On Sunday, White House adviser Elon Musk claimed his “Department of Government Efficiency” found that more than 20 million Americans over the age of 100 have been receiving checks from the Social Security Administration. He alleged the figure included people who were born in 1875. The billionaire shared a screenshot of a spreadsheet he said was from the SSA’s database.
Speaking at a conference of investors in Miami on Wednesday, the president reiterated Musk’s baseless claims about Social Security and appeared to add some embellishments of his own.
“But listen to this – 3.6 million people are on Social Security rolls from the age of 110 years old to 119,” he said. “Do you think there are really that many? Those people are seriously old. But it gets worse – 3.4 7 million people are on Social Security from the age of 120 years old to 129 years old, 3.9 million people are on Social Security from 130 years old to 139 years old.”
Trump later added that there are “3.5 million people from the age 140 to 149 years old” on Social Security, and that “1.3 million people are on Social Security from age 150-159. And over 130,000 people are on Social Security over the age of 160 years old, ok? Including 1,039 people. Think of it. Over 1000 people, between the ages of 220-229. And one person of 240 years old and 249. And the record topper, there is one person on Social Security who is 360 years old, which is approximately 110 years older than our country.”
Also, the 1337 hackers at DOGE don’t know anything about COBOL, apparently.
The challenge with COBOL is that it doesn’t have a standardized way to store and work with dates — unlike most modern programming languages. Instead, many dates in COBOL must be coded to a reference number, often using an international standard, Rege explained.
The most common reference date number is May 20, 1875, under an international standard known as ISO 8601. That means if someone applies for Social Security without a birth date, they may be recorded as 150 years old in the database depending on how a programmer troubleshoots the issue.
Programmers can overcome these limitations in COBOL’s functionality, but they may also opt to use 1875 as a placeholder for unknown dates if it aligns with the database’s purpose… For example, when the federal government began issuing regular monthly Social Security payments in January 1940, recipients needed to be at least 65 to qualify, meaning they needed to be born in 1875 or before.
Those who crafted the Social Security database may have, therefore, set 1875 as the default birth year for anyone who lacked that information at the time.
You’d think at least Big Balls would know some COBOL.
At this point writing “baselessly” after Trump’s claims is just redundant. We live in a post-facts world now where what’s true is decided based on how many people can be convinced of it. It’s Truth made Social… It’s… Wait… Oooh Truth Social… now I get it!
The COBOL thing is what really entertained me. I don’t know any COBOL, but I sure as fuck would have someone who knows it inside and out on my team if I was going to inspect systems that run on it. But then I don’t think I know everything.
Musk is the type of guy to send a mail to a newly hired Junior dev at 4am, saying “migrate this shit to Rust, you have 6 hours.”
And the junior dev uses ChatGPT.
Exactly fucking this.
Don’t forget the part where they insist on “reviewing” the code in near-real time, too…far too many “leaders” in the industry want to behave just like fElon does, but still do terrible things at a smaller scale.
It’s not just COBOL, either. A long time ago, there was bad record keeping for when people were born. You might have to go off things like church baptismal records, and even that’s dicey. COBOL is dealing with the fact that we just don’t know, and that’s just how it is. No amount of “government efficiency” can fix this.
Good luck finding COBOL experts today. I knew a guy who maintained COBOL servers for IBM for over 40 years. His supervisor didn’t know COBOL, so his performance reviews were essentially pass/fail. He was asked to help hire and train his replacement, and ended up postponing his retirement to ensure they had at least one person on site that knew the language. This was around 2015.
I know a bunch of people learned it in preparation for Y2K. Some of those people must still be around. But I doubt they bothered looking.
They also don’t wanna pay money. People who know Cobol want to be paid money in exchange for their services.
Yeah, a lot of the cobol jobs aren’t high paying.
There are definitely some, but those are usually emergency hires and not long term…
That was 25 years ago.
Most of those people won’t have touched it in a decade or more, if they aren’t already retired.
You’ll find them in bank system, they are still forming people in COBOL, easier than rewriting something that nobody really knows how it hold together
We could replace it with “stupidly claims,” but I expect that would simply get everyone else banned like the AP.
They would have figured this out real quick by either talking to the people in question or being competent.
They most likely fired them without ever talking to them.
No, I meant the 150 year olds collecting social security.
But ghosts are scary, okay?
