Hi, everybody, it's Charles W. Chuck Bryant here. Why don't you jump back into the wayback machine with me and we'll go back to April nineteen, twenty twelve for this Saturday Selects episode Social Security Numbers colon less boring than You'd think, And I gotta tell you it is less boring than you'd think. This is a really good episode, So check it out. If you didn't think you wanted to know about social Security numbers, think again, pal.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant aka two eight six five four seven five two three.
Dude, you can't come out your social Security number. I just made that up. I thought about that. I thought about what if I like ended up when we were describing like what the different numbers were. Yeah, I was like, well, my have to be this one. If you listen to the whole podcast, you could put together a social security number. And I was like, don't do that, Josh, don't.
We should probably beep out what I said anyway, because that might be someone else's social Security number.
Yeah, I don't.
I don't want to be responsible for that.
Okay, we'll go back and beat that out. That's really some CoA right there. Why how do you know that that person would be there? Like, yes, you should notice called me out serial number? Why I want a contest.
I can pay for my own hotel in Atlanta to go see the guys.
But just me, so Jerry like that? Yeah? So chuck, josh. Uh do you know much about social security?
A bit?
You're about to chuck?
Yes.
The Social Security Act of nineteen thirty five, Yes, created by our old timey forebears, basically created a scheme, and not scheme in the way of like a carbon trading scheme or something like that. I know you don't like that word, but it's a legitimate word. It doesn't necessarily mean something nefarious. Right, But under this scheme, social security is given to retiring workers, yes, in the month, in the form of a monthly payment, where basically it says, hey,
good job, you did a good job working. Go take care of yourself. We don't want you to die on the street. Sure, this should hopefully sustain you in your retirement years. Right. This is before the advent of four oh one k's and the like.
Right, this just thirty five bucks a month.
Right, Well, the whole basis of it is that the workers of today pay into the Social Security fund and it is immediately taken and distributed dispersed to workers who have retired today. Yeah, so the workers of today are taking care of the workers of yesterday. That's the whole point too. It So this has led some people to claim that the Social Security program is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme where you're taking the money of these people to pay off other people, or socialism even Oh,
it's totally different. It is socialism.
Yeah, but people cry socialism a lot these days, and they don't think about things like social security in all the different ways we do have socialism that people are like, oh, that's fine.
Right, sure, yeah, Well but you can make a case that it is a Ponzi scheme. Sure, but Stephen Goss, chief Actuary for the Social Security Administration, would take issue with that.
I'm sure he would.
He would say it's not a Ponzi scheme because a Ponzi scheme is not sustainable.
Some might argue that social security is not sustainable, and that is, as we say here in the South. That's a whole nother show.
Oh okay, well I won't talk about it anymore.
Well, what do you have some numbers on its sustainability? Well, we can chat about it.
Here's the thing. So if you just if you had zero population growth, this thing would work forever, right, and
it would work completely efficiently with no changes whatsoever. Unfortunately, we don't have zero population growth, and we actually had a spike in population that we know of as the baby boom, right, which means that very shortly and starting now, I think more, there will be way more retired workers than there are workers, which means that the workers of today are going to have far greater burden placed on them taking care of these retired workers than any other workers ever.
Have or will.
But Stephen Goss, chief factuary for the Social Security Administration, says this will eventually work itself out. The government's taken steps to address this, and what is done is raise the amount of money that people throw into this. And they're taking the extra money, and the government is buying treasury bonds, investing in itself. Now here's the weird thing. When they come mature, these bonds, the government pays these
things off with other tax money. So the government is going to pay the Social Security fun back with other tax money.
Yeah.
Now, this will drive people crazy, conservatives, libertarians, liberals, right leaning liberals, right fiscally conservative liberals especially, But Stephen Goss assures us it's just a little bump. We're probably not going to have another population spike for a while, and Social Security will go right back to normal. It just sticks for us right now.
