Did missing/corrupt dates in COBOL default to 1875-05-20?

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/31288/does-or-did-cobol-default-to-1875-05-20-for-corrupt-or-missing-dates

by SeenNotHeard • 1 year ago

277 392 1 year ago

retrocomputing.stackexchange.com

blindriver• 1 year ago

I keep getting gobsmacked by how much misinformation and straight up lies there are on the internet these days. And what's worse is that I keep falling for it like everyone else, even though I pride myself on being so skeptical about everything. I remember reading that last week and thinking "oh, interesting" and now I'm angry at myself for not questioning that more, especially since I worked at a bank.

With so much manipulated information, AI-generated content, and straight up lying, I really can't tell what's real and fake anymore.

I distinctly remember finally not being able to tell the difference between fake and real info during the Allen Texas shopping mall shooting. I went on Twitter to get more info and I couldn't tell what was real and what was fake for the first time because everything was so convincing. That feels like ages ago now because things are so much more sophisticated.

colechristensen• 1 year ago

In the attention economy, what you're saying being true has no relation to you getting paid (and reality is often more boring).

This is what you get for wanting everything to be "free as in beer" and "free as in speech" at the same time in a market economy. Systems optimized to profit from free information have reached great efficiency.

geetee• 1 year ago

It's exhausting. Each side of every argument is full of misinformation, intentionally or not.

drawkward3• 1 year ago

Each side of every argument is full of misinformation, intentionally or not.

This is just silly information, and is used to sow resignation and demean actual and valid arguments.

There are plenty of arguments and forums where misinformation is treated disdainfully, as it should be. HN used to be one of them, but everything anti trump and musk seems to get brigaded, rather than debated.

I will point out that it is predominantly one side in American politics using misinformation as a weapon. Its the side that brought us "teach the controverry" instead of accepting the scientific reality of evolution. Its the side that made it illegal for the CDC and ATF to do studies of firearms. Its the side that claims to be anti- politics in science while at the very same time politicizing science.

Your statement benefits the side that doesnt have truth on its side, and is therefore harmful.

dkjaudyeqooe5• 1 year ago

That always was possible and always required critical thinking and further evidence to resolve.

People just don't have the skills, or are being brainwashed into not using their skills.

fncypants• 1 year ago

Do not both sides any of this. One cannot claim that both sides present misinformation and then not acknowledge that one side is doing so intentionally and the other is not.

Elon tweeted that there was a lot of 150-year-old recipients. That's all he said. [1] So there was a rush to point out why, if this 150 year old number is the only information he's providing of fraud, it is not a prima facie case of fraud. That was a good faith response to a bad faith, selective release of information.

[1] https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/musk-claims-150-year-ol...

So then Musk provides more data, but again, not enough data to provide all the context. What he leaves out is that there have been multiple, prior good faith attempts to investigate these data entries, identify whether there's any fraud, and address any problems. This was the work of inspectors general whose job is to work in good faith to try to resolve these issues.

There is one side acting only in bad faith. If they were acting in good faith, they would raise these issues through legal channels (inspectors general) and then have an orderly, legal process to address them. That is how it has always been done, for a reason. They are not operating legally because they know that what they are doing is in bad faith and would be found out as such.

What we are witnessing is a dismantling of the rule of law. It's important to recognize that and to not to be complicit in it.

cyanydeez2• 1 year ago

Can you give us a misinformation example related to this post. This sounds like an empty complaint with no vector.

chrisco2556• 1 year ago

There's a snarky thread going around attempting to dunk on DOGE employees who revealed that some social security recipients have 150 year old birth dates. The claim is that this is just the default start date for COBOL (like the UNIX epoch), but it's not even true, and even if it was, it's still a major problem if we have social security recipients with no birth date in the system.

BugsJustFindMe2• 1 year ago

The stack exchange question is the example. It specifically talks about a bit of information making the rounds that turns out to be wrong. You read the linked page, and didn't just jump to the comments, right?

frugalmail4• 1 year ago

In this case the misinformation isn't even the attack the mis-informers think it is.

Anybody getting payments with this erroneous data is committing fraud because the choices with that mis-information are that we don't know how old they are. This means they have been 150 years old since they got into the system. That scenario is actually worse than they have been getting payments for some decades after their qualification age.

zimpenfish2• 1 year ago

This means they have been 150 years old since they got into the system.

No, the theory being made was that they appear to be 150 years old because the marker for "unknown DOB" -when queried- comes out as 1875 by default and that wasn't accounted for / known about by the Special Boys given their lack of knowledge around these systems. It's entirely plausible that they look 150 years old (with a badly formed query done in a rush) but there's an "eligibility" section of fields which says they're eligible because they verified their citizenship[0] in 1952 with their military record[1].

Basically doing a query on DOB/age instead of eligibility. Easily done! Just not something to brag about in a press conference before triple-checking that you weren't about to make a massive arsehole out of yourself to the world.

[0] Or however it works, I'm from the UK, I don't know.

[1] Or equivalent validating document.

hypeatei2• 1 year ago

It was posted in the comments that ISO 8601, at one point, mentioned 1875-05-20 as a reference date. According to Wikipedia, it was later omitted[0]. I guess it's possible that the social security system (EDIT: that we know today) was initially designed with that date as a sort of epoch. Either way, it seems nuanced and no one has the full story (including Elon)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

chrisco2556• 1 year ago

was first published in 1988

No, the social security system and the COBOL that powers it predates that standard by quite a lot.

hypeatei2• 1 year ago

That makes a lot of assumptions, especially given there was most likely Y2K problems that needed addressing and system upgrades taking place since the initial system rollout. This page[0] states that there was changes to the system in the 1960s but I can't find anything more recent so... maybe you're right. Who knows.

[0] https://www.ssa.gov/history/ibm.html

jomar• 1 year ago

Wikipedia says "ISO 8601:2004 established a reference calendar date of 20 May 1875 (the date the Metre Convention was signed), later omitted from ISO 8601-1:2019." I was curious what "reference calendar date" is supposed to mean.

Thanks to links in the SE thread, I found the relevant actual text in ISO 8601:2000 (I don't know how different it might be, if at all, in the 2004 document):

The Gregorian calendar provides a reference system consisting of a, potentially infinite, series of contiguous calendar years. Consecutive calendar years are identified by sequentially assigned year numbers. A reference point is used which assigns the year number 1875 to the calendar year in which the “Convention du mètre” was signed at Paris.

This last sentence is simply an obtuse way to say "this year right now, as I [jomar] write this -- we call this 2025". Apparently the ISO committee did not want to refer to what was going on around 1 AD or felt that the missing 0 between 1 BC and 1 AD would lead to confusion or something, so instead used the birth year of the metre to state the bleeding obvious.

jjmarr• 1 year ago

Nobody actually knows what year Jesus was born, so setting "1 AD = Jesus' first full year of life" wouldn't be accurate. It's more or less the same puzzle as COBOL's alleged default.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_the_birth_of_Jesus#Acc...

