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.
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Calling someone a retard for believing something that’s obviously true is straight out of the flat-Earther playbook.
Sure as hell did when I worked there
That sounds surprising modern. That’s good! Or at least I would think it is good. So many things run on mainframes still.
DROP TABLE Musk
I remember seeing this after he bought Twitter
Storms I hope that’s true.
😅
All government data is processed using
sed.lol. You mean vba macros.
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
Everything uses SQL. The world fucking runs on SQL
(yes I know SQL isn’t something that you can “run” something on yadda yadda…)
Elon is basically what a dumb kid thinks smart people sound like
Replace “dumb kid” with half dozen of my boomer relatives, and you’re spot-on.
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.
The nazis weren’t as competent and intelligent as you suggest, that work was outsourced to IBM - Yes, that IBM.
You know that Watson product that IBM sells and advertises so often? R one that plays chess and was on jeopardy (Fun!) Turns out that Watson was the name of the dude that signed off on them accelerating the Holocaust for the nazis. Some believe the nazis couldn’t have been nearly as efficient at unrepentant large scale murder without IBM joining the fray, yet they skate on by…
The OG Nazis were actually bozos too, they just had very good propaganda. So good that you’re still seeing the effects today.
They were more competent bozos. They ran Germany the way that your stupid friend gets laid more often because they aren’t smart enough to be embarrassed by themselves and they know only one goal.
Whereas these guys run America like an ugly stupid person that insists that no, actually, they have already in fact convinced you to sleep with them despite what your words say and the goal is to confuse you into bed.
The best decision that nazis ever made was not to indiscriminately purge the military and bureaucracy. Purges certainly did happen but they were focused on the political class and very targeted elsewhere.
They kept the systems people depended on running well to not immediately create massive public backlash… they also got lucky as hell. The military and populace were deeply bitter after WW1 and they leveraged grand gestures to great effect while changing relatively little administratively. The fucks in the US are making flaccid grand gestures while tearing down systems people actually depend on.
Is it also a case of survivorship bias? Like, I am not super versed in Nazi history, but… There are famous “smart” Nazis like Goebbels and Himmler and Speer - are they only well known because a) they slowly emerged as influential and/or b) it became clear years later that they were the ones behind the wheel?
'Cause I do think that trump and musk are dumb as bricks, but I don’t think Steve Bannon is, and there are probably others like him…
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.
All 3 of those. Yes.
OG Nazis were looking for aryans in Tibet.
OG Nazis were bozos. They advanced people based on the shape of their face. How exactly do you think that would turn out in the long run?
Here’s Lazerpig dissecting the myth of Michael Wittmann for example.
Hopefully all 3 but as the other poster said, Nazis really were clowns.
Sure, Hitler had some early successes militarily - combined arms blitzkrieg was a new deal and effective - but it’s not like that won the war. Besides which there is just so much dumbass occult bullshit going on in the background with the Nazis like you would not believe.
You don’t need to be smart or super competent to get a bunch of people killed. You just need enough people willing to pull the triggers and for the rest of the people to go along. Going along is easy until it ends with shit like the Holocaust.
Going along is easy until it ends with shit like the Holocaust.
Have you seen the reactions every time someone suggests it’d be nice if Israel stopped shooting people and taking their land? We’re pro-genocide now.
to be fair, the israeli palestine conflict is significantly longer running than anything that the germans managed, and so far, hasn’t killed 6 million people, so there’s that.
Part of the problem is that it’s really really difficult to see the magnitude of the issue until the dust has settled, part of the reason we know how many people died in the holocaust is due to the work of various jewish archivists/historians that have spent decades crawling through information trying to piece together what they can, paired with the reasonably meticulous documentation that the germans were known for. (though i can’t confirm that one)
Up until we practically landed boots IN germany, we didn’t really have any idea what was going on, that’s part of why it took so long for anything to be done.
Thankfully it’s 2024 and we have modern technology, so you can’t exactly just “hide” things like genocide anymore, it’s a lot more apparent.
It’s not 2024, and the inability to hide things has apparently just made it more blatant when we decide to ignore genocide.
