SSN numbers are good for 999,999,999 people alive or dead. At some point the US will hit that, right? Do we start reusing numbers? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

  • bokherif@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    How about dead SSNs between ‘36 and ‘62? Great work on the calculation but all I’m saying is, if the government ran out of numbers and recycled them already, nobody would know about it. The whole situation is ridiculous if you ask me and there’s no database of SSNs you can compare it to. Weirdly enough, official government departments straight up lie about things and easily get away with it heh.

    • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      How about dead SSNs between ‘36 and ‘62?

      That’s why I extrapolated from the 1962-2018 numbers and came to a total number of 174.4 x 10^6 deaths.

      The whole situation is ridiculous if you ask me.

      Oh I agree. But it’s a classic issue with old databases. We had a similar issue awhile back with license plates in Denmark. The plates had been assigned inefficiently by incrementing parts annually. So we had unused ranges as well as disused plates. But somehow nobody had made a list of these plates.