The current year numbering is because a monk called Dionysius Exiguus thought the existing system of numbering the years since Emperor Diocletian was stupid as Diocletian persecuted Christians. Dionysius decided the year in which he invented his calendar was 525 years since the birth of Jesus and created the Anno Domini system.

Dionysius didn't really explain why he thought Jesus was born 525 years ago (in December of 1 BC). Many historiographers have tried to understand his logic. Thankfully, unlike COBOL programmers, Dionysius documented his reasoning for picking 1 BC as the reference year, so we only have to argue about whether he was correct.

jedwards12114• 1 year ago

The original post on X completely misinterpreted this to mean that ISO 8601 established days since 1875 as a standard date storage format

masswerk6• 1 year ago

Isn't it possible that 1875 was chosen, because of compatibility with US legacy data encoding and that then an arbitrary, but notable date in this year was chosen as the reference date (i.e., the Convention du Mètre)? I guess, the USA had quite a stake in this…

jedwards12114• 1 year ago

I don’t think there’s anything in ISO 8601 pertaining to integers that represent the number of years since some specific year though.

ISO 8601 prescribes string representations, not integers, and it requires at least four digits for the year, and the year the Convention du Mètre was signed is expressed as 1875, not 0.

ggm2• 1 year ago

I find the stack exchange interesting, but I still think its post-hoc reasoning. I would prefer one of the people who worked on these systems to say it, than have a plausible, but none-the-less third hand take published as "the answer"

dkjaudyeqooe5• 1 year ago

We already have "the answer", it's obviously bad or exceptional data. The question "is it fraud" can't be answered by looking narrowly at that data.

But the idea that no one has noticed the problem and investigated it (including possible fraud) is very unlikely.

ggm2• 1 year ago

Agreed. And, the persistence of bad data like this isn't uncommon. We had a bunch of fields in the SQL registry system I work in set to the literal 4 character ascii string "null" because of a coding error over field == null by somebody. It did no harm to the attributes of interest at the time. It only had consequences later on when the codebase changed.

anadem• 1 year ago

I didn't wok on one of the US government systems, but much of my career was in COBOL compilers (writing run time systems, and checking against the ANSI standards). COBOL would not default to 1875 for a corrupt date.

threeseed3• 1 year ago

COBOL would not default to 1875 for a corrupt date

But COBOL doesn't have a date type.

So isn't its behaviour defined by how the system has been implemented ?

jmclnx• 1 year ago

Not on the System (Wang VS) I worked on in the 80s. Plus in many cases dates used a 2 digit year. So 1875 would be seen as 1975.

Also I never head of this default.

hbarka• 1 year ago

The question of unknown and how to default this value in databases. Since null is not usually possible, there have been hacks on how to do it. 1-1-9999 anyone?

cwbriscoe3• 1 year ago

I have been working on COBOL systems for quite a while now. Currently and for most of my career, we mostly always use DB2 compatible dates ("CCYY-MM-DD").

Pre-Y2k a lot of dates were created with:

ACCEPT WS-DATE FROM DATE.

The above WS-DATE was in YYMMDD format, which is why there was a Y2K issue and needed to be resolved with windowing code. However, windowing code wouldn't work for somebody that was over 100 years old...

Doing a little research there is also (which I have never used since we just use DB2 and date parameter input files for CCYYMMDD dates):

ACCEPT WS-CENTURY-DATE FROM CENTURY-DATE.

This date is in CCYYMMDD format. According to google, the epoch for this date is January 1st, 1601.

Aloisius8• 1 year ago

I'm not sure how a date in the format YYYYMMDD can have an epoch of 1601.

Epochs are used when storing the offset in some unit like seconds or days to a reference date. The epoch for a year YYYY is 1* BCE (since there is no year 0).

It doesn't make sense at all though for YYYYMMDD where there are multiple units and 0 is invalid for two of them.

* You're not really supposed to use dates < 1582 in ISO 8601 though without prior agreement though it's meaning isn't really defined.

Edit: There do exist standards that default to 1875-05-20 when there's a null date however (GIS-related), but I've not seen anything that suggests the SSA uses it.

skissane7• 1 year ago

I'm not sure how a date in the format YYYYMMDD can have an epoch of 1601.

IBM mainframe Cobol contains builtin functions which convert between YYYYMMDD strings and integers - and 1601 is the epoch they use for that integer representation. I assume the person you were replying to was talking about this fact, just stating it somewhat confusingly

The epoch for a year YYYY is 1* BCE (since there is no year 0).

Well, there is a year 0 in astronomical year numbering. One can say that 0 CE = 1 BCE and -1 CE = 2 BCE and more generally n BCE = -(n-1) CE for all integers n > 0. Maybe “0 CE” is incorrect per a strict definition of “CE”, but it is correct if we define it less strictly

* You're not really supposed to use dates < 1582 in ISO 8601 though without prior agreement though it's meaning isn't really defined.

There’s really only two choices: proleptic Gregorian, or Julian. I don’t know why ISO 8601 doesn’t just mandate proleptic Gregorian with astronomical year numbering. But I suppose in the rare cases a computer system needs to represent pre-1582 dates (such as historiography), Julian is the norm. I suppose they could extend the syntax to specify which calendar is being used

Edit: There do exist standards that default to 1875-05-20 when there's a null date however (GIS-related), but I've not seen anything that suggests the SSA uses it.

Do you know which ones specifically? Would be interested to know this

cwbriscoe3• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_(computing) (CTRL-F 1601) Also notice, no mention of 1875.

Also just search "CENTURY-DATE COBOL Epoch"

If you search "CENTURY-DATE COBOL Epoch 1875", it is mostly just recent entries debunking 1875 as an epoch.

HideousKojima• 1 year ago

I'm not sure how a date in the format YYYYMMDD can have an epoch of 1601.

Remove the CMOS battery from a computer with no internet connection running Windows XP and it will default to the 1600's

bborud• 1 year ago

Using an epoch of jan 1 1601 is ... interesting since it means you would have to deal with the switch from julian to gregorian calendar in september 1752. This included dropping 11 days.

Calendars and historic records is a pain.

zosima• 1 year ago

Different countries switched to the Gregorian calendar at different times. Pope Gregory XIII papal bull went into effect October 1582, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar

And so 15 October 1582 used to be the 0 for some COBOL date functions.

