I think you have exactly what it takes to uncritically accept whatever you see at first glance and comment about it on social media. You're doing it right now!

However, that error took me to the Wikipedia page and I learnt that cobalt was named in relation to kobolds (goblins/gnomes) as cobalt ore was a hazard to silver miners - it gives off arsenic fumes when smelted.

[0]: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1632810081497513993

The real world is full of anomalies and missing data, the system deals with it according to the law and administrative precedent.

Edit: here you go: https://www.ssa.gov/help/iClaim_poa.html

Do we know those people are actually receiving support? Could be a hack of the system to take people out of welfare, without removing their whole entry. Maybe those are (again) double-entries with a different purpose, or dead people, or future receivers, or old entries, or just poor data. Just looking at a database, without looking at the business-logic, is usually not a good argument. Heck, It would be actually funny if the DOB of those entries is just saved in a different table or field, and they just did not understand what they are looking at.

This entire tangent is based off Elon Musk not understanding COBOL or the thing he's looking at before he started ranting on X.

There's literally not enough information about anything, it's just anything which can be spun to fit the narrative he's already determined.

In the absence of a null value and proper null processing, zero seems to be the right value. It's clearly exceptional and intuitive to anyone who encounters it in the data, and it would allow the rest of the system to work correctly.

Social security eligibility doesn't have a maximum age but it does have a minimum. If a person claims Social Security without proof of age then their eligibility is dealt with administratively.

So the headline is right, this is 100% a political issue, since any fair minded person with relevant experience wouldn't jump to claiming fraud in this situation but rather they'd assume a data issue.

From yesterdays submission "The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/hitler-oli... :

> To this end, Hugenberg practiced what he called Katastrophenpolitk, “the politics of catastrophe,” by which he sought to polarize public opinion and the political parties with incendiary news stories, some of them Fabrikationen—entirely fabricated articles intended to cause confusion and outrage. According to one such story, the government was enslaving German teenagers and selling them to its allies in order to service its war debt. Hugenberg calculated that by hollowing out the political center, political consensus would become impossible and the democratic system would collapse.

mmm sounds familiar

Was it? I've never heard of that date in connection with COBOL before.

I've heard some people try to connect it to ISO 8601, but I think that's a misinterpretation – yes, the text of some versions of the ISO 8601 standard refers to that date, but only as a fixed point of reference to formally define the ISO 8601 timescale – really an editorial choice which makes no difference to implementations of the standard, which aren't supposed to treat that date in any way specially, and I'm not aware of any that actually do. Furthermore, the reference to this date in ISO 8601 was apparently only inserted in its 2004 revision, while surely this system is much older than that

Now, it isn't impossible that some SSA computer system actually does use "1875-05-20" as some kind of "sentinel" value. Sentinel values like that are actually quite common in legacy systems. But if it does, I don't think it is because it is following any kind of widespread standard (whether COBOL or ISO 8601), I think it may just be an idiosyncrasy of the SSA or of that particular computer system.

But, here's my own guess as to what is happening here: some random anonymous DailyKos commenter has come up with a speculative, and ultimately incorrect, guess as to why DOGE is wrong – and people all over the Internet are now repeating it, because they like what it says, and don't know enough about the technical details involved to realise it is likely wrong. It wouldn't surprise me if SSA computers don't treat the date "1875-05-20" specially at all, and that is just an invention of this commenter

Which is not to say DOGE's claims are right – it is entirely possible that they are wrong – just not for this reason, for some other reason instead...

Without it a lot of people born during the great depression, born in other countries, abandoned, etc would never be eligible for social security. Even today it's entirely possible for a child to be born in the US without their birth being documented.

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/help/iClaim_poa.html

[2] https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0200302000!opendo...

Also, the strategy of "flooding the zone" is something Bannon openly talked about. When these people say they will do X and we then see them doing X, we really should stop saying things like "skeptical paranoid part of me think they might be doing X".

Let's just say my contempt for this utter clown is NP, and my disappointment that critical government systems lack the security required to stop this nonsense is almost as large.

Rewriting it in another language needs to be "bug by bug" compatible anyway (eg "use zero for unknown birthday") and it will most likely introduce new bugs.

In the end the language isn't as important as the tooling around it, and I bet there are modern compilers and debuggers available.