Social Security Information Systems Near Collapse

matty619 writes "An Information Week article warns that the computer systems that run the Social Security Administration may collapse by 2012 due to increased workload, and a half-billion-dollar upgrade won't be ready until 2015. One of the biggest problems is the agency's transition to a new data center, according to a report (PDF) by the SSA's Inspector General. The IG has characterized the replacement of the SSA's National Computer Center — built in 1979 — as the SSA's 'primary IT investment' in the next few years."

Comments

2012

[Sooner Boomer]

So the world will end in 2012!

Re:2012

[PolygamousRanchKid]

So the world will end in 2012!

Only if you are on Social Security, For the rest of the folks, just keep on paying those Social Security taxes . . .

. . . and stay in your homes; there is no danger.

Re:2012

[garompeta]

I am still amazed when I see people who think that the US is the world.
Isn't it amazing that whenever there is an alien invasion, they seem to invade the US first (or some times ONLY in the US). Bleh.

Re:2012

[FuckingNickName]

If I was an alien, I'd invade the US first, and only the US.

Re:2012

[Joce640k]

Look on the bright side. If they come to destroy us the USA will be the first to go.

Re:2012

[Seumas]

Good point. They should invade some other country that nobody cares about and would never notice.

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

Only New York City or Washington DC will be invaded.

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironically you are only sampling US films.

Re:2012

[KDR_11k]

That's marketing. Apparently Americans don't like movies and games where the important people aren't American, I recall a story about a game that was supposed to be about rebels in some Soviet bloc state trying to get the SU out of their country getting a rewrite so it plays in a Soviet-occupied America for that reason.

Re:2012

[ikkonoishi]

They already were. Nobody noticed.

Re:2012

[Mitchell314]

And if I were an invasion, I would alien Britain first.

Re:2012

[mangu]

If I was an alien, I'd invade the US first, and only the US.

And I'd invade China and only China. Your planet would owe its ass to my planet.

Re:2012

[ThunderBird89]

And if I were an invasion, I would alien Britain first.

Don't. The Doctor will kick your ass.

Re:2012

[ThunderBird89]

Only in the US. The Hungarian systems are working fine. Except for the political system, but that's another topic...

Re:2012

[NalosLayor]

Nah, microbes will. Also, watch out for the torpedo rams.

Re:2012

[ThunderBird89]

Or crazy drunk crop-duster pilots with armed missiles on a jammed release.

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

Look on the bright side. If they come to destroy us the USA will be the first to go.

And nothing of value was lost...

Re:2012

[Angostura]

You're wrong. In most disaster movies, there is usually the obligatory 'interference-laden quick-cut TV new reports from around the world section'.

By law this must feature:

The Eiffel Tower, the UK Houses of Parliament, the Taj Mahal and optionally the Sidney Opera House.

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

That's marketing. Apparently Americans don't like movies and games where the important people aren't American

Ya that whole Harry Potter thing, it was a complete flop here in the 'states.

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

It is the world, and we tolerate the rest of you only so long as you amuse us. When you no longer provide for our amusement, we invade your shitty country, kill your women and rape your livestock. Now, get back to producing cheap merchandise for our use.

Re:2012

[FrootLoops]

Ads depress me for a similar reason. Announcer voices are male or female depending on what's being sold; homemaker-type products use white upper middle class-style actresses; life insurance commercials use old male announcers, unless it's the Gerber Life commercial (ironically showing right now) in which case it uses a young (but not too young) woman. Of course, these are generalizations and not strict rules, but the correlation is strong. Incidentally, I hate marketing. It seems to be a necessary evil, but I wish their manipulations were as transparent to everyone as they are to me. Maybe then ads would contain more actual content and less flash.

(Yes, this is off topic, but discussing the social security system's IT infrastructure isn't exactly thrilling conversation.)

Re:2012

[stealth_finger]

So the world will end in 2012!

Of course it will, a movie said so! This obviously has a government cover up spin, when they say "may collapse due to increased workload" they mean " will collapse due to another planet crashing into it"

Re:2012

[Nialin]

Where's the "Morbidly Funny" mod?

Re:2012

[clang_jangle]

Red herring alert -- it's because Harry Potter appeals to yuppie Anglophiles who want their kids to be "classy".

Re:2012

[zippthorne]

I'm pretty sure debt isn't transferrable like that...

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

China works it's ass off polluting itself and treating its people so that U.S. merchants can sell really cheap crap. U.S. does not even pay for this crap, they just print more money, U.S. has 1/5 of the worlds debt, and has 1/4 of the worlds energy consumption (Oil costs whatever dollar bills cost printing, and having some monkey adding zeros to bank accounts). Not to talk about wars, being a bully and disliked, if I was an alien and wanted to have their gratitude i'd attack U.S. and only U.S. The planet Earth would be so grateful to us.

Re:2012

[mangu]

I'm pretty sure debt isn't transferrable like that...

Huh? WTF?

Tell me, have you heard of any recent abduction stories in the US?

No, I don't think so. That's because the aliens who invaded the US had to cut their science budget to pay their debt. No more human anatomy studies for them.

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if Palin is elected. God has a warped sense of humor. He told Pat Robertson to run for president then didn't tell anyone to vote for him. Palin will be elected but the world will end before she can take office. I'd love to see the look on her face when it happens.

Re:2012

[drinkypoo]

The relationship between the US and China is a relationship between two parties. Both nations are equally complicit in this particular fraud scheme.

Re:2012

[GameboyRMH]

Yep for the same reason you go after the root account on a computer...

Re:2012

[kbielefe]

Are you kidding? Debt is transferred all the time. Have you never sold a savings bond?

Also, sovereign debt isn't revolving like a credit card. It has fixed terms and needs to be refinanced all the time. Just China stopping buying new debt would have significant repercussions.

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

optionally the Sidney Opera House.

Is that close to the Sydney Opera House by any chance?

Re:2012

[nedlohs]

It's advertising, obviously they are going to use the type of voice that their research (or just the anecdotes they happen to have heard) says is most effective for the demographics they are selling to.

Re:2012

[slick7]

If I was an alien, I'd invade the US first, and only the US.

If I was an alien, I'd invade France, always do the easy problems first.

Re:2012

[nedlohs]

Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs did that well with the news announcer commenting that it was an unusual weather pattern to hit major landmarks first and then the rest of the world.

Re:2012

[Artifakt]

I'm amazed by how many people call SS a Ponzi scheme. It simply isn't, if only because the payouts and the administrative costs together are generally less than the pay ins. it takes more than not compartmentalising individual pay ins and basing pay outs on individuallly invested funds to make something a Ponzi scheme - otherwise all Health Insurance would be a Ponzi Scheme. For Social Security, there's literally none of the amplification effect of a Ponzi where you have to keep getting more and more people into the system just to cover the existing payouts and the total projected payout grows without limit. The only growth in payout for Social Security is the result of long term growth of population, and the tax rate is high enough to allow for that. You simply can't suddenly have an additional 30% or 50% or more people who have just signed up and now expect to be paid off within a few months or years.
      Social Security is solvent - the worst anyone actually claims about it is it will be falling into a negative range, where intake will be only 75% of outgo, by 2034, and this negative range will last for about 13 to 15 years if no adjustments are made. Some people are calling that bankruptcy. Tell me - when people retire on their savings, doesn't their outgo generally exceed new income? Sure, some of them will eventually exhaust their savings entirely, but we don't announce that all people who retire are bankrupt just because outgo exceeds income, even though that state usually lasts for the rest of that person's life. Social Security enters a temporary period of negative growth, and Social Security is currently owed large amounts because the positive balance it gained during periods of positive growth was borrowed by Congress to support the general fund. Unless population growth slows much further than expected or the US government selectively defaults on its internal debts to its own citizens to prop up its foreign debt, Social security will re-enter a positive growth period way before all the money now owed to it from the general fund is paid back.

Re:2012

[level_headed_midwest]

Social Security actually does classify as a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes give earlier investors payouts not from any actual investing taking place, but from buy-ins from newer investors. They are also destined to fail because the number of people getting paid will exceed the number paying in. Social Security fulfills all of those criteria.

- There is no actual money in the Social Security "trust fund." The money collected by the payroll taxes above and beyond what was required for paying benefits got spent by other government agencies.

- The initial beneficiaries got paid almost exclusively with money collected from younger workers, since they did not contribute much into the system due to timing issues (retiring shortly after the SSA was started and thus not paying much into the system, yet being eligible for benefits.) So, even if all of the money collected in the payroll tax stayed in Social Security, the initial "investors" were still paid off with buy-ins from newer "investors."

- Now that the number of younger workers isn't growing as quickly as it once was (no new baby boom), the retiring workers drawing on the system are now taking out more money than the current workers are paying in. This is the bankruptcy stage.

So, Social Security actually *is* a Ponzi scheme.

Re:2012

[Artifakt]

Palin will never be elected now - Cross-hairs and the death of a ten year old girl decided that.* I used to not particularly like Sarah Palin as a candidate, but I knew she had never actually said she could see Russia from her house (that was Tina Fay, parodying what Sarah actually said). I knew she wasn't as dumb as some people were portraying her, and I was at least willing to listen to her message. Last night, Sarah Palin's website was changed to take down the Cross-hair commercial that had painted them on our now wounded Arizona representitive, hours before Ms. Palin's staff changed anything else (like posting an actual disclaimer that she was not endorsing violence). At this point I will mortgage my home to provide funds for anyone of either party who looks like he or she has a chance to defeat Sarah Palin in 2012. She's been rid of some of her troublesome priests, let her find out that in America, that will not make her King!

*And the death of a Federal Judge, the hopefully non-fatal wounding of the wife of a Navy Captain and multiple mission Astronaut, and the deaths of a campaign worker and three totally unconnected adult bystanders.

Re:2012

[DavidTC]

That's just because kids haven't learned that particular stupidity yet.

Re:2012

[DavidTC]

Palin will be elected but the world will end before she can take office. I'd love to see the look on her face when it happens.

What do you mean? She'd love it if that happened. She does not want to actually govern, she demonstrated that by quitting the Governorship of Alaska.

She just wants to fly around and be rich and famous, and the only way she sees to do that is talk about political stuff, which sometimes means doing something that puts her in the public eye, like running for office.

I, personally, really really really hope she does, but it will only happen if she's out of the public eye by then and needs a 'boost'.

Re:2012

[WoodstockJeff]

I always thought it was Japan that got invaded first...

Re:2012

[michael_cain]

Social Security has always been a pay-as-you-go system, regardless of the public's general misconception about it as "savings" or "investment". The current version of it, adopted from the recommendations of the 1983 Greenspan commission, does have the Boomer generation overpay -- but the commission's plan, which Congress promised to follow, was that the rest of the federal government would run a balanced budget, the national debt would slowly roll over into the SS trust fund, and when the Boomers retired those bonds would be paid for by borrowing from the public again. About the time the last of the Boomers died, the SS trust fund and the US public debt would sit where they were in the mid 1980s, adjusted for population, inflation, and productivity gains. Except for the balanced budget part, things are playing out very close to the commission's forecasts.

After the Boomers, the system reverts to complete pay-as-you-go, requiring a stable 6.2% of GDP. Everyone's forecasts for outlays shows them to be stable, from the SSA itself to the most conservative think tanks. Unfortunately, the commission assumed that future gains from productivity would be shared across the entire spectrum of income; if that had happened, the debate we would be having today would be regarding a permanent small adjustment of the SS tax rates down. But the productivity gains for the last 20 years have been largely captured by those making more than the SS cap, so are not being taxed. A small change in the cap formula, phased in over a decade, would erase the problem entirely.

Productivity gains are why it's not a Ponzi scheme. If you don't include such gains, you simply get the wrong answer.

Re:2012

[garompeta]

Even a gecco speaks with a snobish accent. A gecco, can you believe that sh!t?
Now even a caveman can do it.

Re:2012

[benjamindees]

You simply can't suddenly have an additional 30% or 50% or more people

Great, arbitrary figures. I guess you're arguing that it's not a Ponzi scheme since it happens slowly? Or because it's an inter-generational scam? The people who will be left with nothing haven't been born yet, so they don't exist? Or are you really delusional enough to believe the US economy will always grow faster than population growth...

Regardless, you're wrong anyways. You can easily have an additional 15-20% more people. One example is called the Baby Boomers. Another example is the 40 million immigrants who entered the US in the last two decades.

the positive balance it gained during periods of positive growth was borrowed by Congress

...to waste on unnecessary wars, not to invest in anything beneficial like infrastructure.

Social security will re-enter a positive growth period way before all the money now owed to it from the general fund is paid back.

Pigs will sprout wings and fly before that money is paid back. Successive waves of immigrants and the delusion of free trade will continue to bleed this country of jobs and wealth until there is absolutely nothing remaining with which to form an economy capable of paying off it's ridiculous debt.

Re:2012

[garompeta]

Hah, that's because it is the only country with central dogma.

Re:2012

[FrootLoops]

It's advertising, obviously they are going to use the type of voice that their research (or just the anecdotes they happen to have heard) says is most effective for the demographics they are selling to.

Yes, I understand why they do it. I don't debate its effectiveness, I just bemoan its necessity.

Re:2012

[iluvcapra]

A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud -- people are promised their money goes into X and makes a return but it really doesn't. Is this happening?

I agree with the brother poster that the crank theory that the SS Trust Fund is a "Ponzi scheme" come from people's misconception of it as a savings vehicle. It's not, it's much more like an insurance risk pool. People who pay into SSI have zero equity or ownership stake in the fund and are entitled to no money back. Who gets money out of the fund, and how much, is completely a regime decision and can be changed by law.

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

Faggish accent.

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

If they were the only worthwhile targets and nothing of value was lost then what does that say about the rest of the world?

Re:2012

[FrootLoops]

I always thought it was supposed to be an Australian accent. Maybe it's closer to British? I remember in one ad they made fun of it--he was about to say where he was from and something interrupted him. I dunno how that fits into anything besides making the character memorable. But if you'll remember, the announcer at the end is a younger-middle-aged (probably white) male, which I imagine is the prime demographic for car insurance in my area.

Re:2012

[benjamindees]

Of course it's fraud. Roosevelt sold it to American workers as an "annuity".

And since variable annuities didn't even exist in the US until 1952, everyone knew what he meant was a fixed annuity, rather than a risky investment with no guarantee of return.

Do you really think he wouldn't have been hung from a lamppost if he had tried to sell a 15% tax to go towards a risky investment with no ownership stake or entitlement to money back in the middle of the great depression?

Re:2012

[JBMcB]

> the SS Trust Fund is a "Ponzi scheme" come from people's misconception of it as a savings vehicle.

Probably because it's called a "Trust fund." Pretty much every other use of the term implies a managed pool of wealth that attempts to maintain that wealth.

The way it works now is the trust fund buys securities from the federal government. The federal government then spends the money made on the sale of the security. It owes the social security fund that money back, plus interest. Guess where that money is going to come from? Taxpayers. So they take your retirement money from you, invest it in themselves, then charge you later for getting your own money back through increased taxes to cover the cost of the interest they are charging on themselves.

It's an incredibly stupid way to manage money and, like most of the financial shenanigans the government pulls, if a private trust fund was caught doing it there would be some people going to prison for a long time.
 

Re:2012

[HiThere]

And Godzilla attacks Tokyo, and Mothra has these two little japanese princess figures that advise or cajole him. (If I haven't gotten my monsters mixed up.)

When I lived in Japan back around 1960 I saw LOTS of Japanese SciFi flicks. (Some with subtitles, some with English dubbed.) They *always* attacked Japan. Only in films made originally in English did they attack the US,

Movie makers know that their audiences are ethno-centric and state-centric (whatever the word for that should be). In fact Hollywood movies often take place in the West, and frequently in California. And Hollywood monsters frequently attack west-coast cities. So we're even more parochial than that. But the film-makers USUALLY figure out their audiences prejudices...or at least try to...and sculpt the story around that.

P.S.: A part of this effect may be that it's easier to make a film about what you understand. But that isn't most of it.

Re:2012

[Chaos Incarnate]

People who pay into SSI have zero equity or ownership stake in the fund and are entitled to no money back. Who gets money out of the fund, and how much, is completely a regime decision and can be changed by law.

