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Comment by kilpikaarna | Hacker News Reader

> Again, 150-year-olds are not collecting social security benefits. That specific age was likely a quirk of COBOL. It doesn’t include a date type, so dates are often coded to a specific reference point—May 20, 1875, the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the Convention du Mètre.

I thought this was wishful thinking / already deboonked?

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> That specific age was likely a quirk of COBOL.

This part has if you trust Elon as a source. He shared some graphs where there was no spike at 150, and people older than 150. If you trust Elon on this is really up to the reader, but it's a peeve of mine that sources keep reporting the COBOL epoch thing, which was always just a (plausible) theory as fact.

> Again, 150-year-olds are not collecting social security benefits.

This part hasn't. These 150 year olds are simply people whose death hasn't been recorded. They aren't collecting Social Security. In fact social security automatically stops at 115, and the number of Social Security recipients over 100 is within expectations [1]. This if course doesn't not mean there are zero deab people still receiving checks. With any system this size some fraud will exist, the question is how much, and how much does it cost to chase down.

The issue with unrecorded deaths for people over 100 has been known since at least 2015 [2]. In short it hasn't been fixed due to the cost, combined with the risk of incorrectly marking someone dead, which can seriously fuck up your life, not just social security. This whole bruhaha could have been avoided if someone did a 5-minute Google search before Elon/Trump started their theatrics.

[1] https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/people-ove...

[2] https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf

It's not like nobody's ever looked into fraud and error rates in social programs.

It's consistently pretty damn low, and when problems have been found, they've usually been addressed.

People think these are full of fraud for the same reason they think foreign aid is some insane double-digit percentage of the budget: because Republicans shove messaging at them through dedicated propaganda outlets literally 24/7 complaining about these things, and have done this for decades, and folks don't bother to check.

The agreed error rate is less than 1%

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06H7J0Wjg98&t=233s

a number much lower than the various rates of wage theft that occur/defraud funding of social security by American businesses. Funny which one DOGE is going after first. Seems like Elon should go after businesses fraudulently not funding Social Security as the first priority.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft

It's almost like his stated reasons for DOGE are a thin pretense...

Elon should never be given the benefit of the doubt on anything at this point given how blatantly and frequently he lies. Anything he says should be ignored and assumed to be false without actual evidence.

Also there can be surprising situations with pensions, e.g. people legitimately receiving Civil War military pensions into the 2000s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_....

I don't know Social Security's data model, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was still legitimately paying out pensions derived from the accounts of people who'd be 150+ if they were still living.

> This if course doesn't not mean there are zero deab people still receiving checks. With any system this size some fraud will exist, the question is how much, and how much does it cost to chase down.

Right, it's an optimization problem. You fight the fraud to the point that it optimizes loss. If it costs $1 million to stop $10 million of fraud, you do it. If it costs $1 billion to stop $10 million of fraud, you let that fraud happen.

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