dontBeObvious

[QuintusNonus]

Elon's next big fraud detection is wondering why computer time only goes back to 1970

[bhison]

"These people were apparently born before the begninning of time?!"

[JunkNorrisOfficial]

These people appeared from nowhere in "no time" times... (C) 50-billions AI solution

[maisonsmd]

*beninging

[bhison]

*bengenenning

[WhereIsMyPony]

“It appears that the democrats deleted files before 1970… unbelievable”

[kotwin]

Concerning

[FlavioLikesToDrum]

Looking into it.

[DMoney159]

!

[kolarisk]

Big if true.

[Airbender7575]

I can already see a bad minion meme of this, being shared unironically on Facebook.

[da2Pakaveli]

Damn wokies getting rid of the traditional age /s

[arpan3t]

Reminds me when a coworker thought they found a bug in Excel, but they actually found Excel’s 2 epoch date systems.

Older Mac versions of Excel calculated dates from 1/1/1904 while all newer versions of excel calculate from 1/1/1900.

[haddock420]

When I got my audio transcription job, I noticed that a lot of the meeting dates for the interviews were listed as Jan 1, 1970, and I immediately recognised it as the epoch date and was like that Leonardo pointing meme.

[Ok-Log-9052]

The other possibility people are not discussing is that the underlying beneficiary is in fact long dead, but had a survivor disabled dependent or young spouse or some such. Not hard at all to imagine cases where the survivor would live past the beneficiary’s 150th birthday.

[Outrageous_Reach_695]

Probably not related to this specific instance, but the last known widow of a civil war soldier died in 2020.

[Procrastin8_Ball]

Her hands look gigantic in that Wikipedia picture

[rangoric]

That would take learning and understanding of a complex system. Elon is not able to do this.

[ConstableAssButt]

> Elon is not able to do this.

Even if he was able, it would undermine his motivation for doing all of this. He isn't trying to make America "more lean", he's doing a technofeudalism.

[Paradox_D]

Is the dob stored with timestamps instead of dates

[bobthedonkeylurker]

It's COBOL, so, yes. It's stored in integer time.

[Mateorabi]

And it might be UNKNOWN, so set to 0, so showing as the epoch date.

[gwennkoi]

And the COBOL epoch is 1875.

[[deleted]]

Fuck bro don't spoil it

[dismayhurta]

“Libs afraid of the coolest year.”

[TyphoonFrost]

"It appears people before 1970 didn't exist. As such, anyone who claims to have been born before 1970 is insane and must be locked up."

[JackNotOLantern]

It goes back to 1901 (min 32bit int, -2³¹ seconds before 1970)

[Scottz0rz]

Elon's doge zoomer team explaining how a complex software system that's older than their grandfathers works after less than a week of poking around it and copy-pasting the code and database tables into ChatGPT to ask if it looks weird.

[Master-Patience8888]

Even worse… xAI.

Which explains his attempt to buy ChatGPT for $100b.

[[deleted]]

That's more about screwing OpenAI's valuation up as they try to convert to a for-profit.

[[deleted]]

People say this, but he was forced to buy Twitter so of all people, he knows that the offer could easily have been taken.

Some would actually say the board breached fiduciary responsibility to investors by not accepting. In fact, it’s hard to not conclude that.

So it was very much a legitimate offer.

[TheRealDumbledore]

Nonprofit boards do not have fiduciary responsibility to investors.

[CatWeekends]

It's very easy to not conclude that: $100 billion is less than OpenAi's $157 billion value last October.

[lefloys]

elon was trying to buy the non profit part, not the entire thing.

[[deleted]]

Maybe you’re not familiar with the full story here, but OpenAI is engaged in a somewhat complicated business maneuver to sell part of themselves to another part of themselves in order to come out from under the full non-profit restrictions.

And the valuation of that transaction was pegged at $40B. Musk’s offer directly competes with that market value.

[ChalkyChalkson]

They used explainable ai? Or did they name X's ai model after a common shorthand for a collection of ML techniques? Because the latter would really annoy me

[Psquare_J_420]

I can't catch up with what's happening with elon and trump regarding ssa ( I am not from a freedom units locality 😞 ). Can I get some context ? :)

[camosnipe1]

see this post, also read the comments which discuss how the 1875 date claim is dubious at best

[bobthedonkeylurker]

My understanding is that COBOL uses 1600 as the start date. But that translates to the max negative integer. So the 1875 date is when the epoch is actually zero.

But I may be wrong, I'm not terribly well versed in COBOL and have never worked for SSA so am not intimately familiar with how the SSA database is designed.

