There's a quote I once heard - supposedly from Fitzgerald - that goes:"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time." That feels painfully relevant now, in 2025, as America tries to move forward while still chained to systems built for another century. Walk into any major bank, insurer, logistics warehouse, or hospital network. Beneath the modern dashboards and AI assistants lives something older, louder, slower - a skeleton of code that predates most of the engineers working on it today.