Government systems Memes

Ah, the classic "let's rewrite decades of legacy code in a few months" fantasy! Some tech bro wants to speedrun refactoring millions of lines of COBOL that literally keeps grandma's checks flowing. Because nothing says "responsible software engineering" like treating Social Security's codebase like it's a weekend hackathon project. What could possibly go wrong? Just sprinkle some AI, blockchain, and "agile methodology" on that 60-year-old code and boom – fixed by Tuesday! Next up: rebuilding the entire Pentagon with Legos over a long weekend.

This is a masterclass in legacy systems biting back! The tweet explains how Social Security runs on COBOL (a programming language from the 1950s) where dates are stored using the ISO 8601 standard with an epoch starting 150 years ago (1875). So when a date is unknown, it defaults to zero, which COBOL interprets as 1875. The humor comes from Donald Trump Jr. misinterpreting Elon Musk's comment about this technical quirk as evidence of "150-year-old people collecting Social Security" – when it's actually just a database returning default epoch values! It's the perfect intersection of ancient programming languages, government systems that never get updated, and non-technical people drawing wild conclusions. Mainframe programmers are cackling while pouring another cup of coffee right now.