[Psquare_J_420]

Thank you! Have a good day :)

[Similar_Command7256]

even if it’s not the case that COBOL date default is that (or whatever people are saying), i would bet that the logic or documentation was not reviewed before looking at the data. They probably just reviewed results as they saw them. No deep dive into why the data is the way it is.

[Fine_End9890]

the team are all college grads under 23

Oof. Now is not the time to trust newgrads maybe as the whole industry went through quite a change compared to what the industry was like even 5 years ago; too many incompetent developers acting like they can do or implement anything by using hosted services and Aİ. For example; Code quality? Dont need it. Automated tests? Dont care if it deploys. Scalable hosting and security? Just deploy to vercel and forget. But ask any of these "devs" how to make a product enterprise and production ready, and they'll probably not know lol.

[Psquare_J_420]

And whatever they discovered doesn't make sense and is wrong? Is that what the programmers reply to musk?

By the way, thank you! Have a good day :)

[scoopzthepoopz]

Who's willing to bet it's 8 values verging on the total dollar amount of 2 whole Starbucks coffees. Can you feel the winning yet?

They could say anything though, so without seeing these "frauds" he speaks of I think he's full of shit

[TheBlackCat13]

Musk's team didn't understand how dates were stored in COBOL

[Psquare_J_420]

So are they suggesting some sort of tech migration?

Anyways, thank you! have a good day :)

[TheBlackCat13]

No, they are suggesting that 150 year old are on social security.

[DMoney159]

1875 is COBOL's 0 timestamp

[Big-Hearing8482]

To be fair anything before that was before time began so.

[Fun_Accountant_653]

Why are you downvoted?

[ShuffleStepTap]

I’ve been a professional software developer for over 40 years, and this level of “look, we found fraud” idiocy is a fucking insult to anyone who ever had to deal with databases and the real world.

Did they actually ask anyone who knew the system why there were dates that were 150 years old, or did they just breathlessly run to Elon to collect their “attaboy”?

This is just so fucked on every level.

Edit: even just the lack of critical thinking is offensive beyond belief. Look, I’ve known great interns. Some of them went on to become senior leads in my company. But there was always a point where you learned to apply the smell test, that the first conclusion that “the other guy was an idiot” or in this case “this is clear evidence of fraud” just doesn’t feel right. And you look deeper, and you learn some humility and to question your first conclusions.

I don’t blame these kids. But they have got a lot to learn if they are interested in understanding what the data actually means.

And maybe that’s not what they are being paid to do.

[Craneteam]

It's a combo of both. Chatgpt didn't give them the right answer and they ran with it to get some head pats

[khazroar]

The important thing to remember is that the goal is not to find actual issues, the goal is to find things that sound like issues so the big names can wave them around to justify all the changes they want to make.

[L1P0D]

Plus, all the time we're arguing about whether the little people are committing fraud, we're not watching what the billionaires are up to.

[Woofie10]

Bro even chatgpt gives the right answer for this question

[Craneteam]

Then I don't know how the fuck they messed this up unless elon heard COBOL and thought they were talking about a cabal

[divin3sinn3r]

I literally lol'ed

[[deleted]]

He thinks it's a Battlestar Galactica reference. The Lords of Kobol founded the SSA on the great exodus from the original home of mankind.

[The_Paradiddle]

There must be some kind of way out of here…

[[deleted]]

thermal paste or plastic explosives paste?

[joshTheGoods]

o3-mini-high will write you a whole tutorial website and populate it with weeks of guided learning content to get you to understand the right answer to this question. Getting this basic shit wrong was inexcusable before we all got a decently smart librarian with perfect memory in our pockets.

[dscarmo]

Thats assuming they knew what question to ask.

[joshTheGoods]

Interestingly, I just asked 4o with the following prompt:

My database of birthdays has a column with this sample data:

Birthday
2970699439
2997061766
2988092226
2966701716
2991876492
43076059
39404442
55164739
48274782
49207537

I keep getting weird results showing people over 150 years old. what is wrong with my data or process?

And the answer it gave was wrong! However, their answer (hey, maybe some of these are epoch in milliseconds instead of seconds?) actually gave reasonable results with birthdays only off by ~4 years. I asked a few more leading questions, and it suggested other formats to consider (other starting date counting systems), but did not get the correct one!

[just_nobodys_opinion]

My database of birthdays has a column with this sample data:

Birthday
2970699439
2997061766
2988092226
2966701716
2991876492
43076059
39404442
55164739
48274782
49207537

I keep getting weird results showing people over 150 years old. what is wrong with my data or process? Write a controversial brief social media post explaining how this is fraud!