We may technically have no equity or ownership stake in the fund. Given that we aren't allowed to exempt ourselves from participation, though, we or our estates are sure as hell entitled to our money back... We just probably won't get it.

Re:2012

[DMUTPeregrine]

When dragons belch and hippos flee
My thoughts, Ankh-Morpork, are of thee
Let others boast of martial dash
For we have boldly fought with cash
We own all your helmets, we own all your shoes
We own all your generals - touch us and you'll lose.

Morporkia! Morporkia!
Morporkia owns the day!
We can rule you wholesale
Touch us and you'll pay.

We bankrupt all invaders, we sell them souvenirs
We ner ner ner ner ner, hner ner hner by the ears
Er hner we ner ner ner ner ner
Ner ner her ner ner ner hner the ner
Er ner ner hner ner, nher hner ner ner (etc.)
Ner hner ner, your gleaming swords
We mortgaged to the hilt

Morporkia! Morporkia!
Hner ner ner ner ner ner
We can rule you wholesale
Credit where it's due.

-- Terry Pratchett, the Ankh-Morpork national anthem.

Re:2012

[PPH]

What about the aliens that landed in Johannesburg, South Africa?

Re:2012

[iluvcapra]

An "Annuity" is a form of insurance, subject to the various risks of insurance and cancellation if conditions aren't met.

Do you really think he wouldn't have been hung from a lamppost if he had tried to sell a 15% tax to go towards a risky investment with no ownership stake or entitlement to money back in the middle of the great depression?

That's what the law says. People were happy to pay it because it was a much better deal that anyone in the private market was offering, and the actuarial condition guaranteed the first generation a good return.

Re:2012

[iluvcapra]

Probably because it's called a "Trust fund."

This is imbecilic. Do you have a contract with the SSA guaranteeing you money? What if you die before you vest? Most of the time that money doesn't go to someone else. What if you go blind at 20? you're going to receive gobs of SSA benefits you didn't pay for. You don't own "shares" in the trust funds; I'm sorry that you applied the sort of flaky logic most Americans apply to their credit card statement when trying to understand the Social Security benefit, but that looks like what you're doing.

The way it works now is the trust fund buys securities from the federal government. The federal government then spends the money made on the sale of the security. It owes the social security fund that money back, plus interest. Guess where that money is going to come from? Taxpayers. So they take your retirement money from you, invest it in themselves, then charge you later for getting your own money back through increased taxes to cover the cost of the interest they are charging on themselves.

Notice that the SSA buys its bonds on the open market at market rates. People around the world are willing to pay a premium for US debt because the market predicts that our economy will grow. US debt has rarely ever been cheaper, even with massive QE pumping into the banking system.

Besides, all of the SSA's actions happen in the open. You can go on the SSA's website and see all of the information on these transactions, the health of the fund and how long the fund has. There's no fraud here. If the SSA ever becomes insolvent and unable to pay full benefits, something that tsn't projected to happen until around 2038, it will be a completely public, foreseeable, and preventable. Unless of course people decide they don't want a trust fund anymore, and would rather hand all their money over to Goldman and their buddies to invest...

Re:2012

[iluvcapra]

Entitlements are created by government. If you feel you're entitled to a benefit and you know you're going to live past 2040 (that's the trick!) call your congressman and tell them you want a commission to save Social Security, and not kill it or sell it to Wall Street.

You might want to leave the libertarian stuff at the door though. Demanding money from the trust fund, and demanding it's solvency past 2040, while demanding people should be able to exempt themselves is a bad negotiating position.

Re:2012

[DigiShaman]

Isn't it amazing that whenever there is an alien invasion, they seem to invade the US first (or some times ONLY in the US). Bleh.

OT. But regardless, your example doesn't carry much weight in that Hollywood is
1). American
2). Entertainment for an American audience.

Re:2012

[Joce640k]

The USA is only a few percent of the world and Earth-Alien diplomacy will be a whole lot easier without the ego of the USA in the way trying to run the show.

(and also without all the cigar-chomping rednecks in fighter planes who'll insist on running 'the security'...)

Re:2012

[Attila Dimedici]

We do say that anyone who retires and has no savings is bankrupt. Social Security has no savings because it invested all of its surplus (when it had a surplus) in Treasury Bonds. Unfortunately, the U.S. government has been spending over 20% of GDP while only receiving less than 19% of GDP in revenue. So, at some point (about the same time that SS expenditures exceed intake at current rates of increase), interest on U.S. Federal debt will exceed the amount of revenue raised by taxes.

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

The perception is probably more the reality. Think about it for a min. They send out a statement every year saying what you will make when you retire per month. Mine stands around 1200 a month. Yet right now I pay about 400 a month in. Sounds 'ponzi' scheme like to me. I am also told over and over that there will be drastic cuts coming about the time I retire. So I *MAY* get my 400 a month back or not. However that means my ROI on that 400 a month will probably be close to 0 over 45 years. Hell a money market savings account would do better than that.

It is a wealth destroyer and I keep hearing about the risk of cuts (from my perspective as an 'investor' bad news...). The gov is taking the money from one group and giving it to another. It is a simple wealth redistribution program. Lets call it what it is. I contribute and do not grumble about it because I know it helps people. It is the leaches that take advantage of the program to not contribute to society that I despise. Find a local ghetto or trailer park trust me they know *exactly* how to get the most money from the gov. These people have a check list on how to 'make' 1200 bucks a month plus 400-600 in food stammps. You cant live great on that but you can live decently considering it is tax free. They even consider you stupid for bothering to go to school and not taking advantage of the system. The worst part is if you decide you are tired of 'leaching' you can not get out of it. The gov instantly takes the other money away. So you end up working your ass off and making exactly the same amount or less. Then if you listened to everyone around you how stupid school is, you probably do not have the education it takes to get a decent job.

This program in many ways is a good thing for our society and in many ways a bad thing.

Re:2012

[Chaos Incarnate]

I want one or the other; I don't see the need for both. My preference is to be able to exempt myself (specifically because I don't expect to live past 2040), but I'd settle for a guaranteed payout if I couldn't have that.

Unfortunately, my Congresscritter right now is proud of his & his father's work supporting Social Insecurity and Medicare. I just hope he hurries up and dies, since voting him out doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.

Re:2012

[sjames]

Watch Torchwood or Dr. Who sometime. With those, take every instance of "The President" and "The Whitehouse" and replace them with "The Prime Minister" and "Buckingham Palace" (Rarely 10 Downing Street). The alien invaders typically pick on the U.K. with occasional mention that the U.S. isn't any better off.

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

till you get old enough to care about the fine print, then it's a fraud.

Re:2012

[evought]

Social Security is solvent - the worst anyone actually claims about it is it will be falling into a negative range, where intake will be only 75% of outgo, by 2034, and this negative range will last for about 13 to 15 years if no adjustments are made. Some people are calling that bankruptcy.

The problem is that, given that the fund was borrowed by other departments and a balanced budget was not maintained overall as projections required, it is no easier to raise money for, say, the Department of Education to pay Social Security than it is to raise money for Social Security directly. Either requires raising taxes, decreasing benefits, increasing deficits, cutting spending elsewhere, none of which anyone wants to do. This is not a problem with Social Security as conceived (separate argument) but with corrupt government as implemented. Just as with now defunct municipal retirement funds, it is always easier for a politician to spend now and put off the worry to a later Congress or administration. In general, no "temporary" tax will ever get repealed and no cookie jar will ever go unpilfered.

So, pragmatically speaking, Social Security is bankrupt or, rather, is caught up in the general insolvency of its debtor, the US government.

Re:2012

[mjwx]

If I was an alien, I'd invade France, always do the easy problems first.

The problem with that is after you've invaded France, it's still France.

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with invading France is that a good chunk of the population will form a resistance and wear you down through a war of attrition.

It's funny that when someone does it to you, it's terrorism, but when someone does it to your enemy, it's the resistance.

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

That is simply ignorant. I can't believe this nonsense got rated 5 and insightful.

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm amazed by how many people call SS a Ponzi scheme. It simply isn't, if
> only because the payouts and the administrative costs together are generally less than the
> pay ins.

"it simply isn't" -- sounds like you aren't too confident.

So, the payouts are less than the pay ins? Sounds like Vegas to me.
Another place where you can buy insurance, I might add.

Oh, and it's mandatory too. Lovely.

(another poster)
> People who pay into SSI have zero equity or ownership stake in the fund and are
> entitled to no money back. Who gets money out of the fund, and how much, is
> completely a regime decision and can be changed by law.

Ahh, so it's not a ponzi scheme, it's outright extortion.
Just trust us, we *might* give you *some* of your money back someday.

Now, why should I trust this more than managing my own money myself?

Suppose I don't plan on working and retiring on the "average" schedule as everyone else?
Oh, too bad, you are an "anomaly" and not "the average person" so tough.

There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be
strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the
greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the
weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.

Often misquoted as:

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be
equal in slavery than unequal in freedom

> it takes more than not compartmentalising individual pay ins and basing pay outs on
> individuallly invested funds to make something a Ponzi scheme - otherwise all Health
> Insurance would be a Ponzi Scheme.

Disingenuous at best; this smells like a fallacy.

It's not an x because otherwise y (wish we all love!) would be an x too.

Also, the insurance industries are not particularly kind, benevolent, caring entities you
should use for "things we all love." Trust me, I've worked there.

Then you say:

> For Social Security, there's literally none of the amplification effect of a Ponzi where you
> have to keep getting more and more people into the system

And a little bit later:

> Unless population growth slows much further than expected or the US government selectively
> defaults on its internal debts to its own citizens to prop up its foreign debt, Social
> security will re-enter a positive growth period way before all the money now owed to it from
> the general fund is paid back.

So you don't have to keep getting more people into the system, but if population growth slows
then it might not re-enter a positive growth period.

Sounds like you can't make up your mind.

Sure, just keep shifting those columns and numbers around until it is so convoluted
that noone can tell what is going on. Just like .

Thank you for being honest.

That said, does the good outweigh the bad?
I don't disqualify or judge it purely based on whether it is a scheme or extortion,
(it's not as if there aren't plenty of taxes and corresponding loopholes that are purely
for select interests to take advantage of, and anyone who is not well-connected enough to know them "tough luck")
but let's at least call things what they are.

When you can't do that, it makes me suspect things are not being
used properly, and you know it.

So, the real question: why are you so quick to defend this system?

Re:2012

[The Master Control P]

Yes, the USA is the only country with ego problems that routinely behaves like a narcissistic dick.

Re:2012

[slick7]

If I was an alien, I'd invade France, always do the easy problems first.

The problem with that is after you've invaded France, it's still France.

C'est la guerre!

Re:2012

[slick7]

Insurance companies make their money from investments, actuaries determine the average life span of the average insured individual, the numbers are then adjusted to ensure the underwriters profit from healthy people and they drop the others.
Regardless of how many quarters you complete, if you die before your retirement, your heirs receive $255. Period. Don't forget the greed and corruption tax. Don't forget the politicians who serve one or more terms that get benefits for life as well as health coverage. I was taught that you lead by example, these politicians lead a fine example. People are suffering in this country and around the world. If America isn't at least partially responsible, then who is? Is this the reason why people around the world appear to hate our guts? Or is this a figment of my imagination?

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

On Dr. Who they always invade London!

And just how many alien invasions have you lived through, anyway??

Re:2012

[mjwx]

If I was an alien, I'd invade France, always do the easy problems first.

The problem with that is after you've invaded France, it's still France.

C'est la guerre!

Oh, very well then,

On behalf of the commonwealth of Australia I accept your surrender.

Re:2012

[Eunuchswear]

There is no actual money in the Social Security "trust fund." The money collected by the payroll taxes above and beyond what was required for paying benefits got spent by other government agencies.

Doesn't matter. Money people owe you is an asset.

Re:2012

[tehcyder]

Another knee jerk extreme right winger who has no idea what a Ponzi scheme is, nor how social security works.

Re:2012

[tehcyder]

There is no actual money in the Social Security "trust fund." The money collected by the payroll taxes above and beyond what was required for paying benefits got spent by other government agencies.

I suppose you think it should have been kept in a big fucking piggy bank so that it would have been easier for the nutjob right wingers to steal it.

Re:2012

[tehcyder]

Ah, the pure boneheaded selfishness of the lesser-spotted libertarian.

I suppose you think you should be able to exempt yourself from taxes entirely because you don't use the roads, schools, army or rubbish collection as you fester in your basement imagining your enemies plotting against you.

Re:2012

[tehcyder]

At least if the aliens invaded France instead of the US they'd have a chance of finding some edible food and genuine culture.

Re:2012

[Chaos Incarnate]

I may not use those others, but at least they benefit the community as a whole. Social Security and Medicare only benefit people who weren't bothered to help themselves.

Re:2012

[level_headed_midwest]

The government owes themselves the money. They didn't take that money and lend it out, they spent it. Thus it isn't an asset, it's debt.

Re:2012

[JBMcB]

>This is imbecilic. Do you have a contract with the SSA guaranteeing you money? What if you die before you vest?

That isn't my problem with the trust fund - my problem is with the government spending the surplus it got from the baby boomers when it should have been banking it away for when they retire.

I'm not claiming fraud. I'm not claiming that people won't be getting their money back. I am claiming that it's not a well run institution, and, once again, the taxpayers are going to feel the brunt of it's mismanagement.

Re:2012

[AK Marc]

Social Security actually does classify as a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes give earlier investors payouts not from any actual investing taking place, but from buy-ins from newer investors. They are also destined to fail because the number of people getting paid will exceed the number paying in. Social Security fulfills all of those criteria.

So the same could be said about any insurance scheme. The first person to collect from any new insurance company will get more out than they paid in. And they aren't "destined to fail." They have been cash-positive for years. Given the investments on the book (the net cash goes into T-bills), they will probably weather the lean years of the baby boomers and become cash positive again before that reserve runs out. And, even if they didn't, a small cash infusion from the general fund (to be paid back later) will get them through the last years of that bubble, and they will become cash-positive again and pay back any borrowing necessary.

The only way they'll fail is if Congress chooses to pass a law ending it.

There is no actual money in the Social Security "trust fund." The money collected by the payroll taxes above and beyond what was required for paying benefits got spent by other government agencies.

That's simply a lie. That's like saying that I have no money in the bank because the bank loaned it out to someone else. I have a piece of paper saying that the bank owes me $10. And when I go to the bank and ask for that $10, they give it to me. But, when I redeposit it, by your lies, you'd assert that I have no money in the bank because the bank then loans it out.

SS is the one and only one place people make such lies, so I have to assume that it's people that hate SS who make up lies, and not that a deposit that's repurposed should be considered to not exist.

The initial beneficiaries got paid almost exclusively with money collected from younger workers, since they did not contribute much into the system due to timing issues (retiring shortly after the SSA was started and thus not paying much into the system, yet being eligible for benefits.) So, even if all of the money collected in the payroll tax stayed in Social Security, the initial "investors" were still paid off with buy-ins from newer "investors."

That's because it's insurance, not investment. But you can lie and call it an "investment," since that lie makes it easier to bash it. But when you consider it "insurance" it works like every other insurance company out there where some people pay in and others collect, and it can last forever.

Now that the number of younger workers isn't growing as quickly as it once was (no new baby boom), the retiring workers drawing on the system are now taking out more money than the current workers are paying in. This is the bankruptcy stage.

Except it's not bad enough to cause bankruptcy, and the bubble will end when the boomers make it through such that it will be cash-positive again.

So, Social Security actually *is* a Ponzi scheme.

Saying it as often as you like won't ever make it true.

Re:2012

[AK Marc]

Would you walk past a dying man, starving on the street and make fun of him for not preparing for that eventuality? If so, then you are evil. If not, then you are wrong in your assessment of SS and Medicare.

Re:2012

[slick7]

Another knee jerk extreme right winger who has no idea what a Ponzi scheme is, nor how social security works.

Really...I am 15 years from retirement with 65+ quarters earned. I am of the opinion that I will not see a penny of it. I served my country honorably during a time when the military was looked down upon.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris

Re:2012

[Anonymous Coward]

If I was an alien, I'd invade the US first, and only the US.

If I was an alien, I'd invade France, always do the easy problems first.

Zen fire up ze missiles?

