Social Security Information Systems Near Collapse 279
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."
*HOW* Much?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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:2012 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
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:*HOW* Much?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
OMG! $500,000,000.00 for a datacenter (Score:5, Insightful)
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:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flash... (Score:4, Insightful)
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:LOL, the irony is amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:*HOW* Much?! (Score:0, Insightful)
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:2012 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:1, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Typical IT cognitive distortions... (Score:5, Insightful)
(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:*HOW* Much?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.