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

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

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82 pointstheodpHN108 comments

Anybody surprised of the outcome of some juniors led by a know-it-all?

My gosh, if everything they ever (wrongly) assume is that the people _actually doing their jobs_ where frauds and that it's unnecessary to _ask_...

That cannot work out. And either Musk is too stupid to réalisé, or it's by intention (to destroy). Hint: the outcome is the same. Damage done.

Malicious juniors at that

Why are you confident they don’t have any senior engineers at all?

A more senior engineer would probably have figured out that 'zero means unknown birth date' thing before rushing to his boss so that he can make a fool of himself in front of the entire world (or maybe that was the intention, in that case: props to the unknown junior engineer).

Senior engineers sometimes jump to conclusions too, especially if they are tired or overworked or stressed out.

No doubt, less frequently than junior engineers do, but I don't think from the mere fact that someone has "jumped to conclusions" on an occasion, you can draw any firm conclusions as to their seniority.

ProPublica has published a list of alleged DOGE staff [0] and one of their software engineers is 37, and he previously worked as a CTO. Another DOGE staffer is 36, and she previously worked as head of engineering at a startup, and before that did software development for Goldman Sachs. So it sounds like they do have some "senior engineers"

[0] https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/

It's his intention, and meanwhile he is also trolling the whole US of A like a 4chan teen edgelord.

I am uniquely unqualified to work at DOGE.

I would not be able to tweet without first having a look and trying for more than 12 seconds to understand why this anomaly existed.

Maybe not "uniquely" - there are literally several of us

Dozens!

Make that thousands. Actually I probably could keep my mouth shut, but wth. 150 year olds!

Don't doubt yourself. You're commenting on hackernews without verifying that the "COBOL defaults to random date in 1875" thing is true. A 12 second google search for use of the word "COBOL" with this 1875 date from before the viral tweet doesn't turn up any results, ChatGPT et al don't know about this COBOL default date thing, having a datetype that defaults to a random date in 1875 wouldn't make any sense, nobody has linked to any documentation supporting this claim, there's no reason to believe it etc.

I think you have exactly what it takes to uncritically accept whatever you see at first glance and comment about it on social media. You're doing it right now!

You may be right about COBOL and 1875 but "a datetype that defaults to a random date" is literally how epoch dates work. Except it's not random.

I am right about it. Find a single document - written before the viral tweet that claims this.

The idea doesn't even stand up to basic common sense. Nobody ever thought about the default date in the social security database system before?? Really??? "Uhh, guys, maybe this should be a 'not null' field?"

There is a whole chapter in their manual about how to establish age for people who don't have a birth certificate. They don't just enter null.

https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0200302000!opendo...

> verifying that the "COBOL defaults to random date in 1875" thing is true

I never claimed it to be true. I did not claim it was proof of fraud, I did not claim it was incompetence, I did not claim it was the deep state.

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.

They could be using BI-type dashboards and are looking at visualizations of aggregations auto flagged by outlier detection or whatever.

This is pretty much what they are doing, building buckets for aggregation, no insight

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076#m

Elon is the same person who was claiming Twitter had a "brittle stack" that needed a complete rewrite[0]. It's not surprising he's spewing complete nonsense for attention BUT it is worrying he has access to such critical government systems.

[0]: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1632810081497513993

I haven't seen that particular stack and build setup to dispute or support that claim. Have you?

What I have seen in my part of the developer world, is very brittle stacks/setups where minor changes have butterfly effects on completely unrelated parts. Pushing straight to important branches, build depending on several pretty unrelated repos, unclear and messy dependencies, etc etc. I can totally understand such a claim.

I don't remember Twitter being known for downtime before he bought it and the claim it needed a complete rewrite indicates a lack of experience in software development. Rewriting everything rarely ends up in better software than you had before.

Google ‘fail whale’

I wonder if Twitter is still running on Ruby on Rails. Those were the days...

In case this isn’t sarcasm: it isn’t.

For those who don’t remember that era: https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/08/twitter_epic_traffic_...

Shopify does somehow to this day.

The “fail whale” was a thing years before Elon’s acquisition.

The fail whale was a thing in the late 2000s, when Twitter was famously still on Ruby on Rails. After the early 2010s rewrite in Scala (?) it was pretty much stable.