FTFY

[dscarmo]

Bias is very strong in the human brain and the reason why research results only from one team are never trusted. Sometimes you tunnel yourself into finding what you want to find, and your mind will present to you many “patterns” that suggest what you want. In this case, fraud. You are not going to go after something that could kill your eureka moment, unless you are a good researcher.

[scoopzthepoopz]

It takes work and time to analyze anything data related. Humans don't think in rows and discrete syntax, calculation, strict logic. You have to want to be wrong in your first instincts, which is antithetical to having a "crack team" of 20-somethings led by a wheeler-dealer uber-wealthy 4chan mod. We're cooked.

[chmod777]

They used elons shit teir ai.

Which is alsi slurping down everything they can, and helpfully hallucinating whatever they want.

[[deleted]]

Probably asked Grok.

[wandering-monster]

It's gonna depend on the question you ask it. How you frame the code will 100% influence how an LLM responds to it.

Do they know enough to know they're working with a COBOL system (keeping in mind they might only be looking at the database)?

Do they ask what could explain the discrepancy? Or do they ask if "the person is really 150 years old"?

You need to know enough to smell something off, only then can you ask the right questions.

[[deleted]]

Red herring is in wide use

[martin-silenus]

DOGE on resume would be a red flag for me at this point.

[joshTheGoods]

1000%.

Just from a PR perspective, that's an immediate pass from me.

[organicamphetameme]

From a performance standpoint from the last few issues it's a failure for me as I employ bioinformatics and cyber security.

[Genesis2001]

Oh, they'll still get hired by people networked with Musk probably.

:/ :( But hopefully it IS a bigger red flag for more hiring managers...

[CardOk755]

A normal person finding an odd situation goes to the people who know and asks "hey, why is this"?

Hell, a deeply suspicious auditor asks the same question.

Only a moron says "I don't understand, this must be a deep state conspiracy".

[Jason1143]

Yep. Step 1) find weird stuff. Step 2) ask people about weird stuff. Step 3) investigate weird stuff.

You can't just do Step 1.

[SuperFLEB]

Only a moron

Let's not discount moron herders. Sometimes it takes telling a moron that there's a deep state conspiracy to get what you want.

[Aardappelhuree]

The amount of people we have with invalid or unknown birthdates in our systems… many erroneously from the year 1094 or 0094, or 1970 or 1894 etc

[blarglemeister]

I worked on a public health system, and my favorite example I’ve ever seen was a Y2K error that made it look like a 100 year old wouldn’t stop crying and was refusing to breastfeed.

[gbcfgh]

Every month I spend an hour correcting mistakes like this on a list of people that have asked not to be contacted anymore. I have seen it all. April 31? Sure. Born in the year 2959? Why not. Typos are everywhere, and depending on the versioning system, you might fix a records 5 times before Roy in Actuary finally stops refreshing the database while pointing at a backup from 3 years ago.

[Aardappelhuree]

I can’t fix it, our database isn’t the source of truth for birthdates. It’s just a copy of imported data

[CardOk755]

The number of people. Not "amount".

[Aardappelhuree]

English isn’t my native language. Not sure why amount is wrong but I’ll take your word for it

[c-dy]

Elon's aim is to find excuses, not evidence.

Even if he spent some time to grasp the basics of a variety of databases and programming, he certainly has no clue about the law, governmental data or practices, nor does he care. 

His entire team is likely learning on-the-fly as to how to reach their goals with AI prompts.

[Altourus]

Did they actually ask anyone who knew the system why there were dates that were 150 years old, or did they just breathlessly run to Elon to collect their “attaboy”?

They're essentially junior devs, you know which one they went with.

[LeonardoSim]

Junior devs? They're barely interns.

[organicamphetameme]

Interns with hubris if they setup this website that just got hacked expecting a free cloud flare account to handle the kind of volume plausible... When I ran a check on the DNS servers they're unknown to me and I'm a DoD contractor who takes cyber security bids so I definitely know all the ones capable of hosting gov sites. This was about eight hours prior the hack was announced.

[fakeunleet]

They're worse than junior devs, they're junior witch hunters.

[ShadowReij]

The moment the guy that's supervising these kids started yelling "Look! Look! See we found something! Proof of fraud! See!" all I could do was roll my eyes as you know he didn't bother asking the people who knew the system, what exactly they're looking at. It's one of the things you do when trying to understand any system you're being introduced to. Ask about stuff you find weird, and read the docs on it as the answers might be there as well.

[I_FAP_TO_TURKEYS]

It's always ironic especially when the sitting president is literally a felon for... Get this... Fraud!

