[HN Gopher] Did missing/corrupt dates in COBOL default to 1875-0...
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Did missing/corrupt dates in COBOL default to 1875-05-20?
Author : SeenNotHeard
Score : 251 points
Date : 2025-02-16 23:56 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (retrocomputing.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (retrocomputing.stackexchange.com)
| blindriver wrote:
| I keep getting gobsmacked by how much misinformation and straight
| up lies there are on the internet these days. And what's worse is
| that I keep falling for it like everyone else, even though I
| pride myself on being so skeptical about everything. I remember
| reading that last week and thinking "oh, interesting" and now I'm
| angry at myself for not questioning that more, especially since I
| worked at a bank.
|
| With so much manipulated information, AI-generated content, and
| straight up lying, I really can't tell what's real and fake
| anymore.
|
| I distinctly remember finally not being able to tell the
| difference between fake and real info during the Allen Texas
| shopping mall shooting. I went on Twitter to get more info and I
| couldn't tell what was real and what was fake for the first time
| because everything was so convincing. That feels like ages ago
| now because things are so much more sophisticated.
| colechristensen wrote:
| In the attention economy, what you're saying being true has no
| relation to you getting paid (and reality is often more
| boring).
|
| This is what you get for wanting everything to be "free as in
| beer" and "free as in speech" at the same time in a market
| economy. Systems optimized to profit from free information have
| reached great efficiency.
| geetee wrote:
| It's exhausting. Each side of every argument is full of
| misinformation, intentionally or not.
| drawkward wrote:
| >Each side of every argument is full of misinformation,
| intentionally or not.
|
| This is just silly information, and is used to sow
| resignation and demean actual and valid arguments.
|
| There are plenty of arguments and forums where misinformation
| is treated disdainfully, as it should be. HN _used_ to be one
| of them, but everything anti trump and musk seems to get
| brigaded, rather than debated.
|
| I will point out that it is predominantly one side in
| American politics using misinformation as a weapon. Its the
| side that brought us "teach the controverry" instead of
| accepting the scientific reality of evolution. Its the side
| that made it illegal for the CDC and ATF to do studies of
| firearms. Its the side that claims to be anti- politics in
| science while at the very same time politicizing science.
|
| Your statement benefits the side that doesnt have truth on
| its side, and is therefore harmful.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| You're saying the party of "the President is fine don't
| trust the cheap fakes" is to be trusted?
| drawkward wrote:
| I am making two claims:
|
| 1. Not all arguments suffer from misinformation on both
| sides.
|
| 2. The political right uses misinformation as a weapon at
| a scale that dwarfs that of the political left. Your
| single example does not counter that argument.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Do you have an objective way to measure levels of
| "misinformation as a weapon" that supports claim 2?
| grandempire wrote:
| I don't see how this can be true if you consider
| misleading reporting as misinformation. The political
| right doesn't have the same kind of media support. It
| organized in the old days with radio, and now with blogs
| and twitter networks.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > The political right doesn't have the same kind of media
| support.
|
| How do you figure that? From what I've seen, most US
| media leans right[0], if not overtly right-wing.
|
| [0] In that they'll hammer the left on every small issue
| whilst glossing over the more egregious actions of the
| right.
| milesrout wrote:
| Literally the opposite is true. Trump's every action is
| criticised even when he does exactly the same thing as
| his predecessors. People are acting as is presidents
| haven't made executive orders before. The
| unconstitutional abuse of EOs to effectively enact laws
| dates back decades but suddenly it is a new problem when
| Trump does it.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > suddenly it is a new problem when Trump does it.
|
| Nope.
|
| January 29, 2021: "Biden has taken heat from critics over
| his early reliance on executive action, with Republicans
| saying it betrays his vow to work with Congress on to
| build a consensus on issues."[0]
|
| February 6, 2014: "Executive Order tyranny -- Obama plans
| to rule America with pen, phone"[1]
|
| November 2, 2011: "Obama uses executive orders as a
| political tool"[2]
|
| February 21, 2001: "The Use and Abuse of Executive Orders
| and Other Presidential Directives"[3]
|
| [0] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-has-
| signed-40-executi...
|
| [1] https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/executive-order-
| tyranny-obam...
|
| [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2011/11/01/politics/obama-
| executive-...
|
| [3] https://www.heritage.org/political-
| process/report/the-use-an...
| grandempire wrote:
| 2 Fox News and a heritage link?
|
| The cnn is positive, only including a few negative quotes
| from republicans.
| drawkward wrote:
| Just stop. No evidence presented will satisfy you. Right
| wing misinformation warfare has been going on since _at
| least_ Rush Limbaugh.
|
| The post you are responding to has effectively and
| accurately rebutted the post it is answering, which
| claimed that the media complaing about Trump's EOs is a
| new thing, despite having been done be prior presidents.
| milesrout wrote:
| >The post you are responding to has effectively and
| accurately rebutted the post it is answering
|
| Wrong.
|
| >which claimed that the media complaing about Trump's EOs
| is a new thing, despite having been done be prior
| presidents.
|
| Wrong. My complaint was that Trump is held to a double
| standard on executive orders, and this is true.
|
| >Just stop. No evidence presented will satisfy you. Right
| wing misinformation
|
| The irony. Good god. Maybe if you get your head out of
| your arse and accept you might be wrong on occasion you
| would see what is obvious to everyone across the planet,
| that the media holds Trump to a completely different
| standard.
|
| Next thing you will claim that Israel isn't held to a
| different standard by the UN. Your claim is as obviously
| ridiculous as that.
| drawkward wrote:
| You are alleging all sorts of things, and unlike the
| poster who responded to you, you bring no evidence.
|
| Good day, sir.
| milesrout wrote:
| Exactly. Fox News covered it a little bit. Whereas the
| media hasnt gone a day without this being the leading
| story since Trump was inaugurated.
| drawkward wrote:
| Tearing down our government is somewhat newsworthy, imho.
| Epa095 wrote:
| Is this a joke? Sinclair network. Conservative radio. X.
| aisenik wrote:
| "The mainstream media is (far) left" is misinformation.
| You've been successfully inoculated against critical
| analysis of your media environment.
| grandempire wrote:
| Who are you quoting?
| aisenik wrote:
| I'm referring to the widespread meme (that predates this
| use of the word meme) that is prevalent in the USA. It is
| so frequently repeated in some form, it is practically an
| article of faith. Notably, it is a major component of
| Donald Trump's messaging since he became a right-wing
| political figure.
|
| Quote marks are frequently used to delimit text for
| purposes other than direct attribution to a speaker.
| grandempire wrote:
| > Quote marks are frequently used to delimit text for
| purposes other than direct attribution to a speaker.
|
| Ok but directing your comments at quotes means nobody is
| here to respond.
| drawkward wrote:
| Yet somehow you continue to respond. Ironic.
| sanktanglia wrote:
| One party agreed their old candidate was losing it, the
| other did not so your both sides argument already falls
| apart
| grandempire wrote:
| They said it was false until it couldn't be hidden any
| longer as the public saw it.
|
| Trump is suffering from a lot of problems. But major
| impairment to mental function due to old age, as Biden
| clearly did, doesn't appear to be one.
| snozolli wrote:
| Anyone who has seen an old video of Trump speaking in the
| 80s - 90s and compared it to today knows that his mental
| function is impaired by age.
| grandempire wrote:
| I think no change across 40 years of life is not what
| either of us meant. But How does 2020 Biden hold up to
| this test you came up with?
| bagels wrote:
| Confusing insane asylums and refugee asylum by way of
| talking about Hannibal Lecter points in a completely
| different direction than what you've stated.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| That always was possible and always required critical
| thinking and further evidence to resolve.
|
| People just don't have the skills, or are being brainwashed
| into not using their skills.
| fncypants wrote:
| Do not both sides any of this. One cannot claim that both
| sides present misinformation and then not acknowledge that
| one side is doing so intentionally and the other is not.
|
| Elon tweeted that there was a lot of 150-year-old recipients.
| That's all he said. [1] So there was a rush to point out why,
| if this 150 year old number is the only information he's
| providing of fraud, it is not a prima facie case of fraud.
| That was a good faith response to a bad faith, selective
| release of information.
|
| [1] https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/musk-
| claims-150-year-ol...
|
| So then Musk provides more data, but again, not enough data
| to provide all the context. What he leaves out is that there
| have been multiple, prior good faith attempts to investigate
| these data entries, identify whether there's any fraud, and
| address any problems. This was the work of inspectors general
| whose job is to work in good faith to try to resolve these
| issues.
|
| There is one side acting only in bad faith. If they were
| acting in good faith, they would raise these issues through
| legal channels (inspectors general) and then have an orderly,
| legal process to address them. That is how it has always been
| done, for a reason. They are not operating legally because
| they know that what they are doing is in bad faith and would
| be found out as such.
|
| What we are witnessing is a dismantling of the rule of law.
| It's important to recognize that and to not to be complicit
| in it.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Can you give us a misinformation example related to this post.
| This sounds like an empty complaint with no vector.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| There's a snarky thread going around attempting to dunk on
| DOGE employees who revealed that some social security
| recipients have 150 year old birth dates. The claim is that
| this is just the default start date for COBOL (like the UNIX
| epoch), but it's not even true, and even if it was, it's
| still a major problem if we have social security recipients
| with no birth date in the system.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| > it's still a major problem if we have social security
| recipients with no birth date in the system.
|
| It's not a problem, since there are other ways of
| determining eligibility. If a person doesn't have proof of
| a birth date, what are you supposed to do? Make one up?
|
| And the claim is that it's fraud, which requires evidence,
| not some anomaly which can be several things. Musk and DOGE
| deserve the "dunk" since they're spreading unsubstantiated
| BS.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| If a person doesn't have proof of birthdate, you could
| make up a realistic one. Pick 1935. Pick 1942. Pick
| anything but longer than the oldest human to ever live
| ago. And you know what? Since centenarians are rare
| enough, maybe do annual checkups on those folks to see if
| they're still alive before cutting checks.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Absolutely not. You don't enter false values pretending
| to be accurate, you put in a null value or other marker.
| You want it to make no sense so it's not mistaken for
| real data.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Exactly wrong making up fake data would poison actual
| data. The pupose of these systems isn't to look correct
| to people on twitter. We have zero reason to believe we
| are cutting checks unreasonably inaccurately.
|
| There are of course going to be recently decreased not
| yet accounted for and a tiny number of fraudsters
| collecting grannies check.
|
| Individual annual audits 200 USD per person would cost
| 136B over the next 10 years. Far more than fraud it would
| deter. Fraud which is already minimal.
|
| Indivual audits of client accounts for obvious issues and
| fraud is already a thing because the experts that are
| responsible for such aren't complete morons.
| cozzyd wrote:
| It's what's an LLM would do!
| wat10000 wrote:
| Why would you deliberately input realistic but known
| incorrect data, versus using a special "we don't know"
| value? How on earth could that possibly be better?
| fastball wrote:
| Musk and DOGE do not deserve a dunk that is a lie just
| because they deserve some comeuppance in general.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| The problem is that DOGE public statements like those of
| Trump are a fountain of lies so there is little point in
| digging into them because the alternative is the equivilent
| of looking for some edible corn in a bucket of human waste.
|
| Logical theories include connected records include an age,
| its chaff unconnected to any money being moved retained for
| legal reasons, and them just making it up.
|
| Since they won't substantiate this you can choose your own
| adventure whilst waiting for the boring truth which is
| probably on balance that all receipients have a known age
| but they were unable to look it up correctly and something
| somewhere returns default when not available i in that code
| path.
| frugalmail wrote:
| It's sad that there are so many people that don't realize
| what they're saying is absolutely illogical. I agree with
| you, the technical details are irrelevant if there are
| people getting payments with those attributes it's a
| problem.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Nope, you're totally wrong. it's entirely a technical
| issue if it's an old system that handles exceptional
| circumstances in odd ways. The facts of the case(s) are
| not known.
|
| You don't know what the recipient's details are, you're
| just saying it's a problem without knowing any of the
| facts around the individuals circumstances.
|
| You're simply thinking in the most shallow way possible.
| marky1991 wrote:
| Aren't you just doing the same thing, just in reverse? Ie
| you don't know any facts about individual cases, yet
| assume there is no problem. (If that's not your position,
| in what sense is gp "totally wrong"?)
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > yet assume there is no problem.
|
| Is it plausible that, given the claim is that people
| currently >150 years old are receiving money, in the
| previous 40 years of audits, etc., no-one has noticed
| that people >110 (vanishingly rare in the US) were
| getting money? That it took the arrival of Elon and his
| Special Boys with their cursory glance to immediately
| spot this problem that must have been missed by every
| other developer, tested, auditor, etc. for AT LEAST 40
| years? Or that there has been some vast conspiracy - on
| both sides of the US political aisle - to keep paying out
| this money to clearly ineligible people without a single
| person ever whistleblowing?
|
| My money is on the vastly simpler "Elon and his Special
| Boys[0] have misunderstood" hypothesis.
|
| [0] who have not demonstrated a great acumen for being
| correct at any point, let's be honest.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The number of super old accounts is many millions. There
| is no way that this particular number is indicative of a
| fraud problem.
|
| Now you could motte-and-bailey the sentence "the
| technical details are irrelevant if there are people
| getting payments with those attributes it's a problem" by
| saying oh if _any_ accounts in this group are getting
| payments, even if it 's just a handful of them, that's a
| problem. But if we're talking about the number of these
| accounts being _representative_ of the amount of fraud,
| there 's no way that's true.
| frugalmail wrote:
| How are your "unknown facts" that you've NOT
| substantiated at all, more relevant than my "unknown
| facts" that are based on logical conclusions?
|
| If that field is the qualifying field that it was
| presented as, Then any record with that data means you
| shouldn't be getting payments. And it was communicated
| that there are individuals getting payments with that
| dirty field.
| handojin wrote:
| I think you have to read this one generously. The claim
| isn't about how COBOL works, except incidentally. It's more
| along the following lines:
|
| COBOL doesn't have a default date/time type
|
| As such implementation decisions are left to the
| implementor
|
| The implementors* of the SS system chose 1875 as the epoch
| date for reasons
|
| *I made a lot of money in 1999. The original implementors
| of SS probably used something else ("it'll be rewritten
| before this is a problem" was essentially the whole raison
| de etre of Y2K). The 1875 thing, if it's a thing, was
| probably the result of Y2K work. But I have no direct
| knowledge of these matters.
| fastball wrote:
| 1875 being the result of Y2K work makes no sense to me.
|
| Also the social media claim was that "this is how COBOL
| works", not "this is how the SS system works". It does
| not seem that the person who made the original social
| media claim has any insider knowledge of the SS COBOL
| system.
|
| Definitely seems like misinformation to me.
| skissane wrote:
| > The implementors* of the SS system chose 1875 as the
| epoch date for reasons
|
| The problem is we have no solid evidence that is actually
| true. The claim appears to originate in an anonymous
| DailyKos comment which contains so many factual errors
| (e.g. claiming this is due to COBOL), it is unclear why
| any of it should be believed. For all we really know, the
| SSA code doesn't treat 1875 specially at all. And even if
| it actually does, are these social media claims that it
| does based on inside knowledge of how it works, or just a
| lucky guess?
|
| That's not to say DOGE's claims about 150 year old social
| security recipients are right - for all I know, they
| could be wrong - but, if they are wrong, it could be for
| some reason which is completely unrelated to "1875 as an
| epoch"
| threeseed wrote:
| > claiming this is due to COBOL
|
| Which would be true if it's the case.
|
| Because I couldn't name any programming language people
| in use today that has no built-in date type.
| skissane wrote:
| > Because I couldn't name any programming language people
| in use today that has no built-in date type.
|
| But this isn't true. COBOL 85 has builtin functions for
| representing dates as an integer from 1601 epoch. IBM
| mainframe COBOL supports two operation modes, ANSI-
| compatible mode in which those functions use the 1601
| epoch, and IBM-compatible mode which use a 1582 epoch
| instead - https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-
| zos/6.4?topic=options-intd...
|
| A lot of COBOL software didn't use the COBOL 85 date
| functions because it is so old it long predates COBOL 85,
| and also because old habits die hard and some COBOL
| programmers avoided using them.
|
| COBOL 85 doesn't have a date type per se, dates are
| either integers (count of days since epoch) or strings
| (YYYYMMDD). But, C's 'time_t' isn't really a separate
| type (in the sense that many other languages have them)
| it is just an alias for an integer type. So COBOL is
| closer to C on this than you might think
| cwbriscoe wrote:
| I did a lot of COBOL Y2K work in 1998-2000 and I have
| never once heard of any 1875 epoch related to COBOL until
| the last few days. We either modified code to use
| windowing functions or we just full converted to 4 digit
| years depending on severity. For instance, windowing code
| for front end, 4 digit years for DB, VSAM and flat files.
|
| "The implementors* of the SS system chose 1875 as the
| epoch date for reasons"
|
| So, they invented their own date system instead of just
| using the standard CENTURY-DATE or an ISO-8601 date from
| their DB. Highly doubt...
| dashundchen wrote:
| Did DOGE reveal anything, or did Musk just make an
| unverified claim?
|
| If the claim is true and it's really a case of fraud, isn't
| that a case for the courts and DOJ to handle?
|
| Or he is really trying to undermine trust in the
| government, like his false Gaza condom claim?
| bagels wrote:
| The latter. He's trying to build an "Iraq has WMD" case
| for cutting SSA, by falsely claiming all the payments are
| fraudulent.
| svachalek wrote:
| The trick is that while this is a database in Social
| Security, it is not the database of social security
| recipients.
| bagels wrote:
| Thank, you. All this whining about missing death dates
| totally misses the point. 150 year olds are not receiving
| checks!
