What could possibly go wrong? DOGE to rapidly rebuild Social Security codebase.
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The other thing is you write technical documentation for an audience you assume has at least a basic level of understanding of the "stuff" used to develop the system you are documenting.
So if you document a COBOL program, you assume that the reader is at least a subject matter expert in COBOL (but maybe not an SME in what the application does).
These script kiddies wont understand COBOL (and all its dark corners as all languages have) so they are doubly screwed (don't undersand COBOL and don't understand how the SSA functions, it's rules and procedures)
And I assume their arrogance (to not understand their own ignorance and limitations) will mean they wont reach out to Grey Beards (assuming they haven't all been fired)
Bluck
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#2 should include money. lots of it. politics of fear as well. Many who don't vote (I'm told - I think they're wrong) feel that this is the reason it's pointless. But money in politics is poison, and somehow it has to be expunged from our political system, one way or another.
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Keep in mind that these applications are built on top of very bare platforms.
There were no off-the-shelf libraries, components or whatever.
To compare these 60 MLOC to a modern approach you need to include the LOC of the libraries, data baseservers, etc you'd be using.
Then keep in mind that there is usually very little code re-use.
You don't want to have your application broken because someone made an update to a function you are calling. So you just make your own copy of that function.
Of course you can/should deal with this by extensive use of unit testing. Emphasis on extensive because this is the kind of system that basically can't fail.
But then you need to keep in mind these are very archaic platforms and modern development tools mostly are unvailable to you.
Pretty much.
Just the effort to compile a requirement list and then effort to test the new system before bringing it live will be massive.
Just think that you'll need (lots of) SSA employees to step aside from doing their job on the current system and then redo it on the new system to test the new system before it can be brought live.
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Ahh the ol' checkers vs doers defense!
We don't need to offer a solution to fix SS1 to know that what is being proposed is bad™ for SS because we have been around long enough and participated in enough large scale projects to know that the time line and technological change requirements proposed by Musk are pure bullshit.
Also your claims of lack of cross verification are also bullshit - you can write bad code in any language. The language you use is not the issue.
1. And no one has offered any actual proof of fraud or malfeasance in SS aside from Musk's rantings - some of which were proven wrong simply because he didn't understand how dates are treated in COBOL
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I look forward to this failing and then seeing Republicans contort themselves to blame Democrats for why it failed. I only wish at some point such contortions would become obvious to voters, because somehow large blocks of voters seem to buy into such nonsense.
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With all the jobs that are opening up as the immigrants are shipped out, Elon & Trump want to put children and elderly to work. Thus, no need for SS. The kids pick fruit while granny sews shirts. Problem solved. Welcome back to 1930's.
P.S> Can't work? I hear they have a place where you get a group shower and a warm place to lie in.
P.S> Can't work? I hear they have a place where you get a group shower and a warm place to lie in.
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The problem is that SS EXISTS and conservatives have wanted it to die ever since it was enacted.
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That's why the Gods invented "encapsulation".
Simple example.... an old app with green screens.
So you first understand the data inputs and their current validations then redevelop these as a modern GUI and have a "man in the middle" API that interfaces between the old app and the new GUI. You can then apply new business validation logic in the GUI that would be impossible/too costly to do in the old back end but keep all the goodness of a hardened transactional engine.
Many banks do this.... fancy web/phone app based front ends interfacing to a tried and true transactional engine.
Another classic example, is DSS systems. You couldn't get timely reports out of the transactional engine (maybe because the cycles needed for complex reports would slow down the hardware supporting the transactions) so you do an extract from the transactional system at off peak hours and stick that into a secondary reporting system.
This reporting system can then identify cases of fraud, malformed records etc that dont take cycles from the transactional engine. This is also a classic technique when doing a data conversion... spend time scrubbing the old data (and developing transformations) so the new data repository is clean.
You can.do the address changes via a secondary system that does this well then feed this validated data into the existing back end.
I have no clue if your examples are real (you provide no links to back up these assertions) nor whether SSA has deployed any degree of encapsulation.
Summary: You don't throw out your transactional engine.... you supplement it with secondary systems that fill in any gaps that the old tech has started to exhibit thus leveraging the existing investment/stability of the old transactional engine.
