For anyone unfamiliar, the eponymous "crises" in the title are NOT about the evil orange man who is bad - Notes on the Crises is a political economy newsletter started a few years ago by Nathan Tankus to comment on the intersecting global economic disasters triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Nathan is a @TracingWoodgrains style "truth neurodivergent" not a wingcucked political hack. He's just a big giant dork who does things like FOIA request the minutes from all US Federal Reserve Board meetings from 1967-1973
Nathan looks like this, and I would believe almost anything that he writes, because it is backed by powerful neurodivergent spirits.
When he writes about the COBOL code in the treasury department, I'm confident he's talking to beardy old men who write and maintain that code.
I would also like to clarify some confusion on social media. The issue with understanding and grasping a COBOL system is not knowing COBOL, as a programming language, in the abstract. Nor is it, god help me, something that AI can "do" because you fired one of these chatbots up and got some code that could compile when you asked "write me some COBOL code". The issue is understanding the specific physical limitations of the system, the way that it interacts with the "Business Logic" of the code and a million other contextual factors.
There is specific code which tells you where to direct specific payments in specific ways and the structures, and why they are structured the way they are, requires deep contextual knowledge. This is "business logic". The entire issue with COBOL and why it has been such a struggle to maintain it is that COBOL systems (both private and public) developed for decades with very little documentation, have a million different path dependent coding choices. Mar Hicks 2020 article in Logic Magazine "Built to Last" is worth a read on this topic.
This is what I meant yesterday when I referenced that 30 different COBOL systems at Treasury had developed their own "dialects" and they launched Payment Application Modernization (PAM), which among other things, unified them. What they unified was the business logic of those systems (as well as likely other factors, most notably the physical architecture of the systems they ran on). Part of me wishes they didn't modernize with PAM because those 30 different and distinct systems would have been more secure from their infiltration. PAM processed 4.7 trillion dollars of payments in 2024.
It's also true that some similar issues can emerge with other more recent programming languages and the way "business logic" emerges if a mission critical IT system developed using a more recent programming language. But COBOL is unique; after all it's literally "common business-oriented language". So while knowing the COBOL programming language is better than not knowing it, it does not make that much of a difference with these young Musk programmers mucking about.
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You have 3 known reddit accounts, 2 of which are perm. banned for harassment, at least two twitter accounts that will crosspost between each other to create artificial engagement, and the rdrama account where you boasted about getting me banned for harassment, which ended up getting your main banned from reddit. I have no doubt in my mind that you're using an alt to send false crisis report.
Also, I wasn't the one who decided anything on your ban, Kicken was. Kicken knows way more about this than I do and I have never cared about anything you've tried to accuse me of. What I do care about is how disrespectful to real artists who put in years for their art you are. You think you're doing something that no one else can grasp but in reality you're just an /r/antiwork poster with a lot of free time on their hands. You have no idea what work means, get over yourself.
Snapshots:
https://www.crisesnotes.com/day-five-of-the-trump-musk-treasury-payments-crisis-of-2025-not-read-only-access-anymore/:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
FOIA request the minutes from all US Federal Reserve meetings from 1967-1973:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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