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| The stack exchange question _is_ the example. It specifically
| talks about a bit of information making the rounds that turns
| out to be wrong. You read the linked page, and didn 't just
| jump to the comments, right?
| threeseed wrote:
| Except the link doesn't refute anything at all.
|
| It just says that basically each COBOL system will
| implement dates their own way.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| The thread says any such implementation has nothing to do
| with it being COBOL and further that COBOL doesn't even
| have a concept of dates, which absolutely does refute the
| original claim of "in COBOL, if a date is missing...".
| frugalmail wrote:
| In this case the misinformation isn't even the attack the mis-
| informers think it is.
|
| Anybody getting payments with this erroneous data is committing
| fraud because the choices with that mis-information are that we
| don't know how old they are. This means they have been 150
| years old since they got into the system. That scenario is
| actually worse than they have been getting payments for some
| decades after their qualification age.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > This means they have been 150 years old since they got into
| the system.
|
| No, the theory being made was that they appear to be 150
| years old because the marker for "unknown DOB" -when queried-
| comes out as 1875 by default and that wasn't accounted for /
| known about by the Special Boys given their lack of knowledge
| around these systems. It's entirely plausible that they look
| 150 years old (with a badly formed query done in a rush) but
| there's an "eligibility" section of fields which says they're
| eligible because they verified their citizenship[0] in 1952
| with their military record[1].
|
| Basically doing a query on DOB/age instead of eligibility.
| Easily done! Just not something to brag about in a press
| conference before triple-checking that you weren't about to
| make a massive arsehole out of yourself to the world.
|
| [0] Or however it works, I'm from the UK, I don't know.
|
| [1] Or equivalent validating document.
| hypeatei wrote:
| It was posted in the comments that ISO 8601, at one point,
| mentioned 1875-05-20 as a reference date. According to Wikipedia,
| it was later omitted[0]. I guess it's possible that the social
| security system (EDIT: that we know today) was initially designed
| with that date as a sort of epoch. Either way, it seems nuanced
| and no one has the full story (including Elon)
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > was first published in 1988
|
| No, the social security system and the COBOL that powers it
| predates that standard by quite a lot.
| hypeatei wrote:
| That makes a lot of assumptions, especially given there was
| most likely Y2K problems that needed addressing and system
| upgrades taking place since the initial system rollout. This
| page[0] states that there was changes to the system in the
| 1960s but I can't find anything more recent so... maybe
| you're right. Who knows.
|
| [0]: https://www.ssa.gov/history/ibm.html
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Y2K problems were related to attempting to represent years
| with 2 digit numbers. By no means would setting a date to
| 1875 fix a Y2K problem, it would just exacerbate it. Even
| if the problem originated from a Y2K "fix", it would still
| be a major bug, resulting in millions to billions in
| excessive payouts going to who knows where.
| IX-103 wrote:
| I think parent post is saying that when they fixed the
| Y2K problem, they likely also modernized the date
| representation to comport with international standards.
| It wouldn't really be any more difficult to do both of
| those at the same time than just fixing Y2K bugs.
| jomar wrote:
| Wikipedia says "ISO 8601:2004 established a reference calendar
| date of 20 May 1875 (the date the Metre Convention was signed),
| later omitted from ISO 8601-1:2019." I was curious what
| "reference calendar date" is supposed to mean.
|
| Thanks to links in the SE thread, I found the relevant actual
| text in ISO 8601:2000 (I don't know how different it might be,
| if at all, in the 2004 document):
|
| > _The Gregorian calendar provides a reference system
| consisting of a, potentially infinite, series of contiguous
| calendar years. Consecutive calendar years are identified by
| sequentially assigned year numbers. A reference point is used
| which assigns the year number 1875 to the calendar year in
| which the "Convention du metre" was signed at Paris._
|
| This last sentence is simply an obtuse way to say "this year
| right now, as I [jomar] write this -- we call this 2025".
| Apparently the ISO committee did not want to refer to what was
| going on around 1 AD or felt that the missing 0 between 1 BC
| and 1 AD would lead to confusion or something, so instead used
| the birth year of the metre to state the bleeding obvious.
| jjmarr wrote:
| Nobody actually knows what year Jesus was born, so setting "1
| AD = Jesus' first full year of life" wouldn't be accurate.
| It's more or less the same puzzle as COBOL's alleged default.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_the_birth_of_Jesus#Acc.
| ..
|
| The current year numbering is because a monk called Dionysius
| Exiguus thought the existing system of numbering the years
| since Emperor Diocletian was stupid as Diocletian persecuted
| Christians. Dionysius decided the year in which he invented
| his calendar was 525 years since the birth of Jesus and
| created the _Anno Domini_ system.
|
| Dionysius didn't really explain why he thought Jesus was born
| 525 years ago (in December of 1 BC). Many historiographers
| have tried to understand his logic. Thankfully, unlike COBOL
| programmers, Dionysius documented his reasoning for picking 1
| BC as the reference year, so we only have to argue about
| whether he was _correct_.
| masswerk wrote:
| Isn't it possible that 1875 was chosen, because of
| compatibility with US legacy data encoding and that then an
| arbitrary, but notable date in this year was chosen as the
| reference date (i.e., the Convention du Metre)? I guess, the
| USA had quite a stake in this...
| ggm wrote:
| I find the stack exchange interesting, but I still think its
| post-hoc reasoning. I would prefer one of the people who worked
| on these systems to say it, than have a plausible, but none-the-
| less third hand take published as "the answer"
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| We already have "the answer", it's obviously bad or exceptional
| data. The question "is it fraud" can't be answered by looking
| narrowly at that data.
|
| But the idea that no one has noticed the problem and
| investigated it (including possible fraud) is very unlikely.
| ggm wrote:
| Agreed. And, the persistence of bad data like this isn't
| uncommon. We had a bunch of fields in the SQL registry system
| I work in set to the literal 4 character ascii string "null"
| because of a coding error over field == null by somebody. It
| did no harm to the attributes of interest at the time. It
| only had consequences later on when the codebase changed.
| anadem wrote:
| I didn't wok on one of the US government systems, but much of
| my career was in COBOL compilers (writing run time systems, and
| checking against the ANSI standards). COBOL would not default
| to 1875 for a corrupt date.
| threeseed wrote:
| > COBOL would not default to 1875 for a corrupt date
|
| But COBOL doesn't have a date type.
|
| So isn't its behaviour defined by how the system has been
| implemented ?
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| This is a bit of a red herring.
|
| These sorts of asinine claims by Musk are par for the course. For
| people who don't worship him, he doesn't have much credibility.
| The idea that he "storms the gates" of government and finds
| rampant fraud is a stretch for everyone but those who want to
| believe it.
|
| If fraud was as easy to find as 150 year old recipients there
| would be no fraud. Instead fraudulent claims look perfectly
| legitimate and their fraudulent aspect is not obvious. There are
| so many inexact aspects to dealing with data associated with
| humans and so much variety.
| fastball wrote:
| What are you talking about? This isn't about Elon Musk. This is
| a SE thread about whether or not COBOL backdates to 1875,
| consensus being that it _does not_ do that.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Musk is making claims without substantive evidence. Why do
| you think we're talking about it?
| fastball wrote:
| No, the claim without substantive evidence is that COBOL
| backdates to 1875.
|
| If the source-of-truth for SS payments is the database and
| associated COBOL system, and that system reports payments
| being made to 150 year olds, that is bad. We should not be
| doing that. It doesn't matter if the birth date was
| deliberately added as 1875 or if the COBOL system replaces
| null date values with 1875 (which does not seem to be the
| case if you read the linked thread).
| NoPicklez wrote:
| It is, I assume this post has been made because Elon recently
| said when he addressed the media next to Trump that they
| supposedly found people who were 150 years old collecting
| social security payments.
|
| What has followed is people coming out of the woodwork to
| explain how this may have been reflected in the system since
| the system was written in COBOL and the reasons why those
| people were reflected that way the system, that they likely
| weren't actually having those payments made and it there
| wasn't the wastage of tax payers money as Elon claims.
|
| Whereby citizens that don't have a recorded age are
| represented with an age of 0 and COBOL backdates their age
| from 1875.
|
| It seems to be Elon's DOGE team having access to data that
| they have little experience in reviewing and understanding
| and are spreading claims that are false.
|
| Google it.
| frugalmail wrote:
| They specifically said these people are getting payments.
| That means whether the cause is accurate representation in
| the database, or inaccurate representation in the database,
| this linchpin data should invalidate any payments.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| Do they know that or do they think or assume that?
|
| There is supposedly an automated process to remove social
| security payments from people over the age of 115, unless
| there is an exception.
|
| https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0202602578
| fastball wrote:
| Entirely possible that part of the system fails on
| whatever is causing there to be 150 year olds.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| There are a multitude of possibilities, of which none of
| them were addressed by Musk with no nuance at all.
| fastball wrote:
| I don't think it is useful to do that in a press
| conference.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| Neither is it useful to make such claims as he did so
| blatantly
| fastball wrote:
| Well, it is useful for him, as (if it turns out to be
| mostly true) then it highlights how poorly operations in
| our government are.
|
| The only reason you have to believe that Musk's
| statements are not correct is the aforementioned
| inaccurate assertion about COBOL.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > The only reason you have to believe that Musk's
| statements are not correct is [...]
|
| And his well documented history of spouting bullshit and
| flim-flam.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| That's ingenuoua. He posted the ssa's process for culling
| 115 year olds above. Also, extraordinary claims require
| extraordinary evidence. Presently, there is _no_
| evidence.
|
| This is precisely why business and government are
| different entities. Business is a wealth-creating
| opportunity with less responsibility. Government may not
| be low-latency, but its aim is to be responsible and
| correct. Confusing the two is a major problem.
| fastball wrote:
| What is ingenuoua?
| computerthings wrote:
| Right, so it's useful to just _just say things_ without
| evidence, because they "might turn out to be true" in
| the future.
|
| Something being useful to Musk and his goons doesn't make
| it "useful" without such qualifiers.
|
| > The only reason you have to believe that Musk's
| statements are not correct is the aforementioned
| inaccurate assertion about COBOL.
|
| Hardly. That's just saying how little attention _you_
| paid to the man.
| fastball wrote:
| Not giving out evidence in a press conference (how does
| he even do that?) does not mean that his assertions were
| made without evidence.
| computerthings wrote:
| So where's the evidence?
| fastball wrote:
| Presumably in the SS database. Is your idea that he
| should give everyone on the internet access to this
| database? Because other than seeing it for yourself, I'm
| not sure what evidence he can provide that you will
| believe.
| computerthings wrote:
| More than _zero_ would be a start. You said it 's not
| viable to give evidence of claims during a press
| conference, okay, but it's been a while since then.
| skissane wrote:
| In fact, if you read that document, it mentions there are
| exceptions in which the automated process doesn't
| terminate someone for being >115, and the termination has
| to be done manually for:
|
| > Beneficiaries with other claimants active on the
| record;
|
| > Dually or technically entitled beneficiaries with a
| discrepancy among records (information pertaining to date
| of birth (DOB), suspension, and termination; or
|
| > Beneficiaries in an active pay status on a dually
| entitled record.
|
| What we don't know, is how many >115 records get pushed
| to manual processing, and how efficient that processing
| is. Is there a backlog? How big is it?
|
| It mentions that one thing that can prevent the automated
| process, is when they have multiple records for a person,
| and they have conflicting dates of birth - and then they
| have to follow some process to resolve the discrepancy.
| What happens if they get stuck and can't work out which
| date of birth is the right one?
|
| It also mentions how in some cases they need proof of
| death to carry out the manual termination. What if their
| attempts to procure such proof are unsuccessful?
|
| Speculation: maybe there are a cohort of individuals who
| are long deceased, but they fall into one of the
| exceptions to the automated termination at 115 process,
| SSA is missing proof of death, and if nobody is actually
| "cashing the checks", it might be administratively easier
| to just keep on "paying" them by printing the checks and
| then burying them at the back of a filing cabinet than to
| cancel their social security. Maybe that's who these "150
| year old social security recipients" are. So nobody would
| actually be committing fraud, and the government isn't
| _really_ losing any money (since the checks are never
| cashed). Not exactly good, but maybe not quite as bad as
| Musk et al make it sound either. And quite likely it is
| just a small handful of people who are a rounding error
| in the federal budget.
| fastball wrote:
| You literally have that backwards. The misinfo is that
| COBOL would be back-dating to 1875, as is made clear by the
| linked StackExchange thread and anyone else that has
| actually used COBOL. Regardless, people without an accurate
| age in the Social Security database should not be getting
| payments either, even if they are not actually 150.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| Okay regardless of whether I had it backwards the intent
| of my post was still correct. That there may have been
| people in the system that were 150 years old, due to the
| COBOL language.
|
| And who says they actually were being paid, was that just
| assumed or did they find that people were inappropriately
| being paid? It is been circulated that there is an
| automated component that prevents that from happening if
| people are aged past 115 years old
|
| https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0202602578
|
| It is irresponsible to stand up in front of the
| Whitehouse and spew that there are people receiving
| social security payments that are 150 years old, without
| performing a formal inquiry into the matter or
| communicating the detail appropriately.
| skissane wrote:
| > That there may have been people in the system that were
| 150 years old, due to the COBOL language.
|
| Yes, but this is the whole aspect that is misinformation:
| there is no evidence that (alleged) "150 year old social
| security recipients" has anything to do with COBOL. That
| appears to be simply some speculative and likely
| incorrect theory that some random cooked up, and people
| that don't know any better are repeating as fact
|
| It is entirely possible that Musk/DOGE's claims about
| this topic will turn out to be incorrect - but if they
| do, then I very much doubt that the actual reason,
| whatever it may turn out to be, will be due to any
| feature of the COBOL language (or the implementation of
| it SSA is using)
| NoPicklez wrote:
| The entire issue I have is that there was no
| substantiated evidence from Elon either, the public is
| left to speculate as to why.
|
| But Elon made a great headline for himself without any
| nuanced or substantiated view.
| skissane wrote:
| The solution to Musk's misinformation isn't anti-Musk
| misinformation
|
| Furthermore, while I wouldn't be surprised if Musk's
| claims turn out to be a exaggeration or distortion, they
| are an exaggeration or distortion of genuine internal
| government info - being weighed against uninformed
| speculation by Internet randoms
| notahacker wrote:
| Personally I'd be more worried by uninformed speculation
| by the unqualified internet randoms currently
| reallocating the government budget than uniformed
| speculation of internet randoms pointing out that given
| their representation of "genuine internal government
| info" makes no sense there might be multiple more logical
| explanations. I don't think the barriers to comment on
| internet forums should be higher than the barriers to
| running the country, but YMMV
| ithkuil wrote:
| this is why the social media powered bullshit machine is
| so effective.
|
| Scenario: Chief executive president says that children
| are raped by unicorns. People react by saying, there is
| no way, unicorns don't exist. How do you know they don't
| exist? There are no animals with a unicorn-looking long
| twisted horn on their foreheads, some people respond.
| Somebody else points out that Narwhals exist and somehow
| we've reached the conclusion that people astonished with
| the president in chief are somehow just people with musk
| derangement syndrome and talking from their asses.
|
| In the meantime the extraordinary claim that started all
| this goes unaddressed and we're ready to repeat the cycle
| with the next inflammatory bait that takes no time to
| produce and drains all the energy of all those who want
| to make sense of it.
| skissane wrote:
| > What has followed is people coming out of the woodwork to
| explain how this may have been reflected in the system
| since the system was written in COBOL
|
| There's zero evidence these "people coming out of the
| woodwork" have any idea what they are actually talking
| about. No evidence they have ever worked for SSA or have
| any insider info on how its systems work. It appears these
| "people coming out of the woodwork" are just random
| nobodies speculating in public (likely incorrectly), and
| people are repeating their speculation because they like
| how it sounds and they don't know enough about the topic to
| realise that it probably isn't true
| computerthings wrote:
| Two bits from Hannah Arendt's "Origins of
| Totalitarianism":
|
| > The sympathizers, who are to all appearances still
| innocuous fellow-citizens in a nontotalitarian society,
| can hardly be called single-minded fanatics; through
| them, the movements make their fantastic lies more
| generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in
| milder, more respectable forms, until the whole
| atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which
| are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal
| political reactions or opinions.
|
| and
|
| > Over and above the senselessness of totalitarian
| society is enthroned the ridiculous supersense of its
| ideological superstition. Ideologies are harmless,
| uncritical, and arbitrary opinions only as long as they
| are not believed in seriously. Once their claim to total
| validity is taken literally they become the nuclei of
| logical systems in which, as in the systems of
| paranoiacs, everything follows comprehensibly and even
| compulsorily once the first premise is accepted. The
| insanity of such systems lies not only in their first
| premise but in the very logicality with which they are
| constructed. The curious logicality of all isms, their
| simple-minded trust in the salvation value of stubborn
| devotion without regard for specific, varying factors,
| already harbors the first germs of totalitarian contempt
| for reality and factuality.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| If you thought this was some kind of roast against one
| side, do me a favor and think about it for the opposite.
|
| That's what good posting vague quotes about
| totalitarianism does. You have to engage in specifics for
| your communication to be meaningful.
| computerthings wrote:
| > If you thought this was some kind of roast against one
| side
|
| I wasn't "roasting" anyone, and I've been criticizing the
| same shit in leftist circles for nearly 20 years.
|
| > That's what good posting vague quotes about
| totalitarianism does.
|
| No, that's what you thinking that I think this was some
| kind of roast, and then telling me about that does. Added
| nothing.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Well if I can't tell what side you are criticizing with
| your broad quotes then my point is they aren't really
| effective. Which is why I said posting vague quotes about
| totalitarianism doesn't really do much.
| computerthings wrote:
| That something has to be applicable to only one "side" is
| a goal of your own making, not mine.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They didn't say that.
|
| And they're right, if we can't tell what your quote is
| aimed at, then your post is not doing a good job.
| computerthings wrote:
| if you had any interest, you'd ask, so wtf is this?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Multiple people calling your post unclear _is_ a request
| for you to explain. Even if they don 't use a question
| mark.
| frugalmail wrote:
| How is this asinine? Regardless of the technical details, if we
| don't have an accurate DOB of recipient, then they shouldn't be
| past, present or future beneficiaries unless we get an accurate
| DOB. Something is obviously wrong since the DOB is a critical
| component to the whole program. As far as I'm concerned,
| anybody currently receiving benefits with this issue is
| obviously a problem.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| That's not what the law or administrative statutes say, you
| can prove eligibility without a birth date.
|
| You're simply ignorant on this matter.
| frugalmail wrote:
| You're again trying to attack instead of establishing a
| logical explanation. It's clear you're not here in good
| faith.
|
| Regardless of how somebody establishes their birth date,
| that field would still get updated with the data that gets
| accepted. If that field is invalid, and somebody is
| receiving payments, then it's wrong.
