See the post on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/provisionalidea.bsky.social/post/3lhujtm2qkc2i
According to many comments, the US government DOES use SQL, and Musk is not understanding much what’s going on.
That’s weird, I thought I used SQL databases from government agencies regularly. Guess I was mistaken.
Elon’s shock and fury about the database key sounds like he got a report from an out-of-breath 20 year old DOGE kid who thinks they’re hot shit and discovered some massive flaw.
Elon also seems like the kind of person that believes a database schema is all that’s needed to govern a population.
He’s mad because it isn’t blockchain
I’m sure folks on here know this, but you know, there’s also that 10K a day that don’t so…
What makes this especially funny, to me, is that SSN is the literal text book example (when I was in school anyway) of a “natural” key that you absolutely should never use as a primary key. It is often the representative example of the kinds of data that seems like it’d make a good key but will absolutely fuck you over if you do.
SSN is not unique to a person.
They get reused after death, and a person can have more than one in their lifetime (if your id is stolen and you arduously go about getting a new one).Edit: (See responses) It seems I’m misinformed about SSNs, apologies. I have heard from numerous sources that they are not unique to a person, but the specifics of how it happens are unknown to me.And they’re protected information due to all the financials that rely on them, so you don’t really want to store them at all (unless you’re the SSA, who would have guessed that’d ever come up though!?)
It’s so stupid that it would be hilarious if people weren’t dying.
Small correction to an otherwise great explanation: SSNs are not recycled after death.
**Q20: *Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?*****A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.
“Several generations” well that is fucking garbage
Nah. It’s worked for 50 years and if we get another 30 then it’s done its job well. Government is supposed to review and adjust things as time goes on and Social Security Numbers weren’t intended to uniquely identify citizens. They probably expected an overhaul to be done by 2020.
They fact that we haven’t reworked portions of it and rely on SSNs to identify citizens shows that we haven’t had a forward-thinking Congress in the last 20 years at minimum.
well tbf, the standard coming from computing is doubling the bits until it stops being a problem, or with ipv6 practically having more IPs than there are atoms in the entire planet of earth (i think i did the calculation a while ago, and it was like, most of the atoms in earth, so like, not quite, but for all intents and purposes, might as well be)
According to XKCD about 40% of the earth
yeah that sounds about right, someone should make an XKCD search engine i think.
So they’ve issued almost half the possible numbers, current US population is actively using 1/3rd of them. I think unless there is a major drop in birth rates “several generations” is two. Either my great grandkids will be reusing dead people SSNs or there will be 10 digit numbers which is going to be a problem for any systems that coded it as char(9).
Ongoing trends would indicate a significant drop in birth rate is extremely likely. Major cities will most likely be facing population shrinkage by the end of the century
Thanks for (starting to) explain this concept to people not accustomed to how the US does their shit.
See, where i live, we used to have for example a Tax-Number. That was a thing the taxdepartment used to identify a person. But if you move from city a to city b, that numbers changes. So if you move a lot, you will have numerous of these.
Now, some 15 years back, the Tax-ID was introduced (fellow residents at this point will lnow it might be Germany) and this number is a one-in-a-kind ID that will only be assigned to you. They create it shortly after birth. My sons first registraion ID was this, before anyrhing else. You will also get a uniqie healthcare-ID that also works like that.So…how does that work in the US and why is habing a changing number that is not unique helpful? Or what is Elon not getting? I dont get it either because I dont know how this works for you.
Thanks in advance to shed light on this.
When you die your social is reused and assigned to someone else eventually. This is what makes it not unique. If something were to screw up in the process the new person could have debt from the prior person for example even though it is not their debt. Another concept common is using the last 4. There are so many conflicts when using just last 4 in a database its bad design.
I don’t know all the ways but my identity was stolen and I never knew until my attorney was looking at something else for me in conjunction with the social security commission where I lived, and it popped up under a different name. They then accessed my records using other information, and it was the same number. It took a long time to get it sorted. A few years.
(if your id is stolen and you arduously go about getting a new one)
I thought I had lost mine once and got a new SSN card, they don’t give you a new number, it’s the same number
You know, the thing that always seemed really scary about the OG Nazis is that they were competent, intelligent, put-together people that were just fucking evil. Then you look at the US Nazis and the fucking bozo density is off the charts, but they seem to be succeeding anyway.
