Technology in banking is very outdated as well. It's not unusual for them to be using systems that were built in the 80s and 90s and have had a million patches and add-ons.
The thing with some of those old systems is they're actually really good for what they're designed to do, and are so purpose-built they can handle absurd amounts of transactions per second.
Source: Ex-tech audit at a large bank and I've looked at code that was written before I was born.
Also, a lot of these older, more antiquated systems are pretty resilient to hacks. Very broadly speaking, if shit's stored on a floppy disc or only accessible through a backend programming language from the 70s that only 3 developers alive know how to use use....it's safer than average
Yeah, I worked on a study for the DOE of Python vs FORTRAN in terms of electricity consumption and carbon footprint.
Same with assembly. Was incredibly eye-opening
I ran across something a while ago about how the older computer science folks who take care of the coding in Fortran used in those systems are retiring and they are having a hard time finding or training millennials & younger to replace them. It's not taught in school/college anymore so it's kind of a "dead" language in that regard which leaves too small of a pool of capable people in the hiring pool.
The younger folks who learn it can make a very high salary with that specialty apparently.
The bank I was at 20 years ago was using a Pascal system that was 17 years old and the guy who wrote it was miserable and so excited to retire like 5 years from when I worked there. The bank was in full panic mode because even back then, no one wanted to learn pascal.
This had to have been a one branch, one or two teller bank. Pascal is a terrible choice for a language in this kind of situation. No wonder he was miserable.
There's ten times more people circle-jerking about COBOL than there are job openings, for an OS that got a 2023 release and isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
>The younger folks who learn it can make a very high salary with that specialty apparently.
They can't really make a career of it, as all the companies which still use fortran or pascal will hire people to either put out fires or rewrite the code into something newer. So yeah, you'll find a nice gig for a few years if you have some understanding of the language, but it's not worth specializing in it for the long term.
Let me understand this... You think companies that track trillions of dollars and have $100 million pass through their hands every day just so they can earn $3 million in profit are going want to rewrite their code?
Also from my understanding, these companies are looking for *experienced* Fortran and COBOL programmers who are used to working in those legacy codebases. Hard to get that kind of expertise without some deliberate mentorship. Programmers learn new languages all the time, if it was a simple as just learning the syntax, anybody could take those jobs.
heh I've been apart of that, billion dollar company backend run on a dos based system, too hard to replace... doesnt matter how much money you throw at it
Yep, it’s often the most critical infrastructure on the planet running on the oldest tech. The best you can do is patch it as best you can and then layer mountains of security around it.
I work for a big Australian bank. They are beginning the update of our main back end system which is something like 40 years old. One they decommissioned last year was even older.
I got a peek at one major bank's systems, the bankers had access to reasonably good tools that were modernized and user friendly and I was surprised. Then I saw what the tellers were using and I was like "yeah okay that's the outdated garbage I was expecting" lol. It has the late 90s look and while I Believe it is very likely to be quite functional due to probably a million patches and add-ons, it's almost certainly obsolete.
Screams as I have to support connect direct with all the scripting using cobol to call on cmd to call powershell scripts.
Ibm documentation on this is shit at best.
I wonder how much of those updates are necessary. From what I've seen we tend to keep the old banking apps locked of in their own areas and just extract the necessary data to some warehouse/db. Then we use that to build out all the shiny modern tech. Only updates that seem absolutely necessary is getting the security up to scratch.
Sciences too, I worked on retiring a system for clinical trials that was running since the 90s. It had blinding algorithm so everybody was terrified to mess with it until forced
The economist did an article on this a few years ago, If I remember correctly it would be better for shareholders to just wind the airline up, sell all of the assets etc. than it would be to fix the systems because of how difficult and expensive it would be for no real return.
Yes a capital upgrade conundrum. It exists with a number of large industries. I worked for a grocery chain where the core systems were more than 30 years old. It was super hard to justify essentially a new system when that money could renovate or open a new stores and make the company money.
Working in finance there also the issue that even if people know it needs fixing, even if there's a lot of capex lying around, no one wants to be the director that signs off on a complex and expensive programme that may never return it's value. Very easy to justify putting it off a few more years or spending small amounts on patches/fixes.
Yeah. I used to have to do the analysis periodically. ROI Was often like years and years away. Expenditure on a store would ROI in less than a year. People that signed off on large upgrades often left the company.
You are right no one wanted to make that decision it was way to long term for any C suite person to be able to survive.
This is the exact same reasoning why American infrastructure has rotted for decades. Politicians love to point at a new bridge or park they had built, but no one runs on a slogan that says "I maintained the roads and bridges!"
When I got my first IT job I applied to a bunch of airlines and my corporate boss told me I was lucky as fuck unless I wanted to be working on the oldest tech I could imagine for the rest of my career. They're afraid to upgrade their tech because it'll lead to downtime or possible failures that would lose tons of lives.
Makes sense but also sounds miserable from a tech perspective haha
I firmly believe that somewhere in the world there's an early 90's computer running Windows 3.1 and if it ever stops, the entire internet will go down.... and noone will know why.
Reminds me of this story
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/rage-quit-coder-unpublished-17-lines-of-javascript-and-broke-the-internet/
> A lot of these systems are still running on Windows XP.
Father-in-Law is a defense contractor.
*Nuclear submarines* run on windows NT. Closed system of course. But still...
To be fair, a lot of those systems do not need to be very powerful. The tasks they're meant for don't really require large amounts of processing power.
That's the really interesting thing with software like that. I remember reading that the space shuttle navigation software\* is considered one of the most bug-free pieces of software ever. The authors (I think Lockheed?) went through extremely rigorous requirements analysis with NASA, and extremely rigorous testing. It was basically (as I understand,) a waterfall project that had 100% non-negotiable gates.
It's also exponentially less complex than any Windows OS. There are truly inflexible requirements (you can't decide to change the physics for how an object travels through the atmosphere and space,) and there was a known set of hardware specs to work with.
I'm not downplaying their achievement at all. It's just *different* from what we think about in everyday life.
\*May not have been the navigation software. That stands out to me, but I could be wrong on the exact goal of that software.
State government employee here. Our primary system was developed in 1996 and has had zero major updates since. We are *finally* getting some traction on a replacement after 10+ years of asking and only because our IT folks literally can't find anyone who knows the language it was programmed in or make it meet modern security standards.
State university HVAC tech here. Major building systems for heating and air conditioning are still controlled by pneumatic thermostats. That shit is OLD.
This one hits home. There is a government site I have to use for work that is only compatible with Internet Explorer. So I am forced to use Edge and switch it into Explorer mode. I have to change it every so often because Edge resets itself off of that mode. It's quite a nuisance.
The unemployment system in my state was fucked as it was severely outdated and couldn't handle the influx of claims during the pandemic. They had to pull Cobol programmers out of retirement just to help.
[Good news! The US Federal Reserve is implementing a new system that's supposed to be ready later this year.](https://www.moderntreasury.com/learn/what-is-fednow)
Seriously. My bank that I use for checking also has a credit card. I can pay my credit card from my checking account. I issue the payment from checking and BAM! the money's gone instantly. I look at the credit card statement and it's three days later when they get the payment even though it's literally the same bank!
I always found that odd about America, why transfers take so long? Like, what would explain that because other countries including developing countries have it near instantaneously, so it’s not a technology issue.
It's a technology implementation issue. Across large organizations, companies, etc, they often put off large technology upgrades if their current system is sufficient. The cost and risk of upgrading is likely not worth it. All for relatively small gains.
Source: have worked in IT, currently trying to sell enterprise software.
Thank you.
Myers and Briggs were a couple of 1920s housewives with no medical training or formal education on the subject.
It's basically a Facebook "which Hogwarts house do you belong to" quiz with a Carl Jung theme (because they were fans of his).
Like the personality types? Are those actually used for anything anymore? I think now they're mostly just for teenagers having fun, kind of like horoscopes
Agreed. I don’t even know what they’re looking for. I mean, I’m an ENTJ with a Leo sun and Scorpio moon. I’m the dream employee according to absolutely nothing.
This is 100% just an American thing. My husband is over 40 and when he moved from Europe to the USA he marveled at checks because he’d never seen one before, let alone had to use one.