| Kolya wrote:
| There are ways you could establish eligibility without a
| birth date. For example, they may have a WW2 service
| record but no record of their birth.
| bagels wrote:
| You act as though there can only be one database table in
| existence.
|
| It's telling that Musk did not publish the data on the
| age of people that are receiving payments.
| bagels wrote:
| Would you be surprised to learn that there are other data
| sources and processes in place to make sure that dead people
| don't get benefits, even if this one database table doesn't
| have all the information?
|
| Even a cursory search will show this.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Musk is implying that no serious attempt has been made to find
| fraud.
|
| That sounds quite possible to me.
| dashundchen wrote:
| That's incorrect.
|
| The DOJ and SSA regularly prosecute social security fraud.
|
| Take a look at the website of the Social Security
| Administration's Inspector General site and look through the
| news releases.
|
| https://oig.ssa.gov/
|
| However it's likely not as common as Musk wants you to think.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M88ZzxKyrTg
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This shows that there is non zero fraud enforcement.
|
| That's fine, but far from showing a serious focused fully
| staffed fraud detection operation.
|
| Of course, such an operation may exist, but I haven't seen
| any evidence.
|
| The top SS fraud case in that list is a couple of idiots
| who basically reported themselves:
| https://oig.ssa.gov/news-releases/2025-01-30-husband-wife-
| se...
| jmclnx wrote:
| Not on the System (Wang VS) I worked on in the 80s. Plus in many
| cases dates used a 2 digit year. So 1875 would be seen as 1975.
|
| Also I never head of this default.
| hbarka wrote:
| The question of unknown and how to default this value in
| databases. Since null is not usually possible, there have been
| hacks on how to do it. 1-1-9999 anyone?
| cwbriscoe wrote:
| I have been working on COBOL systems for quite a while now.
| Currently and for most of my career, we mostly always use DB2
| compatible dates ("CCYY-MM-DD").
|
| Pre-Y2k a lot of dates were created with:
|
| ACCEPT WS-DATE FROM DATE.
|
| The above WS-DATE was in YYMMDD format, which is why there was a
| Y2K issue and needed to be resolved with windowing code. However,
| windowing code wouldn't work for somebody that was over 100 years
| old...
|
| Doing a little research there is also (which I have never used
| since we just use DB2 and date parameter input files for CCYYMMDD
| dates):
|
| ACCEPT WS-CENTURY-DATE FROM CENTURY-DATE.
|
| This date is in CCYYMMDD format. According to google, the epoch
| for this date is January 1st, 1601.
| Aloisius wrote:
| I'm not sure how a date in the format YYYYMMDD can have an
| epoch of 1601.
|
| Epochs are used when storing the offset in some unit like
| seconds or days to a reference date. The epoch for a year YYYY
| is 1* BCE (since there is no year 0).
|
| It doesn't make sense at all though for YYYYMMDD where there
| are multiple units and 0 is invalid for two of them.
|
| * You're not really supposed to use dates < 1582 in ISO 8601
| though without prior agreement though it's meaning isn't really
| defined.
|
| Edit: There do exist standards that default to 1875-05-20 when
| there's a null date however (GIS-related), but I've not seen
| anything that suggests the SSA uses it.
| skissane wrote:
| > I'm not sure how a date in the format YYYYMMDD can have an
| epoch of 1601.
|
| IBM mainframe Cobol contains builtin functions which convert
| between YYYYMMDD strings and integers - and 1601 is the epoch
| they use for that integer representation. I assume the person
| you were replying to was talking about this fact, just
| stating it somewhat confusingly
|
| > The epoch for a year YYYY is 1* BCE (since there is no year
| 0).
|
| Well, there is a year 0 in astronomical year numbering. One
| can say that 0 CE = 1 BCE and -1 CE = 2 BCE and more
| generally n BCE = -(n-1) CE for all integers n > 0. Maybe "0
| CE" is incorrect per a strict definition of "CE", but it is
| correct if we define it less strictly
|
| > * You're not really supposed to use dates < 1582 in ISO
| 8601 though without prior agreement though it's meaning isn't
| really defined.
|
| There's really only two choices: proleptic Gregorian, or
| Julian. I don't know why ISO 8601 doesn't just mandate
| proleptic Gregorian with astronomical year numbering. But I
| suppose in the rare cases a computer system needs to
| represent pre-1582 dates (such as historiography), Julian is
| the norm. I suppose they could extend the syntax to specify
| which calendar is being used
|
| > Edit: There do exist standards that default to 1875-05-20
| when there's a null date however (GIS-related), but I've not
| seen anything that suggests the SSA uses it.
|
| Do you know which ones specifically? Would be interested to
| know this
| Aloisius wrote:
| The COBOL days since 1601 epoch makes sense. Now that I
| think about it, if those functions don't work with negative
| numbers, then I imagine even the YYYY strings couldn't have
| years before 1601.
|
| _> Do you know which ones specifically? Would be
| interested to know this_
|
| This is the only one I've found:
|
| https://docs.ogc.org/is/18-010r7/18-010r7.html#100
|
| Temporal datum with Calendar ... and with TimeOrigin
| omitted so should be assumed to be 1875-05-20.
| skissane wrote:
| > The COBOL days since 1601 epoch makes sense. Now that I
| think about it, if those functions don't work with
| negative numbers, then I imagine even the YYYY strings
| couldn't have years before 1601.
|
| IBM mainframe COBOL has two operation modes, ANSI (where
| day 1 is 1601-01-01) and "Lilian" (where day 1 is
| 1582-10-14, the day on which the Gregorian calendar was
| first introduced). ANSI mode complies with ANSI/ISO
| standards for COBOL, Lilian is an IBM-only legacy
| standard. So, in Lilian mode, the earliest value for YYYY
| is 1582. I don't believe negative numbers are accepted.
| cwbriscoe wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_(computing) (CTRL-F 1601)
| Also notice, no mention of 1875.
|
| Also just search "CENTURY-DATE COBOL Epoch"
|
| If you search "CENTURY-DATE COBOL Epoch 1875", it is mostly
| just recent entries debunking 1875 as an epoch.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >I'm not sure how a date in the format YYYYMMDD can have an
| epoch of 1601.
|
| Remove the CMOS battery from a computer with no internet
| connection running Windows XP and it will default to the
| 1600's
| bborud wrote:
| Using an epoch of jan 1 1601 is ... interesting since it means
| you would have to deal with the switch from julian to gregorian
| calendar in september 1752. This included dropping 11 days.
|
| Calendars and historic records is a pain.
| zosima wrote:
| Different countries switched to the Gregorian calendar at
| different times. Pope Gregory XIII papal bull went into
| effect October 1582, see:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar
|
| And so 15 October 1582 used to be the 0 for some COBOL date
| functions.
|
| Later that was changed to Jan 1 1600. In IBM's systems you
| can control what you prefer by a switch:
| https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.4.0?topic=services-date-
| li...
| adbachman wrote:
| No joke, I actually hit this condition in a test suite and
| ended up stumbling across the October 1582 date in a Ruby
| library. It wasn't until I searched "October 10 1582" on
| the Web that I learned the significance. https://gist.githu
| b.com/abachman/f97806e1c0fe8e4e1849e5f8412...
|
| tl;dr - MySQL uses 1000-01-01 as the minimum value for a
| datetime field. Different Ruby libraries use different
| methods to represent dates, which can lead to situations
| that _appear_ to claim that 1000-01-01 != 1000-01-01.
| twic wrote:
| I assume they just use the Gregorian calendar throughout -
| roughly what is called "proleptic Gregorian" [1], although
| since the Gregorian calendar started on 15 October 1582,
| which is before 1601, it's not really proleptic. Just barely
| retroleptic.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proleptic_Gregorian_calendar
| apaprocki wrote:
| The Windows epoch is January 1st, 1601. The rationale is:
|
| "The Gregorian calendar operates on a 400-year cycle, and 1601
| is the first year of the cycle that was active at the time
| Windows NT was being designed. In other words, it was chosen to
| make the math come out nicely."
| Maken wrote:
| Still more logical than January 1st, 1970.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| Unix guys weren't overthinking it on systems running on 16
| kB of RAM, or whatever. Just get a damn number, sheesh.
| layer8 wrote:
| This is the best debunk I could find:
| https://iter.ca/post/1875-epoch/
| Aloisius wrote:
| The SSA's master records, the Numerical Identification (NUMIDENT)
| files, store dates in text as either CCYYMMDD or MMDDCCYY strings
| according to their archived versions.
|
| https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/207202/
|
| I have a hard time believing the DB2 systems would convert it to
| days/seconds/whatever since 1875. It's not impossible, but I
| think whoever came up with the 1875 thing was simply wrong.
|
| That's not to say there are 150 year olds collecting social
| security either. Dates of birth are sometimes missing or entered
| wrong and sometimes death records don't get entered. It's also
| clear DOGE didn't understand that social security numbers can't
| be used as a unique identifiers (nor why it's unnecessary) which
| can lead to all sorts of issues when processing.
|
| Edit: It also seems the SSA presumes anyone over 115 is has died
| and halts payments which makes it even more unlikely there are
| 150 year old beneficiaries:
| https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0202602578
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Social Security started paying out in 1940:
| https://www.proquest.com/docview/146227490?sourcetype=Histor...
|
| With anyone 65 years or older eligible to start receiving
| checks.
|
| The 1875 date almost certainly comes from that. I wouldn't be
| surprised if someone set it as a default for anyone they didn't
| have a birth date for because you could safely assume someone
| was older than that if they were receiving social security when
| it first started _or_ because there are some of those initial
| payments that truly were never discontinued.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| That makes a lot of sense.
| Aloisius wrote:
| They didn't use computers in 1940 for it though. All this was
| stored on paper where using days since 1875 wouldn't have
| made much sense. That would lead to most of the beneficiaries
| having a negative number.
|
| They didn't get their first computer until 1956 and by that
| point, the 1875 date would have made little sense.
|
| It simply makes more sense there was data entry errors.
| Indeed, we know there are since the SSA makes records
| available for dead people. They show people supposedly born
| as early as 1800:
|
| https://aad.archives.gov/aad/fielded-
| search.jsp?dt=3059&tf=F...
| masswerk wrote:
| > All this was stored on paper
|
| Rather, as also mentioned in the answers, on Hollerith
| cards, 5-digit encoded (2 for the year, 3 for the day of
| year). Punch-card appliances were very much a thing. (WWII
| logistics were run by punch-cards.)
| Aloisius wrote:
| They used IBM cards, not Hollerith cards (they used IBM
| 077 collators and 405 accounting machines).
|
| They were coded with 6 digits: 2 for month, 2 day and 2
| year according to the SSA.
|
| https://www.ssa.gov/history/ssa/yourss55.html
| masswerk wrote:
| Notably, this is from December 1955, already on
| computers. There's no mention of how data was handled
| before this. (Also, pre-WWII, people used do talk of
| "Hollerith cards" in a general way - and the system
| started in the 1930s.)
| Aloisius wrote:
| It's mentioned on IBM's site:
|
| https://www.ibm.com/history/social-security-act
|
| https://www.ibm.com/history/punched-
| card#The+Social+Security...
|
| And the SSA site mentions using IBM machines for it in
| 1936. IBM machines only used IBM cards:
|
| https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v69n2/v69n2p55.html
|
| The checks used to pay people were also IBM punchcards.
| kuhewa wrote:
| The very first recipient, Ida May Fuller, would be 150 years
| old currently.
| erik998 wrote:
| In 1875, the American Express Company established the first
| private pension plan in the United States.
|
| I can also see a situation where the SSA recipient in 1940
| was born in 1875. The recipient age 65 could have married
| someone very young for 10 years. That younger person could be
| on survivors benefits and continue receiving payments.
|
| Here is an example:
| https://www.ssa.gov/history/idapayroll.html
|
| On January 31, 1940, the first monthly retirement check was
| issued to Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vermont, in the amount of
| $22.54. Miss Fuller, a Legal Secretary, retired in November
| 1939. She started collecting benefits in January 1940 at age
| 65 and lived to be 100 years old, dying in 1975.
|
| https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10084.pdf
|
| https://www.ssa.gov/survivor/eligibility
|
| So if in 1965 this retired person married someone age 18...
| Then that person at 18 never remarried. Could they end up in
| a situation where they receive survivors benefits from the
| original applicant?
|
| The recent spouse would be born in 1947 and marry in 1965 for
| 10 years until their spouse's death... not have remarried or
| worked, then at age 60 in 2007, derive survivors benefits
| from original applicant?
| hylaride wrote:
| > So if in 1965 this retired person married someone age
| 18... Then that person at 18 never remarried. Could they
| end up in a situation where they receive survivors benefits
| from the original applicant?
|
| "In order to receive this (spousal) benefit, you must have
| been married for at least 10 years, and both you and your
| ex must be at least 62 years of age".
|
| Basically, you could but you wouldn't get much to make it
| worthwhile. I do know that veterans benefits did (at one
| time?) payout to spouses in the way you ask, though. IIRC
| benefits from the American Civil War were paid out into the
| 21st century due to a handful of cases where old veterans
| married young women. The last known "civil war widow" died
| in 2008 having married an 86 year old at 19. A daughter
| received her father's benefits until 2020. There was also
| another spouse who died in 2020, but she never collected
| the pension.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who
| _...
| Projectiboga wrote:
| The ten year rule is more recent than the SSA.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Also factor in there were civil war widows legitimately
| eligible for pensions from their dead soldier husbands until
| the last one died just a couple of years ago:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_.
| ..
|
| Also can be via your father, this lady was collecting a civil
| war pension until 2020:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Triplett
| zten wrote:
| Can't wait for Musk's team to finally peel back these
| layers, realize that the code actually implemented the
| laws, and have to admit they are the idiots and apologize
| for wasting the government's money on a poorly-run audit.
| thecopy wrote:
| They wont admit anything
| flir wrote:
| At least we'll get a good example for the Chesterton's
| Fence wiki page.
| krger wrote:
| Until the Heritage Foundation succeeds in dismantling
| Wikipedia.
| flir wrote:
| That makes me wonder what the Wikimedia Foundation's
| disaster recovery plan looks like.
|
| The crucial bit of infrastructure (and the most
| vulnerable point right now) might be the domain name.
| bee_rider wrote:
| FWIW they have instructions for downloading the whole
| thing, which mention that it is also downloadable from
| BitTorrent. So I think it is functionally impossible to
| delete Wikipedia.
|
| I'd be more worried about propaganda being inserted.
| flir wrote:
| I'm not worried about the data, and even losing the
| servers would be a hiccup. But whatever site is at
| www.wikipedia.org is, in the minds of the general public,
| Wikipedia.
|
| Domain names have been seized in the past.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| I imagine most traffic to Wikipedia is through search, so
| I imagine such a fate is in the hands of search engines.
| If a community-driven alternative appeared, we'd have to
| rely on Google indexing this alternative and ranking it
| higher than the usurped domain.
| ben_w wrote:
| Search is also vulnerable.
|
| It's been called "wokepedia" (not to be confused with
| Wookieepedia, the star wars wiki) by Musk and others,
| telling people not to donate.
|
| And also people have been denouncing Google's search
| results as biased, as being "woke".
|
| I'm still not sure what any specific user of the word
| "woke" means, beyond the Ami/UK right using it as an
| insult, but I can't tell if it's generic or specific,
| critiquing something or just telling supporters when to
| boo and jeer. Does the Ami/UK left still use it to mean
| "being aware of systemic prejudice", or have they also
| shifted? I didn't notice at the time when "meme" stopped
| meaning shared online quiz.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > I'm still not sure what any specific user of the word
| "woke" means
|
| In the context you're referring to it is essentially an
| accusation of certain ideological ulterior motives in
| communication.
|
| Regarding your reference to Google's search results. I
| have no idea what the current behavior is. However a
| couple of years ago there were some remarkable
| differences for certain search terms between different
| geographical versions of the website. It certainly had
| the appearance of pushing an agenda at the time.
| willy_k wrote:
| > I'd be more worried about propaganda being inserted.
|
| FWIW, it would be far from the first time that's happened
| (including for sensitive US issues).
| gota wrote:
| Chesterton's Nuclear Security Program
|
| [0] https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/02/doge-fired-
| hundreds-of-us...
| roywiggins wrote:
| Is it really a Chesterton's Fence if it's covered in
| signs saying "do not remove" with simple explanations in
| large, friendly letters?
| warningforever wrote:
| Not if you stop understanding or believing the signs.
|
| Very well done doc, though overly concerned, on how keep
| people in the future away from nuclear waste: Into
| Eternity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4
| troupo wrote:
| This definitely warrants an /s even if it's obvious :)
| londons_explore wrote:
| Musks team wont be able to make any sweeping changes here
| that impact eligibility or payouts - thats the kinda
| thing where angry pensioners form a mob outside the white
| house and get front page coverage on every news outlet.
| belter wrote:
| "Fact-checking Elon Musk's claims in the Oval Office" -
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyjz24ne85o
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Can't wait for Musk's team to finally peel back these
| layers, realize that the code actually implemented the
| laws_ [...]
|
| Bloomberg's _Odd Lots_ podcast had an episode on this:
| the hard part in replacing /updating government system is
| not the coding part. The hard part is understanding the
| policies that have been changed and modified over the
| decades.
|
| See "This Is What Happens When Governments Build
| Software" (Jun 2023):
|
| > _There 's a lot of frustration about the government's
| ability to build things in the US. Subways. Bridges.
| High-speed rail. Electricity transmission. But there's
| another crucial area where the public sector often
| struggles, and that is software. We saw it with the
| infamous rollout of Obamacare. We see it in the UX of the
| Treasury Direct website. And we saw it in the way state
| unemployment insurance systems broke during the pandemic.
| So why is it so hard for the public sector to build and
| maintain software? On this episode we speak with Jennifer
| Pahlka, the founder and former executive director of Code
| for America and author of the new book Recoding America:
| Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We
| Can Do Better, as well as Dave Guarino, who recently left
| the Department of Labor after working on upgrading the
| unemployment insurance system. Both have a long history
| of working on public sector software systems and they
| explain why the problem is so tricky._
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMtOv6DFn1U
|
| One large component is that a lot of business rules and
| policies have been encoded into the software logic, and
| (re-)translating that into code in a new(er) language is
| part of the challenge.
|
| Related, "Why COBOL isn't the problem":
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420217
| gota wrote:
| > Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode on this:
| the hard part in replacing/updating government system is
| not the coding part. The hard part is understanding the
| policies that have been changed and modified over the
| decades.
|
| That is the hard part in any system, not just government.
| Especially government, maybe, but not
| uncharacteristically and certainly not exclusively!