Later that was changed to Jan 1 1600. In IBM's systems you can control what you prefer by a switch: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.4.0?topic=services-date-li...

twic• 1 year ago

I assume they just use the Gregorian calendar throughout - roughly what is called "proleptic Gregorian" [1], although since the Gregorian calendar started on 15 October 1582, which is before 1601, it's not really proleptic. Just barely retroleptic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proleptic_Gregorian_calendar

apaprocki• 1 year ago

The Windows epoch is January 1st, 1601. The rationale is:

"The Gregorian calendar operates on a 400-year cycle, and 1601 is the first year of the cycle that was active at the time Windows NT was being designed. In other words, it was chosen to make the math come out nicely."

Maken• 1 year ago

Still more logical than January 1st, 1970.

layer8• 1 year ago

This is the best debunk I could find: https://iter.ca/post/1875-epoch/

Aloisius8• 1 year ago

The SSA's master records, the Numerical Identification (NUMIDENT) files, store dates in text as either CCYYMMDD or MMDDCCYY strings according to their archived versions.

https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/207202/

I have a hard time believing the DB2 systems would convert it to days/seconds/whatever since 1875. It's not impossible, but I think whoever came up with the 1875 thing was simply wrong.

That's not to say there are 150 year olds collecting social security either. Dates of birth are sometimes missing or entered wrong and sometimes death records don't get entered. It's also clear DOGE didn't understand that social security numbers can't be used as a unique identifiers (nor why it's unnecessary) which can lead to all sorts of issues when processing.

Edit: It also seems the SSA presumes anyone over 115 is has died and halts payments which makes it even more unlikely there are 150 year old beneficiaries: https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0202602578

CSMastermind• 1 year ago

Social Security started paying out in 1940: https://www.proquest.com/docview/146227490?sourcetype=Histor...

With anyone 65 years or older eligible to start receiving checks.

The 1875 date almost certainly comes from that. I wouldn't be surprised if someone set it as a default for anyone they didn't have a birth date for because you could safely assume someone was older than that if they were receiving social security when it first started _or_ because there are some of those initial payments that truly were never discontinued.

EdwardDiego2• 1 year ago

That makes a lot of sense.

Aloisius8• 1 year ago

They didn't use computers in 1940 for it though. All this was stored on paper where using days since 1875 wouldn't have made much sense. That would lead to most of the beneficiaries having a negative number.

They didn't get their first computer until 1956 and by that point, the 1875 date would have made little sense.

It simply makes more sense there was data entry errors. Indeed, we know there are since the SSA makes records available for dead people. They show people supposedly born as early as 1800:

https://aad.archives.gov/aad/fielded-search.jsp?dt=3059&tf=F...

kuhewa• 1 year ago

The very first recipient, Ida May Fuller, would be 150 years old currently.

erik9982• 1 year ago

In 1875, the American Express Company established the first private pension plan in the United States.

I can also see a situation where the SSA recipient in 1940 was born in 1875. The recipient age 65 could have married someone very young for 10 years. That younger person could be on survivors benefits and continue receiving payments.

Here is an example: https://www.ssa.gov/history/idapayroll.html

On January 31, 1940, the first monthly retirement check was issued to Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vermont, in the amount of $22.54. Miss Fuller, a Legal Secretary, retired in November 1939. She started collecting benefits in January 1940 at age 65 and lived to be 100 years old, dying in 1975.

https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10084.pdf

https://www.ssa.gov/survivor/eligibility

So if in 1965 this retired person married someone age 18... Then that person at 18 never remarried. Could they end up in a situation where they receive survivors benefits from the original applicant?

The recent spouse would be born in 1947 and marry in 1965 for 10 years until their spouse's death... not have remarried or worked, then at age 60 in 2007, derive survivors benefits from original applicant?

qingcharles3• 1 year ago

Also factor in there were civil war widows legitimately eligible for pensions from their dead soldier husbands until the last one died just a couple of years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_...

Also can be via your father, this lady was collecting a civil war pension until 2020:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Triplett

erik9982• 1 year ago

There is so much more info on their site.

https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html

https://www.ssa.gov/history/index.html

https://www.ssa.gov/history/operations.html

Early Operations Social Security Bulletin

Volume 1 - June 1938 - Number 6

ACCOUNTING OPERATIONS OF THE BUREAU OF OLD-AGE INSURANCE

Joseph L. Fay and MaxJ. Wasserman

Bureau of Old-Age Insurance. Mr. Fay is Chief of the Baltimore Accounting Operations Section and Mr. Wasserman is Chief of the Statistics Section. They were assisted by Edward O. Manning of the Statistics Section. https://www.ssa.gov/history/fay638.html

gonzobonzo• 1 year ago

The 1875 date almost certainly comes from that.

Here's 1875 the claim that's been all over Twitter these days[1]:

"Social security runs on COBOL, which does not use a date or time type. So the > date is stored as a number using the ISO 8601 standard. The epoch for this is 150 years ago (1875) - aka the metre standard."

"So if you don’t know the date of something, it will be a 0 value, which in COBOL will default to 1875 - 150 years ago."

Weirdly this post itself didn't get a lot of attention (only 2.2k likes), but a ton of people took a screenshot of it and passed it around as fact, which got a lot more attention. For instance, post like this[2] with 56 thousand likes (there are a bunch of them on Twitter right now, all with a screenshot of this original post).

It's a good example of how misinformation spreads like wildfire, and how extremely few people bother to check to see where or not its accurate. I'm not sure it's useful trying to figure out reasons for a 1875 date when we don't actually have any indication that this was actually occurring, and the discussion started because some made an erroneous claim.

[1] https://x.com/toshiHQ/status/1889928670887739902 [2] https://x.com/enkday/status/1890808249663869204

chrisco2556• 1 year ago

The 1875 date is a made up thing. There's millions of records more than 100+ years old, some as old as 229 years old by birth date. And, it's still very much a problem if the first people to receive SS are still receiving it, or if the system is still cutting checks because their death wasn't ever recorded.

blackeyeblitzar• 1 year ago

How can anyone on the outside make all these guesses about the code and databases? It feels like a lot of speculation to try to prove a claim wrong, but without evidence.

EdwardDiego2• 1 year ago

Yeah, exactly, and no-one can see Musk is tweeting about either.

But we're generally assuming that he's clinging to anything that justifies a pre-existing narrative.

brendoelfrendo• 1 year ago

Indeed, how can an outsider like Musk and his DOGE compatriots make any claim at all? I think it is far more likely that Elon was mistaken, or lied, than the SSA is paying out to multiple non-existent 150 year-olds. In fact, that there are so many plausible explanations that don't involve fraud, it really behooves us to be skeptical. Elon made the claim: he is responsible for supplying the evidence.

