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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
There is a case like that with civil war benefits, the last survivor married a young girl that was his caretaker when he was like 90, and she finally died a few years ago, basically a lifetime after the war had ended.
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:
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
It is a mistake to think that negative uses of “woke” are an exclusively right-of-centre thing.
Rather than repeat myself, I’ll just link to this comment I posted a bit over a month back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42695516 - in which I cite several unabashed Marxists using the word negatively (including Adolph L Reed Jr, and the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International).
If you read Reed, he actually means something rather specific by “woke” - whereas classical/orthodox Marxism views non-class-based oppression (race, gender, sexuality, etc) as downstream consequences of class-based oppression, “wokeness” treats them as if they exist independently of class-based oppression, or as upstream of it, or as a higher priority than it
Just the other day, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) was quoted as saying, regarding his own Democratic Party, that “I think the majority of the party realizes that the ideological purity of some of the groups is a recipe for disaster and that candidly the attack on over-the-top wokeism was a valid attack” - https://www.politico.eu/article/us-senator-mark-warner-democ... - Warner may well be a moderate or centrist Democrat, but I don’t think it makes sense to label him as “conservative” or “right-wing”. He’s not a “conservative Democrat”, in the sense that there was such a thing a decade or two ago [edit: I made some comment here about him not being a member of the Blue Dog caucus, but I’ve removed it because what I was saying didn’t really make sense-the Blue Dog caucus is and was a House caucus, while Warner is a Senator]
I don’t think Warner’s definition of “woke” is as precise as Reed’s, but essentially what he means by it is a form of progressivism which prioritises ideological purity over winning the battle for the median voter’s heart and mind
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.
The code doesn't necessa8ry implement the laws. There could easily be a flag on each record that indicates "current recipent" with a value of "n" or "y". The code, in that case could be something like: if current recipient = y, then print check.
No one is wasting money. These audits must be done. I do think however that the chances of anyone over 115, or deceased, collecting money is extremely low.
Do you normally tweet your half baked “discoveries” as propaganda in an effort to undermine the government when performing an audit?
Edit: I really don’t think the way this audit is being conducted is out of a genuine love for America, or the American citizens, or even out of just wanting to do good work. This is very nakedly a dishonest, petty, and malicious investigation.
It's a government audit, not a private company, so the results will be made public regardless. If the audit finds that the computer code is actually correct according to the laws, but it's the laws themselves that are illogical, wasteful, or easy to defraud, that is still quite useful for the public to know. I agree using Twitter is unconventional but again, it's an audit of a massive public program to which virtually every American who pays taxes contributes (except, ironically, many government employees themselves)
None of this works the way you imagine it does.
Laws are by necessity interpreted. Courts do this all the time. Musk & his kids have zero knowledge, skill or authority in this regard.
System audits require a well defined structure and scope, context, methodology, governance. They take into consideration the IT systems, and the human systems and processes. They clearly define questions to be answered.
This is neither. It is a PR exercise to create an appearance of the regime doing “something” that sounds impressive to their base.
> 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.
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.
He could go one step further and admit that his involvement with any sort of government personnel or logistics decision-making is a mistake until Congress gives his cadre of interns a statutory mandate to do what it's doing.
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
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:
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.)
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.)
Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which became the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), which became International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). These are the same thing, admittedly adding other businesses along the way. (Hence, IBM includes the invention of the tabulating punch-card in its company history.) So, after 1924, it's IBM, but this didn't stop people from talking about Hollerith cards, even in the 1950s. Here, it was used to designate the pre-computer era use with punch-card appliances.
I didn't realize IBM called their own cards Hollerith cards.
They changed the format to 80x10 with rectangular punches in 1928, naming it the IBM Computer Card. They modified it to 80x12 in 1930. IBM themselves distinguish between Hollerith's cards and IBM cards, but I suppose they were the same physical size and old names die hard.
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.
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.
> 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.
The general problem is that what plays well in the media and what makes the most difference aren't necessarily the same thing.
If you want to find large-scale government waste, it's going to be things like Medicare approving unnecessary treatments, or corrupt officials subtly shaping the bidding process for government contracts to make sure they're awarded to the expected cronies for the expected exorbitant costs, or subsidies that are supposed to go to the poor but are shaped in ways that really cause them to go to landlords or drug companies.
But "we streamlined the bidding process for cloud services contracts to make it feasible for smaller entities to make viable bids" is a non-headline even if it would save billions of dollars. "We're eliminating housing assistance and turning it into a refundable tax credit in the same amount for the same people" would improve government efficiency (and outcomes), but it's not viscerally satisfying and makes people feel bored or uncertain rather than happy or angry.
What sells is simple overt fraud. If you can find some 30 year old cashing their dead grandmother's social security checks, that's a headline that will get people worked up. Which means they want to go find some of that stuff to throw meat to the base, while hopefully also doing those other things that are actually more important but don't get the mob excited.
The opposition then plays politics either way. If you actually reduce Medicare spending on unnecessary treatments you're "cutting Medicare" but if you go find a few clear instances of outrageous fraud then it's "just a drop in the bucket" and you're not making any real difference.
> 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.
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”
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.
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.
I’m still kind of surprised they would store days since 1800, but it makes a lot more sense than 1875. At least with 1800 the last two digits are the same, so debugging it is somewhat sane.
My understanding of the claim is that the mainframe data is stored in a high fidelity format but some records simply lack a full year. At the time social security was instituted it was common for people to not know their own age precisely. Beyond memory issues arising from old age, most people just didn't have a pressing reason to track it. So social security benefits were granted to people who seemed old enough even though they didn't have a birth certificate or similar. The claim, as I've heard it, is that the DOGE dolts transferred this data to a more modern system where they blindly passed incomplete or placeholder values into an 8601 library implementation that uses the 2004 standard's reference date of 1875 by default.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
I think the issue is a mix of "the boy who cried wolf" and really smart programmers with almost no real world experience who have been told to find "fraud". I am confident the government is rife with it. Issue is we have unleashed these young developers who I am sure are all excellent programmers who can code me under the table. Issue becomes developers with experience will question requirements, very good developers without experience will say "this is easy" and then just implement it. They were told to find fraud so we are presented with the classic "to a hammer, everything looks like a nail" .
On top of that, Musk is so eager to announce progress that he just repeats what he is told as he knows that these are very smart programmers.
I found myself working in an heavily regulated industry recently and I can tell you if you dropped a young really smart programmer into the code base they would find a million things that are inefficient and wrong. In reality they were carefully coded that way to support some byzantine law or legacy program or one off. An experienced dev will ask "anyone know why we do X in module Y"? and he will get an answer saying "yes, its because of...". The young hotshot dev just deletes and rewrites it or yells "fraud"
So Musk is shooting himself in the foot when if he just waited and verified he could release valid and I am sure damning evidence of fraud but currently he is just "crying wolf"
I've personally worked in such a system. I can tell you -- as someone who asked the question often -- that often, the answer is "because we wrote it that way in 1975 and no one has bothered to spend the time to learn how to make it better since then.
It is not necessarily true something written forty years ago is right. It is not necessarily true that something written forty years ago has some secret logic in it that cannot be improved upon. It is not necessarily true that something written forty years ago cannot be improved by fresh eyes.
Obviously one must not change things recklessly -- but there are often improvements that can be made.
And don't forget that the programmers in question are specifically selected based on their ideological adherence and loyalty. Which is to say, they are already convinced that waste is there, and that it is welfare and entitlements mostly.
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).
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.
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.
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?
"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.
> 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 probable that a huge majority of the 44k were still alive at the time of the audit.
at this point I just assume it's a given that he's tweeting misleading information. it seems like he removes all attempts removing community notes on himself as well. I just don't think the lay person on twitter, which is dumber than a an average layperson, can learn these things in 1 graph or 200 chars.
> 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%.
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.
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.
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.github.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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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
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
> 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.
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)
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 mètre” 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.
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.
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.
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 Mètre)? I guess, the USA had quite a stake in this…
I don’t think there’s anything in ISO 8601 pertaining to integers that represent the number of years since some specific year though.
ISO 8601 prescribes string representations, not integers, and it requires at least four digits for the year, and the year the Convention du Mètre was signed is expressed as 1875, not 0.
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.
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.
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.
* The government is paying claims for people who are 150 years old.
* The database is using 150 year olds as a sentinel value for a missing data.
Given that the people making the claims for the former are reportedly young people (who thus have less experience with the quality of data in actual databases), who are outsiders and thus have not had training on the actual data entry procedures for the database in question, I find it extremely plausible that they made a search term for old claimants, claimed it as clear fraud, and never realized (or even bothered to ask) that it could just be a sentinel value. Especially given Musk's history of contempt for experts who tell him he's wrong, I don't think Musk's explanation that it's fraud holds up to any scrutiny, even given a lack of knowledge of the particulars of the database in question.
> The government is paying claims for people who are 150 years old.
This more likely than you think, likely enough, in fact, that it has already been confirmed to have happened in multiple countries [1]. The problem of fraud and data corruption is widespread enough that it is hampering longevity research [2][3]
Yes, beneficiary fraud is likely--if you said that hundreds of people were drawing Social Security for people who are deceased, I would believe you. But the reason we know this occurs is because we periodically audit the databases to find cases where deaths were unreported.
A claim of 150 years old would be older than the oldest verified age for the past 30 years. Saying that the SSA merely failed to notice the claimant's death is thus tantamount to saying that the SSA has never audited its database for unreported deaths in at least the past 30 years, despite welfare fraud being a salient political issue at multiple times in that timeframe.
But in none of those cases, the claimants are registered as 150 years old. E.g., you might as well argue that since tax evasion is a thing, social security fraud probably is too. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.
> * The government is paying claims for people who are 150 years old.
...and that no-one has noticed for the ~40 years they'd presumably be unlikely to be alive given that living past 110 is vanishingly rare despite audits, etc., until Elon and his Special Boys turned up.
You misunderstood the comment - they mean the team working for Musk making claims about fraud (and yes, plenty has been written in the media, and in HN threads, about them being mostly young men), not that people claiming benefits are young.