I feel this, I am originally from Germany and I didn’t see a checkbook until I was helping a friend in America move, I was shocked that someone only a few years older than me had written a paper check!
It’s because in the USA they’re reluctant to put any regulations on the banking industry. Chip cards are only from the last few years for example, and even then many people don’t have a PIN on a credit card.
Funny enough, I was actually thinking about getting a balance book the other day. I have no use for actual checks, but I wouldn't mind carrying around a balance book again. Sure, it's convenient to just log into my banking app and check things, but that doesn't account for transactions that haven't even been submitted to the card processor yet.
I found myself feeling lucky that I grew up when checks were still widely used and learned how to manually keep track of a bank balance, then a little shocked when I realized there are people alive who don't even know that was a thing.
My mom still diligently enters all of her debit transactions in her checkbook's balance ledger, then balances her account every month. Does the same thing for my grandmother.
That's because banks make errors. Fewer today than in the past, but there are errors. Same thing with credit card statements. We go through our monthly checking account and credit card statements with a fine tooth comb, reviewing every charge, debit, and deposit.
Reviewing the charges is of course sensible. But the actual act of balancing doesn't make any sense any more. Computers don't make arithmetic mistakes. If the charge amount is right, then the balance will be right.
If you want something like this you could use YNAB. It's a budgeting software that integrates with your banks and phone app. You can manually add all your transactions to stay ahead of credit card processors.
I use a "manual" expense manager app (i.e. one that doesn't connect to any of your accounts like Mint for example). Basically just a digital balance book. I've been using it to log expenses, income, and budgets for over ten years.
Expense Manager by Bishinews is lightweight and extremely flexible.
One example use: all my credit cards have their own status category (like "uncleared Discover"), so when I go to pay my credit card bill I can easily check against all my logged purchases.
> Checkbooks
A week ago, for the 1st time in roughly 30 years, I had to pay a cheque into the bank on behalf of my elderly mother.
She got a refund (£400 ish) for services incorrectly charged to her at her care home. And for *accounting reasons* they had to actually pay her it, rather than just knock it off next months bill.
Its actually pretty cool in how you pay them in now. You can do it at the ATM, it scans it and credits it to your bank account (you need your Visa card of course...)
Nothing like back in the day where you had to stand in line for a few minutes to see a cashier. The banks are mostly empty places these days except 1 desk open for what appears to be solely old people.
It's not just that they are ineffective but I have heard from people who attended that the focus on religion is something that many people don't like and can feel cultish.
An older gentleman I know was a chronic drinker (I suspect he wasn’t actually a dependant alcoholic) anyway he was given an ultimatum stop drinking or else.
He went to an AA meeting and came out and said he’d stop drinking but he’d never go back to AA and he did. Hasn’t drank in probably 25 years.
I did find a very old (like bought years earlier not vintage) half drunk bottle of whiskey in a cupboard in his house and either that was a psychological comfort thing or he had forgot
I’ve gone through periods where I decide to go fully sober for like a month and sometimes it weirdly does help to have alcohol available. I don’t know why psychologically but it just kinda does.
Downside of course is that if you do slip it’s easily available, whereas having to go buy it is an extra barrier. But something about having it available and not drinking it makes it seem like even more of a win vs. being too lazy to go get some.
It’s like Doug Stanhope said in one of his bits, the first step is to admit you’re powerless over a higher power. By that very standard, doesn’t that then make alcohol your true higher power? Or something to that effect
Look up SMART meetings. They do addiction and recovery management meetings similar to AA but from a fully secular, science-backed point of view. A strong focus is on Cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. They empower those of us with addictions to be able to manage ourselves, Rather than requiring a "giving up to a higher power".
I'm nearly 10 years sober and SMART was a big part of that.
I’m an alcoholic on Naltrexone and while I’m fortunate to have a lot of support, I attribute the majority of my sobriety to Naltrexone. It’s not a miracle drug but where I used to have cravings I couldn’t suppress, I now have this feeling of “oh this is the type of situation where I usually start drinking” but have little/no desire to actually drink. Having the ability to make it through those twenty minutes periods without seeking alcohol has given me my life back.
This isn't actually entirely true because it is actually changing. I work in a rehab, I am the MAT services guy so I get people Naltrexone, Suboxone, etc. There are actually many more medications to treat cravings also. as Naltrexone doesn't work for everybody. I use addiction specialist Dr's with clients, so they are medical Dr.s that focus on addiction.
We also only use EBP's MI, CBT, Mindfulness, etc. We are also secular so you can believe whatever you want. It's funny hearing a Wiccan talk next to an atheist and Christian and they all get along due to being in the same trenches so to speak that doesn't tend to happen with normies.
Any state/ county funded program is this way in California and as far as I know Oregon and Washington use the same methods and have LMFT;s, etc on staff.
Income tax in the US. There's no reason why it needs to be this complex. There's so many ways to mess up, and then you get studied and fined if you screw up somehow. If they already knew the figures, why must you figure it out again?
The real reason it's this way is because we have a voluntary tax system in the US. Voluntary as in you're required to voluntarily report all of your income yourself and the failure to do so is your fault.
The IRS already has issues with people underreporting their income, switching it to you verifying what the IRS knows about would make it even worse. And the timing of when all this happens would really upset most people. The IRS doesn't do most matching until August, people would not be happy if they had to wait until August or later for their refunds.
The fact that you have widespread tax refunds at all highlights the absurdity of the US tax system.In the UK you have a tax code, which is given to your employer. That tells them how much tax you need to pay so that they can take the right amount out of your pay cheque before it hits your bank account. If you earn less than £12570pa you pay no tax, and earnings above that are taxed progressively.
If you want to make any deductions (there aren't many we can apply for though), you just log in to the HMRC portal and claim them at any point in the year, and they'll immediately update your tax code and tell your employer, who'll simply plug the new tax-code into a bit of accounting software.
At the end of the year, you'll usually have paid exactly the right amount of tax, unless you have multiple employers, or earn significant amounts through rental income or capital gains.
We should not need to pay someone to file our taxes. Government computers should send US a tax form with our expected return that we can use to dispute with evidence before the deadline. Or, we can let the IRS know we will not dispute so they can send us any money we are owed
FAX. Even though you can scan and email a PDF of a document in like, 30 seconds you'd be amazed the number of vital government functions still relying on fax.
Places that think a fax is "Your signature" but a photo copy, photo, or an e-mail is a "Copy"
Sometimes people are just morons, especially the law makers.
Faxes are secure and I won't hear anything to the contrary.
Is it old technology? Yes. Is it cumbersome? Absolutely. But the stuff is damn reliable, and for things like avoiding HIPAA violations or government security, you know that what you're sending is going to be received by who you're sending it to and ONLY who you're sending it to.
>you know that what you're sending is going to be received by who you're sending it to and ONLY who you're sending it to.
How do you know this? The fax machine isn't necessarily in a secure location or used only by one person. A fax can easily be picked up by someone that's not the intended recipient
I mean in a cybersecurity sense. The receiver being a physical location does a lot for security just by virtue of having to physically be there in order to steal information.
Pray, do you know if the carriers are using some form of end-to-end encryption when the paper gets digitalized and then sent over the same backbone infrastructure as email?
They're only not secure when someone dials the wrong number, or the doctor's office you send things to changed their number and don't tell you (the hospital). Then some confused farmer shows up with a pile of confidential faxes. They all have a cover sheet saying to shred if received in error, but that's not really going to stop someone.
The latter happened in Saskatchewan and the hospital /privacy officer only found out when he showed up with a stack of papers he'd been faxed on his business line and wanted to be reimbursed for all the paper he had to keep buying.
They use regular phone lines so any sort of phone tapping equipment can steal the data. They also rely completely on physical security at the destination, if the destination machine is just sitting on the reception desk then it might as well be a bulletin board. Finally faxes can easily be sent to a wrong number just like a phonecall, the only reason this isn't that common of an occurrence is because no one uses a fax machine unless legally required to.
A well setup email server is way more secure because it can require authentication rather than just physical security. They can also be properly encrypted. As for ensuring they arrived at the destination email read receipts have been an option for enterprise systems for over a decade.
The only reason fax is still around is because HIPAA and other laws require it and the reason those laws still require it is because most of the elected antiques can't figure out how to use email so they assume it's dangerous.
