[flagged]
https://xcancel.com/ThatsMauvelous/status/189135619250239902...
This is a piece of misinformation coming from Twitter/X post.
You don't need to trust me on that, you can just go check the standard.
Or you can claim that it's misinformation too. Up to you.
It's not hard to imagine that something like this actually happened. Dismissing it outright just because COBOL does not have a datetime data type and the standard is only 21 years old (that far pre-dates node.js btw) could be playing into the hands of the Muskians who surely love any possibility to get out of this BS in case they made a mistake. Would not be the first they made nor the first they handled that way.
Is that so? How do you know? Afaik that data is confidential and access is highly restricted. Or are you saying that that's what Elon said and we should take his word for it?
> This is yet another case of people taking partisan telephone game conjecture literally.
I don't follow. Could you please explain?
(There probably is some fraud! There is in any large money handling system! Japan had a problem with elderly people claiming pensions after they'd died, for example. It's just that you need a better standard of evidence before cutting off money that people are legally entitled to, because otherwise the fraud detection process is going to have false positives.)
You will need to define your threshold for standard of evidence. If you automatically disbelieve everything on doge.gov, then there is nothing one can do to convince you. You have chosen to shut your eyes.
Please note: I am not an American citizen. As for "rumours", when I was a junior developer working in a service company in Bangalore over 15 years ago, developing tax filing software for an American state, during a test run on live data, I filed bug-tickets for duplicate SSN, SSN's with folks over 150 years of age, obviously spurious unemployment claims, etc. All of them were closed and the contractor told my manager not to file such tickets. (I am really thankful I left that line of work)
These problems are actually very well-known. They really aren't "rumours". You can choose to put in a few hours or a few days of effort in talking to people and figuring this out yourself.
Right now there is an interesting convergence of tech, politics and general newsworthiness that is going to stress the content moderation system. But people flagging a story as obviously political is the system working as designed.
Edit: Also, it's not clear that the death field is the sole criteria for determining the eligibility for payments (i.e. determining the recipient is alive)
I can’t say how annoyed it makes me that Elon’s initial reaction to anything odd seems to be “fraud!!” rather than curiosity
To be fair, being curious about things isn't going to get as much support as screaming "GUBBERMINT FRAUD!" (a red rag to the GOP bull) when you're trying to trash any government departments that stand between you and more money.