Right. The other thing that I'd never really thought about is it could not have been a sustainable program even to begin with, because you start Social Security and when was it, nineteen thirty five? Yeah, people started getting paid out, you know, a year later, two years later, and so they weren't paying in that long. So immediately you've got a problem on your hands because people are starting to get payouts that didn't pay in for twenty years.
Well saying, yes, that is the case, but they were smaller at first.
Yeah, but it still creates a bit of a wrinkle. I think that would wrinkle in time for the future.
I think so. But it was a hump that had to be gotten over, and it was gotten over, like basically the first people just got screwed.
Yeah, well, well, but they didn't pay in that much either though, So.
No, and that's true. So they were rightly screwed. Okay, so let's talk about the history of all this chuck. And by the way, I guess the takeaway from the intro social Security is considered a.
What a punt sis scheme.
I think people were just in there, like say, I know, all.
Right, well you already you already blew the big secret there the Act of nineteen thirty five. It was coined. The name social Security was coined by Abraham Epstein, who led the American Association for Social Security. Yeah, and they began paying out in thirty seven, like you said, yeah, just for workers, right, and it was.
The biggest wage journer of a household basically the dad, right got the money as the retiree. Yeah, and it was a lump something, right.
They didn't pay it in monthly buckets back then.
Tell him what the first guy who got social Security got his lump sum.
Yeah, his lump sum was was it seventeen cents?
Yeah, in January nineteen thirty seven. He was the first guy to get Social Security benefits. And I lickd it up. That's two dollars and fifty five cents in twenty ten money.
Oh wow.
So even back then he was just like, hey, federal government, I got some in my pocket for you.
Yeah, Josh just made an obscene gesture. We should just say that. In nineteen thirty nine, just two years later, they added survivors benefits and benefits to spouses and children. Flash forward to fifty six, they added disability benefits. Medicare was signed into law. Yeah, and in sixty one, the uh, I'm sorry. In sixty one sixty two, the Civil Service Commission and the IRS adopted the Social Security number as your official federal ID number and taxpayer ID number, right respectively.
Which is a kind of a thing because the first Social Security cards specifically said on them not to be used as identification. Yeah, but they never made a follow up law to enforce it, and so everybody's like, no, it's perfect for identification.
Yeah, I'll always remember it because of this card in my wallet.
We'll use the mark of the beast as identification.
The first numbers, because this is not just about Social Security but more about the numbers, which is more interesting than I thought. Slightly, Yeah, it was. They were distributed through the post office because they didn't have field offices yet. So yeah, forty five thousand post offices took the initial task to type up. These cards are called typing centers.
Yeah. So basically this is what I This is the part I entitled bureaucracy. Ho right, Yeah. The Social Security Administration contacted all employers in the United States and said, hey, this is a form SS four and on it you just list the number of employees you have working for you mail it back to us. And so all the employers filled out I have fifteen employees and then mailed
the SS four back to the Social Security Administration. Social Security Administration opened up the SS fours and they said, okay, this employer has fifteen employees, so we're going to mail him fifteen SS five forms, which are basically signing up for your Social Security number.
Yeah.
Right, So they mailed the fifteen back, probably in one package, to the employer, and the employer distributed them among his employees. The employees filled out the SS five forms and they sent them back to the Social Security Administration. Social Security Administration said, oh, okay, now we have these and we're going to assign social Security numbers, right right. They said, hey, go to your post office the post Office gave them
the social Security numbers. The Post Office then sent that duplicate form to the Social Security Administration, who created the master file of all of these documents put together, which was your social Security.
Number file, and that was sent to Maryland.
Yes, and then in Maryland is where it all came together.
That's right. Yeah, well what came together there? The numbers, the numbering, the whole thing, your whole file. Okay, the block file, that's right. So let's talk about the first numbers since we're there.
Who has it? And is it zero zero one zero one zero zero zero one? Is it the first number?
No? Well, we should first say that no one knows for sure who got the very first card in the very first number, because they reckon about several hundred thousand people applied in that first November of nineteen thirty six.