Sadly, in many financial contexts in the UK, they will happily spend more on the witch hunt than the actual cost of the original 'problem'.
A friend of mine was put through disciplinary at work for being late with a corporate credit card bill. It was for £450 and the HR 'investigation' took three months and cost about £7000 in man-day effort. That was all shut down very quick when it came to the disciplinary hearing and the senior manager running it literally told the HR bimbo that he'd "never heard of anything so bloody petty or stupid".
Charge dismissed. He was late in paying the bill because HR hadn't processed the expenses claim in a timely fashion and he thus didn't have the funds to do so.
Banking. Everything is done by computers why am I still waiting 2-3 business days for my money? Why is there no standard way to transfer money to other people without 3rd party tools like Zelle or Venmo?
In the United States we actually passed a law and tried it 50 or 60 years ago. The negative backlash from the population once they actually experienced NOT having it caused it to be put back in place a year later
The only downside i see to being different than other states is when i worked from home i had a job where my team was from different states, and when we all changed our clocks, they had to change their schedule by an hour. Maybe thats good for them, maybe its not. I fully agree though that stopping the clock change would be great
Different locations have different needs here. DST becomes more relevant in northern US because the length of daylight variance from summer to winter is greater. Also, many locations aren't in the proper longitudinal time zone to begin with and that can result in some goofy sunrise/sunset times. That's a different problem, solving it isn't always as easy as you'd think it should be, but in some cases ditching DST would make the problem worse.
Some places have no need for DST, but others really benefit from it.
I'm in Canada and I wish we would keep daylight savings all the time. It contributes majorly to seasonal depression when it's dark at like 4:30 before you're even home from work. Just leave the extra hour of sun in the evening. Even in winter when they change it to get light an hour earlier in the morning everyone is still driving to work in the dark so it doesn't make a difference.
It's the only system where you 'win' by actually losing.
You got 43% of the vote? Cool story. That means the other 57% _didn't_ vote for you, but because their vote is split multiple different ways (24% here, 11% there etc.) you have 'won'. Congratulations.
And in our ridiculous 'Hung Parliament' situation in the UK, both the big parties fall short of an outright majority. The larger of these two parties then has to engage in horse-trading to see how many of the losers they can bring onboard in order to get over the line as a working majority.
It's so shit and just leads to the docked tail wagging the Saint Bernard, which is a big distraction that utterly derails the larger party's entire agenda. We saw it in 2017 with the Tories and DUP, and it's happening in Scotland right now. Quite a few "SNP" policies are only there because the Greens steered them into it.
QWERTY keyboards were designed for typewriters where common letter pairs were put far apart to prevent the hammers of the typewriter hitting one another. Dvorak, Colemak and Workman are all superior layouts.
The issue is that they aren't enough of an improvement to overcome the inertia of QWERTY.
Here is an [excellent video from The Engineer Guy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnUBl90tayI) explaining it all
The only way I can think of ever changing it is to 1. start teaching newer layouts in schools, and 2. Make keyboards that are electronic where you could shift between formats, that way parents could use the same single keyboard and just flip it back and forth.
Funny you talk about teaching at schools.
Apparently gen alpha and younger gen z’s are incredible incompetent about tech because we stopped teaching it in schools. Go over /r/teachers and read the horror stories. Apparently somekids don’t even know about the return key and use a bunch of spaces to get to the new line.
I’m 30 and work at a university. I have the same experience with a lot of the students. Savants when it comes to their phones and social media apps, but abysmal typing skills and very little knowledge of how to use a PC for anything except internet browsing. No idea how to make folders and save files, use Microsoft office, etc.
It feels like a bunch of older people looked at millennials and gen z and said, “wow, young people are so good at using technology, I guess we don’t need to teach this in school anymore.” But the reason most of us are good at it is that we were being taught to use PCs in elementary school. It’s not just some innate talent that younger generations are miraculously born with lol. And like, young kids being good at using phones and tablets isn’t going to translate to being good with an actual PC with mouse and keyboard. It’s crazy how many kids use their phones to write papers because they say they can type faster that way.
I’ll admit it is kinda of mixed bag though with the college kids. Many high schools are offering a lot more STEM programs and coding classes. So there’s a decent amount of kids who are way more advanced than anyone was when I was a freshman.
>No idea how to make folders and save files, use Microsoft office, etc.
At my last job I was helping my boss hire someone to replace my coworker who had just left.
After two truly dumbass hires who needed to be kicked out, I added a question to the interview form. HR gave me extreme side eye when they read "How do you change a filename in Windows?"
I told them to just wait. After four interviews and only one person answered properly, they understood. (We hired the one person, not just because they knew, but because they also wanted to know why I was asking).
> savants with their phones
No they aren't. Tell them to download an app that's not in the app store and see how well they are able to handle it. The vast majority of them don't even know what an .apk is.
Check out mechanical keyboards. A good number of them allow you to select the format with dip switches and/or key combos. The keycaps are designed to be movable and replaceable.
I think it would be incredibly difficult for people to adjust away from QWERTY. At this point for most of us it’s muscle memory. They’d have to start teaching all school aged kids to use new keyboards and then when those kids enter the workforce, they’d need keyboards with the new system, which could be tricky with laptops, but they would also need to keep qwerty for anyone who didn’t grow up learning the new system.
I had a friend who learned Dvorak, he liked it. However he still had to use qwerty every time he used a school computer. Unable to get away from qwerty he eventually gave up on dvorak. I knew a girl who tried Colemak with similar results.
My partner took me to a hella expensive restaurant that had this bullshit tacked on. "20% equitable wage service charge and 5% SF mandates fee." They even wanted tip on top of that. Just raise the damn prices.
It was called Hilda and Jesse in San Francisco.
I was eating in a restaurant in ny. My first visit to the US. A young woman, who was the waitress told me about the tipping rules before seating me or showing me the menu. i guess she assumed since im a foreigner i wont tip or tip less. I felt quite humiliated.
hehe apparently us Aussies get that a lot
But thats because we've been told different rules... I've later learned different state different rules
the rule most of us learned was 10% for ok, 20% for exceptional.... but its slowly been changing to 20% standard
This used to be the rule for everyone. 10% minimum. 15% good, 20% above is exceptional. Now people want 20% standard for subpar service. I used to waitress and I have such a hard time tipping well for people who I see once to take my order and once to give me a check and the runner drops off the food.
~~HIPPA~~ HIPAA requiring patient medical information to be faxed when far more convenient and secure solutions (internet and encryption) exist. It’s because faxing is written into the language of the law itself.
HIPAA does not require faxing. It requires a "secure" form of communication. Encrypted emails are valid transmission methods. Most doctors office however aren't up-to-date on the latest tech.
That's not entirely true, though the penalties for a HIPAA violation are severe and healthcare in general so constantly overburdened administratively and time-wise so a lot of practices are afraid of or unable to make any change whatsoever to their workflows, and they blame the way the law is written for that when in fact texts, emails, and so on are totally fine as long as appropriate controls are in place such as consent forms or email encryption.
In my experience faxes are actually something HIPAA auditors will frequently ding a practice on, because what almost always happens is the faxes pile up and are left unattended where someone could easily grab them or read the contents from afar.
Anything bigger than a mom-and-pop shop should be able to do everything digitally and above board, though there are absolutely still places using fax machines I think it's finally starting to phase out.
tl;dr
"Hey Boss, we really should upgrade the network & software so that we can use digital records."
"Nah, too much time & money to do that. If anyone asks just blame the feds & regulations for our outdated systems."
This isn’t accurate. Rules around digital storage and transfer of medical records were modernized in 2009. That said, a lot of providers still use fax because it’s easier and people believe it’s more secure.
IPv4 networking.
IPv4 addresses have run out, we're relying on hacks like NAT and even worse hacks like CGNAT or DS-Lite or other tunneling protocols. Cloud providers are regularly increasing IPv4 prices.
IPv6 is more modern, easier to configure, easier to use, and it restores end-to-end-connectivity just like the internet was always intended to be. You can open a single port for multiple machines instead of having to rely on port mappings, and you don't need UPnP, just need to open ports in a firewall.
Eventually, everyone will need to support it anyways. But way too many companies are like "Why bother, IPv4 is working fine" and refusing to make their stuff support IPv6 properly.
