No, 150-Year-Olds Aren’t Collecting Social Security Benefits
www.wired.com
Elon Musk claims to have found rampant fraud in the Social Security Administration. There’s a much simpler explanation.

Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the “Convention du Mètre.”

These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.

Archived copy of the article

  • PartiallyApplied@lemmy.world
    51·
    4 days ago

    I would love to see an actual source/docs stating 1875 is a commonly used epoch, rather than microblog posts. Either bring hard facts or shut up, because…

    Arguing over the epoch completely misses the obvious refutation. If there’s errors in the database, that might be because there’s hundreds of millions of individuals represented in the DB, and no data should be made to be perfect at the cost of people starving. I would posit the bigger a tech system gets, the more social constraints it will acquire. The errors in the database could mean there’s underserved people, and we should fund efforts to represent these people, so their needs can be met. What errors don’t mean is that the SSA is being defrauded to such an extent that it should be shut down, but the way Musk has worked his claim makes that implication natural.

    The epoch could be yesterday or at the building of the tower of Babylon and it doesn’t matter, they’ll just deflect and say there’s people who are ageless in the dataset who are defrauding the system and it’s all corrupt

    This article gives validity to opinions of idiots meddling. This is implicit, and perhaps accidental, complicity in an outrageous government outreach. Musk is actively tearing down the government.

    Sure tech is cool, but it’s nowhere near as important as the social issues surrounding it and for a tech based newspaper to ignore that basic fact is embarrassing

    • Madison420@lemmy.world
      2·
      4 days ago

      The people with microblogs basically are the experts, we’ve been paying people who can use this language inordinate amounts for about a decade or so in a desperate attempt to swap systems before all the people who know in practice what they’re doing are all dead.