Re:2012

[slick7]

At least if the aliens invaded France instead of the US they'd have a chance of finding some edible food and genuine culture.

Yeah right, snails, brie and a Chinese made pyramid.

Re:2012

[Eunuchswear]

It is, of course, both.

All debts are liabilities for someone and assets for someone else.

The Government owes money to the social security fund - the fund has an asset, the government has a liability.

If you think the government is not good for the money it owes you've got a rather more serious problem. I wouldn't bother worrying about social security.

Re:2012

[Angostura]

whoops.

pathetic

[z-j-y]

this is a very light system. (no, it doesn't have millions of users.)

*HOW* Much?!

[Seumas]

Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?! No wonder the program has failed and is such a joke. And we're looking to find a way to keep this program afloat well into the future, to "protect" us in our retirement by siphoning off extra taxation from every paycheck for our entire life? The same guys who are spending $500,000,000.00 to upgrade the system that maintains it? You could buy a million iPads at retail price for that. I don't know why you would, but you could. Holy fuck.

Then again, a lot of it is written in COBOL, as the article states. And as our unqualified, ignorant, idiotic National CIO stated last year -- something like this, anyway -- "we need to improve the computer human interface with skip-logic, because a lot of things are in COBOL binary interface". Or something.

Oh, and note that the article said that half a billion dollars is just what has been allocated for the project. So far. How much longer are these guys going to get away with these twenty million dollar Drupal *.gov website projects and other scams?!

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[WarwickRyan]

I know that it sounds like a lot of money, but it may not actually be that bad, depending on what, exactly, is included in that budget.

If, say, they're including upgrading all IT infrastructure for the agency (all desktops, laptops, network etc), and they're including things such as training of users and rollout costs, then it really isn't such a crazy figure at all.

That's also the problem with these projects. They include everything under the sun in one project budget, instead of splitting it out into multiple smaller budgets.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Scam Alert.

Moving to a new data centre should not be that expensive.
COBOL IS scalable - so you just wheel in a bigger more powerful box and it just all works.

So they are lying - probably doing something like redesigning it from scratch and re-writing it VB6 so it does not work with .Google in the year 2020.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay upgrades!

Win xp sp1 machines running on a pentium III chip with 512mb of ram right?

(I say this having just spent the night talking to a client who was b*tching over her website looking funny with the partially transparent .png files... because her work laptop for a pharmaceutic company was locked into IE 6)

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Sir Holo]

$500M is about $1.40 per US citizen.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[grimJester]

Then again, a lot of it is written in COBOL, as the article states.

Yes, and upgrading legacy code to become a modern data center is hard. Why, I remember how I struggled to turn a simple Pascal Hello World into a cafeteria. Can you believe there's no open source tool to translate for loops into pretzels?

Hint: It's a building. With computers. And data.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Charliemopps]

Come on... you know it doesn't include any of that.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[WarwickRyan]

Now I've RTA I do.. it's just talking about hardware..

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[ohiovr]

Just how many people work in the SS bureaucracy anyway? Do they all need alienware gaming laptops?

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[DarkOx]

I really find these OMG we have to get away from COBOL articles sort of silly. While I agree that doing new development in COBOL probably does not make a whole lot of sense most of the time using the existing code base is not a problem. IBM makes it real easy to not only run your forty year old COBOL applications but integrate them with Java, Ruby and other more modern languages. You can even do things like implement web services and the like pretty easily in COBOL these days, I have seen some pretty impressive copy books.

What we should remember is COBOL has run these business systems for 40 years with success. It might not be the most fun thing to write code in but its actually quite good for accounting and basic reporting processes. Oh sure you can do these things in C, C++, Java, or anything else just fine but in general its going to be more error prone because those languages are not really targeted at the task and in truth probably use more total lines of code to get it done, even if most of its warped up in some frame work or STL. Finally most of these business accounting type tasks really do make more sense thought about in structured programming terms or even just simply as control break processes, they can be forced on to an object model like anything else but the operative word there is forced.

There are lots of good reasons to replace systems and forklift old code. If you are tossing out you old COBOL process because its a mess of badly done spaghetti code fine, if you are getting rid of it just because OMGs COBOL is dying that is fixing what is not broken an asking for trouble.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[crow_t_robot]

Oh, and note that the article said that half a billion dollars is just what has been allocated for the project. So far.

You can safely assume this project will overrun its budget just like many many many other government and defense programs.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[zippthorne]

Yeah, and? A $50, 1 TB hard drive could hold 3 kilobytes of information for every citizen in the US. So, the real question is..

Just how much information are they storing here, and how frequently are they accessing it, anyway?

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[jo42]

In addition to the $180,000+ national debt per US citizen. Just keeps on piling up, don't it?

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[vlm]

$500M is about $1.40 per US citizen.

From experience doing genealogical research, if SS is anything like the civil war era northern army pension system, this would still be a substantial cost savings over doing it manually, crazy as that might sound.

Also from having been involved in major data conversion projects over the decades, a cost of $2 per account converted would have been an incredible daydream. Just having a final step of a semi-intelligent semi-trained human being review the converted account will cost more. The only thing saving the SS is probably huge scale and frankly all the accounts are pretty much the same story other than personally identifiable information.

Finally from having been around for awhile I know that shock stories like this are based on rolling everything they possibly can into that figure, rounding up, passing along to the next guy whom adds some more (maybe even the same stuff) and rounds up again, repeat until a scary enough figure is generated. So this is probably like three annual department budgets plus training budget plus a lifetime supply of backup tapes plus a couple weeks salary for all front end personnel (assuming they're paid during training).

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Chris Mattern]

A $50, 1 TB hard drive could hold 3 kilobytes of information for every citizen in the US.

...if you didn't count the computer that would be needed to access it, if you didn't mind waiting a several minutes for *every single piece* of information you needed, and if you didn't care at all if the data was still going to be there when you needed it.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[jellomizer]

I see this type of argument before. If everyone pays an extra dollar for X then we can have so much more money for Y. The problem is there are so many ways to use money that they add up quickly. And you are paying a lot for taxes. That is why we need to keep viglalent on where all are our taxes are going.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to this--decently written old programs are fine (Fortran in our case). Back in the bad old days they focused on the important things and made them work.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Cwix]

Paranoid much?

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[nurb432]

Right. Why fix what isn't broken in a panic. Sure, make it a long term goal to move away from it, as realistically someday it wont be supportable as the pool of people slowly shrink, but don't flip out and convert it into today's latest and greatest language.

COBOL is stable, and has been proven by the test of time. For projects like this you want its successor to do the same.

I still remember in school how 'pascal is the next thing and its all you ever need to learn..'. ya, that worked out real well and it wasn't exactly a new language either. Glad i refused to limit myself with it and learned other things too.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Seumas]

More importantly, that's $5 per tax-payer. Anyway, that's not really relevant to the justification of the expense.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Seumas]

I prefer the argument that if it weren't for the extraordinary taxes (especially when you consider all the taxes you are really gouged for, beyond just income tax - and the increase in the tax rate over, say, when your grandparents were around), think of all the things you could do. In my early thirties, I could have already put my brother and sister through private four year universities and bought our mom a nice house. Or, you know, have covered 1/900,000,000th of the 2010 budget.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd feel more comfortable having my data in a time-tested COBOL based system maintained by a few good people who know what they are doing rather than some "modern" C# or Java based system hacked together on a budget by a bunch of stupid Indians.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[MickyTheIdiot]

...you forgot something. That's the costs of new personnel because of the ones that quit because they have to learn something new.

This might seem silly to some of you, but it's quite real. I worked on a rollout where a department in a certain U.S. state's government in the mid 90s. People resigned in many offices rather than learn about the new equipment even though it was going to help them out tremendously.

This is one of the problems in government agencies... people are there because it is cushy and when they're expect to perform they scat.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[timeOday]

Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?! No wonder the program has failed and is such a joke.

It is absurd to say that SS has failed or is a joke. Without it, millions of elderly would live in poverty, just as they did before the program was instituted, only moreso, since people live longer now.

When a nation's demographics skew older, it is overall less productive and so less wealthy. The effects of that are felt in many ways, including increased direct burden of supporting the elderly. Compared to other nations where the birth rate and immigration are lower, the US is actually in pretty good shape. Adjusting SS for the demographic changes is politically painful, but not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

My company does a few billion in business every year and 70% of that is executing in Cobol some of it has roots back to the early 70s and has moved from mainframes platform to mainframe platform finally settling on an As/400 in the mid 90s. That Cobol is accessed as if it was a typical DB2/SQL stored procedure via the .net/ Microsoft patterns and practices data access block as if it was any other peice of DB code on a SQL Server and serves an entire ecosystem of more modern platforms via a services interface. Cobol is not going anywhere. Our main problem though is finding people who want to maintain that big Iron and keeping them alive.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Nemyst]

Similar arguments are being used about IE6. Doesn't stop ActiveX from being any less horrid and IE6 the bane of web development.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[slick7]

Just how many people work in the SS bureaucracy anyway?

What a trip, unemployment people on unemployment, who will they get to screw them on their entitlements?

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[__aamnbm3774]

Although you were modded up, the parent has a good point.

500 Million is an astronomical number for a SQL database.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[seeker_1us]

I really find these OMG we have to get away from COBOL articles sort of silly. While I agree that doing new development in COBOL probably does not make a whole lot of sense most of the time using the existing code base is not a problem.

See... the problem here is you are trying to apply normal logic. Look at this from a PHB persepective.

It's OLD. Old is BAD.

New is GOOD. Replacing old with new is something that we can spend money on and the PHBs can put on their bragsheets to get promotions.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[magarity]

That's also the problem with these projects. They include everything under the sun in one project budget, instead of splitting it out into multiple smaller budgets.

I'll bet the real problem is scope creep. It probably started out as a two year, $100M project ten years ago and every nine months the requirements are rewritten so that the current work is 50% scrapped and another year and a half and $100M are added. It stinks of poor executive management support and inadequate project management pushback to changes.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Artifakt]

Social Security's client base is a tremendous chunk of "every citizen in the US". With records of every quarterly payment sent in for what is often a 40 or 50 year employment history, every monthly payment sent out for what is often a 10 year plus retirement, Medicare related records, court transcripts and records where someone has successfully challenged a disability ruling, all the ongoing legal paperwork where someone is still in the process of challenging one, an individual investigators report whenever someone applies for disability, a death benefit, or other claim, and the need to verify SSNs to other government agencies in formats they can handle (which means the SSA is being expected to ensure format compatibility so some other, smaller or more isolated agencies don't have to get with the program, would you really expect all that to fit in less than 3 Kb? Would your own employer's copies of your paycheck info fit in less than 3 Kb? How about your medical records (even leaving out actual copies of X-rays and sonograms and such, which I'm pretty sure the SSA doesn't need to store anything analogous)? How many Kb of records does a typical administrative hearing generate? A typical court case?

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[carpefishus]

$500M is about $1.40 per US citizen.

Said another way, that's about $60,000 per US top 1% rich citizen. (The top 1% of wage earners pay 37% of the tax in the US) It's only fair.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay, grandparents. Who weren't paying for the debt from WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Cold War, and the ongoing Oil Wars.

But now we're paying less than them. In spite of the massively increased debt load brought to you by the people we voted into office.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2010-05-10-taxes_N.htm

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[noidentity]

It's for your own good. You cannot be trusted to save for your retirement, and make wise investments, so we're doing that for you.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[DavidTC]

Um, you really need to actually check your assumptions. Because I don't know 'when your grandparents were around', but you're wrong. Just wrong.

Either you're talking about the great depression, when taxes, were, indeed lower, but no one was buying houses or putting people through college or, you know, eating real food...

...or 'your grandparents were around' during WWII when the tax rate was not only higher, no one was even allowed to build new homes because material went to the war effort, as did all the construction workers...

...or 'your grandparents were around' to be, oh, the 1950-1960, when the tax rates were higher.

There is one microscopic sweet spot of post-war, from 1945-1950, when the US was the only functioning economy, when the tax rates was slightly lower than current rates.

But they weren't lower than a decade ago when you hypothesis you could have been doing all these, so you're still wrong. Your grandparents had 5 years at that rate. You had a decade. (And we're talking maybe 3% lower than current rates.)

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to think it was impossible to blow that much on an IT project. Then I worked for a relatively small govt agency and watched a $75M project get fucked up. Basically govt managers build empires by bringing in an army of "consultants" (80% are useless) who are incentivized to extend projects for as long as possible without actually delivering anything. Instead of making decisions the usual response is to hire more consultants who will make decisions for you. But more consultants require more project manager consultants, who require more governance consultants, who require more process consultants, and on and on it goes.

It becomes a giant revolving-door circle-jerk cluster-fuck of $100-400/hr contractors.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I watched a "team" spend $500,000 over 8 months to develop a stand-alone windows application with 1 screen to edit 1 database table, porting . Management's response? The team had done outstanding work and the entire organization should exemplify them because other teams had gone years without producing anything. The agency needed another 1000+ screens ported from COBOL to Windows, and after 7+ years and close to $75M the work continues even though the original budget was $3-5M.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[garompeta]

I can charge a reasonable price for parsing your code and translating it to donuts.
You can get the pretzel module by paying the upgrade.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[MasaMuneCyrus]

I'd rather just contract the damn project out to , but oh no, GOD FORBID we ever put "private" or "contracted" and "social security" in the same sentence...

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[benjamindees]

if SS is anything like the civil war era northern army pension system, this would still be a substantial cost savings over doing it manually,

Yeah, the Social Security Administration records are maintained with quills and scrolls. They need $500 million to upgrade to computers otherwise they will have to go back to using stone tablets.

Sadly, this is probably more accurate than I'd like to believe.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Belial6]

I would say that the 'pool of people' shrinking is not even a problem. Any of us that write code, know that once you know how it works, the language is just a matter of syntax. Cobol isn't the magic language that no one can learn after 1990. Hire developers and train them if they can't get to the point of being useful in a short amount of time, then maybe they just don't have what it takes to be a good developer anyway.

The 'shrinking pool of developers' problem is only a problem when you have the mindset that everyone must be a star on their first day. It is how we see ads asking for 10 years of experience in technology that is only 5 years old.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[iluvcapra]

I'd feel a lot better about spending the half-a-fucking-billion dollars if I wasn't completely certain that the whole SSI system was going to be scrapped by some concern-trolling "deficit hawk"-types before I ever saw a check.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[korgitser]

Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?!

It's not that much. The US prints and borrows more money every year. While it baffles me that americans can honestly believe that SS is a bad idea, it's still nothing compared to the world that honestly thinks lending real money to the US and buying dollars in return is a good idea.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Belial6]

I have my doubts about how SSI is handled as well. One of them being that it is not Social Security Insurance, but in fact, Social Security Retirement. Thus for honesty's sake, it should be renamed to SSR. That being said, most people CANT be trusted to save for their retirement. It is sad but true. We either need something like SSI, we need to be willing to let old people starve, or we need to figure out something else to do with all of the 70+ people who can't work and have no savings. I am open to debate on the subject, and won't even dismiss letting them stave out of hand.

It doesn't even take a person having not saved for retirement for them to be destitute in their old age. All it takes is for them to be blinded by their love of a family member. How many people have had their life savings blown because their spouse went off the deep end and decided to blow the whole thing. How many people have ended up destitute because when realized that they couldn't handle their own finances anymore, they let their child 'help' them. Then their child siphoned it all off, leaving their parent with nothing.

Yes, SSI could use some major restructuring, starting with what it's actual purpose is, but it isn't as simple as you make it out to be.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

There are offices in every metro in the 3rd largest country in the world. Think about it: This is across 50 States, the federal district and five inhabited territories. That's a whole lot of people and a whole lot of offices to network. You're talking about an enormous system that includes all citizens, people working in the US, and handles payouts for all retirees and disabled persons. Running a country isn't free.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[DesScorp]

"Then again, a lot of it is written in COBOL, as the article states."

The article also states that the reason the IG wants to replace the software is that "COBOL is a dead or dying language".