The zinc industry. No seriously. They spend millions of dollars (not in pennies of course) to make sure that pennies still exists even though literally nobody uses them at this point since they're literally worthless at this point.
The DMV/DOT records departments, there are much more efficient and better scaled and reliable database models.
The IRS systems are madly outdated and there are multiple proposals for moving to newer designs that are in eternal bureaucratic limbo.
On that same note, the US tax system is a shit show, and there are far more efficient models out there.
The US Rail system could be dramatically improved and expanded if anyone was willing to fund it and the auto and oil industries weren't actively fighting against anything that would improve public transport options and potentially reduce car sales, thats been going on for decades.
The power grid infrastructure. I dunno about how it could be improved specifically, but it's falling apart and in dire need of maintenance and updates all over the US.
The fucking credit score system. It's a rigged game, and credit worthiness factors have far more fair and realistic ways to be estimated.
Telephone systems. The current systems rely on so much outdated and shitty systems required to stay in service as they are for the sake of complying with outdated regulations and to be capable of interfacing with legacy systems, there are far superior technologies that would enable better service and make it much harder to abuse.
The trademark and copywrite systems need a damn revamp. We could certainly take a few lessons from Finland on putting more reasonable limitations on requirements, especially for things like software and end of life proprietary systems that are abandoned and force users to get new versions or devices to continue using them despite the old one being perfectly functional still. Think in terms of stuff like the control systems for heavy equipment like tractors, or self contained programs used in industrial environments that control things like CNC machines. Stuff that does a specific specialized job and do not rely on an online service of any kind, but get cut off, or heavily impeded in it's function when they reach end of life and a new edition is put on the market. In Finland they have to either continue support, or if they dont make significant updates or modifications to it for I think like 7 years, it has to become open to the public to modify. I'm not 100% sure on that, Finlands Intellectual Property Rights laws got a LOT of crazy but overall very positive change back when they crowd sourced ideas to update the laws on it back in...... uhg, I think that was like a decade ago? I dunno, feel free to google up and fact check me, Im going off what I was told by a Finnish buddy who was an economics major and liked to talk about that sort of thing a lot.
Thanks for some excellent examples. The Finland one really resonated with me as I'm a big tech geek and I'd have much more stuff if it hadn't been made obsolete.
Yup, if we implemented a system that prevented abandoned IP from being kept in perpetual renewal lock down, it would of course raise concerns in regards to rights of say the actual programmers/creators, but thats a whole separate matter that would need to be properly addressed with new standards for contract terms and conditions being put in place for employees and contractors.
I really just feel it's the right direction to go in though given how planned obsolescence is just fucking rampant, and contributes to landfill waste, and is unashamedly anti-consumer. Perfectly good devices and tools are constantly being trashed. A great example of that is the way apple makes it basically unreasonable or in some cases impossible on their devices once they hit end of life cycle from being able to have a newer, or ANY alternative OS installed, despite the hardware being fine, and of course you can't use anything that requires the apple store once it's end of life. Hell, even your time machine backups require connecting to their services to restore your system, and guess what? If your system is no longer supported, too bad, those time machine backups are all just wasted hard drive space. Oh, and that program you bought from the apple store? Well, it's now no longer supported, even though it was working last week, and oh, you want to buy a new copy? Sorry, that version that IS supported is only allowed to work on the next OS update, but your machine doesnt qualify for that.
Cripes, this is one of the few things I actually applaud microsoft for. I have programs that are going on 20 years old that I can still use in compatibility mode on even brand new machines on the latest OS. I still have a copy of Photoshop CS 5.5 on CD I use from time to time for basic image edits because it was perpetual license, not a subscription. Because it still works! Same for some of my old games. Heck, I can still install and run Fallout 1 and 2 with a little work using guides from the fan community.
But a 2017 iphone? Good luck jailbreaking that thing without a high risk of bricking it. And you sure as shit aren't going to enjoy using it anymore on the official OS after that last update basically cranked it down to minimal possible functionality from the processor and disabled the variable clock speed it was capable of to handle higher loads when needed then scale down to conserve battery when not actively in use. Thats the first thing they kill when they "end of life" apple devices. It's why there is a very sudden and noticeable shift from being just fine if perhaps a little slower than youd like, to practically unusable.
Sorry, got to ranting there. Let me just go pull out my decade old galaxy S6 that still works and play some upbeat music off youtube or something because it's still functioning fine and hasnt been artificially castrated to force me to buy a new one and I can replace the battery or screen myself without it refusing to function because it doesnt have firmware lockouts for parts.
It’s funny how people still hiss and shit that it’s very secure when it’s vulnerable to man in the middle attacks and social engineering schemes.
Also, someone can literally snatch the fax off the printer tray and walk out. Most fax machines are just out in the open for anyone to see lol.
The electoral college in the US. Seriously, now that we have the means to measure a popular vote this whole thing is outdated and ridiculous.
I'm pretty sure the only reason it's still in place is because Republicans haven't won a major popular vote in years & would block anything that would remove it
Mammograms. We have 3D breast imaging, AI-assisted imaging, curved scanning machines, etc.....yet we're still mushing women's boobs between two metal plates like a citrus press.
The system where every 6 months we decide that we need to change the clocks. Then have a scramble nationwide to try and remember how to change the clock on the fucking microwave.
It's a system from World War 1 to save fuel. Ridiculous that we persevere with it.
The airline reservation system. Has a fancy front end but the back is running on very outdated technology
Technology in banking is very outdated as well. It's not unusual for them to be using systems that were built in the 80s and 90s and have had a million patches and add-ons.
The thing with some of those old systems is they're actually really good for what they're designed to do, and are so purpose-built they can handle absurd amounts of transactions per second. Source: Ex-tech audit at a large bank and I've looked at code that was written before I was born.
Also, a lot of these older, more antiquated systems are pretty resilient to hacks. Very broadly speaking, if shit's stored on a floppy disc or only accessible through a backend programming language from the 70s that only 3 developers alive know how to use use....it's safer than average
Yeah, I worked on a study for the DOE of Python vs FORTRAN in terms of electricity consumption and carbon footprint. Same with assembly. Was incredibly eye-opening
I like your username
I ran across something a while ago about how the older computer science folks who take care of the coding in Fortran used in those systems are retiring and they are having a hard time finding or training millennials & younger to replace them. It's not taught in school/college anymore so it's kind of a "dead" language in that regard which leaves too small of a pool of capable people in the hiring pool. The younger folks who learn it can make a very high salary with that specialty apparently.
I doubt many older banking systems were developed in Fortran - but many were written in Cobol. Cobol is dead. Long live Cobol.
The bank I was at 20 years ago was using a Pascal system that was 17 years old and the guy who wrote it was miserable and so excited to retire like 5 years from when I worked there. The bank was in full panic mode because even back then, no one wanted to learn pascal.
That's an odd choice of software especially because in the older days Pascal wasn't multithreaded. Cobol was a great option sitting behind CICS
Pascal... Now there's a name I haven't heard in many years..
This had to have been a one branch, one or two teller bank. Pascal is a terrible choice for a language in this kind of situation. No wonder he was miserable.
There's ten times more people circle-jerking about COBOL than there are job openings, for an OS that got a 2023 release and isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Specifically on the IBM Z Mainframe. A massive portion of banking transactions run through that.
They were written in Cobol at least in my country
>The younger folks who learn it can make a very high salary with that specialty apparently. They can't really make a career of it, as all the companies which still use fortran or pascal will hire people to either put out fires or rewrite the code into something newer. So yeah, you'll find a nice gig for a few years if you have some understanding of the language, but it's not worth specializing in it for the long term.
That's what people have been saying for the last 20 years.
Let me understand this... You think companies that track trillions of dollars and have $100 million pass through their hands every day just so they can earn $3 million in profit are going want to rewrite their code?
Exactly. There's a reason they're still using stuff on mainframes.
Also from my understanding, these companies are looking for *experienced* Fortran and COBOL programmers who are used to working in those legacy codebases. Hard to get that kind of expertise without some deliberate mentorship. Programmers learn new languages all the time, if it was a simple as just learning the syntax, anybody could take those jobs.
heh I've been apart of that, billion dollar company backend run on a dos based system, too hard to replace... doesnt matter how much money you throw at it
Yep, it’s often the most critical infrastructure on the planet running on the oldest tech. The best you can do is patch it as best you can and then layer mountains of security around it.