Three possibilities come to mind:
- These bozos are going to find out, hard and soon.
- The OG Nazis were actually bozos too.
- Competence and intelligence doesn’t actually matter in running a fascist regime
the OG Nazis were dumb as bricks lmao. Weird nerds with massive egos half of which believed in magic.
Hitler and Himmler believed in “World Ice Theory” which was put forth by some German crackpot who stated the base matter of all reality was ice.
Every German person I’ve ever met talks so confidently about shit that you just kinda assume they know what they’re talking about, until they start talking about a domain you’re an expert in and you realize they’re actually kinda dumb but with good vocabulary.
OG Nazis were looking for aryans in Tibet.
OG Nazis were master manipulators, dressed cool as fuck and their propaganda machine was one of the best ever. Intelligent? There is no hard evidence of that, and their military strategies were poorly thought. They had fucking cool weapons and equipment, so maybe good engineers were involved, but that’s it.
Elon is basically what a dumb kid thinks smart people sound like
He got community-noted for being wrong. Per usual, it’s only a matter of time before he deletes his post.
More likely, he’ll delete the community note
Elon starting to comment on technical matters was the moment I learned he was actually completely beyond incompetent, since I have some actual expertise on the subject. Right around the time he bought Twitter and commented publicly on its architecture.
This is further evidence to that point
He’s the Steven Segal of futurism
Now i Really want to see The Dipshit run.
His response to the 2018 Thai Cave rescue is what made me realize how big of a shit stain on society he is.
Jesus Fucking Christ !!!
What does Elmo think the government use ? MongoDB, because its Web Scale [0]?
Ah, a classic watch. :-)
Elon probably thinks that SQL is MS SQL Sever, MySQL, or some such.
A government official known for performing a nazi salute just broadcast an ableist slur.
Cool cool cool
“Political appointee”
Gotta keep play to the cheap seats, these clowns
Civilized people should really coopt the word “removed” to mean Republican. I mean, they have the ® next to their names to remind us already.
Then when someone takes offense you can just say
Jesus Titty-Fucking Christ, Carol. Just because someone has a mental disability doesn’t make them a Republican!"
Way to throw disabled people under the bus because you aren’t clever enough to find another way to insult their intelligence.
Also using the phrase “civilized people” makes you sound like you’d fit in with the other Republicans.
Jesus Titty-Fucking Christ, Carol. Just because someone has a mental disability doesn’t make them a Republican.
Musk doesn’t understand database design (or the existence of
PRIMARY KEY ()), surprise.“Your tax dollars are being stolen”
Rare moment of clarity from our global barony.
Isn’t Oracle a big government supplier with millions if not billions worth of contracts?
Elon is a fraud but for someone who claims he created one of the Web’s first e-commerce sites this level of ignorance is embarrassing
He paid some people to pretend he’s the founder, then used that title to build a reputation of being genius and what not. And he’s been getting rich off of investor capitol ever since.
I don’t know which company he did and didn’t start himself. But I know he definitely didn’t write the code behind ebay or paypal
His first venture was a business directory on the internet (ie. The yellow pages, but online). No idea if he or this brother actually wrote any code for it, or if they hired someone. Wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t do any actual work for that project either.
He came from some hella rich parents, and he does not have the skills. I doubt it was his work
Someone needs to explain to Musk how to debug with the JSON so that the ipv6 GUI does not overflow into the git API front-end
Easy. Just defragment the kernel flux, water root but do not saturate the soil, and then set the virtual tensors to sigWumbo++. If you saturated root then set the tensors to asyncoMumbo-- to account for the extra conductivity. After that refragment the kernel flux because it was happy that way.
careful, “git api” almost makes sense
SSNs are literally just handed out to hospitals and social security offices in batches and given out in sequential order. They were specifically and intentionally designed to be a terrible system of ID numbers because people actually used to care about their privacy. There are countless people who’ve gone their whole lives using the wrong social security number and gotten their benefits just fine, because unlike everyone else in this dumpster fire of a country the social security office has never been stupid enough to rely on just a single number.
He sure is loose with that r-word…
It gets a reaction and that lets him feel something.
His father used to call him that. Makes sense he uses it lightly.
It triggers the libs