Bluck (a bloke that has done all of the above and more with legacy systems)
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That doesn't sound like a software problem.
It's already been proven that the "People who are too old to exist are receiving Social Security!" so-called-problem is just Musk's script kiddies not understanding the data. As to kids, Social Security provides payment to both survivors and the disabled. Shockingly, some of those folks are under 11.
As to "PPF loans", what are you talking about? The only PPF I'm aware of even vaguely related to the subject at hand is the Public Providing Fund in India.
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Knowing that you think COBOL can't compare two values tells me everything I need to know about your software "expertise."
Insolvency will occur because the very wealthy have accumulated so much wealth (with the top 1% of the population now having more wealth than the entire middle class) and the fact that Social Security taxes are capped. Remove the cap, tax dividends for SS, and the system will be solvent for a very long time
Don't bother answering my question about PPF. I'm doing what I should have done sooner and putting you on Ignore. Now go away, troll.
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Just to clarify, they were using libraries. It was just that they were libraries of source code, so a lot of those 60 million lines would have been copy/pasted from libraries. Which still supports your overarching point that the code length has to be compared to code length of more modern systems including the source length of the libraries being called.
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The very wealthiest fraction of Americans. Those who accumulate obscene amounts of wealth specifically so they can dominate others. It is sick, and we should look at it as immoral. Because those are the ones who are responsible for the actual plan to burn it all down , loot everyone and everything else, and part it out, Russian lkleptocracy style. Because what they already had wasn't, and will never be, enough.
And yes, we should look at the current cabinet as oligarchs in waiting. They want what they saw done in Russia. Make sure everyone, every voter knows it.
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Depending on where you are in the states, “y’all” is just the missing second person plural. “All y’all”, refers to the entirety of a group. I mean the former.
Well, the isn’t what I meant, but there is an argument to be made that resistance is an individual responsibility. It doesn’t have to be French. Just throwing sand in the gears or pointing the authorities in the wrong direction. Doing your job badly on purpose. The US government actually produced some pretty good manuals on this back in the day.
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They are already trying to do this.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...-immigrant-jobs-child-labor?CMP=share_btn_url
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"...working on a project formally called the “Are You Alive Project” targeting what these operatives believe to be improper payments and fraud within the agency’s system by calling individual beneficiaries." Yeah, that will work out great. Scammers have been doing that sort of thing for years, and will surely ramp up their efforts if that Project actually happens. We've been tediously training our parents and grandparents for years not to take or fall for calls like that.
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If all these stories of SSI fraud were true, why don't we hear about at least thousands of cases? I'm sure there are anecdotes of families not notifying SS that grandpa died and keep collecting. But the claims are fraud is rampant. Where are they?
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In the same place that you’ll find all the concrete proof of wide scale voter fraud. /s
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Thanks. Once again, we find that Musk never invents anything, he just steals other's ideas and then claims them for himself. Once he took over Tesla, he had the company's history rewritten so that he was the founder of the company. Like Felon45, he is an exceptionally and incurably narcissistic psychopath.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...conway-anti-psychopath-election-b2634614.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...-oxford-university-kevin-dutton-a7204706.html
https://uproxx.com/viral/trump-psychopath-harvard-professor/
https://www.salon.com/2023/06/01/tr...hosis-will-grow-as-he-becomes-more-desperate/
etc.
PS: And both are also Nazis.
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One thing to remember is that lines of code are a very crude measure, and it’s not suitable for comparison between languages because code density varies a lot. This is especially important for COBOL where every data structure, display or input field will spread across at least a line each, and lots of statements have multi-line forms. I would expect that the line count would go down a bit migrating to a richer language, especially one with richer libraries which mean less first-party code to maintain.
For a big application like this, usually the first step is identifying natural boundaries. They don’t have one 60M line program but many thousands of routines which do all kinds of things, and that’s where you might start carving things out to replace it. For example, maybe you migrate the code which manages the process of mailing checks because that’s a fairly discrete function and you can test it carefully at the interface without having to rewrite the code which manages new accounts or death reports, does fraud checks, reporting, etc. at the same time.
