Comment on How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL?
valtia@lemmy.world 6 days ago
There can be duplicate SSNs due to name changes of an individual, that’s the easiest answer. In general, it’s common to just add a new record in cases where a person’s information changes so you can retain the old record(s) and thus have a history for a person. That’s how the SSA is able to figure out if a person changed their gender, they just look up that information using the same SSN and see if the gender in the new application is different from the old data.
Another accusation Elon made was that payments are going to people missing SSNs.
A much simpler answer is that not all Americans actually have an SSN. The Amish for example have religious objections towards insurance, so they were allowed to opt out from social security and therefore don’t get an SSN.
It’s true that some Americans don’t have Social Security numbers, but those Americans can’t collect Social Security benefits unless/until they get one.
My bad, I thought it was about payments in general (including other programs) but it says social security database. Sorry.
DarthKaren@lemmy.world 6 days ago
JFC: married individuals, or divorced and name change back, would be totally fucked. Just on the very surface is his fuckery.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Hypothetically you could have a separate “previous names” table where you keep the previous names and on the main table you only keep the current name. There are a lot of ways to design a db to not unnecessarily duplicate SSNs, but without knowing the implementation it’s hard to say how wrong Musk is. But it’s obvious he doesn’t know what he’s talking about because we know that due to human error SSN-s are not unique and you can’t enforce uniqueness on SSN-s without completely fucking up the system. Complaining about it the way he did indicates that he doesn’t really understand why things are the way they are.