I used to be friends with a group of developers at Twitter after their rewrite. They had no complaints about “brittleness” or stability generally.

We do know Elon isn’t anywhere near as smart as he likes to project in areas of modern computing, so I tend to not believe his claims.

This was the man who publicly called a senior developer at Twitter an idiot for saying something about the government using SQL.

Did they rewrite it?

And then he bought it, fired a bunch of engineers and DID not rewrite it to prove that it wasn’t brittle.

s/colbalt/COBOL/

However, that error took me to the Wikipedia page and I learnt that cobalt was named in relation to kobolds (goblins/gnomes) as cobalt ore was a hazard to silver miners - it gives off arsenic fumes when smelted.

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?

Nothing they have done suggests competence, reliability, or honesty.

They seem to be just some average junior engineers but with huge hubris. I have worked with junior engineers better than them.

Wait. If the issue is that birth year is missing, how is that possible?? I mean, its social security! Isn'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's seems very odd…

It could be a ETL error during ingestion into a reporting system, casting errors, all sorts of things, the speculation is endless.

What makes you think people with no known age are receiving benefits?

This entire tangent is based off Elon Musk not understanding COBOL or the thing he's looking at before he started ranting on X.

There's literally not enough information about anything, it's just anything which can be spun to fit the narrative he's already determined.

There are other ways to prove eligibility. For instance if you've been working for 50 or more years then you're likely to be eligible. Or you might have school or other records that give you an approximate age. Or your children may have birth certificates that give you a minimum age.

The real world is full of anomalies and missing data, the system deals with it according to the law and administrative precedent.

Edit: here you go: https://www.ssa.gov/help/iClaim_poa.html

Also: https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0200302000!opendo...

When dealing with a population the size of the USA, and edge case you can imagine will be hit. Dealing with uncertainty is a must.

Sounds like big, socialist, communist government to force citizens to register their birthday with the state.

What precisely is your point? There are various benefits not contingent on age, so while it is concerning, it by no means would by itself invalidate someone's entitlement in receiving the checks. There is probably some interface or was, for a period, a bug that meant nulls were entering the db, or something of that nature. This needs to be fixed if it still exists, and the data needs to be made true.

So how do they know the age of someone who has incomplete records like that? Take their word for it? That sounds like trouble.

What would invalidate the benefits is death. This 150 year old business is a corner case obviously, so finding those dead people is not so easy. I'd assume there are more checks issued to dead people who were never reported than dead people who were properly recorded as dead. I don't know the frequency of fraud in either case but one is easier to get away with than the other.

It's not uncommon for people born in countries with dysfunctional governments to have an unknown date of birth, or at least no official record of it.

They would still get a proforma birth date.

Maybe in the US, I don't actually know. What date do they use then?

In my country such cases get an unknown date of birth. Having just a year of birth is also possible.

A lot of Native Americans used Jan 1 for their birth date when signing up for WW2 service.

Many service members during the drafts would add or subtract a few years with the help of local authorities.

My grandfather didn't know his birth year and lied to make himself seem younger when it suited him.

I have great-grandparents without any documentation that we suspect were fleeing wars or had been shanghaied

I have at least one 3x great-grandparent with only a first name before her marriage. We know nothing else about her.

There have been a lot of threads of 'Things Programmers Believe About Time' that are worth looking into. The exceptions to 'computer time' and reality are fun and tough to deal with. Same things apply to names. Suffice to say, Elon's crack team hasn't really thought of the reality of life and the messiness of it.

But that's not the point and we all know it.

My father used to work with someone who was originally from some Pacific Island country (forget which, might have been Fiji). And the story was, in that country, at least back then, you didn't get a birth certificate at birth; to register your children with the government, you had travel to a government office that was like a day's walk away (most people didn't have cars). And so a lot of parents didn't bother doing it with their eldest child, they'd wait until they'd had a few, and then go register them in a batch. And the government officials had no proof of when the child was actually born, so they just put down the date you registered them as the date of birth. Which meant this guy had the same date of birth as all his younger siblings, despite being several years older than them. And then he used that to get a passport, and then a visa to immigrate to Australia, and then after a few years Australian citizenship... and now all his legal documents say he's a few years younger than he actually is. And he decided he wasn't even going to try to fix it, the morass of bureaucracy involved wasn't worth it.

