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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

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