Elon Musk says millions in Social Security database are between ages of 100 and 159

[dogs4thewin]

Makes some sense. Doesn't easily explain 160 year old recipients though.

Well, no not quite that old but older than people usually live

 

[Arcangl86]

Unless the people were on other people's benefits. For example, I am on my late father's SSDI benefits if I were to live to be say 80 he would have been 110 but I would still be on his benefits ( not that I am likely to live to be 80, but you get the point) stuations like that where someone is on someone's else record when the person whose record it is is LONG deceased, but it was say a much younger spouse or a disabled child who was very young at the time of the record holder's death.

The last civil war pension was paid until 2020, which I think is an extreme but good illustration of your point.

 

[Valletta]

They're claiming it's a feature of the program they use (that's 60 years old) and when a DOB is missing it assigns an arbitrary date.
If this is true let's hope they get an updated system so they can properly track SS recipients.

Not a very good system. If someone's date of birth is missing they should contact that person, assigning an arbitrary date is crazy.

 

[Laodicean60]

This is another reason to implement AI. Last hope they fix SS for my millennials because Daddy took their cookies with all this uncontrolled spending.

 

[Stephen3141]

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No, there are not tens of millions of people who are dead, and getting SS payments.

But I htink that Musk will move on to some other topic, before he admits that he
misunderstands how the archaic COBOL programming language stores dates.

 

[Gregory Thompson]

Musk says one person is in Social Security database with age set between 360 and 369​

Elon Musk indicated in a post on X that millions of people listed in a Social Security database are recorded as centenarians "with the death field set to FALSE!"

“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE! Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security," Musk posted, adding a couple of rolling on the floor laughing emojis.

Continued below.

Elon Musk says millions in Social Security database are between ages of 100 and 159

Elon Musk indicated that a Social Security database lists millions of centenarians "with the death field set to FALSE."

www.foxnews.com

Reminds me of that longevity serum in Fallout 4. Apparently, the family who used it had to "go on a trip" every so often and come back as their successor.

 

[Valletta]

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apnews.com

No, there are not tens of millions of people who are dead, and getting SS payments.

But I htink that Musk will move on to some other topic, before he admits that he
misunderstands how the archaic COBOL programming language stores dates.

It's false information in the story about COBOL. COBOL was designed for business, so generally it was the best language for business programs, which almost always include dates. COBOL specifically has numeric fields, and that is where you would almost always put a date. (They do also have packed-decimal dates for more efficient calculations). They have alphanumeric fields too, which would do only if you never did any calculations with the date. Obviously they do calculations with the date, so some person must have decided if they didn't know the date they would put in some fabricated date. That's a human decision that has nothing to do with COBOL.

 

[JustaPewFiller]

It's false information in the story about COBOL. COBOL was designed for business, so generally it was the best language for business programs, which almost always include dates. COBOL specifically has numeric fields, and that is where you would almost always put a date. (They do also have packed-decimal dates for more efficient calculations). They have alphanumeric fields too, which would do only if you never did any calculations with the date. Obviously they do calculations with the date, so some person must have decided if they didn't know the date they would put in some fabricated date. That's a human decision that has nothing to do with COBOL.

Also, the dataset is very large and very old.

I'd be more shocked if it didn't have some bad data in it. Most very large, very old institutional data sets I've worked with have had their fair share of garbage that have crept into them over the years. Often times for reasons like you outlined. One of the last ones I looked at indicated a few computer systems were in use by the company before the company existed.

You flag it as "bad". Figure out what to do about it - correct (if possible), ignore, etc. and move on.

But that doesn't make for very exciting headlines.

 

[Stephen3141]

It's false information in the story about COBOL. COBOL was designed for business, so generally it was the best language for business programs, which almost always include dates. COBOL specifically has numeric fields, and that is where you would almost always put a date. (They do also have packed-decimal dates for more efficient calculations). They have alphanumeric fields too, which would do only if you never did any calculations with the date. Obviously they do calculations with the date, so some person must have decided if they didn't know the date they would put in some fabricated date. That's a human decision that has nothing to do with COBOL.

Regardless of the purposes that COBOL was ORIGINALLY designed for, it is
NOW an obsolete computer language.

A lot of the Y2K scare was becasue of the continuing use of ancient programming
languages such as COBOL, and the fears that number ranges in these languages
were never designed for the program to be used a long as it was.

It's not a matter of what you COULD represent in COBOL, but, the problem is that
programmers using these ancient languages never imagined how long the programs
would be used, without being replaced with much more modern computer programs.

 

[Valletta]

Regardless of the purposes that COBOL was ORIGINALLY designed for, it is
NOW an obsolete computer language.

A lot of the Y2K scare was becasue of the continuing use of ancient programming
languages such as COBOL, and the fears that number ranges in these languages
were never designed for the program to be used a long as it was.

It's not a matter of what you COULD represent in COBOL, but, the problem is that
programmers using these ancient languages never imagined how long the programs
would be used, without being replaced with much more modern computer programs.

Last I heard, 90% of Fortune 500 companies were using it. It's really great for basic financial transaction calculations in batch processing. But the new languages are more suited toward online transactions, yet batch processing is still necessary. Y2K was seen in advance and solved. It was not the fault of COBOL or any other computer language. When computers came into existence the hardware was expensive. Memory and program storage were at a premium. Programmers were extremely aware of this, a program could run for days if space was not taken into account, and thus programmers made fields as small as possible. Four digits for a year was considered wasteful of space. So programmers in ALL computer languages used two digits for the year. To calculate how many years an employee had worked in 1970 who started in 1965, 70 minus 65 yields 5 years. The calculation would not work once the year reached 2000. When the year 10,000 A.D. rolls around a similar problem will occur for those of today who only used four digits, no matter what the language. Don't worry about Musk misunderstanding.

 

[RileyG]

Musk says one person is in Social Security database with age set between 360 and 369​

Elon Musk indicated in a post on X that millions of people listed in a Social Security database are recorded as centenarians "with the death field set to FALSE!"

“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE! Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security," Musk posted, adding a couple of rolling on the floor laughing emojis.

Continued below.

Elon Musk says millions in Social Security database are between ages of 100 and 159

Elon Musk indicated that a Social Security database lists millions of centenarians "with the death field set to FALSE."

www.foxnews.com

This has to be an error- obviously