Are DOGE's Claims of Social Security Payments to 150-Year-Olds Way Off Base?

Anybody surprised of the outcome of some juniors led by a know-it-all?<p>My gosh, if everything they ever (wrongly) assume is that the people _actually doing their jobs_ where frauds and that it&#x27;s unnecessary to _ask_...<p>That cannot work out. And either Musk is too stupid to réalisé, or it&#x27;s by intention (to destroy). Hint: the outcome is the same. Damage done.

I am uniquely unqualified to work at DOGE.<p>I would not be able to tweet without first having a look and <i>trying</i> for more than 12 seconds to understand why this anomaly existed.

Even if you are not at all familiar with cobalt, if you had any brains you would notice that an oddly large number of people are exactly 150 years old which should tell you that it probably means something else than age.

Why on earth would anyone believe what the DOGE people are saying? And even if what they said was true (because a stopped clock is right twice a day), why would we believe their reasoning as to why?<p>Nothing they have done suggests competence, reliability, or honesty.

Wait. If the issue is that birth year is missing, how is that possible?? I mean, its social security! Isn&#x27;t one of the key ideas of that based on age? If its like the Irish system, a card is sent on your 18th birthday (iirc… its been a while since i got mine!) with full details. How would they know what age you are for different entitlements? Retirement? Etc? That&#x27;s seems very odd…

The 1875 thing seems... unlikely. While it is possible that the SSA decided to create an epoch of 1875, I don&#x27;t believe COBOL itself has such an epoch.<p>Moreover, the SSA&#x27;s actual Numerical Identification (NUMIDENT) files, the master records for applications&#x2F;deaths&#x2F;claims, appears to stored dates in text as either YYYYMMDD or MMDDYYYY strings according to their archived versions.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openicpsr.org&#x2F;openicpsr&#x2F;project&#x2F;207202&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openicpsr.org&#x2F;openicpsr&#x2F;project&#x2F;207202&#x2F;</a><p>I think it&#x27;s more likely that there are missing death records for some entries (which isn&#x27;t really a problem unless there are active claims), data entry error, someone didn&#x27;t get the most recent NUMIDENT iteration (the records are essentially append-only) or did something silly like tried to treat social security numbers as unique ids.

The greatest economic empire the world has ever seen cannot afford social security please understand. Now please vote for the party that gives tax cuts to corporations.

I think the way the headline is structured make it seem like this is merely a political issue. However the government staff&#x27;s inability to understand the epoch in ISO standard is definitely a technical issue.

The concerning thing about this is in Conservative circles, now it’s essentially a “fact” that Social Security has been paying 150 year olds, and they use it to justify DOGE’s existence. They are incentivized to lie.<p>Has Musk made a public retraction on this? We know a lie spreads faster than the truth, and given how loudly he crowed about finding 150 year olds, he should be at least as loud correcting himself.

Allow me to present a possible theory:<p>1) Assume Social Security has a field called &quot;verified birthday by US birth certificate&quot; which is a timestamp measured in days. 2) Assume this timestamp starts on May 20, 1875 which was once a COBOL epoch standard. 3) Assume if someone does not have a verified birth certificate that field will be 0. 3) Assume one of Musk&#x27;s junior engineers runs a query against the SS database on this field. 4) Assume said engineer runs the results through an AI trained to spot various kinds of fraud and asks it to spot anything unusual. 5) Assume the AI spits out &quot;We have found X million records matching fraud parameters since ages are over 120 years old.&quot; 6) Assume said engineer excitedly runs over to Musk with the results and Musk does not bother contacting anyone at the Social Security Administration to see if there is a logical alternative explanation other than fraud since he never bothered to check the $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza claim.

Guys, just an American peasant asking a question. My mama never knew the day she was born. I&#x27;m 70 and once did a little tech work.Mama drew Social Security off my daddy&#x27;s account after he died. I also thought about how Census records of say the 1920s have a blank for unknowns like my mom&#x27;s.

Since you have to be at least 62 years old to collect social security, I would think that every eligible person would have a verified birthdate in the system.<p>So it seems that not having a birthday, or having one that&#x27;s a default, should be a red flag.

the cobalt thing would only explain the 150 years but what about the ranges after that including 1 at 300? clearly something wierd going.

Because running systems for entire countries for decades is complex. And bugs and problems arise. This is normal behaviour of complex systems.

One of the key problems with Elon and DOGE in general is that they keep making very confident claims without putting in any effort to verify that they have their facts in order. It&#x27;s gross negligence because we know that have access to the necessary resources to verify each claim they make.<p>The more skeptical part of me wonders if this is all part of the broader Trump strategy to flood the media with as much misinformation as possible. An adversarial party can produce bullshit at a much higher rate than it can be verified. Based on the communications we&#x27;ve seen so far, I find it hard to believe that these people are acting in good faith.<p>It&#x27;s not even that I&#x27;d expect perfection. If the DOGE team was producing tons of claims acting in good faith, they&#x27;d probably make some mistakes. But the failure rate smells of malicious action or incompetence.

US life expectancy is like 53, they should flag any payment for anyone over that age :)

Saddening. The gall to assume they can walk into a large institution with computing infrastructure older than them and start poking and pulling cables out without thinking for a moment. The arrogance it takes to not stop, to not doubt, to not take the time to understand, but instead to make pronouncements of inefficiency or errors when it is _you_ who is erroneous. Beyond the technical ignorance and arrogance, it is sickening because of how fundamental a safety net social security is for peoples&#x27; literal survival. Sociopaths should not be sent into these places.

A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right and evil doesn’t become good just because it’s accepted by the majority quote by Booker T. Washington. A better question would be why does Elon Musk have access to Social Security information? That’s not one of the agencies he’s supposed to be looking at is it?

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines strikes again.

While Elon is known to bullshit I do not doubt that the system was being drained with corruption. Social Security kept falling short, but there was no reason for it to. As people die and fall off social security which is designed to last till a person is 90 should be able to gracefully adjust to inflation.

Since musk accurately predicted that full self-driving cars would be common by 2017, I believe we should trust him about this one ;)<p>My guess would be that it&#x27;s an error in expanding a two-digit year. But we don&#x27;t know if the error is in the original application controlling the payments, or if the error was in a report made by a 19-year-old DOGE employee.

About these DOGE people, I&#x27;ll be more interested to see the next Democrat DoJ filing criminal charges against them all. I expect they&#x27;ll each spend life in prison in some form, especially Felon Musk.

When Elon Musk says something that sounds insane, the only reasonable thing to assume, without further information, is that he&#x27;s just making it up.<p>The man has a very complicated relationship with honesty.

Is this like his level 97 character on POE2? He&#x27;s a sociopathic liar.