I'm not misunderstanding anything, lol, this whole subthread is pretty wild though. Nobody introduced young benefit claimants anywhere into the discussion.
Original comment:
Which of these scenarios is more likely: The government is paying claims for people who are 150 years old [or sentinel values]
Followed by a claim that Musk's young employees have argued for "the former" i.e. that the government is paying claims for people who are 150 years old. Nobody is 150 years old, so we know it's not the first scenario. Moreover nobody - not Musk and not anyone working for him - has claimed that such people exist or they're receiving money. The claim has always been from the start that the data quality is very low and a possible reason for this (or effect of this) is fraud.
Also, sentinel values aren't the correct answer, as established by Musk himself in a followup. The argument that these guys don't understand the basics of databases was always extremely unlikely and was indeed proven false within hours.
This is the guy who claimed Twitter was slow because "App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!" and then fired the engineer who pointed out they're doing zero remote procedure calls. "Standing", heh. With whom is the question.
Even if we set aside for the moment the question of whether or not they're actually right about their claims that have no public evidence, there's also the question of materiality. When multibillion dollar businesses are audited they don't prove financial statements are accurate to the penny. There are 67 million people receiving some form of Social Security benefits. If say 67 of those are listed 150 years old in the database, so that this is literally a one-in-a-million issue, is that really an issue worthy of the amount of attention this has received?
I hate the guy but wanted to fact check this to keep my claims in check. It is true. Here'a a chatgpt that points to several confirming major news websites.
This led me to something even more chilling. He appears to be critiquing people's net worth vis a vis their salaries. It may just be more bullsh but if so, it's an unacceptable level of invasion of privacy. And further confirmation that he is not fit to do this kind of work:
"We do find it sort of rather odd that there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have, ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position,” Musk claimed"
The implication here, that someone could be examining our wealth and deciding if we deserved it or not, is horrifying. It rcalls some of the other dark aspects of totalitarian governments.
It's totalitarian if the government does it. Private citizens are allowed (Free Speech) to make private judgments of this sort, even if their reasoning / conclusions are ludicrous or unsavory.
Indeed. And there are formal procedures to, and both legal and administrative oversight over, those investigations.
It's not appropriate for the Chief Executive (far less an unappointed private citizen, in charge of an ad hoc advisory body) to have arbitrary un-auditable access to every citizen's financial records.
Repeating secondhand information from someone who has spent a few days looking at an immensely complex system with which they have zero experience doesn’t give a lot of additional confidence. It may even be worse. Can you really know anything that quickly under those circumstances? It seems virtually guaranteed that any such statement is necessarily going to be a misunderstanding.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I found it for you. The number was "about half" of the $100B/year to individuals with no SSN or temp ID, and the source was "the consensus in the room" in a meeting with treasury. I find basically every aspect of the statement to be extremely suspect given the general vagueness of it, to the fact that a good portion of "the room" were likely his people, to Elon's general penchant for stretching the truth, but even if we take it at face value he isn't saying what you think he's saying. it's closer to:
"His team and some higher-ups at Treasury guesstimated that at least half of a very high risk category of payments, making up roughly 1.3% of total entitlement spending, are obvious fraud"
> One is that front line workers, when asked in a safe environment, will give enormous estimates for how much of their payout is fraudulent.
I would love to see a real source for this and what kind of information they were using to make those estimates.
> 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.
This is a wildly uncharitable interpretation. A more reasonable one, and one that you will see echoed throughout research on this topic, is that enforcement itself needs to go through a cost-benefit analysis. We can always invest more to catch more fraud, but at what point are we spending more money than we are recovering, and what was the human cost of delays or erroneous denials for eligible individuals. The alternative is itself a wasteful mindset that cares more about punishing evildoers than it does about stretching tax dollars or providing for those less fortunate as the law demands.
> The alternative is itself a wasteful mindset that cares more about punishing evildoers than it does about stretching tax dollars or providing for those less fortunate as the law demands.
Yes, I've encountered a person recently on this forum who had taken the position that even a single case of fraud is unacceptable; it's better to waste an infinite amount of money to catch all fraud, than to have a program at all if the alternative is to tolerate any level of fraud. I tried to engage them on the futility of this but they insisted it was a matter of morality to stamp out said fraud, because not doing so encouraged it.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 £500m 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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".
> 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?)
Mostly, they never started. Likely because the person died a long time ago, in many cases before the Death Master File existed and before claiming benefits, which is why as the OIG report notes, the vast majority of the numebrs in question have no records at all on the MBR, which contains everyone who has claimed beneffits administered by SSA since the 1970s.
In other cases, they started when the person was alive and eligible, and ended when social security got death information, which was recorded in the Master Beneficiary Record--where it needs to be to stop payment--but not in Numident. (All this is in the OIG report.)
> 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
Like Social Security, other federal benefits programs do a lot more to verify that the person claiming information is eligible to receive benefits they are claiming then checking whether or not they are listed as dead in Social Security records, both initially and periodically. Social Security numident death information is a secondary check, not a single-source of truth. You want it right or both its primary and secondary uses, but its not the primary way that beneficiaries are validated as being both alive and who they claim to be.
> which leads to the question of what did cause the payouts to stop?
Pretty obviously the most common reason would be that the payments never started in the first place.
US social security payments don't start automatically on reaching an age, but you need to apply for them, right? Processing the application would be the ideal time to do all kinds of validity checks.
It'll probably frighten and confuse your average pimple faced incelbro that at one time the Social Security administration used paper based manual processes.
I've got popcorn ready for when President Musk's incelbro's use database queries to delete 20 million fraudulent Social Security accounts.
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"
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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)
> 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.":
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, do not for one second think that this behavior isn't intentional.
Elon knows it is BS. But that's not the point, the point is to create outrage, and legitimize it all to the MAGA crowd. It is all intentional misleading.
They are basically inundating that base with tech content that only lifelong developers would be able to parse. It’s a serious propaganda effort. I’m sad right now dude.
What is the point of this? To hide information for audience which in majority does not understand what these data and graphs means but they are going to assume it's meaning is what they wish to see there? So they can basically prove their points with data hidden by literal obfuscation lol.
I'm not so much sad as amazed slash disgusted. This is antivax thinking pattern.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.)
I'm late to the party but want to add that "reference date 1875-05-20 defaults to 150 years" explanation makes no sense to me.
Assuming the reference date is correct and unknown birth date is stored as timestamp 0. Since we are before 2025-05-20 at the moment the reported age has to be 149 years, not 150.
What I'm missing? Would be very unusual to round up age.
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.
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.
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.
> 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”
> 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
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"?)
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.
The person I was replying to was implying that they were fraud.
But uh, you don't think Musk was implying that? He decided to make an announcement that there were lots of super old accounts without any implication beyond their mere existence in a completely inactive state?
And I'm not going to ignore blatant implications to accept "oh he didn't say it".
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.
Have you interacted with the federal government? Or any government at all? Do you know how much money they waste? Do you think a 7 trillion dollar budget isn't going to be filled with multiple hundreds of billions of dollars of false payments, waste, fraud, and 42-year old loopholes that have never been closed? Our national debt is growing at trillions a year. That's not sustainable. The inflation is happening now. It gets a lot worse without this.
Of course there is waste. Nothing runs with 100% efficiency.
You claim a huge scale of fraud, "multiple hundreds of billions of dollars" which we can bound as
200/7000 - 900/7000
Or something roughly in the range of 3-12%.
So, not exactly invisible. Probably pretty findable.
Where is the evidence of these "multiple hundreds of billions of dollars"? If you are going to go about it from individual fraudulent SS recipient upwards, you will be looking for fraud forever. A liftetime of SS is, what, $100,000? So, like 0.00005% of the amount of fraud you claim?
If this is how DOGE is going about it, IT WOULD BE THE LEAST FUCKING EFFICIENT GOVERNMENT PROGRAM EVER.
This is not how you find fraud. This is not how you audit. This is a smash and grab job, orchestrated by the most wealthy human and most powerful elected official on the planet.
Trump and Musk are not truly worried about debt. Their current top goal is to commit to trillions in future debt to cut taxes for the top 0.1% of earners. The current Treasury estimate is these tax cuts will cost $4.5 trillion and accumulate to the wealthiest in the country.
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?
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...".
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.
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.
You're replying to a thread on an article about how someone just made up the 1875 thing to own Elon.
There's definitely a "both sides" problem here. Many more commenters are making totally unfounded assertions about how these systems actually work for the same reason.
You yourself are pontificating about the inspector general's report at a level of expertise beyond what you likely have. I have some familiarity with IGs, though not in the SSA. It has been eye-opening to see people crawling out of the woodwork to talk about their role, their effectiveness, their "good faith attempts", etc. They don't actually know any of this: it's just ammo they found online to "get" Musk since the controversy started.
Why is it so hard to just suspend judgement about these claims, rather than attack them with little basis? Or at least go after it for solid philosophical reasons? I can't understand why the level of discourse on this subject on Hacker News, of all places, is so bad.
The way Musk has acted in the past 4 weeks has caused people here to feel it's not in good faith. Suspending judgement when people are lying to your face is a recipe for getting the wool pulled over your eyes. We have ample reason to think Musk isn't acting in good faith, mainly because of the drive-by posting he is doing and the way he's not working with Congress. He wants to make incredible claims without credible evidence... which just makes his claims incredible.
If Musk were doing what FDR did 100 years ago -- affecting major change by working through Congress -- there would be a different response.
I don't approve of Musk for varying reasons, but FDR's relationship with Congress was a little more complicated than that. If anything, Musk and Trump have not yet come close to Roosevelt's excesses, which are now thankfully mostly forgotten and not used as examples. Roosevelt did not so much as "work" with Congress as directly control it, particularly in his first term. Even in his later terms, he directly embedded his executive staff in Congressional committees. He also had no problem ignoring legislation that did not suit him, and had no problem using the FBI and IRS to harass and destroy his political enemies, which helped cooperation quite a bit. Today we find even a hint of this unacceptable. (We've also now mostly forgotten FDR's war against the media.)