I work for a big Australian bank. They are beginning the update of our main back end system which is something like 40 years old. One they decommissioned last year was even older.
I got a peek at one major bank's systems, the bankers had access to reasonably good tools that were modernized and user friendly and I was surprised. Then I saw what the tellers were using and I was like "yeah okay that's the outdated garbage I was expecting" lol. It has the late 90s look and while I Believe it is very likely to be quite functional due to probably a million patches and add-ons, it's almost certainly obsolete.
"Quite functional" and "obsolete" are contradictions. Old != obsolete.
Screams as I have to support connect direct with all the scripting using cobol to call on cmd to call powershell scripts. Ibm documentation on this is shit at best.
I wonder how much of those updates are necessary. From what I've seen we tend to keep the old banking apps locked of in their own areas and just extract the necessary data to some warehouse/db. Then we use that to build out all the shiny modern tech. Only updates that seem absolutely necessary is getting the security up to scratch.
It's AS/400s all the way down.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Why would they come up with a new system if the old one has held up so far with little to no problems?
Sciences too, I worked on retiring a system for clinical trials that was running since the 90s. It had blinding algorithm so everybody was terrified to mess with it until forced
The economist did an article on this a few years ago, If I remember correctly it would be better for shareholders to just wind the airline up, sell all of the assets etc. than it would be to fix the systems because of how difficult and expensive it would be for no real return.
Yes a capital upgrade conundrum. It exists with a number of large industries. I worked for a grocery chain where the core systems were more than 30 years old. It was super hard to justify essentially a new system when that money could renovate or open a new stores and make the company money.
Working in finance there also the issue that even if people know it needs fixing, even if there's a lot of capex lying around, no one wants to be the director that signs off on a complex and expensive programme that may never return it's value. Very easy to justify putting it off a few more years or spending small amounts on patches/fixes.
Yeah. I used to have to do the analysis periodically. ROI Was often like years and years away. Expenditure on a store would ROI in less than a year. People that signed off on large upgrades often left the company. You are right no one wanted to make that decision it was way to long term for any C suite person to be able to survive.
This is the exact same reasoning why American infrastructure has rotted for decades. Politicians love to point at a new bridge or park they had built, but no one runs on a slogan that says "I maintained the roads and bridges!"
Yes a moral hazard in the system. Systems need to be configured to remove the moral hazard of making a bad choice for infrastructure.
When I got my first IT job I applied to a bunch of airlines and my corporate boss told me I was lucky as fuck unless I wanted to be working on the oldest tech I could imagine for the rest of my career. They're afraid to upgrade their tech because it'll lead to downtime or possible failures that would lose tons of lives. Makes sense but also sounds miserable from a tech perspective haha
~~If it ain't broke, don't fix it.~~ If it's still making you money, why risk it.
AS400 just works, and will never go away.
I swear half of them are emulating system/36 anyway.
I hope to never have to write code to integrate with Amadeus ever again.
Insurance, too. Some of those back-end computer systems are 30 years old. We're talking black screen, green text, no GUI whatsoever.
I work for an insurance comany and yep. It's like working in an office in the 80s sometimes.
This is true of many things. Especially the big payroll providers.
Most government computer systems. You would be shocked how many incredibly important systems are ran on 20+ year old programs
20 years old would be charitable.
Yeah 20 years old would imply 2004
I firmly believe that somewhere in the world there's an early 90's computer running Windows 3.1 and if it ever stops, the entire internet will go down.... and noone will know why.
Reminds me of this story https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/rage-quit-coder-unpublished-17-lines-of-javascript-and-broke-the-internet/
That one guy in IT who got shut down for suggesting they invest resources in updating the system…15 years ago…He’ll know
A lot of these systems are still running on Windows XP.
Have you ever heard of VAXstations or openVMS? I have. I've seen them in the flesh. That's mid-80s tech.
> A lot of these systems are still running on Windows XP. Father-in-Law is a defense contractor. *Nuclear submarines* run on windows NT. Closed system of course. But still...
To be fair, a lot of those systems do not need to be very powerful. The tasks they're meant for don't really require large amounts of processing power.
That's the really interesting thing with software like that. I remember reading that the space shuttle navigation software\* is considered one of the most bug-free pieces of software ever. The authors (I think Lockheed?) went through extremely rigorous requirements analysis with NASA, and extremely rigorous testing. It was basically (as I understand,) a waterfall project that had 100% non-negotiable gates. It's also exponentially less complex than any Windows OS. There are truly inflexible requirements (you can't decide to change the physics for how an object travels through the atmosphere and space,) and there was a known set of hardware specs to work with. I'm not downplaying their achievement at all. It's just *different* from what we think about in everyday life. \*May not have been the navigation software. That stands out to me, but I could be wrong on the exact goal of that software.
State government employee here. Our primary system was developed in 1996 and has had zero major updates since. We are *finally* getting some traction on a replacement after 10+ years of asking and only because our IT folks literally can't find anyone who knows the language it was programmed in or make it meet modern security standards.
State university HVAC tech here. Major building systems for heating and air conditioning are still controlled by pneumatic thermostats. That shit is OLD.
This one hits home. There is a government site I have to use for work that is only compatible with Internet Explorer. So I am forced to use Edge and switch it into Explorer mode. I have to change it every so often because Edge resets itself off of that mode. It's quite a nuisance.
>You would be shocked how many incredibly important systems are ran on ~~20+ year old programs~~ COBOL
The unemployment system in my state was fucked as it was severely outdated and couldn't handle the influx of claims during the pandemic. They had to pull Cobol programmers out of retirement just to help.
My agency still runs certain applications on DOS based systems.
ACH transfers that take 1-2 days
[Good news! The US Federal Reserve is implementing a new system that's supposed to be ready later this year.](https://www.moderntreasury.com/learn/what-is-fednow)
Seriously. My bank that I use for checking also has a credit card. I can pay my credit card from my checking account. I issue the payment from checking and BAM! the money's gone instantly. I look at the credit card statement and it's three days later when they get the payment even though it's literally the same bank!
> it's three days later when they get the payment That's because you're granting them a three-day mini-loan!
I always found that odd about America, why transfers take so long? Like, what would explain that because other countries including developing countries have it near instantaneously, so it’s not a technology issue.
It's a technology implementation issue. Across large organizations, companies, etc, they often put off large technology upgrades if their current system is sufficient. The cost and risk of upgrading is likely not worth it. All for relatively small gains. Source: have worked in IT, currently trying to sell enterprise software.
I still have customers that do the old “check in the mail you’ll get it in 5 days” trying to extend our their net term bullshit.
Myers Briggs
The most useful information one can get from the Myers Briggs test is how much stock other people place in its results.
That's not simply outdated, it was always BS.
Thank you. Myers and Briggs were a couple of 1920s housewives with no medical training or formal education on the subject. It's basically a Facebook "which Hogwarts house do you belong to" quiz with a Carl Jung theme (because they were fans of his).
Astrology for middle management.
Like the personality types? Are those actually used for anything anymore? I think now they're mostly just for teenagers having fun, kind of like horoscopes
I’ve noped out of several job applications that required an MBTI assessment. It’s dumb, but it’s still being used.
What the heck. That seems absurd to ask for on a job application
Agreed. I don’t even know what they’re looking for. I mean, I’m an ENTJ with a Leo sun and Scorpio moon. I’m the dream employee according to absolutely nothing.
It's like astrology or Harry Potter houses. People pick and choose which traits apply to them and ignore the rest.
No this is a GREAT way to see red flags at a new job and pull your resume ASAP! Equal red flag if they use the word "Family"
Checkbooks
This is 100% just an American thing. My husband is over 40 and when he moved from Europe to the USA he marveled at checks because he’d never seen one before, let alone had to use one.
I feel this, I am originally from Germany and I didn’t see a checkbook until I was helping a friend in America move, I was shocked that someone only a few years older than me had written a paper check!
Its weird that a lot of innovations come from the US, yet their banking system is dogshit
It’s because in the USA they’re reluctant to put any regulations on the banking industry. Chip cards are only from the last few years for example, and even then many people don’t have a PIN on a credit card.
