5 ms·

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

„Social Security isn’t paying out to 150-year-olds, it’s paying out to people whose birthdays we don’t even know“ is not exactly reassuring. How is it possible that the db contains records with such a vital datum missing? How is it possible that SSNs aren’t unique? I can’t come up with an explanation that doesn’t boil down to either negligence or fraud.

tgv 2y ago
How is it possible that your code contains bugs? I think that question may have the same answer.
raverbashing 2y ago
Looks like you never touched any system with real life data Edit: the link below gives more information on ssns. SSNs so far been unique, but there are some issues
- MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
  Thats not how SSNs are supposed to work at all.
- zettabomb 2y ago
  SSNs are not reused: https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    Thanks, very informative link
  - Yoric 2y ago
    I don't know how it happens in the US, but in France, during several years, I had an error-code SSN. My papers had been misfiled at birth, due to the unreadable writing of the cleric who recorded my birth, and it took 2-3 years to fix this. This error-code SSN was full of 0s, so obviously shared with others. I wouldn't be surprised if some migrants waiting for confirmation of paperwork also had some shared temporary special-code SSN.
throwanem 2y ago
You ask in effect: 'How is it that a data collection - whose cardinality is well into the hundreds of millions, likely close to half a billion (500,000,000); - which has been maintained for now just about exactly a hundred years; - which predates birth certificates and birth records being common across large swaths of the country (not predates their systematization or encoding, but predates their reliable existence); - which for a lot of its history has been maintained by hand, should come to have occasional inconsistencies?' So framed in knowledge of the Social Security Administration's history, I confide the question may reveal its own answer.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  That's not what he's asking. He's asking why there apparently isn't a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation, assuming that's the issue. Bear in mind that social security fraud is a major problem in many countries and impossibly old people is a usual indicator. The famous "blue zones" that were once studied for their long lived people are now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud.
  - thecopy 2y ago
    >now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud Im genuinely curious about this, would you mind sharing references?
    - throwanem 2y ago
      See my nearby comment [1] with links and context on the study to which GP is referring. Tl;dr: the claim is not supported. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076455
  - zettabomb 2y ago
    >a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation I understood GP as saying that this data is the best, cleanest data available. If nothing better exists, then record what you have. If that means some fields are blank, well then they're blank - you'll have to deal with this for country-sized databases, one way or another.
SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
> How is it possible that the db contains records with such a vital datum missing? This is a weird question. How would you even go about finding out an unknown date of birth? Especially when it happened > 50 years ago and half the world away. For whom is it "vital" ? Will it prevent me from going about my daily business? See also: Why are so many people born on the 1st of January? It's a statistically impossible number. A: Because they know their approximate year of birth, only.
tpm 2y ago
> How is it possible that the db contains records with such a vital datum missing? It might not be missing, it also can be unknown and unknowable. There are people with their date of birth not recorded or recorded only approximately. It happens when the date is recorded on a piece of a paper in a building that then burns down or during natural or human-made catastrophes. Or it might not be recorded at all, or only some parts are missing (like the day of the month). Working for a different public administration, it's so common we have a special date type for that.
- d1sxeyes 2y ago
  Or a definitely wrong value was removed but there's nothing to correct it with. For example, if someone was registered with a birth date of 02/18/1458, or has a birth certificate with that on it. Bear in mind that humans make mistakes, and the people who issue birth certificates or type them up are humans. 02/18/1458 is patently wrong, but what do you do? Just guess that someone misread a 9 as a 4? What if the person in front of you is clearly too young (or old) to have been born in 1958? You can't just revoke someone's social security because someone screwed up.
jandrese 2y ago
You think it is not possible that people born in homesteads in the 1920s and 1930s in rural and isolated communities don’t have birth records? Or immigrants from countries that didn’t have paper birth records?
sensanaty 2y ago
I know a few people that don't have an official birth date. My brother in law is Papuan and no one in his village has an official birth year or date since they just don't keep track of it, so when he got his first official government ID at a much later stage of his life, he chose an arbitrary date cause it means nothing to him. He's probably around 35-40, but his birthday says he's in his 60s. It's not all that rare even in the West, especially for older people. Records get lost or never get collected in the first place.
nkrisc 2y ago
My grandmother was born in the 1930s in Chicago (second most populous US city at the time) and she never even knew exactly what year she was born in. It’s fairly common.
a0123 2y ago
Yeah, who's ever heard of an incomplete database or a database that barely holds together and has had to have weird adjustments done to it in order to avoid fucking up other bits of data? We can tell you've never touched a database or worked in tech. Not that there is any shame in that. But the same way I keep my opinion to myself when my doctor gives me my diagnosis, people who have never handled a database really should follow that advice. A local library can barely keep its database straight and it's very slightly easier than a database containing millions of people's information. Dozens of millions.

