Why 150 years olds are still getting social security benefits - eviltoast
  • Kalysta@lemm.ee
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    24 hours ago

    Good luck getting musk to pay to update the programs that most of the government uses.

    These programs were written in COBOL, and they have had no reason to upgrade things that are still working.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        This is the part everyone is missing. Real life is messy and sloppy and incomplete. Real life has bad data. All the time, especially when you’re trying to match 100 year old records. Not handling bad data s a problem of inexperience, regardless what technology you use. Announcing it as fraud, is just being an ignorant asshole.

        That being said, if Musk is willing to put out the billions of dollars it would cost to modernize, that would be great! But it still has to handle bad data. Maybe musk could add hundreds of millions to the budget to hire enough people to manually confirm all the data from before the records were digitized. Good luck with that

        • shawn1122@lemm.ee
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          20 hours ago

          If you want actual proof of this, look at your medical records. And I say this as a healthcare worker. All kinds of nonsense ends up in the chart for a myriad of reasons.

          • AA5B@lemmy.world
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            20 hours ago

            And that’s with modern record keeping where there are all safeguards and things are eventually digitized. Imagine the days when it was only on paper at some hospital where the records room was damaged in a flood or it wasn’t digitized for half a century so no way to check the handwriting, or the person had a strong accent or some dirt or mold fuzzed the paper, etc ……

            I am one of the millions of people in the US whose name was fudged by immigration officials at Ellis Island. We know the name they wrote down and we have the family claim of what it used to be, by Mon objective way to prove it or to know why. To make this anecdote crazier, my parents went back to the old country to find records. However this was the height of the Cold War and it was behind “the iron curtain” so they were prevented from leaving their hotel under threat f arrest as spies