I am sure, fwiw, that there are many, many boneheaded design choices in legacy federal IT systems. But I would bet a substantial sum that this one goes in the “there’s something critical Elon doesn’t understand” bucket.
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I learned that when I was in high school, I can't remember what class but I remember someone asking what would happen when they ran out of numbers and the teacher said " the numbers are recycled after so much time of someone's death" but I can't remember how long I want to say 50 yrs but not sure
Yeah I'm not sure of the details I just know they get reused. When everything was paper files I don't think it came up too much but as things are now digital and a lot of stuff is (inappropriately) linked on SSN I expect it to become a bigger issue
I would suggest that, more commonly, there are design choices that made sense at the time, possibly decades ago and under all kinds of constraints, that quickly got baked in (because other designs relied on them) and now look boneheaded and are easy to mock. Enterprise software evolves.
Almost(almost) 100% of these flaws are probably VERY well understood by the admins/engineers of those systems.
4 basic reasons they haven't already been fixed:
-Length of time to properly fix
-cost of fix
-authority to proceed
-outage is unacceptable
Criminal malpractice is not a project plan.
This true of any working IT system, and it's utterly besides the point.
The point is, that nobody ever, ever modernizes a large brown-field system by setting loose a bunch of know-nothing tech bros to "hack on it." You only do that if your intention is to destroy it and not fix it.
Setting loose some kids who know only how to code and nothing of accounting or even real life will result in cherry-picked examples that may look suspect on their face, but really make sense once some depth of understanding is applied. Their objective has nothing to do with improvements.
„know only how to code“ is a continuum. just bc someone calls themself a coder doesnt mean theyre worth a damn. and this team isnt there to write good code. one of their objectives is probably to output „420“ at 4:20.
another thing. i was full project cycle but ive met ZERO coders who could design scalable data architecture. that cant be universal but that was my experience. (i have met a few dbas and data architects who could code well tho.) lol nevermind the incrementalism of legacy systems.
its not a difficult language but the information flow, map it with some not even beta class ai? really? whos the willing domain expert to guide the ai? oh, wait. the goal wasnt to improve; it was just to effing wreck the whole damned thing.
I'll bet that Musk also doesn't realize that people can change their name and still keep the same SSN (eg when someone marries and adopts their spouse's surname).
Do you have a link? I’ve done data management my entire career and I can come up with about 10 reasons I wouldn’t use SSN as a PK. More if I have it half a second’s thought.
Pretty sure he doesn't know what a relational database is -- given his mocking of someone for asserting that the government uses SQL (which it obviously does).
Take it to the bank: dude doesn’t know shit about coding so has zero way to validate what he’s hearing. He just likes to pose that he’s technical which is the worst kind of manager/leader in the world.
And these DOGE idiots sure won't be fixing any problems they find. They only know how to destroy things and will try and replace as much as they can with AI generated gibberish.
Fewer than that, even. SSNs never have 9 as the first digit, 666 as the first three, 000 as the first three, 00 as the middle two, or 0000 as the last 4.
Elon Musk is an econ major. He does not know how to code. He is not an engineer. He failed out of 4 different universities before his investors finally just bought him a degree.
It means you have multiple entries for when people change names. Cause.. people change names a LOT, but they don't get a new social security number when it happens.
so OF COURSE the Social Security number would not be a unique Identifier on it's own.
It’s like CIN numbers in Cal Optima. You would think a CIN would be a primary key, but it’s not. The UID is the primary key because the CIN will match to more than one client (who is the same person) if their name changes. This is basic stuff.
Don’t even get me started on how HMIS treats family units because a family unit can change multiple times a week, month, or year. The primary key for a family unit comes from the Record ID of the initial assessment. Or, it does in Clarity, anyways. It seems really stupid, but it works.
Beautiful move though. Infuriates and provides confirmation bias to MAGA who fully believes they are doing "The right thing." It's complete bullshit that we'll spend years correcting and MAGA will believe forever.
The trouble is, debunking this bullshit requires specialized knowledge that only so many people have. That same knowledge is not enough to actually change the minds of MAGA supporters who are drunk on all the chaos. I don’t know how you reach these people.
Stop inviting them to parties and tell them why. Too many posts about 'my MAGA buddy.' If you sit down with a Nazi, you are a Nazi. If you sit down with MAGA, you ARE MAGA.
There's also situations where people claim inaccurate SSNs (e.g., working without authorization). Those people still make payments into Social Security without triggering a huge rush at ICE to deport them. The payments in have to be accounted somewhere even if SSA knows there's something off.
I'd bet money right now that there's a StartDate EndDate field to show when the SS# was started and ended to show which one is active. The active one doesn't have an end date.
The block would be if you try to have two rows that are active.
I can think of a couple of reasons to have duplicates, and a couple of ways they could handle it. I work as a DBA on a system with a similar person database, where the person ID table has multiple entries - and you can tell which one is current because there's a field flagging old ones as inactive.
The Republican Party didn’t just change—it has become unrecognizable. Now, the GOP isn’t a party—it’s a machine built on grievance, conspiracy, and power for power’s sake. This piece I wrote lays out exactly how it happened—and why there’s no going back.
I wouldn’t say boneheaded. I’d say they were making decisions and didn’t follow best practices because know one new what best practices were. We learned best practices from their mistakes.
When you are the first person designing a system the size of the IRS or Treasury department, you’re going to make decisions that make sense, but turn out to be less than optimal.
Having spent most of my life in IT, I can’t tell you how many times the unknowing, overconfident dipshit crashed some piece our systems because they were fucking around where they had no business and never asked for help from the people in charge. Gonna happen here, just a matter of time.
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4 basic reasons they haven't already been fixed:
-Length of time to properly fix
-cost of fix
-authority to proceed
-outage is unacceptable
Criminal malpractice is not a project plan.
I've been on networks like that.
"Run to Fail" (RTF) is another term that means roughly, "We're integrating new capability, including bug fixes, and testing it thoroughly."
For instance: How many people have ever heard of Treasury's BFS net going down? Or BFS for that matter?
The point is, that nobody ever, ever modernizes a large brown-field system by setting loose a bunch of know-nothing tech bros to "hack on it." You only do that if your intention is to destroy it and not fix it.
But even supposing you had a crack team of genius software engineers, and further suppose they knew this code...
This is not how you'd treat a big, important software system, if your goal was something besides vandalism.
The duplication he thinks he's found is built in to a multi-step verification chain. It's technical, but what it's not is duplication of SS accounts.
so OF COURSE the Social Security number would not be a unique Identifier on it's own.
Even MAGA DB folks will just keep quiet about it.
Let's face it. Non-MAGA is more fun.
The block would be if you try to have two rows that are active.
https://jasonegenberg.substack.com/p/how-the-party-of-reagan-became-the
Did parents plan this fraud at birth, since SS numbers have long been assigned via birth notices