When I worked for a COBOL vendor as a student job in the 90s, a huge step many of our customers made was migrating their existing code to use a SQL database instead of the integrated database because that allowed them to have other tools interact with the same data so they could gradually migrate features to something like Java rather than having to do the whole app in one go. We also had RPC interfaces so you could have other languages call specific modules, allowing things like creating a new web front end without having to replace the enormous amounts of code which processed orders after they were in the system - since they had a very well-defined input structure, they could have a web form collect the same fields and then pass it to the existing COBOL app, or get a record out and display it in a friendlier way.
I’d expect that a lot of what SSA has are things like reports for a hundred different purposes, and so you might have a high-benefit project simply to export that data into a modern reporting environment so business users can use the tools they’re familiar with rather than having to ask a COBOL developer to make the report for them.
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Since Musk cult members are totally incapable of understanding inside their own heads* the prognoses are not exactly great (total failure). Of course, since their goal is seek and destroy, they don't need to understand.
*They can't even see obvious contradictions.
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I mean...I too kinda took offense to the "lol I'm gonna laugh at all of you from afar because this is what you wanted" notion. Regardless of how/why/when someone decided they'd had enough and left, turning around and having that attitude toward those of us that are still here really does kinda suck. Is it the exact same as "fuck you, got mine" attitudes? I don't know. Y'all can split hairs over that if you want. Maybe it is, maybe not, but regardless, I know I don't like it. I think it's kind of a shitty mentality to have toward the rest of us who are still here who did not choose this, who do not want this.
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Yeah, but what you do is figure out how you want the new system to work first. This is a large legacy system comprised of lots of modules of smaller systems with all their business rules and edge cases, so the idea that you can just go in and do the entire codebase in one go, into a whole new language, with people who don't know the existing language, in a matter of months (not even a year) is absolutely laughable (and terrifying) to anyone who has any knowledge of these large legacy systems.
The thing to understand with stuff like this is, you have to be able to drop the new one in where the old one's running, and it has to happen seamlessly. So say you update the system, cheques are still produced without anyone noticing you're running new software. So what you produce needs to be robust with the same functionality as before... which basically means you have to start planning what you're doing before you actually hack out some code (and, pro tip, the people doing the planning are not usually the people writing the code). Jumping right to code is the 100% wrong way to approach this problem.
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Right-wing business interests have been trying to roll back the New Deal programs since they were enacted. A lot of the libertarian “Christianity” was promoted as part of that effort – http://kevinmkruse.com/book/one-nation-under-god/ will have a lot of familiar names connected in ways I hadn’t appreciated prior to reading it – and there are basically two reasons why they’re so opposed to social programs. One is simply the bitter resentment about taxes being “stolen” to pay for the unworthy (often meaning black people) or for things they don’t think they need. The other is that business owners like financial precarity because it means workers are more likely to accept whatever they’re offered, and things like Social Security or Medicare not only mean that people are less dependent on the largesse of their boss but also more likely to be able to do things like go on strike or switch jobs without endangering the relatives they support.
In the specific case of the social security trust fund, you also have all of the Wall Street types wanting to rake off commissions for managing that fund. SSA runs at like 0.5% overhead and mutual funds are at least twice that much so there are literal billions going to buy yachts and private islands if they can start managing that much money.
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That sort of "let's just jump into the middle of a routine - entry points are for losers" is a typical assembly trick to save space by reusing the tail end of a subroutine. Same with jumping to end a subroutine rather than call/return. That works in assembly because abstractions there are all fictional and you have to be aware of things like that anyway. And it should be done in the "fuck, how do we fit this into a 1K/8k/64k PROM now?" stage, not habitually.
Edit: I missed my point - programmers from the 60s had assembly (or various look alike macro analogues), fortran, cobol as their options mostly... so they tended to use the same tricks, and why "structured programming" was a big deal.
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Probably. But most people are missing the reasons why.
When I was doing this stuff for my employer (a public university) I was in the very enviable position of doing implementation and policy. I was both technical and domain expert. In terms of broad technical expertise I'm maybe a 5/10. I'd hazard that most people on this forum are better programmers than I am. But I can hold my own. I've been coding for almost 45 years - there's experience in there. But in terms of domain expertise I'm 10/10. I did statewide policy implementation. I was the expert in my narrow field.
