As long as the dollars are spent on them and no one else

To all you IT people and people just doing coding – back in my day we called in programming and I had the job title of programmer – do you know about COBOL? Unless you work in particular industries, have been doing coding for a long time, or are working on antique systems, you probably don’t. Which means you probably don’t know its idiosyncrasies. Such as how it stores dates. Thankfully, my need to use it was quite brief. COBOL is a computer programming (or coding) language, as are C++, python, java, and such. I’ve been out of the industry for a good many years so I don’t know the modern languages. So I looked up top programming languages for 2025 and found a list on Geeks for Geeks. Beyond what I mentioned above it listed C#, PHP, Ruby, Swift, SQL, Kotlin, and several more. I’ve heard of C# and SQL though used neither. I hadn’t heard of the others. lobachevsky of the Daily Kos community wrote:

Elon Musk claimed that his team found 150-year-old people collecting Social Security! He implied there were dead people being sent benefits, with checks cashed by someone else. But no—the people getting paid are very much alive. They are collecting their own benefits. They’re not committing fraud. They’re just not 150 years old, of course.

What’s going on is that on May 20, 1875 the International Bureau of Weight and Measures was established. Though computers, and COBOL, are nowhere near that old the creators of COBOL chose representing dates as the number of days since that date. That was ... let me see now ... almost 150 years ago. If the Social Security system doesn’t know a birth date it has as blank or zero. Elsewhere in the COBOL program it would know to say a birth date of 1875 should be interpreted as no birth date. But a person reading just the database would not know that. Which is a big reason why sending DOGE employees barely in their 20s, if that, rampaging through a computer system is a really bad idea. I guess they didn’t notice every one of those 150 year old people were born on the same date. Walter Einenkel of Kos reports that Musk is or will soon have the Internal Revenue Service in his sights. The primary goal is to lay off all those newly hired agents, the ones with the job to make sure the rich don’t cheat on their taxes. Yeah, the people from whom the IRS collected more than $1 billion last year. DOGE in the IRS means the boys have access to the tax info of every tax payer in America. That by itself is scary. It also means the richest guy in the world has the power to fire the people who collect his taxes. How that affects the speed of your tax refund is not known. File your taxes anyway. The deadline is still April 15. You don’t want to give them a reason to come after you. Oliver Willis of Kos reported that during a time of international turmoil – a tenuous cease fire in Gaza with the nasty guy talking about ethnic cleansing, the nasty guy and Putin discussing Ukraine’s fate without Ukraine, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth angering NATO allies, and the usual daily arguing and fighting at various places around the world – the US does not have an ambassador to the United Nations. One would think that would be necessary so at least the nasty guy and his minions could speak with a unified voice. There is a nominee for the job, Rep. Elise Stefanik. But her confirmation is on hold. That’s because the Republican House majority is so slim that her vote might be critical – for such things as approving the $880 billion cut to Medicare to ease in the vote for tax cuts for billionaires due later this year.

The state of paralysis once again shows that Republicans have prioritized the well-being of the wealthiest above everything else, even America’s role on the world stage.

Kos of Kos discussed the research funding given out by the National Institutes of Health to universities. Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama said she would work with Health Secretary Robert Kennedy to make sure the Alabama University system would be exempted. She must think the University of Michigan, the University of California system, or the universities of all the other states are not also doing top level research.

It’s so weird that the biggest moocher states like West Virginia, Louisiana, and Alabama suddenly love socialism—as long as the dollars are spent on them and no one else. And Alabama, the eighth-biggest moocher state in the country which gobbles up twice as much in federal funds as it pays in taxes, really needs to learn a lesson. Trump’s draconian cuts (instigated by his co-President Elon Musk and his shady DOGE cabal) won’t hurt blue states as much as they will decimate red states. If Republican legislators and voters alike want those federal dollars, maybe vote for the party that believes in sharing the wealth and uplifting everyone? Which brings us back to the difference between us and them: We are capable of empathy, even when something doesn’t affect us directly. Republicans only care when it does. Meanwhile, the University of Alabama will need to pinch pennies. Maybe they can start with football coach Kalen DeBoer’s $10 million annual salary, which will add up to over $80 million through 2031.