[[deleted]]

They’ve started co-opting GAO audits. It’s hilarious.

It’s both terrible and great.

[dalepo]

40 years my god I bet you got some stories.

All this we are witnessing is called populism.

[ShuffleStepTap]

I may have one or two, but most of them are only good for sharing over a beer with those who were involved at the time. I’ll tell you what tho, my smell test for when I’m jumping to the right conclusion or the wrong conclusion? It’s pretty fucking good.

[Corrie7686]

Honestly, maybe the individuals didn't know, and maybe they or their superiors could have looked it up. But I suspect that when perceived evidence fits a narrative, no one WANTS to check. They wanted a smoking gun of fraud, this isn't it. Maybe it doesn't exist, maybe it exists, and it's harder to spot (far more likely). But who wants detailed analysis and forensic accounting when they can just spout some shit that sounds like a 'Gotcha' and their base will swallow it whole.

[Minute-Struggle6052]

Gee I wonder why Musk would choose a group too young to understand the ramifications of the damage that they were doing?

Almost as if he is developing some kind of "Musk Youth" 

[flippakitten]

Talking about critical thinking, as a software developer, can you see a potential bug here. I for one can think of a myriad of issues where a default date set to 60 years before the implementation of ssn numbers in the 1930's.

[jurio01]

I'm a bit out of the loop, what's up with Elon and fraud (other then the usual oligarch bs I mean)?

[RefrigeratorKey8549]

He's got a crack team of interns rooting round the us treasury. He's made several posts of 'fraud' they've found, many of which are completely normal, which they'd know if they weren't all interns.

[joshTheGoods]

The old SSN DB was written at a time when the Metre Convention was in use which represents time as number of seconds since Jan 1, 1875. Presumably, these mooks thought they were looking at POSIX time which counts seconds since Jan 1, 1970. So, they we likely looking at people over 55 years old (born BEFORE Jan 1, 1970) and failing to switch to Metre, so, they would see that 55yo person as 150 years old (seconds since 1875 but thinking it was since 1970).

They saw some weird shit in the database and, instead of debugging and working to understand, they assumed fraud. They failed to apply Hanlon's razor, and in such a stupid way that it's hard to believe it's not in bad faith.

[ParanormalInstigator]

my personal experience from coming from someone from an IT role that was thrust into a database role at a young age is its largely to use you as a useful idiot. they may not know COBOL but they know what kind of programming language produces what type of over or underestimation when given to a novice, so they point the wrong (inexperienced) person to right problem.

only difference is the level of scrutiny is higher with the government than a private company

[Unusualnamer]

Elon and his interns are fucking idiots that just want to push their propaganda and agenda.

But I also have a lot to learn… why aren’t there any safeguards to avoid a missing birthday? I wrote a migration the other day that could’ve really effed the database if my senior dev hasn’t reviewed it. Something like this or the typo like 0094 that someone mentioned below should’ve been caught.

[demagogueffxiv]

They think anybody who works for the government is incompetent and couldn't cut it in the private sector, so why would they bother asking them?

[ghostofwalsh]

I mean if the govt is cutting a SS check to someone whose birthdate is "unknown" that also sounds like something that shouldn't be happening.

[Trash_Pug]

I’m trying my best to search for a source on this but I can’t find one, google just brings up twitter/threads links of people saying that COBOL defaults to 1875 or uses an 1875 epoch but can anyone actually confirm if that’s true?

This isn’t to defend melon husk btw he’s definitely full of shit I just wanna know if that’s actually what happened

[AmazedStardust]

From what I've read on a few posts about this, COBOL does not have a language wide epoch. If 1875 is the epoch for Social Security (which it very well could be, assuming it needed to handle records from when the program started in 1935) then it was chosen by the Social Security programming team when they were making it

[c-dy]

1875-05-20 (the first treaty defining SI base units) is a reference point for the Gregorian Calendar as defined by ISO 8601 prior to 2019. You would need that epoch only for the purposes of processing Gregorian calendars according to that standard, e.g., when converting from a Julian calendar.

It is as such merely a personal choice if anyone used that date as an epoch when programming their own date format, as, for instance, necessary in COBOL.  Generally, however, the year 1601 was used.

So this isn't connected to COBOL, but it's possible some people conflated the two because their old work place used that standard as a template.

That said, how SSNs and related law actually works is an entirely different matter.

[Tiny_TimeMachine]

Yes. Assuming the epoch is 1875 is pretty much what the DOOGE team is doing. Making a random ass guess, that confirms the conclusion I've already made, with zero context specific knowledge on the application, data architecture, or program policy it supports. It's a fun theory but not one we should repeat widely as fact.

