(After) Wednesday OT: Quirks And Layoffs, COBOL DOGE, SS-US, Orbital, King Trump

All readers welcome

no you’re not, and neither is anyone else

Big day today. A reminder about how we discuss politics on ACF: you’re free to criticize any public figure plus your humble author, but personal attacks on another reader will be chastised, edited, or deleted as I see fit. Don’t waste your time with that kind of drama. As the Rhodesians once said: be a man among men.

Cucks and biz

buy the car, keep the mole

Alright, you vile creatures — stop sending me the Autopian article about big layoffs at Cars&Bids. Or you can send it to the senior insurance company magazine editor who secretly tried to interview for a management position there years ago but was told in no uncertain terms that he didn’t even rate an email followup from The Doug himself, much less an actual call or Zoom. You dodged a bullet there, my friend, thankfully leaving you free to focus on more profitable activities like hiding in your mancave and ignoring your sons.

I don’t take any pleasure in Doug’s core business idea failing — and if you read the Autopian numbers, which don’t add up to more than about $500k a month of revenue for a company with a lot of mouths to feed, I don’t think “failing” is too strong a description — but I do take pleasure in once again accurately predicting the future. Two years ago I said that

Cars and Bids will fold or merge before 2030.

My reasoning at the time: There’s absolutely no reason for second-tier online auctions to exist other than the fact that they are less fraud-resistant, which is not a good reason. With the exception of a few True Believers, the majority of listings on C&B are cars and/or sellers that don’t pass muster on BaT. That’s not a sustainable business model unless you want to cut costs to the bone, aggressively pursue the bad apples, and run the string out until someone sues you into oblivion.

Don’t worry about Doug. He got paid well out of it, and he’s not the sort of person to be overly troubled by pride or toxic masculinity over C&B’s snapped-cable-elevator descent. It would bother me if my business failed in public for no other reason than the fact that it sucks balls compared to a slew of remarkably incompetent competitors, but I don’t think Doug has any greater ambition in this world than to have a dollar in his pocket, and that ambition has been satisfied at least twenty million post-tax times. Good for him — but unless you also have that kind of money sitting around to waste, I highly suggest you list your next collector automobile with Bring-A-Trailer.

Midwits gonna midwit while Elon gonna impregnate

Several of my friends have been posting something to the effect of

The DOGE claim that ‘150-year-olds are collecting Social Security’ is bullshit, what’s actually happening is Elon’s kids don’t understand COBOL, and COBOL bases its dates on a null date of 1875, so anyone for whom you don’t have a birthdate is automatically 150 years old… checkmate, fascists! Learn 2 coad!

The people posting this “fact” aren’t stupid people, but they are universally not programmers. I’m a programmer, and I learned both COBOL and FORTRAN as a 14-year-old attending an advanced comp-sci program at Ohio State back in the Cretaceous Period. (I was so pissed at my parents for making me go! I wanted to ride my bike all summer.) This “explanation” smelled strongly of “Paul Krugman 127-IQ stupidity” to me so I started looking into it.

Let’s put aside for a moment the facts that nobody who has a null entry in their birthdate field should be collecting Social Security. How is this not universally agreed upon? I spoke with a professional in the retirement field recently who told me, “I used to go through and take people off pension rolls for having a null birthdate, or other missing but important information, all the time. I’d tell the clients to call the person and see if they could come to the phone — and if not, why.”

The Social Security Administration knows it has a serious data issue, so in 2015 they handled it in the laziest and most blunt-trauma way possible: by no longer paying benefits to anyone who is over 115 years old but not marked “dead” in the database. The SSA database, by the way, has 18.9 million “undead” people who fall into that bucket, which seems like a problem in and of itself. Occam’s Razor tells us that the SSA almost certainly has millions of dead people to whom benefits are still being paid, unless, you know, the “undead” issue is magically non-applicable to people born after 1911.

Back to the programming thing:

This sounds so very smart and hip but: ISO 8601 was released in 1988, long after the core SSA functions were written, and COBOL didn’t support ISO 8601 until…

Anybody here think that the SSA rewrote their code between 20201101 and now?

Turns out that COBOL does, in fact, have a base date: it is January 1, 1601. So if the DOGE kids sound the alarm about 624-year-old people collecting Social Security, that will likely be the reason.