> It's not uncommon for people born in countries with dysfunctional governments

Think of the United States during the Great Depression, for instance. Today’s 80 to 100 year olds were born in that era.

> I mean, its social security! Isn't one of the key ideas of that based on age?

Do we know those people are actually receiving support? Could be a hack of the system to take people out of welfare, without removing their whole entry. Maybe those are (again) double-entries with a different purpose, or dead people, or future receivers, or old entries, or just poor data. Just looking at a database, without looking at the business-logic, is usually not a good argument. Heck, It would be actually funny if the DOB of those entries is just saved in a different table or field, and they just did not understand what they are looking at.

If you think about it, Social Security really doesn't really need to care that much what your birthday was when you are working and paying taxes into the system. When you retire and want to collect benefits is when things would change. If you don't have proof of age at that point you may need to go through some hoops to prove your age & eligibility. So it makes sense there could be millions of people in there with a day 0 since the epoch age. Also, don't forget millions of undocumented workers have a SS# and won't be collecting any benefits later.

The 1875 thing seems... unlikely. While it is possible that the SSA decided to create an epoch of 1875, I don't believe COBOL itself has such an epoch.

Moreover, the SSA's actual Numerical Identification (NUMIDENT) files, the master records for applications/deaths/claims, appears to stored dates in text as either YYYYMMDD or MMDDYYYY strings according to their archived versions.

https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/207202/

I think it's more likely that there are missing death records for some entries (which isn't really a problem unless there are active claims), data entry error, someone didn'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.

Welcome to the only person in this thread that actually knows something real!

What you're missing is that the system was created around 1935, and at that time the eligibility age was 60, so it seems possible that the default entry would be 1875, or the initial youngest year of eligibility for the system.

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.

The reason people invest here is because our government doesn't try as hard to steal all their money as other countries in the world. It's not the fault of any business that this country misspent all the tax money up to now and got into debt. If businesses are taxed too severely, the small amount of production that happens here will be further reduced, and our downfall will be guaranteed.

"Tax cuts to corporations" maybe makes for a good sound byte in some crowds but what they're really after and benefits them way more and will cause way more deficits is the income tax.

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

If government computers were still using older than ~45 years COBOL versions with May 20 1875 as a baseline, wouldn't many more people be 150 yo than a few dozen?

From Musk statement:

> we've got people in there that are about 150 years old

From that I don't get whether it is 1 person or N people, whereas N is more probable IMHO. However, how big N is, is unknown.

There are thousands, if not millions, of Americans with FNU, or First Name Unknown. And many with LNU, Last Name Unknown.

Having well documented existence since birth is fairly recent. Not everyone has clear birth certificates. For example, my father and his younger brother have the same birth year.

So it checks that really old people have unknown birthdate.

Yeah, it's a pretty obvious tell that people haven't worked in any depth with large amounts of complex data when they are surprised that there are huge anomalies. Many, many assumptions do not hold at scale.

My mom's birth county's records building burned down in the 1940s. She has no birth certificate. When government agencies hear this, they ask if there are baptism records. The records from the church where she was baptized burned in the 1950s. It's been a massive pain for her, and government data systems are exposed to cases like this.

Data at sufficient scale is incredibly messy because many seemingly impossible things have a reasonable probability of being present.

'People' is plural. If he only found one he would say 'a person' or 'someone'.

That only works when people aren't employing hyperbolic rhetoric.

It says when they don't know the birthdate (a empty value in the field ABS(TIMESTAMPDIFF(YEAR, NOW(), birthdate))).

No, it would be 149years now, right? It will only turn 150 on May 20th this year

Do you understand the issue? What value would you have entered into the birth date field in this situation?

In the absence of a null value and proper null processing, zero seems to be the right value. It's clearly exceptional and intuitive to anyone who encounters it in the data, and it would allow the rest of the system to work correctly.

Social security eligibility doesn't have a maximum age but it does have a minimum. If a person claims Social Security without proof of age then their eligibility is dealt with administratively.

So the headline is right, this is 100% a political issue, since any fair minded person with relevant experience wouldn't jump to claiming fraud in this situation but rather they'd assume a data issue.