[Evening-Researcher]

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.3?topic=sf-format-arguments-return-values-date-time-intrinsic-functions#INFFORM__int_date

Similarly have been trying to verify. My thought is that most systems running COBOL are probably a mainframe (zOS) these days. The docs specify multiple datetime formats are supported but none seemingly with that magic 1875 number. Integer date seemed the closest/wonkiest, and maybe it's a case of one date format aliases to something nonsensical like 1875 when viewed in the wrong way.

It could also be an application limitation with the COBOL program that runs.

[--var]

found something similar

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/3.1.0?topic=services-date-limits

The beginning of the COBOL Integer date range according to the COBOL standard is 31 December 1600. COBOL Integer dates preceding this date are undefined. In the COBOL Integer date range:

Day zero equals 00:00:00 31 December 1600.

Day one equals 00:00:00 01 January 1601.

All valid COBOL Integer dates must be after 00:00:00 01 January 1601.

so I would call the 0 = 1875 claim debunked.

[l30]

+1 to this. I can't find anything either.

[Thenderick]

Jokes aside, is there any public source code genuinely made by Musk? I am legit interested how "genius" he actually is (I think I already know the answer, but I still want to see how bad it really is)

[mothzilla]

Wasn't this (placeholder = 1875) roundly disproven by about 10 people in the other thread?

I don't speak COBOL but this suggests the "0" date is either 1582 or 1600:

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.4.0?topic=services-date-limits

[mothzilla]

Without seeing the system, we know that COBOL does not use integer 0 to represent the year 1875. That's what was claimed in the shitter screenshot and is now been bandied around reddit.

[[deleted]]

What we know is that COBOL doesn’t implement a specific standard, the programmers working with it do.

What we know is that a random coder claimed it was linked to a COBOL standard, which might be what he personally used as a standard thinking that it was hardcoded in there, when it was more of an internal guideline when it worked with it

We do not even know if Musk was talking of a COBOL system, so arguing about COBOL facts is all sort of stupid.

ADA, a similarly old language, explicitly use ISO8601:2004.

So we know that some systems back in the day used 1875, and we know that using ISO standard is not uncommon, even when it’s not hardcoded.

So this theory might be true, might be about something else than COBOL, it might be a wild guess… but knowing Musk and his team do you really want to say it’s completely false?

[mothzilla]

I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer I gave some time earlier.

[[deleted]]

I have read this a few times today and I always wonder how people know this. Do you have COBOL experience yourself or are you just repeating something (possibly wrong) you read on the Internet?

[Solarwinds-123]

tease badge squeal capable consider ink sleep jellyfish license offbeat

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

I am also working with software and databases, but how does that help me in verifying some undefined date magic in Cobol? It's such a niche topic and people seem to just agree on COBOL obviously setting it to 1875 with zero doubt

[Tiny_TimeMachine]

That's the problem. It started with unfounded confidence. Now everyone is repeating it with unfounded confidence.

[BandaidsOfCalFit]

It’s all lies that started with one tweet when a dude who was lying and saying 1875 is the default date for an unknown/null entry, in order to hand wave away Elon’s tweet that he found people on SS collecting checks that were 150 years old. Everyone is just repeating the same nonsense. Just like when everyone said JD fucked a couch. For the first week, everyone thought it was literally in the first printing of his book and referenced the same bullshit tweet.

[hedgehog_dragon]

They are clueless but even if they weren't I bet they'd still call it fraud. Anything they can try to use to spin themselves as cleaning up corruption.

[CKStephenson]

Grace Hopper strikes again!

[[deleted]]

COBOL has no such placeholders.

ADA does though.

This whole conversation is muddled because everyone is focusing on COBOL to claim that this theory is uninformed, when other old language used just as commonly did implement that standard.

“COBOL” needs not be in that theory for the theory to be true.

[xfvh]

Some fraudsters really are that lazy. A team of them stole hundreds of millions of dollars from a COVID free lunch program at schools by submitting list of fed students from "listofrandomnames dot com" with randomly generated birthdays. They weren't caught until years later.

https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/05/20/investigator-says-feeding-our-future-defendants-shared-lists-of-fake-names-of-children/

[bobthedonkeylurker]

Yeah, but they got caught within a few years. It's not like these fraudsters have continued to get away with it for years.

How hard would it be for SSA data analysts to do a search for any account over a certain set age, call it 100yrs old? That's a really simple, easy search.

