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Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

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paulsutter

Here’s a tweet from Elon with a table of ages of all people marked not deceased who are collecting social security

(hint: there is a smooth trend of people of all ages up to 199, so the 1875 thing was pure misdirection)

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076?s=46&t=NN3...

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This comment definitely needs to be bumped up. It adds extra data to the mystery.

Here's the raw data:

  Age Range,Count
  0-9,38825456
  10-19,44326480
  20-29,47995478
  30-39,52106915
  40-49,47626581
  50-59,45740805
  60-69,46381281
  70-79,33404412
  80-89,15165127
  90-99,6054154
  100-109,4734407
  110-119,3627007
  120-129,3472849
  130-139,3936311
  140-149,3542044
  150-159,1345083
  160-169,121807
  170-179,6087
  180-189,695
  190-199,448
  200-209,879
  210-219,866
  220-229,1039
  240-249,1
  360-369,1

Bar plot of data:

https://imgur.com/a/34Y5BSv

If you assume all the non-deceased (as marked in the DB) are still getting a SS check, then simply tallying up 65+ amounts to a 8 trillion dollar social security payout annually. We are definitely not paying that.

My guess is the deceased flag is different from the “eligible for payout” flag, or that flag is determined on another join. They spoke too quickly, which is a common human error.

Someone else smarter run some experiments.

This is the smoking gun that Musk has no understanding of what he's looking at. A competent engineer would look at these numbers, recognize that they don't match payments, and shut up until they figure out the bigger picture that can explain everything they see.

Instead, he raced to tweet it. This is just dumb.

Agree.

Some professional auditors on Reddit were saying how often they go into a business and find a bunch of stuff that immediately looks like fraud, then they go interview knowledgeable employees and find a ton of weird accounting edge cases which explains all the out-of-bounds stuff.

But.. it sounds much better to the population if you scream that you found $8Tn a year in fraud.

Oh, do not for one second think that this behavior isn't intentional.

Elon knows it is BS. But that's not the point, the point is to create outrage, and legitimize it all to the MAGA crowd. It is all intentional misleading.

I love how these people are absolutely prone to even basic "common sense". You need to blame someone for your misery.

One of the oldest tricks. We are still just unga bunga tribal apes some of us smarter that the other but it's still not enough.

You need to look at how the republicans on X are discussing this:

https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/1886647920566636637

They are basically inundating that base with tech content that only lifelong developers would be able to parse. It’s a serious propaganda effort. I’m sad right now dude.

What is the point of this? To hide information for audience which in majority does not understand what these data and graphs means but they are going to assume it's meaning is what they wish to see there? So they can basically prove their points with data hidden by literal obfuscation lol.

I'm not so much sad as amazed slash disgusted. This is antivax thinking pattern.

Quick Google search says 1.6 trillion will be paid this year.

From this: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076

The sum of groups age 60-89: 94,950,820

The sum of all groups age 60-369: 121,794,498

From this: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/OASDIbenies.html

Number of beneficiaries receiving benefits on Dec 31, 2024: 68,455,973

If I understand the post, these are persons who are marked not deceased--it is not stated that they are receiving money, though it may be implied. For example, there are some persons under ten years of age who are receiving Social Security benefits, as having lost one or two parents (survivor benefits). The number certainly does not amount to 39 million.

In the early 1980s my job at Army Materiel Command (DARCOM in those days) was to report energy consumption trends for all Depots, Arsenals, RDT&E, etc. in our Defense Energy Information System (DEIS) database. I was a 30-yr old newbie to DoD, but the numbers were not adding up. Nobody questioned what was being reported, because frankly, they only looked at trends not what the outrageously huge energy consumption actually was. Some installations were reporting almost no energy usage and others reporting waay too much. It took me a while to identify the problem, and much much longer to correct it. In a nutshell, only some installations were reporting correctly: Everything was supposed to be converted to MBTUs. But I found some reporting in 1,000s; others reporting in gallons of fuel instead of converting to MBTUs; others using wrong conversion factors. Elon's team found data that doesn't make sense. There's nothing wrong with publicizing the absurdity of what he found. Explanations will come, but the fact remains - somebody has been asleep at the wheel, and nothing good comes from bad data. Are we overpaying? Maybe so. Is it fraud? Maybe. Is it innocent error. Could be. Could it be that fraudulent SSNs are getting used without detection?? A real possibility.

Don't gripe about Elon. He's doing a job that nobody before him has done. It's about time. Thank you Pres Trump!! Thanks Elon!!

The OIG most recently did the job in 2023, as multiple HN members have posted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43083362

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