Except, well, no it's not. It's not used as much as in the past, but as we saw in 2000, it's not going away, either. Like the mainframes that COBOL runs on, predictions of the extinction of these systems have be preached from ranks of PC-ville for 30 years. And 30 years from now, they'll probably still be saying the same thing. COBOL's age in and of itself is not a very good justification for changing the software. The same people criticizing COBOL for it's age often advocate going to a language like C, and they seem to forget that C is pretty long in the tooth itself. It's not the age of the language, it's whether or not it can meet your needs. And for mainframe users, COBOL seems to work just fine. As a taxpayer, I have the sinking feeling that a lot of the justification for these multi-million dollar upgrades is simply a case of "keeping up with the Joneses"... the perception that the SSA has to go to pc-based servers, the cloud, Java, etc, because that's what everyone else is doing, so we should do it too, right?.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[noidentity]

That being said, most people CANT be trusted to save for their retirement. It is sad but true. We either need something like SSI, we need to be willing to let old people starve, or we need to figure out something else to do with all of the 70+ people who can't work and have no savings. I am open to debate on the subject, and won't even dismiss letting them stave out of hand.

I wonder if knowing that they won't be allowed to starve is part of the reason they don't save for their retirement. Sort of like the too-big-to-fail thing with companies; why be careful if you'll get bailed out when you screw up badly?

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[noidentity]

Sorry for the double reply, just felt compelled to respond to the second part as well :)

It doesn't even take a person having not saved for retirement for them to be destitute in their old age. All it takes is for them to be blinded by their love of a family member. How many people have had their life savings blown because their spouse went off the deep end and decided to blow the whole thing. How many people have ended up destitute because when realized that they couldn't handle their own finances anymore, they let their child 'help' them. Then their child siphoned it all off, leaving their parent with nothing.

Siphoning the money off, kind of like the Social Security Administration itself has done? They didn't save it; they spent it, and now depend on the money current people are "saving" to pay for the people who they were supposed to be saving for decades ago. Let people decide how to invest their own damn money. At least those who can do so properly will be allowed to do so, instead of being forced to buy into this pyramid scheme.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Roarkk]

As a storage admin for a decent size (1000+ employee) company, I get this argument from management every day. We can go out and buy a terabyte for $50! How hard is it to justify 10TB for project X?

Answer: Your USB drive (or internal SATA drive, or cheap single desktop RAID solution) has neither the performance, reliability, or feature set required by a modern datacenter.

A standard (7200rpm) USB drive can get around 320 IOPS. A single application in an enterprise environment, serving multiple users, can easily require 20,000+ IOPS at the database level. An environment like the SSA could easily have dozens of apps serving the same number of users (employees, not even counting customers). How many USB drives do you plan on connecting? How are you going to maintain, monitor, and expand your 1000's of daisy chained USB drives? How many millions are you going to spend designing, implementing, and maintaining an interface to control them? How much to train people to use it?

Enterprise storage solutions from EMC, NetApp, 3Par etc. help control the issues above, but they don't come cheap. A terabyte of space for a NetApp filer, if you count licensing, training, power, cooling, disaster recovery etc., will run you easily $10,000 / TB. EMC storage can be double that.

I can't guess how much data they need to store, but knowing that they have 106,000 employees, and knowing that my company has around a thousand, even if they needed only a tenth as much storage as us, they're looking at 10 petabytes, or $100,000,000 in storage. If you budget roughly the same amount for network and server hardware, then about as much as both combined for application development, support, transition, and staff, then throw in a final $100,000,000 for government waste and bureaucracy, you're pretty much right on target.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[HiThere]

I think you've misanalysed that. They work in civil service because they're afraid of change. When change is *going to happen* they reanalyze their job options. Maybe there would be less change to be dealt with if they changed to somewhere else, where people already knew how the system worked.

The effects are largely the same, but that actions to mitigate the problem are very different. E.g., long ago I used to set up duplicate systems...the new one and the old. It was a big hassle, but it solved several kinds of problem (at, admittedly, a cost). It ensured that people could ease into the new system, so we didn't have people leaving because they were afraid of it. (OK, it was a small office. If I'd been dealing with more people, I'm sure that would have happened, and a couple of people *did* take early retirement.)

People in civil service don't dislike working anymore than anyone else does. They dislike being bored, just like everyone else. But they have a greater fear of change. Otherwise they'd leave for better pay when the economy was booming. The combination of a dislike of being bored and a fear of change presents problems in dealing with their work. Most of it is rather boring, so they dislike it, but they aren't afraid of it.

P.S.: I'm not sure that civil servants are much different for the workers in other large bureaucracies. You might want to think about it. (I don't have much experience, as I was a civil servant for over 20 years, and had only an extremely little experience with other large bureaucracies. ... And I spent just about all my desire for change in dealing with technology. I sure didn't like it when other parts of my job changed. Administrators, however, seemed to like to reorganize things every couple of years. My guess it that they had just gotten too bored with the old organization, because despite what they proclaimed the new organization never worked any better (or much differently) than the old one.

Some job categories, however, don't have any real option to institute change. We had an accountant who regularly took trips to Las Vegas. She MUST have known the odds. But I guess she needed the change. When she retired she made a silly mistake and took too much of her retirement pay as a lump sum, and had to pay punitive taxes on it. An *accountant*! And she was a good accountant.

Myself, I developed the habit of switching computer languages. I still do it excessively. I've good marvellous arguments as to why I do it, but I frequently find myself wondering just why. Do I really believe the arguments? But the rest of my life is quite stable.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

And they have to build redundant systems with backup. Failure is not an option.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[HiThere]

Where are you going to get the maintenance programmers? You *WILL* need them. You must adjust the system whenever the laws change.

I think, that were I in charge, I'd be recommending a conversion of Java. C & C++ are decent choices, but they don't yet have a consensus on how to handle Unicode strings. It's true the current system doesn't handle them, but I'd consider it a gross mistake if the converted system doesn't. And the files will nearly HAVE to have the strings stored as utf-8, if only from space considerations. (But also because converting ASCII into utf-8 is dead simple.)

That said, a project this size could build a unicode library as a trivial addition. But ensuring that this was handled properly everywhere would be difficult, and when coding in C it's easy to slip and use char instead of whatever you choose to use for unicode. And literals WILL need to be run through a macro, or they will end up being of char type. (I *KNOW* that C and C++ ignore this. That's a mistake.)

P.S.: This argument for why Java should be chosen over C/C++ is silly and trivial ... in the sense that the standards committee could solve it extremely quickly and have the "intermediate standard" implemented the same day. (The "intermediate standard" wouldn't actually handle anything besides ASCII, but the literals would be defined to be utf-8 strings. With no requirement to handle anything outside the 7-bit ASCII set of characters. Then a proposed standard could be argued out which detailed how to allow other chars into the literals. Ideally char would become a reserved word, and current usage be preserved by a temporary waiver that allowed "char" to be made equivalent to the new byte type. The proposed standard would redefine this somehow...to be thrashed out, as a unicode char. (Could be the same as "wide character" of the current standard.) Etc.

But until the unicode mess has been sorted out, I can't consider C/C++ suitable for any code that needs to be maintained over time.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Bender0x7D1]

Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?!

That only sounds like a lot. If a university with 50,000 faculty, staff and students announces a $1 million dollar upgrade it wouldn't seem too bad. Now multiply that by 6,000 to account for a US population of 300 million people and you would get to $6 billion. So, half a billion is pretty reasonable.

Also, since you mentioned iPads - there is a world of difference between enterprise equipment and commercial equipment. You might not care if your system dies due to a failed power supply, but these servers can't go down. Which means redundant power supplies that are hot swappable. Plus you are going to have multiple drives with hardware RAID that are also hot swappable. You might think enterprise equipment isn't needed or is too expensive - until you have to tell your boss 50,000 people aren't going to get their checks on time since a server went down.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[garyebickford]

Then again, a lot of it is written in COBOL, as the article states.

Good point. As a similar example, Citibank said that they spent $500 million fixing their code for Y2K. That was almost entirely labor. They also said that had they not done the fixes, Y2K would likely have destroyed the bank.

(The retired COBOL programmers that Citibank brought in were reportedly paid from $100,000 to $200,000 per year. So 500 programmers is $50,000,000 to $100,000,000 per year and 1000 is $100,000,000 to $200,000,000 per year. 2.5 years of burn at the higher rate is $500,000,000. They may have spent more time and burned less per year, of course - I don't know the details.

I expect that upgrading the software at SSA is an equivalent task.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[garyebickford]

Indeed. I used to work at a Global 1000 company, which decided to adopt SAP first in the US and then globally. The biggest part of the budget was not the software but the internal labor of training, redefining business practices to be compatible with the new system and software conversion. After spending $700 million on the $300 million project, they finished the US system and canceled the global conversion. SAP stock dropped 20% overnight.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[garyebickford]

I've good marvellous arguments as to why I do it, but I frequently find myself wondering just why.

"What's on the other side of that hill?" :D

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[m50d]

Oh sure you can do these things in C, C++, Java, or anything else just fine but in general its going to be more error prone because those languages are not really targeted at the task

In my experience that's simply not true. There's a reason we create new languages, we apply the lessons learned from old ones to make them better, and a computer programming language is the most general tool in existence - an awful lot of things are really very similar at a programming level.

and in truth probably use more total lines of code to get it done, even if most of its warped up in some frame work or STL.

So they take more code, if you include code that you don't have to write or pay for yourself.

Finally most of these business accounting type tasks really do make more sense thought about in structured programming terms or even just simply as control break processes, they can be forced on to an object model like anything else but the operative word there is forced

Again, not my experience. I was surprised, because OO makes very little sense in terms of how I expect the world to operate - but having done it in practice, it works.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Belial6]

Given the number of people that didn't have savings prior to SSI, I would say that for many, it's existence does not come into play, although it would be silly to say that it doesn't for many others. One of the big problems is that our system is actually built on making sure people don't understand money. There are big pushes from many sides to confuse, or to teach people things that are not true. Heck, I have yet to hear one person that is supposed to be an authority on finance who doesn't tell people they should always have a mortgage on their home.

If you want to convince people that SSI needs to go, you first have to convince them that it is OK to let little old ladies be thrown out of the homes they have lived in for 60 years, to starve penniless on the streets. When those that oppose your ideas drag out examples, they will not be dragging out the 60 year old woman who lives in an 12 room mansion, and can afford enough plastic surgery that she still looks 35, and hasn't worked a single day in her life other than the BJs she gives to her husband who inherited the family business. They will find a little 80 year old woman who has worked since she was 16, saved money from every paycheck, paid into the SSI coffers her whole life, and is now starving on the streets.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

That figure is meaningless, the US owes somewhere around 40-50% of the debt to american citizens. So if the debt is say 10trillion, and the U.S. owes 5 trillion to the US, the US could pay itself off, and use that newly paid off money to pay the other 5 trillion (not nearly this simplistic, but it makes a figure of some-big-number-owed-by-every-american useless because if it actually was personal debt, everyone could just swap money and pay off the rest relatively easily in a few years)

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

What we should remember is COBOL has run these business systems for 40 years with success.

Are we sure there's no selection bias involved here? After all, we're not counting the failures at all, are we? Nor are we counting the maintenance costs, which could be continually increasing - but which are continually paid because it's for a critical system that nobody wants to replace because they're already so heavily invested in it and as long as it's still "working" it hasn't all been a waste?

After all, if COBOL was so great that everything has been running on it for 40 years... why are there all these COBOL jobs, still? In the absence of new projects, that'd mean those 40 year old systems must require constant tinkering...

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again, a lot of it is written in COBOL, as the article states. And as our unqualified, ignorant, idiotic National CIO stated last year -- something like this, anyway -- "we need to improve the computer human interface with skip-logic, because a lot of things are in COBOL binary interface".

The US National CIO is a moron plain and simple. For information system such as that of the Social Security Administration COBOL makes perfect sense. These days COBOL can run on mainframes or commodity servers though mainframes provide better stability. The only human interface for the data entry staff necessary is a smart terminal with a text user interface. Fire the US National CIO and their entire staff of dingbats before the usual suspect contractor firms get their sweaty palms on any portion of the system.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[noidentity]

Well, if people could actually own their houses, their costs would be much lower when they retire. My mother "bought" an average house, but still has to pay about $400 a month in taxes (i.e. rent to the state).

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[ultranova]

I know that it sounds like a lot of money, but it may not actually be that bad, depending on what, exactly, is included in that budget.

Mainly bonuses to the CEOs of corporations doing the work, judging by the past. Giving public money to private individuals is only bad when those individuals are poor.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[ultranova]

Well, if people could actually own their houses, their costs would be much lower when they retire. My mother "bought" an average house, but still has to pay about $400 a month in taxes (i.e. rent to the state).

Does your mother guard her house and other possessions with a shotgun in hand? Maintain the roads leading there? Maintain the electric grid, water and sewage systems? Keep a few cruiser missiles handy to defend against invading armies? Enforce zoning and pollution controls to keep someone from building a smoke-belching factory right next to her house? Maintain her own currency system to trade with her local grocers?

She gets off cheap.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Belial6]

While SOME of your points may be valid, claiming that property taxes pay for all of those things is childish, as you know very well that things like maintaining the electric grid, water and sewage systems are paid for as direct bills for their use. You are also fully aware that the local taxing authority does not handle protection against invading armies, nor do they handle maintaining a currency system. In fact, the only thing you mention that IS handled by the taxing authority that takes money from noidentities mother for the privilege of 'owning' her home is is street maintenance and zoning. Limit your snide remarks to that, and you might be seen as something other than a troll. It wouldn't necessarily make you right, but at least it wouldn't sound stupid.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[noidentity]

Sorry, that $400 was just in property taxes. If you want to talk of those services, be sure to include income tax, sales tax, gasoline tax, and all the other indirect taxes that are included in the prices of things.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[tibit]

The fact that it's in COBOL is irrelevant. It most likely runs on old-ish IBM hardware that new-ish IBM hardware can happily emulate, at a fraction of that cost. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh... to assume millions of people screwed up badly just because they had difficulty getting jobs that paid enough for food, clothing, shelter AND retirement.
Perhaps a better solution would be to automatically confiscate any "golden parachute" given to a CEO who HAS SCREWED UP BADLY, and use that to shore up the Social Security of all the little people who they stepped on along the way.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's disgusting.

Much like how we paid $18,000,000 for the redesign of Recovery.gov. The best part being, it's a site that's supposed to better illustrate how wisely our tax dollars are spent.

For $15,000,000 I'll rebuild f'ing Amazon.com in three months. By myself. In a clown suit, on national TV.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[IICV]

Can you believe there's no open source tool to translate for loops into pretzels?

It's not open source, but I believe there is a webservice for that over here.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[sjames]

There is a lesson we can learn from all of that old stable cobol code. It's not so incredibly stable and reliable because of some intribnsic feature of the language, it's because nobody expects it to sing and dance while it does it's work. It tends to have simple interfaces (or batch processing with no real interface) and just do the assigned task without worrying about entertaining the user with just the right fonts and animated cursors and other such crap. At most it'll do CICS (a sort of old-school curses).

C is almost entirely inappropriate for business computing. COBOL offers no pointers for people to mis-handle. BCD is much better than IEEE floats for financial purposes.

At the same time, COBOL programmers are getting rare and you'll need to pay WELL to get people to do it, if for no other reason it's seen as a dead end that can actually be a negative on a resume. If we were back in the '70s where professional jobs lasted a lifetime that wouldn't matter much but these days it's a killer. It's to the point that when updates are needed, if they're anything beyond completely trivial, it's probably worth carefully re-implementing the module in something else while you still have people fluent in the old code.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[sjames]

How many programmers want "4 years maintaining inventory system in COBOL" on their resume? You and I know it's no big deal, but HR will see that as code for old guy who expects a decent work/life balance and thinks his ancient skills are still relevant.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Belial6]

Then don't write it as "4 years maintaining inventory system in COBOL". I'm sure if you tried, you could come up with a better way to put it, AND, my point was that you can get young people and train them in a very short period of time. Nobody thinks that a 27 year old is an 'old guy'.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[sjames]

If HR can ask for 10 years of experiance in a language that's 5 years old, they can believe anything!

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[tehcyder]

It makes you wonder why they bother having taxes at all...