So, when my legislature wanted to fix a problem with pathways to college, some of my work was used in writing that policy, but in the end the policy was a negotiation between the elected officials and it contained some compromises as well as some, well, to be charitable, bullshit that sounded good to voters but either didn't help with the task, or possibly undercut the task. They wrote that legislation and handed down to people like me to implement it. So I got my colleagues together, from all across the state and we got to work on it. We understood the intent of the law, and we agreed with it, but the details left much to be desired. There were gaps - things we needed in the law to really be successful, like mandates on institutions to do certain things, which lacking a mandate we needed to get them to volunteer to do this thing. It was hard to get nearly 200 universities in 3 systems to voluntarily do the thing needed. It took a lot of time and energy. There were also things that we could exploit, sloppily written language that allowed us to violate some of the bullshit in spirit, but comply in the strictest legal sense.
And in this process we were trying to automate as much of it as we could, and we did quite a bit. Some of that came by taking other legislation and exploiting it for our purpose. Some of the previous efforts by the legislation to solve this problem were still on the books, and we leaned into that to compel some of these things to get done. When we needed a classification system which this new law didn't provide, we could have formed hundreds of committees to invent a new one constantly trying to pull them into a cohesive system, or we could take the system the legislature previously tried to implement but failed and simply adopt it, which is what we did bypassing all that work.
But the thing we couldn't do is go back to the legislature and say 'yo, this job would be 10x easier if we made this minor change to the law that we suspect nobody would take issue to'. I mean, we tried, but in a political system which is perfectly engineered to create conflict rather than solve problems, that's a fraught thing to do. Democrats we talked to were afraid that Republicans would use that as a vehicle to undermine other efforts. Democrats we talked to were afraid that other Democrats would use that to rebalance the system in a way that favored their district, etc. So instead we had to do the 10x as much work.
Now, at work, because I was also a policy guy, if we were implementing a system that could be radically simplified by a small change, I could bring that to my colleagues have that discussion (because I was also in the weeds on it, I was very good at explaining it in ways the policy people could understand - that was just practice and knowing how they think and what their talents were) and so getting a minor policy change to make implementation vastly easier wasn't hard to do. Inside a company, that's usually how you do things 'boss, this new product is almost impossible to code up because of this provision, can we get that changed in the following way' and a week later boss has run it up the flagpole and now that's been changed. You can't do that in government - at least not in the 2 party pay-for-every-inch-of-land-in-blood political space that we have.
And note, Social Security is 90 years old. In that political space, they do not clean up their old work very often, so what social security does, and who it serves, and all the little rules and exclusions and interactions with other parts of government have been changed literally hundreds of times and old rules not necessarily removed or brought into alignment with newer intentions. Code has to reflect all of that because the SSA folks don't get to massage it to make it work - they have to implement exactly what was written, and anything they can't gets handed off to a human worker to implement. And in a system with 300 million people, that gets out of hand fast, so a lot of things you might have said 'this happens so infrequently we won't bother to spend 6 months to code up', well, that happens in SSA as well, but a 0.01% chance of happening is still 30,000 people - equivalent to a small city worths of phone calls, visits, etc. It's a lot of manpower, so there's a greater incentive to code that up.
So, until fairly recently public workers could opt out of Social Security in favor of state run pension, but only if they took that opt-out prior to a certain date (when the law changed). That meant that the system needed to be able to recognize that a worker was a public sector worker who took that exemption and allow them to not pay the social security portion of payroll tax and only pay the Medicare, etc. portion of payroll tax (this is information that must be exposed to the payroll system of that workers employer, and also must be exposed to the IRS who do the enforcement, so don't break the IRS in the process). If that worker then took a different job outside of the public sector, they would be required to pay full payroll taxes again (which the system would need to keep track of this individual with some years exempted ands some years not exempted), and if that person then went back to work in the public sector job, are they required to pay in to SS, or are they still exempt from the previous exemption? Many of these people are still working, still have that exemption. That impacts what they are obligated to pay in payroll taxes, and what they receive in benefits. And that needs to be maintained, well, at least until all of those people die and their beneficiaries die. That could be another 50 years? Maintaining that code and those rules that changed 30 odd years ago for another half century.
Government systems and agencies aren't like the private sector. Private sector problems are fucking easy mode, even in areas like banking and finance. That stuff is complicated in other kinds of ways, but you always have the option to not do a hard thing (like my mom's bank just not handling trusts - fuck you, we don't want to deal with that).