Note that the doge.gov website has a section called "savings," which originally said "Receipts coming by Valentine's Day." Now it says "Receipts coming over the weekend!", and seeing as it's 11:50pm on the East Coast of the US right now, that seems unlikely, too.

russdill• 1 year ago

Also they do a heck of a lot more than retirement benefits. And really, it could actually be a survivor benefit and the deceased person could have been born 150 years ago and the survivor still living.

masswerk6• 1 year ago

Let's say, someone grew up in an orphanage in the 1940s with an unknown date of birth. This was before any computer systems and the date would have been recorded on punch-card, probably in 2+3 digits, here defaulting to `00` for the year for a missing value. It's plausible that this would have been transitioned as-is to any more modern date encodings.

Aloisius8• 1 year ago

After much searching, I found documentation on SSA's Master Beneficiary Records format from after the Y2K update.

Date of Birth in some of these records is stored as days since January 1, 1800. There's no reference to 1875 anywhere. See section 2.3 Date formats:

https://omb.report/icr/200704-0960-012/doc/2576801

masswerk6• 1 year ago

But it was common to encode missing two-digits data as something in the high-90s, maybe specifying a reason in the least significant digit. (I was taught to do so at university and did so myself for a project.) So, if the start date is indeed 1880, the code for missing date could still have been 95.

jedwards12114• 1 year ago

I’m still kind of surprised they would store days since 1800, but it makes a lot more sense than 1875. At least with 1800 the last two digits are the same, so debugging it is somewhat sane.

ein0p• 1 year ago

As a person to whom all of this is "clear", and who "understands" everything, could you please explain how a system whose entire function depends on knowing the person's birth date would function without knowing the birth date?

dvogel• 1 year ago

My understanding of the claim is that the mainframe data is stored in a high fidelity format but some records simply lack a full year. At the time social security was instituted it was common for people to not know their own age precisely. Beyond memory issues arising from old age, most people just didn't have a pressing reason to track it. So social security benefits were granted to people who seemed old enough even though they didn't have a birth certificate or similar. The claim, as I've heard it, is that the DOGE dolts transferred this data to a more modern system where they blindly passed incomplete or placeholder values into an 8601 library implementation that uses the 2004 standard's reference date of 1875 by default.

NoPicklez2• 1 year ago

That theory could track since DOGE did seek approval to use SQL visual query software, the software may have parsed those birth dates in that regard.

Again why it is so irresponsible of Musk to have addressed the public in the way he did without (presumably) all of the facts and without nuance

NoPicklez2• 1 year ago

The part of all of this which I have a problem with from the outside, is that it seems extremely irresponsible to address the White House and the public to say you have found people that are 150 years old receiving social security payments in such a provocative way. As if you have so simply stumbled across this error that has gone unnoticed.

There’s been no formal inquiry, there was no mention of any of the checks and balances that may have been occurring, there’s been no nuance to the argument from him at all. Okay maybe there are people that look to be 150 years old, is there a reason why? Were they actually being paid the social security or was there a legitimate exception? Maybe people were but it was so few and far between and was an internal controls issue which all governments and companies have globally or was none of it true and your team simply assumed they were being paid.

After reading an article where Gov security experts were worried because they were having to give Elon’s team access to Putty and SQL tools. It seems like people are going through this data and making inferences that may not be completely true or vetted.

trymas• 1 year ago

… it seems extremely irresponsible to address the White House and the public to say …

It’s simple as:

1. They don’t care;

2. It fits their agenda;

Cthulhu_2• 1 year ago

Exactly. Statements like this have been used to approve new programs and legislation that in at least one case led to sweeping profiling and the incorrect retraction of government benefits, causing tens of thousands to end up in poverty and debt and the consequent issues of divorce, children removed from parents, even suicides: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...

This all started when a group of Bulgarian migrants took advantage of a loophole, registering as residents for a small amount of time and defrauding the government for about €4 million. The price tag to set it right again was €7.4 billion as of last year: https://nos.nl/artikel/2503966-de-toeslagenaffaire-van-een-m...

What I'm trying to say is that right-wing / populist talking points can and will lead to sweeping reform with long term and far reaching consequences. For a few years we had an era of fact checking where these statements were immediately marked, but all the services have removed it again. I'm honestly surprised Twitter still has community notes.

sumo89• 1 year ago

And there's no punishment for being wrong. Even a newspaper has to publish official apologies, not that anyone bothers to read them. He could say the sky is red on that platform and there's nothing anyone could do to force him to change it or admit he's wrong.

hassleblad23• 1 year ago

Have they revealed how many people actually fall in that category? Agreed that more nuance is necessary.

ddxv• 1 year ago

He recently shared the usual X style cropped screenshot which implied millions of records "where death is false" and the rows age appeared to be 110+

As someone who uses databases everyday, there's always nuance to data, especially when you're trying to simplify data for a small report. Hard to believe there are millions of records so obviously wrong.

gscott2• 1 year ago

At the very least Social Security should try to get the correct birth dates and verify these folks are alive. Because it sounds like no one is checking and fixing this. If you were running social security and you see people have no date of birth and they come up as 150 years old, you fix it. Apparently that basic thing is not happening and Elon musk is calling this out. I see no problem with fixing it.

MrBuddyCasino6• 1 year ago

„Social Security isn’t paying out to 150-year-olds, it’s paying out to people whose birthdays we don’t even know“ is not exactly reassuring.

How is it possible that the db contains records with such a vital datum missing? How is it possible that SSNs aren’t unique? I can’t come up with an explanation that doesn’t boil down to either negligence or fraud.

tgv• 1 year ago

How is it possible that your code contains bugs? I think that question may have the same answer.

raverbashing2• 1 year ago

Looks like you never touched any system with real life data

Edit: the link below gives more information on ssns. SSNs so far been unique, but there are some issues

throwanem6• 1 year ago

You ask in effect: 'How is it that a data collection

- whose cardinality is well into the hundreds of millions, likely close to half a billion (500,000,000);

- which has been maintained for now just about exactly a hundred years;

- which predates birth certificates and birth records being common across large swaths of the country (not predates their systematization or encoding, but predates their reliable existence);

- which for a lot of its history has been maintained by hand,

should come to have occasional inconsistencies?'

So framed in knowledge of the Social Security Administration's history, I confide the question may reveal its own answer.

SideburnsOfDoom4• 1 year ago

How is it possible that the db contains records with such a vital datum missing?

This is a weird question. How would you even go about finding out an unknown date of birth? Especially when it happened > 50 years ago and half the world away.

For whom is it "vital" ? Will it prevent me from going about my daily business?

See also: Why are so many people born on the 1st of January? It's a statistically impossible number.

A: Because they know their approximate year of birth, only.

tpm2• 1 year ago

How is it possible that the db contains records with such a vital datum missing?