Oh, wait, no it doesn't, unless you are a moron.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[tehcyder]

Oddly enough, most people in HR aren't programming fanboys.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[vlm]

if SS is anything like the civil war era northern army pension system, this would still be a substantial cost savings over doing it manually,

Yeah, the Social Security Administration records are maintained with quills and scrolls. They need $500 million to upgrade to computers otherwise they will have to go back to using stone tablets.

Folks disabled during the war of northern aggression generally were documented very early with fountain pen on paper (say, heart disease due to typhus or getting shot), but the old age pensioners generally got typewritten notes. I don't believe any of them survived to even the early electromechanical punchcard era.

I was thinking more in terms of workflow, apply, provide proof, approve/disapprove, appeal, pay out till they die at which point they worked remarkably fast to close the account. There can be quite a remarkable stack of paperwork, especially if multiple appeals are involved due to a contested disability, address changes, in and out of nursing home/hospitals, etc.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[tehcyder]

Oddly enough, wankface, a lot of poor people have neither the time, education, interest nor money to worry about investments.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[tehcyder]

Well, if people could actually own their houses, their costs would be much lower when they retire. My mother "bought" an average house, but still has to pay about $400 a month in taxes (i.e. rent to the state).

Which would be a travesty if she lived alone on a desert island with no communication or interaction with society.

Buffoon.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Anonymous Coward]

>from 1945-1950

get a clue. The US economy from 1946 - 49 was a disaster as they struggled to convert from war production to consumer production, absorb millions of workers (returned soldiers) into the economy, and uncontrolled inflation. Yes, it was better than living in bombed-out cities, but it was NOT a robust, golden time in the US economy. Why do you think Truman had such a hard time getting elected in 1948: it was because people "vote their pocketbook" and they were not economically happy.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[tehcyder]

Don't know about the US , but here in the UK Council Tax (which is a property tax based on occupancy not ownership admittedly) contributes towards things like the fire brigade, police, schools, roads, and libraries too.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Avatar8]

No, that IS a ridiculous amount even considering everything you listed.

Say the SSA employs 20,000 people and uses 2,000 servers. $1,000 per user and $10,000 per server equates to and $20mil and $20mil or $40 million total. Yes, many severs cost more than $10k, but many, many more cost much, much less than $10k.

I've worked in IT for 27 years so I know a great deal about systems, upgrades, data centers, licensing and many associated costs. Even the largest corporation employing 500,000 people and using 50,000 servers would be thrilled to have a $500mil budget. They'd build a new datacenter, deploy all new network systems, new servers, new storage and new desktops/laptops for everyone and simply abandon the old datacenter.

Only because this is a government agency are they allowed to get away with this. Who is going to hold them accountable? The government?

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Avatar8]

You are slightly correct.

I seem to recall the "re-vamp" of the SSA IT infrastructure began in 1990 and awarded so many hundreds of millions of dollars to the contracting company to get it done by 2000.

2000 rolls around, no re-vamp, complete and utter failure and complete loss of the money. What does the SSA do? Award another 10 year contract to the SAME contracting company for even more money.

Whose failure is that?

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[Avatar8]

I thought everyone, including our own backwards government, learned to get rid of COBOL during Y2K. In fact I thought all the COBOL was *replaced* with C, but apparently they simply applied script bandages.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[DavidTC]

Erm, I didn't say it was bed of roses.

In fact, pointing out that it was a bad time economically sorta makes my point more. The only time we've had taxes this low are during in economic problems. (Yes, yes, we're also in economic problems now...but we had taxes this low for a decade, well before any problems.)

I just said that it and the Great Depression were the only times that 'grandparents' could be adults that we had a lower tax rate than now.

That is, assume we don't have 60 year olds wandering around here talking about their grandparents or something. Specially, to see lower taxes and not be in an economic disaster, from age 20-30, these 'grandparents' would have to be born before 1900, to be an adult from 1920-1930. (And then they probably lost their house and investments in the 1929 crash, so that seems like a really bad example.)

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[AK Marc]

While SOME of your points may be valid, claiming that property taxes pay for all of those things is childish, as you know very well that things like maintaining the electric grid, water and sewage systems are paid for as direct bills for their use.

I'm from Dallas. The water and sewer are owned by the city. The city gets a majority of their funding from property taxes. The electric generation is paid for by direct bills, but the "grid" is a gift from the government (land use managed by the city that takes my property tax) of my land and other private land so they can serve people. If the government funded by my property taxes didn't give them land for free, there'd be no grid.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[AK Marc]

You might think enterprise equipment isn't needed or is too expensive - until you have to tell your boss 50,000 people aren't going to get their checks on time since a server went down.

The google way just seems better. Clusters of inexpensive and unreliable computers is cheaper and faster than expensive and "reliable" servers for the same function.

much cheaper solution!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Half a Billion? Years? a crack team of 2 dozen professional data thieves would pull and squeeze every ounce of data out of that system in matter of days and probably with out a single restart to the mainframe. and would sell it back to you for pennies a person. $10 million tops.

Re:much cheaper solution!?

[gtall]

Yes, but those 2 dozen professional data thieves are attempting to build a system that will last another 10-20 years with increasing demands on it and a constantly changing database. Do get a sense of proportion.

obvious solution

[outsider007]

Just use facebook ID's instead.

Re:obvious solution

[Huntr]

I really can't decide whether to mod this funny, insightful or terrifyingly possible.

Not that it matters now...

Re:obvious solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stop making that joke. The politicians aren't laughing, they are thinking it sounds better and better.

2012

[Odinlake]

may collapse by 2012 due to

That's not news. The Mayan's, or whatever, told us that like 1500 years ago or somethin'.

Flash...

[Genda]

In a related story, it has been reported that top officials at the Social Security Administration are prepared to reduced the entire Social Security System to a Web App and run it on the Amazon Cloud.

Re:Flash...

[jcr]

It's appropriate, since the entire "social security trust fund" is nothing but IOUs from a government that's deeper in debt than any other government has ever been in all of recorded history.

-jcr

Re:Flash...

[jellomizer]

And having a web app is bad why?

Re:Flash...

[wampus]

I'm not worried. Those nukes are paid for, and will become remarkably liquid when we need them.

Re:Flash...

[hrvatska]

It's appropriate, since the entire "social security trust fund" is nothing but IOUs from a government that's deeper in debt than any other government has ever been in all of recorded history.

-jcr

But the US also has an economy that's larger than any other economy in recorded history. How large is the debt in proportion to the economy? How much of that debt is owed to the social security trust fund?

Re:Flash...

[Anonymous Coward]

Social Security..aa.. there is an app for that as well, as long as you all buy my new iphone. Performing badly, citizen? FaceTime.

Re:Flash...

[deblau]

It's appropriate, since the entire "social security trust fund" is nothing but IOUs from a government that's deeper in debt than any other government has ever been in all of recorded history.

-jcr

But the US also has an economy that's larger than any other economy in recorded history. How large is the debt in proportion to the economy? How much of that debt is owed to the social security trust fund?

Year, Debt (in $B), Debt/GDP
2005 12638.4 62.77
2006 13398.9 63.49
2007 14077.6 63.99
2008 14441.4 69.15
2009 14258.2 83.29
2010 14623.9 94.27 (projected)

There were precisely six years in our nation's history when our debt-to-GDP ratio was over 90%: 1944-1949. Of course, we had a huge jobs program back then, which was pumping up the economy. We were able to leverage that momentum to pay down the debt to 50-year debt/GDP lows by the mid 1970s (although the absolute size of the debt kept increasing through that period).

Source: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_debt_chart.html

The net present value of total OASDI costs over the next 75 years is estimated to be about $5.3T, or about 37% of the present value of the debt. On the other hand, the net present value of Medicare part A costs over the same window is $13.4T, or 94% of the present value of the debt. As anyone who is familiar with the numbers will tell you, Medicare is a much larger and more immediate problem than Social Security.

Source: http://www.cga.ct.gov/2010/rpt/2010-R-0197.htm

Next time, look up the numbers yourself, ya lazy bum.

Re:Flash...

[DavidTC]

If you don't like that the social security program has money and the government doesn't, so the government keeps borrowing from social security, perhaps you should figure some way to fix the government's financial woes (A good start might be not extending tax cuts, which costs hundreds of billions of dollars, and not repealing the health care bill, which saves hundreds of billions of dollars.), and not worry about, you now, the single part of the government that actually seems to be doing okay.

Re:Flash...

[tchdab1]

Alternately, the entire 1966 social security management application is being ported to a palm pilot connected to a cell phone (ATT) and managed part-time by a contractor who is a full-time SQL programmer and dba.

Re:Flash...

[mjwx]

2010, 14623.9, 94.27, [% of GDP] (projected)

Greece's debt got to 110% of it's GDP before the crap hit the fan and Greece had no real industry to speak of (they relied a lot on tourism which dried up in the GFC).

Now what matters is, does the US have a plan to pay it all back. After WWII the European nations had a plan to repay their WWII debts, it took the UK over 60 years and some are still repaying them.

One of the reasons Australia is doing so well is that our debt is less then 5% of our GDP which is below the 30 yr average. But then again we didn't let our banks run amok either, nor did we start two wars AND lower taxes, nor artificially deflate the interest rate to encourage reckless borrowing. It seems the US has a lot of problems and no one wants to make the hard decisions (raise tax and institute austerity measures, it's the only proven way to get out of this mess).

Re:Flash...

[garyebickford]

a government that's deeper in debt than any other government has ever been in all of recorded history

I'm not thrilled about the debt, but this is nowhere near true. Today, Japan's national debt is close to or has surpassed 200% of GDP. The average European country is up around 80% IIRC. We are around 65% or 70% - I forget exactly (read The Economist for good figures.) Our debt is presently still somewhat less than it was at the end of WWII. Of course, we were in much better shape to pay it off then than now for many reasons.

As a side note, one of the causes of the boom in the 50s was the Marshall Plan and other programs we used to rebuild the nations of Europe and all across the globe, that were destroyed in WWII. The Marshall Plan gave money to those countries, but they had to spend it on American goods - food, supplies, tractors, trucks, factory equipment, etc. which generated something on the order of $5 of economic activity in the US for every dollar sent over there (that's my number, which is just the typical fanout of a dollar spent on goods.) So (again, my estimate) the government probably received about $1 in new corporate and personal income taxes for every $1 sent overseas.

Re:Flash...

[jcr]

I'm not thrilled about the debt, but this is nowhere near true.

The US government's total unfunded obligations are in the neighborhood of a hundred trillion dollars. SS alone is around 17.5 trillion.

-jcr

sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh, it seems that I have to do everything myself these days...

What better way to explain away...

[3seas]

Why there is no money in SS to distribute...

Going Bust

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole thing is fixin' to puke anyway:

According to the latest estimates, Social Security will take in less in revenue than it pays out each year by 2016. That's just a few years. And the program will go completely insolvent by 2037 if no serious changes are made. Medicare will be insolvent by 2017.

So, piss away another half billion. Who gives a shit?

Re:Going Bust

[zippthorne]

When it takes in less revenue than it pays out, it will already be insolvent. The "surplus" was "invested" in treasure bonds. Who do you think pays those back..

Re:Going Bust

[garyebickford]

When it takes in less revenue than it pays out, it will already be insolvent.

Not strictly true. If revenue is less than expenses, you are on a _potential_path_ to insolvency, but you're not insolvent until you don't have any money left, you've sold everything that you can, and nobody will lend you any more.

It's quite reasonable to have expenses exceed revenues for a period of time, such as (for a country) when paying out increased unemployment during a recession. Those unemployment payments prevent a large number of people from taking any job they can get at dirt wages, which would cause other people to get laid off or be forced to take pay cuts, and would generally push the economy into a deflationary spiral. Unemployment insurance is a way of time-shifting cash flow in the economic system - which is the ONLY thing that government can do about jobs. Every 'jobs' program, or 'economic development program' is simply a method of time shifting the flow of money through the economy. You are essentially either borrowing money from the future, or handing out money borrowed in the past.

Unfortunately we have been borrowing money for bread and circuses for the last 40 years. (read about Pericles, who stayed elected in Athens by spending money on bread and circuses instead of defense - it worked fine until the Persians attacked.)

A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[maraist]

This is sick. The three physical costs of S.S. as I can see it:
1) Data acquisition (who has incrementally paid into the system) - this is B.S. accounting because it's all going to come from the general tax fund soon anyway, so why the charade?
2) Call centers - (this is for old people after all)
3) Printing checks

The rest can be handled by less than a million dollars in hardware / software.
3 can be outsourced (paychex doesn't overburdern my company with overhead as far as I know).
2 can be outsourced and them some
1 as I already alluded to is the fault of congress, and is largely unnecessary. You have to double the efforts of the IRS to make sure payments are correct. You have to audit, you have to make multiple transfers of small orders of money. You need financial advisors (who purchase US treasuriers with the surpluses), bla bla bla.. All simplified by simply being part of the general tax fund and withdrawing directly from US treasury.

A hadoop system can trivially destroy 300 million pieces of data in less than an hour - I don't care what language it's written in. This incremental B.S. thinking is pervasive in all forms of government and just needs to be viserally reacted to by the voting public. A company that's not in the black that needs a $500M investment to 'keep afloat' for crap like this would go out of business and be replaced from scratch. Dead is a powerful natural tool. It needs to be applied here.

Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[dbIII]

It already is and that's the problem.
Instead they should try running it like a government. You need at least enough people to watch the contractors or they rob you blind.
Endless red tape is not a feature of government versus private enterprise. It's actually sometimes far worse in very large private enterprises and there is usually little or nothing to catch the inevitable petty or major corruption. Badly run private enterprise can look just as bad or far worse than badly run government, and on some levels they are indistinguishable. Look at Australia's Telstra under Trujillo as a shining example of a business that could not possibly fail due to it's monopoly status but that didn't stop it trying to fail in so many ways.

Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[vlm]

1) Data acquisition (who has incrementally paid into the system) - this is B.S. accounting because it's all going to come from the general tax fund soon anyway, so why the charade?

They gather that data to verify eligibility and calculated benefit payout. Don't you get an annual statement listing what you earned for the past X years and if you were to become disabled you would get Y dollars per month, etc? I just got my annual statement on Friday.

They send this out annually because if the food store that I worked at in 1991 forgot to credit me with that income, its a heck of a lot easier to set the record straight in 1992 rather than waiting for me to retire or become disabled decades later and ooops I haven't paid in enough "fully qualified" years for whatever benefit.

Also if someone steals your SS number and works under it, you can trivially figure out how much money they earn, which is interesting.

Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[maraist]

Because the difference in receiving $145 / year for life instead of $135 is so great a risk? The goal of S.S. was to make people 'feel' like it's something you have to work towards. (Maybe at the time the ponsi scheme looked like it might work indefinitely). But how would people survive up to age 65 if they didn't already work. So what's the charade all about then? Just give them a reasonable retirement amount from the general tax fund, and require a 10% min tax rate on every working citizen and you're done. Enough of this robbing peter to pay Paul crap.

Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[the eric conspiracy]

Social security is going to an all direct deposit system. So you can cross off printing checks.

The call centers could easily be outsourced to Zimbabwe or wherever English is spoken with the worst accent possible thereby eliminating the need to pay benefits.

The data thing is the hard part. It isn't 300 million records, it's 300 million times the number of paychecks you receive in your lifetime. But that could easily be handled the same way the people who receive the paychecks do. Shoeboxes. And anyway with the Great Recession who has a job anyway?

So what's the problem?

Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[BigSlowTarget]

A 7% variance is OK? That's about $50B a year vs the entire SS administration budget of $12B and no matter what you'd still have to pay someone and have systems to make sure some jackass wasn't collecting for six fake people. Let's just ignore that it would take a major legislative effort that might cost more than the new systems.

Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[Anonymous Coward]

My dad signed up for payments a year or so ago and tried to call in. He was so amazed that he sent me the phone number. It is one of those horrible "How can I help you" voice recognition systems that does not recognize anything. So he was forced to go to an actual office and deal with an actual person. I would love to see what consulting company but this crap in and how much money that got paid for it. Fix this and make a fucking web page and we could cut the staff requirements. But then again, this is gov and they need to hand out jobs to citizens who can't get real jobs.

Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[BigSlowTarget]

The costs of the rote standardized execution of normal transactions is nothing compared to processing the exceptions created by over 2000 pages of law that have no doubt given rise to hundreds of times that much supporting legal interpretation documentation each and every one of which may require implementation of a supplementary system.