I will also state for the record that COBOL, when used for what the SSA does with it, is an order of magnitude simpler than are most programming languages and frameworks in 2025. I understood it just fine as a child. The reason people don’t want to work in the field is not, as the media claims, complexity. They just don’t want to be dependent on legacy jobs for the rest of their lives, and also COBOL is a resume killer in a business where only the young and friendless thrive. The reason banks and governments don’t regularly revise their COBOL isn’t because the language is so difficult. It’s because people hate refactoring old code. If you had the time and budget to fix the COBOL, you could feed it through a Large Language Model and get something very similar in a modern language, which you could then implement, and that’s what enterprises around the Western World are very gradually doing.

The moral of the story here is that there’s a very real contingent of the media, the Twitterati, and the social-media universe that likes to play at being scientists, programmers, and other “smart people”. Because these people are not scientists or programmers, they fail to understand the iterative, zero-thrills, plodding nature of these enterprises, and therefore they are easily seduced by things that sound scientific or programmer-y.

Which is why you have an utter moron like Paul Krugman repeating the “1875 thing” without taking even two minutes to see if it might be true. These are the people who set policy and decide the future in the Uniparty Universe, by the way. These are the people who said stuff like “What’s in the COVID-19 vaccine? It’s called SCIENCE, bigot! That’s what’s in it!” These are the folx who are considered Very Smart People in the world of The Current Thing.

But in the end, they’re literally no smarter or more effective than the trailer-park-right-wing “Facebook uncle” who periodically posts warnings about 5G towers or braying demands that “I DO NOT AUTHORIZE THE META CORPORATION TO EXAMINE MY TESTICLES REMOTELY!!!!”

As fast as any, and faster than most

Speaking of ancient American inventions that deserve better than what they’ve gotten: The SS United States has been ejected from her Philadelphia berth and will be sunk outside Destin, FL to create an artificial reef. Measuring 990 feet long, she was the largest passenger liner to be entirely constructed in the United States, and was awarded the Blue Riband in 1952 for the fastest transatlantic passage — in both directions. For the record, she was ten percent faster than the Queen Mary, which held the record from 1938 to 1952, and was once clocked at 44.1 miles per hour in open sea trials.

Designed in conjunction with the Navy, and built to military standards of damage isolation, she could have simply sailed away from any capital ship in existence, which was kind of the point. Submarines would have stood no chance — and like the Concorde, the SS United States could cruise effortlessly at very nearly its maximum speed.

Our culture is obsessed with the Titanic, and why not? It’s a memorable and tragic story, one that resonates with anyone who feels doom and/or romance approaching in their own lives. Thus the exhibitions, the mega-dollar dives down to the wreck, and a museum in Pigeon Forge, TN that replicates much of the ship from scratch. Perhaps we should consider that the SS United States is a better and more admirable story. She was fast, she was safe, and she was, quite simply, the best that ever was. If we truly had a warrior culture, rather than a culture of emotion and hysteria, you’d be able to see her somewhere, fully restored, for the rest of your life and the lives of your children.

The most boring space story since “The Last Jedi”

Orbital, Samantha Harvey, 2024. Prior to reading Orbital, the much-praised winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, I read two of the losers: The Safekeep and Stone Yard Devotional, noting that my previously modest faith in the selection committee had been significantly bolstered by their choices. Well… consider that faith shattered, because Samantha Harvey’s tiresome, self-satisfied, and massively try-hard little “love letter to the Earth” is, like most of the stuff in orbit nowadays, just worthless trash. Perhaps that’s too harsh a thing to say about a book that is often beautifully and perceptively written, and on which the author clearly did all of the required NASA-and-math homework ahead of time, but Orbital commits the cardinal fiction sin of having absolutely zero, no, nada plot whatsoever.

