Comment by hnthrow90348765
2 days ago
Intent to drop in, make major changes, and pretend like they won't break anything is ill intent
We criticize engineers who drop into a code base and try to make changes without understanding. You can be forgiven for doing it a few times, but after that you're doing it intentionally. And if they hired engineers that didn't know this, that's incompetence at both levels.
Not only is this different code bases and IT products, it's across organizations and done very rapidly.
I am also not convinced that they don't simply have malicious intent most of the time.
Elon has been operating in bad faith since the Twitter Files (so, the very start). Announce X, publish receipts that show ~X, but nobody reads receipts so checkmate.
The "140 year old people in social security DB" post is just the latest example of bad-faith. Either there is actually >>$100B of social security fraud and that's the story or he wants to pretend like that's the case when he knows full well that presence in the DB does not indicate eligibility or payouts.
Agreed. Show the check numbers, mailing dates, bank transfers, etc. If there's actually really tens of billions flowing out to dead people monthly... demonstrate that. Should NOT be hard at all.
Should not be hard... if it exists. Which is why I'm 99% sure it doesn't. But the lie will go twice around the world before the truth gets its pants on, as always.
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I understand that these 140/150 year old recipients are actually the results of incomplete birthdate data.
To steelman the argument though, it seems reasonable to audit these recipients so that we can get their true birthdate entered. The number of recipients who lack a valid birthdate because they found a way to fraudulently claim benefits is likely non-zero, but probably low. But in any event, cleaning up the data can’t be a bad thing.
If something costs more to fix than it costs to leave sitting around, fixing it is less efficient. In this case it's already been investigated prior to DOGE, and deemed not worth the effort to clean up [1].
[1] https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
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To quote patio11,
“The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero
He was talking about the banking system. But he was also hinting at something bigger. There is a game theory problem often referred to as the meter maid problem. What is the optimal amount of meter maids in a city, where optimal can be defined in at least a few different ways, but roughly means the cost to revenue optimal. You end up with a couple of obvious extremes, no parking enforcement means no cost, but no revenue (plus parking may end up out of control if charging for parking is more than just revenue generating). The other extreme is thay you have enough people policing parking that no one ever fail to comply, this is the highest cost, but not the highest revenue, because you don’t get revenue from ticketing. So the answer is that the optimal number lies somewhere where the number of meter maids allows some percentage of people get away with failing to comply with parking rules (whether deliberate or accidental can further complicate the problem since both will happen).
So back to your steelman. Cleaning data is most certainly a desirable thing, but it is likely not the optimal thing, especially if the cost is high. And unauditable access to systems is a very high cost. Seems to me much of this auditing could be done in a much more acciuntable way.
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Why spend money chasing people who aren't collecting checks? That sounds like waste to me.
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> these 140/150 year old recipients
What is the evidence these exist?
Show us the (public) Court Filings. The formal start of education to evaluate if there is truth, if there is a guilty party, and to legally render a verdict. The check numbers and other PII can be evaluated by the courts. We the People can know the numbers; the scale per case and in sum, of the 'fraud' identified.
Presence in the DB allows for downstream fraud, even by accident. If that DB is the source of truth for SS payouts elsewhere, clean up the data. There's no reason for it to be there.
Social Security receives payments as well as makes them. SSNs are keys for both.
The “super old person” SSN numbers are in the DB mostly because non-citizens are using them to pay into the system. If you delete those numbers, the next payroll run will inject them right back in.
And you would remove important accounting metadata for each payment. Metadata that is consumed by the systems that prevent fraudulent payments from going out.
The only way to stop the fake/bad SSNs is to go into the field and address each instance with employers. This is time-consuming and expensive, which is why no one has done it much.
The reason given that the SSA does not clean up the data is it would cost too much for little to no administrative benefit. They also don't want to add new inaccurate data to the system.
The no administrative benefit bit checks out with napkin math. Of the 18.9 million entries for people age 100 or older they are paying out benefits to 44,000. The total number of people in the US age 100 or older is around 90k to 100k, depending on time period for comparison.
There's an Inspector General audit report in a nearby comment for source.
> Presence in the DB allows for downstream fraud, even by accident.
That's like saying null columns in a particular database table must be filled in (or have the row entirely erased) because someone, somewhere, somehow, might infer the wrong thing about them, if they completely ignore all the other tables and business rules.
___
"Hello, I am Oldy McOldperson. Give me money."
"...Sorry sir, but that person would be almost 150 years old now, and that's well past our Impossibly Old threshold of 115 years. Furthermore, one our other databases says that person was reported as missing 90 years ago."
"But Oldy's--I mean, my precise confirmed date of death is still blank, therefore I'm alive, so give me money!"