It's never the "1) Do this 2) Do 1 again with a different name" system that costs money. It's exceptions, interfaces, changes, specialized reporting and human intervention required crap that costs and that is an absolutely key fact of IT business.

Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[Velex]

Enough of this robbing peter to pay Paul crap.

Too bad you're proposing the same thing. A better idea would be to stop robbing Peter and let Peter just put the amount he's paying in into an investment fund of sorts he has control over. And if you work somewhere like I do, my employer is helping to give me a "pension" by matching my 401(k) contributions anyway (the difference is that once my employer contributes to my 401(k), the money becomes mine, whereas with a pension I'd need to worry about sticking with this dead-end job for the next 40 years and not being fired over some drama).

Really, this relying on an employer ("pension") or government ("social security") to cut you a check because you've reached a certain age and to continue to cut you checks until you croak is silly. When I'll be 65, it's doubtful there's going to be any kind of social security anymore, or else it will look completely different and may not even be a very good option. At any rate, I'm going into this fully assuming that (like everything else in my life, big surprise here), if I want to afford heat in winter and buy food, it's going to be 100% my responsibility when I retire. And if I intend to only pursue hobbies after a certain age, I need to start preparing now for a way to continue to pay my bills without working.

Really, the fact that my paycheck (and my employer also) is taxed to pay for old people who didn't save during their lifetimes really just sort of leads to resentment towards them. I don't have any tears for when I hear yet another story about an old person who's having trouble living off social security alone. Although that could also be because when I used to work fast food, I made $800 per month and had to pay rent and bills. It seems these old folks are getting just as much, probably don't have to pay rent, and can't figure out how to make it work despite all the wisdom they're suppose have (being older than I am after all).

Just means I suppose that I'll eat rice and beans today and drive an economy car while everyone else drives gas-guzzling SUVs and eats banquets every night, so that one day in 40 years when they're starving and hoping for a job as a WalMart greeter to make ends meet, I'll still be eating rice and beans, and quite used to it and content with my retirement also I might add.

But how would people survive up to age 65 if they didn't already work.

You would be surprised. My parents decided to cut me off one day (doctor said one thing, bible said another, so I lost) when I was in the middle of college, so I had to drop out and get a full time job since my expected family contribution was high enough that FAFSA wouldn't help me. If you want to do something, it's 100% your responsibility to plan ahead and have legal control of the resources you need, and that includes retirement. Sorry, that's just how life is.

I'm not going to repeat the same mistake with retirement, and I think that those who do make a mistake like that with their retirement can very well pay the price. I know people who haven't worked (except maybe an odd job once when they were teenagers) in their whole life, and I know what those people are like. These aren't people born into wealth, these are just people, who for whatever reason, have managed to get their parents to continue to house them and feed them and clothe them. I'm sure you're familiar with the typical aspie basement-dweller who doesn't have a job? They do exist, and I certainly don't want them receiving my tax dollar.

If their parents are so over-attached to their kids that they'll pay for their kids to live well into adult life, that's their private matter. It becomes my matter when my tax dollars start going to them, and at least the current system with its flaws does at least prevent my tax dollar from going to them (at least in the form of social security, but that's what we were talking about).

Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the difference in receiving $145 / year for life instead of $135 is so great a risk?

Spoken like someone who has never had to live on a fixed income, but almost certainly will someday, IF he is lucky.

Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[maraist]

"The data thing is the hard part."

Not that we're in any real disagreement here.. But for $5k, I can get you a geographically redundant system with 16 drives and 32Gig RAM that can handle 20M real-time multi-way indexed records a day without breaking a sweat - and be an OLTP system - something S.S. does not even require. Even with this crippled system, you can handle the entire year's worth of work-load in one month. Not that I've ever needed to run batch processing, but there's no reason the same system can't handle 1B records a day. And with a little clever system design, you can trivially perform off-line batch work that can get you to 1T records a day. And this is one machine (though the geographic redundancy might start to lag beyond 1G).

I'm sure the real latency is in the inter-bank operations. But again, even with credit card transactions, this is a no-brainer with high bandwidth potential. For $5k!!!! I don't care what security or COBOL scripting is involved. This does not require 100,000x as much money as this. As a public service, I'd offer this for free G*d damnit. This is government bloat plain and simple.

Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[sco08y]

Because the difference in receiving $145 / year for life instead of $135 is so great a risk?

Spoken like someone who has never had to live on a fixed income, but almost certainly will someday, IF he is lucky.

I'll bet you'd be the first in line to demand more services from your local government, and damn the effect on property taxes!

(Note for the clueless: property taxes cause the most hardship for people on a fixed income.)

Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[vlm]

Spoken like someone who has never had to live on a fixed income, but almost certainly will someday, IF he is lucky.

My grandmother gets a COLA pay raise from SS almost every year. I haven't kept up with inflation since 2001 in other words I've been poorer every year relative to inflation.

Statistically my anecdote is pretty much the normal situation. SS recipients have a fixed income, relative to inflation, and the median income of wage earners relative to inflation has been decreasing since the 70s.

I cam only dream of moving up to a fixed income instead of a declining income.

Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[Avatar8]

I don't necessarily agree with (or can verify) your suggestion for a solution, but I do agree the SSA (and all government departments) should be run like a business.

Mostly they need to be held accountable. What happens when a department in a business goes over budget? They get their budget for the next year cut or they have to implement methods to generate more revenues.

As a shareholder (taxpayer) the SSA is not performing up to my standards for which I am paying and they are grossly misusing appropriated funds. They simply need to hire the right company to do the job correctly and in a timely manner. Having experience in this field and such exercises, I know it could be done in three years with one fifth of the amount in the article.

Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[maraist]

And for medicare and medicaide, I'd agree with you.. That's a per-transaction system. This is a once per head transaction. There is more special casing and oversight in stock trading - so sorry, I disagree - given the miniscule volume of data.

Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[maraist]

What does a 401k have to do with a social safety net? Do you realize what SS was designed for? The great depression left millions with nothing to eat. So are you suggesting that your F'D mis-managed 401k funds when they dry up at age 70 are all the society owes you? That and the freedom to feed off of trash cans? Oh, that's right.. That's what family and churches are for. Except. What if you're a widow with no children, and are estranged from other relatives. What if the entire town is a ghost town.

Sorry, should have invested in a 'better' portfolio. N.M.P. Don't let the class system hit you on the way down.

Now if you're fine with seeing old people on the street in your home town, then go ahead and advocate the demise of S.S. (e.g. privatization which will produce such a stock boom/bust period, due to a one shifting of massive funds, that you'll likely be crying in less than 10 years after it's activated). Still, It's a legitimate political course of action.

As to whether you think YOU will have anything in S.S. when you retire.. That's up to you and your generation isn't it? It's this generation that's going to decide the funding reserves for ourselves - through our election of public officers. The next generation will have the moral quandary of not immediately cutting off the preceding generation - few people are willing to cut people off cold - they much prefer to starve people in the distant future - with things like options to buy lottery tickets, etc. But keep in mind, the government prints money, so US treasury debt, and S.S. payments and military payments have zero fear of defaulting. It's the rest of society (namely renting working-class) that gets the shaft in the future.

In the end, what I'm saying is that S.S. is about a roof over your head and food to eat.. Medicare is about pumping you up with useless placebos to keep you going. If you want a car in your old age, that's up to your personal investments. Now is that too hard to advocate?

LOL, the irony is amazing

[argoff]

.... a collapsing computer system for a collapsing ponzi scheme. All I can say is burn baby burn !!

Re:LOL, the irony is amazing

[Dolphinzilla]

I was thinking the same thing - and it would be funny if I wasn't one of the ones left holding the bag of crap

Re:LOL, the irony is amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense - all they have to do is drag Bernie Madoff out of prison and put him on the job, and SS will be in the green and earning 20% a year in *no time*!

Re:LOL, the irony is amazing

[gtall]

It is only a ponzi scheme now because Congress continually increased the number of straws sucking money out of the system. All they need do is increase the age at which you can withdraw benefits. Unless of course you think a society should send all its blue hairs out to the desert to die away from everyone else.

Re:LOL, the irony is amazing

[hrvatska]

It's not a Ponzi scheme since there are viable alternatives for keeping the system solvent until the boomers are mostly dead. It's only a Ponzi scheme if it's impossible for it to be sustained. It isn't. You may not like the choices, but there are choices.

Re:LOL, the irony is amazing

[maztuhblastah]

It's not a Ponzi scheme since there are viable alternatives for keeping the system solvent until the boomers are mostly dead. It's only a Ponzi scheme if it's impossible for it to be sustained. It isn't. You may not like the choices, but there are choices.

"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors." [source] Just saying...

Re:LOL, the irony is amazing

[DavidTC]

No, that's a stupid way to fix the system.

The actual way to fix the system is to raise or even remove the income cap.

Or just raising rates by 2% or whatever. Or means testing.

Idiots looking at the social security system and claiming it's about to be 'broke' and we should give up on it are like idiots looking at a gas gauge in a bus and claiming we're almost out of gas so we should get out and walk.

We're only going to run out of gas only if morons repeating over and over 'social security is broke' actually manage to elect enough navigators to keep us from stopping at a fucking gas station and buying more gas.

The rich, in this analogy, own a taxi service, aka, the stock market, where they wish people would spend their money instead.

Rich people: 'Social security is broken because there's a very minor problem with it that will cause issues in a few decades, we should get rid of it.' Young people: 'I heard that people think social security won't be there when we retire, so I'm all for doing away with it.' Chorus: 'Social security is going to die because we're going to kill it, so we should kill it.'

It's the most goddamn absurd attempt at a self-fulfilling prophesy I've ever seen. And the real joke is that everyone desperately wants people to forget the alternative was 'letting people invest in the stock market', so if we'd actually privatized social security back when Bush wanted to it, we'd have lost all that money. And if, instead, we'd have invested in 'safe' bonds and stuff...we'd still have lost that money, because the damn bond rating places were criminally asleep at the wheel the last decade and giving perfect ratings to utter shit packages of loans.

So now, hilariously, no one actually mentions where we'd invest this retirement money instead of social security. They're going to wait a decade and then start pimping giving it to the rich, um, I mean, investing in the stock market, and hope we forget what happened this last decade.

So, the next time you hear an idiot talk about 'private retirement accounts', ask them what you think we should let people invest in. And then pretend they started invest in that in 2000, and see how well the market did.

Re:LOL, the irony is amazing

[hrvatska]

You're offering only part of what defines a Ponzi scheme. Using that very brief and incomplete definition, most of what people invest their money in for retirement is a Ponzi scheme. Let's consider some other characteristics that define a Ponzi scheme.

Ponzi schemes offer large short term returns that are abnormally high or consistent. Social security doesn't.

Ponzi schemes require an ever increasing amount of money to continue paying off past investors. Social security has a temporary problem from the large number of boomers, but social security can be, and has been, modified in the past to reflect changes in the size of the taxpaying workforce and the number of beneficiaries. Once the boomer bump is over social security will stabilize.

Ponzi schemes don't reveal the method by which they generate their great short term results. Social security is transparent as to where the money is coming from, where it's invested and who receives benefits. It's what it claims to be, a mandatory transfer payment system under which current workers are taxed on their income, with no promise of huge payouts.

Ponzi schemes typically don't invest any of the money people invest in it. Money paid into social security is invested in U. S. government securities. Social security owns trillions of dollars of US securities. Social security owns more US government securities than China.

Re:LOL, the irony is amazing

[JesseMcDonald]

Money paid into social security is invested in U. S. government securities.

This is perhaps the most underhanded aspect of the whole scheme. With very few exceptions, income from U.S. government securities is spent on current consumption, not investment. The principle and interest are paid back with future tax income, which comes from—you guessed it—the same people paying into Social Security. So these "investors" are paying not only the original S.S. income tax, but also the principle and interest to pay back the "loans" S.S. makes to the rest of the government. Even assuming the principle part balances out (in lieu of additional taxes elsewhere, with spending remaining constant), that still leaves them paying their own interest on top of the regular S.S. income tax.

Re:LOL, the irony is amazing

[sco08y]

It's not a Ponzi scheme since there are viable alternatives for keeping the system solvent until the boomers are mostly dead. It's only a Ponzi scheme if it's impossible for it to be sustained. It isn't. You may not like the choices, but there are choices.

So, viable alternative #1, cutting benefits, instead of a conman telling you "you're screwed, you're not getting your money back" it's the government telling you that.

And with viable alternative #2, increasing taxes, instead the whole thing falling apart when the con is discovered, the government says, "you're going to continue paying and you'll pay more, or you can have no income or you can go to jail."

It's definitely not a Ponzi scheme, that's for sure.

Re:LOL, the irony is amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

ask them what you think we should let people invest in.

You obviously haven't paid enough attention to your brainwashing. A simple perusal of quotes from certain vitriolic radio personalities reveals the answer. GOLD, because you can eat it when the supermarkets no longer exist. And 1 acre of seeds! for the same reason.

Posting AC because I forgot my uid from back in the late 90s early 00s and haven't bothered to get a new one. And because obvious troll is obvious.

Re:LOL, the irony is amazing

[DavidTC]

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD! Only Gold can SAVE US NOW!

Seriously, you know what would a fuckload better than stupid gold in an actual economic collapse?

Some sort of power generator, preferably a renewable one. As an added bonus, you don't have to wait until then to use it. I'm sure the people who actually were smart enough to get those would be willing to trade the power for lumps of metal they can't do anything with. Or not.

Hell, the Boy Scout Handbook will, literally, be worth its weight in gold. When makes the gold a pretty dumb investment instead of just buying the book.

Not that I do think there's going to be any sort of 'collapse' (Although I think the bank problems are just getting started.), but it's very telling what sort of stupid shit people think is important.

I bet 90% of the gold hoarding morons don't even have a plan to get drinkable water if everything blows up. Or own a hand-cranked battery charger. I wonder how many of them realize you need water to grow these 'seeds' they have? Seeds in quotes because they probably are all dead.

Remember when survivalism used to be done by people who were paranoid, yes, but who were smart and well prepared? They'd have basement stocked with canned goods and generators and supplies of gasoline that they'd carefully top off? With rows of car batteries and a hand crank in case the gas ran out? Remember those guys? (I'm sure they're still out there.)

Sure, they were classic example of 'craziness is taking an incorrect premise to the logical ends', but at least you could fucking respect those guys and they got starring roles in apocalyptic stories.

Instead we now get paranoid people who are idiots who think you, apparently, can live off gold.

OMG! $500,000,000.00 for a datacenter

[theVarangian]

Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?! No wonder the program has failed and is such a joke. And we're looking to find a way to keep this program afloat well into the future, to "protect" us in our retirement by siphoning off extra taxation from every paycheck for our entire life? The same guys who are spending $500,000,000.00 to upgrade the system that maintains it? You could buy a million iPads at retail price for that. I don't know why you would, but you could. Holy fuck.

I like bashing expensive government projects as much as the next guy, but if you are creating a nation wide IT system of any kind for a nation of 300+ million people $500,000,000.00 it doesn't sound too far off. Hell, Apple just sank $1 billion into a datacenter and Google sank $600 million into a datacenter in Berkeley, South Carolina and that one is just one of their many data centers. People love to take the total costs for a project like this and shout: "SCANDAL! $500,000,000.00 spent on failed IT project". Nobody mentions that the investment in a data center is largely recoverable since it and it's hardware can easily be repurposed. It's only development and training costs that are wasted which is bad enough but still only a fraction of the costs. The main scandal here is not so much the cost of, its the fact that they will run out of capacity before the new datacenter is ready. As for COBOL being a dying language COBOL is in good company on death row along with C, C++, OpenGL, BSD (and UNIX in general) plus a number of other things IT that have been labeled as "dying" almost as long as I have been in the IT business which is longer than I care to remember. The claim " is dying!" is a long time IT gutter-press favorite.

Re:OMG! $500,000,000.00 for a datacenter

[Seumas]

But look at what the expense is actually covering. And the fact that it's simply renovating an existing structure. Half a billion is absurd. It's not like they're starting out with any materials or employees and doing it all from scratch.