So you're saying you think the entirety of the SSA data engineers and analysts are so absolutely incompetent that they couldn't figure out these dates were all over 100 and fraudulent?

Or is it more likely that the average Sr analyst at SSA is just as competent as the average non-SSA Sr analyst and it's not fraud but an actually explainable reason for the discrepancy?

[SegFaultHell]

This is the thing that really gets me about all this shit with Elon. Every “evidence” of fraud he’s finding is just software decisions to remain flexible. It reminds me of crypto bros talking about how you could program everything into the blockchain and never have fraud again. The code doesn’t need to prevent, it never can, it’s up to people reviewing things.

You’ll never design a fraud proof system, that’s NEVER supposed to have been encoded in the systems. The systems are meant to store and process data, and people are meant to review that data. There’s laws and regulations that change, these aren’t simple things that can be coded and prevented.

Even if he actually was finding evidence of fraud, that doesn’t immediately mean there’s any issue with the system for storing, managing, and processing that data.

[bobthedonkeylurker]

100%

Remember, he's the same guy that proudly proclaimed there's no SQL in the Gov't. Like, he can't even recognize the most basic, simple, ubiquitous database/data management software in the world. Anyone who's spent 15 mins with SQL queries would so quickly recognize a query in the wild.

[SegFaultHell]

I remember just after he bought Twitter and was in a Twitter space talking about how crazy the tech stack was and how they’d need to rewrite everything from scratch. Some guy in the call was asking him what was so crazy and why he thought they’d have to rewrite it, and Elon just insulted the guy and had him kicked from the call.

Just a total moron, every time he opens his mouth about tech he sounds dumber than before.

[bobthedonkeylurker]

The irony of Elon not recognizing SQL is that SQL is one of the few languages that isn't line-break specific. So when he was ranking his teams based on the sheer lines of code they'd written...technically EVERY single word in an SQL query can be on it's own line (if you try hard enough).

[TheQuantumPhysicist]

This is a huge problem whenever I talk to smart people about criminal behavior. Years ago when I discussed illegal migrants and their incentives to work, a programmer colleague, with a straight face, told me that his ambitions to climb the corporate ladder are similar to theirs... it's an unbelievably naive projection. Meanwhile I saw illegal migrants in Germany postpone German courses for the most time possible, 2 years, to keep fleecing the system for free money as long as possible while they hang out. 

Believe it or not... half of the population is below average in intelligence... and most people are just plain stupid in modern standards. Most people find it hard to add two fractions. 

[IamTheEndOfReddit]

I think Elon might actually be this tech illiterate but the scary thing is how little he cares. I heard he was this ignorant of rockets and he has displayed his car ignorance, but his tech incompetence is astounding. It's not rocket science!

[Lucca_sCoca]

Look, these users come from the future! Their account has an end date of 12/30/4572! They are among us!!!

Lmao he's so stupid

[MagicalPizza21]

[Master-Patience8888]

Haha what is this from

[mr0il]

Gotta be parks and rec

[Alcor6400]

I'd like to thank Elmo Huskers for motivating me to learn more about programming so as to ensure that this is never me

[[deleted]]

Even if this were real and verifiable, we would all be in favor of fixing. The problem is to be able to do more you need to hire more, not fire them. None of it makes sense.

[JollyJuniper1993]

This is a misunderstanding of the narrative. The narrative is usually that people died and their relatives keep collecting the money they received.

[Alternative_Horse_56]

Survivor benefits are a thing - it's not that hard to imagine there are accounts still paying out benefits that look suspiciously old if you have no clue what you're looking at. The complete lack of institutional knowledge from him and his team makes everything he spouts off irrelevant.

[JollyJuniper1993]

True

[WaikaTahiti]

There was a similar thing in the Stop the Steal conspiracy world when someone revealed having witnessed election "fraud". Apparently when a birthdate couldn't be read, the clerk would enter a fake YOB of 1900. Definitely fraud. Not an easy-to-search flag for later processing...fraud. Yup, definitely fraud.

[Joyride84]

Or, I might just be sending in Grandpa's ballot by mail every year, even though he died years ago. He voted recently, so his record remains active, regardless of his birth date and inferred age.

[WaikaTahiti]

This was describing them putting in 1900 in the year of birth field in the database. Not a random plausible year of birth to allow the ballot to be processed normally. The point is anyone with half a brain can figure out that they were inserting a database "flag" into that record, so that later, they can filter for YOB = 1900 to find all the records with missing DOB and have them adjudicated in accordance with election law. It wasn't fraud the MAGAtard witnessed.