"Sir, only a complete moron would believe that's how it works."
Elon has been operating in bad faith since he called that hero diver a pedo
Elon has been operating in bad faith since he came to the US on a student visa and then illegally worked for a startup.
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Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice
This is correct. Depending on the stakes, the right answer would be to err on the side of caution. Certainly repeated incompetence in a private setting would be grounds for suspension or termination.
At what point does incompetence /become/ malice?
There is certainly a level of incompetence that requires active ignorance to one's naivety. I'd certainly consider a stubborn person who arrogantly ignores concerns of experts malicious. The active nature certainly matters.
Yes. Consider the concept of negligence. It is malicious to take action without exercising reasonable care, and part of reasonable care is ensuring that you are the slightest bit qualified to perform the action.
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Yes and: fraud and errors are often indistinguishable.
People with malice like Elon Musk have noticed the widespread use of this aphorism and repeatedly leverage it to their advantage.
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> The reason I still give them benefit of the doubt on their intentions is...because they did come out and say that 20% of the savings should go back to taxpayers as a refund and that 20% should go directly to reducing the debt. That being said, these are nice things that people would want to hear so I too am paying attention.
I'd rather the government keep the money and use it to pay for the many services that it provides. Like ensuring that I have clean water, unadulterated food, clean air, a functional banking system, healthcare, safe vehicles, making sure that unemployed people don't starve, researching infectious disease remediation, performing scientific research, maintaining national parks, making sure that kids have a baseline education, doing humanitarian work around the globe, and a thousand other things I don't have the time to enumerate.
I feel like people lose sight of exactly how ridiculously much money a trillion dollars is. You’re mentioning a bunch of desirable things you’d like the federal government to do, while ignoring the millions wasted on everything from a $90,000 bag of bushings to $1,300 coffee cups to $150,000 soap dispensers to billons on empty government buildings. You can simultaneously want the government to reduce waste and provide these services. Lately it feels like folks are getting too carried away and becoming “pro government waste” as some type of political flex. Really, the problem is _who_ is doing the reduction and _how_, not _that_ we’re doing it.
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I think that addresses the root issue here- the money is not efficient in getting those things done. It's not even hidden and the freeloaders really seemed to feel no shame since covid (maybe social media is the cause?). It happens all over the world in every organization. Usually companies die off, but the budget just increases for the government.
Of course we don't want to toss the baby out with the bath water, but it's high time for a major course correction. In our government it is very hard to turn the ship around, and motivate people to serve.
I'd much prefer if we could magically motivate the 3/5 of govvies who are in cruise mode to try harder.
Should the government get a blank check? If there is waste and removing it won’t reduce efficacy, it should be purged.
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You are not paying attention if you believe that a crack team consisting of the world's richest man and half a dozen tween interns physically invading government offices and dismantling entire departments fast enough to make your head spin is anything other than "ill intent".
You realize that the entire executive branch excluding defense is like 10% of the federal budget.
There isn’t enough money to be saved to give you back anything.
People don’t understand scale. They will cut spending $800B, cut taxes by $4T and people will say that action is budget neutral.
You're giving them the benefit of the doubt because they made a vague promise to give you a bigger tax refund?
Did you read the entire post you are responding to? I clearly said this at the end:
"That being said, these are nice things that people would want to hear so I too am paying attention."
It is in my nature to give the benefit of the doubt.
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You give them the benefit of the doubt because they tell you exactly what you want to hear?
It is in my nature to give the benefit of the doubt, but as my post clearly says at the end: "That being said, these are nice things that people would want to hear so I too am paying attention."
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Did they mention which tax payers those 20% will be going back to?
Small temporary income tax cuts, big permanent capital gains tax cuts.
Always has been, always will be.
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Not yet as far as I've seen.
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Do you think they can be trusted to tell the truth?
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This is Clientelism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clientelism
It's what authoritarian populists do when they get control of governments. They "hack" the economy with short-term stimulus and giveaways to keep the rubes content and happy while they dismantle civil society and the rule of law and entrench themselves.
Economic stagnation and decline usually follow within a couple year, but if they've entrenched themselves well enough, they don't have to care about public opinion very much and can shift to repression.
I did have a question about that. Where does the other 60% go? Isn’t the whole point to reduce the debt?
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I’m sorry but the naivety of your comment is absolutely hilarious. Good luck getting your refund when the IRS is being ran by a handful of angsty young adults
DOGE and POTUS are incentivized to follow through on this type of thing because it would increase good-faith in the masses big time. I don't think they'd renege on it. I'm certainly not naive! You can see that I've been contradicting DOGE on things since they became a thing. (@cyrsbel on X)
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