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I have read similar things about payroll software. The
| thing about laws, regulations and payroll is: you _do
| not_ get to adapt the rules to the software, the software
| has to implement everything exactly as prescribed. Even
| that one-off thing from 1977 that still influences a few
| pensions by a few cents a month.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I work for a company that employs ~5k people. There's an
| entire IT team just for payroll and it's bigger than Ops.
| When Elon says he and a handful of devs were going to fix
| the entirety of the Treasury dept on their own, they are
| either lying, or have no fucking idea what they're doing.
| Probably both.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > The thing about laws, regulations and payroll is: you
| _do not_ get to adapt the rules to the software, the
| software has to implement everything exactly as
| prescribed.
|
| _You_ do not get to adapt the rules to the software.
| _The government_ can look at the state of the rules, say
| "this rule is obsolete, inefficient or unnecessarily
| complicated" and enact a different rule.
|
| They rarely do this, which is why having someone go
| through and make the attempt is potentially valuable.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _That is the hard part in any system, not just
| government._
|
| Another episode from _Odd Lots_ , "Why Corporate America
| Still Runs on Ancient Software That Breaks", with Patrick
| McKenzie (patio11 here at HN):
|
| > _Southwest Airlines had a disastrous holiday season,
| thanks in part to a software bug that left crews out of
| place and grounded thousands of flights. But Southwest
| isn 't alone in having software in the headlines lately.
| The New York Stock Exchange recently had a software error
| that caused weird pricing on stocks and the FAA had its
| own computer issue that grounded planes earlier this
| month. So what's the deal with corporate software? Why do
| these crashes happen? And why does the user experience
| typically leave something to be desired? On this episode
| of the podcast we speak with Patrick McKenzie, an expert
| on engineering and infrastructure, who writes the Bits
| About Money newsletter and recently left payments company
| Stripe after six years. We talked about the challenges of
| keeping any software system alive after years of upgrades
| and updates, the distribution of tech talent across
| industries, and whether non-tech companies can close the
| gap with Silicon Valley._
|
| * https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-corporate-
| america-...
|
| * https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/why-corporate-america-
| still-r...
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6UQaXpzwQA
| drawkward wrote:
| Wait if you like, just dont hold your breath.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| You'll be waiting a long time.
|
| Rule #1 of the new American oligarch: never admit a
| mistake
| kolanos wrote:
| > Rule #1 of the new American oligarch: never admit a
| mistake
|
| Is this really a new rule? By my understanding of
| history, this has been the standard operating procedure
| for governments since... well, since they became a thing.
| And when mistakes are admitted, they're done so very
| slowly. For example, it took the U.S. government nearly
| half a century to apologize for the Japanese internment
| camps.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| There was at least the hope that the people in the
| government would, someday, apologize. Or, failing that,
| that they would pay at the ballot box come next election.
|
| The new guard are far more like the old royalty of
| Europe. Look at their lifestyles and riches: how could
| they _possibly_ be wrong? Back then it was called the
| divine right of kings: they were chosen by God - the
| literal creator and master of the universe - and thus, by
| definition, could not be wrong.
|
| Today it's the absolution of the market: how could you
| possibly be that wealthy if you are a screw-up? It's hard
| to get rich, so those who have become so must be better
| than the conventional wisdom and decency. Any wrong move
| is written off as another move in a 4D chess game that
| the average person just can't understand.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Musk admitted in the White House interview that he'd made
| a mistake on the $50m for condoms to Gaza.
| erik998 wrote:
| There is so much more info on their site.
|
| https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html
|
| https://www.ssa.gov/history/index.html
|
| https://www.ssa.gov/history/operations.html
|
| Early Operations Social Security Bulletin
|
| Volume 1 - June 1938 - Number 6
|
| ACCOUNTING OPERATIONS OF THE BUREAU OF OLD-AGE INSURANCE
|
| Joseph L. Fay and MaxJ. Wasserman
|
| Bureau of Old-Age Insurance. Mr. Fay is Chief of the
| Baltimore Accounting Operations Section and Mr. Wasserman is
| Chief of the Statistics Section. They were assisted by Edward
| O. Manning of the Statistics Section.
| https://www.ssa.gov/history/fay638.html
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| > The 1875 date almost certainly comes from that.
|
| Here's 1875 the claim that's been all over Twitter these
| days[1]:
|
| "Social security runs on COBOL, which does not use a date or
| time type. So the > date is stored as a number using the ISO
| 8601 standard. The epoch for this is 150 years ago (1875) -
| aka the metre standard."
|
| "So if you don't know the date of something, it will be a 0
| value, which in COBOL will default to 1875 - 150 years ago."
|
| Weirdly this post itself didn't get a lot of attention (only
| 2.2k likes), but a ton of people took a screenshot of it and
| passed it around as fact, which got a lot more attention. For
| instance, post like this[2] with 56 thousand likes (there are
| a bunch of them on Twitter right now, all with a screenshot
| of this original post).
|
| It's a good example of how misinformation spreads like
| wildfire, and how extremely few people bother to check to see
| where or not its accurate. I'm not sure it's useful trying to
| figure out reasons for a 1875 date when we don't actually
| have any indication that this was actually occurring, and the
| discussion started because some made an erroneous claim.
|
| [1] https://x.com/toshiHQ/status/1889928670887739902 [2]
| https://x.com/enkday/status/1890808249663869204
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The 1875 date is a made up thing. There's millions of records
| more than 100+ years old, some as old as 229 years old by
| birth date. And, it's still very much a problem if the first
| people to receive SS are still receiving it, or if the system
| is still cutting checks because their death wasn't ever
| recorded.
| skissane wrote:
| > or if the system is still cutting checks because their
| death wasn't ever recorded.
|
| My speculation: there are a small handful of _long_ dead
| people, for whom the SSA has never received proof of death,
| and they fall through some bureaucratic loophole in the
| "assume people over 115 are dead" rules, so the SSA is
| still printing them checks. But these checks haven't been
| deposited in a bank account in many decades, and the SSA
| doesn't even have a current address to send them, so it
| just sticks them in a filing cabinet in their basement. No
| fraud, the government isn't _really_ losing any money since
| the checks aren 't being deposited or cashed, just a little
| bit of bureaucratic stupidity that no doubt adds up to a
| rounding error in the federal budget. But you can see how
| Musk/Trump/et al could spin this to sound a lot worse than
| it really is.
| kolanos wrote:
| > But these checks haven't been deposited in a bank
| account in many decades, and the SSA doesn't even have a
| current address to send them, ...
|
| While this is likely true for a majority of cases. I am
| confident that there are both bank accounts and addresses
| that have remained valid since the 1940s. For example,
| ABA routing/account numbers on checks go back to 1910.
|
| Presuming checks are being printed, it would not surprise
| me if they are being sent through the U.S. postal system.
| What happens to them after that, though, is anyone's
| guess. Banks generally stay on top of deceased customers.
| But even then, a bank account can be transferred to
| beneficiaries and retain the same account number.
|
| i would expect that banks would flag a check being
| deposited in the name of a known deceased former account
| holder. But there have already been cases mentioned in
| this thread where someone can receive SSA benefits on
| behalf of a deceased spouse/parent. As such, it is
| conceivable that those checks could be deposited.
| skissane wrote:
| I guess the difference is: if you see a social security
| check for a 150 year old being deposited, that would make
| you suspect fraud, and so you would investigate to
| determine if it is fraud, or some obscure case where it
| is actually legitimate. Whereas, if the checks never get
| deposited, where is the fraud? Which is why I think that
| the undeposited check case is the most likely to "fall
| through the cracks"
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| How can anyone on the outside make all these guesses about the
| code and databases? It feels like a lot of speculation to try
| to prove a claim wrong, but without evidence.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Yeah, exactly, and no-one can see Musk is tweeting about
| either.
|
| But we're generally assuming that he's clinging to anything
| that justifies a pre-existing narrative.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Indeed, how can an outsider like Musk and his DOGE
| compatriots make any claim at all? I think it is far more
| likely that Elon was mistaken, or lied, than the SSA is
| paying out to multiple non-existent 150 year-olds. In fact,
| that there are so many plausible explanations that _don 't_
| involve fraud, it really behooves us to be skeptical. Elon
| made the claim: he is responsible for supplying the evidence.
|
| Note that the doge.gov website has a section called
| "savings," which originally said "Receipts coming by
| Valentine's Day." Now it says "Receipts coming over the
| weekend!", and seeing as it's 11:50pm on the East Coast of
| the US right now, that seems unlikely, too.
| zten wrote:
| I've gone rushing to my boss in the past with similarly
| hastily researched claims and conclusions to what Musk is
| tweeting. In my experience, they were usually the result of
| me having performed insufficient research, and did not have
| nearly the impact I thought they would. However, these kind
| of junior level mistakes make for great propaganda. Anyone
| can read his conclusion and the chart and with zero
| critical thought, think "duh! The government is so stupid!
| I knew I couldn't trust them to run a benefits program
| correctly!" And that's exactly what Musk wants us to
| conclude. As you note, however, we cannot conclude that -
| there is a much, much higher burden of proof we should be
| demanding.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Given that other systems do have problems with paying out
| to dead people or people who are alive but faking their
| age, it'd be impressive if the US system had zero such
| cases. The claim isn't unlikely on its face, especially
| given what he said about Treasury never denying payments
| for any reason in order to minimise complaints.
|
| As to "how can he make claims at all", it's because civil
| servants have been told to work for him, which means he is
| supposed to have access to more information than actual
| outsiders do (everyone on this thread).
| flir wrote:
| I'm sure the US system has a few cases of dead claimants.
| I mean, it's a country of 330m people.
|
| Dead and 150? Bit harder to believe. It's an
| extraordinary claim, if you get my drift.
| Panoramix wrote:
| Why? Japan found over 200k ghost centenarians in their
| database. A significant amount were fraud related,
| relatives that keep receiving checks for example. So not
| hard to believe for me.
| flir wrote:
| > Japan found over 200k ghost centenarians in their
| database
|
| Weeeeeell....
| https://cnrs.hal.science/hal-03478634/document
|
| > Why?
|
| 150. I already said this.
|
| The children of a 150-year-old would probably be in their
| ~120s. The grandchildren would be in their ~90s.
|
| You're claiming a social security account that's been
| passed down through multiple generations, like some kind
| of family heirloom.
|
| It's an extraordinary claim, if you get my drift.
| danso wrote:
| The SSA OIG has done a couple of investigations into this
| the past decade. In 2023 [0], it agreed with the SSA that
| "almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report
| [people aged 100 or older] currently receive SSA
| payments" (while disagreeing that the costs and risks of
| a mass correction effort outweigh the benefits)
|
| > _While we agree that adding presumed death information
| to these records will result in incorrect dates of death
| appearing on these Numident records, we do not agree it
| poses a significant risk of erroneously recording death
| information on living numberholders' records. For
| example, we see little risk in adding presumed death
| information to the millions of Numident records belonging
| to individuals born in the 1800s who haven't worked or
| received SSA payments in more than 50 years._
|
| > _SSA determined the estimated $5.5 to $9.7 million in
| expenditures to correct these errors was too costly to
| implement and that the effort would have limited benefit
| to the administration of SSA programs. We acknowledge
| that almost none of the numberholders discussed in the
| report currently receive SSA payments. However, SSA
| issued each of these individuals a valid SSN and these
| SSNs could allow for a wide range of potential abuse._
|
| [0] https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf#
| page10
| Amezarak wrote:
| We all know that Musk is not someone with a strong
| commitment to the truth. We all know he's a grifter. How
| long has FSD been coming now? What was the deal with the
| diver?
|
| But so much of these DOGE criticisms are simply reflexive
| "Musk bad." There is no a priori reason why it's unlikely
| that a small amount of people are being paid benefits out
| of a byzantine bureaucratic system that's almost a hundred
| years old.
|
| Just a few years ago, I was listening to a story on NPR
| about SSI fraud (also administered by the SSA) and how
| common it was. Now, apparently we're all convinced all
| government agencies contain approximately zero fraud, or at
| least detectable-by-Musk fraud, simply because it's the
| cause du jour. It's totally bizarre to read these HN
| stories (I flag most of them) and people are making totally
| unfounded claims on the processes, controls, and operation
| of government IT systems, apparently assuming they are just
| as good as what exists at Meta or Google. Well, I have
| personal experience, and maybe my program was an outlier,
| but these people seem to have extremely rosy expectations,
| and often have no idea how the government works even in
| theory ("there's an IG to find things like this!").
|
| It's really exhausting and disappointing. DOGE can be a
| misguided operation run by a grifter that misreports
| findings and will never save the amount of money promised
| _and_ a lot of stuff in the government can be awful,
| missing even basic controls.
| troupo wrote:
| > But so much of these DOGE criticisms are simply
| reflexive "Musk bad."
|
| I mean, these are your own words:
|
| > DOGE can be a misguided operation run by a grifter that
| misreports findings
|
| And that's the main issue and criticism, not that
| everyone believes that the government is perfect
| Amezarak wrote:
| But people aren't saying that. Instead, they're just
| inventing reasons why Musk is wrong, with no evidence or
| invented evidence, like the subject of this article.
| troupo wrote:
| Because Musk has already given ample evidence of how
| wrong he is on multiple accounts.
|
| It's on _Musk_ to provide evidence for his extraordinary
| claims. So far that evidence has been in very short
| supply.
| Amezarak wrote:
| Yes, but people are just _making stuff up_ about why he's
| wrong. That is literally no better.
|
| You may as well just suspend judgement about these
| claims. No amount of evidence is going to convince most
| people here: we saw that with the Hunter laptop, where
| the goalposts moved with each additional proof the
| smallest amount possible.
| troupo wrote:
| "No amount of evidence" does not equal "no evidence".
|
| In case of Hunter laptop there was a grand jury, an FBI
| investigation, a criminal case, a joint investigation by
| _two_ Republican committees against Joe Biden etc. etc.
|
| What evidence has Musk provided?
| buttercraft wrote:
| Are these made up?
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/10/elon-
| mus...
| Amezarak wrote:
| This is not a good article. The Reuters and Politico
| examples, for instance, are particularly tendentious.
| Overpaying for subscriptions, or buying unnecessary
| subscriptions is exactly how such payments would operate.
| thordenmark wrote:
| Tons of evidence released already, even if you've only
| been casually following DOGE. And for some, no amount of
| evidence will ever be enough. Why is it so hard to
| believe an agency as big and inefficient as the US Govt.
| would have plenty of waste?
| lostdog wrote:
| I love comments about there being "tons" of evidence
| without pointing to a single piece of it. Few things make
| me chuckle as hard as this.
| cjkarr wrote:
| I've been waiting for that evidence. All I see is a
| message stating "Receipts coming over the weekend!"
|
| https://doge.gov/savings
| troupo wrote:
| Nope, there's no evidence. There's an endless list of
| something cut, with no evidence that it was wasteful,
| fraud, or not within the remit of the agencies in
| question.
|
| Like this one:
| https://x.com/DOGE/status/1890593889314038216
|
| Or claims with literally no evidence other than the
| tweets like this:
| https://x.com/DOGE/status/1890849405932077378
| svachalek wrote:
| I started out with a similar position, but so far
| everything I've heard out of DOGE is either:
|
| 1. Misrepresenting congressionally approved expenditures
| he royally disapproves of as "fraud"
|
| 2. Misleading, under-researched, unsupported statistics
| as "waste"
|
| The longer this goes on, the more impressed I am with our
| government. I had no idea it would be this hard to find
| anything legitimate to attack.
| kolanos wrote:
| > 1. Misrepresenting congressionally approved
| expenditures he royally disapproves of as "fraud"
|
| This seems dubious to me. In almost all congressional
| expenditures the funds allocated are done so at a
| department level with broad statutes applied. It is
| largely left up to that department to decide what to
| actually do with those funds specifically. It seems like
| a stretch to characterize this as "congressionally
| approved" and more like an abdication by congress on
| large swaths of government spending.
| ModernMech wrote:
| There is of course a feedback loop here. It's not like
| they get a check and no one ever looks to see what it was
| spent on. Congress has multiple levels of oversight over
| these agencies, including several congressional
| Committees (House and Senate), inspectors general, and
| whistleblowers. This oversight serves to minimize fraud,
| waste, and abuse.
| russdill wrote:
| Also they do a heck of a lot more than retirement benefits. And
| really, it could actually be a survivor benefit and the
| deceased person could have been born 150 years ago and the
| survivor still living.
| masswerk wrote:
| Let's say, someone grew up in an orphanage in the 1940s with an
| unknown date of birth. This was before any computer systems and
| the date would have been recorded on punch-card, probably in
| 2+3 digits, here defaulting to `00` for the year for a missing
| value. It's plausible that this would have been transitioned
| as-is to any more modern date encodings.
| Aloisius wrote:
| After much searching, I found documentation on SSA's Master
| Beneficiary Records format from after the Y2K update.
|
| Date of Birth in some of these records is stored as days since
| January 1, 1800. There's no reference to 1875 anywhere. See
| section 2.3 Date formats:
|
| https://omb.report/icr/200704-0960-012/doc/2576801
| masswerk wrote:
| But it was common to encode missing two-digits data as
| something in the high-90s, maybe specifying a reason in the
| least significant digit. (I was taught to do so at university
| and did so myself for a project.) So, if the start date is
| indeed 1880, the code for missing date could still have been
| 95.
| ein0p wrote:
| As a person to whom all of this is "clear", and who
| "understands" everything, could you please explain how a system
| whose entire function depends on knowing the person's birth
| date would function without knowing the birth date?
| NoPicklez wrote:
| The part of all of this which I have a problem with from the
| outside, is that it seems extremely irresponsible to address the
| White House and the public to say you have found people that are
| 150 years old receiving social security payments in such a
| provocative way. As if you have so simply stumbled across this
| error that has gone unnoticed.