From the distance of almost 100 years, it's difficult to see that FDR was an extreme radical when it came to executive power and probably the most powerful US President of all time. It's a good thing he was mostly a good one too.
> We have ample reason to think Musk isn't acting in good faith, mainly because of the drive-by posting he is doing and the way he's not working with Congress.
I don't think the "drive-by posting" or not working with Congress indicate anything of the kind. Congress has for decades done it's best to do absolutely nothing. Even when just a few years ago they busted the CIA spying on Congress, Congress did nothing. Congress has passed basically no major legislation since the ACA (itself pathetically watered down and passed narrowly) except in extremis. The best you get is one party or another grandstanding in committees about some nakedly partisan "investigation." But if they don't even do anything about a level of corruption and abuse that includes spying on Congress itself, why on earth do you think they'd care about low-to-mid-level fraud/waste?
As for drive-by posting, I think we all know Musk is a fundamentally unserious person, not a deep thinker, and prone to exaggeration or outright lying. That doesn't mean that DOGE personnel aren't looking into and finding things that perhaps we'd be better off without and which the executive has the legitimate power to correct or terminate. I don't see any problem with looking more deeply into Social Security payments. As I said in another post, we've had years of reporting on mass SSDI fraud, and other countries do have small amounts of pensioner fraud. Probably we have some too, and this strange belief that "the IG and Congress would have discovered any such problems" seems bizarrely naive to many of us who have worked in the government.
At any rate if Musk is making false claims, then making our own false claims does not help us or any good cause in any way. Lying because someone else is lying does not make anything better. Almost as bad is silly tendentious "well, actuallys" that dress up as a "fact check" and word everything very carefully as if Musk is totally wrong about something when the substance is correct. Consider the Reuters situation. Here's what Musk tweeted:
> “Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the US government for ‘large scale social deception,’” Musk tweeted the night before. “That is literally what it says on the purchase order! They’re a total scam. Just wow.”
The entire story is written as if Musk and Trump are deranged conspiracy theorists...when in fact what Musk tweeted was correct. Yes, OK, actually "Thomson Reuters Special Services" was the one with the contract, not "Reuters", and yeah sure they're all actually ultimately part of the same organization, they own Reuters, but there's a firewall between them, we promise, so...and yeah, it was to study "large scale deception" and "social engineering defense" but actually it's a good thing and-
Long story short, Reuters did have some dumb consulting contract with the government regarding social engineering "defense", which likely was a huge waste of money. Of course, it also wouldn't be surprising if the government was not only paying for "defense" (just as the Department of Defense was not "defending" American from Iraq) but Musk didn't make that claim in the Tweet.
This is just an example. I find it just as bad as what Musk does. If we're trying to educate people telling our own lies and bending the truth to fit our narrative doesn't help anything.
> FDR's relationship with Congress was a little more complicated than that. If anything, Musk and Trump have not yet come close to Roosevelt's excesses
Yeah, what I'm saying is that going through Congress such as FDR did is what would make those actions defensible. If Congress wants to be compliant, that's their prerogative. This Congress wants to be compliant, they can pass laws to do what they are.
So if Musk were doing the same as FDR, I would have much less of an objection, and not much of a Constitutional grounds to stand on. I think they aim to wield executive power, but I think trying to go around Congress is what tips the scales from "radical view of executive power" to "dictatorial view of executive power".
> Congress has for decades done it's best to do absolutely nothing.
This is false, Congress has done N things. Some guys have proclaimed the N things are insufficient, and they demand a new thing be done. Now we are doing N+1 things. Are they working? Who knows; we can't tell because they won't post sufficient details.
We do know what Congress has done is not 0% effective - oversight, whistleblowers, IGs have identified areas of waste/fraud/abuse. Of course there's room for improvement by adding other areas of feedback and DOGE could have been that, but they won't/can't be by going around Congress.
> That doesn't mean that DOGE personnel aren't looking into and finding things that perhaps we'd be better off without and which the executive has the legitimate power to correct or terminate.
I have found in my life that "the fish rots from the head" is often true. A person of such low character surrounds himself with people of similar or lower character, because they lack the temerity to say no to him. Given the recent reports on the people who are in DOGE, they seem to be DEI hires, in that they seem to have been hired due to their proximity to Musk-owned companies rather than their ability to audit federal programs.
> This is just an example.
It's a great example of what I'm talking about when I said "drive by posting". Why is it up to leadstories.com to bring me this very relevant context about the program? Why didn't Musk describe the nature of the program in his initial tweet?
To me this tweet is implying that the money was spent for a social engineering program that caused large scale social disruption. Is that a fair reading, or do you disagree with that? Either way, it seems like many other people interpreted it that way with my reading and became alarmed, hence the reaction.
But when you look at the added context, it becomes clear this program is about preventing large scale social disruption via social media, which seems to me like a good thing. They are apparently paying Reuters for some sort of SaaS tool. I don't know what it does but if it's waste or fraud Musk could explain exactly why/how. But he doesn't, he just tweets his indignation at some perceived abuse and that's the end of it. How is this any different or going to produce better results than "grandstanding in committees about some nakedly partisan investigation".
> The entire story is written as if Musk and Trump are deranged conspiracy theorists
Can you point out where you feel the article characterizes Musk in this way? To me, the article reads as a recitation of factual statements. Every claim is backed by supporting evidence. They describe Musk in neutral and factual terms. They accurately depict his words. It only mentions Trump in passing by way of mentioning his first term. Are you claiming it has left out factual information to slant a narrative? Or that the information is presented in a misleading way?
So where does that leave us? Is the program waste/fraud? No idea, DOGE hasn't provided enough information enough though he has it all.
>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.
Confusing insane asylums and refugee asylum by way of talking about Hannibal Lecter points in a completely different direction than what you've stated.
I think no change across 40 years of life is not what either of us meant
Impaired by age is impaired by age. Don't try to move the goalposts. If you meant something more specific, you should have been more specific.
But How does 2020 Biden hold up to this test you came up with?
See above. I didn't come up with anything. 2020 Biden was fine. As for 2024 Biden, I don't care if he was a head in a jar, he and his cabinet were doing great.
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.
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.
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.
> 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]
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.
>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.
Those were just the stories I could find in 5 minutes.
Also previous presidents didn't issue nearly as many EOs with nearly as controversial content which gives rather less for people to complain about (and yet they still did.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
> 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: https://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.
Look at the comments.
They know that COBOL defaults to 1875, point is that propaganda pundits look for any reason to spew toxic misinformation and rile 99.999% of uniformed sheeple that voted for orange felon.
It's horrifying to see even the Associated Press repeating this claim a truth. AP links to the Wired article, which links to the same old ExTwitter post that originated the claim. Neither did any fact checking ffs
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.
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?
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?
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.
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/Dutch_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 €4 million. The price tag to set it right again was €7.4 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.
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.
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.
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.
Except that his email to buzzfeed clearly targeted Unsworth. Legal muddling by Musks lawers led Unsworth's to get the email out of the lawsuit, to save time and money, but that ended to be a bad legal strategy.
Okay, so then to win that pointless online argument he argued to a journalist investigating it that it was a true allegation and accused them, the journalist, of protecting pedophiles.
There's no way he comes out of this not looking like a petty, power-mad, knowingly-lying psychopath.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
With approximately 1,600 employees, the HHS-OIG performs audits, investigations, and evaluations to recommend policy for decision-makers and the public.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
„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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
" 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.
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.
> 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.
[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.
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:
> 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’.
>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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The cost benefit calculation is, of course, reasonable. But there are 2 things that need to happen here.
1. Run a complex process requiring human intervention to determine age where it is hard to determine
2. Enter the result of step 1 in the DB
And it's pretty obvious that 99.99% of the cost of this is coming from step 1. So I find it completely implausible that just tracking the results here, when a single error could potentially result in a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars, is not cost effective.
> 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?
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.
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.
Here's how to tell, far easier: take the number of people receiving checks in that age bracket. From what I read, it was 44,000 ish, but I can't verify that. If it's not - it's still going to be a number far less than 20 million.
Do all those people have correct data? If not, correct that. If they do, then there's no fraud.
And even after that, even if the data is incorrect, it doesn't mean there's fraud. You have to go case by case to check if they're actually being collected and not just sitting somewhere.
So .. yes. There's potential for fraud, but we're not going to (accurately) know about the scale for a long time, and it's definitely not going to be on the scale of 20 million recipients.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
lol I think the Diablo Rakki was determined to be a hoax but I did find this interesting paste of Things Elon Musk launched or unveiled in less than 10 years:
Boring Co.
Crew Dragon
Cybercab
Cybertruck
DOGE
Falcon Heavy
Falcon 9
FSD
Grok 1,2,3
Megapack
Model 3
Model X
Model Y
Neuralink
OpenAI
Optimus
Powerwall
Roadster 2.0
Robovan
Solar Roof
Starlink
Starship
Tesla Semi
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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 Old Aged, Survivors, and Disabled Insured. They're legally separate programs and thus have different statutes regulating who can draw benefit from them.
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
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.
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?
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.
>Regardless of how somebody establishes their birth date, that field would still get updated with the data that gets accepted.
Nope. Social security data has a lot of "readers" that need to query the government with a question and get the answer, but do not get the actual data that can give you the answer.
None of those organizations are empowered to write back any confirmation they get. For very good reasons, the government does not let random consumers overwrite social security data. The system is instead designed to be tolerant of bad data and encourage lower level groups to merely check for eligibility.
A concrete example: In our state's insurance marketplace, if your name on the application does not match your name in the Social Security database, it gets flagged. You then provide the state documentation that proves you are the person with the name on the application. That clears the issue and allows you to get your health insurance benefits, but does NOT update the row in the social security database! Doing so would require allowing a downstream, el-cheapo third party contractor application to randomly overwrite whatever it wants in the literally national database. That's a stupid idea. This isn't Google, where randomly shutting off accounts on mistakes is fine. When the government does that, we are supposed to tell them not to do that.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
> > random nobodies speculating in public (likely incorrectly), and people are repeating their speculation because they like how it sounds
> That made me think of how Arendt described the pre-totalitarian mishmash of opinions and totalitarian "opinions" [0], that's the first quote.