Most people don't expect modern government records to be so chaotic. If so many incomplete and even erroneous entries are allowed (they are, as the social security numbers are in fact reused or else entered wrong) then there will be some significant fraud to be uncovered. That fraud might be harder to find than simply looking for people who are too old. But it's there, no doubt, and more fraud happens every single day. If you look into this stuff you'll find dead people getting payments, and children paying social security taxes as their data is stolen.

It reveals the lack of technical expertise at play for the most powerful bureaucrats in the world.

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.

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.

>now it’s essentially a “fact” that Social Security has been paying 150 year olds

From yesterdays submission "The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/hitler-oli... :

> To this end, Hugenberg practiced what he called Katastrophenpolitk, “the politics of catastrophe,” by which he sought to polarize public opinion and the political parties with incendiary news stories, some of them Fabrikationen—entirely fabricated articles intended to cause confusion and outrage. According to one such story, the government was enslaving German teenagers and selling them to its allies in order to service its war debt. Hugenberg calculated that by hollowing out the political center, political consensus would become impossible and the democratic system would collapse.

mmm sounds familiar

Allow me to present a possible theory:

1) Assume Social Security has a field called "verified birthday by US birth certificate" 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'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 "We have found X million records matching fraud parameters since ages are over 120 years old." 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.

> 2) Assume this timestamp starts on May 20, 1875 which was once a COBOL epoch standard.

Was it? I've never heard of that date in connection with COBOL before.

I've heard some people try to connect it to ISO 8601, but I think that's a misinterpretation – yes, the text of some versions of the ISO 8601 standard refers to that date, but only as a fixed point of reference to formally define the ISO 8601 timescale – really an editorial choice which makes no difference to implementations of the standard, which aren't supposed to treat that date in any way specially, and I'm not aware of any that actually do. Furthermore, the reference to this date in ISO 8601 was apparently only inserted in its 2004 revision, while surely this system is much older than that

Now, it isn't impossible that some SSA computer system actually does use "1875-05-20" as some kind of "sentinel" value. Sentinel values like that are actually quite common in legacy systems. But if it does, I don't think it is because it is following any kind of widespread standard (whether COBOL or ISO 8601), I think it may just be an idiosyncrasy of the SSA or of that particular computer system.

But, here's my own guess as to what is happening here: some random anonymous DailyKos commenter has come up with a speculative, and ultimately incorrect, guess as to why DOGE is wrong – and people all over the Internet are now repeating it, because they like what it says, and don't know enough about the technical details involved to realise it is likely wrong. It wouldn't surprise me if SSA computers don't treat the date "1875-05-20" specially at all, and that is just an invention of this commenter

Which is not to say DOGE's claims are right – it is entirely possible that they are wrong – just not for this reason, for some other reason instead...

> Was it? I've never heard of that date in connection with COBOL before.

Which COBOL? COBOL for AIX:

> The beginning of the Lilian date range is Friday 15 October 1582, the date of adoption of the Gregorian calendar. Lilian dates before this date are undefined.

* https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-aix/5.1?topic=times-feedba...

COBOL for z/OS

> DATE-OF-INTEGER […] A positive integer that represents a number of days succeeding December 31, 1600, in the Gregorian calendar. The valid range is 1 to 3,067,671, which corresponds to dates ranging from January 1, 1601 thru December 31, 9999.*

* https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.4?topic=functions-da...

So two COBOLs, from the same vendor (IBM), have different epochs. More:

> CEECBLDY: Converts character date value to the COBOL Integer format. Day one is 01 January 1601 and the value is incremented by one for each subsequent day. […]

> CEEISEC: Converts binary year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and millisecond to a number representing the number of seconds since 00:00:00 14 October 1582

* https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.5.0?topic=services-basics-...

See also:

> I have seen COBOL epochs in active use of 1600.01.01, 1875.05.24, 1900.01.01, 0000.00.00, 1970.01.01, 2000.01.01. and others.

* https://old.reddit.com/r/ISO8601/comments/1ipikj5/those_who_...

You cite two COBOL implementations which use 1582 or 1600/1601 as epoch dates – that's not evidence that any COBOL uses 1875-05-20 as an epoch date.

Then you cite an pseudonymous Reddit comment which claims they've seen a COBOL implementation using 1875-05-24 (not actually 1875-05-20, although maybe they meant to say 20 and the 24 is a mistake) – but can't even tell us what it is named.

