Comment by pjc50

5 days ago

Everything political gets downvoted, from either side, but you're going to need better evidence than Musk and rumors for this fraud.

(There probably is some fraud! There is in any large money handling system! Japan had a problem with elderly people claiming pensions after they'd died, for example. It's just that you need a better standard of evidence before cutting off money that people are legally entitled to, because otherwise the fraud detection process is going to have false positives.)

6 comments

pjc50

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lenkite  5 days ago

Being down-voted is OK, but posts being flagged and removed for posting factual news is not.

You will need to define your threshold for standard of evidence. If you automatically disbelieve everything on doge.gov, then there is nothing one can do to convince you. You have chosen to shut your eyes.

Please note: I am not an American citizen. As for "rumours", when I was a junior developer working in a service company in Bangalore over 15 years ago, developing tax filing software for an American state, during a test run on live data, I filed bug-tickets for duplicate SSN, SSN's with folks over 150 years of age, obviously spurious unemployment claims, etc. All of them were closed and the contractor told my manager not to file such tickets. (I am really thankful I left that line of work)

These problems are actually very well-known. They really aren't "rumours". You can choose to put in a few hours or a few days of effort in talking to people and figuring this out yourself.

  • kasey_junk  5 days ago

    Something can be factual and political. The guidelines suggest that political content is off topic for this site and that you should flag it.

    Right now there is an interesting convergence of tech, politics and general newsworthiness that is going to stress the content moderation system. But people flagging a story as obviously political is the system working as designed.

Panoramix  5 days ago

Why is it unreasonable to demand that every recipient of money is alive and has a valid age in the system? This shouldn't be a political statement.

  • parodysbird  5 days ago

    He's just queried records with dead=FALSE. It's not active recipients of social security payments. All its showing is that some portion of people die without the death being officially logged on their record in the social security database.

    Edit: Also, it's not clear that the death field is the sole criteria for determining the eligibility for payments (i.e. determining the recipient is alive)