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Trump Orders Government To Stop Work On Y2K Bug, 17 Years Later (bloomberg.com)
The federal government will finally stop preparing for the Y2K bug, seventeen years after it came and went. Yes, you read that right. Bloomberg reports: The Trump administration announced Thursday that it would eliminate dozens of paperwork requirements for federal agencies, including an obscure rule that requires them to continue providing updates on their preparedness for a bug that afflicted some computers at the turn of the century. As another example, the Pentagon will be freed from a requirement that it file a report every time a small business vendor is paid, a task that consumed some 1,200 man-hours every year. Seven of the more than 50 paperwork requirements the White House eliminated on Thursday dealt with the Y2K bug, according to a memo OMB released. Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of man-hours across the federal government. The agency didn't provide an estimate of how much time is currently spent on Y2K paperwork, but Linda Springer, an OMB senior adviser, acknowledged that it isn't a lot since those requirements are already often ignored in practice.
Gotta keep track of those unsigned 32-bit int timestamps, they're going to creep up on you in 2038.
Well, the Y2k stuff being removed is great. But the bit about reports for small business payouts? 1200 man hours == ~30 weeks of 40 hours/week work. Ie, you managed to cut one job That's great if it was redundant work--and honestly it should be. So great for Trump. Let me guess, I'm not leftist enough so it doesn't count?
One, Washington has been a massive partisan witch hunt since at least the 1990s (probably since 1790, but I can personally verify since the 1990s). Two, the rhetoric during Obama's years made him out to be the anti-christ. Not to say Bush's years were very stellar either--the Hitler references don't do anyone any good. You see a pattern here?
I can readily bring myself to admit that regulations, like these, should be eliminated. I have no problem with the notion that Trump can do good.
Because...?
Yep, President. And as President, he has a lot less power than he imagines. Unlike his claims about President Obama, Presidents aren't kings nor can they really act like them. There's two other branches of government which will quickly dispel the notion that one can just Executive Order one's way into doing whatever one wants. Since Congress is so dysfunctional, that general leaves the courts to challenge and establish the Executives powers.
Honestly, given the scope of surveillance the NSA, CIA, and FBI have done on the American people, the power of the President needs slam downed hard. Too bad the courts seem very unwilling to actually follow through on that.
PS - Really, if all you listen to are partisan hacks, you're part of the problem. But, yea, whatever. Obama spying on Trump was good because, you know, NSA surveillance is good. Except it's bad because the President [Trump] shouldn't have that power going forward.
Or maybe it's okay some of the time with a warrant. Particularly describing the things to be searched. Not a retroactive fishing expedition into the pre-recorded phone calls, internet searches, etc of all Americans. Seriously, if Trump is so against what Obama did,
he actually has the power to stop it from happening again for a long time. You know, instead of dick around in immigration law which is the purview of Congress.
Seriously? Is there anything else they are preparing for that has already come and gone?
Well reputedly in 1803 the British government prepared for the potential invasion of Napoleon by creating a civil service position for someone to stand on the white cliffs of Dover with a spyglass and ring a bell if they saw Napoleon coming. The position was finally cancelled in 1945, 124 years after Napoleon died.
He most certainly not removing burdens with the new burden that government software will now have y2k problems again.
One thing the simpler man doesn't understand is that problems like Y2K (or 2038) don't go away once the date has passed. Too small storage containers used in already existing data won't magically transform. Someone needs to make that happen, each and every time old data is accessed. Do a study of things like census records, and you'll be hit by the Y2K bug.
The very preparation for Y2K caused additional problems. Uncoordinated preparation caused forms that suddenly changed from YY/MM/DD to mandatory YYYY/MM/DD at arbitrary dates in the late 90s.
This means that you'll run into the problem when handling and comparing data from the same sources from before 2000.
Relatedly, the "2038 problem" will also still be with us long after 2038, because of all the data stored in signed 32-bit time format won't magically transform. Someone needs to make sure it's done.
The regulations are probably too specific, and focus on the specific instance of the problem when a generic regulation[*] would have been better. But then again, politicians who couldn't see the bigger picture existed back then too.
[*]: Like "All data is to be converted to representations not subject to container size prior to processing, or a justification for and implications of the limited container size must be documented."
Among the effects, this could lead to a resurgence of BCD and CPUs who handle them natively again, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
Not an american but you guys should seriously consider getting rid of the electoral college. I'm no expert on american political history but it is my understanding that the system was originally put into place to safeguard a takeover by a tyrant. That is, the founding fathers were smart enough to understand that there are times in which the democratic will of the people may be hijacked, and this is where the electoral college could step in and make a more rational choice.
However, has it ever actually worked that way? No. Has the electoral college ever actually had any will of their own? No. It's simply made american elections to be this weird-ass game in which it's possible to win by getting less of the popular vote b y playing essentially moneyball with the election as Trump successfully did. Twice in the 2000s the EC has resulted in the candidate with less votes winning the nomination. It's a catch 22: supposing the candidate that wins the popular vote wins the EC as well, the EC cannot then vote against the candidate even if there's good cause to suspect he/she is a risk to the nation because that would go against the will of the people. If the candidate that wins the EC and loses the popular vote as with Trump the EC still can't do its job and vote any differently because that would be seen as 'changing the system" and there'd be a massive outcry over a hijacked election.