It might not be missing, it also can be unknown and unknowable. There are people with their date of birth not recorded or recorded only approximately. It happens when the date is recorded on a piece of a paper in a building that then burns down or during natural or human-made catastrophes. Or it might not be recorded at all, or only some parts are missing (like the day of the month). Working for a different public administration, it's so common we have a special date type for that.

jandrese2• 1 year ago

You think it is not possible that people born in homesteads in the 1920s and 1930s in rural and isolated communities don’t have birth records? Or immigrants from countries that didn’t have paper birth records?

sensanaty• 1 year ago

I know a few people that don't have an official birth date. My brother in law is Papuan and no one in his village has an official birth year or date since they just don't keep track of it, so when he got his first official government ID at a much later stage of his life, he chose an arbitrary date cause it means nothing to him. He's probably around 35-40, but his birthday says he's in his 60s.

It's not all that rare even in the West, especially for older people. Records get lost or never get collected in the first place.

nkrisc• 1 year ago

My grandmother was born in the 1930s in Chicago (second most populous US city at the time) and she never even knew exactly what year she was born in. It’s fairly common.

a01233• 1 year ago

Yeah, who's ever heard of an incomplete database or a database that barely holds together and has had to have weird adjustments done to it in order to avoid fucking up other bits of data?

We can tell you've never touched a database or worked in tech.

Not that there is any shame in that. But the same way I keep my opinion to myself when my doctor gives me my diagnosis, people who have never handled a database really should follow that advice.

A local library can barely keep its database straight and it's very slightly easier than a database containing millions of people's information. Dozens of millions.

figassis2• 1 year ago

Problem with this is, if or when they are proven wrong, it will be very privately, no one will ever hear about it. It will be lost in the noise of “we found lots of fraud”. And no one will be able to get as straight an answer as the accusation. So no actual consequences for difamation. If feel like this is an issue with all politicians. They accuse very loudly, admit wrongdoing very quietly or never.

aredox• 1 year ago

Reminder that Musk once wrote an email to buzzfeed stating "“I suggest that you call people you know in Thailand, find out what’s actually going on and stop defending child rapists, you fucking asshole", about Vernon Unsworth, the man who saved 12 children from dying in the Tham Luang cave. He had no proof and went on to accuse him of not even being a diver.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-thai-... https://www.ccn.com/5-saucy-elon-musk-revelations-in-explosi...

ZeroGravitas6• 1 year ago

And then won a legal case by arguing that it was just a generic insult not a specific allegation (and having expensive lawyers).

rcbdev• 1 year ago

What are you saying or referring to? The Stackexchange posting you're replying to does not refer to the U.S. government at all as far as I can tell. How do you connect the link you're responding to to the White House at all?

suddenlybananas• 1 year ago

https://nypost.com/video/elon-musk-claims-some-recipients-of...

dathinab• 1 year ago

Musk doesn't care about

- correctness of information

- completeness of information

- nounces of formulation

- accidental misleading people

he has more then once verbatim repeated or re-posted conspiracy theories, including trivially disprovable which also don't pass the common sense check (i.e things you only "fall" for if you either act extremely reckless and negligent or intentionally fall for it as it pushes your ideology no matter how wrong it is)

jiggawatts• 1 year ago

I like this comment:

----

There was a time when data structures were made to fit purpose, not compilers. Having a look at the subject, shows clearly the constrains for valid dates:

    Social Security was introduced in 1935.
    To be eligible for benefits one had to
        pay in at least 40 quarters, that's 10 years
        be at least 65 years old

This means the first regular beneficiaries of social security payments were 65 in 1945, aka of the 1880 cohort. Virtually noone participating in this system can be born before 1880. Anyone older will not most likely not be a beneficiary, and anyone younger (aka still paying in) will be, well, younger.
So add another 5 years for wiggle room and we end at a nice round 1875 as earliest year for any birthday to be recorded.
A perfect rational base for a date entry, isn't it?

----

The "COBOL doesn't work like that" comments are missing the forest for the trees: This is a very old system with bespoke coding to match legislation, not legislation to match compiler default behaviour.

Fundamentally, unless a government employee that has worked directly on this codebase speaks up, we're all just guessing.

Sniffnoy• 1 year ago

However, the MUMPS programming language (which is still commonly used in various medical stuff) does use December 31, 1840 as its epoch. (It doesn't have a separate date type, but it does have date-handling functions which operate on numbers and use this as the epoch.)

totallynothoney• 1 year ago

It's gonna be hilarious if: this is a data entry error (1957?), the payments are to a surviving widow because the dates just fit [0][1], simply the query was wrong, or more probably Musk just lied.

[0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_... [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_May_Fuller

dashundchen2• 1 year ago

Why are we taking Musk at his word when his current MO is to cast doubt and mistrust on government spending?

Musk, Trump and the admin have already been pushing so many outright lies via their propaganda channels. Despite being deunked the lies are repeated nonstop.

The lie that USAID spent $50 million on condoms in Gaza (the money was for running hospitals) for example.

Or the lie about funding an opera about a transgender woman (the money was for a university in Columbia, unrelated to a performance put on at the school).

They are spewing lies left and right. Lies go twice around the block before the truth has put its pants on.

Why should we believe him on this?

EdiX• 1 year ago

Or the lie about funding an opera about a transgender woman (the money was for a university in Columbia, unrelated to a performance put on at the school).

You've got that wrong. The grant to fund the opera exists: https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_SCO20021GR3086_19.... Specifically the grant was given "to raise awareness and increase the transgender representation through the opera As One, by American composer Laura Kaminsky".

The lie in this case would be that USAID awarded the grant, it was awarded by the Department of State instead.

roshin• 1 year ago

This is why I like hn. Many times I read about all of the horrible things that the current administration does. Due to so many cases where I know the news is wrong I stopped trusting anything. However, I feel like here I can let my guard down a bit and be more certain that a specific criticism is true.

moralestapia• 1 year ago

that a specific criticism is true

Or false, in this case.

paulsutter• 1 year ago

Here’s a tweet from Elon with a table of ages of all people marked not deceased who are collecting social security

(hint: there is a smooth trend of people of all ages up to 199, so the 1875 thing was pure misdirection)

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076?s=46&t=NN3...

qingcharles3• 1 year ago

This comment definitely needs to be bumped up. It adds extra data to the mystery.

Here's the raw data:

  Age Range,Count
  0-9,38825456
  10-19,44326480
  20-29,47995478
  30-39,52106915
  40-49,47626581
  50-59,45740805
  60-69,46381281
  70-79,33404412
  80-89,15165127
  90-99,6054154
  100-109,4734407
  110-119,3627007
  120-129,3472849
  130-139,3936311
  140-149,3542044
  150-159,1345083
  160-169,121807
  170-179,6087
  180-189,695
  190-199,448
  200-209,879
  210-219,866
  220-229,1039
  240-249,1
  360-369,1

Bar plot of data:

https://imgur.com/a/34Y5BSv

bloomingkales2• 1 year ago

If you assume all the non-deceased (as marked in the DB) are still getting a SS check, then simply tallying up 65+ amounts to a 8 trillion dollar social security payout annually. We are definitely not paying that.