Maybe, somewhere out there, is a COBOL implementation which actually does use 1875-05-20: but if nobody can name it, we don't even know that it exists.

And even if someone actually succeeds in digging up the name of a COBOL implementation using 1875-05-20 as an epoch date, can we be sure that is actually the COBOL implementation SSA is using?

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

So it seems that not having a birthday, or having one that's a default, should be a red flag.

or at the very least an estimated birth date. If people are claiming money, that's the very least they can provide.

strangely, that is exactly how the system works.

You can very well have no known birthdate but documents that do prove that you are over 62 years old.

There are procedures for people whose birthdate is unknown [1][2]

Without it a lot of people born during the great depression, born in other countries, abandoned, etc would never be eligible for social security. Even today it's entirely possible for a child to be born in the US without their birth being documented.

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/help/iClaim_poa.html

[2] https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0200302000!opendo...

You're assuming there isn't a contingency process for people without a recorded birthdate.

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's gross negligence because we know that have access to the necessary resources to verify each claim they make.

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've seen so far, I find it hard to believe that these people are acting in good faith.

It's not even that I'd expect perfection. If the DOGE team was producing tons of claims acting in good faith, they'd probably make some mistakes. But the failure rate smells of malicious action or incompetence.

Elon has stated that you're "retarded" if you believe the government uses SQL. So it's difficult to assume any level of competence from him or his team or anyone who continues to prop him up quite frankly. This should be a blatant and obvious tell to anyone with passing technical abilities. But many seem to lose all ability to reason when it comes to supporting Trump and people around him like Elon.

The ability to reason isn't lost, it's replaced with motivated reasoning.

They are tangentially pursing <some political goal I agree with>, thereby I will latch onto <whatever implausible deniability they have for what they are doing>.

The other key problem is that they knowing confidently lie on top of just not caring about the truth.

Also, the strategy of "flooding the zone" is something Bannon openly talked about. When these people say they will do X and we then see them doing X, we really should stop saying things like "skeptical paranoid part of me think they might be doing X".

I'm finding it hard to constrain my vocabulary in this situation.

Let's just say my contempt for this utter clown is NP, and my disappointment that critical government systems lack the security required to stop this nonsense is almost as large.

The BFS systems do have the proper security according to a very recently filed affidavit from a career IT manager with direct knowledge of those systems. There was reporting earlier that Marko Elez had been using personal devices to connect to Treasury systems. In testimony the manager wrote that his access was exclusively by means of a special issue BFS laptop with DLP software and “enhanced” monitoring. But he also noted that Elez was given far broader access than even auditors were typically granted. And that testimony didn’t ameliorate other concerns.

And of course that’s just BFS.

I’m not at all disagreeing with you though. The lack of adults in the room, the apparent lack of proper background checking, the fact that the kids DOGE has running around have no real experience, it’s all alarming.

And no one seems interested in talking about it. The legal world is on fire right now. The lawyers that keep the country running in accordance with the laws are sounding the alarm and no one seems interested in answering and it’s $&)@-/; embarrassing as a country.

That's because they've decided what the problem is before any evidence. They're not looking for problems, they're looking for the evidence to prove they were right.

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' literal survival. Sociopaths should not be sent into these places.

In fairness I don't think Musk and the rest of the tech bro Illuminati want poor people to survive.

I'd say that they're more likely to want poor people to feel extremely vulnerable and utterly reliant on being employed. That makes for a very compliant and docile workforce that can be exploited extremely easily.

At least until they can be replaced by AI, at which point they can be turned into biofuel.

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 ;)

My guess would be that it's an error in expanding a two-digit year. But we don'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'll be more interested to see the next Democrat DoJ filing criminal charges against them all. I expect they'll each spend life in prison in some form, especially Felon Musk.

Wishful thinking. Even in a world where the US wants to (and will be allowed to) vote democrats in power again, they have proven themselves incapable of bringing GOP criminal operatives to justice. They delay and ponder whether it would be a bad look or set a bad precedent. Mostly they just don't have the will.

Optimistic of you to assume those who are setting up a regime of unchecked power will simply give it up in 4 years.

When Elon Musk says something that sounds insane, the only reasonable thing to assume, without further information, is that he's just making it up.

The man has a very complicated relationship with honesty.

Is this like his level 97 character on POE2? He's a sociopathic liar.

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