Re:OMG! $500,000,000.00 for a datacenter

[Anonymous Coward]

But look at what the expense is actually covering. And the fact that it's simply renovating an existing structure. Half a billion is absurd. It's not like they're starting out with any materials or employees and doing it all from scratch.

Is it? I didn't see anything about the whole $500 million being spent on the old NCC data center. Both the article and the report mention the funds going toward the construction of a new datacenter to replace the old NCC from 1979. The way I see it the real scandal is still the fact the project wasn't started sooner. With the old NCC is running out of capacity and the new facility only coming online three years after the old NCC reaches saturation point it should not be surprising that they have to put (read: waste) money into beefing up the old NCC facility. If this project had gotten off the ground sooner that would not be an issue and I don't see how the Social Security Administration can necessarily be blamed for this capability gap either since for all I know by the time they got the funding it was already too late to get the new facility online in time.

Re:OMG! $500,000,000.00 for a datacenter

[noidentity]

It's even worse; $500000000.0000000000000000000000000000000000000 spent on failed IT project!!!!

Re:OMG! $500,000,000.00 for a datacenter

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the book about its sales effort, EMC charged the Iranian government at least 48 million in 1979 dollars(140 million today) to setup their social security database. Although, as the book indicates, others in the Iranian government considered this number so impossibly high that bribing must have occurred and subsequently jailed two EDS employees.

Re:OMG! $500,000,000.00 for a datacenter

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, a lot of times renovating an existing structure and re-purposing / recycling personnel and materials has a higher dollar cost and longer time line than starting from scratch.

I used to work for a large (50,000+ student) public university and we were looking at installing a small server room (~1000 square feet) in a building that was centrally located on our main campus and had become mostly empty when the department that had owned it moved into a new building they had built. When we looked into the cost of renovating the existing structure, we found it would cost us almost as much as if we wanted to build a brand new, 2 story building and every phase of the renovation would have to be approved by the State government, meaning the project would take ages. We quickly realized why the department who utilized the building built a new structure instead of expanding and renovating the existing structure and did the same ourselves.

Reminds me of a Despair Poster

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my favorites, actually:

http://www.despair.com/consulting.html

"Consulting: If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem."

Collapse?

[seven of five]

What does it look like for a computer system to "collapse?" Suddenly no longer able to process a single transaction?

Re:Collapse?

[YoungHack]

I suppose it looks the same as when your backup system collapses. The next backup starts before the current backup has finished.

The system collapses when next month's work has to start and this month's work is still processing.

Re:Collapse?

[hrvatska]

It might be able to complete transactions, but not in a timely manner. If social security checks didn't go out on time there'd be a political shit storm that would make the tea party seem tame.

Re:Collapse?

[Belial6]

A decade ago, I did work on updating the system at the 'California Board of Pest Control'. They had a system that had "collapsed". What it looked like was an office that had stopped buying cubicle walls. They instead had built their walls from stacks of paper that had to be processed. They literally had walls made of stacked paper. I will say it a third time just because the image in my head was so startling. They had made the internal walls of the office out of 12' tall stacks of paper. When I displayed shock at what I saw, they explained that this was just the new stuff that they hadn't gotten moved to the big warehouse across the street. It looked a lot like one of those houses you see on the news where the owner went insane, and become a hard core pack rat.

This is a metaphor for the entire system

[Anonymous Coward]

Social Security is a bankrupt Ponzi scheme. It was never intended to be a retirement account or a slush fund, and yet that's how it gets used. After the Great Depression, Social Security was created to keep elderly people who had worked their whole lives from living in squalor in their last years. But now people are living well past the age when they can begin collecting Social Security - many of them still perfectly capable of working. I say if you want to depend on Social Security to see you through in your old age, then the government needs to put you in public housing and put you on a meal plan - not just give you cash. Everyone collecting Social Security lives in the same kind of housing and eats the same food and gets the same medical care. Don't want to live like that? Then try thinking past tomorrow, you knuckleheads, and start investing in a 401(k) at the very least. The stock market over any 50-year period WAAAAY outperforms your returns on your Social Security payroll tax over the same period.

Re:This is a metaphor for the entire system

[Anonymous Coward]

I generally max out on social security withdrawals from my paycheck around 7 to 8 months into the year - and I've been doing that for quite a while - it is very depressing to think about pitifully small portion that I myself will see of this money and even more depressing to think about how much money I COULD have made off of it - I agree the sooner the whole thing crashes and burns the better !

Re:This is a metaphor for the entire system

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll be in that position soon myself, and it's a damn shame that so much money is going to be wasted. I generally contribute to charities quite a bit, and that money that I'm pissing away to the government could have been put to much better use if I was allowed to invest it and then spread around the returns at the local level as I saw fit. I think that no one who works their whole lives should die in the street of starvation and exposure. Beyond that, I have no obligations to you. Don't want to work? Then you don't get to eat, either.

Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[Anonymous Coward]

These "modernization" projects never cease to amaze me. As noted above, COBOL has worked for 40 years. I believe the US population has more than doubled in 40 years. So why don't they just call IBM, order up another room full of equipment that quadruples processing capacity and call it a day?

I know big systems are hard. You can't just say "robocopy *.*" and come back on Monday and it works. But you CAN implement a new system in pieces. Design a system that contains all the new data, and seamlessly retrieves the records from the old system at some event- new claims go in the new system, and it copies the old data then. If there is an exception, then send it to a room full of experts to do it manually. Meanwhile, in the background, some other system is backfilling the old data. So what if it takes 5 years? Meanwhile, you can serve the clients.

I saw the opposite happen recently at an unemployment system- a new, web-based system was over-engineered, and flash-cut over a weekend. And there were lines out the doors for a month. Because all the data was moved over auto-magically and the new system auto-generated "please come into the office" letters for everyone. If the process was done in chunks, using the front line employees as their own data sanitizers, it wouldn't have happened.

I generally max out on social security withdrawals from my paycheck around 7 to 8 months into the year - and I've been doing that for quite a while - it is very depressing to think about pitifully small portion that I myself will see of this money and even more depressing to think about how much money I COULD have made off of it - I agree the sooner the whole thing crashes and burns the better !

Not with the other 140m workers out there doing the same thing. It doesn't scale. SS might not scale either, but investing in the productive capacity of the entire working population is going to return better than investing in a stock market flooded with easy money.

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[nedlohs]

Not with the other 140m workers out there doing the same thing. It doesn't scale. SS might not scale either, but investing in the productive capacity of the entire working population is going to return better than investing in a stock market flooded with easy money.

But you aren't doing that. You're investing in special treasuries (with non-standard payout rules). 140 m workers investing in the productive capacity of the economy instead of loaning money to the government could very well have much better performance. Of course you could choose to buy treasuries anyway...

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[Artifakt]

The Social Security Administration and IRS are two civilian govt. agencies that bought into computing early (1960's or even before). Part of this upgrade is like the FBI's situation of 10 years or so ago. Under USA PATRIOT, they have to work with a whole bunch of other agencies that are all built around more modern gear (Homeland Security mandates SSA can send data seamlessly to Border Security, FEMA, DEA and others, who don't know COBOL from Commander Adama's dog). Soc. Sec. now has to be able to verify to other agencies, not just that a name and number match, but that the number was issued as "valid for employment" (As opposed to numbers issued as part of some student only visas and such). This mandate comes from HSA, and yet the funding is carried on SSA's books. That way, the public (especially on the right) complains more about how civilian agency costs are too high, and doesn't see it as part of the Police Agency section of the budget.

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[Artifakt]

(Doubling up here for the quoted part)
1 . For every person who swears they could make a lot more investing their money themselves there are 2 or 3 who try it and fail, and 2 or 3 more who keep meaning to get around to it but don't ever get their act together. Maybe the parent could really do it, maybe he's smarter and more self disciplined than a lot of other people who have made the same boast, but statistically, he's way wrong.
2. If he's paying on 8 months, that's about an 8.3% rate, compared to the poorest workers making only 10 or 20 K a year, who are paying 12.5%. He's complaining about being taxed at a lower rate than the poorest people who have a job at all. Whaaaaahhhhhh! Tell, me, I'm 6''5", 250 lbs can bench press 480 (Kilos), and personally kicked Bruce Lee's, John Claude van Damme's and Chuck Norris' asses at the same time, beating them severely with Kurt Russell in his Snake Pliskin suit, and I own my own nuclear weapons for defense, so why do as much of my taxes go for police protection as some fat neckbeard's (Disclaimer: Not really, on any of that - Disclamer 2: If you did somehow believe all that BS, I also want to sell a nice bridge cheap, you'll make loads of money.). Oh, and I come from a very long lived family, why aren't my insurance rates lower than everyone else's? I do better work than any of my coworkers, why am I in the same paygrade? Whaaaaahhhhh!!!!!!

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[DavidTC]

140 m workers investing in the productive capacity of the economy...

...went broke in 2008 when the stock market crashed and now you've got 6 million people attempting to retire on no money.

Don't worry, they could have invested in their house, and lived on reverse mortgages...oh, shit, wait, the value of their house just plummeted and no one's giving out reverse mortgages anymore, are they?

They could have invested in bonds instead. I'm sure the bond-rating agencies weren't just rubber-stamping A++ rating on shitty bonds backed by bad mortgages...no, wait, they were, weren't they?

Do you 'privatize social security' idiots not actually pay attention to the actual news?

Please list anything that someone investing in 'the productive capacity of the economy' could have started investing in 2000 and made money. (No, you don't get to retroactively pick specific companies, but you can pick something like the Dow...although that specially, obviously, is not a good idea.)

It doesn't have to 'make money' every year, but it needs to somewhat predictably increase and never ever plummet, because people will be living off it. Come on, it's got to be somewhere around 4% to beat social security, and let's say it can't ever drop by more than 5% over a year. Please point to it.

Oh, and you don't get to use government bonds. Using government bonds is just having the government pay for it in a slightly stranger way. Duh. Saying 'The government shouldn't be handling retirement, instead, people should loan the government money and live off the interest that the government provides' is utterly surreal, especially from a group of people who uniformly want the government to stop borrowing and live with its mean.

This, of course, doesn't address the problem of some people living to 100 and hence running out of money in their account. I guess we can be charitably and assume that the system just assumes people will pay their own way until age 90 or whatever, and then the government will just cover the few remaining people, but that is going to cost at least some money.

And it's also failing to address the fact that if everyone invested, it would entirely distort the market. If everyone invested in the stock market, well, it would be a very different stock market. if everyone bought bonds the demand for bonds would stay high, which would result in people issuing lower-rate bonds to cover the market. But first let's see if you can find somewhere to invest in the first place, and then we can look at what 140 million people investing in that market would do.

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Those 6 million people you mention shouldn't have had their money in stocks so close to retirement. Ignorance is the biggest problem with our economy.

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[hrvatska]

There have to be productive places in the economy in which to invest it. The world was awash in liquidity in 2005 looking for a place to be invested. It found one. US mortgage backed securities. Or maybe all that money could have been invested in the very productive tech stock bubble of the late 1990s. US corporations are sitting on over $1 trillion looking for a productive place to invest it. If you added all the money paid into social security to that pile I'm not sure it would be any more productive. In the end, though, don't you end up with a different version of the same problem social security is facing? If the boomers own trillions and trillions of dollars worth of investments, who's going to buy all those investments from them so they can get their money back?

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[DavidTC]

BZZZZT, that was not an answer to the question I posed asking where people should have their money instead of social security.

Please try again.

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[sco08y]

(Doubling up here for the quoted part)
1 . For every person who swears they could make a lot more investing their money themselves there are 2 or 3 who try it and fail, and 2 or 3 more who keep meaning to get around to it but don't ever get their act together. Maybe the parent could really do it, maybe he's smarter and more self disciplined than a lot of other people who have made the same boast, but statistically, he's way wrong.

Most of us just get a 401K account, or a TSP if you're military / government. People can easily get 10% rate of return, and doing that over 30 years you can pile up a good amount of money, and if you shovel it into bonds towards the end you're not likely to lose it.

According to this calculator, which is based on historical data, the rates of return for SS are miserable. Even if you left your money in bonds the whole time you could beat SS.

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[uid7306m]

From http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1648 :
Simple rate-of-return comparisons such as those Glassman and many other individual-accounts proponents use fail to take into account the costs of continuing to pay for the benefits of current beneficiaries (and the benefits that current workers have accrued) when computing rates of returns for individual accounts, while including these costs in the rate of return computed for Social Security. These costs remain, however, even if Social Security is eliminated for new workers and replaced entirely by individual accounts. As a result, such comparisons are inherently biased. Since the payments to current beneficiaries (and the benefits that current workers have accrued) are not avoided by setting up individual accounts, the returns on individual accounts should not be artificially inflated by excluding the cost of these payments.

In other words, we have the obligation to pay for people who don't have 401ks yet.

Also, 10% earnings is unrealistically optimistic! I just looked up my Vanguard accounts, and over 10 years, 5% is more typical. And, *then*, you have to subtract off inflation. In the real world (vs. one's dreams) one has to settle for about 3% yield over inflation.

So, sorry, parent post. You're all wrong.

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[nedlohs]

...went broke in 2008 when the stock market crashed and now you've got 6 million people attempting to retire on no money.

How did they go broke in 2008? I owned stocks in 2008, they are worth more today then they were then.

They could have invested in bonds instead. I'm sure the bond-rating agencies weren't just rubber-stamping A++ rating on shitty bonds backed by bad mortgages...no, wait, they were, weren't they?

Yes the bond-rating agencies were being fraud, still anyone who bothered to look could see that real estate was in a bubble and avoid those.

Even if you didn't avoid those, again they don't make up 100% of your holdings.

Yes people who are retiring int the short to medium term shouldn't have all their money in long term investment vehicles - that's not even common sense, that's just not being retarded.

Please list anything that someone investing in 'the productive capacity of the economy' could have started investing in 2000 and made money. (No, you don't get to retroactively pick specific companies, but you can pick something like the Dow...although that specially, obviously, is not a good idea.)

OK.

The DOW.

Let's say it's $10,000 a year (the number doesn't matter since you can just multiply anyway).

And you are a spectucalarly stupid investor who buys all $10,000 on one day and that day always happens to be the highest day for the DOW that year.

So how does your investment perform (total is how many DJIA "units" we own in total):

year: 2000, DJIA: 11722.98, total: 0.85
year 2001, DJIA: 11337.92, total: 1.74
year 2002, DJIA: 10635.25, total: 2.68
year 2003, DJIA: 10453.92, total: 3.63
year 2004, DJIA: 10854.54, total: 4.55
year 2005, DJIA: 10940.55, total: 5.47
year 2006, DJIA: 12510.57, total: 6.27
year 2007, DJIA: 14164.53, total: 6.97
year 2008, DJIA: 13058.20, total: 7.74
year 2009, DJIA: 10548.51, total: 8.69
year 2010, DJIA: 11585.38, total: 9.55

The DJIA closed at 11,674.76 last week, so our investment is worth $111,487.51. So basically unchanged (up $1,487.51 over what we invested), with the absolutly worst case investment plan (buy the yearly high).

But of course we've been earning dividends as well (though admitedly since the DJIA isn't very "I" anymore it's not really the place to be seeking dividends). Of course the DJIA is currently amazingly overvalued and propped up by the Fed yet again, hence low dividends and a pretty good chance of a big drop again.

It doesn't have to 'make money' every year, but it needs to somewhat predictably increase and never ever plummet, because people will be living off it. Come on, it's got to be somewhere around 4% to beat social security, and let's say it can't ever drop by more than 5% over a year. Please point to it.

That's just a stupid requirement. In the first half of my working life I don't give care if it goes down by 50% one day, as long as it comes back up. When I'm actually retiring I likely have it all in bonds anyway - essentially what SS is 100% government bonds. Being able to have more swings early on is verry useful.

And yes I could lose it all. Not having low income pensions/etc funded by general revenue (i.e. not a promise to people to magically invest their money and payouts to the rich because they paid in as well) would be a bad combination.

And the DOW is a pretty stupid place to put your money - though note that your "obviously, is not a good idea" place is actually up over that timeframe (hooray for inflation).