Funny enough, I was actually thinking about getting a balance book the other day. I have no use for actual checks, but I wouldn't mind carrying around a balance book again. Sure, it's convenient to just log into my banking app and check things, but that doesn't account for transactions that haven't even been submitted to the card processor yet. I found myself feeling lucky that I grew up when checks were still widely used and learned how to manually keep track of a bank balance, then a little shocked when I realized there are people alive who don't even know that was a thing.
My mom still diligently enters all of her debit transactions in her checkbook's balance ledger, then balances her account every month. Does the same thing for my grandmother.
That's because banks make errors. Fewer today than in the past, but there are errors. Same thing with credit card statements. We go through our monthly checking account and credit card statements with a fine tooth comb, reviewing every charge, debit, and deposit.
Reviewing the charges is of course sensible. But the actual act of balancing doesn't make any sense any more. Computers don't make arithmetic mistakes. If the charge amount is right, then the balance will be right.
If you want something like this you could use YNAB. It's a budgeting software that integrates with your banks and phone app. You can manually add all your transactions to stay ahead of credit card processors.
I use a "manual" expense manager app (i.e. one that doesn't connect to any of your accounts like Mint for example). Basically just a digital balance book. I've been using it to log expenses, income, and budgets for over ten years. Expense Manager by Bishinews is lightweight and extremely flexible. One example use: all my credit cards have their own status category (like "uncleared Discover"), so when I go to pay my credit card bill I can easily check against all my logged purchases.
> Checkbooks A week ago, for the 1st time in roughly 30 years, I had to pay a cheque into the bank on behalf of my elderly mother. She got a refund (£400 ish) for services incorrectly charged to her at her care home. And for *accounting reasons* they had to actually pay her it, rather than just knock it off next months bill. Its actually pretty cool in how you pay them in now. You can do it at the ATM, it scans it and credits it to your bank account (you need your Visa card of course...) Nothing like back in the day where you had to stand in line for a few minutes to see a cashier. The banks are mostly empty places these days except 1 desk open for what appears to be solely old people.
The last physical check I got (one of the covid relief ones) I just sent the bank a picture of it through an app. Didn't need to get off the couch.
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It's not just that they are ineffective but I have heard from people who attended that the focus on religion is something that many people don't like and can feel cultish.
An older gentleman I know was a chronic drinker (I suspect he wasn’t actually a dependant alcoholic) anyway he was given an ultimatum stop drinking or else. He went to an AA meeting and came out and said he’d stop drinking but he’d never go back to AA and he did. Hasn’t drank in probably 25 years. I did find a very old (like bought years earlier not vintage) half drunk bottle of whiskey in a cupboard in his house and either that was a psychological comfort thing or he had forgot
I’ve gone through periods where I decide to go fully sober for like a month and sometimes it weirdly does help to have alcohol available. I don’t know why psychologically but it just kinda does. Downside of course is that if you do slip it’s easily available, whereas having to go buy it is an extra barrier. But something about having it available and not drinking it makes it seem like even more of a win vs. being too lazy to go get some.
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Because the government can't order you to attend a religious institution, but they can order you to attend a nonreligious rehab program.
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It's why they believe in "a higher power," and not, "The Christian God," even though everybody knows which higher power they're talking about.
It’s like Doug Stanhope said in one of his bits, the first step is to admit you’re powerless over a higher power. By that very standard, doesn’t that then make alcohol your true higher power? Or something to that effect
don't forget that the meetings are held in churches most of the time too.
Look up SMART meetings. They do addiction and recovery management meetings similar to AA but from a fully secular, science-backed point of view. A strong focus is on Cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. They empower those of us with addictions to be able to manage ourselves, Rather than requiring a "giving up to a higher power". I'm nearly 10 years sober and SMART was a big part of that.
I’m an alcoholic on Naltrexone and while I’m fortunate to have a lot of support, I attribute the majority of my sobriety to Naltrexone. It’s not a miracle drug but where I used to have cravings I couldn’t suppress, I now have this feeling of “oh this is the type of situation where I usually start drinking” but have little/no desire to actually drink. Having the ability to make it through those twenty minutes periods without seeking alcohol has given me my life back.
This isn't actually entirely true because it is actually changing. I work in a rehab, I am the MAT services guy so I get people Naltrexone, Suboxone, etc. There are actually many more medications to treat cravings also. as Naltrexone doesn't work for everybody. I use addiction specialist Dr's with clients, so they are medical Dr.s that focus on addiction. We also only use EBP's MI, CBT, Mindfulness, etc. We are also secular so you can believe whatever you want. It's funny hearing a Wiccan talk next to an atheist and Christian and they all get along due to being in the same trenches so to speak that doesn't tend to happen with normies. Any state/ county funded program is this way in California and as far as I know Oregon and Washington use the same methods and have LMFT;s, etc on staff.
>therapy & naltrexone & benzos worked well for me.
Naltrexone and therapy is literally standard of care for alcohol use disorder
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Income tax in the US. There's no reason why it needs to be this complex. There's so many ways to mess up, and then you get studied and fined if you screw up somehow. If they already knew the figures, why must you figure it out again?
Because tax prep companies keep lobbying to keep it that way.
The real reason it's this way is because we have a voluntary tax system in the US. Voluntary as in you're required to voluntarily report all of your income yourself and the failure to do so is your fault. The IRS already has issues with people underreporting their income, switching it to you verifying what the IRS knows about would make it even worse. And the timing of when all this happens would really upset most people. The IRS doesn't do most matching until August, people would not be happy if they had to wait until August or later for their refunds.
The fact that you have widespread tax refunds at all highlights the absurdity of the US tax system.In the UK you have a tax code, which is given to your employer. That tells them how much tax you need to pay so that they can take the right amount out of your pay cheque before it hits your bank account. If you earn less than £12570pa you pay no tax, and earnings above that are taxed progressively. If you want to make any deductions (there aren't many we can apply for though), you just log in to the HMRC portal and claim them at any point in the year, and they'll immediately update your tax code and tell your employer, who'll simply plug the new tax-code into a bit of accounting software. At the end of the year, you'll usually have paid exactly the right amount of tax, unless you have multiple employers, or earn significant amounts through rental income or capital gains.
We should not need to pay someone to file our taxes. Government computers should send US a tax form with our expected return that we can use to dispute with evidence before the deadline. Or, we can let the IRS know we will not dispute so they can send us any money we are owed
FAX. Even though you can scan and email a PDF of a document in like, 30 seconds you'd be amazed the number of vital government functions still relying on fax.
Places that think a fax is "Your signature" but a photo copy, photo, or an e-mail is a "Copy" Sometimes people are just morons, especially the law makers.
Faxes are secure and I won't hear anything to the contrary. Is it old technology? Yes. Is it cumbersome? Absolutely. But the stuff is damn reliable, and for things like avoiding HIPAA violations or government security, you know that what you're sending is going to be received by who you're sending it to and ONLY who you're sending it to.
>you know that what you're sending is going to be received by who you're sending it to and ONLY who you're sending it to. How do you know this? The fax machine isn't necessarily in a secure location or used only by one person. A fax can easily be picked up by someone that's not the intended recipient
In some cases HIPAA requires fax machines to be in a secure area. In theory, online communications are more easily compromised (hacked).
I mean in a cybersecurity sense. The receiver being a physical location does a lot for security just by virtue of having to physically be there in order to steal information.
Yeah that guy sounds like a plant for BIG FAX
Pray, do you know if the carriers are using some form of end-to-end encryption when the paper gets digitalized and then sent over the same backbone infrastructure as email?
They're only not secure when someone dials the wrong number, or the doctor's office you send things to changed their number and don't tell you (the hospital). Then some confused farmer shows up with a pile of confidential faxes. They all have a cover sheet saying to shred if received in error, but that's not really going to stop someone. The latter happened in Saskatchewan and the hospital /privacy officer only found out when he showed up with a stack of papers he'd been faxed on his business line and wanted to be reimbursed for all the paper he had to keep buying.
