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Comment by hassleblad23 | Hacker News Reader

Have they revealed how many people actually fall in that category? Agreed that more nuance is necessary.

He recently shared the usual X style cropped screenshot which implied millions of records "where death is false" and the rows age appeared to be 110+

As someone who uses databases everyday, there's always nuance to data, especially when you're trying to simplify data for a small report. Hard to believe there are millions of records so obviously wrong.

With US not having centralized vital records registry and also not having demographyc registry and not issuing id cards out of principle -- it's pretty easy to have consistency issues on the scale of millions.

Add the fact that people also move to other countries and US government may not even know somebody died, because death was not reigistered in US.

I wouldn't put it past our government. Who ever even looks at this stuff? Nobody cares to look when they're spending other people's money. Traditionally the play has been: don't rock the boat and you keep your job for life.

Office of the Inspector General looks at this stuff.

Trump fired 17 of them:

https://campaignlegal.org/update/significance-firing-inspect...

> This blatantly illegal and incredibly concerning mass firing removes the only independent offices within agencies designed to protect taxpayer money and root out corruption, fraud, waste and mismanagement.

I also posted the 2022 report the office generated elsewhere in the thread, a follow up to their 2015 report.

> Office of the Inspector General looks at this stuff.

I wish that were the case, if it was these date of births would have already been fixed. Sounds like they fired 17 useless employees and can split the work of the 17 amongst 150 other employees.

Sounded like "out of 25", but just for context:

With approximately 1,600 employees, the HHS-OIG performs audits, investigations, and evaluations to recommend policy for decision-makers and the public.

There's OIGs for different departments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Inspector_General_(U...

I quoted this exact article. It seems almost a tradition to fire all heads of OIGs after elections, from all sorts of presidents.

The cited examples are Reagan and Bush, both of whom relented to some degree after Congress pushed back. Obama fired one IG, with stated cause. And of course, in 2022, Congress passed a law requiring 30 days advance notice to Congress. So perhaps traditional but also fairly clearly violating the 2022 law.

At the very least Social Security should try to get the correct birth dates and verify these folks are alive. Because it sounds like no one is checking and fixing this. If you were running social security and you see people have no date of birth and they come up as 150 years old, you fix it. Apparently that basic thing is not happening and Elon musk is calling this out. I see no problem with fixing it.

There's opportunity cost in fixing it. The problem is we don't know if it's actual fraud. The SSA might, or they might not. It might not actually be a problem, or a problem that is an acceptable cost of running the agency. It might even be a cost that's acceptable to the country, given all the complexities involved (that we don't know about)

That's the problem with ALL the things Musk is coming out with. We just don't know! We don't know how much we are "losing" to them, we don't know know how serious these problems are. We don't know the context.

We're just getting thrown little bites of information. They sound ridiculous! They are! A lot of things can sound ridiculous if you say them out of context. He's saying a lot of stuff where the listener can go "well, yeah, obviously we should fix that". It's the "common sense" play of the right wing. Yes, it's hard to disagree with. It might be right, and we might need to fix it. It also might not be the best use of our time, energy and money to fix. We don't know what the opportunity cost is.

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