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That sure sounds like (2), just restated. It would still be incredibly dishonest for Musk to say based on these numbers that this is the largest fraud in histo
by hyperpape 2y ago
That sure sounds like (2), just restated.
It would still be incredibly dishonest for Musk to say based on these numbers that this is the largest fraud in history.
> In 2010, the Japanese government announced that 82 percent of its citizens reported to be over 100 had already died.
> In 2012, Greece announced that it had discovered that 72 percent of its centenarians claiming pensions – some 9,000 people – were already dead.
Those numbers are three to four orders of magitude smaller than the ones we're discussing. Even factoring in the US being 30 times larger than Greece, we would have less than half a million pensioners if the proportion is similar.
The fact is, Elon found a number and waved it around like a red flag. And both of us are smart enough[0] to know that it doesn't mean what he says it means. But for some reason, you're insisting on defending the original deceptive tweets.
[0] I mean that genuinely! I've read your posts on garbage collection. And in this discussion I take it you're recognizing that those millions of records are likely overwhelming not fraudulent.
- mike_hearn 2y agoWell, thank you for the compliment :) There's slippage of claims here, maybe. It's clearly not the case that every record with wrong data is fraudulent, and I don't think Musk believes or said that (though maybe he did, the dude tweets all the time). We certainly agree that it isn't the case. The claims being made as I understand it are that the US SSDB has a lot of obviously wrong data in it, that bad age data is frequently a sign of fraud as proven by the audits of other countries, the age data is genuinely bad and not a result of misunderstandings, and therefore that Musk is likely correct when he argues there is a lot of fraud in the system. What does "a lot" mean? It's vague but clearly not 100%. At the same time, if the numbers do transfer then less than half a million people fraudulently claiming pensions is quite a lot! And that would be just one source of fraud, one of the easiest to detect without effort. There will be plenty of people under the age of 100 who have died and weren't registered either, or people who never existed and so on. So whether we're talking millions, or a million, or even with a very restricted criteria less than half a million. In ordinary English, it's a lot.
- hyperpape 2y agoI wasn't kidding about the "biggest fraud" line. It's not an exaggeration, he's just that full of crap. Direct quote from Musk: "Yes, there are FAR more 'eligible' social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA. This might be the biggest fraud in history."[0] The worst part is that there’s already a public report about these social security numbers. And it genuinely makes the SSA look bad, but it also makes clear that very few of these accounts ever received payments, and of those that did, they were generally cut off around a decade ago.[1] Does Musk know about the report? Does he care? If someone wanted to come in and clean house and say "you have to do better" I can imagine there's a case to be made there. That's not what's happening, though. [0] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891357918605332965 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891357918605332965 [1] https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
- mike_hearn 2y agoNow I'm curious what the biggest fraud in history actually is!