Allow me to clarify what I was saying: there is no inherent problem with “random nobodies” speculating about things - I am myself a “random nobody” in this context. The problem is when people start talking about those pseudonymous speculations as if they were coming from genuine life experience with this particular computer system, or closely related computer systems-which is what I interpreted the comment I was replying to as claiming (or at least it could be read as implying it). Furthermore, while both I and the sources for these speculations are “random nobodies”, I’d say I’m a much more informed random nobody, because I’ve read enough COBOL documentation to realise that what they are saying is of dubious plausibility, whereas it appears they haven’t.
That’s not to say I’m endorsing Musk’s claims about “150 year old social security recipients”-I don’t know what the actual truth behind them is (and I don’t think anyone else publicly discussing them does either), but I think more likely than not they are an exaggeration, distortion or misinterpretation - so I do think they are probably (at least partially) wrong - but (outside a small cohort of current and former government officials and contractors, who likely are restrained by confidentiality obligations from participating in the public debate) nobody knows exactly how and why they are wrong - but I know enough about COBOL to know that COBOL-centric theories about why Musk is wrong are very likely themselves wrong.
And finally, replying to someone’s comment with quotes - without any explanation of why you think the quotes are relevant to the comment you are replying to - isn’t a helpful communication style. Rather than leaving people guessing at what you are trying to say-or leaving them with the onus of asking you to clarify-much better to just explain it explicitly in your initial reply. Plus, I have the suspicion that your reply was triggered by a misunderstanding of my position - that you were reading me as saying “Musk is right”, when what I’ve actually been saying (not explicitly in that particular comment, but I think it becomes clearer if you read my other comments on the topic) is “Musk could well be wrong-indeed more likely than not he is-but not for this reason”
> That made me think of how Arendt described the pre-totalitarian mishmash of opinions and totalitarian "opinions"
That is genuinely all. If that is not welcome here, fine, but this "what are you trying to say?" as if there has to be some other layer I just don't get, or this flagging spree against me now.
> much better to just explain it explicitly in your initial reply.
"this made me think of" is implied to me. I could have put some specific phrase in italics, but other than that, just flag the thing. Any reply I make just gets used against me anyway, so do whatever.
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.
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
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.
> 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)
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
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
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.
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.
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.
What was the claim? That there are millions of people above 120 years old in the SS database that aren't marked dead? That doesn't sound extraordinary, or a claim that's hard to challenge by even past employees that had access to the data. but all we got is propaganda and FUD.
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.
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.
His team ran a query and shared the results. How is that zero? What do you expect him to provide? Litterally NOBODY is arguing that the results aren't accurate based on data other than an, easily verifiable, erroneous claim about the COBOL platform or "mUsK SAiD iT"
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.
>...exceptions in which the automated process doesn't terminate someone for being >115
You gave a several good explanations about why the current automated processes don't mark the records as deceased. But those are excuses. Just because the design of the system is flawed, that doesn't mean the system isn't in error because the code implements the design.
All those sound like it needs to be fixed to me. As somebody that deals with data for large enterprises that are nowhere near, obviously, as the government, but definitely companies with 100k employees and several in the Fortune 20. It's rudimentary to:
- have a data staging area before data gets into any financial system intended for payment transactions. Those staging systems can be used for analytical, reporting, and especially data cleaning.
- No use one record to represent the obligations to a completely different records of the same type. i.e. overloaded corrupt master data.
Uncurated data systems should be treated completely differently than systems that actually impacts financial transactions. Just because it's taxpayer money, they shouldn't be able to avoid criticism because they're wasting the money. If anything they should be more accountable.
There has been an ongoing dispute between the SSA and its OIG about what to do about millions of dormant accounts for which SSA lacks a date of death. [0] SSA OIG views these accounts as a risk and wants them marked as presumed dead. SSA argues that it is unnecessary, that it would cost millions in administrative and IT costs for little real benefit, that there is a risk of accidentally marking living people as dead, and disagrees that it is a fraud risk since no benefits have been paid to these dormant accounts for many decades, and any attempt to “reactivate” one of them would be flagged as an anomaly and investigated as potential fraud. It would not surprise me if Musk’s claims of “150 year old social security recipients” turn out to be a distortion of this pre-existing debate. The distortion is in presenting these accounts as active cases of fraud, since the vast majority of them haven’t received benefits in decades, or never claimed them to begin with - they are mostly long-dead people who were registered with the SSA in the first few decades of its existence, but for whatever reason their death was never reported to the SSA (the processes for doing so were less effective decades ago and so the further back you go, the more deaths were “missed”)
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).
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"
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
> 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_...
The ten year rule is more recent than the SSA.
There is a case like that with civil war benefits, the last survivor married a young girl that was his caretaker when he was like 90, and she finally died a few years ago, basically a lifetime after the war had ended.
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
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.
> 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
> 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!
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.
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.
They saw the movie "Dave" and didn't realize it was fiction.
> 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.
> 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
They wont admit anything
At least we'll get a good example for the Chesterton's Fence wiki page.
Until the Heritage Foundation succeeds in dismantling Wikipedia.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
It is a mistake to think that negative uses of “woke” are an exclusively right-of-centre thing.
Rather than repeat myself, I’ll just link to this comment I posted a bit over a month back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42695516 - in which I cite several unabashed Marxists using the word negatively (including Adolph L Reed Jr, and the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International).
If you read Reed, he actually means something rather specific by “woke” - whereas classical/orthodox Marxism views non-class-based oppression (race, gender, sexuality, etc) as downstream consequences of class-based oppression, “wokeness” treats them as if they exist independently of class-based oppression, or as upstream of it, or as a higher priority than it
Just the other day, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) was quoted as saying, regarding his own Democratic Party, that “I think the majority of the party realizes that the ideological purity of some of the groups is a recipe for disaster and that candidly the attack on over-the-top wokeism was a valid attack” - https://www.politico.eu/article/us-senator-mark-warner-democ... - Warner may well be a moderate or centrist Democrat, but I don’t think it makes sense to label him as “conservative” or “right-wing”. He’s not a “conservative Democrat”, in the sense that there was such a thing a decade or two ago [edit: I made some comment here about him not being a member of the Blue Dog caucus, but I’ve removed it because what I was saying didn’t really make sense-the Blue Dog caucus is and was a House caucus, while Warner is a Senator]
I don’t think Warner’s definition of “woke” is as precise as Reed’s, but essentially what he means by it is a form of progressivism which prioritises ideological purity over winning the battle for the median voter’s heart and mind
I see, then it has indeed shifted meaning again.
Thanks for the detailed response; one of the previous times I said this here, the answer was snarky disbelief that I hadn't kept track.
> 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).
It is loaded with propaganda right now.
Chesterton's Nuclear Security Program
[0] https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/02/doge-fired-hundreds-of-us...
Is it really a Chesterton's Fence if it's covered in signs saying "do not remove" with simple explanations in large, friendly letters?
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
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.
[flagged]
Well good news. There's not pervasive fraud in the system, so that won't happen.
Source: the beneficiaries of such fraud, were it to occur…
The code doesn't necessa8ry implement the laws. There could easily be a flag on each record that indicates "current recipent" with a value of "n" or "y". The code, in that case could be something like: if current recipient = y, then print check.
No one is wasting money. These audits must be done. I do think however that the chances of anyone over 115, or deceased, collecting money is extremely low.
What makes you have the impression that the government doesn't do audits, with actual professional auditors? Because it does, and does so regularly
I suspect any admission would be made with far less fanfare than what accompanied the accusations made today.
If an audit ultimately finds that the computer code is perfectly aligned with the law, how does that make it a poorly-run audit, or a waste?
Do you normally tweet your half baked “discoveries” as propaganda in an effort to undermine the government when performing an audit?
Edit: I really don’t think the way this audit is being conducted is out of a genuine love for America, or the American citizens, or even out of just wanting to do good work. This is very nakedly a dishonest, petty, and malicious investigation.
It's a government audit, not a private company, so the results will be made public regardless. If the audit finds that the computer code is actually correct according to the laws, but it's the laws themselves that are illogical, wasteful, or easy to defraud, that is still quite useful for the public to know. I agree using Twitter is unconventional but again, it's an audit of a massive public program to which virtually every American who pays taxes contributes (except, ironically, many government employees themselves)
None of this works the way you imagine it does. Laws are by necessity interpreted. Courts do this all the time. Musk & his kids have zero knowledge, skill or authority in this regard.
System audits require a well defined structure and scope, context, methodology, governance. They take into consideration the IT systems, and the human systems and processes. They clearly define questions to be answered.
This is neither. It is a PR exercise to create an appearance of the regime doing “something” that sounds impressive to their base.
"Fact-checking Elon Musk's claims in the Oval Office" - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyjz24ne85o
Wait if you like, just dont hold your breath.
This definitely warrants an /s even if it's obvious :)
You'll be waiting a long time.
Rule #1 of the new American oligarch: never admit a mistake
> 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.
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.
Musk admitted in the White House interview that he'd made a mistake on the $50m for condoms to Gaza.
He could go one step further and admit that his involvement with any sort of government personnel or logistics decision-making is a mistake until Congress gives his cadre of interns a statutory mandate to do what it's doing.
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
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...
> 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.)
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
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.)
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.
Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which became the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), which became International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). These are the same thing, admittedly adding other businesses along the way. (Hence, IBM includes the invention of the tabulating punch-card in its company history.) So, after 1924, it's IBM, but this didn't stop people from talking about Hollerith cards, even in the 1950s. Here, it was used to designate the pre-computer era use with punch-card appliances.
I didn't realize IBM called their own cards Hollerith cards.
They changed the format to 80x10 with rectangular punches in 1928, naming it the IBM Computer Card. They modified it to 80x12 in 1930. IBM themselves distinguish between Hollerith's cards and IBM cards, but I suppose they were the same physical size and old names die hard.
> 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
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.
> 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.
The general problem is that what plays well in the media and what makes the most difference aren't necessarily the same thing.