|
| There's been no formal inquiry, there was no mention of any of
| the checks and balances that may have been occurring, there's
| been no nuance to the argument from him at all. Okay maybe there
| are people that look to be 150 years old, is there a reason why?
| Were they actually being paid the social security or was there a
| legitimate exception? Maybe people were but it was so few and far
| between and was an internal controls issue which all governments
| and companies have globally or was none of it true and your team
| simply assumed they were being paid.
|
| After reading an article where Gov security experts were worried
| because they were having to give Elon's team access to Putty and
| SQL tools. It seems like people are going through this data and
| making inferences that may not be completely true or vetted.
| trymas wrote:
| > ... it seems extremely irresponsible to address the White
| House and the public to say ...
|
| It's simple as:
|
| 1. They don't care;
|
| 2. It fits their agenda;
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Exactly. Statements like this have been used to approve new
| programs and legislation that in at least one case led to
| sweeping profiling and the incorrect retraction of government
| benefits, causing tens of thousands to end up in poverty and
| debt and the consequent issues of divorce, children removed
| from parents, even suicides: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du
| tch_childcare_benefits_scand...
|
| This all started when a group of Bulgarian migrants took
| advantage of a loophole, registering as residents for a small
| amount of time and defrauding the government for about EUR4
| million. The price tag to set it right again was EUR7.4
| billion as of last year: https://nos.nl/artikel/2503966-de-
| toeslagenaffaire-van-een-m...
|
| What I'm trying to say is that right-wing / populist talking
| points can and will lead to sweeping reform with long term
| and far reaching consequences. For a few years we had an era
| of fact checking where these statements were immediately
| marked, but all the services have removed it again. I'm
| honestly surprised Twitter still has community notes.
| sumo89 wrote:
| And there's no punishment for being wrong. Even a newspaper
| has to publish official apologies, not that anyone bothers to
| read them. He could say the sky is red on that platform and
| there's nothing anyone could do to force him to change it or
| admit he's wrong.
| hassleblad23 wrote:
| Have they revealed how many people actually fall in that
| category? Agreed that more nuance is necessary.
| ddxv wrote:
| He recently shared the usual X style cropped screenshot which
| implied millions of records "where death is false" and the
| rows age appeared to be 110+
|
| As someone who uses databases everyday, there's always nuance
| to data, especially when you're trying to simplify data for a
| small report. Hard to believe there are millions of records
| so obviously wrong.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I wouldn't put it past our government. Who ever even looks
| at this stuff? Nobody cares to look when they're spending
| other people's money. Traditionally the play has been:
| don't rock the boat and you keep your job for life.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Office of the Inspector General looks at this stuff.
|
| Trump fired 17 of them:
|
| https://campaignlegal.org/update/significance-firing-
| inspect...
|
| > This blatantly illegal and incredibly concerning mass
| firing removes the only independent offices within
| agencies designed to protect taxpayer money and root out
| corruption, fraud, waste and mismanagement.
|
| I also posted the 2022 report the office generated
| elsewhere in the thread, a follow up to their 2015
| report.
| gscott wrote:
| > Office of the Inspector General looks at this stuff.
|
| I wish that were the case, if it was these date of births
| would have already been fixed. Sounds like they fired 17
| useless employees and can split the work of the 17
| amongst 150 other employees.
| wruza wrote:
| Sounded like "out of 25", but just for context:
|
| _With approximately 1,600 employees, the HHS-OIG
| performs audits, investigations, and evaluations to
| recommend policy for decision-makers and the public._
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| There's OIGs for different departments.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Inspector_General
| _(U...
| wruza wrote:
| I quoted this exact article. It seems almost a tradition
| to fire all heads of OIGs after elections, from all sorts
| of presidents.
| BryantD wrote:
| The cited examples are Reagan and Bush, both of whom
| relented to some degree after Congress pushed back. Obama
| fired one IG, with stated cause. And of course, in 2022,
| Congress passed a law requiring 30 days advance notice to
| Congress. So perhaps traditional but also fairly clearly
| violating the 2022 law.
| Muromec wrote:
| With US not having centralized vital records registry and
| also not having demographyc registry and not issuing id
| cards out of principle -- it's pretty easy to have
| consistency issues on the scale of millions.
|
| Add the fact that people also move to other countries and
| US government may not even know somebody died, because
| death was not reigistered in US.
| gscott wrote:
| At the very least Social Security should try to get the
| correct birth dates and verify these folks are alive. Because
| it sounds like no one is checking and fixing this. If you
| were running social security and you see people have no date
| of birth and they come up as 150 years old, you fix it.
| Apparently that basic thing is not happening and Elon musk is
| calling this out. I see no problem with fixing it.
| loktarogar wrote:
| There's opportunity cost in fixing it. The problem is we
| don't know if it's actual fraud. The SSA might, or they
| might not. It might not actually be a problem, or a problem
| that is an acceptable cost of running the agency. It might
| even be a cost that's acceptable to the country, given all
| the complexities involved (that we don't know about)
|
| That's the problem with ALL the things Musk is coming out
| with. We just don't know! We don't know how much we are
| "losing" to them, we don't know know how serious these
| problems are. We don't know the context.
|
| We're just getting thrown little bites of information. They
| sound ridiculous! They are! A lot of things can sound
| ridiculous if you say them out of context. He's saying a
| lot of stuff where the listener can go "well, yeah,
| obviously we should fix that". It's the "common sense" play
| of the right wing. Yes, it's hard to disagree with. It
| might be right, and we might need to fix it. It also might
| not be the best use of our time, energy and money to fix.
| We _don 't know_ what the opportunity cost is.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| ,,Social Security isn't paying out to 150-year-olds, it's
| paying out to people whose birthdays we don't even know" is not
| exactly reassuring.
|
| How is it possible that the db contains records with such a
| vital datum missing? How is it possible that SSNs aren't
| unique? I can't come up with an explanation that doesn't boil
| down to either negligence or fraud.
| tgv wrote:
| How is it possible that your code contains bugs? I think that
| question may have the same answer.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Looks like you never touched any system with real life data
|
| Edit: the link below gives more information on ssns. SSNs so
| far been unique, but there are some issues
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Thats not how SSNs are supposed to work at all.
| zettabomb wrote:
| SSNs are not reused: https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html
| raverbashing wrote:
| Thanks, very informative link
| Yoric wrote:
| I don't know how it happens in the US, but in France,
| during several years, I had an error-code SSN. My papers
| had been misfiled at birth, due to the unreadable writing
| of the cleric who recorded my birth, and it took 2-3
| years to fix this.
|
| This error-code SSN was full of 0s, so obviously shared
| with others.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if some migrants waiting for
| confirmation of paperwork also had some shared temporary
| special-code SSN.
| throwanem wrote:
| You ask in effect: 'How is it that a data collection
|
| - whose cardinality is well into the hundreds of millions,
| likely close to half a billion (500,000,000);
|
| - which has been maintained for now just about exactly a
| hundred years;
|
| - which predates birth certificates and birth records being
| common across large swaths of the country (not predates their
| systematization or encoding, but predates their reliable
| _existence_ );
|
| - which for a lot of its history has been maintained by hand,
|
| should come to have occasional inconsistencies?'
|
| So framed in knowledge of the Social Security
| Administration's history, I confide the question may reveal
| its own answer.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| That's not what he's asking. He's asking why there
| apparently isn't a standard process to locate and clean
| missing data through investigation, assuming that's the
| issue.
|
| Bear in mind that social security fraud is a major problem
| in many countries and impossibly old people is a usual
| indicator. The famous "blue zones" that were once studied
| for their long lived people are now believed to mostly be
| an artifact of undetected pensions fraud.
| thecopy wrote:
| >now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected
| pensions fraud
|
| Im genuinely curious about this, would you mind sharing
| references?
| throwanem wrote:
| See my nearby comment [1] with links and context on the
| study to which GP is referring. Tl;dr: the claim is not
| supported.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076455
| zettabomb wrote:
| >a standard process to locate and clean missing data
| through investigation
|
| I understood GP as saying that this data _is_ the best,
| cleanest data available. If nothing better exists, then
| record what you have. If that means some fields are
| blank, well then they 're blank - you'll have to deal
| with this for country-sized databases, one way or
| another.
| throwanem wrote:
| > That's not what he's asking. He's asking why there
| apparently isn't a standard process to locate and clean
| missing data through investigation, assuming that's the
| issue.
|
| If that's what he was trying to ask, then I have, as
| detailed above, some notes on the attempt. But the myth
| that Social Security numbers were ever designed to work
| even half-assedly well as a single national ID number
| will never die, I suppose.
|
| > Bear in mind that social security fraud is a major
| problem in many countries and impossibly old people is a
| usual indicator. The famous "blue zones" that were once
| studied for their long lived people are now believed to
| mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud.
|
| I can't really evaluate Newman's preprint [1] with much
| confidence, but it's only been out since September, and
| the Ig Nobel isn't peer review. Given also that the US
| state with the largest count of "supercentennarians" in
| Newman's data, Iowa, has a whopping _37_ [2] of them, you
| 're stretching this piece of un-peer-reviewed research
| far past anything it could reasonably be asked to support
| - hence, I suspect, the "are now believed" passive-voice
| weaseling in your claim quoted above.
|
| [1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3
|
| [2] As given "1.25e-05" (p. 5, ibid.) or 12.5 per
| million, for a population just over three million. I've
| taken the liberty of rounding down on the assumption we
| are not meant to be counting fractional
| supercentennarians.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| SSNs were designed to act as a national ID number for the
| purposes of the social security system. It's in the name.
| Why are you describing this as a "myth"? Do you think the
| people who designed that system sat down and said, right
| boys, how can we half-ass this?
|
| Peer review hardly means anything in these sorts of
| fields but seeing as you asked, the same guy has
| previously published peer-reviewed papers on fraud in
| Blue Zones research. Here's a press release with some
| references:
|
| https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/2024/sep/ucl-demographers-
| wor...
|
| _> Dr Newman has previously disproved a 2016 study
| published in Nature on extreme-age research that
| accidentally rounded off a substantial amount of its data
| to zero. His peer-reviewed paper demonstrated that if
| corrected, this error eliminated the core findings
| claiming that human lifespan had a defined limit. Then,
| Dr Newman also countered a 2018 paper which made the
| opposite claim and, in the process, demonstrated a
| theoretical result predicting that patterns in old-age
| data are likely to be dominated by errors.
|
| In investigating this theory, Dr Newman demonstrated
| fundamental and comedic mismatches between longevity
| claims and observed patterns. In the process, Dr Newman
| revealed that the well-publicised "Blue Zones" claims for
| the secrets of longevity are infallibly flawed.
|
| Dr Newman showed that the highest rates of achieving
| extreme old age are predicted by high poverty, the lack
| of birth certificates, and fewer 90-year-olds. Poverty
| and pressure to commit pension fraud were shown to be
| excellent indicators of reaching ages 100+ in a way that
| is 'the opposite of rational expectations'._
| cm2187 wrote:
| But mostly given that the primary condition for receiving
| social security is age, it doesn't inspire confidence
| that they are making payment without having any age data.
| Muromec wrote:
| They probably do have reasonabke checks in place, likely
| done manually when applying. Just because the computer
| doesn't have it in a searchable database doesn't mean the
| system as a whole doesnt know
| fallingknife wrote:
| Why would they not add a birthday to the DB after making
| the age check?
| Muromec wrote:
| I obviously can't know why, but apparently the system
| allows to keep receiving benefits without the date being
| present in the database and maybe even claim benefits
| without the date being present, which is why.
|
| Maybe the data was there initially, but was deleted or
| lost for technical reasons, for example the date was
| incomplete, e.g. only the year of birth was known, but
| not the exact day and then was dropped to null as invalid
| during some kind of upgrade.
|
| Maybe the data was not possible to enter into the system
| for technical reasons -- somebody didn't have access,
| something was down, the next shift was supposed to enter
| it once the system was back up. Maybe the same, but for
| process reasons, for example setting the date requires
| attaching the birth certificate and the birth certificate
| is lost.
|
| Maybe the data was intended to be entered, but somebody
| forgot to actually do it, was waiting for birth
| certificate to be produced, but approved the benefits
| provisionally.
|
| Maybe the birth certificate was shown to the official,
| but was of the wrong kind (handwritten extract, foreign
| document without consular legalization, damaged,
| illegible or incomplete date), so it was legit enough to
| start paying benefits but not legit enough to upload to
| the server. Maybe the date was conflicting with other
| records somehow. Maybe there was a court decision
| involved which determined eligibility for benefits but
| didn't determine exact date of birth.
|
| The key point here -- the system allows for this kind of
| inconsistency (benefits are being paid, but the date is
| not present) and relies on a human process to eventually
| reach a consistent state, but the process failed and
| nobody really cares to rectify it as long as benefits are
| being paid.
|
| That's assuming the benefits are actually paid to those
| people and the organization is not aware of this data
| issue and not investigating those people for fraud right
| now.
|
| In an organization big enough there is always this kind
| of stuff happening (see "seeing like a bank"), which is
| tolerated as long as statutory task is not compromised.
| fallingknife wrote:
| This still seems bad to me because the SSA should not be
| concerned with actual DOB, only DOB for the purposes of
| SS benefits. This will be actual verified DOB in the vast
| majority of cases, but we are talking about edge cases
| here. If the SSA determines, by whatever procedure, that
| someone is eligible for retirement benefits (meaning that
| they are determined to be over 65), it is incredibly
| sloppy not to insert some DOB in the SS DB.
| Muromec wrote:
| Of course it's sloppy to not have any date in the DB. The
| thing is -- we don't know why exactly it happened and
| what kind of procedure they follow or don't. Maybe there
| is a scan of the certificate somewhere and it's illegible
| and nobody cares, because it's not a problem really.
| Benefits are mostly being paid to people eligible and any
| effort to achieve better quality will waster more money
| than is lost to fraud. That's of course _triggering_
| every autistas mind, but so what?
|
| It could also be that entries in the DB that are complete
| are not exactly correct or even belong to real people and
| of course there is fraud and corruption going on at least
| somewhere.
| tpm wrote:
| > social security fraud is a major problem in many
| countries
|
| It is not a major problem, it is a minor problem blown
| completely out of proportions by right-wing propaganda to
| cover much bigger problems caused by power-grabbing, tax-
| evading plutocracy.
|
| > a standard process to locate and clean missing data
| through investigation
|
| What would that process look like assuming you are e.g.
| trying to establish a DOB of a person born long time ago
| in a country that does not exist anymore under wartime
| conditions? Would that be cost effective?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Inconsistencies make sense.
|
| But it also seems to fine to say "we aren't paying out any
| more money for any inconsistent records till the person
| comes forward and gives us the info to fix the records".
|
| Obviously, if such a thing is done at scale, you need to
| have the staff to handle all the phone calls etc in a
| timely manner.
| Muromec wrote:
| It's not the fault of the person, there is no legal basis
| to do so and it simply doesn't matter. Eventually
| everyobe just does anyway.
| bawolff wrote:
| Until what? The person produces records that don't exist?
|
| Someone born in a cabin in the middle of the woods 90
| years ago is not neccesarily going to have "info" to fix
| their birth records (especially if non religious, so
| there are no church records). They could give you a date,
| but they aren't going to be in a position to prove it.
| londons_explore wrote:
| In which case you review the details they can provide,
| and if it looks likely legit you re-enable it.
|
| However if their name is "bobby tables" and their date of
| birth is 35th January 1806, and their only proof of that
| is a handwritten note with star signs, you disable it
| till either more proof is provided or a court makes a
| final decision.
| throwanem wrote:
| Meanwhile here in the real world, when the US government
| arbitrarily refuses to honor its agreements - obligations
| it has in good faith entered into, and which no other
| party first violated - the dollar cracks. Only a very
| stupid American (or Englishman) wants that. I concede
| there are many very stupid Americans (and Englishmen) to
| the fore just now. They are sadly no less stupid for such
| prominence.
| a0123 wrote:
| "You just re-enable it".
|
| What world do you people live in?
|
| You do realise that the amount of "fraud" being
| discovered barely registers as a rounding error, right?
| That there is no significant amount being "wasted" here,
| right?
|
| And none of that is about government efficiency or
| "saving money". Right?
|
| Now that Elon has discovered all that fraud, how is the
| economy working out for you? How is the price of eggs
| doing? Have you finally become a millionaire now that all
| this red tape is gone? When is it supposed to happen? Why
| aren't you rich yet?
| jandrese wrote:
| You are going to demand that these very old, often
| suffering from dementia, strokes, Alzheimer's, etc...
| Americans go out to the state capital to defend their
| existence in front of a literal death panel? If they get
| their benefits cut off they die.
|
| Old people vote. There is no way Congress goes along with
| a scheme like this.
| figassis wrote:
| I assume if social security is being paid and being
| spent, someone has the ability to manage a bank account,
| and that person then has a bank account, and the bank has
| collected enough kyc info to satisfy this correct? If
| not, at least there is a person on the other side that is
| mentally able to verify their identity.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > not, at least there is a person on the other side that
| is mentally able to verify their identity.
|
| That wasn't the question though. There could be this
| verified identity, good paper trail, bank records for
| decades etc. And still exact date of birth can be unknown
| and unknowable. Data lost to the mists of time.
| a0123 wrote:
| You do a lot of assuming for people who clearly have
| never dealt with that sort of things.
|
| Crazy how people will believe the weirdest customer
| service stories (and have no problem relating because
| we've all been in a kafkaesque situation) but the second
| they can bash "the administration and civil servants" or
| "random people who get a little bit of help and are NOT
| me", all of that goes out the window and things are
| supposed to be perfect and run smoothly.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Just to bring up a parallel, there was a influx of
| migration from the Caribbean to Britain between 1948 and
| 1970. These people were wanted and welcomed. A large
| proportion were children. The only records of their
| identity were held on paper by the UK government. They
| were called the _Windrush generation_ , because the
| earliest of them crossed the ocean on HMT _Empire
| Windrush_.
|
| The UK government then LOST their paper records.
|
| In 2018, under the "hostile environment policy" set by
| Theresa May, the UK government started legally
| threatening these immigrants, and asked them to prove
| their settled status -- despite that same government
| having lost the only records that could prove that. The
| government then tried sending some "home" to countries
| they'd barely seen as a child and had zero family or
| friends in, and zero prospects.
|
| This was the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal
|
| > The March 2020 independent Windrush Lessons Learned
| Review, conducted by the inspector of constabulary Wendy
| Williams, concluded that the Home Office had shown
| "ignorance and thoughtlessness" and that what had
| happened had been "foreseeable and avoidable".
|
| Ignorance and thoughtlessness. Foreseeable and avoidable.
| Does that sound similar to what's happening today?
| thecopy wrote:
| Are we optimizing for nice and clean database table
| constraints over paying out welfare to people who need
| it?
| throwanem wrote:
| Theirs is the "foolish consistency" whatsisname was on
| about, the hobgoblin one.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm confident they don't just pay someone if their data
| is inconsistent; the database is not the only source of
| truth.
|
| The next question then becomes, how much does it cost to
| fix these inconsistencies? I'm also 99% confident that
| there's a small army of people that work to do so
| already, that is, fix and work with and around the
| inconsistencies.
| yaur wrote:
| back in the 1920s and 30s it wasn't uncommon for people
| to be born at home and social security numbers wouldn't
| have been obtained at birth because there were no social
| security numbers yet. In some cases data of birth is
| uncertain e.g. summer of 1934 or 35. IN such cases any
| written record is likely to be at least unofficial and
| more than likely non-existent.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > which predates birth certificates and birth records being
| common across large swaths of the country
|
| All true, but you underestimate severity of the problem by
| a large margin if you assume that it is confined to the
| USA, a fairly affluent and bureaucratically stable country.
|
| People in USA databases aren't necessarily born in the USA.
| Refugees by definition don't come from situations with
| stability.
| throwanem wrote:
| I can't tell what argument you're trying to advance here.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| " large swaths of the country" -> Internal to the
| country. it's worse, it's not purely an internal problem.
|
| I mean that people in USA databases aren't necessarily
| born in the USA. That the USA's record-keeping is better
| than many countries. And that many people go to the USA
| because of instability that is incompatible with good
| record-keeping. Same with UK, EU or any other western
| country.
|
| Western culture makes more of a persons "Birthday" than
| some others.
|
| I have edited the above comment to clarify.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| According to the Social Security database there are
| 20,789,589 living people over the age of 100.
|
| According to the last US census that number was about
| 90,00.
|
| Are you ok with sending social security checks to 20
| million dead people?
| loktarogar wrote:
| Do we send Social Security checks to everyone in the
| Social Security database?
