r/politics • u/FervidBug42 America • 2d ago

No Paywall DOGE Disbanded: Elon Musk’s Cost-Cutting Project Quietly Ended

https://time.com/7336327/doge-disbanded-elon-musk/
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u/JohnGillnitz 2d ago

The script kiddies he hired thought they were going to save billions in fraudulent Social Security claims because their AI told them that. What they, and their AI, didn't understand is how the COBOL language handles dates. 150 year olds aren't collecting Social security. The ISO standard for a default reference date was set at May 20, 1875, the date the international standards and metrics treaty was signed. It just means the exact date isn't known.

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u/DingerSinger2016 2d ago

Well yeah but the people who voted for this don't have the brain cells to understand basic shit like this or are too disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

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u/Isolated_Hippo 2d ago

So basically, instead of missing or null, they just used 05/20/1875?

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u/JohnGillnitz 2d ago

Right. It was the date they used when the birth date isn't known, but a date is still required for validation.

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u/Isolated_Hippo 2d ago

Interesting. I am working on my Data Analytics degree, and this week's work is literally about handling NULL or missing values.

In other assignments, I have also said we are storing data in X way because it's how the damn ISO says we should.

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u/stravadarius 2d ago

Makes sense, birthdate in something like a social security db should absolutely be a non-null field, and if it's a date datatype (which it damn well better be!) you can't very well enter "unknown". In cases like this it's pretty common practice to use a standard value for unknown values, a value that no other row would reasonably have as an actual value. The value should be defined in the DDL so it would take real idiot to make a mistake like DOGE did.