If you want to find large-scale government waste, it's going to be things like Medicare approving unnecessary treatments, or corrupt officials subtly shaping the bidding process for government contracts to make sure they're awarded to the expected cronies for the expected exorbitant costs, or subsidies that are supposed to go to the poor but are shaped in ways that really cause them to go to landlords or drug companies.
But "we streamlined the bidding process for cloud services contracts to make it feasible for smaller entities to make viable bids" is a non-headline even if it would save billions of dollars. "We're eliminating housing assistance and turning it into a refundable tax credit in the same amount for the same people" would improve government efficiency (and outcomes), but it's not viscerally satisfying and makes people feel bored or uncertain rather than happy or angry.
What sells is simple overt fraud. If you can find some 30 year old cashing their dead grandmother's social security checks, that's a headline that will get people worked up. Which means they want to go find some of that stuff to throw meat to the base, while hopefully also doing those other things that are actually more important but don't get the mob excited.
The opposition then plays politics either way. If you actually reduce Medicare spending on unnecessary treatments you're "cutting Medicare" but if you go find a few clear instances of outrageous fraud then it's "just a drop in the bucket" and you're not making any real difference.
> 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.
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”
The very first recipient, Ida May Fuller, would be 150 years old currently.
That makes a lot of sense.
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.
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
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.
I’m still kind of surprised they would store days since 1800, but it makes a lot more sense than 1875. At least with 1800 the last two digits are the same, so debugging it is somewhat sane.
My understanding of the claim is that the mainframe data is stored in a high fidelity format but some records simply lack a full year. At the time social security was instituted it was common for people to not know their own age precisely. Beyond memory issues arising from old age, most people just didn't have a pressing reason to track it. So social security benefits were granted to people who seemed old enough even though they didn't have a birth certificate or similar. The claim, as I've heard it, is that the DOGE dolts transferred this data to a more modern system where they blindly passed incomplete or placeholder values into an 8601 library implementation that uses the 2004 standard's reference date of 1875 by default.
That theory could track since DOGE did seek approval to use SQL visual query software, the software may have parsed those birth dates in that regard.
Again why it is so irresponsible of Musk to have addressed the public in the way he did without (presumably) all of the facts and without nuance
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
Are these made up?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/10/elon-mus...
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.
"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?
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?
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
I've been waiting for that evidence. All I see is a message stating "Receipts coming over the weekend!"
https://doge.gov/savings
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.
I think the issue is a mix of "the boy who cried wolf" and really smart programmers with almost no real world experience who have been told to find "fraud". I am confident the government is rife with it. Issue is we have unleashed these young developers who I am sure are all excellent programmers who can code me under the table. Issue becomes developers with experience will question requirements, very good developers without experience will say "this is easy" and then just implement it. They were told to find fraud so we are presented with the classic "to a hammer, everything looks like a nail" .
On top of that, Musk is so eager to announce progress that he just repeats what he is told as he knows that these are very smart programmers.
I found myself working in an heavily regulated industry recently and I can tell you if you dropped a young really smart programmer into the code base they would find a million things that are inefficient and wrong. In reality they were carefully coded that way to support some byzantine law or legacy program or one off. An experienced dev will ask "anyone know why we do X in module Y"? and he will get an answer saying "yes, its because of...". The young hotshot dev just deletes and rewrites it or yells "fraud"
So Musk is shooting himself in the foot when if he just waited and verified he could release valid and I am sure damning evidence of fraud but currently he is just "crying wolf"
I've personally worked in such a system. I can tell you -- as someone who asked the question often -- that often, the answer is "because we wrote it that way in 1975 and no one has bothered to spend the time to learn how to make it better since then.
It is not necessarily true something written forty years ago is right. It is not necessarily true that something written forty years ago has some secret logic in it that cannot be improved upon. It is not necessarily true that something written forty years ago cannot be improved by fresh eyes.
Obviously one must not change things recklessly -- but there are often improvements that can be made.
Fair point
And don't forget that the programmers in question are specifically selected based on their ideological adherence and loyalty. Which is to say, they are already convinced that waste is there, and that it is welfare and entitlements mostly.
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).
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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 probable that a huge majority of the 44k were still alive at the time of the audit.
at this point I just assume it's a given that he's tweeting misleading information. it seems like he removes all attempts removing community notes on himself as well. I just don't think the lay person on twitter, which is dumber than a an average layperson, can learn these things in 1 graph or 200 chars.
51% is most. 49% could still be > $100bil
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%.
Let’s see what the revised fraud report discovers.
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.
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.
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...
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.github.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.
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
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."
Still more logical than January 1st, 1970.
Unix guys weren't overthinking it on systems running on 16 kB of RAM, or whatever. Just get a damn number, sheesh.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
>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
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.
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
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 mètre” 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.
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.
The original post on X completely misinterpreted this to mean that ISO 8601 established days since 1875 as a standard date storage format
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 Mètre)? I guess, the USA had quite a stake in this…
I don’t think there’s anything in ISO 8601 pertaining to integers that represent the number of years since some specific year though.
ISO 8601 prescribes string representations, not integers, and it requires at least four digits for the year, and the year the Convention du Mètre was signed is expressed as 1875, not 0.
> was first published in 1988
No, the social security system and the COBOL that powers it predates that standard by quite a lot.
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
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.
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.
[flagged]
Which of these scenarios is more likely:
* The government is paying claims for people who are 150 years old.
* The database is using 150 year olds as a sentinel value for a missing data.
Given that the people making the claims for the former are reportedly young people (who thus have less experience with the quality of data in actual databases), who are outsiders and thus have not had training on the actual data entry procedures for the database in question, I find it extremely plausible that they made a search term for old claimants, claimed it as clear fraud, and never realized (or even bothered to ask) that it could just be a sentinel value. Especially given Musk's history of contempt for experts who tell him he's wrong, I don't think Musk's explanation that it's fraud holds up to any scrutiny, even given a lack of knowledge of the particulars of the database in question.
> The government is paying claims for people who are 150 years old.
This more likely than you think, likely enough, in fact, that it has already been confirmed to have happened in multiple countries [1]. The problem of fraud and data corruption is widespread enough that it is hampering longevity research [2][3]
No, it's not likely at all.
Yes, beneficiary fraud is likely--if you said that hundreds of people were drawing Social Security for people who are deceased, I would believe you. But the reason we know this occurs is because we periodically audit the databases to find cases where deaths were unreported.
A claim of 150 years old would be older than the oldest verified age for the past 30 years. Saying that the SSA merely failed to notice the claimant's death is thus tantamount to saying that the SSA has never audited its database for unreported deaths in at least the past 30 years, despite welfare fraud being a salient political issue at multiple times in that timeframe.
But in none of those cases, the claimants are registered as 150 years old. E.g., you might as well argue that since tax evasion is a thing, social security fraud probably is too. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.
> * The government is paying claims for people who are 150 years old.
...and that no-one has noticed for the ~40 years they'd presumably be unlikely to be alive given that living past 110 is vanishingly rare despite audits, etc., until Elon and his Special Boys turned up.
[flagged]
Maybe you need to look up what "sentinel value" means. It almost looks as if you're replying to a different post.
[flagged]
You misunderstood the comment - they mean the team working for Musk making claims about fraud (and yes, plenty has been written in the media, and in HN threads, about them being mostly young men), not that people claiming benefits are young.
I'm not misunderstanding anything, lol, this whole subthread is pretty wild though. Nobody introduced young benefit claimants anywhere into the discussion.
Original comment:
Which of these scenarios is more likely: The government is paying claims for people who are 150 years old [or sentinel values]
Followed by a claim that Musk's young employees have argued for "the former" i.e. that the government is paying claims for people who are 150 years old. Nobody is 150 years old, so we know it's not the first scenario. Moreover nobody - not Musk and not anyone working for him - has claimed that such people exist or they're receiving money. The claim has always been from the start that the data quality is very low and a possible reason for this (or effect of this) is fraud.
Also, sentinel values aren't the correct answer, as established by Musk himself in a followup. The argument that these guys don't understand the basics of databases was always extremely unlikely and was indeed proven false within hours.
This is the guy who claimed Twitter was slow because "App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!" and then fired the engineer who pointed out they're doing zero remote procedure calls. "Standing", heh. With whom is the question.
Even if we set aside for the moment the question of whether or not they're actually right about their claims that have no public evidence, there's also the question of materiality. When multibillion dollar businesses are audited they don't prove financial statements are accurate to the penny. There are 67 million people receiving some form of Social Security benefits. If say 67 of those are listed 150 years old in the database, so that this is literally a one-in-a-million issue, is that really an issue worthy of the amount of attention this has received?
We're talking about the same team that said they were sending $50m of condoms to Gaza and went on to say that Hamas was using them to make bombs?
I note that the same dude also said in his White House interview not to believe him because he'll often be wrong.
I hate the guy but wanted to fact check this to keep my claims in check. It is true. Here'a a chatgpt that points to several confirming major news websites.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67b2e31b-e6fc-800f-9ed8-5a4ce1d254...
This led me to something even more chilling. He appears to be critiquing people's net worth vis a vis their salaries. It may just be more bullsh but if so, it's an unacceptable level of invasion of privacy. And further confirmation that he is not fit to do this kind of work:
"We do find it sort of rather odd that there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have, ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position,” Musk claimed"
The implication here, that someone could be examining our wealth and deciding if we deserved it or not, is horrifying. It rcalls some of the other dark aspects of totalitarian governments.
The implication is that people are taking money under the table, i.e. corruption. Do you find that so hard to believe?
> The implication here, that someone could be examining our wealth and deciding if we deserved it or not, is horrifying.
IRS is indeed horrifying.
Is Musk the IRS? Why do him or his cronies get to see people's salaries and net worth? BTW any news on DJTs tax return? Maybe we should ask Elon?
> Is Musk the IRS?
Is it only totalitarian if Musk does it? Someone examines wealth and decides if it's deserved or not every day.
> BTW any news on DJTs tax return? Maybe we should ask Elon?
Maybe. Wouldn't it be great if he tried to uncover his tax returns? Would you still think it's a sign of totalitarianism?
