What the Musk is Happening

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fact checking
https://www.politifact.com/article/2025 ... id-spendi/

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8QLgLfqh6s Ezra Klein podcast insights. 'Musk wants everyone to know it's him'

Also the DOGEkids have entered NOAA and begun takeover with threats
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... adquarters

[mister_coffee]

This is Very Bad:

https://www.crisesnotes.com/day-five-of ... s-anymore/

[mister_coffee]

It is estimated in 2024 that there are over 800 billion lines of COBOL in production. This is a much larger number than was estimated for 25 years ago during the infamous Y2K "crisis".

Also, interestingly, most COBOL programs aren't completely written in COBOL. And in a lot of cases you can't reproduce the source code of the current system in COBOL. The reason why is a complicated story.

In the 1960s and 1970s compilers were crazy expensive, with a COBOL compiler for IBM 360s going for about $50,000. So most people who bought a computer in those days didn't necessarily buy a compiler. What happened was that a cottage industry of programmers popped up who had taken out a second mortgage and bought a COBOL compiler, and they could go around and write custom software for people for a price. It was nice work if you could get it.

Now is where things get a little wild. A lot of businesses were cheap and didn't want to bring back these consultants for "minor" modifications. Sometimes that wasn't even possible because the consultants had retired or gotten real jobs somewhere. And compilers in those days were primitive and had some odd little quirks as well. One of those little quirks was the concept of "patch space", which was basically places you could modify the machine code produced by the COBOL compiler in the running system. The original intent of this was to let you fix bugs (sometimes the compilers produced buggy code too). However, over the decades many systems built up a crazy infrastructure around these patches, to the point that it is impossible to recreate a single piece of source code that represents all of the functionality of the system as it currently exists. Over the years a lot of this stuff was never written down and a lot of the knowledge is in the heads of people who are in retirement homes if they are even still alive.

As a general rule of thumb, any system coded and designed before about 1980 probably has this problem somewhere. If they are lucky it is probably only in some dark and musty and seldom-used corner, but you can't know that until you look around and discover what kind of crawling horrors there might be.

Full disclosure: I never wrote programs in COBOL. But some programs I wrote in FORTRAN in the 1980s are still in use for some reason and they have similar problems. It makes for hilarious phone calls and emails.

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Nope. Compromised since article written.

[PAL]

Still running on COBOL!

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by Paul Krugman
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/what ... -happening