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| There is a flag that marks an entry as active. If that
| flag was set to inactive, there wouldn't be an issue.
| loktarogar wrote:
| I'm not worried about Social Security knowing if everyone
| in their DB is alive or not. I am only worried about dead
| people still receiving funds. How many of those 20
| million are receiving funds?
|
| If someone is marked alive incorrectly and is not
| receiving funds, I do not care if that data is bad. It's
| not ideal, but it's not an actual problem.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Yes, the issue is if there is social security fraud, not
| if someone is incorrectly filed as alive. We will see how
| much of it was fraudulent once the suspicious database
| entries have been investigated.
| loktarogar wrote:
| So it's not 20 million checks, then?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > How is it possible that the db contains records with such a
| vital datum missing?
|
| This is a weird question. How would you even go about finding
| out an unknown date of birth? Especially when it happened >
| 50 years ago and half the world away.
|
| For whom is it "vital" ? Will it prevent me from going about
| my daily business?
|
| See also: Why are so many people born on the 1st of January?
| It's a statistically impossible number.
|
| A: Because they know their approximate year of birth, only.
| tpm wrote:
| > How is it possible that the db contains records with such a
| vital datum missing?
|
| It might not be missing, it also can be unknown and
| unknowable. There are people with their date of birth not
| recorded or recorded only approximately. It happens when the
| date is recorded on a piece of a paper in a building that
| then burns down or during natural or human-made catastrophes.
| Or it might not be recorded at all, or only some parts are
| missing (like the day of the month). Working for a different
| public administration, it's so common we have a special date
| type for that.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| Or a definitely wrong value was removed but there's nothing
| to correct it with.
|
| For example, if someone was registered with a birth date of
| 02/18/1458, or has a birth certificate with that on it.
| Bear in mind that humans make mistakes, and the people who
| issue birth certificates or type them up are humans.
| 02/18/1458 is patently wrong, but what do you do? Just
| guess that someone misread a 9 as a 4? What if the person
| in front of you is clearly too young (or old) to have been
| born in 1958?
|
| You can't just revoke someone's social security because
| someone screwed up.
| jandrese wrote:
| You think it is not possible that people born in homesteads
| in the 1920s and 1930s in rural and isolated communities
| don't have birth records? Or immigrants from countries that
| didn't have paper birth records?
| sensanaty wrote:
| I know a few people that don't have an official birth date.
| My brother in law is Papuan and no one in his village has an
| official birth year or date since they just don't keep track
| of it, so when he got his first official government ID at a
| much later stage of his life, he chose an arbitrary date
| cause it means nothing to him. He's probably around 35-40,
| but his birthday says he's in his 60s.
|
| It's not all that rare even in the West, especially for older
| people. Records get lost or never get collected in the first
| place.
| nkrisc wrote:
| My grandmother was born in the 1930s in Chicago (second most
| populous US city at the time) and she never even knew exactly
| what year she was born in. It's fairly common.
| a0123 wrote:
| Yeah, who's ever heard of an incomplete database or a
| database that barely holds together and has had to have weird
| adjustments done to it in order to avoid fucking up other
| bits of data?
|
| We can tell you've never touched a database or worked in
| tech.
|
| Not that there is any shame in that. But the same way I keep
| my opinion to myself when my doctor gives me my diagnosis,
| people who have never handled a database really should follow
| that advice.
|
| A local library can barely keep its database straight and
| it's very slightly easier than a database containing millions
| of people's information. Dozens of millions.
| figassis wrote:
| Problem with this is, if or when they are proven wrong, it will
| be very privately, no one will ever hear about it. It will be
| lost in the noise of "we found lots of fraud". And no one will
| be able to get as straight an answer as the accusation. So no
| actual consequences for difamation. If feel like this is an
| issue with all politicians. They accuse very loudly, admit
| wrongdoing very quietly or never.
| aredox wrote:
| Reminder that Musk once wrote an email to buzzfeed stating ""I
| suggest that you call people you know in Thailand, find out
| what's actually going on and stop defending child rapists, you
| fucking asshole", about Vernon Unsworth, the man who saved 12
| children from dying in the Tham Luang cave. He had no proof and
| went on to accuse him of not even being a diver.
|
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-thai-...
| https://www.ccn.com/5-saucy-elon-musk-revelations-in-explosi...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| And then won a legal case by arguing that it was just a
| generic insult not a specific allegation (and having
| expensive lawyers).
| rcbdev wrote:
| What are you saying or referring to? The Stackexchange posting
| you're replying to does not refer to the U.S. government at all
| as far as I can tell. How do you connect the link you're
| responding to to the White House at all?
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| https://nypost.com/video/elon-musk-claims-some-recipients-
| of...
| dathinab wrote:
| Musk doesn't care about
|
| - correctness of information
|
| - completeness of information
|
| - nounces of formulation
|
| - accidental misleading people
|
| he has more then once verbatim repeated or re-posted conspiracy
| theories, including trivially disprovable which also don't pass
| the common sense check (i.e things you only "fall" for if you
| either act extremely reckless and negligent or intentionally
| fall for it as it pushes your ideology no matter how wrong it
| is)
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I like this comment:
|
| _----
|
| There was a time when data structures were made to fit purpose,
| not compilers. Having a look at the subject, shows clearly the
| constrains for valid dates: Social Security was
| introduced in 1935. To be eligible for benefits one had
| to pay in at least 40 quarters, that's 10 years
| be at least 65 years old
|
| This means the first regular beneficiaries of social security
| payments were 65 in 1945, aka of the 1880 cohort. Virtually noone
| participating in this system can be born before 1880. Anyone
| older will not most likely not be a beneficiary, and anyone
| younger (aka still paying in) will be, well, younger.
|
| So add another 5 years for wiggle room and we end at a nice round
| 1875 as earliest year for any birthday to be recorded.
|
| A perfect rational base for a date entry, isn't it?
|
| ----_
|
| The "COBOL doesn't work like that" comments are missing the
| forest for the trees: This is a _very_ old system with bespoke
| coding to match legislation, not legislation to match compiler
| default behaviour.
|
| Fundamentally, unless a government employee that has worked
| directly on this codebase speaks up, we're all just guessing.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| However, the MUMPS programming language (which is still commonly
| used in various medical stuff) does use December 31, 1840 as its
| epoch. (It doesn't have a separate date _type_ , but it does have
| date-handling functions which operate on numbers and use this as
| the epoch.)
| totallynothoney wrote:
| It's gonna be hilarious if: this is a data entry error (1957?),
| the payments are to a surviving widow because the dates just fit
| [0][1], simply the query was wrong, or more probably Musk just
| lied.
|
| [0].
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_...
| [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_May_Fuller
| dashundchen wrote:
| Why are we taking Musk at his word when his current MO is to cast
| doubt and mistrust on government spending?
|
| Musk, Trump and the admin have already been pushing so many
| outright lies via their propaganda channels. Despite being
| deunked the lies are repeated nonstop.
|
| The lie that USAID spent $50 million on condoms in Gaza (the
| money was for running hospitals) for example.
|
| Or the lie about funding an opera about a transgender woman (the
| money was for a university in Columbia, unrelated to a
| performance put on at the school).
|
| They are spewing lies left and right. Lies go twice around the
| block before the truth has put its pants on.
|
| Why should we believe him on this?
| EdiX wrote:
| > Or the lie about funding an opera about a transgender woman
| (the money was for a university in Columbia, unrelated to a
| performance put on at the school).
|
| You've got that wrong. The grant to fund the opera exists: http
| s://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_SCO20021GR3086_19....
| Specifically the grant was given "to raise awareness and
| increase the transgender representation through the opera As
| One, by American composer Laura Kaminsky".
|
| The lie in this case would be that USAID awarded the grant, it
| was awarded by the Department of State instead.
| roshin wrote:
| This is why I like hn. Many times I read about all of the
| horrible things that the current administration does. Due to so
| many cases where I know the news is wrong I stopped trusting
| anything. However, I feel like here I can let my guard down a bit
| and be more certain that a specific criticism is true.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >that a specific criticism is true
|
| Or false, in this case.
| paulsutter wrote:
| Here's a tweet from Elon with a table of ages of all people
| marked not deceased who are collecting social security
|
| (hint: there is a smooth trend of people of all ages up to 199,
| so the 1875 thing was pure misdirection)
|
| https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076?s=46&t=NN3...
| qingcharles wrote:
| This comment definitely needs to be bumped up. It adds extra
| data to the mystery.
|
| Here's the raw data: Age Range,Count
| 0-9,38825456 10-19,44326480 20-29,47995478
| 30-39,52106915 40-49,47626581 50-59,45740805
| 60-69,46381281 70-79,33404412 80-89,15165127
| 90-99,6054154 100-109,4734407 110-119,3627007
| 120-129,3472849 130-139,3936311 140-149,3542044
| 150-159,1345083 160-169,121807 170-179,6087
| 180-189,695 190-199,448 200-209,879
| 210-219,866 220-229,1039 240-249,1 360-369,1
|
| Bar plot of data:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/34Y5BSv
| bloomingkales wrote:
| If you assume all the non-deceased (as marked in the DB) are
| still getting a SS check, then simply tallying up 65+ amounts
| to a 8 trillion dollar social security payout annually. We
| are definitely not paying that.
|
| My guess is the deceased flag is different from the "eligible
| for payout" flag, or that flag is determined on another join.
| They spoke too quickly, which is a common human error.
|
| Someone else smarter run some experiments.
| ipv6ipv4 wrote:
| This is the smoking gun that Musk has no understanding of
| what he's looking at. A competent engineer would look at
| these numbers, recognize that they don't match payments,
| and shut up until they figure out the bigger picture that
| can explain everything they see.
|
| Instead, he raced to tweet it. This is just dumb.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Agree.
|
| Some professional auditors on Reddit were saying how
| often they go into a business and find a bunch of stuff
| that immediately looks like fraud, then they go interview
| knowledgeable employees and find a ton of weird
| accounting edge cases which explains all the out-of-
| bounds stuff.
|
| But.. it sounds much better to the population if you
| scream that you found $8Tn a year in fraud.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Quick Google search says 1.6 trillion will be paid this
| year.
| cafard wrote:
| If I understand the post, these are persons who are marked not
| deceased--it is not stated that they are receiving money,
| though it may be implied. For example, there are some persons
| under ten years of age who are receiving Social Security
| benefits, as having lost one or two parents (survivor
| benefits). The number certainly does not amount to 39 million.
| jotux wrote:
| From this: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076
|
| The sum of groups age 60-89: 94,950,820
|
| The sum of all groups age 60-369: 121,794,498
|
| From this: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/OASDIbenies.html
|
| Number of beneficiaries receiving benefits on Dec 31, 2024:
| 68,455,973
| noobermin wrote:
| I love how everyone is talking technical details whilst ignoring
| where it came from. This eliding of context and focusing on a
| technical question is a great way for people trying to cope with
| either stress if you're against it or with criticism if you're
| for it.
| hans_castorp wrote:
| I worked on a COBOL system in the early 90s that stored a one-
| digit year :)
|
| However, the records were never stored for more than 4 years, so
| this was never a problem.
| gsck wrote:
| Who needs just one Y2K when you can have one every 10 years!
| jamesrom wrote:
| Musk said: "Crazy things like just cursory examination of Social
| Security and we've got people in there that are 150 years old."
|
| He qualified this claim as a "cursory examination". It's clearly
| a comment about the quality of the data and systems. That this is
| the kind of thing that would be prone to fraud.
|
| Before you hit downvote, please provide evidence that you didn't
| hallucinate Musk's claims here.
| pavlov wrote:
| But then he goes around saying he actually found massive
| evidence of fraud. It's not like he tweets: "Guys, my
| admittedly cursory examination gave me a feeling this old
| system which I've never seen before could be prone to fraud."
|
| What proof does he (or you) even have that a COBOL system is
| particularly prone to fraud? The world's most important banks
| still run many things on COBOL. Are you saying that bank
| mainframes are full of IT fraud?
| jamesrom wrote:
| Who said a COBOL system is prone to fraud?
|
| Incomplete and inaccurate data is prone to fraud. Talking
| about COBOL is missing the point.
| pavlov wrote:
| The point is that a date set to 1875 is actually a null in
| COBOL.
|
| It doesn't mean the data is missing or inaccurate, any more
| than a null reference in Java means your program is going
| to segfault. It simply indicates that the data is not
| present in this scope.
|
| If Musk was posting: "Guys I just discovered they have tons
| of null checks in their code here, that's obviously an
| indication of fraud!" -- would that make any sense to you?
| spullara wrote:
| Y'all are trying to be very specific about this 150 year old
| thing when there are vast number of people with ages above 100
| that are in the database:
|
| https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076
| ... 100-109 4,734,407 110-119 3,627,007
| 120-129 3,472,849 130-139 3,936,311 140-149
| 3,542,044 150-159 1,345,083 160-169 121,807
| 170-179 6,087 180-189 695 190-199 448
| 200-209 879 210-219 866 220-229 1,039
| 240-249 1 360-369 1
| gloflo wrote:
| And that means what?
|
| Data values are nothing without the exact context in which they
| were created and the exact context in which they are used.
| That's like level 1 data analysis.
|
| Publishing such data without context is deceitful.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| How is it published without context? We know that this is the
| age field from the social security system. And that the query
| omits records that are recorded as dead. Therefore, the
| social security system in America has records that claimed to
| be for people who are alive for whom the date of birth field
| is incompatible with that status. That seems like quite a lot
| of context, actually.
|
| I don't know why some people are finding it so hard to accept
| that there is likely to be fraud in this system. Look into
| the determined origins of the so called blue zones to see
| that every country has problems with this, albeit some more
| than others. It's the government giving out free money, so
| naturally it attracts very sophisticated fraud schemes and
| civil servants are rarely motivated to track it down and
| investigate properly.
| troupo wrote:
| How many of those are test data, simple clerical errors
| (and how many of those are already in the process of being
| rectified), and how many of those are in actual use (e.g.
| how many actually use those SSNs in the wild)?
|
| This is the important missing context. Musk can and does
| _claim_ a lot. He rarely, if ever, provides any evidence or
| context. And none of his or his team 's actions can be
| verified or monitored.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| He does. That's what started this thread: he provided
| evidence and context to back up his claims of widespread
| government waste and fraud. What that got him was a bunch
| of smears from people spreading misinformation about
| COBOL.
|
| Anyone else in the world would just stop sharing stuff
| publicly given this kind of public abuse. There's no
| requirement to do so. But Musk just shared evidence and
| context again, by showing the output of the equivalent of
| SELECT GROUP(age), COUNT(*) FROM SSNS WHERE DEAD = FALSE:
|
| https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076
|
| It shows approx 1.3 million SSNs in the 150-159 age
| bucket, along with many millions more that are actually
| over that age, and over 1000 SSNs allocated to people
| over 200 years old, including one that is for someone
| marked as 360-369 years old. There are over 20M people
| listed as 100+ years old. Total sum is around 395M
| people. Therefore there is no 1875 epoch and that claim
| was simply misinformation.
|
| So here's what we know given his statements:
|
| 1. There are a lot of data entry errors in the SSN
| database.
|
| 2. These aren't test data, misinterpretations of an
| epoch, etc.
|
| 3. Such errors are extremely common and not being
| rectified.
|
| 4. Many SSNs aren't unique.
|
| 5. There are far more records in the database than people
| in America.
|
| If we combine those statements with prior knowledge of
| other related topics, we can infer:
|
| * The data quality issues are much more extensive than
| just age and number of records.
|
| * Whatever processes are meant to ensure data quality
| don't work.
|
| * This was not previously known to the public.
|
| * Civil servants know all this but are often unable to do
| anything.
|
| We also know that this situation is expected. It would be
| much more crazy if Musk announced his team couldn't find
| fraud in SS. Just look at the graph for payouts from the
| American disability benefits system - it tracks general
| economic performance. Other countries don't see such a
| thing in their payouts, where improving economic
| conditions magically make long term disabilities
| disappear, but they also tend to be more aggressive at
| cracking down on benefits fraud. The UK did a big purge
| some years ago where every single person claiming
| disability benefits was re-assessed.
|
| Anytime someone comes in and does basic checks of
| government finance systems they always find lots of very
| basic stuff. At one point it was discovered, again in
| Britain, that a Labour council was regularly paying
| invoices multiple times and nobody had noticed for years.
| Paying money out to dead or non-existent people is a
| common problem in all such systems.
| camjw wrote:
| Given the pretty large scale fraud here, do you expect
| people to go to prison for this? In the case that no-one
| is prosecuted and no-one goes to prison, how would you
| update your opinion on this story and on Elon in general?
| Amezarak wrote:
| Not speaking for GP, but even if this story is 100% true,
| why would you think anyone would go to prison? Obviously,
| nobody wants to clog up the court system with cases like
| this, and the people are probably not wealthy enough to
| fine or even claw the money back. I would just expect it
| to be terminated. Fraud like this is almost never
| prosecuted.
|
| The only exception I'd see is if there are people who
| have somehow gamed the system to collect multiple
| payments at once.
| troupo wrote:
| It's not a "large scale fraud". This is:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_C._Conn?wprov=sfti1
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| His last name being "Conn" is very apt.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| I think it's important to maintain curiosity rather than
| assume "pretty large scale fraud" here. It seems very
| likely that the vast majority of these old records are
| not actually receiving active benefits, and even the few
| that are may have valid reasons (ex living younger
| spouses).
|
| https://xcancel.com/ThatsMauvelous/status/189135619250239
| 902...
