My Eclectic Tastes

You water your plants for the first time in a while. Surprisingly they’re not dead yet. You remember a movie that you really enjoy and you find the energy to watch it. You feel better afterwards. Maybe you still can’t find the motivation to reply to your friends but you buy yourself a nice scented candle and read your book. You take a nice long shower and you feel refreshed, so you put on an outfit you find cool. Then after what seems like forever, you get a good night of sleep. You wake up with more energy than usual so you play with your dog. Then you cook that healthy meal you really enjoy. You reach out to a friend.

You start remembering what brought you joy. You start again with the little things. You look back on the days that have passed and feel relieved they’re over.

Luke: she strangled Jabba the Hutt to death with a chain.

So right now, Musk is claiming to be going through government records to find fraud, waste, and abuse. Obviously that's not true because he's got a team of less than a dozen people, many of them have little to no actual experience (not being old enough to have actually had any), and the experience his team does have has nothing to do with actually tracing complex finances. What experience this team does have is in programming, or at least in software, so you'd expect that they might, at the very least, be okay at that.

Yesterday, Musk claimed that he'd found massive fraud in Social Security with payments going to 150 year old people. That sounds pretty bad right? Why did he claim that? Well, in examining the Social Security databases, they found a bunch of people listed with birthdays in 1875. Proof positive!

Yeah, except not so much. If you look more closely at those records, not only is every single birthday in 1875, but every single birthday is on the same date; May 20th, 1875. That's an oddly specific cluster isn't it?

If you work in software, you know there are a bunch of standards out there, and one of those standards is called ISO-8601. According to ISO-8601 standard, if there are issues with a date, your software should return a date of May 20th, 1875 because it's a date that just about no computer system would actually use. In other words, it uses an obviously wrong date because that way you know instantly that you have a problem, and it uses a specific date because then you can easily search for that specific date and see all of your bad data at once to make it easier to fix.

If Musk and his team were actually good or even minimally competent programmers, they might not be familiar with ISO-8601 specifically (there are a metric crap-ton of ISO standards and I doubt any rational human being is familiar with more than a few of them), but they'd see a cluster of strangely specific bad data and immediately check if it was part of an error standard before doing anything else. In this case it's not just that his (likely barely of age) programmer didn't spot this, no one else on his team, including him, did either.

Here it is again. You might want to save it just in case an accident like that happens again

her name was freddie oversteegen and she, at the age of fourteen, along with her older sister truus who was 16 and their friend johanna “hannie” schaft who was 19, was a part of the netherlands most famous all female resistance cell which was dedicated to fighting the nazis and dutch traitors.

among other things, they are known to have blown up bridges and railroads, smuggled jewish children from concentration camps and, as the tweet mentions, seducing nazis and then shooting them with guns that they had hidden in their bike baskets. freddie is quoted as having said that they “had to do it.” and that it was a “necessary evil, killing those who betrayed good people.”

though freddie and her sister truus were both lucky and survived the war, hannie schaft wasn’t. at the age of 24, hannie was caught and around three weeks later was executed by nazis, only 18 days before the netherlands were eventually liberated. she was shot with one only wounding her, and, before the final shot, hannie is quoted as having told the executioners: ik schiet beter, which translates to “i shoot better.”

though she didn’t survive, hannie is recognized as a national icon and a face of the dutch resistance, with her story even being retold in a movie from 1981 called “the girl with the red hair.” along with this, truus also founded the national hannie schaft foundation in 1992, on which freddie served as a board member.

freddie, at the time of her death, was 92 years old and the last surviving member of the resistance cell, with truus having died two years earlier at the age of 92.