths of Holodomor or the famine during the Great Leap Forward.
Yeah, my parents are hardcore preppers, for all the wrong reasons. For the longest time, it was the “Biden is going to roll tanks down the streets” type of prepping. But now I’m seeing the prepping in a new light, because it could 100% turn into a full blown “nobody can afford soup, and the government is actively dismantling the soup kitchens while forcing people onto the streets” economy.
It’ll end up somehow being blamed on Dems. Remembering the time Congress overrode Obama’s JASTA veto, then the GOP immediately blamed Obama for not warning them harder.
Well well well, if that isn’t the consequences of your choices coming around to bite you in the ass. I am well aware that the individuals suffering are not individually to be blamed but I have zero sympathy in this particular case.
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.