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| > 5. There are far more records in the database than
| people in America.
|
| Isn't that entirely expected? Someone coming to the US on
| a work visa gets assigned an SSN, works for some time and
| then leaves.
| swores wrote:
| Plus when someone dies, they're more likely to set
| "dead=1" or similar than to just delete all records about
| them immediately.
| troupo wrote:
| > He does.
|
| He doesn't. All he has shown is a list and claimed what
| he claimed. Based on that alone you're ready to expound a
| full theory spanning several pages of text.
|
| And most of that text is trying to guess and to fill in
| the context. None of your guesses are correct until shown
| otherwise, and he hasn't shown anything except this list.
|
| And yet we already know from his team's actions how
| reckless they are and how far from the truth are the many
| claims they make.
| maweaver wrote:
| Being in a database with "dead = false" is not the same
| thing as being "on social security" (as in, receiving
| money from the program). Sure it's a starting point for
| investigation, but it's not by itself evidence of
| widespread fraud.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I'm surprised on a comment section full of software
| engineers this isn't more obvious. Whether or not your
| receive the benefit would be business logic, why would
| that be implemented in a data base?
| acdha wrote:
| > Such errors are extremely common and not being
| rectified.
|
| Two things to consider here: the first is that we don't
| know if those records are actually tied to checks being
| sent, and we don't know whether they're linked to people
| who are still living (older men marrying younger women
| wasn't uncommon). Anyone who's worked on systems like
| this knows that you often have to review the entire
| record and the code which uses it because over the
| decades coders overloaded other fields on a fixed-size
| record.
|
| The other thing to keep in mind is that most federal
| agencies have been underfunded for decades and government
| systems have to be more careful about false positives
| than false negatives. If they flag someone's record as
| fraudulent and stop sending checks, that might mean some
| 90 year old gets evicted or can't get the medical care
| they need, which is both inhumane and also a big
| political risk if their representatives or the media pick
| up the story. If you don't have the staff to dig into
| data correction, it's much safer to continue sending a
| small amount of money than to cut them off when you don't
| have a confirmation of death.
|
| Quoting the generally critical IG report:
|
| > Approximately 18.4 million (98 percent) numberholders
| are not currently receiving SSA payments and have not had
| earnings reported to SSA in the past 50 years (see Table
| 2).
|
| > The fact that these individuals were age 100 or older,
| had no earnings in the past 50 years, and received no SSA
| payments indicates they are deceased.
|
| https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Yes, they're trying to figure out the actual money flows
| at the moment. Musk just tweeted that the payment files
| sent to the Treasury don't reconcile with the other
| databases, so it's just going to be a huge mess working
| out what's really going on.
|
| The IG report you link is very useful! It confirms a lot
| of what Musk has posted about the age buckets in the
| database, proving there was never any misunderstanding of
| the schema or epochs.
|
| It does also say that many of the numbers without
| accurate death data aren't being used to pay out, which
| is why the SSA doesn't bother fixing them (which leads to
| the question of what did cause the payouts to stop?). So,
| the bad age/death data doesn't automatically imply
| pensions fraud.
|
| Nonetheless the OIG is in Musk's corner here (as of July
| 2023). The reason is that even if SSA isn't paying out
| their death data is used by the rest of the US government
| to stop fraudulent payouts for benefits programmes after
| death, and so the SSA not bothering to ensure data
| quality opens up the rest of the government to fraud even
| if we accept their claim that it's not causing them
| problems directly. The OIG writes, _" SSA has not
| established controls to annotate death information on the
| Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum
| reasonable life expectancies ... Death information
| missing from the Numident and the [death master file]
| hampers both SSA and Government-wide efforts to prevent
| and detect fraud and misuse"_.
| troupo wrote:
| Let's go back to the original-ish discussion.
|
| So, it was just data without context. And the important
| context is:
|
| - the issues with this data isn't unknown
|
| - this data has already been investigated
|
| - Musk's claims can be charitably called exaggerations.
| Quote from the report that you say "is in Musk's court":
| "We acknowledge that almost none of the numberholders
| discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments"
| enragedcacti wrote:
| Those are all reasonable inferences only if _you are very
| confident that you have the whole picture_. We (you, me,
| and elon) obviously do not given that THIS WAS ALREADY
| INVESTIGATED under Biden and under Obama before that!
| Inferences 3 and 4 definitely wrong and 1 and 2 are
| suspect as well.
|
| https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
|
| >Other countries don't see such a thing in their payouts,
| where improving economic conditions magically make long
| term disabilities disappear
|
| I don't know much about this but this could easily be
| explained by policy differences. The US has extremely
| strict income limits around disability:
|
| > If you continue to work, your condition must also limit
| you from earning income above an amount we call
| "substantial gainful activity" (SGA). In 2024, SGA is
| $1,550 per month
|
| We literally quantify disability by economic output, it
| would be insane not to expect disabilities to "disappear"
| when the economy improves and pay rises. Does that mean
| there is little to no fraud? Of course not, I know that I
| don't know enough to claim that.
|
| Both of these are great examples of the limits of this
| "first principles" approach to complex legal and social
| systems, and everyone should be extremely skeptical of
| someone like Elon who is seemingly incapable of the self-
| reflection necessary to realize he might not have the
| whole picture.
| contravariant wrote:
| It all boils down to what you consider more likely. Someone
| not quite understanding the data they're looking at or that
| nobody noticed several tens of millions of dead people
| receiving social security.
|
| Whichever it is I would be very careful before making any
| grand public statements about it. And as far as fraud goes
| this doesn't sound anywhere near sophisticated.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Those aren't the only two possibilities.
|
| I guess it depends on how much prior knowledge someone
| has of such problems. The correct explanation isn't
| "nobody noticed", it's "people noticed but could
| not/would not do anything about it". But how much you
| know about these problems will depend where you get your
| news from. If you never read right wing sources, you
| aren't exposed to stories about benefits/grants fraud as
| places like the Guardian or CNN just don't cover it, so
| all this will appear fantastical and absurd. If you're
| used to such stories then it all seems plausible and
| normal.
|
| These types of things usually have some aspects in
| common. One is that front line workers, when asked in a
| safe environment, will give enormous estimates for how
| much of their payout is fraudulent. The people who are in
| denial about it are usually the people at the top, not
| the bottom. They don't ask, nobody tells, they don't want
| to know because they'll be held accountable for it and
| they fundamentally, ideologically, do not care about
| waste or inefficiency, viewing it as preferable to even
| one innocent person not getting their money.
|
| I can't find it now but Musk has alleged similar things;
| he got private estimates from civil servants that 50% of
| the payouts from their department were probably fraud of
| some kind (it might not have been SS, I don't remember),
| and that the staff in charge of blocking payments at the
| Treasury were told to never do so. This kind of thing is
| what you'd expect. Often the front line civil servants
| are frustrated by this situation, as it's their taxes
| being wasted too. It's the people at the top who cover it
| up.
| contravariant wrote:
| And in what scenario would it be a good idea to give all
| defrauders a heads-up instead of going after potentially
| millions of them?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Those two aren't incompatible! When you discover
| financial fraud - in any context - you send the evidence
| that alerted you to the fraud to the police so they can
| build a prosecution case, and then cut off the money.
| Stopping the money flow doesn't stop anyone from
| prosecuting fraud that happened in the past.
| contravariant wrote:
| What worries me is that neither of those are mentioned to
| have taken place.
|
| And if they had I would expect more detailed 'proof' than
| the single simplest SQL query one could think of.
|
| Or actually I wouldn't expect any public statements at
| all. Scoring quick political points is nowhere near worth
| endangering the legal cases. Which could not be anywhere
| close to even identifying the alleged fraudsters in such
| a short amount of time.
|
| You seem quite happy to find reasons for something you
| expected to be true. Like I was happy to know he made a
| silly mistake with epochs.
|
| Excited by this I quickly tried and unfortunately
| succeeded to falsify that information. Could you do me a
| favour and try the same with your read of events?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Well it wouldn't be SQL they used as Musk tweeted
| recently when someone mentioned SQL that:
|
| > "This retard thinks the government uses SQL"
|
| URL provided because if the country can be saved your
| first reaction should still be "No way that actually
| happened!", but it did:
|
| https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889062581848944961
|
| Tweet submitted for HN discussion here :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43078219
| contravariant wrote:
| Skepticism is obviously going to be my first response.
|
| I was arguing it should be yours as well.
|
| And you seem to want to go off-topic, again, but what
| idiot would believe the U.S. government _doesn 't_ use
| SQL? The U.S. government is the direct _cause_ of the
| creation of SQL.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I think you might be assuming I'm a different poster,
| though not sure.
|
| I just thought that when debating whether the information
| provided by Musk was a simple SQL statement, and the
| general weight to put on it, the fact that he recently
| confidently stated that the government don't use SQL was
| a relevant bit of info to use when we weigh up
| alternative hypotheses.
| contravariant wrote:
| Ah sorry, I did confuse you with the other person I was
| talking to. That explains the shift in topics. Really
| whether it was SQL or not is still irrelevant, hence my
| rather sharp tone.
|
| I still stand by the other things I said though.
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| He is a liar and cannot be trusted. He's lied about his
| past, being caught saying that his wealth didn't come
| from his family's emerald mine. He lied about his long
| support for apartheid and his general racism. He's been
| lying about full self driving for most of his tenure at
| Tesla. He lied about being a founder of Tesla. He lied
| about making Twitter better when he bought it and
| destroyed 75% of its value. And he's lying about any
| fraud at SSA.
|
| Why on earth would you believe a serial liar?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| It doesn't endanger any future legal cases to post stats
| from the database. Governments have done such audits
| before and it never caused any issues for prosecution of
| specific cases.
|
| What we're discussing here is a bunch of tweets, not a
| legal case put before a judge. Musk is often throwing
| around the word fraud to mean something like "we were
| told the money would be spent on wells in Africa but it's
| actually being given to newspapers" and similar things
| which probably wouldn't be considered fraud in a
| courtroom, but people know what he means.
|
| I'm happy to double check specific claims, but I'm not
| sure what you're uncertain about. You're arguing that if
| you discover fraud you have to continuing giving the
| fraudsters money until the guy finally shows up in court?
| Or is found guilty? I don't quite know how or why I'd
| double check that because that's not how the law works
| and it would be silly if it did.
| abrahamepton wrote:
| Assuming that the age field is the only thing being used
| for determining payouts is really wildly naive. If you
| wanted to game SSA, this would be the dumbest and
| easiest-to-catch way to do it. Your other garbage about
| how frontline worker estimates of fraud being large means
| the fraud itself must be large bespeak a silly person
| who's already reached the conclusion he wants. All your
| conspiracy theorizing sounds like a person marinating in
| right wing garbage news sites for a while. Sorry to your
| family.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Dumb and easy to catch, yes you're right, and yet it
| happens all the time. An example from the UK [1]:
|
| _(Feb 2025) Bereaved families asked to return pension
| overpayments
|
| Over the past five years, the DWP mistakenly paid more
| than PS500m in state pensions and pension credits to the
| deceased, recovering about half from bereaved relatives._
|
| They can't prosecute this because it's not fraud if
| someone just gives you money and then later realizes it
| was a mistake. So they must resort to asking the families
| if they'd kindly return the money.
|
| You say the age field isn't the only thing being used to
| determine payouts - obviously that's true, there is also
| the is_dead field. These systems are about giving you
| money after a certain age until you die. If those fields
| are inaccurate then the money paid out will also be
| inaccurate.
|
| It's unfortunate you got so personal at the end there.
| There's no conspiracy being theorized anywhere here. Just
| a lack of care when it comes to other people's money.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9w5eeexex9o
| notachatbot123 wrote:
| Context would be _for example_ knowing how the code around
| the data handles those values. Some numbers in a database
| do not in any way imply real world effects.
| hyperpape wrote:
| It does seem to me that logically, you have two choices:
|
| 1) Take the numbers at face value. In that case, you are
| predicting millions of accusations of fraud and an enormous
| number of prosecutions in the next year or two.
|
| 2) the situation is somehow more complicated, and most of
| those millions of records with 140+ ages do not represent
| fraudulent activity.
|
| P.S. Mentioning the blue zones is incredibly silly. Those
| regions have modest numbers of individuals being reported
| in the 100-120 age range, which probably are fraudulent.
| None of those areas have millions being reported to be
| 140+. For instance, Sardinia had 13 reported centenarians
| per 100,000 population, which would be equivalent to
| ~39,000 centenarians in the US. So it's orders of magnitude
| less than this database shows.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Or the third choice:
|
| (3) The data quality is so bad that there is no way to
| reliably know if a case is fraudulent or not without an
| investigation so expensive the ROI is negative, so
| everything remains unclear and unresolved forever.
|
| That's usually how it goes with cases like these.
| Sometimes there are gangs who organize large scale fraud
| against the system and those might attract the attention
| of prosecutors, but people not reporting a death or
| double payment or similar isn't worth it. There might
| never be a clear answer to how the database got into this
| state. But the basic point stands that data quality for a
| critical dataset is really low in obvious ways, so what
| about all the non-obvious ways?
|
| I mentioned blue zones because there are a lot of people
| on this thread who are really having a hard time
| believing there can be problems as obvious as people who
| have died but continue receiving payments in social
| security schemes. Blue zones is just an easily searchable
| keyword to learn more about other times when it's
| happened at scale, e.g.
|
| _In 2010, the Japanese government announced that 82
| percent of its citizens reported to be over 100 had
| already died.
|
| In 2012, Greece announced that it had discovered that 72
| percent of its centenarians claiming pensions - some
| 9,000 people - were already dead.
|
| Puerto Rico's government said in 2010 that it would
| replace all existing birth certificates due to concerns
| about widespread fraud and identity theft._
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/26/the-secret-of-
| blue-...
|
| Obviously nobody is claiming the database reflects
| reality. Governments often have multiple data sources
| that are badly out of alignment. A census can give more
| accurate data, but that doesn't mean SS is synced to it.
| For instance, in the UK during COVID, more people came
| forward in some age ranges for a COVID vaccine than
| theoretically existed in the country at all. The UK's
| population data is so badly screwed up that people
| started using the quantity of NHS numbers issued instead
| to try and estimate it.
| gloflo wrote:
| There is zero proof that what was quoted is actually
| cause for any payouts. The examples you cite are likely
| not similar at all.
| hyperpape wrote:
| That sure sounds like (2), just restated.
|
| It would still be incredibly dishonest for Musk to say
| based on these numbers that this is the largest fraud in
| history.
|
| > In 2010, the Japanese government announced that 82
| percent of its citizens reported to be over 100 had
| already died.
|
| > In 2012, Greece announced that it had discovered that
| 72 percent of its centenarians claiming pensions - some
| 9,000 people - were already dead.
|
| Those numbers are three to four orders of magitude
| smaller than the ones we're discussing. Even factoring in
| the US being 30 times larger than Greece, we would have
| less than half a million pensioners if the proportion is
| similar.
|
| The fact is, Elon found a number and waved it around like
| a red flag. And both of us are smart enough[0] to know
| that it doesn't mean what he says it means. But for some
| reason, you're insisting on defending the original
| deceptive tweets.
|
| [0] I mean that genuinely! I've read your posts on
| garbage collection. And in this discussion I take it
| you're recognizing that those millions of records are
| likely overwhelming not fraudulent.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Well, thank you for the compliment :)
|
| There's slippage of claims here, maybe. It's clearly not
| the case that every record with wrong data is fraudulent,
| and I don't think Musk believes or said that (though
| maybe he did, the dude tweets all the time). We certainly
| agree that it isn't the case.
|
| The claims being made as I understand it are that the US
| SSDB has a lot of obviously wrong data in it, that bad
| age data is frequently a sign of fraud as proven by the
| audits of other countries, the age data is genuinely bad
| and not a result of misunderstandings, and therefore that
| Musk is likely correct when he argues there is a lot of
| fraud in the system.
|
| What does "a lot" mean? It's vague but clearly not 100%.
| At the same time, if the numbers do transfer then less
| than half a million people fraudulently claiming pensions
| is quite a lot! And that would be just one source of
| fraud, one of the easiest to detect without effort. There
| will be plenty of people under the age of 100 who have
| died and weren't registered either, or people who never
| existed and so on. So whether we're talking millions, or
| a million, or even with a very restricted criteria less
| than half a million. In ordinary English, it's a lot.
| hyperpape wrote:
| I wasn't kidding about the "biggest fraud" line. It's not
| an exaggeration, he's just that full of crap.
|
| Direct quote from Musk:
|
| "Yes, there are FAR more 'eligible' social security
| numbers than there are citizens in the USA.
