23 ms·

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

277 points by SeenNotHeard 2y ago

UltraSane 2y ago
Elon Musk is a liar with no credibility whatsoever. Don't believe anything he says.
blindriver 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  It's exhausting. Each side of every argument is full of misinformation, intentionally or not.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - drawkward 2y 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.
    - readthenotes1 2y ago
      You're saying the party of "the President is fine don't trust the cheap fakes" is to be trusted?
      - drawkward 2y ago
        I am making two claims: 1. Not all arguments suffer from misinformation on both sides. 2. The political right uses misinformation as a weapon at a scale that dwarfs that of the political left. Your single example does not counter that argument.
        BurningFrog 2y ago
        Do you have an objective way to measure levels of "misinformation as a weapon" that supports claim 2?
        grandempire 2y ago
        [flagged]
- cyanydeez 2y ago
  Can you give us a misinformation example related to this post. This sounds like an empty complaint with no vector.
  - chrisco255 2y 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.
    - bloomingkales 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - chrisco255 2y ago
        Have you interacted with the federal government? Or any government at all? Do you know how much money they waste? Do you think a 7 trillion dollar budget isn't going to be filled with multiple hundreds of billions of dollars of false payments, waste, fraud, and 42-year old loopholes that have never been closed? Our national debt is growing at trillions a year. That's not sustainable. The inflation is happening now. It gets a lot worse without this.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        drawkward 2y ago
        Of course there is waste. Nothing runs with 100% efficiency. You claim a huge scale of fraud, "multiple hundreds of billions of dollars" which we can bound as 200/7000 - 900/7000 Or something roughly in the range of 3-12%. So, not exactly invisible. Probably pretty findable. Where is the evidence of these "multiple hundreds of billions of dollars"? If you are going to go about it from individual fraudulent SS recipient upwards, you will be looking for fraud forever. A liftetime of SS is, what, $100,000? So, like 0.00005% of the amount of fraud you claim? If this is how DOGE is going about it, IT WOULD BE THE LEAST FUCKING EFFICIENT GOVERNMENT PROGRAM EVER. This is not how you find fraud. This is not how you audit. This is a smash and grab job, orchestrated by the most wealthy human and most powerful elected official on the planet. This is NOT democracy. This is Autocracy.
- frugalmail 2y 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.
  - zimpenfish 2y 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.
hypeatei 2y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
- chrisco255 2y ago
  > was first published in 1988 No, the social security system and the COBOL that powers it predates that standard by quite a lot.
  - hypeatei 2y 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 https://www.ssa.gov/history/ibm.html
    - chrisco255 2y ago
      Y2K problems were related to attempting to represent years with 2 digit numbers. By no means would setting a date to 1875 fix a Y2K problem, it would just exacerbate it. Even if the problem originated from a Y2K "fix", it would still be a major bug, resulting in millions to billions in excessive payouts going to who knows where.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - IX-103 2y ago
        I think parent post is saying that when they fixed the Y2K problem, they likely also modernized the date representation to comport with international standards. It wouldn't really be any more difficult to do both of those at the same time than just fixing Y2K bugs.
ggm 2y 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"
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y 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.
  - ggm 2y 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- anadem 2y 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.
  - threeseed 2y 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 ?
dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
[flagged]
- fastball 2y ago
  What are you talking about? This isn't about Elon Musk. This is a SE thread about whether or not COBOL backdates to 1875, consensus being that it does not do that.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
    Musk is making claims without substantive evidence. Why do you think we're talking about it?
    - fastball 2y ago
      No, the claim without substantive evidence is that COBOL backdates to 1875. If the source-of-truth for SS payments is the database and associated COBOL system, and that system reports payments being made to 150 year olds, that is bad. We should not be doing that. It doesn't matter if the birth date was deliberately added as 1875 or if the COBOL system replaces null date values with 1875 (which does not seem to be the case if you read the linked thread).
  - NoPicklez 2y ago
    It is, I assume this post has been made because Elon recently said when he addressed the media next to Trump that they supposedly found people who were 150 years old collecting social security payments. What has followed is people coming out of the woodwork to explain how this may have been reflected in the system since the system was written in COBOL and the reasons why those people were reflected that way the system, that they likely weren't actually having those payments made and it there wasn't the wastage of tax payers money as Elon claims. Whereby citizens that don't have a recorded age are represented with an age of 0 and COBOL backdates their age from 1875. It seems to be Elon's DOGE team having access to data that they have little experience in reviewing and understanding and are spreading claims that are false. Google it.
jmclnx 2y 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 2y 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?
cwbriscoe 2y 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.
- Aloisius 2y 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.