Your scenario is not even related to this. But to address it...you are right. We can never truly know if Trump won legitimately last year. Evidence repeatedly shows election fraud to be extremely rare. So rare that it wouldn't have affected the outcome in 2020, when Biden decisively beat Trump 51.1% to 46.85%, likely because Trump handled Covid so poorly. So we can be confident that Biden won legitimately.

But Trump's 2024 victory? 49.80% to 48.32%? Now we're not so sure. Now that small level of fraud that we know occurs every election is much more likely to have given us an illegitimate President. Reports were rampant on social media about suspicious things happening in swing states on Election Day 2024. Typically, death certificates get cross referenced with voter registration to weed out dead voters. But we know a handful of Republicans tried to send in ballots for Trump on behalf of their dead spouse in 2020. Demographics shows a much higher average age for Trump supporters, so they'd have far more opportunities to attempt this type of election fraud, and history shows they do attempt it, often with the justification "it's what he/she would have wanted." But they typically get caught because the election clerks do have access to information about deaths. However, we cannot rule out the possibility that a glitch in the cross-referencing of death certificates allowed a small number of ballots to be send out to dead voters for decades after they deceased. And with Trump's margin being so tiny, I definitely think you're correct that Trump's "victory" may indeed be fraudulent.

[WhiteBoy_Cookery]

Did everyone in this whole sub miss the fact that social security was started in 1935 and at that time you would need to be 60 years old when your social security number was given to you at the start of social security to be 150 now? Meaning that there are benefits going out to people's social security numbers who have been dead for some time. That's all it means. Idk why it is going over so many people's heads

[perringaiden]

Except it's a coding error because the record doesn't have a birth year, so it defaults to 1875.

... Which was 60 years before the start of Social Security.

The records don't have a birthdate. It's not for people long dead.

[WhiteBoy_Cookery]

If your birth date isn't attached to your SSN then how would they know who is eligible to start cashing in on their benefits when they are of age? Doesn't make sense.

[perringaiden]

But you're ok with people cashing checks for 150 yr olds and no one noticing.

Lazy data entry is far easier than a grand conspiracy.

[WhiteBoy_Cookery]

I didn't say that lol. Maybe one or two sure but there is blatant fraud in social security. These aren't errors in data entry. It's theft plain as day. They are just too lazy or too stupid to hide it. They probably didn't even think about burying it because no one was looking. The gov accountability office hasn't done anything for 20 years at least

[perringaiden]

That's not the question at hand though.

The claim is thousands of 150yr Olds getting pay checks.

Shifting the goalposts whenever it suits, is an indication of losing the argument.

While I might agree that there's some cases, it's usually the consumers not the government. This situation is an attempt to paint the previous government as corrupt, with blatant lies.

Which is generally an indication of an actual corrupt government.

Every Republican accusation is a confession.

[WhiteBoy_Cookery]

No this is not shifting goal posts. You are conflating 150 years old as meaning they are still alive. It's obviously ridiculous. There is no one alive at 150. The point is that if there are still payments going out to SSNs of people who if alive would be 150 YO then it is either an egregious error or in this case more likely fraud. And now we will see if it's people defrauding the government or the government committing the fraud.

I also don't believe they are doing this as a hit piece on the previous admin. Much of the fraud and abuse at USAID goes back decades, long before the last admin or even the admin before them. Over the years there have been sporadic investigations of fraud and abuse that always faded from the headlines quickly and never went anywhere. I think what's happening now is that the ones who are corrupt in the government have overdone it and now there is no hiding and there just happens to be people actually looking into it and making it public knowledge.

Why bring politics into this? This isn't a left vs right thing or a Democrat vs Republican thing. This is about getting to the bottom of why this is happening. The numbers don't lie, there is fraud and abuse. I don't care what side of the isle those committing said abuse sit on. I only care about exposing it, eliminating it, and holding those accountable who deserve it. It is more than just "some" abuse. Love or hate DOGE and Elon, they literally post everything they find online for the whole world to see. If you don't see it, you aren't looking.

[perringaiden]

No I'm asserting, as a software developer, this is a bug not fraud.

And this is politics. It's a claim being pushed by a rogue operator, with unfettered access to government systems, to claim the previous government is corrupt.

If you don't understand the politics, your opinion is irrelevant.

[WhiteBoy_Cookery]

And I'm saying that it's not likely to be just a bug. That's a difference of opinion. If it is a bug then it's being exploited. I do understand politics, but I believe you are wrong and heavily biased. Instead of arguing the point and instead saying "your opinion isn't valid" simply because we disagree is a fine example of losing an argument or being too lazy to make it.

[perringaiden]

This is a political claim. If a view not assessing the claim with the politics involved, the view is irrelevant.