So if you want to simplify systems like SSA, you do that by changing the political system so that lawmakers are willing to work together to solve these problems, and not look at them as opportunities to break government, to score ideological points, and so on. Good luck with that.
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I don't think it's an attempted defense of all Americans. I just think it's a reminder that some of us (probably most Americans who are active on this web site) very pointedly didn't want this and didn't vote for this, and it sucks to hear people say they're going to enjoy watching us suffer for it - and see that sentiment get so many positive votes, meaning so are probably a whole bunch of other people here.
This isn't the one and only thread on this web site that it has happened since the election, either.
As the kids say these days - feels bad, man.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Here's the thing about ALL of those clunky old programs; they're reliable. Incredibly so. Usually with a minimum of maintenance.
Meanwhile switching to newer and more complex programs often means having to up active maintenance and patching by orders of magnitude.
In many cases what you gain is a lot of options which are nice to have but you might not actually need, while losing all control over what the database does or how it works because that's now all in the hands of rotating teams of programmers in cubicle farms somewhere in India or Burma. Who can only make it work by slavishly following the instructions given at the time handover was made.
A lot of people complained about the old Lotus Notes CRM but literally everyone to migrate to Siebel has been ready to switch to more friendly and functional systems such as smoke signals, telegraph messages, and heliograph after having that abomination inflicted on them.
Oracles old OED system ISP-S is as old as it gets - but it can get the shit done it was designed to get done on a shoestring budget. Whereas a more modern replacement such as SAP can cost a cool billion USD to migrate your shit to...and the maintenance cost to keep it running while your business adapts to it is ridiculous.
Shell had to, for instance, build and run an internal department if SAP programmers to fit it for their needs. For years. And that was the cheap option.
It may be desirable to renovate a dated database for a multitude of reasons. Accumulated cruft over the decades. Homegrown workarounds.
The greybeards still grokking COBOL dying off or increasingly being able to ask a kings ransom for keying in about a dozen lines.
But the right way to go about that is to spend years determining how to update the system, whether to replace it, if so with what, how to adapt the new system to your needs, which roles you need to fill for training and business-side administration, what level of support you need to get and from whom...and of course who gets to defenestrate the persistent Oracle salesman camping out in your conference room ever since they heard you wanted to replace your database.
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Not to mention... If you make a new system that woks exactly like the previous one to the point where no one will notice you pushed it to production and retired the old one... What was it all for ? Yes, future maintenance is important, but at what cost ?
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The SSA is acutely aware of the need for a clean up.
It's a ongoing decades (plural) long work.
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Yes, my wife is stuck in that situation. Why? Because my wife is POA (that's [P]ower [O]f [A]ttorney, because you seem to not understand a great many things) for a friend of ours who had degenerative Alzheimers and can no longer mange her finances. She has no family, no spouse, no kids. So my wife needs to be able to log into SSA and do things like change her bank deposit information, her address, and so on on her behalf. A change in bank information is currently being flagged as fraudulent because the folks doing these changes to SSA seem to believe that only the SSA recipient should be able to do these things and pass the identity verification steps. If your mom is in a coma, she can't do that, but still needs those benefits in order to pay bills and is entitled to those benefits. DOGE seems to believe she is forfeit to those benefits, that the woman my wife is helping is forfeit to those benefits, that the 6 year old who is receiving SSA benefits because they are the survivor dependent of a couple who paid into Social Security and died (that acronym on your paystub is OASDI which stands for [O]ld [A]ge, [ S ]urvivors, and [D]isability [ I ]nsurance. So yes, 6 year olds do get SSA payments as a survivor - it's insurance and they are a beneficiary) is forfeit to those benefits. And the 6 year old can't pass the identity verification because a) they're 6, b) they have no credit score which is used for verification. So they have a guardian who does that on their behalf and that looks like fraud to a group of billionaires who have no concept of what's involved in taking care of other people.
I can assure you that the change my wife has entered is not fraudulent. I suspect you realize that Musk is a liar, but his lies conform to your ideology, so you are willing to believe them because you want them to be true, not because they are true. You are a flat earther. You just don't realize it.
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It's the one thing I never claim I am. I'm an administrator. I can program, I have over 40+ programming languages on my CV (not COBOL, I've only passing familiarity with it); but programming is a discipline, and I don't have that when I'm coding.