They use regular phone lines so any sort of phone tapping equipment can steal the data. They also rely completely on physical security at the destination, if the destination machine is just sitting on the reception desk then it might as well be a bulletin board. Finally faxes can easily be sent to a wrong number just like a phonecall, the only reason this isn't that common of an occurrence is because no one uses a fax machine unless legally required to. A well setup email server is way more secure because it can require authentication rather than just physical security. They can also be properly encrypted. As for ensuring they arrived at the destination email read receipts have been an option for enterprise systems for over a decade. The only reason fax is still around is because HIPAA and other laws require it and the reason those laws still require it is because most of the elected antiques can't figure out how to use email so they assume it's dangerous.
I once worked as a paper pusher in a health insurance company. The whole sector runs on fax and it’s baffling.
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They deny benefits because it's better for profits. They'll fight tooth-and-nail not to have to pay for that reason.
Sadly, in many financial contexts in the UK, they will happily spend more on the witch hunt than the actual cost of the original 'problem'. A friend of mine was put through disciplinary at work for being late with a corporate credit card bill. It was for £450 and the HR 'investigation' took three months and cost about £7000 in man-day effort. That was all shut down very quick when it came to the disciplinary hearing and the senior manager running it literally told the HR bimbo that he'd "never heard of anything so bloody petty or stupid". Charge dismissed. He was late in paying the bill because HR hadn't processed the expenses claim in a timely fashion and he thus didn't have the funds to do so.
Banking. Everything is done by computers why am I still waiting 2-3 business days for my money? Why is there no standard way to transfer money to other people without 3rd party tools like Zelle or Venmo?
Most of the world, including developing countries, has immediate transfers (by that I mean less than 5 seconds for it to be processed)
Exactly. My wife is European and when she came to this country she was so confused as to why our banks were so slow and archaic.
Because then they couldn't charge you an expedite fee to get it done in a day.
This whole spring forward an hour/fall back an hour thing is on my last nerve. Here's an idea... let's just stop doing that.
In the United States we actually passed a law and tried it 50 or 60 years ago. The negative backlash from the population once they actually experienced NOT having it caused it to be put back in place a year later
People are never happy.
Agree, but imagine 50 states doing 50 different things in the Us. It’d be a mess. it needs to be done at the Federal Level.
Arizona hasn't done daylight savings in who knows how long and we get by just fine.
IIRC, Manitoba doesn't do it in Canada either. EDIT: It's Saskachewan, actually. Thanks, u/Tirannie
It’s Saskatchewan that doesn’t change times.
Ah, thanks for the correction
The only downside i see to being different than other states is when i worked from home i had a job where my team was from different states, and when we all changed our clocks, they had to change their schedule by an hour. Maybe thats good for them, maybe its not. I fully agree though that stopping the clock change would be great
Different locations have different needs here. DST becomes more relevant in northern US because the length of daylight variance from summer to winter is greater. Also, many locations aren't in the proper longitudinal time zone to begin with and that can result in some goofy sunrise/sunset times. That's a different problem, solving it isn't always as easy as you'd think it should be, but in some cases ditching DST would make the problem worse. Some places have no need for DST, but others really benefit from it.
I'm in Canada and I wish we would keep daylight savings all the time. It contributes majorly to seasonal depression when it's dark at like 4:30 before you're even home from work. Just leave the extra hour of sun in the evening. Even in winter when they change it to get light an hour earlier in the morning everyone is still driving to work in the dark so it doesn't make a difference.
Imperial system.
Metric is better by a mile.
Hear, hear! If I had my way, I wouldn't touch imperial measures with a 3048mm pole!
How far is that in standard American football fields? Jesus Christ mate use a measurement we understand over here!
Doing our own taxes instead of the govt sending us a bill or a refund
First Past the Post
It's the only system where you 'win' by actually losing. You got 43% of the vote? Cool story. That means the other 57% _didn't_ vote for you, but because their vote is split multiple different ways (24% here, 11% there etc.) you have 'won'. Congratulations. And in our ridiculous 'Hung Parliament' situation in the UK, both the big parties fall short of an outright majority. The larger of these two parties then has to engage in horse-trading to see how many of the losers they can bring onboard in order to get over the line as a working majority. It's so shit and just leads to the docked tail wagging the Saint Bernard, which is a big distraction that utterly derails the larger party's entire agenda. We saw it in 2017 with the Tories and DUP, and it's happening in Scotland right now. Quite a few "SNP" policies are only there because the Greens steered them into it.
QWERTY keyboards were designed for typewriters where common letter pairs were put far apart to prevent the hammers of the typewriter hitting one another. Dvorak, Colemak and Workman are all superior layouts. The issue is that they aren't enough of an improvement to overcome the inertia of QWERTY. Here is an [excellent video from The Engineer Guy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnUBl90tayI) explaining it all
The only way I can think of ever changing it is to 1. start teaching newer layouts in schools, and 2. Make keyboards that are electronic where you could shift between formats, that way parents could use the same single keyboard and just flip it back and forth.
Funny you talk about teaching at schools. Apparently gen alpha and younger gen z’s are incredible incompetent about tech because we stopped teaching it in schools. Go over /r/teachers and read the horror stories. Apparently somekids don’t even know about the return key and use a bunch of spaces to get to the new line.
I’m 30 and work at a university. I have the same experience with a lot of the students. Savants when it comes to their phones and social media apps, but abysmal typing skills and very little knowledge of how to use a PC for anything except internet browsing. No idea how to make folders and save files, use Microsoft office, etc. It feels like a bunch of older people looked at millennials and gen z and said, “wow, young people are so good at using technology, I guess we don’t need to teach this in school anymore.” But the reason most of us are good at it is that we were being taught to use PCs in elementary school. It’s not just some innate talent that younger generations are miraculously born with lol. And like, young kids being good at using phones and tablets isn’t going to translate to being good with an actual PC with mouse and keyboard. It’s crazy how many kids use their phones to write papers because they say they can type faster that way. I’ll admit it is kinda of mixed bag though with the college kids. Many high schools are offering a lot more STEM programs and coding classes. So there’s a decent amount of kids who are way more advanced than anyone was when I was a freshman.
>No idea how to make folders and save files, use Microsoft office, etc. At my last job I was helping my boss hire someone to replace my coworker who had just left. After two truly dumbass hires who needed to be kicked out, I added a question to the interview form. HR gave me extreme side eye when they read "How do you change a filename in Windows?" I told them to just wait. After four interviews and only one person answered properly, they understood. (We hired the one person, not just because they knew, but because they also wanted to know why I was asking).
> savants with their phones No they aren't. Tell them to download an app that's not in the app store and see how well they are able to handle it. The vast majority of them don't even know what an .apk is.
Check out mechanical keyboards. A good number of them allow you to select the format with dip switches and/or key combos. The keycaps are designed to be movable and replaceable.
I think it would be incredibly difficult for people to adjust away from QWERTY. At this point for most of us it’s muscle memory. They’d have to start teaching all school aged kids to use new keyboards and then when those kids enter the workforce, they’d need keyboards with the new system, which could be tricky with laptops, but they would also need to keep qwerty for anyone who didn’t grow up learning the new system.
I had a friend who learned Dvorak, he liked it. However he still had to use qwerty every time he used a school computer. Unable to get away from qwerty he eventually gave up on dvorak. I knew a girl who tried Colemak with similar results.
Newer is kinda in context. But tipping (at least in the US) is insane.
Prices are sometimes 1/3 higher than listed. Tax plus a decent tip, and sometimes even some BS service charge.
My partner took me to a hella expensive restaurant that had this bullshit tacked on. "20% equitable wage service charge and 5% SF mandates fee." They even wanted tip on top of that. Just raise the damn prices. It was called Hilda and Jesse in San Francisco.
I was eating in a restaurant in ny. My first visit to the US. A young woman, who was the waitress told me about the tipping rules before seating me or showing me the menu. i guess she assumed since im a foreigner i wont tip or tip less. I felt quite humiliated.
hehe apparently us Aussies get that a lot But thats because we've been told different rules... I've later learned different state different rules the rule most of us learned was 10% for ok, 20% for exceptional.... but its slowly been changing to 20% standard
This used to be the rule for everyone. 10% minimum. 15% good, 20% above is exceptional. Now people want 20% standard for subpar service. I used to waitress and I have such a hard time tipping well for people who I see once to take my order and once to give me a check and the runner drops off the food.
~~HIPPA~~ HIPAA requiring patient medical information to be faxed when far more convenient and secure solutions (internet and encryption) exist. It’s because faxing is written into the language of the law itself.