  - skissane 2y 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
layer8 2y ago
This is the best debunk I could find: https://iter.ca/post/1875-epoch/ https://iter.ca/post/1875-epoch/
Aloisius 2y 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/ 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 https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0202602578
- CSMastermind 2y ago
  Social Security started paying out in 1940: https://www.proquest.com/docview/146227490?sourcetype=Historical%20Newspapers 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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - EdwardDiego 2y ago
    That makes a lot of sense.
  - Aloisius 2y 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&cat=all https://aad.archives.gov/aad/fielded-search.jsp?dt=3059&tf=F...
NoPicklez 2y 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- aaron695 2y ago
  [dead]
- trymas 2y 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_ 2y 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_scandal 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-miljoenen-naar-een-miljardenoperatie 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Sniffnoy 2y 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.)
jiggawatts 2y 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.
totallynothoney 2y 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_survived_into_the_21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_... [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_May_Fuller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_May_Fuller
dashundchen 2y 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 2y 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_1900 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 2y 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 2y ago
  >that a specific criticism is true Or false, in this case.
paulsutter 2y 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=NN3Ma3wsHBF26PLjy342bw https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076?s=46&t=NN3...
- qingcharles 2y 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 https://imgur.com/a/34Y5BSv
  - bloomingkales 2y 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.
    - ipv6ipv4 2y ago
      This is the smoking gun that Musk has no understanding of what he's looking at. A competent engineer would look at these numbers, recognize that they don't match payments, and shut up until they figure out the bigger picture that can explain everything they see. Instead, he raced to tweet it. This is just dumb.
      - 2y ago
noobermin 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  Who needs just one Y2K when you can have one every 10 years!
jamesrom 2y 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.
- pavlov 2y 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?
  - jamesrom 2y 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.
    - pavlov 2y ago
      The point is that a date set to 1875 is actually a null in COBOL. It doesn't mean the data is missing or inaccurate, any more than a null reference in Java means your program is going to segfault. It simply indicates that the data is not present in this scope. If Musk was posting: "Guys I just discovered they have tons of null checks in their code here, that's obviously an indication of fraud!" — would that make any sense to you?
      - jamesrom 2y ago
        [flagged]
spullara 2y 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 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
- gloflo 2y 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_hearn 2y 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.
    - troupo 2y ago
      How many of those are test data, simple clerical errors (and how many of those are already in the process of being rectified), and how many of those are in actual use (e.g. how many actually use those SSNs in the wild)? This is the important missing context. Musk can and does claim a lot. He rarely, if ever, provides any evidence or context. And none of his or his team's actions can be verified or monitored.
Devasta 2y 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.
- bagels 2y ago
  I'm sure Fox news will investigate his claims and let their listeners know that he lied about this.
ZeroGravitas 2y 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43077199
- empathy_m 2y 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.
laurent_du 2y 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jklinger410 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
throw0101d 2y ago
Related, "Why COBOL isn't the problem": * https://lucid.co/techblog/2020/11/13/why-cobol-isnt-the-problem https://lucid.co/techblog/2020/11/13/why-cobol-isnt-the-prob... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420217
bobnick 2y 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 2y 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).
cjbgkagh 2y 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 2y 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 https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1891406665242546383
- __m 2y ago
  Do they receive social security though? His tweet doesn’t explicitly say so, might be willfully omitted.
  - cjbgkagh 2y 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.
bagels 2y 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 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.
- tonymet 2y ago
  51% is most. 49% could still be > $100bil
  - enragedcacti 2y 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%.
    - tonymet 2y ago
      Let’s see what the revised fraud report discovers.
- enragedcacti 2y 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 2y ago
msie 2y ago
Imagine all the wasted cycles dealing with Trump's/Elon's/DOGE misadventures.
Modulius 2y 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 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.
jedwards1211 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
As I just posted in a thread https://dev.to/mdchaney/cobol-dates-may-20-1875-and-disinformation-5ggh 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 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 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.