Now think about it, Trump would have been a perfect case for the EC to step in: he's clearly an unstable individual, lacks any political experience and his 'proposals' are for the most part rather insane and there's a good case to be made that he may in fact be suffering from an onset of Alzheimer's (disjointed speech, erratic personality, highly limited covabulary and repeated use of generic words such as something, anything etc.). Less then third of the country actually supported him and the other candidate in fact got MORE votes, so the EC siding against Trump because he's unfit to rule and siding with the majority of the voters would be rationally and democratically justified. Like, a more clear-cut example case of why the electoral college exists cannot be found in recent history. However did they do it? No, because as I said the EC has just become a stamping mechanism which currently makes the votes of individuals count less in some states than in others. In fact when this possibility was brought up aqfter the elections it was held as layghable by most. "What, actually electing the person who got the most votes? Don't be kidding, we have to elect the unstable raving orange dude, I mean, he won 'the system'. Nothing we can do. Rules is rules." And because they cannot deviate from voting according to the rules of the game, the people in the EC might just as well be kicked out and the system changed so that votes are valued differently based on the states. I mean, it'd be de facto the same thing as the current model. It makes absolutely no sense from the point of view of democracy, and it does not further the benefit of the american people, from my view.
It should not be possible in a democracy for a person to be elected into the most powerful seat in the land by getting less votes. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...", if your vote counts less than someone else's because you live in California and not Ohio, you are not equal. The system that was originally pout in place to safeguard the republic from tyranny has now been morphed into something which actually makes it easier for any would-be tyrants to step in because you don't even have to win the popular vote.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
What is your point? First you state that the democratic will of the people is sometimes wrong and the electoral college should correct it. Then you say that the populist vote should win no matter what in a democracy.
These are conflicting.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal
The declaration of independence is not a legal document. If it were, we would not have had a need for that pesky civil war. An honest mistake.
The electoral college system, like nearly all political systems, was put in place as a compromise of many views. Preventing tyranny, as you put it, was just one view. The most important part of the electoral college was its design in being an extension of the bicameral congress. One side represents states as population dictates, the other does not. Reasoning behind this is two fold:
The US is a federation. The president is elected by the states, not the people. It just so happens that everyone agrees in letting people have a say anyway, as opposed to many parliamentary systems where the leader is chosen by the winning party.
Small population states still matter and the people that live there deserve to be heard. If we went full democratic, only a handful of counties in the country out of thousands would have their values respected and listened to while the rest will be ignored or abused. Clearly not a good outcome, and so people in different states do have different weighting by design: to ensure the people that produce the food which everyone survives with gets to have their say in how the country is run.
No, I did not say that's what I think, I said I'm under the impression that that's the reason behind EC's existence. But to clarify yes the people can sometimes be cheated into voting for candidates that should not be allowed to rule because they hold immoral/unconstitutional views (see, third reich among other things, Adolf was democratucally elected). HOWEVER, this is not the case now as what's happened in the 2000s is that the EC does the reverse, helping to automatically nominate a person that gets less of the votes without it having anything to do with consideration of the candidates but simply following preset rules.
No they are not. See, what I'm saying is precisely that the EC does not prevent a populist from winning in is current shape, it makes it easier by shrinking the amount of the popular vote one needs to secure to win the nomination. The EC on paper is an organ of governance which is supposed to be able to affect the outcome of the election based on their own judgement of the candidates, but it does not do so under any circumstances so it's just become an automated engine for wannabe-populists to gain power by winning the 'right' votes. This makes no sense and is in contradiction with what I understand to be the point of something like the EC.
I never claimed it is legally binding, I just loaned the phrase from there to reflect the fact that i do not think the EC in its current function serves the american ideal of people being equal.
They won't be ignored or abused. In a popular vote the vote of everyone counts the same, no matter the location. The idea of a democracy is that everyone has an equal say in the matter on the vote. The fact that a city has millions of people living in it does not logically translate to 'therefore the people in the countryside need to have more votes." The geographical location you inhabit should not bear any weight in a democratic vote in my view, It doesn't do so here (Finland) or anywhere else in the west, and you don't see the people in the countryside being 'ignored or abused'. The people in the countryside hold power in proportion to their numbers and still have the local municipal governments to represent them on a national level.
But this turns the system on its head giving undue power to those people. Why should someone living on the countryside have any more say in who rules over the entire country? The people in the cities are just as much citizens as the people in the countryside. Just because someone lives in a sparsely populated area does not mean their opinion of who should rule should count any more. That's what equality means, that's what democracy as a decision making method means.
There are other means of making sure that the majority cannot override the rights of the minorities. That's why countries have constitutions which guarantee rights to people and protect them from being eaten by majority votes. You're arguing that in addition to this the people on the countryside deserve to get to choose the president moreso than the people in the cities, which makes no sense to me.
I understand why the system is the way it is, I just think it'
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead