Posted on 02/18/2025 4:08:19 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Even in 1999, the y2k issue stopped age counts at 99 !
Bring back windows 98 and msdos
The database contains everyone who has ever had a SS number, because the numbers are not reused. The first SS check went out in 1938.
Right now, with 340 million people in the US, probably at least 300 million have a SS number. If you add in everybody who has died since in the past 85 years, the database is going to be pretty big. However, the number of people collecting SS benefits right now is 67 million, which seems about right.
Here’s an excerpt from WIRED:
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-doge-social-security-150-year-old-benefits/
Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.
COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it.
Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the Convention du Mètre.
These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.
That’s just one possible explanation for what DOGE allegedly found. Musk could also have simply looked up the SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015 the agency has automatically stopped benefit payments when anyone reaches the age of 115.
The fact that the Social Security system contains millions of entries from people who are dead is likely distinct from a potential COBOL-caused error, and also not news. A report written by the SSA’s inspector general in 2023 found that 98 percent of those aged 100 or older in the Social Security databases are not in receipt of any benefits. The report added that the database would not be updated because it would cost too much money to do so.
“DOGE going into all these agencies with largely unfettered access with a wrecking ball and no understanding of the business logic and structure behind the code, database, and configured business logic, related payment systems, and integrated decision trees, poses real risks to the privacy and persona-level data of millions of people across all of those records,” Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency executive-turned-whistleblower, tells WIRED.
They sure do put out a lot of excuses, but no real defense. People that work for the federal government need to go to jail.
As for the title, I do not think that is what Elon Musk said. I don’t think he knows yet exactly who all are receiving checks. These are just people on the active Social Security list. So, the list is ripe for fraud.
Why would people that old be left on the SSA database if they weren’t considered still active?
Maybe I missed it, but I'm not sure that Musk said those checks are going out. I believe that Musk stated the SS database contains some people who are unbelievably old. I think he left it as an implied problem if checks are going out to people who are 150. He didn't say the checks were going out. He just said the database was sloppy.
Overall, this article seems like a desperate attempt to explain away all sloppiness and imply "there's a good reason for that". I, for one, am tired of such excuses.
They don’t send checks.
Weak excuse and honestly not believable. We are expected to believe these no name anon programmers who have not seen the data know better than real genius programmers and Musk how data sets work in a database.
I was learning COBOL back in 83 using punch cards, it is not as obscure as they are trying to make it out to be.
Here is some info on the size of Congressional Staffs.
The size of individual members’ personal staffs were still relatively small, with the average senator having six staffers and representatives limited to having five staffers.
So we have 535 House and Senate members and they have more than 2,500 staff employees.
And for decades the House and Senate have Oversight Committees and during that entire time these more than 3,000 Congress Critters have been unable to find any of the non-sense spending that Elon Musk and his few helpers have found in four weeks.
I can only conclude that it takes far more people to cover up waste, fraud, and abuse than it takes to expose waste, fraud, and abuse.
The issue is that the database has the “deceased” field set to false. Whether checks are going out to them is a separate question; one which nobody seems to dispute. The real question is how much. They say in this story that it’s about 0.7% of the total sent each year. It should be double checked, and systems upgraded.
And they still have 40+ million more active accounts than the population.
What a stupid question.
“”Why would people that old be left on the SSA database if they weren’t considered still active?”””
Because they still vote.
I assumed from the start that the age numbers were bad data. The bottom line is that ALL data discrepancies MUST be resolved before granting benefits.
Yes and no.
I believe that should be FORMER inspector general.
If that's not true in the present, it will be true in the not too distant future.
The only quote from Elon Musk that I read us from his own Tweet on X, which reads as follows:
——————————
According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!
Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security 🤣🤣
____________________
Nothing in that Tweet tells us that Musk is saying that these centenarians are still receiving social security.
The title of this article is MISLEADING.
Has he said this or that there all these very old people still on the rolls
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