4w ago

No, 150-Year-Olds Aren't Collecting Social Security Benefits

www.wired.com No, 150-Year-Olds Aren’t Collecting Social Security Benefits

Elon Musk claims to have found rampant fraud in the Social Security Administration. There’s a much simpler explanation.

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.

Archived copy of the article

26 comments

That certainly was a lot more energy to debunk the lie than to tell it, but that's a neat fact, TIL.
- That’s kinda why it works so well on so many stupid people, the lies are easy to consume and fixing the damage is difficult.

Wrong answer
The correct answer is: "Don't fucking touch social security asshole!"
The entire time they've weighed people down with fact checking they've already moved on to the 10th lie in order to persuade hapless saps to go along with whatever horrific scheme they've concocted to take more from the poor and give the richest even more money
Stop playing their game
- When I looked up the link to Big Balls from AC/DC on Youtube, I could not believe how many idiots in the comments I saw cheering fElon's dogebags on.
  These people are either very, very, very wealthy or still just have no idea how fucked they are going to be.
  You have to be a very special kind of idiot to cheer on leopards eating your own face, but here we are...
  
  I often wonder how many of them are real, I can see basic laymen getting caught up in the flood of pro-Elon bots
  Basic NPC types only have one philosophy: go with the flow

Another reminder that Elon sounds stupid from the moment you hear him talk about something you know a little bit about.
- https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/109572674700288958
  More apropos with every passing day. I remember going through the same thing when fElon acquired Twitter:
  He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
  Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
  Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.

Ah, yes, quite a few systems use that. Iirc, when I first got into research I believe it was SPSS that have me pause (maybe STATA) when dates seemed to reference day in the 60s. It's been a while so I don't remember the specifics, but I always thought it was a neat way to handle dates.
- Ah, yes, quite a few systems use that. Iirc, when I first got into research I believe it was SPSS that have me pause (maybe STATA) when dates seemed to reference day in the 60s. It's been a while so I don't remember the specifics, but I always thought it was a neat way to handle dates.
  Maybe it was 1 January 1970, the Unix epoch
  
  Well, looked it up and it wasn't SPSS I was thinking of, seems they use 1582 and count to by seconds which results in pretty absurd intergers. And STATA arbitrarily uses 1 Jan 1960 because why not.
  Honestly your version sounds cooler. I use R now for my data needs, and looking is up, those badasses do use 1 Jan 1970. Why anyone pays for statistical software when we have R and Python, I'll never understand.
  
  Also fun to note is that Excel incorrectly assumes 1900 is a leap year due to errors from Lotus 1-2-3. Once you start working with dates you realize how weird everything gets.

Another reminder that Elon sounds stupid from the moment you hear him talk about something you know a little bit about.

Wait. Are you telling me that dumbass teenagers that are extremely cocky and steeped in Dunning-Kruger, along with their stupid leader fElon might not have stopped to ask questions about something they have no fucking clue about?
That they didn't stop and wonder....maybe I should talk to an expert on this, and someone that with a bit more wisdom than someone that thinks computers started with their "generation"? You know, an "old"? Maybe even, a, gasp, a "boomer"?
🤣 🤣

Think before you speak before you drive me mad. FFS, Trump and Musk are gonna drive me insane.

I would love to see an actual source/docs stating 1875 is a commonly used epoch, rather than microblog posts. Either bring hard facts or shut up, because…
Arguing over the epoch completely misses the obvious refutation. If there’s errors in the database, that might be because there’s hundreds of millions of individuals represented in the DB, and no data should be made to be perfect at the cost of people starving. I would posit the bigger a tech system gets, the more social constraints it will acquire. The errors in the database could mean there’s underserved people, and we should fund efforts to represent these people, so their needs can be met. What errors don’t mean is that the SSA is being defrauded to such an extent that it should be shut down, but the way Musk has worked his claim makes that implication natural.
The epoch could be yesterday or at the building of the tower of Babylon and it doesn’t matter, they’ll just deflect and say there’s people who are ageless in the dataset who are defrauding the system and it’s all corrupt
This article gives validity to opinions of idiots meddling. This is implicit, and perhaps accidental, complicity in an outrageous government outreach. Musk is actively tearing down the government.
Sure tech is cool, but it’s nowhere near as important as the social issues surrounding it and for a tech based newspaper to ignore that basic fact is embarrassing
- The people with microblogs basically are the experts, we've been paying people who can use this language inordinate amounts for about a decade or so in a desperate attempt to swap systems before all the people who know in practice what they're doing are all dead.

It seems he also shared an Excel sheet with people listed way into their 200s marked as alive. I don't think it's just the COBOL thing. Someone mentioned how those others could be typos for that birthday. Instead of 1969 someone put in 1769. Could also be something fucky going on with the system.
- Could also just be made up. Fabricating evidence in the age of the computer is not hard.
  
  Especially when the evidence in question was just a picture of an Excel sheet iirc.

That archive is dead. Here’s another.
- Thanks. I've edited the post to use the new one

26 comments