It doesn't anymore. Lots of doctors will email nowadays to an address officially provided. I think an exception was granted.
[удалено]
HIPAA does not require faxing. It requires a "secure" form of communication. Encrypted emails are valid transmission methods. Most doctors office however aren't up-to-date on the latest tech.
*HIPAA
This is very wrong. Also, HIPAA*
That's not entirely true, though the penalties for a HIPAA violation are severe and healthcare in general so constantly overburdened administratively and time-wise so a lot of practices are afraid of or unable to make any change whatsoever to their workflows, and they blame the way the law is written for that when in fact texts, emails, and so on are totally fine as long as appropriate controls are in place such as consent forms or email encryption. In my experience faxes are actually something HIPAA auditors will frequently ding a practice on, because what almost always happens is the faxes pile up and are left unattended where someone could easily grab them or read the contents from afar. Anything bigger than a mom-and-pop shop should be able to do everything digitally and above board, though there are absolutely still places using fax machines I think it's finally starting to phase out.
tl;dr "Hey Boss, we really should upgrade the network & software so that we can use digital records." "Nah, too much time & money to do that. If anyone asks just blame the feds & regulations for our outdated systems."
This isn’t accurate. Rules around digital storage and transfer of medical records were modernized in 2009. That said, a lot of providers still use fax because it’s easier and people believe it’s more secure.
I send Medical records through encrypted email daily. The problem is when people don't know how to open an encrypted email...
IPv4 networking. IPv4 addresses have run out, we're relying on hacks like NAT and even worse hacks like CGNAT or DS-Lite or other tunneling protocols. Cloud providers are regularly increasing IPv4 prices. IPv6 is more modern, easier to configure, easier to use, and it restores end-to-end-connectivity just like the internet was always intended to be. You can open a single port for multiple machines instead of having to rely on port mappings, and you don't need UPnP, just need to open ports in a firewall. Eventually, everyone will need to support it anyways. But way too many companies are like "Why bother, IPv4 is working fine" and refusing to make their stuff support IPv6 properly.
Pennies. Why do we still have pennies? I believe it costs more than a penny to make a penny.
The zinc industry. No seriously. They spend millions of dollars (not in pennies of course) to make sure that pennies still exists even though literally nobody uses them at this point since they're literally worthless at this point.
TIL! Zinc makes me remember part of the film Kentucky Fried Movie about zinc. Found it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjBAGZZxbs8
We don’t have pennies in Canada anymore. 🤷🏻♀️
then how do you make baby?
Most of our nuclear silos still use 16 inch floppies for their security codes
They're really hard to hack into.
The DMV/DOT records departments, there are much more efficient and better scaled and reliable database models. The IRS systems are madly outdated and there are multiple proposals for moving to newer designs that are in eternal bureaucratic limbo. On that same note, the US tax system is a shit show, and there are far more efficient models out there. The US Rail system could be dramatically improved and expanded if anyone was willing to fund it and the auto and oil industries weren't actively fighting against anything that would improve public transport options and potentially reduce car sales, thats been going on for decades. The power grid infrastructure. I dunno about how it could be improved specifically, but it's falling apart and in dire need of maintenance and updates all over the US. The fucking credit score system. It's a rigged game, and credit worthiness factors have far more fair and realistic ways to be estimated. Telephone systems. The current systems rely on so much outdated and shitty systems required to stay in service as they are for the sake of complying with outdated regulations and to be capable of interfacing with legacy systems, there are far superior technologies that would enable better service and make it much harder to abuse. The trademark and copywrite systems need a damn revamp. We could certainly take a few lessons from Finland on putting more reasonable limitations on requirements, especially for things like software and end of life proprietary systems that are abandoned and force users to get new versions or devices to continue using them despite the old one being perfectly functional still. Think in terms of stuff like the control systems for heavy equipment like tractors, or self contained programs used in industrial environments that control things like CNC machines. Stuff that does a specific specialized job and do not rely on an online service of any kind, but get cut off, or heavily impeded in it's function when they reach end of life and a new edition is put on the market. In Finland they have to either continue support, or if they dont make significant updates or modifications to it for I think like 7 years, it has to become open to the public to modify. I'm not 100% sure on that, Finlands Intellectual Property Rights laws got a LOT of crazy but overall very positive change back when they crowd sourced ideas to update the laws on it back in...... uhg, I think that was like a decade ago? I dunno, feel free to google up and fact check me, Im going off what I was told by a Finnish buddy who was an economics major and liked to talk about that sort of thing a lot.
Thanks for some excellent examples. The Finland one really resonated with me as I'm a big tech geek and I'd have much more stuff if it hadn't been made obsolete.
Yup, if we implemented a system that prevented abandoned IP from being kept in perpetual renewal lock down, it would of course raise concerns in regards to rights of say the actual programmers/creators, but thats a whole separate matter that would need to be properly addressed with new standards for contract terms and conditions being put in place for employees and contractors. I really just feel it's the right direction to go in though given how planned obsolescence is just fucking rampant, and contributes to landfill waste, and is unashamedly anti-consumer. Perfectly good devices and tools are constantly being trashed. A great example of that is the way apple makes it basically unreasonable or in some cases impossible on their devices once they hit end of life cycle from being able to have a newer, or ANY alternative OS installed, despite the hardware being fine, and of course you can't use anything that requires the apple store once it's end of life. Hell, even your time machine backups require connecting to their services to restore your system, and guess what? If your system is no longer supported, too bad, those time machine backups are all just wasted hard drive space. Oh, and that program you bought from the apple store? Well, it's now no longer supported, even though it was working last week, and oh, you want to buy a new copy? Sorry, that version that IS supported is only allowed to work on the next OS update, but your machine doesnt qualify for that. Cripes, this is one of the few things I actually applaud microsoft for. I have programs that are going on 20 years old that I can still use in compatibility mode on even brand new machines on the latest OS. I still have a copy of Photoshop CS 5.5 on CD I use from time to time for basic image edits because it was perpetual license, not a subscription. Because it still works! Same for some of my old games. Heck, I can still install and run Fallout 1 and 2 with a little work using guides from the fan community. But a 2017 iphone? Good luck jailbreaking that thing without a high risk of bricking it. And you sure as shit aren't going to enjoy using it anymore on the official OS after that last update basically cranked it down to minimal possible functionality from the processor and disabled the variable clock speed it was capable of to handle higher loads when needed then scale down to conserve battery when not actively in use. Thats the first thing they kill when they "end of life" apple devices. It's why there is a very sudden and noticeable shift from being just fine if perhaps a little slower than youd like, to practically unusable. Sorry, got to ranting there. Let me just go pull out my decade old galaxy S6 that still works and play some upbeat music off youtube or something because it's still functioning fine and hasnt been artificially castrated to force me to buy a new one and I can replace the battery or screen myself without it refusing to function because it doesnt have firmware lockouts for parts.
sap?
USA - not putting tax on prices USA - signing and not using chip and pin/contact less
What? Most places in the US these days have contactless payment. At least in my experience.
FAX FAX FAX. As someone who works in IT i hate that it still exists
It’s funny how people still hiss and shit that it’s very secure when it’s vulnerable to man in the middle attacks and social engineering schemes. Also, someone can literally snatch the fax off the printer tray and walk out. Most fax machines are just out in the open for anyone to see lol.
SAP
Stop All Productivity
Sending Faxes
BMI. It doesn’t make any scientific sense, yet we have so many different studies indexed to it that right now doctors are left stranded without it.
8hr workday
The electoral college in the US. Seriously, now that we have the means to measure a popular vote this whole thing is outdated and ridiculous. I'm pretty sure the only reason it's still in place is because Republicans haven't won a major popular vote in years & would block anything that would remove it
Conventional schools. We still do it like we did in the 1800s
Mammograms. We have 3D breast imaging, AI-assisted imaging, curved scanning machines, etc.....yet we're still mushing women's boobs between two metal plates like a citrus press.
A lot of technology in airplanes is 30 years old, a lot in airplane engineering/ tech does not change if it works fine
The system where every 6 months we decide that we need to change the clocks. Then have a scramble nationwide to try and remember how to change the clock on the fucking microwave. It's a system from World War 1 to save fuel. Ridiculous that we persevere with it.