No, 150-Year-Olds Aren’t Collecting Social Security Benefits
www.wired.com
Elon Musk claims to have found rampant fraud in the Social Security Administration. There’s a much simpler explanation.

Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the “Convention du Mètre.”

These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.

Archived copy of the article

  • HappySkullsplitter@lemmy.world
    2·
    4 days ago

    I often wonder how many of them are real, I can see basic laymen getting caught up in the flood of pro-Elon bots

    Basic NPC types only have one philosophy: go with the flow