It's totalitarian if the government does it. Private citizens are allowed (Free Speech) to make private judgments of this sort, even if their reasoning / conclusions are ludicrous or unsavory.
IRS is a part of the government and it's their job to make such judgements and investigate suspicious situations.
Indeed. And there are formal procedures to, and both legal and administrative oversight over, those investigations.
It's not appropriate for the Chief Executive (far less an unappointed private citizen, in charge of an ad hoc advisory body) to have arbitrary un-auditable access to every citizen's financial records.
Repeating secondhand information from someone who has spent a few days looking at an immensely complex system with which they have zero experience doesn’t give a lot of additional confidence. It may even be worse. Can you really know anything that quickly under those circumstances? It seems virtually guaranteed that any such statement is necessarily going to be a misunderstanding.
> from interacting with the DOGE team
Who are a bunch of teenagers with zero COBOL or government experience.
I would take a random person on the internet, especially on here, any day.
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.
I'm sure Fox news will investigate his claims and let their listeners know that he lied about this.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Now I'm curious what the biggest fraud in history actually is!
There is zero proof that what was quoted is actually cause for any payouts. The examples you cite are likely not similar at all.
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.
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.
I found it for you. The number was "about half" of the $100B/year to individuals with no SSN or temp ID, and the source was "the consensus in the room" in a meeting with treasury. I find basically every aspect of the statement to be extremely suspect given the general vagueness of it, to the fact that a good portion of "the room" were likely his people, to Elon's general penchant for stretching the truth, but even if we take it at face value he isn't saying what you think he's saying. it's closer to:
"His team and some higher-ups at Treasury guesstimated that at least half of a very high risk category of payments, making up roughly 1.3% of total entitlement spending, are obvious fraud"
> One is that front line workers, when asked in a safe environment, will give enormous estimates for how much of their payout is fraudulent.
I would love to see a real source for this and what kind of information they were using to make those estimates.
> 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.
This is a wildly uncharitable interpretation. A more reasonable one, and one that you will see echoed throughout research on this topic, is that enforcement itself needs to go through a cost-benefit analysis. We can always invest more to catch more fraud, but at what point are we spending more money than we are recovering, and what was the human cost of delays or erroneous denials for eligible individuals. The alternative is itself a wasteful mindset that cares more about punishing evildoers than it does about stretching tax dollars or providing for those less fortunate as the law demands.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/elon-musk-alleges-50b-f...
> The alternative is itself a wasteful mindset that cares more about punishing evildoers than it does about stretching tax dollars or providing for those less fortunate as the law demands.
Yes, I've encountered a person recently on this forum who had taken the position that even a single case of fraud is unacceptable; it's better to waste an infinite amount of money to catch all fraud, than to have a program at all if the alternative is to tolerate any level of fraud. I tried to engage them on the futility of this but they insisted it was a matter of morality to stamp out said fraud, because not doing so encouraged it.
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 £500m 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
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
Plus when someone dies, they're more likely to set "dead=1" or similar than to just delete all records about them immediately.
> 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
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".
> 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?)
Mostly, they never started. Likely because the person died a long time ago, in many cases before the Death Master File existed and before claiming benefits, which is why as the OIG report notes, the vast majority of the numebrs in question have no records at all on the MBR, which contains everyone who has claimed beneffits administered by SSA since the 1970s.
In other cases, they started when the person was alive and eligible, and ended when social security got death information, which was recorded in the Master Beneficiary Record--where it needs to be to stop payment--but not in Numident. (All this is in the OIG report.)
> 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
Like Social Security, other federal benefits programs do a lot more to verify that the person claiming information is eligible to receive benefits they are claiming then checking whether or not they are listed as dead in Social Security records, both initially and periodically. Social Security numident death information is a secondary check, not a single-source of truth. You want it right or both its primary and secondary uses, but its not the primary way that beneficiaries are validated as being both alive and who they claim to be.
> which leads to the question of what did cause the payouts to stop?
Pretty obviously the most common reason would be that the payments never started in the first place.
US social security payments don't start automatically on reaching an age, but you need to apply for them, right? Processing the application would be the ideal time to do all kinds of validity checks.
It'll probably frighten and confuse your average pimple faced incelbro that at one time the Social Security administration used paper based manual processes.
I've got popcorn ready for when President Musk's incelbro's use database queries to delete 20 million fraudulent Social Security accounts.
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"
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.
> 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.
[dead]
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?
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/189135619250239902...
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.
It's not a "large scale fraud". This is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_C._Conn?wprov=sfti1
His last name being "Conn" is very apt.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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%.
> 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.
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...
> 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.
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).
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:
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.
This is the best debunk I could find: https://iter.ca/post/1875-epoch/
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
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.
>that a specific criticism is true
Or false, in this case.
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.
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.
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...
This comment definitely needs to be bumped up. It adds extra data to the mystery.
Here's the raw data:
Bar plot of data:https://imgur.com/a/34Y5BSv
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.
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.
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.
Oh, do not for one second think that this behavior isn't intentional.
Elon knows it is BS. But that's not the point, the point is to create outrage, and legitimize it all to the MAGA crowd. It is all intentional misleading.
I love how these people are absolutely prone to even basic "common sense". You need to blame someone for your misery.
One of the oldest tricks. We are still just unga bunga tribal apes some of us smarter that the other but it's still not enough.
You need to look at how the republicans on X are discussing this:
https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/1886647920566636637
They are basically inundating that base with tech content that only lifelong developers would be able to parse. It’s a serious propaganda effort. I’m sad right now dude.
What is the point of this? To hide information for audience which in majority does not understand what these data and graphs means but they are going to assume it's meaning is what they wish to see there? So they can basically prove their points with data hidden by literal obfuscation lol.
I'm not so much sad as amazed slash disgusted. This is antivax thinking pattern.
Quick Google search says 1.6 trillion will be paid this year.
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
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.
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
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.
They aren't willing to provide the right lies or spin to justify cutting SSA altogether. That is the end goal.
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.
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.)
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.
Who needs just one Y2K when you can have one every 10 years!
I'm late to the party but want to add that "reference date 1875-05-20 defaults to 150 years" explanation makes no sense to me.
Assuming the reference date is correct and unknown birth date is stored as timestamp 0. Since we are before 2025-05-20 at the moment the reported age has to be 149 years, not 150. What I'm missing? Would be very unusual to round up age.
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.
Can you give us a misinformation example related to this post. This sounds like an empty complaint with no vector.
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.
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.
> 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”
> 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.
> 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
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...
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.
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?
The latter. He's trying to build an "Iraq has WMD" case for cutting SSA, by falsely claiming all the payments are fraudulent.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It's what's an LLM would do!
Musk and DOGE do not deserve a dunk that is a lie just because they deserve some comeuppance in general.
The trick is that while this is a database in Social Security, it is not the database of social security recipients.
Thank, you. All this whining about missing death dates totally misses the point. 150 year olds are not receiving checks!
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.
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.
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.
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"?)
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.
Nobody ever said all of those records were fraud other than legacy media and internet randos.
The person I was replying to was implying that they were fraud.
But uh, you don't think Musk was implying that? He decided to make an announcement that there were lots of super old accounts without any implication beyond their mere existence in a completely inactive state?
And I'm not going to ignore blatant implications to accept "oh he didn't say it".
> 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.
Isnt this related to an unverified claim of fraud, so it dpesnt really make a useful distinction because the misinformation is countering the same.
[flagged]
Have you interacted with the federal government? Or any government at all? Do you know how much money they waste? Do you think a 7 trillion dollar budget isn't going to be filled with multiple hundreds of billions of dollars of false payments, waste, fraud, and 42-year old loopholes that have never been closed? Our national debt is growing at trillions a year. That's not sustainable. The inflation is happening now. It gets a lot worse without this.
Of course there is waste. Nothing runs with 100% efficiency.
You claim a huge scale of fraud, "multiple hundreds of billions of dollars" which we can bound as
200/7000 - 900/7000
Or something roughly in the range of 3-12%.
So, not exactly invisible. Probably pretty findable.
Where is the evidence of these "multiple hundreds of billions of dollars"? If you are going to go about it from individual fraudulent SS recipient upwards, you will be looking for fraud forever. A liftetime of SS is, what, $100,000? So, like 0.00005% of the amount of fraud you claim?
If this is how DOGE is going about it, IT WOULD BE THE LEAST FUCKING EFFICIENT GOVERNMENT PROGRAM EVER.
This is not how you find fraud. This is not how you audit. This is a smash and grab job, orchestrated by the most wealthy human and most powerful elected official on the planet.
This is NOT democracy. This is Autocracy.
Trump and Musk are not truly worried about debt. Their current top goal is to commit to trillions in future debt to cut taxes for the top 0.1% of earners. The current Treasury estimate is these tax cuts will cost $4.5 trillion and accumulate to the wealthiest in the country.
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?
Except the link doesn't refute anything at all.
It just says that basically each COBOL system will implement dates their own way.
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...".
It's exhausting. Each side of every argument is full of misinformation, intentionally or not.
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.
You're replying to a thread on an article about how someone just made up the 1875 thing to own Elon.
There's definitely a "both sides" problem here. Many more commenters are making totally unfounded assertions about how these systems actually work for the same reason.
You yourself are pontificating about the inspector general's report at a level of expertise beyond what you likely have. I have some familiarity with IGs, though not in the SSA. It has been eye-opening to see people crawling out of the woodwork to talk about their role, their effectiveness, their "good faith attempts", etc. They don't actually know any of this: it's just ammo they found online to "get" Musk since the controversy started.
Why is it so hard to just suspend judgement about these claims, rather than attack them with little basis? Or at least go after it for solid philosophical reasons? I can't understand why the level of discourse on this subject on Hacker News, of all places, is so bad.
>You're replying to a thread on an article about how someone just made up the 1875 thing to own Elon.
That commenter on DailyKos wasn't put in charge of dismantling parts of the government.
Musk Was.
The way Musk has acted in the past 4 weeks has caused people here to feel it's not in good faith. Suspending judgement when people are lying to your face is a recipe for getting the wool pulled over your eyes. We have ample reason to think Musk isn't acting in good faith, mainly because of the drive-by posting he is doing and the way he's not working with Congress. He wants to make incredible claims without credible evidence... which just makes his claims incredible.
