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Trump's Second Term

a_unique_person said:
It's not actually a COBOL thing.

Whoever wrote the code, that just how they chose to do it. COBOL has standard Y2K compliant dates as well.
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This reminds me of the unholy mess that is date/time stamp data in NSSDC telemetry. However, for someone like Musk who pretends to be a galaxy brain to immediately jump to the "fraud" conclusion when he encounters something he doesn't understand is entirely irresponsible. Anyone who has had to work in legacy systems knows about epoch problems in offset-encoded dates and/or times.

Wudang said:
20 years since I wrote COBOL so I checked my copy of COBOL Unleashed - they mention the CYYDDD format "uses the year 1990 as a starting point (or any other years that you choose)". So the 1875 appears arbitrary.
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Epochs are always arbitrary. For spacecraft, the epoch is often the launch date. The practice of reckoning years from the accession of a monarch persisted well into the 21st century, if only for ceremonial purposes.

Similarly, when it's important to include the concept of "unknown value," you want an explicit pattern of bits to represent that, so you can distinguish between garbled data and legitimately missing, unknown, or computationally invalid data (such as the result of dividing by zero). And you want that to be a clearly "wrong" value, which doesn't preclude it being arbitrary. And it often can't be zero. And you would do this even if you switched to a purportedly epoch-less format such as YYYYMMDD. (The Gregorian calendar just uses the accepted birth year of Jesus as its epoch.) If the designers and users of a system used a specific date well in the past to encode the idea of, "We don't know the actual date," then anyone who was actually familiar with the system would soon learn to recognize 18750520 as "no known date."

The point is only slightly tarnished by other people's mistaken efforts to attribute this to some inherent feature of COBOL. It's also hasty and wrong, but it's a wholly minor order of error compared to jumping from, "Hm, what's going on here?" to saying under color of law, "Someone must be committing fraud!" Unfortunately it feeds the myth that anyone who criticizes Elon Musk's intellect doesn't know what they're talking about.

You can lament the existence of legacy systems and you can decry a policy that doesn't update them regularly. But there's no excuse for turning them over to techno-toddlers to break while "fixing" them. I think some people already pointed out Musk's complaint that some databases weren't "de-duped" to remove "duplicate" Social Security numbers. This is more properly interpreted as Musk's ignorance of the practice of leaving some databases unnormalized because they run faster that way. Experience matters. So does honesty.
 
Explorer said:
As an addendum to my previous post,Trump has allowed Musk to use the same approach as he does in politics, and over here in the UK, it is called "trial and error", and requires no upfront thinking, only post damage restorative measures. It is usually the most expensive method, but easier on the brain cells. Even the Polish foreign minister knows this, when he stated yesterday "President Trump has a method of operating, which the Russians call reconnaissance through battle. You push and you see what happens, and then you change your position, legitimate tactics".

However, let us all hope this doesn't apply to a potential nuclear war.
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One of The Posotus' catch-phrases has always been "We'll see what happens."
 
ultimately, i think to those defending the musk administration at this point don’t really care whether he’s right or wrong. he’s shown himself to be a lying fool dozens of times, and the world keeps handing him more money and power. i’m not sure right and wrong have ever mattered.
 
Explorer said:
As an addendum to my previous post,Trump has allowed Musk to use the same approach as he does in politics, and over here in the UK, it is called "trial and error", and requires no upfront thinking, only post damage restorative measures. It is usually the most expensive method, but easier on the brain cells. Even the Polish foreign minister knows this, when he stated yesterday "President Trump has a method of operating, which the Russians call reconnaissance through battle. You push and you see what happens, and then you change your position, legitimate tactics".

However, let us all hope this doesn't apply to a potential nuclear war.
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A related point can be made by taking a look at how Musk's handled Twitter. Musk's actions saddled Twitter with a debt that would have been rather absurd to expect the company to pay back from the start, and then his "Move fast and break things" led to, what, an 84% decrease in revenue on top of that? Naturally, he repeatedly tried to blame everyone else for all his problems and acted to maliciously attack targets of opportunity in court under BS pretexts.

Why the **** should anyone trust him with things that work best on principles that aren't even business in the first place when he's just that bad with unfamiliar business paradigms anyways?
 
