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The Almighty Buck Operating Systems Software Technology

Computer Program Prevents 116-Year-Old Woman From Getting Pension (theguardian.com) 216

Bruce66423 quotes a report from The Guardian: Born at the turn of the past century, Maria Felix is old enough to remember the Mexican Revolution -- but too old to get the bank card needed to collect her monthly 1,200 pesos ($63) welfare payment. Felix turns 117 in July, according to her birth certificate, which local authorities recognize as authentic. She went three months without state support for poor elderly Mexicans after she was turned away from a branch of Citibanamex in the city of Guadalajara for being too old, said Miguel Castro, development secretary for the state of Jalisco. Welfare beneficiaries now need individual bank accounts because of new transparency rules, Castro said. "They told me the limit was 110 years," Felix said with a smile in the plant-filled courtyard of her small house in Guadalajara. In an emailed statement, Citibanamex, a unit of Citigroup Inc, said Felix's age exceeded the "calibration limits" of its system and it was working to get her the bank card as soon as possible. It said it was adjusting its systems to avoid a repeat of the situation.
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Computer Program Prevents 116-Year-Old Woman From Getting Pension

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  • Poor design (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 27, 2017 @08:04AM (#54312157)

    The limit clearly should have been 256 from the beginning.

    • Re:Poor design (Score:4, Insightful)

      by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @08:05AM (#54312161)
      Wouldn't that require an 8.005624549-bit integer type?
      • by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @09:14AM (#54312533) Homepage Journal

        No, children below age of 1 are not eligible for elderly welfare benefits.

      • Wouldn't that require an 8.005624549-bit integer type?

        No. log2(116) + 1 (because first bit is 0/1, every other is 2^n where n>1 = 7.85798099513. Then, you floor the value because the 7 is the highest-order bit needed, and the remainder is made up as a subset (i.e. 1 doesn't require another bit to represent, can be represented in combination of lower bits). So 7 bits. So even using 8-bit bytes, signed or unsigned, her age would be fine..

        • (i.e. 1 doesn't require another bit

          Should have read "less than 1 doesn't require another bit" but slashey ate my <

    • Clearly they didn't do a Boundary Value Analysis and didn't cover their Equivalence Partition Classes correctly
    • 180. That's as long as Adam was supposed to have lived according to the Bible. If you believe that sort of thing. I think the modern recorded limit is like 122.

      • by Bruce66423 ( 1678196 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @09:45AM (#54312763)

        Gen 5:5

        Methuselah 969 Gen 5:25

        What DO they teach them in Sunday School these days...

        • What DO they teach them in Sunday School these days...

          Fiction. But nobody really reads or even really believes the bible anymore anyway. People just pick and choose the bits of it to follow that suit their particular sensibilities and pretend that only those bits are the "word of god". In fact most of them don't even read the bits they follow. Someone else reads those bits and that someone else tells them what they want them to mean. Must be nice to have a world view unencumbered by evidence or logic or responsibility...

          • My favorite quote from the bible for those who pick and choose:

            Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.... Jesus said, "Go thou, and do likewise."

        • That Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise because the pension system was clearly unsustainable.

          • Speaking of Adam and Eve, I've often wondered how the human population developed. Cain supposedly killed his bother, and nothing was said about female humans born to Adam and Eve. Even if Adam and Eve had daughters, or Cain and Eve have daughters, did Cain and/or Adam have children with Eve's daughters? Sounds like lots of incest was going on regardless of the situation.
      • Mathuselah was 969. But surely people didn't live seven times longer. Were earth years shorter? What would cause earth's orbit to slow, I wonder.

    • Not thinking it through, watch them set the limit to 118.

  • by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @08:07AM (#54312171) Homepage Journal
    Surely you meant "AI" or "deep neural net", not just a "computer program"? It is 2017.
  • Wrong! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @08:19AM (#54312225)

    The computer program isn't preventing anything, it's a bank that wrote shitty software that is preventing it. Do not blame machines for doing exactly what you told them to do!

    • Except of a law or guideline (also written by people) was preventing her from getting money, you'd still say "Law prevents woman from getting her money."

    • Actually it's worse than that. It's the bank manager (or CEO) that refuses to input false information with a note having the truth and a memo to their employees to fix it or be fired.

      Computers are not perfect. The difference between a good manager and a MORON is the moron says "sorry, the computer won't let us do that", while the manager ignores the rules and takes personal responsibility to see that the customer gets serviced.

  • So crunching some numbers. Hard math ahead, watch out: So one spends 2 decades in school. Works for 5 decades. Is on pension for 5 more decades. So one's productive for less than half of one's whole life, and during that time one must support oneself and another unproductive person (young or old).

  • ...I just want to know the magic being her old age.

    Perhaps it's a brand of Tequila she drinks every day that keeps her in such high spirits.

    • by bongey ( 974911 )

      She isn't 116 is the reason, just do a google image search for "oldest living person". She easily looks 10-20 years younger. Her birth certificate was most likely issued much later than her actual birth date. That is also why the genius world records organization requires more than just a local birth certificate. https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]

  • by hidflect ( 769917 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @08:37AM (#54312323)
    In accordance with our records, you should be dead now. Please do the needful...
  • The bigger question is why the limit was 116 and not a round binary number, like say 128.
    • Actually the limit was 110 supposedly. It's probably stored as a base 10 decimal number. Maybe in BCD format. This being a stodgy financial database.

      • Banks are big users of AS/400. I'm thinking it has something to do with EBCDIC. Flight numbers are still 6 characters long because of some IBM limitation from the early 1960s.

    • In COBOL 110 is generally more-round than 128.

  • Go into the fucking vault and get the lady her pension money in cash. The bank can eat the loss, the problem is their fault, and at her age, she's earned it.

    • by mysidia ( 191772 )

      Yeah.... give her the cash assistance she was due PLUS 25% default interest for the bank's past failure in their obligation to settle up their debt promptly.

  • Born before 1907? Seriously the bank should give every customer they have that reaches 110 $100,000 in cash and be done with it. Fixing the system will cost 50 times that.

    There are likely many places in the system that only have 2 digits for the year of birth. There is likely no source code for all of them and even if there is the documentation and coding styles used make fixing this almost impossible. You can't just lengthen the field as the code expect things to be at specific offsets. (there is li
    • I doubt very highly it's a 'two digit year' storage issue.

      More likely, it's perfectly correct and reasonable boundary checking; an age should never be less than 0, and never more than, what? How many people are actually older than 110? She is an extreme outlier, and proof positive that the boundary checking is working.

      • by mysidia ( 191772 )

        So, what happens when someone wakes up from a 130 year cryo sleep, and their age is now 160?

  • Surely there is some down and dirty fast solution to get her money into her hands. A court appointed guardian or social worker could receive, convert to cash and put her money in hand. And the bank should easily be able to upgrade that software in a matter of hours, not days.
  • I wonder how many times the code correctly shut off payments to people who were really dead. 110 is the wrong upper limit, but I don't know that the idea of an upper limit is bad. If the limit were 140, would we feel sufficiently confident to disallow payment?

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