Just to get technical here, you think the US bond credit rating is based on whether a cron job runs in time? And your fear is they will break the cron and won’t be able to fix the script?
But for all I know, it could be manual. Perhaps Bob runs a COBOL script each morning to pull a list of recipients, which Sally double checks for the various quirks that this old legacy system can produce, before giving it to Jim to run the payment script - with specific parameters for known edge cases - and if there is an error then Jenny from IT knows what to do. Only problem is that Bob, Sally, Jim and Jenny just got fired, the department was ordered to delete their documentation, and the responsibility now lies with some 19 year old with no background in either Finance or COBOL who just showed up on his first day thinking "how hard can it be?"
- computers have outages, so I imagine they run them earlier than legally required and have procedure to detect and fix failure
- computers have outages so I imagine there are legal procedures for handling issues with bond payments
- if they break treasury payments trump will tell them to fuck off
- this whole situation is a larp because you associated “treasury” and “bonds” in your mind and imagined that this risk exists
No. My argument is that bond defaulting is a legal status. Not a server outage. And that we are getting into larp territory with no evidence they are tampering with bonds.
Yes, but the fact that it is even a question is absurd.
I guess my thought is that you have a boss that told you to touch a computer system, normally only a few people touch it, because of you make a mistake, your company looses 100 billion dollars.
You make pretty sure that whoever is dealing with that system are experts, you make sure that they do not modify it without following procedures, you double/triple check that their change won't have side affects, you then run the changes on a test system just to make sure.
And yeah, you are only adding a print statement, it should be fine...
But what if it's not.
Move fast and break things is fine if worst case scenario your social media site goes down.
Move fast and break things is less fine when you could fuck up a key piece of financial infrastructure.
I don't have evidence of anything, no one does. We don't have evidence that there won't be any mistakes either.
In the past we could expect reliability, because the system was always reliable, within the processes and systems that people implemented around it.
It seems to me that a lot of those processes have been skipped.
But for all I know, it could be manual. Perhaps Bob runs a COBOL script each morning to pull a list of recipients, which Sally double checks for the various quirks that this old legacy system can produce, before giving it to Jim to run the payment script - with specific parameters for known edge cases - and if there is an error then Jenny from IT knows what to do. Only problem is that Bob, Sally, Jim and Jenny just got fired, the department was ordered to delete their documentation, and the responsibility now lies with some 19 year old with no background in either Finance or COBOL who just showed up on his first day thinking "how hard can it be?"