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The IT running Social Security does not appear to be much of a problem. The underlying logic and economics of the program are. It will currently run out of money in some small amount of years. This isn't an earth shattering kaboom type of problem, it 'just' requires Congress to adjust who pays into the system and when and a bunch of incredibly obtuse details. It would likely be better if Congress could actually streamline the underpinning statute but that ain't gonna happen. Neither is it likely that Congress is going to do much of anything to figure out the funding issue because it involves hard political choices. Much easier for Musk to just break the system entirely and then say 'oh, we didn't know this would happen, but, oops, we don't know how to fix it either'.
The FAA air traffic control system really does have problems at an IT level. It is very complex, has been underfunded for decades and is being pushed to the max because everybody wants more planes flying. As I noted the 'Next Gen' system has been right around the corner for about the same time as commercial fusion power generation. And, as it stands now, just about as likely to work.
Neither of these problems are amenable to a drug addled narcissist leading a group of 20 something wanna be supercoders who have been feeding on Cheetohs and Mountain Dew for the past two years.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I grok where they're coming from. They mentioned it here earlier. They're a targeted demographic.
Which in the US means they've spent their lifetime openly hearing people discussing their status as undesirable lessers. If you're LGBTQ or POC your public life will have been one where a massive amount of people have more or less discussed the genocide of the group you belong to.
And liberals, even the staunchest of allies, have often refused to draw lines in sand, supported having that shit banned...or just refused to sit at the table with the bigots until these last few years.
To anyone who is a white cis-male heterosexual...well, in the US few ever knew or noticed how dangerous simply going outside could be in many areas for those who weren't in the in-group not actively targeted.
Hell, black people have taught their children 'The Talk' - how not to get murdered by white police officers - for generations but it wasn't until George Floyd being killed on literal camera that a lot of white americans sit up and notice. Black people? Not surprised because that, to them, was just tuesday.
To those who are LGBTQ or POC, living in the US can not have been a fun experience, with some 80% of people either against them or unwilling to have their back in the most basic of ways.
Yeah, that still leaves a lot of americans who did what they could. It surely sucks for them to get lumped in with the cruel and casually apathetic.
But I get why. The fascists are in power now and history tells us quite clearly what the odds are that within a few years the camps will open to see the undesirable separated from the 'decent' folk.
For those targeted who can get out of the US, this last election was probably the step where 'home' became 'hostile nation' in their minds.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Oh, damn, let's not get started on the differences between a sysadmin and a programmer. The former must have at least passing familiarity with blunt weaponry.
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Yeah, I'm not arguing any of that. I don't blame anyone for leaving. I don't mock them, or laugh at them, or wish them any ill will, either. They made a decision they felt was best for them. I respect that.
I just don't like hearing that I'm gonna be laughed at - and that people are going to enjoy laughing at me - specifically because people are going to be suffering now and during what's to come. It feels bad knowing that people are going to do that, and publicly express that they're going to do that here, and get a lot of support for the notion that they're going to do it.
That sucks, man. And I sincerely hope that shoe is never on your foot in your country. If it ever is, I won't laugh at you or anyone there for it.
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My Dad died last year at 97. He was a Canadian citizen, but had worked in the US in the 60s, for long enough to apply for a small SS pension, which he received from age 65-onward. Starting when he was around 85, the Americans not only contacted him regularly to make sure he was still alive, a US government employee visited him at home in Toronto a couple of times to make sure that he was indeed the person to whom they were mailing a measly $150 monthly cheque to.
OBVIOUSLY, I shall be wearing old-man makeup to impersonate Dad from now on as I fraudulently cash his cheques (that's two steakhouse dinners, baby!!), but my point is that the SSA was ALREADY doing a good job of verifying that recipients are still alive. Elmo's know-mothing junior hacker crew will be making the system less efficient, guaranteed.
OBVIOUSLY, I shall be wearing old-man makeup to impersonate Dad from now on as I fraudulently cash his cheques (that's two steakhouse dinners, baby!!), but my point is that the SSA was ALREADY doing a good job of verifying that recipients are still alive. Elmo's know-mothing junior hacker crew will be making the system less efficient, guaranteed.
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