My guess is the deceased flag is different from the “eligible for payout” flag, or that flag is determined on another join. They spoke too quickly, which is a common human error.

Someone else smarter run some experiments.

cafard• 1 year ago

If I understand the post, these are persons who are marked not deceased--it is not stated that they are receiving money, though it may be implied. For example, there are some persons under ten years of age who are receiving Social Security benefits, as having lost one or two parents (survivor benefits). The number certainly does not amount to 39 million.

jotux• 1 year ago

From this: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076

The sum of groups age 60-89: 94,950,820

The sum of all groups age 60-369: 121,794,498

From this: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/OASDIbenies.html

Number of beneficiaries receiving benefits on Dec 31, 2024: 68,455,973

Data-Miner• 1 year ago

In the early 1980s my job at Army Materiel Command (DARCOM in those days) was to report energy consumption trends for all Depots, Arsenals, RDT&E, etc. in our Defense Energy Information System (DEIS) database. I was a 30-yr old newbie to DoD, but the numbers were not adding up. Nobody questioned what was being reported, because frankly, they only looked at trends not what the outrageously huge energy consumption actually was. Some installations were reporting almost no energy usage and others reporting waay too much. It took me a while to identify the problem, and much much longer to correct it. In a nutshell, only some installations were reporting correctly: Everything was supposed to be converted to MBTUs. But I found some reporting in 1,000s; others reporting in gallons of fuel instead of converting to MBTUs; others using wrong conversion factors. Elon's team found data that doesn't make sense. There's nothing wrong with publicizing the absurdity of what he found. Explanations will come, but the fact remains - somebody has been asleep at the wheel, and nothing good comes from bad data. Are we overpaying? Maybe so. Is it fraud? Maybe. Is it innocent error. Could be. Could it be that fraudulent SSNs are getting used without detection?? A real possibility.

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!!

glompers• 1 year ago

The OIG most recently did the job in 2023, as multiple HN members have posted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43083362

noobermin• 1 year ago

I love how everyone is talking technical details whilst ignoring where it came from. This eliding of context and focusing on a technical question is a great way for people trying to cope with either stress if you're against it or with criticism if you're for it.

hans_castorp• 1 year ago

I worked on a COBOL system in the early 90s that stored a one-digit year :)

However, the records were never stored for more than 4 years, so this was never a problem.

gsck• 1 year ago

Who needs just one Y2K when you can have one every 10 years!

jamesrom2• 1 year ago

Musk said: “Crazy things like just cursory examination of Social Security and we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old.”

He qualified this claim as a “cursory examination”. It’s clearly a comment about the quality of the data and systems. That this is the kind of thing that would be prone to fraud.

Before you hit downvote, please provide evidence that you didn’t hallucinate Musk’s claims here.

pavlov2• 1 year ago

But then he goes around saying he actually found massive evidence of fraud. It’s not like he tweets: “Guys, my admittedly cursory examination gave me a feeling this old system which I’ve never seen before could be prone to fraud.”

What proof does he (or you) even have that a COBOL system is particularly prone to fraud? The world’s most important banks still run many things on COBOL. Are you saying that bank mainframes are full of IT fraud?

jamesrom2• 1 year ago

Who said a COBOL system is prone to fraud?

Incomplete and inaccurate data is prone to fraud. Talking about COBOL is missing the point.

spullara• 1 year ago

Y'all are trying to be very specific about this 150 year old thing when there are vast number of people with ages above 100 that are in the database:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076

   ...
   100-109 4,734,407
   110-119 3,627,007
   120-129 3,472,849
   130-139 3,936,311
   140-149 3,542,044
   150-159 1,345,083
   160-169 121,807
   170-179 6,087
   180-189 695
   190-199 448
   200-209 879
   210-219 866
   220-229 1,039
   240-249 1
   360-369 1

gloflo2• 1 year ago

And that means what?

Data values are nothing without the exact context in which they were created and the exact context in which they are used. That's like level 1 data analysis.

Publishing such data without context is deceitful.

mike_hearn13• 1 year ago

How is it published without context? We know that this is the age field from the social security system. And that the query omits records that are recorded as dead. Therefore, the social security system in America has records that claimed to be for people who are alive for whom the date of birth field is incompatible with that status. That seems like quite a lot of context, actually.

I don't know why some people are finding it so hard to accept that there is likely to be fraud in this system. Look into the determined origins of the so called blue zones to see that every country has problems with this, albeit some more than others. It's the government giving out free money, so naturally it attracts very sophisticated fraud schemes and civil servants are rarely motivated to track it down and investigate properly.

mmusson• 1 year ago

Another thing is that COBOL records commonly have complicated unions (to save space) where a separate code affects how you interpret the fields. You need to understand all the business logic to make sure you are reading the data correctly.

kolinko• 1 year ago

With "death" flag set to false - sure. But are they collecting benefits / are they active in any way? Otherwise it's just that the death may not have been recorded.

If Elon Musk wanted to be honest, he should've published a statistic like that, but with SSNs that seem still active.

There were around ~1M (if not more) unidentified bodies found in the States over the last 100 years. On top of that, before digitisation, you've had mistakes in filling the data, lost documents and a ton of other possible causes for not marking someone as dead in SSN. As long as they are not collecting benefits, it's more hassle to fix than it's worth.

In a bit similar spirit - in Poland we're considering turning public health insurance into just a tax, and doing blanket assumption that every citizen has health insurance. Since we have less than 1% uninsured, the costs of tracking and verification are comparable/higher than just giving "free" insurance to the remaining 1%.

delusional• 1 year ago

If Elon Musk wanted to be honest,

Elon and his fans don't think this way. They don't consider it dishonest to publish misleading information (it's "just the fact").

If Elon wanted to be truthful and thorough, he would actually do some analysis. It's quite clear that he doesn't care about either of those things though and just immediately tweets whatever the 20 years olds with laptops send him.

joshuahedlund2• 1 year ago

This is good info. The histogram definitively disproves the COBOL theory.

It’s always good to respond to odd things with curiosity rather than cynicism.

It also seems clear that the vast majority of these old records are not collecting benefits, and even the few that are may have valid reasons (ex living younger spouses)

https://xcancel.com/ThatsMauvelous/status/189135619250239902...

enilakla• 1 year ago

It seems that for a lot of people, that source isn't reputable (e.g. they would want to see more than a screenshot a guy posts on his website to know the situation is as you described).

tayo423• 1 year ago

This list adds up to 20million

60 million receive social security from age https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/OASDIbenies.html

1/3 of recipients are fake death fraud?

There's about 60million from cenus data between the age of 60-85...