|
| This might be the biggest fraud in history."[0]
|
| The worst part is that there's already a public report
| about these social security numbers. And it genuinely
| makes the SSA look bad, but it also makes clear that very
| few of these accounts ever received payments, and of
| those that did, they were generally cut off around a
| decade ago.[1] Does Musk know about the report? Does he
| care?
|
| If someone wanted to come in and clean house and say "you
| have to do better" I can imagine there's a case to be
| made there. That's not what's happening, though.
|
| [0] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891357918605332965
|
| [1] https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Now I'm curious what the biggest fraud in history
| actually is!
| mmusson wrote:
| Another thing is that COBOL records commonly have complicated
| unions (to save space) where a separate code affects how you
| interpret the fields. You need to understand all the business
| logic to make sure you are reading the data correctly.
| kolinko wrote:
| With "death" flag set to false - sure. But are they collecting
| benefits / are they active in any way? Otherwise it's just that
| the death may not have been recorded.
|
| If Elon Musk wanted to be honest, he should've published a
| statistic like that, but with SSNs that seem still active.
|
| There were around ~1M (if not more) unidentified bodies found
| in the States over the last 100 years. On top of that, before
| digitisation, you've had mistakes in filling the data, lost
| documents and a ton of other possible causes for not marking
| someone as dead in SSN. As long as they are not collecting
| benefits, it's more hassle to fix than it's worth.
|
| In a bit similar spirit - in Poland we're considering turning
| public health insurance into just a tax, and doing blanket
| assumption that every citizen has health insurance. Since we
| have less than 1% uninsured, the costs of tracking and
| verification are comparable/higher than just giving "free"
| insurance to the remaining 1%.
| delusional wrote:
| > If Elon Musk wanted to be honest,
|
| Elon and his fans don't think this way. They don't consider
| it dishonest to publish misleading information (it's "just
| the fact").
|
| If Elon wanted to be truthful and thorough, he would actually
| do some analysis. It's quite clear that he doesn't care about
| either of those things though and just immediately tweets
| whatever the 20 years olds with laptops send him.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| This is good info. The histogram definitively disproves the
| COBOL theory.
|
| It's always good to respond to odd things with curiosity rather
| than cynicism.
|
| It also seems clear that the vast majority of these old records
| are not collecting benefits, and even the few that are may have
| valid reasons (ex living younger spouses)
|
| https://xcancel.com/ThatsMauvelous/status/189135619250239902...
| enilakla wrote:
| It seems that for a lot of people, that source isn't reputable
| (e.g. they would want to see more than a screenshot a guy posts
| on his website to know the situation is as you described).
| tayo42 wrote:
| This list adds up to 20million
|
| 60 million receive social security from age
| https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/OASDIbenies.html
|
| 1/3 of recipients are fake death fraud?
|
| There's about 60million from cenus data between the age of
| 60-85...
|
| Does no one think critically?
| mint2 wrote:
| Nah, many people willfully and gleefully put blinders on when
| presented a thin veneer of a statement if it supports what
| they want to be true.
|
| As you point out, Elon's stats don't even pass a cursory
| snuff test in regards to what he's trying to imply, but his
| champions don't bat an eye.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Y 'all are trying to be very specific about this 150 year
| old thing when there are vast number of people with ages above
| 100 that are in the database:_
|
| You may wish to read the SSA Inspector General audit report,
| "Numberholders Age 100 or Older Who Did Not Have Death
| Information on the Numident.":
|
| * https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
|
| > _It 's a gripping read. It tells me, for instance, that 98
| percent of these folks have received no payments._
|
| * https://twitter.com/justinwolfers/status/1891516202612060438
|
| The report states:
|
| > _SSA determined the estimated $5.5 to $9.7 million in
| expenditures to correct these errors was too costly to
| implement and that the effort would have limited benefit to the
| administration of SSA programs. We acknowledge that almost none
| of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive
| SSA payments. However, SSA issued each of these individuals a
| valid SSN and these SSNs could allow for a wide range of
| potential abuse._
|
| So it would cost several million dollars to correct the
| database to prevent less than several million from going out.
|
| Once again, perhaps the government knows what it's doing, these
| "discoveries" are not new or surprisingly, and that a cost-
| benefit analysis has already been done.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Elon Musk is a liar with no credibility whatsoever. Don't believe
| anything he says.
| Devasta wrote:
| Whether or not Musk is right about 150 year olds getting Social
| Security doesn't matter, he just wants to destroy the
| administrative state. So long as that happens, they'll be
| perfectly happy with the outcome even if they get proven wrong on
| some technicalities later.
|
| Prove Musk wrong on this and he'll just go about his day as
| normal; 20 minutes later there'll be someone tweeting an unhinged
| screed about how the US government is spending 10 trillion this
| year changing the name of the Department of Homeland Security to
| the Department of Homeland Inclusivity to which he'll quote tweet
| "Interesting" and then he'll set his little band of freaks to
| cause mayhem somewhere else.
| bagels wrote:
| I'm sure Fox news will investigate his claims and let their
| listeners know that he lied about this.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Related document for how we used to handle this before the
| "oligarchs tweeting slander" approach gained support:
|
| https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
|
| Numberholders Age 100 or Older Who Did Not Have Death Information
| on the Numident
|
| > The attached final report presents the results of the Office of
| Audit's review. The objective was to determine whether the Social
| Security Administration had effective controls to annotate death
| information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded
| maximum reasonable life expectancies. Please provide within 60
| days a corrective action plan that addresses each recommendation.
| If you wish to discuss the final report, please call me or have
| your staff contact Michelle L. Anderson, Assistant Inspector
| General for Audit
|
| They decided not to do anything about it (e.g. add a "presumed
| dead" field) because they thought it would be a waste of money!
|
| > In response to our 2015 report, SSA considered multiple
| options, including adding presumed death information to these
| Numident records. SSA ultimately decided not to proceed because
| the ". . . options would be costly to implement, would be of
| little benefit to the agency, would largely duplicate information
| already available to data exchange consumers and would create
| cost for the states and other data exchange partners."16 SSA also
| believed a regulation would be required to allow it to add death
| information to these records, and adding presumed death
| information to the Numident would increase the risk of
| inadvertent release of living individuals' personal information
| in the DMF.
|
| Submitted here in case anyone wants to discuss the SHOCKINGLY
| boring REVELATIONS contained within:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43077199
| empathy_m wrote:
| I think it's worth reading both the 2015 OIG report on the
| topic ("Title: Numberholders Age 112 or Older Who Did Not Have
| a Death Entry on the Numident", A-06-14-34030) and also the
| 2023 followup you submitted. I left a comment over on that
| submission after reading both.
|
| It's nice that the hard work of investigating government
| inefficiency is being noticed and celebrated -- you can really
| see the tensions between providing reliable services and
| fighting fraud risk in the 2015 & 2023 reports.
|
| If you care about finding waste, it seems like a really strange
| choice to summarily fire the inspectors general who have worked
| hard on this sort of investigation.
| bagels wrote:
| They aren't willing to provide the right lies or spin to
| justify cutting SSA altogether. That is the end goal.
| Muromec wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. This is what I expected -- of course
| somebody already looked at it, did the math and decided to not
| do anything, which was the most reasonable thing.
| laurent_du wrote:
| So the bottom line is that a left-wing activist put out some lies
| in order to discredit Musk, and every single reader of the
| original misinformation piece swallowed it without any attempt to
| analyze it critically. And they say that right-wingers are the
| ones who are more amenable to propaganda?
|
| Yet everyone's conclusion is, as usual, Musk bad. Nobody cares
| about left-wing fakes news if they are useful to the agenda being
| pushed forward.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| One cannot even begin to address the amount of misinformation
| that has come from the left since Trump has been elected.
|
| This is why, however, people in general act with decorum. Trump
| and Musk are making themselves easy targets for this vitriol.
| Leaving people with absolutely no will to critically think
| about any of the claims levied against them.
|
| In fact, any claim levied against them is welcomed ammunition.
| Any attempt to reduce this ammunition is considered support for
| the enemy.
|
| During Trump's first administration people decried that we had
| begun living in a post-truth society. That accusation was made
| against the Trump supporters.
|
| Now, during his second term, we truly live in a post truth
| society. Where in most cases the truth simply does not matter
| to most people. This division seems to run so deep I am afraid
| at what it means for our society.
| worksonmine wrote:
| One thing I've noticed is when Trump says something the left
| starts by denying it before using it themselves. Fake news
| was coined by Trump and now it's adopted by the left but they
| call it misinformation, and they even started the Trusted
| News Initiative during Covid to weaponize it. It's not lies,
| it's "misinformation", true, but wrong?
|
| Confusing times and the only conclusion I can draw is that
| those in power are losing ground thanks to the internet and
| it makes them behave like this. Everyone in willful
| ignorance. Even otherwise clever people are acting bat-shit
| crazy as soon as Musk is mentioned, but a few years ago they
| would've bragged about getting a Tesla using their NFT
| profts.
| blame-troi wrote:
| Ignorant. When I learned COBOL, which would have been
| contemporary to many of the original systems, data types were
| numbers of various formats, characters, primitive fixed length
| strings, and bits. There was no data type for dates. It would
| have been roll your own. Pre UNIX being mainstream we used
| '7-4-5' dates in assembly based from 1900 (this was a financial
| business but not the IRS).
|
| This isn't a COBOL issue (if it's even an issue at all), it's a
| data design issue. As many have pointed out, there are reasons
| for this possible origin date.
| throw0101d wrote:
| Related, "Why COBOL isn't the problem":
|
| * https://lucid.co/techblog/2020/11/13/why-cobol-isnt-the-prob...
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420217
| bobnick wrote:
| I worked with COBOL long before DB2. I also worked on the COBOL
| compiler in the 70s. Unless things changed drastically if a value
| wasn't initialized the compiler left garbage in the variable when
| the program was loaded. If you were lucky this caused the program
| to ABEND when you tried to use it, if no ABEND you got strange
| results. It was up to the programmer to set a default date if one
| was required by the application. Many applications started with
| VSAM which did not care if a date in a record was invalid. This
| caused many systems to set default dates when converting to DB2.
| DB2 does not allow garbage to be loaded into a date field. COBOL
| does not initialized data unless instructed to do so.
| MrCOBOL wrote:
| No! It does not - Someone coded it to default or entered the data
| that way, and no edit prevented it - and it sounds like no
| regular maintenance (even a reporting process) is present to
| indicate ages > 100 (which may raise a flag to be looked into).
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I assume this was in response to Elons claim of finding a number
| of people aged 150 years old and the response that this was due
| to COBOL default date and how this was an example of the people
| doing the datamining were incompetent.
|
| Someone would have to be really incompetent to find a spike at
| precisely 150 years old and not investigate it further. Elon
| tweeted ~ 10 hours ago the age breakdown and there does not
| appear to be a spike at 150 so if that information is correct
| then this is no longer evidence of incompetence.
| phcreery wrote:
| Additionally, the data is comparable to the census [1] which
| suggests there is not a lack of data context or translation
| from DB date format to actual date/age.
|
| Then again, these are just posts of screenshots on a site
| filled with AI-generated content.
|
| [1] https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1891406665242546383
| __m wrote:
| Do they receive social security though? His tweet doesn't
| explicitly say so, might be willfully omitted.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I don't know, incomplete information all round.
|
| I consider it plausible but also consider Elon to be a rather
| unreliable source. Part of this seems like JJ Abram's mystery
| box storytelling where new mysteries are opened before the
| old mysteries are resolved - and when finally resolved the
| resolution is deeply unsatisfying.
|
| My experience with government is that where it's not
| recklessly incompetent it is flagrantly corrupt, and
| increasingly so. To an extent I would not have believed had I
| not seen it myself. I completely understand why others may
| not share that belief. While I am in general support of
| taking a chainsaw to government, as opposed to a scalpel, I
| do wish it was better people doing it. That way when such
| crazy statements are made I could consider them likely true
| because the person stating them would not have done so
| without it being true. Elon has told too many falsehoods for
| me to give him the same benefit of the doubt.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| When you say "government", do you mean the USA civil
| service, the subject of Musk's ire?
|
| >"where it's not recklessly incompetent it is flagrantly
| corrupt" //
|
| Care to give a couple of the examples from your direct
| experience?
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Just run of the mill stuff, pay-to-play to such an extent
| that everyone in a public service department that I sell
| software into all have jobs with vendors lined up for
| after they retire. They are very open about it. Most
| other vendors have been investigated for bribery by SFO,
| PNF and or FBI. Only a few stuck, I think they just bribe
| more people to make the other bribery charges go away.
| One that did stick was KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton.
| Most vendors in my space seem to operate on a pyramid
| scheme where the money they take in from new deals has to
| pay for the consulting fees of the predecessors. I'm more
| interested in making good technology than dealing with
| the stress of all that so I try to compete on technical
| merits - which is tough.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's a pretty pathetic argument that you support wielding
| the chainsaw, but preferably from a more desirable tyrant.
| Nobody who would agree to wielding the chainsaw in a
| democratic society is worthy of the privilege.
|
| People who share your nihilist perspective combined with
| solutions contrived from ignorance are why we're here. And
| where we are going will redefine corruption.
| diob wrote:
| It's absolutely willfully omitted. I guarantee 0 evidence of
| anything will ever come out, just shock headlines to make it
| seem like they're doing something.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| They might, but that's irrelevant in a way. If they're 150
| years old, they're dead, and if you claim the OASDI benefit
| of someone who is dead, you're committing a crime.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| A brief search suggests it's inheritable in limited
| circumstances. Are you saying that's false?
|
| I'm recalling the posts about the last person claiming
| civil war pensions dying in 2020 (155 years after the war)
| and wondering if there is anything similar going on here.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| If it's designated by law to be inheritable then it's a
| moot point.
|
| It's also worth noting that OASDI is not the same as a
| Civil War pension. One was set up to support men who
| fought in service of the Federal government, the other
| was set up to keep the _O_ ld _A_ ged, _S_ urvivors, and
| _D_ isabled _I_ nsured. They're legally separate programs
| and thus have different statutes regulating who can draw
| benefit from them.
| manquer wrote:
| War pension claims like that were common and not fraud.
|
| The pension is claimed by the wife of the veteran , it
| was a practice to marry a very young girl very late in
| life partly because of the pension.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows
| _wh...
|
| The person you are referring to was eligible as a
| disabled child of veteran
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Triplett
|
| There are many age curiosities out there like the fact
| the grandson of John Tyler the 10th president who was
| born in 1790 is still alive, I.e his grandfather was born
| 235 years ago!
|
| they are just that curiosities, not really fraud and even
| when it is one, it never significant just like voter
| fraud never turns out to be one .
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Even if that is the case, there should be an easy way to
| query that. even If they update the systems, and discover
| zero fraud or bad data it's still a net win
| enragedcacti wrote:
| An audit was completed in 2023 (using June 2021 data) where
| they found that of the 18.9 million aged 100+, approximately
| 44,000 were receiving payouts. UN data says there were
| ~90,000 centenarians in the US in 2021.
|
| https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
|
| https://www.bumc.bu.edu/centenarian/statistics/
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Social Security is incredibly complicated. There's a
| canonical answer to every question. Someone like Elon doesn't
| know or care about the details.
|
| There's also a number of programs. SSI, Disabilty, Death
| Benefits, retirement, etc. Blind people are eligible for a
| benefit by law.
|
| Is there, somewhere in the United States, a disabled, blind
| child whose parents are deceased and whose birthdate is
| unknown? Almost certainly yes.
|
| Is that fraud? Only if you're a "genius" who targets victims
| who can't fight back to demonstrate his intellect.
| thiht wrote:
| I fail to see why anybody would believe anything coming from
| Musk's mouth.
| burnte wrote:
| And yet millions still do. People believe what the WANT to
| believe, and that frequently is something other than facts.
| actinium226 wrote:
| People believe _stories_. It 's ridiculous to suggest
| otherwise.
|
| As competing narratives become more compelling, people
| switch the stories they believe.
|
| So if you want people to start believing in the set of
| facts you hold to be true, tell them a compelling story
| about those facts, don't just tell at them for not fact
| checking.
| mlacks wrote:
| probably because despite all of his negative aspects, he has
| transformed the online payments industry, space industry, and
| auto industry.
| belter wrote:
| All that while playing Diablo and posting 200 racist memes
| a day....
| fragmede wrote:
| Are you trying to tell me that, eg
|
| > $10M for "Mozambique voluntary medical male circumcision"
|
| is a complete and utter fabrication, designed to make the
| federal government look stupid, and has little/no basis in
| reality?
|
| I'm shocked, I tell you. Shocked!
|
| https://x.com/doge/status/1890849405932077378?s=46
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Wait, I thought they sent 200 million condoms over there.
| joyeuse6701 wrote:
| I can think of two good reasons such a thing may be a good
| idea in such a place, if you can't, you're not qualified to
| second guess the decision.
| ertian wrote:
| He was making fun of someone for suggesting that the federal
| government uses SQL.
|
| Dude has been burning credibility at an amazing pace.
| bagels wrote:
| Social security office knows that there are records in that
| database without confirmed deaths.
|
| They use multiple techniques and data sources to determine who to
| send benefits to.
|
| This is not news to the SSA.
|
| https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
|
| "AGENCY COMMENTS SSA disagreed with our recommendations. Agency
| officials stated that most of the records discussed in the report
| involve numberholders who do not currently receive SSA payment"
|
| So, they can do better, but sure, they are sending some
| relatively small number of checks out to dead people. That
| doesn't mean Musk needs to lie about the the program as an excuse
| to cut the whole thing, which is actually what we see playing
| out.
| tonymet wrote:
| 51% is most. 49% could still be > $100bil
| enragedcacti wrote:
| In this particular case 'most' means 99.77%:
|
| > At the time of our review, approximately 44,000 of the 18.9
| million numberholders were receiving SSA payments.
|
| There were something like 90k centenarians in the US at the
| time so the amount of fraud from this category is likely some
| small fraction of that 0.27%.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| > they are sending some relatively small number of checks out
| to dead people.
|
| This isn't even necessarily true from the report. SSA said 44k
| of the 18.9 million 100+ were receiving payments, but the US
| had something like 90k centenarians in 2021. It's probably that
| a huge majority of the 44k were still alive at the time of the
| audit.
| msie wrote:
| Imagine all the wasted cycles dealing with Trump's/Elon's/DOGE
| misadventures.
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