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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That’s weird, I thought I used SQL databases from government agencies regularly. Guess I was mistaken.
If you and Elon disagree about something, just assume he’s wrong about it. If you both agree on something, THEN you might be mistaken.
i agree but would like to add that it’s generally good practice to stay away from rockets
this really needs more circulation because too goddamn many people still believe his PR
That’s phrased brilliantly, and capturey my own perception of Musk
Thank you. I was trying to find this earlier today.
If it’s tech he doesn’t know shit about it, I learned that years ago during the Twitter acquisition days
He sounds like a CEO who “knows enough to fuck shit up, not enough to know how to fix it, but thinks they do” AKA the worst executive known to IT
Remember when he said he knows more about engineering than anyone else on the planet?
Indeed. I’m starting to think I can’t trust what that Musk guy says.
Hey you’re looking for a new truck aren’t ya? Well do we have a deal for you!
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The US government basically ONLY uses SQL…
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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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!
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.
This has happened many times. In the last city I lived in, a man went in to have a leg amputated and they got the wrong one, so he ended up with zero legs.
This is the first I’ve heard something like that about Iceland; but I do know a little bit about Icelandic personal ID numbers.
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.
https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus explains it pretty well
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It’s supposed to be unique and might actually be now, but there are def duplicate ssns out there. Craziest identity situation I was told by a project manager of government system that is all about identities. Same First, Same last,same Date of Birth, same SSN; different people.
Weird story, and I have to assume this is data entry error, identity theft, or something else: I couldn’t sign up for a hospital billing platform because my name and full birthdate (including year) conflicted with someone else in the system. I called the hospital billing department and they were very confused about the whole situation. It didn’t really get resolved, and I basically had to let it go to collections so that I could pay because of the shitty system. I don’t have a very common name, and never have had this problem before.
(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.
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.
No. You can have control over specific parameters of an SQL query though. Look up insecure direct object reference vulnerabilities.
Consider a website that uses the following URL to access the customer account page, by retrieving information from the back-end database:
https://insecure-website.com/customer_account?customer_number=132355Here, the customer number is used directly as a record index in queries that are performed on the back-end database. If no other controls are in place, an attacker can simply modify the customer_number value, bypassing access controls to view the records of other customers.
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
Goddammit, now you’re giving him ideas.
2027 Bingo Card: US adopts BTC as reserve currency, replaces USD, both crash.
BTC? No way, that’s way too sane. It’s going to be DOGE.
Nah it’ll be Trump Coin. Gotta own the grift from the top down
It’s not impossible. There are a lot of crypto grifters who have been prepping to scam the American government.
Pretty sure that was already something they announced that they’d do.
I wouldn’t be giving him any ideas unless I founded a company and he bought his way in
He already wants to replace everything in the US with Blockchain and Crypto scam shit doesn’t he?
Did you want to trust a central authority for your Social Security? It’ll get censored! /s
Database schema = “Not fraudulant”, what’s so hard about that? Login credentials don’t even need to be encrypted if you say no fraud before you log in, and cross your fingers. It’s basic programming knowledge, come on man. Also throw some salt over shoulder and slaughter a goat for good measure just in case.
You just describe half of my career. 😅
You joke, but one of the programs at my work we use legit doesn’t need credentials, just a username. That one’s a head scratcher to me.
Would that almost be OK if it were like 40 characters long? Like, you can view any photo on Google Photos if you have the right alphanumeric string
Would still be saved insecurely in password managers and other issues though
Login? Why would I do that? Aren’t the credentials in the code? I just hit the go button.
In plain text I assume right? You’re not crazy…
If they weren’t in plain text how could we check to make sure it’s still there?
Login credentials don’t even need to be encrypted if you say no fraud before you log in, and cross your fingers
Don’t forget to unset the evil bit as well!
I remember seeing this after he bought Twitter
Storms I hope that’s true.
I kind of doubt it. It’s been known that he’s a fraud of a coder for a while, that seems like a clear riff.
Enough that I was really disappointed when Some More News talked about Zip2 like he was the sole founder and therefore must have been good at coding at some point.
Btw, the guy he and his brother founded the company with died at 51.