tgv 2y ago

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

raverbashing 2y ago

Looks like you never touched any system with real life data Edit: the link below gives more information on ssns. SSNs so far been unique, but there are some issues

MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
Thats not how SSNs are supposed to work at all.
zettabomb 2y ago
SSNs are not reused: https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html
- raverbashing 2y ago
  Thanks, very informative link
- Yoric 2y ago
  I don't know how it happens in the US, but in France, during several years, I had an error-code SSN. My papers had been misfiled at birth, due to the unreadable writing of the cleric who recorded my birth, and it took 2-3 years to fix this. This error-code SSN was full of 0s, so obviously shared with others. I wouldn't be surprised if some migrants waiting for confirmation of paperwork also had some shared temporary special-code SSN.

throwanem 2y ago

You ask in effect: 'How is it that a data collection - whose cardinality is well into the hundreds of millions, likely close to half a billion (500,000,000); - which has been maintained for now just about exactly a hundred years; - which predates birth certificates and birth records being common across large swaths of the country (not predates their systematization or encoding, but predates their reliable existence); - which for a lot of its history has been maintained by hand, should come to have occasional inconsistencies?' So framed in knowledge of the Social Security Administration's history, I confide the question may reveal its own answer.

mike_hearn 2y ago
That's not what he's asking. He's asking why there apparently isn't a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation, assuming that's the issue. Bear in mind that social security fraud is a major problem in many countries and impossibly old people is a usual indicator. The famous "blue zones" that were once studied for their long lived people are now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud.
- thecopy 2y ago
  >now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud Im genuinely curious about this, would you mind sharing references?
  - throwanem 2y ago
    See my nearby comment [1] with links and context on the study to which GP is referring. Tl;dr: the claim is not supported. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076455
- zettabomb 2y ago
  >a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation I understood GP as saying that this data is the best, cleanest data available. If nothing better exists, then record what you have. If that means some fields are blank, well then they're blank - you'll have to deal with this for country-sized databases, one way or another.

SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago

> How is it possible that the db contains records with such a vital datum missing? This is a weird question. How would you even go about finding out an unknown date of birth? Especially when it happened > 50 years ago and half the world away. For whom is it "vital" ? Will it prevent me from going about my daily business? See also: Why are so many people born on the 1st of January? It's a statistically impossible number. A: Because they know their approximate year of birth, only.

tpm 2y ago

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

d1sxeyes 2y ago
Or a definitely wrong value was removed but there's nothing to correct it with. For example, if someone was registered with a birth date of 02/18/1458, or has a birth certificate with that on it. Bear in mind that humans make mistakes, and the people who issue birth certificates or type them up are humans. 02/18/1458 is patently wrong, but what do you do? Just guess that someone misread a 9 as a 4? What if the person in front of you is clearly too young (or old) to have been born in 1958? You can't just revoke someone's social security because someone screwed up.

jandrese 2y ago

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

sensanaty 2y ago

I know a few people that don't have an official birth date. My brother in law is Papuan and no one in his village has an official birth year or date since they just don't keep track of it, so when he got his first official government ID at a much later stage of his life, he chose an arbitrary date cause it means nothing to him. He's probably around 35-40, but his birthday says he's in his 60s. It's not all that rare even in the West, especially for older people. Records get lost or never get collected in the first place.

nkrisc 2y ago

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

a0123 2y ago

Yeah, who's ever heard of an incomplete database or a database that barely holds together and has had to have weird adjustments done to it in order to avoid fucking up other bits of data? We can tell you've never touched a database or worked in tech. Not that there is any shame in that. But the same way I keep my opinion to myself when my doctor gives me my diagnosis, people who have never handled a database really should follow that advice. A local library can barely keep its database straight and it's very slightly easier than a database containing millions of people's information. Dozens of millions.