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
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.
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?
"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_...
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:
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":
That is the hard part in any system, not just government. Especially government, maybe, but not uncharacteristically and certainly not exclusively!
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.
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...
The crucial bit of infrastructure (and the most vulnerable point right now) might be the domain name.
I’d be more worried about propaganda being inserted.
Domain names have been seized in the past.
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.
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.
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
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.
FWIW, it would be far from the first time that’s happened (including for sensitive US issues).
[0] https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/02/doge-fired-hundreds-of-us...
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 were coded with 6 digits: 2 for month, 2 day and 2 year according to the SSA.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
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.
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"
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.
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.
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
It's on Musk to provide evidence for his extraordinary claims. So far that evidence has been in very short supply.
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.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/10/elon-mus...
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?
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
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"
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.
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).
Dead and 150? Bit harder to believe. It's an extraordinary claim, if you get my drift.
> 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
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.
But we're generally assuming that he's clinging to anything that justifies a pre-existing narrative.
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.
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 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%.
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.
Calendars and historic records is a pain.
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...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proleptic_Gregorian_calendar
"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."
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.
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
> 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.
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.
Remove the CMOS battery from a computer with no internet connection running Windows XP and it will default to the 1600's
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, the social security system and the COBOL that powers it predates that standard by quite a lot.
* 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.
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]
[1] https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-blue-zone-distraction
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000148
[3] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3Yes, 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.
...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.
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.
I note that the same dude also said in his White House interview not to believe him because he'll often be wrong.
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.
IRS is indeed horrifying.
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 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.
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.
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.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076
...
100-109 4,734,407
110-119 3,627,007
120-129 3,472,849
130-139 3,936,311
140-149 3,542,044
150-159 1,345,083
160-169 121,807
170-179 6,087
180-189 695
190-199 448
200-209 879
210-219 866
220-229 1,039
240-249 1
360-369 1Data 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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...
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 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?
> "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
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 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.
Why on earth would you believe a serial liar?
I still stand by the other things I said though.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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"
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.
I've got popcorn ready for when President Musk's incelbro's use database queries to delete 20 million fraudulent Social Security accounts.
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 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.
https://xcancel.com/ThatsMauvelous/status/189135619250239902...
The only exception I'd see is if there are people who have somehow gamed the system to collect multiple payments at once.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
[0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_... [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_May_Fuller
----
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
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.
Or false, in this case.
(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...
Here's the raw data:
Age Range,Count
0-9,38825456
10-19,44326480
20-29,47995478
30-39,52106915
40-49,47626581
50-59,45740805
60-69,46381281
70-79,33404412
80-89,15165127
90-99,6054154
100-109,4734407
110-119,3627007
120-129,3472849
130-139,3936311
140-149,3542044
150-159,1345083
160-169,121807
170-179,6087
180-189,695
190-199,448
200-209,879
210-219,866
220-229,1039
240-249,1
360-369,1
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.
Instead, he raced to tweet it. This is just dumb.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not so much sad as amazed slash disgusted. This is antivax thinking pattern.
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
Don't gripe about Elon. He's doing a job that nobody before him has done. It's about time. Thank you Pres Trump!! Thanks Elon!!
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:
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.
However, the records were never stored for more than 4 years, so this was never a problem.
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.
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 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”
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.
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
"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...
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It just says that basically each COBOL system will implement dates their own way.
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.
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.
That commenter on DailyKos wasn't put in charge of dismantling parts of the government.
Musk Was.
If Musk were doing what FDR did 100 years ago -- affecting major change by working through Congress -- there would be a different response.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
The cnn is positive, only including a few negative quotes from republicans.
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.
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.
Good day, sir.
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.)
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.
People just don't have the skills, or are being brainwashed into not using their skills.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also I never head of this default.
Nobody in this HN thread has used the word "sentinel" - see another HN about the concept https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195425
People got hung up on: - "COBOL defaults to..." rather than "banking practices are..." - epoch start dates - many pointing out COBOL didn't use epochs or counts, just much-damned YYDDD or YYMMDD actual strings.
Also, Elon loves to stir with partial misinfo hence his tweet https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076 with the breakdowns by age bracket. "Death set to FALSE" means "Death date not known" but that's not clickbaity enough.
That long tail looks awfully like data entered from historical records lacking death dates - there have been a few discussions of the cost of finding death dates and the decision to avoid spending $millions on it, as this is not data used to make payments.
You would expect, in a system that's pulling data from many sources, to see historical jumps in data cleanup like this. Imagine a few large states finally get around to digital records of deaths, so their data is easily aggregated - you get a sudden flushing of people who would previously have been left on the list. However, this will only apply from a certain age onwards as those sources in turn don't have the time/budget/interest to digitise really old records.
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.
* https://lucid.co/techblog/2020/11/13/why-cobol-isnt-the-prob...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Incomplete and inaccurate data is prone to fraud. Talking about COBOL is missing the point.
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?
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’s simple as:
1. They don’t care;
2. It fits their agenda;
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.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-thai-... https://www.ccn.com/5-saucy-elon-musk-revelations-in-explosi...
There's no way he comes out of this not looking like a petty, power-mad, knowingly-lying psychopath.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Inspector_General_(U...
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.
- 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)
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.
- 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Old people vote. There is no way Congress goes along with a scheme like this.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
Im genuinely curious about this, would you mind sharing references?
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.
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.
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.
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 last US census that number was about 90,00.
Are you ok with sending social security checks to 20 million dead people?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: the link below gives more information on ssns. SSNs so far been unique, but there are some issues
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> $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!
Dude has been burning credibility at an amazing pace.
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
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.
No one suggested otherwise, in fact, that's virtually verbatim what I said.
Then again, these are just posts of screenshots on a site filled with AI-generated content.
[1] https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1891406665242546383
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.
>"where it’s not recklessly incompetent it is flagrantly corrupt" //
Care to give a couple of the examples from your direct experience?
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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 a cursory search will show this.
You're simply ignorant on this matter.
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.
It's telling that Musk did not publish the data on the age of people that are receiving payments.
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.
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.
However it's likely not as common as Musk wants you to think.
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...
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.
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
That's what good posting vague quotes about totalitarianism does. You have to engage in specifics for your communication to be meaningful.
And they're right, if we can't tell what your quote is aimed at, then your post is not doing a good job.
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.
Unfortunately your reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113282) also breaks the site guidelines. If you keep doing this, we're going to have to ban you, so it would be good if you'd please stop doing this.
> 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 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.
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.
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)
But Elon made a great headline for himself without any nuanced or substantiated view.
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
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.
There is supposedly an automated process to remove social security payments from people over the age of 115, unless there is an exception.
The only reason you have to believe that Musk's statements are not correct is the aforementioned inaccurate assertion about COBOL.
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.
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.
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.
And his well documented history of spouting bullshit and flim-flam.
> 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.
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.
[0] see e.g. https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
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).
But COBOL doesn't have a date type.
So isn't its behaviour defined by how the system has been implemented ?
But the idea that no one has noticed the problem and investigated it (including possible fraud) is very unlikely.