this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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Enough Musk Spam
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They also found that there's people over 200, so that default date thing doesn't really explain it all.
It's because that explanation isn't correct. The real deal is you just have entries without a death date, so if you ran a query this get super old ages as a result.
Note that isn't a database of payments or even people eligible for them, just a listing of 'everyone' with a SSN. There is a separate master death index. In the old days, wild west kind of stuff people would disappear so the death date would never get entered. Modern days every morgue and funeral home has to legally notify SS when someone dies, there is a specific form and major hell to pay if you don't do it.
Social Security numbers were first issued in 1937. You would have need someone to be over 110 in 1937 to have an age over 200. I think that it's a combination of birthdays entered wrong plus no official death date.
Wouldn't matter anyway the ss admin automatically stops pay and initiates audit for anything over 115.
I think those are related to survivor benefits. Like an old man marrying a young woman in the 40's. Like the civil war vets marrying woman in the 20th century. The last civil war widow was getting benefits until she died in 2020. But still the same basic issue.
But in that case the old man isn't getting benefits but just is needed as a reference for the person actually getting them.
Also a lot of people between 110 and 150, so I'm sure there is a larger answer.
However, Social Security cuts off at 115, and they supposedly found like 10 million people older than that. Considering there are only ~50m people on Social Security, and the database they were searching wasn't even about current recipients, most people would conclude that there is likely an error in data, rather than immediately jump to fraud. Of course, ketamine is a hell of a drug and Elon is not most people.
It's definitely still concerning if the database has a large number of errors. But systematic fraud would be much worse ofc.
the database doesn't have to necessarily be accurate if there's other checks - a flag for test data, a system that checks the person is real against another database before dispersing funds etc
It's really funny to me that everyone thinks every database is always 100% correct. What a magical world it would be!
A minor grammar point: in this context, the word is actually "disbursing," from the same root as "bursar," a job title you may have encountered in school administrations. "Disbursing" means "paying out from a fund." "Dispersing" means "scattering" or "causing to dissipate." So the old system was disbursing funds. The new system will be dispersing funds.
That's true. Would be better if it was though.
Someone with the skills and knowledge to clean up 150-year old typographical errors in one particular table in the Social Security database system would probably provide more benefit to the taxpayers covering their salary by doing some other task.
How would you clean up that data? If they didn’t have the correct data in the first place, where do you expect to find it decades later?
Sometime real life is just bad data and that’s not necessarily a problem. All of the business logic and agency process around not spending money for those situations is probably one of the difficult areas blocking modernization or shrinkage. Bad data is reality. How you handle it shows how experienced you are
It might be better to move to a new database at this point rather than trying to fix the existing one. It won't give immediate benefits but could be helpful down the line.
Or it could cost a fortune and fuck a lot of other processes up.
That's true
I am hoping California ditches SSN and other identifiers from the US Treasury. That information is no longer safe, so we need a fresh database that is secure from DOGE fuckery, among many other hostile actors.
Fixing an archival dataset that doesn't even pertain to people actively receiving benefits is so far down the list of priorities as to be a criminal misuse if resources.
Lol why bring drugs into this? Specifically ketamine?
Because Musk is pretty open about his ketamine abuse
Ah. I see now. Thank you.