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.
Not every fascist and Nazi needed to be competent, intelligent, and put-together. Just enough of them. I suppose we’ll find out in real-time if they have amassed sufficient numbers this go 'round.
I think some of the more intelligent US Nazis are letting the bozos do their thing and riding the coat-tails and avoiding direct blame if things turn. I’m looking at a good chunk of the House and Senate.
The OG Nazis were actually bozos too.
“Your tax dollars are being stolen”
Rare moment of clarity from our global barony.
Right for the wrong reasons.
SQL is not web-scale
Time to watch this gem again: https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs
I cannot wait to cut off the testicles of a 3.000lb raging bull as it tries to kick my head in.
Brings me back
NoSQL is web-scale.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
The entire number is garbage. Change the last digit and you have randomly guessed a perfectly valid SSN.
Less secure than a gift card
You can guess a phone number as well by changing the last number, but that information has 0 value unless it is coupled with other informations.
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.
It doesn’t. There is no truely unique ID in the US.
Source: myself. Worked on health insurance and it was hell.
It’s wild too. I’ve been in the hospital a lot lately and in addition to a bar-code wristband, every healthcare worker, before doing anything with me (the patient) will ask my full name and either birthday or address and then double-check it against the wrist band. This is to make sure, at every step, that they didn’t accidentally swap in some other patient with the same name. (Not so uncommon, lots of men have their father’s name.)
Meanwhile in like Iceland, everyone gets assigned a personal GPG key at birth so you can just present you public cert as identification, not to mention send private messages and secure your state-assigned crypto-wallet. Not saying such a system is without flaw but it seems a lot better than what we’re doing!
This is a joke right? I really really hope that they aren’t trusting randoms to know how to manage a gpg key properly.
It’s hard enough to get people actually interested in it to do it correctly.
And using gpg to constantly identify yourself would mean needing to keep multiple copies of your private key all over the place. I find it unlikely that regular people are issuing new keys and revocation certs properly. Not to mention having canonical key servers (maybe the government could manage that, but the individual is responsible for maintaining a way to get the canonical most up to date key)
Using gpg backfires because if you lose access to the key or it’s compromised (say by putting it on your phone) you lose everything. They work for people who know what they are doing because you are supposed to issue keys for specific tasks and identities, but there is just no way that that is happening.
I’m being sarcastic but not by much. Nordic countries do have much better digital id systems and the EU overall looks to be following their model.
You want them to do that regardless of the how the country keeps track of individuals. The point of all that asking is to make sure they have the right patient for the right procedure.
You don’t want to have something amputated or removed unless you have to.
The SSN is supposed to just be a number that you give your employers and the IRS so that your social security (the USs blanket retirement savings/pension system) contributions get logged correctly to you and then when you retire you can use that number to get the social security benefits that you paid into. The number has ended up being used for all sorts of things because the USA is slightly broken because it is SORT OF a unique ID number for each US citizen, except of course that it wasn’t intended to be that, SSNs are only supposed to be used from first social security contribution (first paycheck) to last social security payout (death) so naturally they can just be recycled.
Thanks, get it now.
So, Elon doesnt know this and thinks that multiple uses of SSN is a proof of a fraud when in reality it is just a sign for a bad system that is not used as intended or not designed as it is needed?He’s complaining that a number isn’t unique and is being poorly used, but the number isn’t supposed to be unique and he’s complaining that it’s not being used in a way that experts are specifically warned not to use it in.
But on a second, stupider layer, this is the system those numbers originate from. So however they use them is how they’re supposed to be used.
But then, back above that first stupid layer, on an even more basic and surface level degree of stupid, the government definitely uses SQL databases. It uses just… so many of them.
This is a good summary. I had to go pull up wikipedia on it since I roughly knew that social security was a national insurance/pension kind of system but am actually hazy on details.