Does no one think critically?

mint2• 1 year ago

Nah, many people willfully and gleefully put blinders on when presented a thin veneer of a statement if it supports what they want to be true.

As you point out, Elon’s stats don’t even pass a cursory snuff test in regards to what he’s trying to imply, but his champions don’t bat an eye.

throw0101d4• 1 year ago

Y'all are trying to be very specific about this 150 year old thing when there are vast number of people with ages above 100 that are in the database:

You may wish to read the SSA Inspector General audit report, "Numberholders Age 100 or Older Who Did Not Have Death Information on the Numident.":

* https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf

It's a gripping read. It tells me, for instance, that 98 percent of these folks have received no payments.

* https://twitter.com/justinwolfers/status/1891516202612060438

The report states:

SSA determined the estimated $5.5 to $9.7 million in expenditures to correct these errors was too costly to implement and that the effort would have limited benefit to the administration of SSA programs. We acknowledge that almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments. However, SSA issued each of these individuals a valid SSN and these SSNs could allow for a wide range of potential abuse.

So it would cost several million dollars to correct the database to prevent less than several million from going out.

Once again, perhaps the government knows what it's doing, these "discoveries" are not new or surprisingly, and that a cost-benefit analysis has already been done.

UltraSane• 1 year ago

Elon Musk is a liar with no credibility whatsoever. Don't believe anything he says.

Devasta• 1 year ago

Whether or not Musk is right about 150 year olds getting Social Security doesn't matter, he just wants to destroy the administrative state. So long as that happens, they'll be perfectly happy with the outcome even if they get proven wrong on some technicalities later.

Prove Musk wrong on this and he'll just go about his day as normal; 20 minutes later there'll be someone tweeting an unhinged screed about how the US government is spending 10 trillion this year changing the name of the Department of Homeland Security to the Department of Homeland Inclusivity to which he'll quote tweet "Interesting" and then he'll set his little band of freaks to cause mayhem somewhere else.

bagels5• 1 year ago

I'm sure Fox news will investigate his claims and let their listeners know that he lied about this.

ZeroGravitas6• 1 year ago

Related document for how we used to handle this before the "oligarchs tweeting slander" approach gained support:

https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf

Numberholders Age 100 or Older Who Did Not Have Death Information on the Numident

The attached final report presents the results of the Office of Audit’s review. The objective was to determine whether the Social Security Administration had effective controls to annotate death information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies. Please provide within 60 days a corrective action plan that addresses each recommendation. If you wish to discuss the final report, please call me or have your staff contact Michelle L. Anderson, Assistant Inspector General for Audit

They decided not to do anything about it (e.g. add a "presumed dead" field) because they thought it would be a waste of money!

In response to our 2015 report, SSA considered multiple options, including adding presumed death information to these Numident records. SSA ultimately decided not to proceed because the “. . . options would be costly to implement, would be of little benefit to the agency, would largely duplicate information already available to data exchange consumers and would create cost for the states and other data exchange partners.”16 SSA also believed a regulation would be required to allow it to add death information to these records, and adding presumed death information to the Numident would increase the risk of inadvertent release of living individuals’ personal information in the DMF.

Submitted here in case anyone wants to discuss the SHOCKINGLY boring REVELATIONS contained within:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43077199

empathy_m• 1 year ago

I think it's worth reading both the 2015 OIG report on the topic ("Title: Numberholders Age 112 or Older Who Did Not Have a Death Entry on the Numident", A-06-14-34030) and also the 2023 followup you submitted. I left a comment over on that submission after reading both.

It's nice that the hard work of investigating government inefficiency is being noticed and celebrated -- you can really see the tensions between providing reliable services and fighting fraud risk in the 2015 & 2023 reports.

If you care about finding waste, it seems like a really strange choice to summarily fire the inspectors general who have worked hard on this sort of investigation.

bagels5• 1 year ago

They aren't willing to provide the right lies or spin to justify cutting SSA altogether. That is the end goal.

Muromec6• 1 year ago

Thanks for sharing. This is what I expected -- of course somebody already looked at it, did the math and decided to not do anything, which was the most reasonable thing.

laurent_du• 1 year ago

So the bottom line is that a left-wing activist put out some lies in order to discredit Musk, and every single reader of the original misinformation piece swallowed it without any attempt to analyze it critically. And they say that right-wingers are the ones who are more amenable to propaganda?

Yet everyone's conclusion is, as usual, Musk bad. Nobody cares about left-wing fakes news if they are useful to the agenda being pushed forward.

jklinger410• 1 year ago

One cannot even begin to address the amount of misinformation that has come from the left since Trump has been elected.

This is why, however, people in general act with decorum. Trump and Musk are making themselves easy targets for this vitriol. Leaving people with absolutely no will to critically think about any of the claims levied against them.

In fact, any claim levied against them is welcomed ammunition. Any attempt to reduce this ammunition is considered support for the enemy.

During Trump's first administration people decried that we had begun living in a post-truth society. That accusation was made against the Trump supporters.

Now, during his second term, we truly live in a post truth society. Where in most cases the truth simply does not matter to most people. This division seems to run so deep I am afraid at what it means for our society.

worksonmine• 1 year ago

One thing I've noticed is when Trump says something the left starts by denying it before using it themselves. Fake news was coined by Trump and now it's adopted by the left but they call it misinformation, and they even started the Trusted News Initiative during Covid to weaponize it. It's not lies, it's "misinformation", true, but wrong?

Confusing times and the only conclusion I can draw is that those in power are losing ground thanks to the internet and it makes them behave like this. Everyone in willful ignorance. Even otherwise clever people are acting bat-shit crazy as soon as Musk is mentioned, but a few years ago they would've bragged about getting a Tesla using their NFT profts.

blame-troi• 1 year ago

Ignorant. When I learned COBOL, which would have been contemporary to many of the original systems, data types were numbers of various formats, characters, primitive fixed length strings, and bits. There was no data type for dates. It would have been roll your own. Pre UNIX being mainstream we used '7-4-5' dates in assembly based from 1900 (this was a financial business but not the IRS).

This isn't a COBOL issue (if it's even an issue at all), it's a data design issue. As many have pointed out, there are reasons for this possible origin date.

throw0101d4• 1 year ago

Related, "Why COBOL isn't the problem":

* https://lucid.co/techblog/2020/11/13/why-cobol-isnt-the-prob...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420217

bobnick• 1 year ago

I worked with COBOL long before DB2. I also worked on the COBOL compiler in the 70s. Unless things changed drastically if a value wasn't initialized the compiler left garbage in the variable when the program was loaded. If you were lucky this caused the program to ABEND when you tried to use it, if no ABEND you got strange results. It was up to the programmer to set a default date if one was required by the application. Many applications started with VSAM which did not care if a date in a record was invalid. This caused many systems to set default dates when converting to DB2. DB2 does not allow garbage to be loaded into a date field. COBOL does not initialized data unless instructed to do so.

