@nicholas @mac_ack @sun > Nobody I've seen offering this claim has even attempted to explain why auto-paying social security for people who don't have valid birthdays in the system is in any way less concerning or worthy of investigation.

in another thread someone pointed out the 'why' here -- because people old enough to have had paper record(anyone on old age-based social security, whatever it's called down there) may not have had it and it's more cost effective to just have the local government office just know who people are than to actually bother to collect birthdays for everyone in a systematic way.

it's a generational culture gap - 2 generations ago, the idea of collecting even that kind of basic data on people even for a government was seen as a lot of work nowadays(and probably suspicious) now it's just an entry in a database, that if the system has been working since birth should be automatically there

in the past -- your proof of birthday like your proof of anything else was *your* responsibility to have the documentation for *on paper*. there wasn't necessarily a central location where that data was stored, and if it was, there was no guarantee that they would actually have the data or even if they did that they would be ever able to retrieve it.

1976's alan westin's "databanks in a free society" described the current state of things in the 40s-70s generally and what a mess it was.