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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."
So the world will end in 2012!
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
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?!
Just use facebook ID's instead.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
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.
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.
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
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.
-Michael
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.
(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!!!!!!
Who is John Cabal?
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.