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.
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). 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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus explains it pretty well
Thank you!
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’m in the middle of building a small Access database. I keep having to dissuade a coworker not to use people’s SSNs as the primary key for a table of persons. I didn’t even know these facts about SSNs; it just seemed like a bad idea.
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.
He’s doing a “census audit” and trying to consolidate a lot of different datasets from different sources containing the same individuals. None of the sources contain any sort of unique ID column in common so he’s using the SSN I guess to join tables? I don’t fully understand what he’s doing. I don’t think he actually has a functioning relational database setup. The few glimpses I’ve seen of his Access database looks chaotic.
Separately I made a simple database with the same persons for the purposes of generating monthly invoices, and I gave them auto-increment IDs; my database is supposed to link to his because he wants to monitor record changes and incorporate them into his ongoing census thing. But he’s not liking my primary key and keeps wanting me to switch to SSNs so it’s easier for him to do whatever he’s doing.
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
A government official known for performing a nazi salute just broadcast an ableist slur.
Cool cool cool
Gotta keep play to the cheap seats, these clowns
Maury determined that this was a lie.
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.
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.
Lmao we’re gonna get to watch eel-on-musk and all of his dipshit wünderkinds speedrun through all of the pitfalls a junior DBA / data engineer is liable to make, and they’re gonna do it on prod, and prod is the US government.
What could possibly go wrong
Either a DELETE FROM or a DROP DATABASE if I had to guess
An
UPDATEwithout aWHEREclause that doesn’t get noticed for a week or two. Your data’s hosed and you can’t really cope with reverting to your last known good backup. Bonus points if you haven’t tested your recovery procedures recently. Then he runs around screeching about how the data is obviously fraudulent and he’s a genius for finding it.Little Johnny Tables, the hero we didn’t expect.
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 hope the screenshot dude is also going to stop this unquestioning belief in the things people say or claim without evidence.
Those first two paragraphs look like a tendency to prefer hero-worship to critical thought; that seems to be a fairly widespread problem in humans from long before this latest batch of demagogues.
There’s also a hint of “I’m not an ‘expert’ in it so I can’t (be bothered) to understand anything about it” also a very depressingly common attitude.
That’s phrased brilliantly, and capturey my own perception of Musk
this really needs more circulation because too goddamn many people still believe his PR
Thank you. I was trying to find this earlier today.
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!
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
And if it isn’t tech he knows even less about it.
This guy Elons
Removed by mod
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?
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 nowI wouldn’t even consider “per minute” frequently queried. Per millisecond for stock market shit
So you’re saying Relational DataBase Management Systems do really well as soon as Relations are involved?
And Structured Query Language is a handy language for querying structured data?
What’s funny is that Relational Databases in fact sucks when somewhat complex Relations are involved. Moment you step out the of the realm of Tabular data you’ll have very miserable time. Like good luck modeling and querying simple nested product catalog.
Graph databases are better choice for truly relational data
To nitpick, Census data is heavily queried. They use Oracle now, I believe.
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.
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.
Maybe it’s all just one big .xlsm file?
Using pivot tables.
Nah, that’s too fancy. It’s all held together by some arcane Visual Basic macro someone wrote 25 years ago right before going to retirement and no one has dared to touch it ever since.
Qbasic, if that.
Biden is a blue dog and never cared about infrastructure. Trump cant spell the word. Obama did, but for overpriced drones and oil. Bush only did for oil and deregulated to make things worse. Clinton cut thing Bush Sr cut things. Reagan fucked everything up with “trickle down”
Meaning the last president that did major infrastructure spending is at best Carter, Ford or Nixon.
Holy mother of visual basic
*visual basic for applications
being corrected by a nsfw acc was not on my lemmy bingo list lol
I could see it all being a big vendor specific XML file with XSLT for the application layer
with vlookups across multiple sheets to get around row limitations, that’s just common sense in MyExcelDB
You guys are idiots, they use dbeaver and pgadmin not sql… Or maybe its Acess yes they use Acess
Musk doesn’t understand database design (or the existence of
PRIMARY KEY ()), surprise.Also that’s not how deduplication works.
He means/thinks that SSN is not unique (which is not a problem, just different design).
Of course he’s wrong about lots of stuff, just the nerd in me could not not explain it.
I imagine he’s looking at a payments table where there is a non-unique key to relate a citizen to each payment.