As a megarich techie… With the dirt on Elon’s real capabilities.
Interesting.
IIRC they kicked him out of PayPal because he wanted to run everything on windows instead of the Unix/Linux servers they were running on. And the reason for it was because he couldn’t figure out Linux.
He is a fraud gamer. He is almost definitely a fraud coder.
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 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…
Don’t forget Von Braun…
I’m no expert, but this podcast series seems to suggest Von Braun was mainly very focused on shooting rockets to the moon and fiddling the right guys to get crazy amounts of funding for that goal. I’m not saying he wasn’t a nazi, he was, but exterminating jews etc was probably not his mean focus in life… In the Von Braun case it was propaganda towards his own leaders, to get lots of money. The reason he’s well remembered is not propaganda but because what he tried actually worked out very well and was the basis for pretty much every rocket since. If he’ld happen to live in Soviet Russia, he would probably have become a member of the communist party, whatever would get him more money/free labor for shooting new trials towards space.
Stop carrying water for Nazis, liberal.
Even fucking Forbes thinks it makes you a clown.
Von Braun had a choice where he went to go. He chose the state with segregation and not the one with your “infinite labor supply” that beat America into orbit because he was a fucking Nazi.
Stalin had a nasty habit of putting some of his best designers into gulags. Von Braun probably would have ended up in one of them.
The high leadership were absolute bozos, except for their propaganda guy (Goebel?). And at the lower levels, they had good engineering (still do). Thankfully the higher ups were more interested in building an über-weapon (because that’s good propaganda) than actually winning the war.
Let’s hope the current crop of nazis se their downfall faster. Actually, fuck hope. Let’s make them.
OG Nazis were looking for aryans in Tibet.
Just look at the military decisions Hitler made, that was luckily an incompetent guy thinking he’s smarter than everyone else. That rings a bell, doesn’t it?
In the long run, making less stupid decisions wouldn’t most likely have changed the outcome, but even more people would likely have died (and unfortunately the people executing the murder of the Jews weren’t as incompetent as their glorious leader).
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.
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…
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.
It’s absolutely the second one. They basically all had brain damage from ww1 (who knew explosions are bad for you) and several of them including Hitler were drugged the fuck up. Julius Streicher was a clown, but not like a funny or sad clown, more like pathetic, like honestly comparable to someone from 8chan. Goebbels was a creepy loser. Hitler was a meth addict with ibs and anger issues who spent his last days just destroying the air quality of the bunker he would die in and kept invading countries despite already being at war. Heidrich died by personally chasing after antifascists who happened to have a grenade. And that’s not touching on their archeological or spiritual beliefs which are on par with qanon for believability and sensibility
Yep, the actual competence was basically in the army (inherited from a long military tradition), so it’s important that those generals don’t cave.
Heidrich died by personally chasing after antifascists who happened to have a grenade.
That’s a fucked up way to describe the assassination.
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.
The OG Nazis were actually bozos too.
All 3 of those. Yes.
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.
As someone who has literally helped the government use SQL for over a decade, this is huge news.
Elon and DOGE should really look into all of those Oracle contracts the Fed pays for. Must be all inefficiency and fraud.
Please do. Most of my sales these days are people dropping Oracle due to cost.
It would be one of the areas that would save the government a bunch of money. But, Ellison is in the Trump camp so it’s not going to happen.
Spinnaker? MongoDB? EnterpriseDB?
If Oracle works for the application and you want to save money, you’ll stick to SQL. Probably Postgres, MySQL, or MariaDB.
All of those are open source, so nothing to sell really (well, except MySQL, which is Oracle).
EnterpriseDB is the closest you can get to “selling” Postgres.
I’m sure EDB isn’t the only one in town selling support contracts for open source applications. It is a lucrative business.
Not the only one, but the closest one.
At least they aren’t using Access???
Access can do (some) SQL! 😱
I’ve worked for US federal government, access to Access* was the only way I could do some things that wasn’t torture… severe torture.
*keep in mind that SQL is a query language. It can be implemented in different ways and not necessarily within an RDMS.
