The system obviously needs improvement and like it or not Trump and Musk are the first to actually try to improve it.
https://dev.to/mdchaney/cobol-dates-may-20-1875-and-disinformation-5ggh
- There is no “date” data type in COBOL. Dates are stored however the programmer wants, but usually numeric character strings
- There’s no “default” date, even if there were such a data type
- Even if there were a default, 1875 would be a bizarre choice
That (obviously) doesn’t mean Elon Musk is right. It just means that this explanation of it being some magical COBOL epoch value is wrong. What’s more likely is that the Social Security database is very old and has a lot of iffy data in it.
My guess is that it contains everybody who has ever had a social security record, including all the duplicates, all the typos, and everything else. At some point there were probably hundreds of thousands of records that were transcribed from paper into a computer, and it was considered safer to keep the iffy data and make a plan to deal with it later, vs. remove someone from the database who should legitimately be there.
I would also imagine that the systems that take the records out of the DB probably have filters in place that remove the (known) bad records before they’re used.
There is no “date” data type in COBOL, but there is in DB2, where the data would be saved, unless they are on an older VSE OS and data is still saved in VSAM files. Many still use 12/31/39 as a default max date even though OS/400 systems can handle up to year 9999 now (we still use 12/31/39 in testing where I work). It could be someone arbitrarily started using 1875, and others copied that.
The actual payment system stops payments automatically at age 115 and requires manual verification to restart. The database that is being reported is not even a report of who is getting paid.
This is just dramatic, public evidence of the arrogance and incompetence of DOGE from down to his racist younglings.
For a while, I thought they would at least be good at technology. This episode shows that even that is not true.
How he chose this elite group of chuckleheads is an eyebrow raiser. Other than racism, they seem to have no credentials at all. I mean, on brand for this administration I guess.
Found the link to the SSA page describing the policy which took effect in 2015.
115 sounds too late imo, payments should need manual verification way earlier
I keep hearing that gen Z is actually pretty shit with understanding things outside GUIs.
And now I’m watching it actively destroy my country.
I get this feeling too, but then again can we blame them? With all the locked down tech these days you really have to get out of your way to learn. And in most cases it works well enough. Whereas people growing up between lets say the 1970-2000s had to muck around with their tech to get it to work. Thus learning the intricacies while using it.
Isn’t “embarrassing and dangerous” their whole strategy?