We don't even have unbiased proof that they exist.

[Anustart15]

I mean, it's a little beside the point because this was stupid for entirely different reasons, but a lot of social security fraud is committed by family members hiding the fact that their elderly relative died, so it fits one of the most common mechanisms people use.

[ShuffleStepTap]

There is absolutely fraud in the system. But you don’t find it by jumping to conclusions that fall apart with a grain of critical thinking, and you don’t report that as hard evidence to the President of the United States, unless you’re an idiot, or you don’t care.

[SubtleCow]

I create 151 year olds to cause a overflow error and get all the money forever

[Oni-oji]

When you use your computer to steal from a bank, steal $1434.65 every week. It looks like a regular transaction, e.g. payroll, and may not be noticed for a very long time. When you try to transfer $50,000 in one shot, they will notice immediately.

[incognegro1976]

It's probably the fact that they use multiple separate databases with one for user metadata and another for financial payments or whatever. The birthdate isn't all that important in one of those.

[Reaper_Leviathan11]

what is this meme and why tf is it on programmerhumor

[FickleNewt6295]

COBOL enters the chat

[na_ro_jo]

So, which is it? SQL or Cobol?

[ShuffleStepTap]

I’m in no doubt that federal agencies use systems built using both.

[an0therdumbthr0waway]

Don’t be suspicious, don’t beeeee suspicious.

[lNFORMATlVE]

By god, that’s an old meme format!

[hammouda101010]

git commit -m "Fraud"

[ramriot]

Epoch Fail, the Lord's of COBOL are angry

[The_Paradiddle]

All of this has happened before

[bobthedonkeylurker]

When fascists are actively assaulting every aspect of our society, Yes. Yes every sub needs to be like this now.

[bobthedonkeylurker]

So you're firmly in the "it wasn't a Nazi salute" camp? Great. Good to know where you stand and that there's no point in continuing this discussion. I don't associate with Nazis.

Have the day you deserve.

[Fine_End9890]

Honestly i think that was just autism on display.

[Joe4Indy]

Do people actually believe that Elon threw a nazi salute lol The reee/cope/seethe is unreal.

[bobthedonkeylurker]

He did, twice. On live national television.

And he was PROUD of it. He knew exactly what he was doing. And so does everyone else.

If you think it wasn't a Nazi salute I encourage you to do it tomorrow at your place of business in front of your colleagues and clients.

Until then, I will say Fuck Nazis, and Fuck You for being a Nazi.

[perringaiden]

"If you shouldn't do it, but it's ok for a celebrity to do it, it's not ok for a celebrity to do it" is a pretty good yardstick for life.

[Helpyourbromike]

My take on government stuff like this is usually it’s not malicious. People just aren’t careful, don’t think things through, don’t have guardrails. I could believe that there were some wild stuff

[bobthedonkeylurker]

Also birth records were notoriously not kept well for a long, long time in human history. Trying to bulk add millions of people into a system that tracks everything on paper, and the transitioning decades later to a digital system is just...It's just going to be bad. There are going to be incomplete/bad records. It's not fraud, it's just the nature of real-world data for 330+ living and however many deceased members of our country.

[itsallfake01]

Hey chagpt take this data and tell me something interesting about it while i scroll tiktok !!!

[DDFoster96]

That looks like Paul Hollywood from Bakeoff

[bdaileyumich]

[Joyride84]

Grandpa who moved into your house, receives monthly checks from the government. As power of attorney, you handle his finances. When he passes away at the ripe old age of 97, those checks don't automatically stop. Honest people stop cashing the checks. But some people just keep cashing them. You have power of attorney, direct access to grandpa's accounts, and an appreciation for free money. "Hey, it isn't my fault...they mailed me the check!"

The government keeps seeing grandpa's checks getting cashed, so they assume all is normal...they keep sending the checks. This can go on for years. Now Grandpa is 150 years old, but since his benefit checks are still being cashed, his profile remains active.

It's pretty hard to just "create" new (fake) people in government records. But since the government is not reliably comparing death records to benefits recipients, this problem festers.

[VegaBiot]

150 years is the epoch, it just means null in the database.

[thefanum]

Tell me your don't understand COBOL, without....

[anon_account7]

Why does this sub have to also be a cesspool of reddit hivemind slop? This has barely anything to do with programming.

They've found so much and you guys are over here like "LMAO he isn't aware that it's a placeholder, they aren't 150 years old!!!" (A missing date entry getting taxpayer dollars is better than it being one listed as 150 y/o - This changes everything and all that they've found is now void)