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Blue Mountain said:
+1: Executive Order: Establishing the National Energy Dominance Council (+1 for benefit to USA)
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It's important to understand that these orders in some cases invoke additional Presidential authority under so-called emergency powers. If the President declares an "emergency," he can temporarily exercise 136 additional powers that include bypassing normal procedure and oversight. Congress has only limited authority to push back, generally limited to determining what to do when the notion of "temporary" as expired. These "emergencies" often extend literally for years, and the law doesn't impose many restrictions on how the President must arrive at the decision that an emergency exists.

Similarly the courts have limited authority to check this power, and generally have not desired to do so except for Republican presidents.

What declaring a "national energy emergency" does is to negate the effect of environment and safety regulations on the production of energy. So in the facetious worst case, this would including drilling for oil in Teddy Roosevelt's head on Mount Rushmore. Obviously it means ignoring anything intended to stem global climate change. Pres. Trump wasn't even coy about this. When declaring the emergency and assuring oil companies they wouldn't have to obey existing regulations, he specifically characterized his policy as, "Drilll, baby, drill."
 
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JayUtah said:
However, for someone like Musk who pretends to be a galaxy brain to immediately jump to the "fraud" conclusion when he encounters something he doesn't understand is entirely irresponsible.
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He immediately jumps to “fraud” because he is only looking for fraud, and he desperate find it. He is not interested in anything else.

It must make him mad that despite all his efforts and blustering accusations, he has found exactly nothing.
 
An article today in the Guardian on the wider implications of what Musk is doing to US financial systems has a few interesting points about how all this will affect the world economy if it all goes pear shaped (a good chance given the level of intellect invovled):

www.theguardian.com

Forget Trump’s tariffs, the president’s bond market threat is worse | Heather Stewart

Elon Musk’s crazed takeover of America’s financial plumbing risks shattering confidence in US institutions and in turn global financial stability
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
An article today in the Guardian on the wider implications of what Musk is doing to US financial systems has a few interesting points about how all this will affect the world economy if it all goes pear shaped (a good chance given the level of intellect invovled):

www.theguardian.com

Forget Trump’s tariffs, the president’s bond market threat is worse | Heather Stewart

Elon Musk’s crazed takeover of America’s financial plumbing risks shattering confidence in US institutions and in turn global financial stability
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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It's almost as if President Musk and his orange pet are embarked on a program of destabilizing and weakening the governmental structure of the United States, creating domestic unrest in its population, isolating it from the confidence of its military allies and trading partners, and reducing its stature in the world. Now who might want that to happen?
 
Andy_Ross said:
JD Vance went to Munich, ignored Chancellor Scholz and had meetings with the leader of the most far-right party.

What does that tell us?
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The one thing it doesn't tell us is that the Trump administration is Nazi or Nazi adjacent, only that they want to encourage neo-Nazis
 
JayUtah said:
It's important to understand that these orders in some cases invoke additional Presidential authority under so-called emergency powers. If the President declares an "emergency," he can temporarily exercise 136 additional powers that include bypassing normal procedure and oversight. Congress has only limited authority to push back, generally limited to determining what to do when the notion of "temporary" as expired. These "emergencies" often extend literally for years, and the law doesn't impose many restrictions on how the President must arrive at the decision that an emergency exists.
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It reminds me of a science fiction setting I read, in which a military leader took absolute control of a star nation "for the duration of the crisis". He took control in 2784, and his descendents remained in charge until 3078. The "crisis" never officially ended, but the nation ceased to exist.
 
Armitage72 said:
It reminds me of a science fiction setting I read, in which a military leader took absolute control of a star nation "for the duration of the crisis". He took control in 2784, and his descendents remained in charge until 3078. The "crisis" never officially ended, but the nation ceased to exist.
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There are still something like 40 active declarations of emergency in the U.S., including the one from 2001 declaring a national emergency after the 9/11 attacks. That's not even the oldest one.
 
steenkh said:
He immediately jumps to “fraud” because he is only looking for fraud, and he desperate find it. He is not interested in anything else.

It must make him mad that despite all his efforts and blustering accusations, he has found exactly nothing.
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He is deranged ego in search of a prize that only he can find with his mad skillz, to validate his claim to be the smartest man on the planet, just like those video games he scammed. It's all a stupid but dangerous game using the world as his real time gaming platform.
 
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