MrCOBOL• 1 year ago

No! It does not - Someone coded it to default or entered the data that way, and no edit prevented it - and it sounds like no regular maintenance (even a reporting process) is present to indicate ages > 100 (which may raise a flag to be looked into).

cjbgkagh3• 1 year ago

I assume this was in response to Elons claim of finding a number of people aged 150 years old and the response that this was due to COBOL default date and how this was an example of the people doing the datamining were incompetent.

Someone would have to be really incompetent to find a spike at precisely 150 years old and not investigate it further. Elon tweeted ~ 10 hours ago the age breakdown and there does not appear to be a spike at 150 so if that information is correct then this is no longer evidence of incompetence.

phcreery• 1 year ago

Additionally, the data is comparable to the census [1] which suggests there is not a lack of data context or translation from DB date format to actual date/age.

Then again, these are just posts of screenshots on a site filled with AI-generated content.

[1] https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1891406665242546383

__m• 1 year ago

Do they receive social security though? His tweet doesn’t explicitly say so, might be willfully omitted.

cjbgkagh3• 1 year ago

I don’t know, incomplete information all round.

I consider it plausible but also consider Elon to be a rather unreliable source. Part of this seems like JJ Abram's mystery box storytelling where new mysteries are opened before the old mysteries are resolved - and when finally resolved the resolution is deeply unsatisfying.

My experience with government is that where it’s not recklessly incompetent it is flagrantly corrupt, and increasingly so. To an extent I would not have believed had I not seen it myself. I completely understand why others may not share that belief. While I am in general support of taking a chainsaw to government, as opposed to a scalpel, I do wish it was better people doing it. That way when such crazy statements are made I could consider them likely true because the person stating them would not have done so without it being true. Elon has told too many falsehoods for me to give him the same benefit of the doubt.

diob• 1 year ago

It's absolutely willfully omitted. I guarantee 0 evidence of anything will ever come out, just shock headlines to make it seem like they're doing something.

lenerdenator5• 1 year ago

They might, but that's irrelevant in a way. If they're 150 years old, they're dead, and if you claim the OASDI benefit of someone who is dead, you're committing a crime.

enragedcacti5• 1 year ago

An audit was completed in 2023 (using June 2021 data) where they found that of the 18.9 million aged 100+, approximately 44,000 were receiving payouts. UN data says there were ~90,000 centenarians in the US in 2021.

https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf

https://www.bumc.bu.edu/centenarian/statistics/

Spooky233• 1 year ago

Social Security is incredibly complicated. There’s a canonical answer to every question. Someone like Elon doesn’t know or care about the details.

There’s also a number of programs. SSI, Disabilty, Death Benefits, retirement, etc. Blind people are eligible for a benefit by law.

Is there, somewhere in the United States, a disabled, blind child whose parents are deceased and whose birthdate is unknown? Almost certainly yes.

Is that fraud? Only if you’re a “genius” who targets victims who can’t fight back to demonstrate his intellect.

thiht• 1 year ago

I fail to see why anybody would believe anything coming from Musk's mouth.

burnte2• 1 year ago

And yet millions still do. People believe what the WANT to believe, and that frequently is something other than facts.

mlacks2• 1 year ago

probably because despite all of his negative aspects, he has transformed the online payments industry, space industry, and auto industry.

fragmede• 1 year ago

Are you trying to tell me that, eg

$10M for "Mozambique voluntary medical male circumcision"

is a complete and utter fabrication, designed to make the federal government look stupid, and has little/no basis in reality?

I'm shocked, I tell you. Shocked!

https://x.com/doge/status/1890849405932077378?s=46

ertian• 1 year ago

He was making fun of someone for suggesting that the federal government uses SQL.

Dude has been burning credibility at an amazing pace.

bagels5• 1 year ago

Social security office knows that there are records in that database without confirmed deaths.

They use multiple techniques and data sources to determine who to send benefits to.

This is not news to the SSA.

https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf

"AGENCY COMMENTS SSA disagreed with our recommendations. Agency officials stated that most of the records discussed in the report involve numberholders who do not currently receive SSA payment"

So, they can do better, but sure, they are sending some relatively small number of checks out to dead people. That doesn't mean Musk needs to lie about the the program as an excuse to cut the whole thing, which is actually what we see playing out.

tonymet2• 1 year ago

51% is most. 49% could still be > $100bil

enragedcacti5• 1 year ago

In this particular case 'most' means 99.77%:

At the time of our review, approximately 44,000 of the 18.9 million numberholders were receiving SSA payments.

There were something like 90k centenarians in the US at the time so the amount of fraud from this category is likely some small fraction of that 0.27%.

enragedcacti5• 1 year ago

they are sending some relatively small number of checks out to dead people.

This isn't even necessarily true from the report. SSA said 44k of the 18.9 million 100+ were receiving payments, but the US had something like 90k centenarians in 2021. It's probable that a huge majority of the 44k were still alive at the time of the audit.

shombaboor• 1 year ago

at this point I just assume it's a given that he's tweeting misleading information. it seems like he removes all attempts removing community notes on himself as well. I just don't think the lay person on twitter, which is dumber than a an average layperson, can learn these things in 1 graph or 200 chars.

msie• 1 year ago

Imagine all the wasted cycles dealing with Trump's/Elon's/DOGE misadventures.

Modulius• 1 year ago

Probably will go unnoticed or downvoted because of twitter link but here is the main goal of spewing such a bullshit:

https://x.com/KariLake/status/1891841704703013067

Look at the comments. They know that COBOL defaults to 1875, point is that propaganda pundits look for any reason to spew toxic misinformation and rile 99.999% of uniformed sheeple that voted for orange felon.

jedwards12114• 1 year ago

It's horrifying to see even the Associated Press repeating this claim a truth. AP links to the Wired article, which links to the same old ExTwitter post that originated the claim. Neither did any fact checking ffs

Calzifer• 1 year ago

I'm late to the party but want to add that "reference date 1875-05-20 defaults to 150 years" explanation makes no sense to me.

Assuming the reference date is correct and unknown birth date is stored as timestamp 0. Since we are before 2025-05-20 at the moment the reported age has to be 149 years, not 150. What I'm missing? Would be very unusual to round up age.

n0denine• 1 year ago

Perhaps there is a default date of 1875 if the date of birth isn’t known. When slavery ended just before 1875, a large number of them never received an actual birth certificate while enslaved, and likely didn’t know their date of birth… so it would go with the system default.

SandyAndyPerth• 1 year ago

As I just posted in a thread https://dev.to/mdchaney/cobol-dates-may-20-1875-and-disinfor...

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.

Did missing/corrupt dates in COBOL default to 1875-05-20?

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