If Musk were doing what FDR did 100 years ago -- affecting major change by working through Congress -- there would be a different response.
I don't approve of Musk for varying reasons, but FDR's relationship with Congress was a little more complicated than that. If anything, Musk and Trump have not yet come close to Roosevelt's excesses, which are now thankfully mostly forgotten and not used as examples. Roosevelt did not so much as "work" with Congress as directly control it, particularly in his first term. Even in his later terms, he directly embedded his executive staff in Congressional committees. He also had no problem ignoring legislation that did not suit him, and had no problem using the FBI and IRS to harass and destroy his political enemies, which helped cooperation quite a bit. Today we find even a hint of this unacceptable. (We've also now mostly forgotten FDR's war against the media.)
From the distance of almost 100 years, it's difficult to see that FDR was an extreme radical when it came to executive power and probably the most powerful US President of all time. It's a good thing he was mostly a good one too.
> We have ample reason to think Musk isn't acting in good faith, mainly because of the drive-by posting he is doing and the way he's not working with Congress.
I don't think the "drive-by posting" or not working with Congress indicate anything of the kind. Congress has for decades done it's best to do absolutely nothing. Even when just a few years ago they busted the CIA spying on Congress, Congress did nothing. Congress has passed basically no major legislation since the ACA (itself pathetically watered down and passed narrowly) except in extremis. The best you get is one party or another grandstanding in committees about some nakedly partisan "investigation." But if they don't even do anything about a level of corruption and abuse that includes spying on Congress itself, why on earth do you think they'd care about low-to-mid-level fraud/waste?
As for drive-by posting, I think we all know Musk is a fundamentally unserious person, not a deep thinker, and prone to exaggeration or outright lying. That doesn't mean that DOGE personnel aren't looking into and finding things that perhaps we'd be better off without and which the executive has the legitimate power to correct or terminate. I don't see any problem with looking more deeply into Social Security payments. As I said in another post, we've had years of reporting on mass SSDI fraud, and other countries do have small amounts of pensioner fraud. Probably we have some too, and this strange belief that "the IG and Congress would have discovered any such problems" seems bizarrely naive to many of us who have worked in the government.
At any rate if Musk is making false claims, then making our own false claims does not help us or any good cause in any way. Lying because someone else is lying does not make anything better. Almost as bad is silly tendentious "well, actuallys" that dress up as a "fact check" and word everything very carefully as if Musk is totally wrong about something when the substance is correct. Consider the Reuters situation. Here's what Musk tweeted:
> “Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the US government for ‘large scale social deception,’” Musk tweeted the night before. “That is literally what it says on the purchase order! They’re a total scam. Just wow.”
Here's an example of a fact check: https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2025/02/fact-check-u-s-go...
The entire story is written as if Musk and Trump are deranged conspiracy theorists...when in fact what Musk tweeted was correct. Yes, OK, actually "Thomson Reuters Special Services" was the one with the contract, not "Reuters", and yeah sure they're all actually ultimately part of the same organization, they own Reuters, but there's a firewall between them, we promise, so...and yeah, it was to study "large scale deception" and "social engineering defense" but actually it's a good thing and-
Long story short, Reuters did have some dumb consulting contract with the government regarding social engineering "defense", which likely was a huge waste of money. Of course, it also wouldn't be surprising if the government was not only paying for "defense" (just as the Department of Defense was not "defending" American from Iraq) but Musk didn't make that claim in the Tweet.
This is just an example. I find it just as bad as what Musk does. If we're trying to educate people telling our own lies and bending the truth to fit our narrative doesn't help anything.
> FDR's relationship with Congress was a little more complicated than that. If anything, Musk and Trump have not yet come close to Roosevelt's excesses
Yeah, what I'm saying is that going through Congress such as FDR did is what would make those actions defensible. If Congress wants to be compliant, that's their prerogative. This Congress wants to be compliant, they can pass laws to do what they are.
So if Musk were doing the same as FDR, I would have much less of an objection, and not much of a Constitutional grounds to stand on. I think they aim to wield executive power, but I think trying to go around Congress is what tips the scales from "radical view of executive power" to "dictatorial view of executive power".
> Congress has for decades done it's best to do absolutely nothing.
This is false, Congress has done N things. Some guys have proclaimed the N things are insufficient, and they demand a new thing be done. Now we are doing N+1 things. Are they working? Who knows; we can't tell because they won't post sufficient details.
We do know what Congress has done is not 0% effective - oversight, whistleblowers, IGs have identified areas of waste/fraud/abuse. Of course there's room for improvement by adding other areas of feedback and DOGE could have been that, but they won't/can't be by going around Congress.
> That doesn't mean that DOGE personnel aren't looking into and finding things that perhaps we'd be better off without and which the executive has the legitimate power to correct or terminate.
I have found in my life that "the fish rots from the head" is often true. A person of such low character surrounds himself with people of similar or lower character, because they lack the temerity to say no to him. Given the recent reports on the people who are in DOGE, they seem to be DEI hires, in that they seem to have been hired due to their proximity to Musk-owned companies rather than their ability to audit federal programs.
> This is just an example.
It's a great example of what I'm talking about when I said "drive by posting". Why is it up to leadstories.com to bring me this very relevant context about the program? Why didn't Musk describe the nature of the program in his initial tweet?
To me this tweet is implying that the money was spent for a social engineering program that caused large scale social disruption. Is that a fair reading, or do you disagree with that? Either way, it seems like many other people interpreted it that way with my reading and became alarmed, hence the reaction.
But when you look at the added context, it becomes clear this program is about preventing large scale social disruption via social media, which seems to me like a good thing. They are apparently paying Reuters for some sort of SaaS tool. I don't know what it does but if it's waste or fraud Musk could explain exactly why/how. But he doesn't, he just tweets his indignation at some perceived abuse and that's the end of it. How is this any different or going to produce better results than "grandstanding in committees about some nakedly partisan investigation".
> The entire story is written as if Musk and Trump are deranged conspiracy theorists
Can you point out where you feel the article characterizes Musk in this way? To me, the article reads as a recitation of factual statements. Every claim is backed by supporting evidence. They describe Musk in neutral and factual terms. They accurately depict his words. It only mentions Trump in passing by way of mentioning his first term. Are you claiming it has left out factual information to slant a narrative? Or that the information is presented in a misleading way?
So where does that leave us? Is the program waste/fraud? No idea, DOGE hasn't provided enough information enough though he has it all.
>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.
You're saying the party of "the President is fine don't trust the cheap fakes" is to be trusted?
One party agreed their old candidate was losing it, the other did not so your both sides argument already falls apart
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.
Confusing insane asylums and refugee asylum by way of talking about Hannibal Lecter points in a completely different direction than what you've stated.
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.
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?
I think no change across 40 years of life is not what either of us meant
Impaired by age is impaired by age. Don't try to move the goalposts. If you meant something more specific, you should have been more specific.
But How does 2020 Biden hold up to this test you came up with?
See above. I didn't come up with anything. 2020 Biden was fine. As for 2024 Biden, I don't care if he was a head in a jar, he and his cabinet were doing great.
Goalpost moving? Does this sound like 2020 Biden to you? https://youtu.be/0_v00iGJCLY?feature=shared
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.
Do you have an objective way to measure levels of "misinformation as a weapon" that supports claim 2?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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...
2 Fox News and a heritage link?
The cnn is positive, only including a few negative quotes from republicans.
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.
>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.
You are alleging all sorts of things, and unlike the poster who responded to you, you bring no evidence.
Good day, sir.
drawkward you are one the inserting yourself in every trump thread you are not a part of.
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.
> Fox News covered it a little bit.
Those were just the stories I could find in 5 minutes.
Also previous presidents didn't issue nearly as many EOs with nearly as controversial content which gives rather less for people to complain about (and yet they still did.)
Tearing down our government is somewhat newsworthy, imho.
"The mainstream media is (far) left" is misinformation. You've been successfully inoculated against critical analysis of your media environment.
Who are you quoting?
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.
> 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.
Yet somehow you continue to respond. Ironic.
Got me. Hey what are you doing here?
Is this a joke? Sinclair network. Conservative radio. X.
[dead]
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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?
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?
> 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: https://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.
Probably will go unnoticed or downvoted because of twitter link but here is the main goal of spewing such a bullshit:
https://x.com/KariLake/status/1891841704703013067
Look at the comments. They know that COBOL defaults to 1875, point is that propaganda pundits look for any reason to spew toxic misinformation and rile 99.999% of uniformed sheeple that voted for orange felon.
It's horrifying to see even the Associated Press repeating this claim a truth. AP links to the Wired article, which links to the same old ExTwitter post that originated the claim. Neither did any fact checking ffs
Elon Musk is a liar with no credibility whatsoever. Don't believe anything he says.
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.
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?
Who said a COBOL system is prone to fraud?
Incomplete and inaccurate data is prone to fraud. Talking about COBOL is missing the point.
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?
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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.
> … 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;
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/Dutch_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 €4 million. The price tag to set it right again was €7.4 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.
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.
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.
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...
And then won a legal case by arguing that it was just a generic insult not a specific allegation (and having expensive lawyers).
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Except that his email to buzzfeed clearly targeted Unsworth. Legal muddling by Musks lawers led Unsworth's to get the email out of the lawsuit, to save time and money, but that ended to be a bad legal strategy.
Okay, so then to win that pointless online argument he argued to a journalist investigating it that it was a true allegation and accused them, the journalist, of protecting pedophiles.
There's no way he comes out of this not looking like a petty, power-mad, knowingly-lying psychopath.
I didn't say that he doesn't. What I said is that it isn't defamation.
Have they revealed how many people actually fall in that category? Agreed that more nuance is necessary.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
There's OIGs for different departments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Inspector_General_(U...
I quoted this exact article. It seems almost a tradition to fire all heads of OIGs after elections, from all sorts of presidents.
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.
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.
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.
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?
https://nypost.com/video/elon-musk-claims-some-recipients-of...