277 points by SeenNotHeard 2y ago

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

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 2y 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 2y ago
It's exhausting. Each side of every argument is full of misinformation, intentionally or not.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- drawkward 2y 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.
  - readthenotes1 2y ago
    You're saying the party of "the President is fine don't trust the cheap fakes" is to be trusted?
    - drawkward 2y ago
      I am making two claims: 1. Not all arguments suffer from misinformation on both sides. 2. The political right uses misinformation as a weapon at a scale that dwarfs that of the political left. Your single example does not counter that argument.
      - BurningFrog 2y ago
        Do you have an objective way to measure levels of "misinformation as a weapon" that supports claim 2?
      - grandempire 2y ago
        [flagged]
cyanydeez 2y ago
Can you give us a misinformation example related to this post. This sounds like an empty complaint with no vector.
- chrisco255 2y 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.
  - bloomingkales 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - chrisco255 2y ago
      Have you interacted with the federal government? Or any government at all? Do you know how much money they waste? Do you think a 7 trillion dollar budget isn't going to be filled with multiple hundreds of billions of dollars of false payments, waste, fraud, and 42-year old loopholes that have never been closed? Our national debt is growing at trillions a year. That's not sustainable. The inflation is happening now. It gets a lot worse without this.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - drawkward 2y ago
        Of course there is waste. Nothing runs with 100% efficiency. You claim a huge scale of fraud, "multiple hundreds of billions of dollars" which we can bound as 200/7000 - 900/7000 Or something roughly in the range of 3-12%. So, not exactly invisible. Probably pretty findable. Where is the evidence of these "multiple hundreds of billions of dollars"? If you are going to go about it from individual fraudulent SS recipient upwards, you will be looking for fraud forever. A liftetime of SS is, what, $100,000? So, like 0.00005% of the amount of fraud you claim? If this is how DOGE is going about it, IT WOULD BE THE LEAST FUCKING EFFICIENT GOVERNMENT PROGRAM EVER. This is not how you find fraud. This is not how you audit. This is a smash and grab job, orchestrated by the most wealthy human and most powerful elected official on the planet. This is NOT democracy. This is Autocracy.
frugalmail 2y 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.
- zimpenfish 2y 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.

hypeatei 2y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

chrisco255 2y ago
> was first published in 1988 No, the social security system and the COBOL that powers it predates that standard by quite a lot.
- hypeatei 2y 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 https://www.ssa.gov/history/ibm.html
  - chrisco255 2y ago
    Y2K problems were related to attempting to represent years with 2 digit numbers. By no means would setting a date to 1875 fix a Y2K problem, it would just exacerbate it. Even if the problem originated from a Y2K "fix", it would still be a major bug, resulting in millions to billions in excessive payouts going to who knows where.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - IX-103 2y ago
      I think parent post is saying that when they fixed the Y2K problem, they likely also modernized the date representation to comport with international standards. It wouldn't really be any more difficult to do both of those at the same time than just fixing Y2K bugs.

ggm 2y 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"

dkjaudyeqooe 2y 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.
- ggm 2y 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
anadem 2y 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.
- threeseed 2y 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 ?

dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago

[flagged]

fastball 2y ago
What are you talking about? This isn't about Elon Musk. This is a SE thread about whether or not COBOL backdates to 1875, consensus being that it does not do that.
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
  Musk is making claims without substantive evidence. Why do you think we're talking about it?
  - fastball 2y ago
    No, the claim without substantive evidence is that COBOL backdates to 1875. If the source-of-truth for SS payments is the database and associated COBOL system, and that system reports payments being made to 150 year olds, that is bad. We should not be doing that. It doesn't matter if the birth date was deliberately added as 1875 or if the COBOL system replaces null date values with 1875 (which does not seem to be the case if you read the linked thread).
- NoPicklez 2y ago
  It is, I assume this post has been made because Elon recently said when he addressed the media next to Trump that they supposedly found people who were 150 years old collecting social security payments. What has followed is people coming out of the woodwork to explain how this may have been reflected in the system since the system was written in COBOL and the reasons why those people were reflected that way the system, that they likely weren't actually having those payments made and it there wasn't the wastage of tax payers money as Elon claims. Whereby citizens that don't have a recorded age are represented with an age of 0 and COBOL backdates their age from 1875. It seems to be Elon's DOGE team having access to data that they have little experience in reviewing and understanding and are spreading claims that are false. Google it.

jmclnx 2y 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 2y 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?

cwbriscoe 2y 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.

