Elon Musk set out hundreds of very young and arrogant programmers to modify code throughout the federal government including to change decades old code used by Treasury, Social Security, etc. While this went on he would tweet idiotic statements like "Dead people are getting social security!" (because he didn't understand the deceased have beneficiaries) and "we're giving social security to people who are 150 years old!" (because he and we presume some subset of his young programmers didn't understand date fields being set to the epoch indicated the date of birth/death had not been recorded).

All this is to say we probably shouldn't assume any current US government website, especially ones that have to do with immigration, hasn't been completely modified by this team.

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monkeyelite 3 days ago | parent [-]

Is your claim that they found zero people fraudulently collecting social security through a dead relative?

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zzzeek 2 days ago | parent [-]

no, this is an entirely bad faith representation of my words as written

he most certainly did not understand that the vast majority of what he perceived as "dead people getting benefits" were completely legitimate cases where beneficiaries were receiving those benefits and/or the data was encoded without a real birth/death date

since you appear to be of the opinion that Musk was somehow indicating a useful fact of some kind, here's mainstream media reporting of the claims made by Trump and Musk (we can assume Trump was advised by Musk) and their extreme inaccuracy:

https://apnews.com/article/social-security-payments-deceased...

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monkeyelite 2 days ago | parent [-]

> since you appear to be of the opinion that Musk was somehow indicating a useful fact of some kind,

No but I am glad he took action to fix it.

The Cobol 150 year thing is also incorrect and was widely criticized in tech circles: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/31288/did...

	▲	zzzeek 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Musk wasn't criticizing COBOL he was criticizing a specific thing he misunderstood in social security code which people in that thread said as much. I think you're trying to see something you want to see there.