Isn't "embarrassing and dangerous" their whole strategy?
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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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.
Conspiracy theory: They know this, but being able to claim to their followers, with official records to show for it, who know NOTHING about programming, is an easy, effective win for them. They can claim fraud to their gullible audience and now have records they can point to and say "LOOK! THEY'RE GIVING DEAD PEOPLE SOCIAL SECURITY MONEY!"
This is why you come up with a hypothesis before running an experiment and collecting data. Otherwise you can pick a pattern in the data to propose just the right hypothesis.
The question is, how do you not know the age of a recipient? I feel like that's kinda required to know, no?
There are many people who were born in developing nations during times of war who do not know their exact age. They usually do have an idea of a range though.
Ah, well that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
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