Oh, and you don't get to use government bonds. Using government bonds is just having the government pay for it in a slightly stranger way. Duh. Saying 'The government shouldn't be handling retirement, instead, people should loan the government money and live off the interest that the government provides' is utterly surreal, especial

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[ChrisMaple]

If you're healthy, behave in a healthy manner, and have good heredity, you're a fool to buy insurance.

Basically, there are only three reasons to buy insurance. 1) You know something the insurance company doesn't (so you're out to defraud it). 2) You're being forced to buy insurance. 3) You're a coward.

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[DavidTC]

The DJIA closed at 11,674.76 last week, so our investment is worth $111,487.51. So basically unchanged (up $1,487.51 over what we invested), with the absolutly worst case investment plan (buy the yearly high).

Fencepost error. You invested eleven years in there. You invested in 2000, and in 2010, and all the years in the middle. That's 11 deposits of $10000, which is $110,000 invested.

You got a return of $1487, which is under 0.3% interest rate. (Technically, I don't know what day you started, so the investment could have been slightly longer than 10 years, or slightly short than 11, or somewhere in the middle, so the rate varies.)

Inflation, meanwhile, was 3.8% over that period. The DOW: Doing ten times worse than inflation. Put all your money in it tomorrow!

Yes the bond-rating agencies were being fraud, still anyone who bothered to look could see that real estate was in a bubble and avoid those.

If only we had some third party agencies that would rate bonds to make sure that they were reasonable investments...oh, FUCK.

Sorry, you lose that argument. People can't do an infinite amount of research on bonds. They're bonds, not stocks. You're not supposed to have to do research to weed out obviously bogus ones. You're supposed to pick your level of risk and go with AA+ or BB, end of story.

Just like you don't get to specify individual stocks, you don't get to specify individual bonds either. The retirement plan you think people should be using has to be automatic, not having people do research every month to figure out where to invest. A computer must be able to do it.

If people can do it wrong because of lack of research and lose all their money, your plan is broken.

Now, if you want to specify only specific types of bonds, like government or commercial real estate, feel free...but you don't get to exclude mortgage backed bonds retroactively solely because that specific market blew up. That's cheating.

So you're an idiot? Obviously government bonds would be part of almost any investment strategy.

If the government provides for retirement, it provides for retirement.

Everyone saying 'We should invest ourselves, not have SS' and then expecting to able to buy nice safe government bonds are actually expecting the government to provide for their retirement...they just don't want the government to provide for other people's retirement.

It's especially ironic as half the idiots wanting to phase out social security claim to be 'deficit hawks' who, if they actually wanted to reduce the deficit, would, you know, be wanting less bonds issued. Instead they want to loan the government money and live off it later at nice high interest rates in a way that only they participate in, as opposed to a standardize government program.(1)

I have nothing against investing in government bonds in the actual real world, but it's the height of dishonesty to assert that social security is a bad idea, and everyone should purchase government bonds instead.

I really don't get why it has to be SS or nothing?

It's not SS or nothing. You can invest additionally wherever you want.

But in the actual world, where 90% of Americans live and work, they do not actually make enough to invest anywhere. They'll have some medical expense or some layoff or lose their house because the bank committed fraud when it sold them to them and then use their retirement principle to recover from that, or declare bankrupcy and lose it anyway, and never managed to recover any savings.

All the people who think we should put the base level of retirement, the thing that keeps people from staving in the streets, in a place where people can access it, have never been in a situation where people actually have no money, and, would, you know, use that money instead if they could get to it. (Of course, no one's been in that circumstances, as we don't let people wipe out their SS money.)

Of course, yo

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[nedlohs]

Fencepost error. You invested eleven years in there. You invested in 2000, and in 2010, and all the years in the middle. That's 11 deposits of $10000, which is $110,000 invested.

You got a return of $1487, which is under 0.3% interest rate. (Technically, I don't know what day you started, so the investment could have been slightly longer than 10 years, or slightly short than 11, or somewhere in the middle, so the rate varies.)

Which is exactly what I said. Did you just not bother reading?

Inflation, meanwhile, was 3.8% over that period. The DOW: Doing ten times worse than inflation. Put all your money in it tomorrow!

I also covered that. You know "dividends" and "this is the worst case most pathologic strategy possible over your cherry picked bad timing period".

Just like you don't get to specify individual stocks, you don't get to specify individual bonds either. The retirement plan you think people should be using has to be automatic, not having people do research every month to figure out where to invest. A computer must be able to do it.

No but surely you can say "not all the same bonds" and not "new fancy complicated bonds". Treasuries, munis, and corporate bonds ratios dependant on how far away retirement is and current prices. Not whatever fancy new shit wall street thought up this week.

But in the actual world, where 90% of Americans live and work, they do not actually make enough to invest anywhere. They'll have some medical expense or some layoff or lose their house because the bank committed fraud when it sold them to them and then use their retirement principle to recover from that, or declare bankrupcy and lose it anyway, and never managed to recover any savings.

The money they currently pay into social security would be required to be invested, obviously enough.

But clearly you don't actually bother reading what other people write and have already made up your mind, so there's no point discussing futher (since I'd just be repeating what I've already written). Here's a hint: I'm not American, I'm from a country with both forced retirement savings in personal accounts and government pensions for those that need them. Amazingly enough the elderly aren't starving in the streets.

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[DavidTC]

Which is exactly what I said. Did you just not bother reading?

I misread that, because it didn't occur to me that you though a return of $1400 over 11 years was useful! I've make that much interest on my checking account.

I also covered that. You know "dividends"...

Except that dividends on the Dow are, um, about 1.4%.

You know, worse than one year CDs.

Even combining that with the 0.3% interest rate, you can invest in five year CDs and make more. Granted, not over 10 years at a $10,000 a year..but you could probably come out even by investing in the longest possible CD that would be done at the limit each year, with 10, 7, 5, etc as time goes by.

...and "this is the worst case most pathologic strategy possible

I point to the actual change in value: 2009: 11722.98, 2010: 11585.38.

It doesn't matter 'when' the sells happen, it matters that the Dow went down.

Yes, if you were a day trader, you could have made money. That doesn't change anything. People are supposed to be regularly investing via some sort of plan, not day trading the Dow.

over your cherry picked bad timing period".

Ah, yes, the check-picked time period that just happened. Would you rather I use 1960 to 1970? Or 1970 to 1980? Did you know a dollar invested in 1966 and taken out in 1982 would be worth 33 cents after inflation? You're the one trying to cherry pick times.

And you're wrong. The pathological worse time period would be from 2000-2009.

But let's not use the worse case scenarios. I would take the first day of the year, but that day is weird for the market. So let's do it fair and roll a dice for the day to invest. The first year Dow was 11722 for a random value, and 11722 mod 365 is 42. (Seriously? 42?) The 42th day of the year is, what, February 11?

Everyone invested 10,000 on Feb 11, starting in 2000 and moving it to some other account (bonds?) in Feb 11, 2010. (Thank goodness they didn't move it in Feb 11 2009.)

Treasuries, munis, and corporate bonds ratios dependant on how far away retirement is and current prices.

You do realize that muni bonds are threatened now, right? Because so many local governments are bankrupt? And the Republicans want to repeal the law disallowing state governments from declaring bankrupcy, so even state bonds are in danger? (Local governments can or can't, depending on the state, but states can't.)

And I will again point out that investing in government bonds is just a roundabout and insane way of the government providing retirement, instead, you know, actually having payouts indexed to things like social security. It provides no discernible benefit to anyone.

So you've left corporate bonds...rated by the same bond rating industry we've discovered does nothing at all.

I'm not American, I'm from a country with both forced retirement savings in personal accounts and government pensions for those that need them.

You keep using the phrase 'government pensions'. I don't think you know what that means in the US, or you don't know what social security is.

Pensions, in America, are things employers provide. Employers include 'the government', but no one gets a 'government pension' if they didn't work for the government.

Government 'pensions' in other places, from what I understand, are essentially an account that people pay into through taxes and collect later. This is what social security is. We just do not call it a 'pension'. We call it 'insurance' for some utterly inexplicably reason.

Granted, you said 'if they need it', which is what we mean by 'means testing', giving it only to people who have no retirement income (aka, a pension) from previous employers. We don't currently do that for social security, but has been proposed as one of the fixes. (We don't do it mainly because almost no one gets any sort of retirement pension anymore, so it's a lot of work to means test for almost no net gain.)

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[nedlohs]

I point to the actual change in value: 2009: 11722.98, 2010: 11585.38.

Why not point to the actual change of 2009: 6,547.05, 2010: 11585.38?

yes the stock market is a stupid place to invest if you buy 100% of your holding at one random point in time, and sell it all at one other random point in time.

And you're wrong. The pathological worse time period would be from 2000-2009.

You just don't read. Pathalogical refered to the buying strategy not the time frame.

Government 'pensions' in other places, from what I understand, are essentially an account that people pay into through taxes and collect later. This is what social security is. We just do not call it a 'pension'. We call it 'insurance' for some utterly inexplicably reason.

You have the completely wrong understanding. I already described how they actually work. But again you don't read.

I'm done. You win. And all you had to do was not read anything I wrote.

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[DavidTC]

Why not point to the actual change of 2009: 6,547.05, 2010: 11585.38?

Which is great for all the money you invested in 2009.

Not great all for the money invested in the previous 20 years if you needed it in 2009.

yes the stock market is a stupid place to invest if you buy 100% of your holding at one random point in time, and sell it all at one other random point in time.

Which is how any sort of required investments work.

You have the completely wrong understanding. I already described how they actually work. But again you don't read.

No, I explained that you used the word 'government pension' to talk about some sort of thing that the poor elderly can get, and I politely pointed out you're using the wrong term and no one in America knows what you're talking about, because only government employees can earn government pensions, so it hardly works as some sort of national solution.

That is only a 'win' if you're an idiot.

Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions...

[nedlohs]

No "required investment" that I have ever heard of reauires you to buy 100% of your holding at one point in time and then sell them all at once.

They usually have you buying every month or every two weeks depending on how often you get paid. And have you selling in a slowly increasing rate after you retire. But of course since you don't have such a system you know the system I've worked under and my parents have retired under much better than me.

How buying small amounts every month for 50 years, and selling small amounts every month for 30 years could possibly be thought of as all at onec I'll never understand.

Yes "government pension" means something else to Americans, that's why I tried to point out the difference between it and social security, which you ignored.

But as I said, you win. I'm not interested in arhguing about definitions.

Those of us in more enlightened countries will just continue with our moderate combination system that actually works. You can keep your wierd "pay billionares more than you pay the penniless" system.

Robert A. Heinlein

[yoshi_mon]

While Heinlein was full of all sorts of products of his generation, and I don't ascribe to everything he has said, one of the things he wrote has always struck me:

"He felt that democracy was a very good system, for beginners."

That quote was from an alien that oversaw 3 galaxies and had a political system far beyond what even Heinlein was willing to describe.

Now, everyone is going to take something away from that quote but what I take away from it is that we should not be so static in our system of governance. Our system while a lot better than most is not above a better system that could be drafted for this age. And then that system will be eclipsed by another system that fits that age better.

Sadly, it takes blood and tears to make these changes. One day we might know better. One day.

Re:Robert A. Heinlein

[joebagodonuts]

It was a work of fantasy

Half a bil, what?

[Kaz Kylheku]

You could run this on a couple of Intel servers and a big RAID.

Congress is the problem

[minstrelmike]

The managers are the problem but in the government, even tho Congress tries to blame the bureaucrats, it is the waffling and micromgmt of congress critters that causes the issue.

For example, the Dept of Homeland Security consists of 22 Agencies that report to 88 Congressional Subcommittees. Not sure how many different congress critters have interfered with SSA or directly with the spending on computers but I'll bet that's where the 'management problem' lies.

Sorry -- typo correction

[HiThere]

Well, a bit more than a typo but:
Ideally char would become a reserved word, and current usage be preserved by a temporary waiver that allowed "char" to be made equivalent to the new byte type.
changes to:
Ideally char would become a reserved word, and current usage be preserved by a temporary waiver that allowed a macro for "char" to be made equivalent to the new byte type.

Just use .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

Just compile COBOL to .NET byte code and throw it on Windows Azure. Problem solved. Next!

Similar to Y2K?

[constantnormal]

This strikes me as a task comparable to the Y2K crisis, which was handled well enough that the vast majority of the sheeple believe it to have been a scam, a tremendous waste of time, money, and urgency that was all for naught.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The major differences between this and the Y2K crisis is that the politically-dominated government, and not profit-minded enterprises, is responsible for dealing with the problem. And so we are likely to see government gridlock drive us straight into a collapse of the system that would have been paying out a huge chunk of the spending money to just about the largest demographic group in the country -- those age 60-something-and-over, with the resultant impact on the economy triggering an economic crisis that will be truly stupendous to behold.

Consider the alternative: an economy that is strapped for reasonable-paying jobs, hires a bunch of the near-retiring or retired boomer coders, delaying their retirements and generating additional cash flows into the economy. We get a smooth transition to a SS system (hardware and software) that is capable up supporting the huge demographic bubble of the boomers, that also happens to lessen the impact of an abrupt boomer retirement. This covers more than mere coders, as the planning and logistics and setup of a number of fault-tolerant fail-over capable data centers employs a lot more than just coders and analysts.

And Obama says he can't find any "shovel-ready" jobs.

Re:Similar to Y2K?

[deadweight]

Arghhhhhhhhh............ The article was about power and space problems in our building and issues with legacy COBOL. NOTHING - NADA - about politics and money issues with paying retirees. NOT ONE THING.

Re:Similar to Y2K?

[Avatar8]

I think you missed constantnormal's point.
This potential "collapse" should be treated with the same urgency as Y2K.

As the legacy applications factor into the infrastructure re-vamp, employing older coders and engineers would bring in the right experience, delay their retirement and effectively defer some of the outgoing funds they'd be calling upon by keeping them employed.

Re:Similar to Y2K?

[deadweight]

The "collapse" is news to us and we work here! We HAVE people that run and program the mainframe. It isn't going away and we hire new people when the old ones leave. As for delaying retirements, we aren't slaves. If someone wants to leave, there is no way to stop them. Also we don't kick people out at X age if they want to stay.

Re:Similar to Y2K?

[Avatar8]

*Whoosh* That's the sound of the point of the above post going over your head. Not talking about YOU, current employees, delaying retirement or any such bunk.
Thanks for proving a point about government employees.

nah

[tkprit]

Sooooooo inclined to agree with you! ...but ultimately I'd buy into a Ponzi scheme if I could get payout with very little or no investment, which is what our SSI allows. So not ponzi.

OK - I actually work in the facility!

[deadweight]

It is NOT collapsing. Our mainframe is chugging along happy as ever. We are virtualizing servers to free up space and reduce power consumption. Gov't IT is not perfect by any means, but I think this is a ploy to make sure no one cuts our budget.

Re:OK - I actually work in the facility!

[Avatar8]

Government IT is pathetic by many means. Having supported the DoEd in the past, I know what kind of IT-ignorant, over-process oriented, near-brain dead people are running your agency. I pity you.
I did exactly what you are doing. I virtualized 75% of the DoEd infrastructure. Sure it was only 600 or so computers, but it only took one year, $250,000 in hardware and the cost of my meager salary. WTF is taking $500million?!?!?!

The statement of your IG says it all for how behind government agencies are. "...COBOL is dead or dying..." Really?!??! How 1990's of him. ANYTHING written in COBOL could and should have been replaced by a C script in 1999.

My main issue with SSA and ALL government departments is the lack of accountability. SSA has been undergoing a restructuring since 1990, spending hundreds of millions of tax dollars with little to nothing to show for it. Yet how does everyone react? "Oh, that's the government for you. Give them another half a billion $$ and we'll see how they're doing in another 10 years."

If our government agencies and departments were businesses, they'd have been shut down decades ago and gone the way of Enron after a few audits for misappropriated spending.

Re:OK - I actually work in the facility!

[deadweight]

We are building an entire new datacenter - this is including the buildings. While I am sure it could be done better/faster/cheaper, it is a large building, not some new racks and a few new servers. I am not over on the mainframe side, so I'll have to ask about replacing COBOL with C. I suspect the answer is ROFLMAO :)

Wow....

[hesaigo999ca]

I never thought I would hear it, 1979, and still running, wow, just that is a feat in itself, and the immense stupidity for not thinking ahead is another...