I don’t mean it has no plot like Ulysses has no plot, or like The Waste Land has no plot. I mean that Ms. Harvey continually toys with the idea of having something happen, only to discard it. The novel is set on the International Space Station. One of the astronauts receives word that her mother has died… which is sad, but nothing results from it. The crew is asked to track a typhoon… which is a bad typhoon, and it affects someone one of them knows, but there’s nothing to be done about it. Perhaps the worst part of the book is when we find out that…

there is a crack slowly widening on the Russian side of the ISS, and it’s leaking air, and…

oh, that’s right, nothing actually happens, and the book ends with everyone breathing and doing their jobs just fine. We find out that four other astronauts are flying to the moon — this very minor plot point, I suppose, allows the publisher to promote the book in the “Sci-Fi” category — but we never find out if they get there. The closest thing to an actual plot event happens when some lab mice learn to “fly” in zero gravity. Oh, and we find out that one of the astronauts had a sex dream about another astronaut when they first came to the ISS, but it was so embarrassing to them that they never had a sex dream of any kind ever again.

Supposedly Orbital beat out at least two much better novels because there are so many “poetic” passages about the earth and space. Which is like giving “Best Sports Car” to a Macan because it carries more cargo, or — and this is the sad but direct analogy — giving Crest Of A Knave the Grammy for Hard Rock Album in 1989 because it was artsier than all the real hard rock albums. The primary difference between Orbital and the Jethro Tull album: “Raising Steam” and “Steel Monkey” actually have a few fans almost four decades after the fact, while this book will be long forgotten by then. Grade: C-

I thought it was Christopher Walken the whole time

Not a few ACF readers have contacted me about this AI parody “Time” cover posted by the President’s Instagram account. For obvious reasons of age, interest, and having actual lives outside media, most of them don’t realize that the image refers to Trump’s oft-ridiculed claim, made decades ago, that as the leading real estate investor of the time he was “the king of New York”.

That’s the context of the picture — but any time a President affects the trappings of a king it is apt to make everyone but modern-monarchy advocate Curtis Yarvin a bit nervous. Could it really be happening? Is Hitler Trump really going to destroy The Our Democracy, the way Joy Behar said he would?

To some degree, this is an issue tailor-made to fall across partisan lines; plenty of people who call this “fascism” would call it “a joke” if Joe Biden had done it, and vice versa. When “your guy” does something that steps past the boundaries of taste, your first impulse is to minimize it, and when the enemy does the same you raise the black flag then call for the slitting of throats.

this, also, looks suspicious, even once you realize that as president he is also the commander-in-chief of the girl scouts

Speaking personally, I can’t decide if it’s 4-D chess (get your opponents to breathe fire and sweat blood over a goofy computer illustration) or raw narcissism (he does love gold toilet appointments) or just a lack of appropriate gravitas (don’t we want our Presidents to be above memes?) from the Oval Office. I will tell you what it is not: any actual attempt to trial-balloon an extension of President power into the realm of kingly dominion. Nor is it the first incomprehensible step in a Hitlerian assumption of near-absolute power. Other than Donald Trump Jr., who would benefit mightily from a switch to Caesarian rules, I can’t imagine there is a single person in the Administration who wants to significantly change how the Presidency works.

Speaking even more personally, I continue to be disappointed in my left-leaning friends, who often appear unable to discuss their dislike of Trump and his policies without launching fearlessly and thoughtlessly into hyperbole. Surely you all know that it’s possible to strongly oppose “The Orange Man” without continually talking about Germany in 1939. In fact, you can more effectively oppose him if you’re willing to actually contest Trump on the real issues, because the rest of us have been listening to The Boy Who Cried Hitler since 2016 and the closest thing we’ve had in nine years to an actual Kristallnacht was, at least theoretically, intended to promote the dignity of Black Lives Mattering.

My suggestion to anyone who is offended by the “King Trump” image is this: You should do your best to restrict the powers of this administration and every Administration that follows. If you don’t want Imperial Presidencies, then do what it takes to make sure we don’t have any more of them. Ah, but here’s the problem: nobody really wants to restrict the Presidential powers, which are turning out to be perhaps a bit… stouter that any of us suspected, because you’re all thinking about the day Your Guy Or Gal sits in that chair and does exactly the same stuff, in the opposite direction.

The older I get, the more I respect the very young and often terrified men who built this country. They always thought in terms of ideals and institutions, not personalities. They balanced the branches of government because they understood, rightly, that the success of an institution is more often determined by its policies and procedures than by, say, the inherent righteousness of whatever ideals it holds in the moment. We should be more like them. It’s within our power to do so. And within our grasp. Just not, sadly, within our twisted, envious, partisan hearts.