Gulf of America is an IF-ELSE Condition

The US population is split on if changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America is a good thing or not. Google admitted to deleting reviews of the ‘Gulf of America’ on its Google Maps. The US population is also split on the effect that Musk’s DOGE is going to have on making the US Federal government more efficient. Public opinion is leaning towards more transparency in what DOGE deems as waste.

The Gulf of America is more than a name. It’s a tangible allegory. There is a massive gulf between the thoughts and actions between one group who supports these changes and those who do not. There’s the Gulf of America and ROW (rest of the world).

It wasn’t until today when I was being recorded for a virtual technology panel that will debut on March 5–6, 2025 that I realized there is a “Gulf of America” between the US and the rest of the world when it comes to technology adoption.

During the panel they were talking about the need for transparency in government and how AI with knowledge graph technologies could be bridge context and help each countries’ citizens. I spoke up quickly.

“Whoa. I am in the US. Watch this space!”

I went on to say, it’s very cute to hear mature countries in Europe talk about the need to break down data silos and create context when a group of US twenty-somethings are digging around in the Federal social security, education, and healthcare core systems without us as tax payers knowing what’s going on.

Are they implementing AI agents? Are they loading data warehouses and data lakes into graph databases? Or they using machine learning to find patterns?

No one knows.

We hardly even know the handful of developers that make up Musk’s DOGE team. If his team is revealed and you say something about them or keep them accountable, Musk personally has threatened you, me, and anyone who reveals their identities.

So for the other countries of the world, the USA has become a technology reality show.

The world is watching us as citizens become the Guinea pigs of this new digital government experiment that right now seems more based on ideology than cost savings.

It’s the same “watch and wait” that people did when Musk took over Twitter (now called X — but lets face people still call it Twitter). Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and laid off more than 6,000 employees- roughly 80 per cent of the company’s staff. How did he determine who to fire? The workforce was forced to justify their roles and even judge whether their own colleagues should be retained.

This echoes J. Edgar Hoover’s war on what he deemed as subversives as he ran the FBI. Hoover’s culture is that he encouraged others to rat on each other to push out undesirables.

But profit is the point. So is X more profitable than Twitter was?

There’s a Gulf of America with the answer:

• Fidelity reports that X is worth 80% less.
• A non-descript blog boasts that all advertisers all returned to X a few months before the November 2024 election and its profits were $1.25 billion which was about double the highest adjusted EBITDA of Twitter which was in 2021 at $682 million.

How are they determining who to fire? Also a “Gulf of America answer:

• Trump has offered a federal employee buy out where Fed employees who volunteer to leave have been promised to have their salaries paid until September 30 without requiring them to work, though unions have warned the offer is not trustworthy.
• Others are just being led out the door.

Imagine twenty somethings are digging into the systems you maintained for years, sometimes decades, and you are asked to hand in your Federal badge at the security desk.

Some get to walk away, get to do their hobbies and travel on Trump’s dime (if Trump keeps his word) until September. Others fight back tears as they don’t know how they will pay their bills.

A gulf of potentials arise:

• The big consulting agencies such as Deloitte, Accenture, PWC, and KPMG are in a “lets wait and see” posture to see if DOGE is successful. And if not, the big consulting firms can go out and hire all of the fired and buy out Federal employees back and charge our US government double the cost — just to keep the federal government back to normal.
• Or maybe Musk and his DOGE posse will be successful — and it will become an operational SKYNET that determines who gets social security, who gets educational loans, who gets food stamps, and who determines who gets paid in the US military. Such random decisions being made by binary code. Or a RAG.

So if the Gulf of America is an IF-ELSE, how does that bode well for the human condition? Ask any developer, the short comings of IF ELSE include the lack of being able to deal with:

• Typos or syntax errors: Simple mistakes in the conditions, like writing = instead of == for comparison, can lead to unexpected results.
• Complex or nested conditions: Overly complicated IF ELSE structures can be hard to read and debug, making it easy to introduce logic errors.
• Unhandled edge cases: Failing to consider all possible input values or scenarios can lead to unexpected behavior in certain situations.

And humans and US citizens especially deal more in a quantum realm. We are a bunch of complex nested conditions with unhandled edge cases. We deal with past, present, and we envision future scenarios all at the same time.

How does AI agents see the future in determining decisions at a government, federal level? How does DOGE build in context for FDIC failing? A run for the banks? Or the stock market losing all its gains?

If the US population is split on if changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, the rest of the world is watching and placing bets. Will what Musk is doing lead to economic catastrophe or will he lead us to digital government transparency, efficiency, and equality?

No one knows.

Especially the LISP code that DOGE is embedding around the Federal government’s mainframe COBOL systems.