Aloisius 2y 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.
- skissane 2y 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

layer8 2y ago

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

Aloisius 2y 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/ 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 https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0202602578

CSMastermind 2y ago
Social Security started paying out in 1940: https://www.proquest.com/docview/146227490?sourcetype=Historical%20Newspapers 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- EdwardDiego 2y ago
  That makes a lot of sense.
- Aloisius 2y 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&cat=all https://aad.archives.gov/aad/fielded-search.jsp?dt=3059&tf=F...

NoPicklez 2y 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.

deleted 2y ago
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aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
trymas 2y 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_ 2y 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_scandal 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-miljoenen-naar-een-miljardenoperatie 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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Sniffnoy 2y 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.)

jiggawatts 2y 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.

totallynothoney 2y 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_survived_into_the_21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_... [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_May_Fuller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_May_Fuller

dashundchen 2y 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 2y 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_1900 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 2y 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 2y ago
>that a specific criticism is true Or false, in this case.

paulsutter 2y 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=NN3Ma3wsHBF26PLjy342bw https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076?s=46&t=NN3...

qingcharles 2y 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 https://imgur.com/a/34Y5BSv
- bloomingkales 2y 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.
  - ipv6ipv4 2y ago
    This is the smoking gun that Musk has no understanding of what he's looking at. A competent engineer would look at these numbers, recognize that they don't match payments, and shut up until they figure out the bigger picture that can explain everything they see. Instead, he raced to tweet it. This is just dumb.
    - 2y ago

noobermin 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
Who needs just one Y2K when you can have one every 10 years!

jamesrom 2y 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.

pavlov 2y 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?
- jamesrom 2y 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.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    The point is that a date set to 1875 is actually a null in COBOL. It doesn't mean the data is missing or inaccurate, any more than a null reference in Java means your program is going to segfault. It simply indicates that the data is not present in this scope. If Musk was posting: "Guys I just discovered they have tons of null checks in their code here, that's obviously an indication of fraud!" — would that make any sense to you?
    - jamesrom 2y ago
      [flagged]

spullara 2y 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 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

gloflo 2y 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_hearn 2y 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.
  - troupo 2y ago
    How many of those are test data, simple clerical errors (and how many of those are already in the process of being rectified), and how many of those are in actual use (e.g. how many actually use those SSNs in the wild)? This is the important missing context. Musk can and does claim a lot. He rarely, if ever, provides any evidence or context. And none of his or his team's actions can be verified or monitored.

Devasta 2y 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.

bagels 2y ago
I'm sure Fox news will investigate his claims and let their listeners know that he lied about this.

ZeroGravitas 2y 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43077199

empathy_m 2y 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.

laurent_du 2y 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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jklinger410 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.

throw0101d 2y ago

Related, "Why COBOL isn't the problem": * https://lucid.co/techblog/2020/11/13/why-cobol-isnt-the-problem https://lucid.co/techblog/2020/11/13/why-cobol-isnt-the-prob... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420217

bobnick 2y 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 2y 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).

cjbgkagh 2y 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 2y 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 https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1891406665242546383
__m 2y ago
Do they receive social security though? His tweet doesn’t explicitly say so, might be willfully omitted.
- cjbgkagh 2y 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.

bagels 2y 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 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.

tonymet 2y ago
51% is most. 49% could still be > $100bil
- enragedcacti 2y 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%.
  - tonymet 2y ago
    Let’s see what the revised fraud report discovers.
enragedcacti 2y 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 2y ago

msie 2y ago

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

Modulius 2y 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 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.

jedwards1211 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago

As I just posted in a thread https://dev.to/mdchaney/cobol-dates-may-20-1875-and-disinformation-5ggh 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 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 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.