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)
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„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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
Are we optimizing for nice and clean database table constraints over paying out welfare to people who need it?
Theirs is the "foolish consistency" whatsisname was on about, the hobgoblin one.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I can't tell what argument you're trying to advance here.
" 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.
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.
> 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.
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’.
>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.
>now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud
Im genuinely curious about this, would you mind sharing references?
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
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.
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
Why would they not add a birthday to the DB after making the age check?
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.
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.
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.
The cost benefit calculation is, of course, reasonable. But there are 2 things that need to happen here.
1. Run a complex process requiring human intervention to determine age where it is hard to determine
2. Enter the result of step 1 in the DB
And it's pretty obvious that 99.99% of the cost of this is coming from step 1. So I find it completely implausible that just tracking the results here, when a single error could potentially result in a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars, is not cost effective.
> 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?
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?
Do we send Social Security checks to everyone in the Social Security database?
There is a flag that marks an entry as active. If that flag was set to inactive, there wouldn’t be an issue.
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.
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.
So it's not 20 million checks, then?
Too early to tell. But if the Covid PPP Loan Fraud is any indication, the potential is massive.
Here's how to tell, far easier: take the number of people receiving checks in that age bracket. From what I read, it was 44,000 ish, but I can't verify that. If it's not - it's still going to be a number far less than 20 million.
Do all those people have correct data? If not, correct that. If they do, then there's no fraud.
And even after that, even if the data is incorrect, it doesn't mean there's fraud. You have to go case by case to check if they're actually being collected and not just sitting somewhere.
So .. yes. There's potential for fraud, but we're not going to (accurately) know about the scale for a long time, and it's definitely not going to be on the scale of 20 million recipients.
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> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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
SSNs are not reused: https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html
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.
Thanks, very informative link
Thats not how SSNs are supposed to work at all.
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.
How is it possible that your code contains bugs? I think that question may have the same answer.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine all the wasted cycles dealing with Trump's/Elon's/DOGE misadventures.
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.
I fail to see why anybody would believe anything coming from Musk's mouth.
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
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.
Wait, I thought they sent 200 million condoms over there.
He was making fun of someone for suggesting that the federal government uses SQL.
Dude has been burning credibility at an amazing pace.
probably because despite all of his negative aspects, he has transformed the online payments industry, space industry, and auto industry.
All that while playing Diablo and posting 200 racist memes a day....
lol I think the Diablo Rakki was determined to be a hoax but I did find this interesting paste of Things Elon Musk launched or unveiled in less than 10 years:
Boring Co. Crew Dragon Cybercab Cybertruck DOGE Falcon Heavy Falcon 9 FSD Grok 1,2,3 Megapack Model 3 Model X Model Y Neuralink OpenAI Optimus Powerwall Roadster 2.0 Robovan Solar Roof Starlink Starship Tesla Semi
And yet millions still do. People believe what the WANT to believe, and that frequently is something other than facts.
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.
"People believe stories. It's ridiculous to suggest otherwise."
No one suggested otherwise, in fact, that's virtually verbatim what I said.
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
Do they receive social security though? His tweet doesn’t explicitly say so, might be willfully omitted.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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 Old Aged, Survivors, and Disabled Insured. They're legally separate programs and thus have different statutes regulating who can draw benefit from them.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>Regardless of how somebody establishes their birth date, that field would still get updated with the data that gets accepted.
Nope. Social security data has a lot of "readers" that need to query the government with a question and get the answer, but do not get the actual data that can give you the answer.
None of those organizations are empowered to write back any confirmation they get. For very good reasons, the government does not let random consumers overwrite social security data. The system is instead designed to be tolerant of bad data and encourage lower level groups to merely check for eligibility.
A concrete example: In our state's insurance marketplace, if your name on the application does not match your name in the Social Security database, it gets flagged. You then provide the state documentation that proves you are the person with the name on the application. That clears the issue and allows you to get your health insurance benefits, but does NOT update the row in the social security database! Doing so would require allowing a downstream, el-cheapo third party contractor application to randomly overwrite whatever it wants in the literally national database. That's a stupid idea. This isn't Google, where randomly shutting off accounts on mistakes is fine. When the government does that, we are supposed to tell them not to do that.
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.
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.
> 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
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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.
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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.
That something has to be applicable to only one "side" is a goal of your own making, not mine.
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.
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Multiple people calling your post unclear is a request for you to explain. Even if they don't use a question mark.
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> > random nobodies speculating in public (likely incorrectly), and people are repeating their speculation because they like how it sounds
> That made me think of how Arendt described the pre-totalitarian mishmash of opinions and totalitarian "opinions" [0], that's the first quote.
Allow me to clarify what I was saying: there is no inherent problem with “random nobodies” speculating about things - I am myself a “random nobody” in this context. The problem is when people start talking about those pseudonymous speculations as if they were coming from genuine life experience with this particular computer system, or closely related computer systems-which is what I interpreted the comment I was replying to as claiming (or at least it could be read as implying it). Furthermore, while both I and the sources for these speculations are “random nobodies”, I’d say I’m a much more informed random nobody, because I’ve read enough COBOL documentation to realise that what they are saying is of dubious plausibility, whereas it appears they haven’t.
That’s not to say I’m endorsing Musk’s claims about “150 year old social security recipients”-I don’t know what the actual truth behind them is (and I don’t think anyone else publicly discussing them does either), but I think more likely than not they are an exaggeration, distortion or misinterpretation - so I do think they are probably (at least partially) wrong - but (outside a small cohort of current and former government officials and contractors, who likely are restrained by confidentiality obligations from participating in the public debate) nobody knows exactly how and why they are wrong - but I know enough about COBOL to know that COBOL-centric theories about why Musk is wrong are very likely themselves wrong.
And finally, replying to someone’s comment with quotes - without any explanation of why you think the quotes are relevant to the comment you are replying to - isn’t a helpful communication style. Rather than leaving people guessing at what you are trying to say-or leaving them with the onus of asking you to clarify-much better to just explain it explicitly in your initial reply. Plus, I have the suspicion that your reply was triggered by a misunderstanding of my position - that you were reading me as saying “Musk is right”, when what I’ve actually been saying (not explicitly in that particular comment, but I think it becomes clearer if you read my other comments on the topic) is “Musk could well be wrong-indeed more likely than not he is-but not for this reason”
> That made me think of how Arendt described the pre-totalitarian mishmash of opinions and totalitarian "opinions"
That is genuinely all. If that is not welcome here, fine, but this "what are you trying to say?" as if there has to be some other layer I just don't get, or this flagging spree against me now.
> much better to just explain it explicitly in your initial reply.
"this made me think of" is implied to me. I could have put some specific phrase in italics, but other than that, just flag the thing. Any reply I make just gets used against me anyway, so do whatever.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
Entirely possible that part of the system fails on whatever is causing there to be 150 year olds.
There are a multitude of possibilities, of which none of them were addressed by Musk with no nuance at all.
I don't think it is useful to do that in a press conference.
Neither is it useful to make such claims as he did so blatantly
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.
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.
What is ingenuoua?
What was the claim? That there are millions of people above 120 years old in the SS database that aren't marked dead? That doesn't sound extraordinary, or a claim that's hard to challenge by even past employees that had access to the data. but all we got is propaganda and FUD.
> 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.
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.
Not giving out evidence in a press conference (how does he even do that?) does not mean that his assertions were made without evidence.
So where's the evidence?
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.
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.
His team ran a query and shared the results. How is that zero? What do you expect him to provide? Litterally NOBODY is arguing that the results aren't accurate based on data other than an, easily verifiable, erroneous claim about the COBOL platform or "mUsK SAiD iT"
No analyst or technical insiders have come out to dispute it, can't be that wrong.
>so it's useful to just just say things without evidence, because they "might turn out to be true" in the future.
The evidence is a query run on the data. No insiders have disputed the results.
>Hardly. That's just saying how little attention you paid to the man.
Convincing evidence filled rebuttal from an internet rando. What @fastball said is based on readily available fact.
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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.
>...exceptions in which the automated process doesn't terminate someone for being >115
You gave a several good explanations about why the current automated processes don't mark the records as deceased. But those are excuses. Just because the design of the system is flawed, that doesn't mean the system isn't in error because the code implements the design.
All those sound like it needs to be fixed to me. As somebody that deals with data for large enterprises that are nowhere near, obviously, as the government, but definitely companies with 100k employees and several in the Fortune 20. It's rudimentary to: - have a data staging area before data gets into any financial system intended for payment transactions. Those staging systems can be used for analytical, reporting, and especially data cleaning. - No use one record to represent the obligations to a completely different records of the same type. i.e. overloaded corrupt master data.
Uncurated data systems should be treated completely differently than systems that actually impacts financial transactions. Just because it's taxpayer money, they shouldn't be able to avoid criticism because they're wasting the money. If anything they should be more accountable.
There has been an ongoing dispute between the SSA and its OIG about what to do about millions of dormant accounts for which SSA lacks a date of death. [0] SSA OIG views these accounts as a risk and wants them marked as presumed dead. SSA argues that it is unnecessary, that it would cost millions in administrative and IT costs for little real benefit, that there is a risk of accidentally marking living people as dead, and disagrees that it is a fraud risk since no benefits have been paid to these dormant accounts for many decades, and any attempt to “reactivate” one of them would be flagged as an anomaly and investigated as potential fraud. It would not surprise me if Musk’s claims of “150 year old social security recipients” turn out to be a distortion of this pre-existing debate. The distortion is in presenting these accounts as active cases of fraud, since the vast majority of them haven’t received benefits in decades, or never claimed them to begin with - they are mostly long-dead people who were registered with the SSA in the first few decades of its existence, but for whatever reason their death was never reported to the SSA (the processes for doing so were less effective decades ago and so the further back you go, the more deaths were “missed”)
[0] see e.g. https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
Musk is making claims without substantive evidence. Why do you think we're talking about it?
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).
Musk is implying that no serious attempt has been made to find fraud.
That sounds quite possible to me.
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.
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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M88ZzxKyrTg
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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"
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.
> 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 ?
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.
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.