The major issue with it as id (aside from DBA’s gripes about it) is that credit agencies and banks started to rely on it for credit scores and loans. You see, the US has a social scoring system (what we always accuse China of) but the only thing it tracks is how reliable you are about paying off debts. So with your home address, name, and SSN, basically anyone can take out loans or credit cards in your name. This will then damage your credit score, making it harder to get loans, buy a home, rent property, or even get a job.
That’s why Americans are always concerned about having our identity stolen: because you don’t need a lot of info to financially ruin someone’s life.
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.
https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus explains it pretty well
Came here looking for Grey, was not disappointed.
Thank you!
SSNs are not reissued after death and never have been. I’ve been seeing a lot of people comment this, but I’m not sure where they’re getting it from. (They’re not unique for other reasons, however.)
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I’m hardly the king of databases, but always using a surrogate key (either an auto-incremented integet or a random uuid) has done me pretty well over the years. I had to engineer a combination of sequential timestamp with a hash extension as a key for one legacy system (keys had to be unique but mostly sequential), and an append-only log store would have been a better choice than an RDBMS, but sometimes you make it work with what you have.
Natural keys are almost always a bad idea though. SSNs aren’t natural, which is one pitfall: implicitly relying on someone else’s data practices by assuming their keys are natural. But also, nature is usually both more unique than you want (every snowflake is technically unique) and less than you’d hoped (all living things share quite a lot of DNA). Which means you end up relying on how good your taxonomy is for uniqueness. As opposed to surrogate keys, which you can assure the uniqueness of, by definition, for your needs.
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Just curious, but if SSNs were not recycled after death, would there be any reason not to use them as a primary key?
They’re sequential, so the values above and below yours are valid SSNs of people born in the same hospital around the same time.
This would make it trivially easy to get access to records you shouldn’t
Isn’t that assuming you have access to doing arbitrary SQL queries on the database? Then you’d by definition have access to records you shouldn’t.
As the user posted, one human can have more than one SSN in their lifetime. Many humans will never have an SSN. Some of those humans may have a TIN. Some humans may have at least one TIN and one SSN at some point.
(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
OP is talking about identity theft, not physically losing your card.
A government official known for performing a nazi salute just broadcast an ableist slur.
Cool cool cool
“Political appointee”
alien invader
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!"
Gotta keep play to the cheap seats, these clowns
btw do you know why it was decided to treat the r-word as an ableist slur? And why didn’t they also make “idiot” a slur, since it has basically the same etymology? Is this a lemmy-specific thing? I’ve never seen anyone use or interpret the r-word as a slur outside of lemmy
In contemporary language, that word (among others) is almost entirely used as an insult by way of equating somebody’s intelligence with those who have intellectual disabilities, which creates a negative connotation. Similarly, this is why we don’t say things we dislike are “gay” anymore. It’s disrespectful to the people who actually fall under the definition, and it proliferates negative associations with traits that people are stuck living with and had no choice in acquiring.
The only reason “idiot” hasn’t followed suit is because it’s much more culturally ingrained, and there’s hasn’t been as significant of an attempt to change it as with other words.
I’ve never seen anyone use or interpret the r-word as a slur outside of lemmy
It’s not exclusive to Lemmy, but it is mostly left-leaning spaces or gen Z individuals who see it that way. Center and right-leaning spaces see treating the word as a slur to be censorship (as opposed to being respectful of others) and keep using it or actively push back by saying it more.
Not Lemmy specific. There was US legislation related to the word being deemed offensive fifteen years ago (given the slow nature of Congress, it wasn’t a new sentiment then, either): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa’s_Law
Fair enough that plenty of insulting words could be cast as abelist: but my guess is that a word like “idiot” is old enough that most folks called that in a medical context aren’t around any more. Maybe I’m wrong though: plenty of folks do push against saying things like “crazy” in an insulting manner.
You must not be close to anyone that has any sort of mental illness. It’s a very broad and hurtful term. It has been for a long time.
Edit. Found this online
https://www.spreadtheword.global/resource-archive/r-word-effects
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
His response to the 2018 Thai Cave rescue is what made me realize how big of a shit stain on society he is.
He’s the Steven Segal of futurism
Now i Really want to see The Dipshit run.