Elon is basically what a dumb kid thinks smart people sound like
Ok genuine question, what is the difference between a SQL database and a simple Excel spreadsheet?
In the context of this tweet most important differences are:
SQL is a language for querying databases.
Most common used databases are relational databases. With relational databases you can setup, well, relations and constraints.
Imagine you have 2 tables (2 excel sheets) one with people, and one with home ownership. You can set the following constraint: (1) each person shows up only once in the people table. And the following relation: (2) every home owner must refer to an existing person in people table.
When modifying the table contents, the system checks if no constraints or relations are violated.
Excel, just like a badly designed relational databse, would, for example, have no problem with duplicate people, or home ownership referring to non-existant people.
I get what you say but excel even the 98 version can do duplicate/missing data constraints.
The big difference between the a relational database and a spreadsheet is that “can do” clause in your sentence. In a relational database they MUST have those constraints to be related.
In the Microsoft ecosystem Access is the relational database. Excel is a table manager with fancy features.
I spent more than I’d like to admit wondering “what the fuck is a wel relation?!”
The excel file contains the data. It’s equivalent to the database.
The excel program is how you interact with the data. SQL is how you interact with databases.
Doesn’t matter how the data is structured inside the database. You can ask in the SQL language and you will receive an SQL answer.
A whole lot. Too much to cover in one post in any kind of detail.
A modern relational database management system (RDBMS) is a highly optimized beast. How it accesses storage is very carefully considered. It has a whole mini language for defining relations between data. There are tools for debugging specific queries to make them faster. They index data with tradeoffs between read and write speeds. There are sophisticated locking mechanisms so multiple users can read and write at the same time. They have transactions where many alterations can be packed up together and written efficiently at once. Those transactional alterations are atomic, meaning there are guarantees that all of them happen or none of them happen. The entire thing is based on set theory, and it has survived attacks by many other pretenders to the throne for decades.
And if you’re using Oracle, you can get all that while paying a highly optimized pricing model set up by the best financial advisors Larry Ellison can find to maximize value extraction from your company.
And alternatively, for excel once you leave the realm of a single person entering data for a single project over time sizes you start entering the “why does this take 10 minutes to open” territory
People yell at you if you use an excel spreadsheet as a database
Does anyone yell if I use SQL?
Only the programmers that have to run queries in it because that’s their job. 😭
only is its sqlite.
Wow wow what did sqlite ever do to you
I have seen some unholy things done with it.
Many things. I mean, you could hack a lot of stuff into Excel but generally
SQL has foreign keys and integrity checks. You can make it so like if you delete a user it automatically cascades to delete other rows like their addresses.
You can prevent someone from entering the wrong type of data in particular columns. This one’s an integer and that one’s text.
It’s designed to work on larger scales. Excel stops at 1 million rows per spreadsheet, unless my search just gave me AI slop.
You can do queries, for selecting as well as updating and deleting. You can join tables.
It’s much easier for other applications (such as a website) to talk to a SQL database
You can do transactions.
There’s a lot. That’s just off the top of my head.
SQL is a language used to manage and interact with most relational databases so it is used often to describe relational databases. There are many tables in a relational database, each is very much like an excel tab. The excel spreadsheet can have many tabs relating to each other. So kinda similar. However a relational database is better defined, more functions and forced relationships, and most important space efficenct. Excel takes probably 100-1000 times more space, and that is best case.
So they both store data in a table like structure, but that’s about where the similarities end. Excel is useful for handling smaller more flexible data sets, but has performance, scalibility, storage, and structural deficiencies compared to SQL, it’s also harder for computer languages to communicate with a shared excel dataset and modify it vs SQL.
One of the major issues with excel as a database is data limits, excel only allows for ~1 million rows. Considering there are ~1 billion possible SSNs, excel would not be a great medium for them for that reason alone.
One big advantage of SQL is you need to structure your data on the creation of the table and it’s designed with the expectation that all data will fit a structure, including unique keys, format, and other limits and structures. This allows you to enforce database rules easily and massively reduce storage size and query times.
There are a bunch of other reasons for using SQL but most of it boils down to either it’s faster, easier for multiple computers to access and read/modify simultaneously, or better for enforcing rules and structures when modifying it.
