As far back as we have written records, we have the notion that people in past were better and more honest and the present day is corrupted.
Classical antiquity had the notion of a lost golden age and a heroic age in past, while later times considered the classical antiquity as the lost golden age. Victorians romanticized the middle ages, while we romantisize the victorians.
It is just easier to see the flaws and imperfections in the present. And there is the survivorship bias: Quality products and buildings survive, while low quality crap is destroyed and lost. The swords survive but the pointy sticks are lost. The good music survive but the crap is forgotten.
COBOL is used for the longest continuously running systems, particularly in the financial industry, many of which have been in production since the 1960s - mainly on mainframes, but noawadays also increasingly in cloud environments. There's nothing that comes close to the level of reliability that these offer, with the next closest probably being Fortran, Ada and Erlang.
I found this article with some numbers [0], with the top one being that "95% of ATM swipes rely on COBOL code". If you just need to maintain something in production, and only occasionally update the business logic, without having to upgrade the architecture, COBOL is the way to go.
My old boss wrote COBOL code for a core finance process… in 1975, well before I was born. He retired in 2019, and that code is still there with a few mods and probably will remain for another decade.
In fairness, it’s pretty fundamental stuff. But… the company has been working on moving to some Oracle bs for 5-6 years.
> I would first ask what happened such that Denmark owns Greenland in the first place
I think there is some misunderstanding of the issue here. While Greenland isn’t fully independent, many domains, including social services and child protective services in Greenland are managed by Greenland itself, not by Denmark.
But the controversial tests described in the article did not happen in Greenland - They happened in Denmark, but they were considered unfairly biased aginst Greenlandic parents living in Denmark.
The article is about tests administered in Denmark by the Danish authorities. Greenland has its own child protective services ran by Greenlanders, presumably with a better cultural understanding of their own citizens (although cultural differences and different languages does also exist inside of Greenland).
Somehow that never actually applies to the people actually working with children, which are either front-line child protection "agents" (US term) or the people who actually take day-to-day care of children in care.
So let's check an actual social worker job in Denmark, working with these children. Nope. Denmark is the same as everywhere else. No requirements. If I understand this page (I'm using Firefox translate) correctly they state they're flexible if you don't even know the language.
So I think it's safe to say: the social workers in Denmark, who actually work with children, doesn't require any education at all, nothing, nada, zero, niente, just like everywhere else, and clearly: some don't even know the language the children speak.
This very, very large difference in what people think they know about the child protection system and what actually happens is extremely common everywhere, including in the Netherlands. Another point where people often have no idea how bad things really are is how locked up these children are in these institutions. One can make comparisons to point out how ridiculous it is: in the Netherlands a high security prisoner additionally punished with isolation on death row (yes, the Netherlands has a death row, just no executions) has significantly more rights than children in state care. (Some) children in care are isolated in a room 23 hours per day and are not allowed any personal effects, and never get to see other children. On death row, in isolation, you are isolated in a bigger room with a shower and a TV, and you're allowed personal effects like books. You also get 1h with other prisoners in the open air. Also, ironically, a prisoner on death row cannot be denied access to an (if necessary free) lawyer (children don't get lawyers, despite having to appear before a judge regularly. Not that those legally required judge appearances aren't often canceled), and also prisoners have the right to an education and whatever that requires (including web meetings with teaching staff, as many as required). The prison literally pays for the books. Some children in state care can and are denied education, and none get their books paid by the institution.
The first problem is that nobody will ever do anything about sex and sexual abuse in youth institutions. The foster care system effectively has the same approach to protecting children against abuse, physical and sexual, as the sea has when it protects fish from water.
And the same appears to be true in Denmark/Greenland:
Which brings the question: are you protecting children from child sexual abuse if you take them into the system? No, you're not.
It gets much worse: in fact you are causing child sexual abuse. When the UN researched it worldwide you see: child abuse (violent or sexual) happens most at schools, over half of the total. That is the big source of child sexual abuse (~half by other children, ~half by staff). Obviously youth institutions do nothing to protect children against this. In second place ... are youth institutions themselves. Additionally: it is exceedingly rare for children to be abused by their birth parents. If abuse happens at home, the biggest share is at home, but not by family members, then "reconstituted" families (2nd or 3rd marriage with kids from multiple marriages, and usually between non-siblings, not the parents), then reconstituted families the parents with not-their own children, and then the last 0.3% or so of child sexual abuse is by the parents.
(and so, yes, "most" sexual abuse does not start with a predator going after kids, it happens because someone who works a lot with children gets the opportunity and cannot say "no" when it is really easy, and this is the vast majority. In other words, while obviously keeping predators away from kids is important, don't expect it to lower the numbers much. And ... where do people work a lot with children? Schools, school-related sports, and youth services)
You want to prevent child sexual abuse? NEVER place kids in a position where they are continuously dependent on a stranger. Just never do that. Of course, I realize, no form of youth services can work without doing that.
The problem with this is "medical statistics". You take a lot of kids, almost never for sexual abuse, out of the home situation, where the odds of sexual abuse by parents are something like 3/100000 or so, and "protect them", by placing them into an institution where something like 10% of girls get abused, and 5% or so of boys. Obviously this massively increases the number of child sexual abuse victims, it does not decrease them.
Classical antiquity had the notion of a lost golden age and a heroic age in past, while later times considered the classical antiquity as the lost golden age. Victorians romanticized the middle ages, while we romantisize the victorians.
It is just easier to see the flaws and imperfections in the present. And there is the survivorship bias: Quality products and buildings survive, while low quality crap is destroyed and lost. The swords survive but the pointy sticks are lost. The good music survive but the crap is forgotten.
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