The amount of data, sql is designed to manage large datasets, millions of rows. Excel has its limits.
Storage data structures. Database tables are designed for fast read/write. Excel is designed for fast simultaneous parallel computation.
To get a sense of what this looks like, you can read more about their data structures; Databases typically store data in what’s called a “B Tree” and spreadsheets typically store as a format that can be easily converted into a “Directed Acyclic Graph” (although Excel lets you turn off the “acyclic” part if you allow circular references).
Although, with Excel specifically, there’s probably not much difference since it has some database functionality now.
He used to be regarded as tony stark. Nah he is Justin Hammer. Steals ideas implements them shit and has no idea about anything
I used to think he was the modern Thomas Edison, but it turns out he’s actually the modern Thomas Edison.
Difference is, Edison had scientist that invented something useful. Elon, well…he came up with the idea of a shittier version for busses, trams and subways
That’s so fucking clever, I love it.
I get your point but I disagree. I think both Tony Stark and Justin Hammer are more competent than Elon.
Hammer was no where near as good as Tony but he did make some good stuff.
I would say he’s more like Obadiah Stane, an opportunist taking credit for others work.
True. Atleast Hammer knew his weapons and could sell them alone
Phony Stark*
Dont forget openly bragging about his wide berth of knowledge
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.
Elon probably thinks
Not really sure he does, I think he’s clearly paying others to do that for him
My bad, I forgot he doesn’t have time to think.
Too busy being one of the best players at Path of Exile 2. Despite that he doesn’t identify the valuable loot. Or how to use the map. Or how levels work. But he’s top 50! All very believable.
They probably do use lots of NoSQL DBs too, which perform better for non relational “data lake” style architectures where you just wanna dump mountains of data as fast as possible into storage, to be perused later.
When you have cases where you have very very high volume of data in, but very low need to query it (but some potential need, just very low), nosql DBs excel
Stuff like census data where you just gotta legally store it for historical reasons, and very rarely some person will wanna query it for a study or something.
Keep in mind when I talk about low need to query, the opposite high need us on the scale of like, "this db gets queried multiple times per minute’
Stuff like… logins to a website, data that gets queried many times per minute or even second, then sometimes nosql DBs fall off.
Depends what is queried.
Super basic “lookup by ID” Stuff that operates as just a big ole KeyValuePair mapping ID -> Value? And thats all you gotta query?
NoSql is still the right tool for the job.
The moment any kind of
JOINenters the discussion though, chances are you actually wanna use sql nowJust so you know census data is very heavily queried. Everything from civil engineering to economics wants to look at that dataset every day.
Like I said, in the scale compared to actual high frequency data though, that’s still be infrequent.
High frequency DBs are on the scale of many queried per second
Even with tonnes of data scientists and engineers querying the data, that’s still in the scale of queries per minute, which is low frequency in the data world.
I wouldn’t put it past them to experience numbers in the per second realm, especially as new data posts and everyone is rushing to grab it.
To nitpick, Census data is heavily queried. They use Oracle now, I believe.
I wouldn’t even consider “per minute” frequently queried. Per millisecond for stock market shit
Lol had never seen that before, but Jesus Christ that is a painful depiction of my life.
Felon Musk is such a fucking moron lol
Musk doesn’t understand database design (or the existence of
PRIMARY KEY ()), surprise.Maybe Musk needs to learn about data normalization and natural keys.
I’m curious what the actual data looks like. I’ve spent quite a bit of time auditing large data systems.
I would expect these databases to be largely denormalized with very wide tables, I would expect them to favour natural keys like a SSNs, and built around per department use cases.
I would not expect them to be highly normalized because then when you need something from another department you need them to ensure consistency.
These systems probably have like 50 years of legacy code or more in them too.
That’s what he does. Not understand things.
Now now, he also has LeAdErShIp skills like taking his incorrect understandings and making the ToUgH dEcIsIoNs and being DeCiSiVe and taking RiSkS that will in no way impact his lifestyle but could destroy the careers and lives of thousands to millions of other people.
More importantly, not understand things and then comment on them like he is the real shit
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.