So he didn't do the math, but they're some I'm sure you could figure out statistically, and I'd be interested to hear how to do this. But if one hundred thousand people all got their card that day, yeah, and the post offices were open from like eight to five, sure how many people were handed their Social Security number card simultaneously? That day, right, how many first people were there? There's got to be some awesome math equation to figure that out.
Yeah, somebody should do that for us since then, so they don't know officially who it was, but their first official record they do know. It was a guy named John David Sweeney Junior. And he had the social Security number five to five nine one, and by oh, I mean zero of course or ought.
And he got his because the head of the Social Security Administration took it off the top of a stack, yeah, and said this is the first one. That's right, So there you go.
But they did offer that to oh no, they sorry.
The zero zero one number, the lowest number right on record.
Right before we get to there, though, John David Sweeney ironically died before he could collect his Social Security payments.
John David Sweeney's the one with the first social Security number, So that is very ironic.
It is.
That's the fact of the podcast if you ask me.
Oh yeah, yeah, because retirement age was sixty five and he died at sixty one. Yeah, Today they handle it differently. It's a little confusing, but actually it's not that confusing. You just have to be good at math. Benefits are reduced by five nights of one percent for every month you retire before the age of sixty five. Slacker yeah or rich person.
Yeah, good for you.
So so back to the number one one or whatever.
Yeah, the all time low number holder who always will be until we start recycling numbers if we ever need to. We won't. We may, we may. Her name is Grace d Owen. She is of Concord, New Hampshire, or Conquered Okay, and uh yeah, because we always get male from people. It's like, oh, you pronounced it Nevada, it's Nevada. Or if we say Nevada, they say, hey, you pronounced Nevada incorrectly, it's Nevada.
No, it is Nevada. But I tell everyone that writes in from Nevada only people from Nevada say Nevada. Everyone else has.
Nevada, especially people in Missouri. So chuck. Grace Diowen of Concord, New Hampshire got the lowest number zero zero one zero one zero zero zero one with her security numbers. It was and she got that not because she was first in line. As we've said, different guy got that low number or a different guy got the first number, and it wasn't low. She got it because of where she lived. Originally, the number scheming was based on, well, the first two numbers were based on the state you lived.
In, right, and starting northeast, moving westward.
Right, and so you had less than fifty possible primary numbers, the first two, first three numbers.
Yeah, well not even They didn't even have fifty at the time, did they.
No, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, so this is a total waste of digits. They figured out very quickly, so they started assigning them to zip codes instead. Right, And we should talk about these numbers. Do you want to hear Are we there?
Well, we are almost there, but you didn't mention that Grace Owen got that number. That actually offered it as an honor to John G. Winnet, the Social Security Board chairman, and John Campbell, the Federal Bureau of Old Age Benefits rep for the Boston They offered them both the number one one one, and they both said, no, no thanks.
We are true bureaucrats and that would be against the bureaucracy's rules.
That's right. And seventeen cents to Ernest Ackerman, the first guy to get a payment.
Yes, but item a Fuller made out like a bandit.
This is exactly the problem.
This is not the problem. Missus Fuller did good things with her money. She bought herself an edsel. Yeah, she uh invested in uh webvan. She did great things. She did so item A. Fuller retired in November nineteen thirty nine, and she was the first person to start collecting monthly benefits. So by the time she by the time Social Security payments, or by the time you had to start paying him,
because another fact is that you can't opt out. And the time she retired, she contributed a total of twenty four dollars and seventy five cents. Yes, because of the Social Security scheme. By the time she died at age one hundred and nineteen seventy five, she collected a total of twenty two thousand, eight hundred and eighty eight dollars and ninety two cents.
She not sustainable.
She made out. She wore like a bandanna around her face like the rest of her life. She did.
Yeah, she was a Social Security bandit.
Yeah.
Okay, back to the numbers. Is that enough history?
I think so? Ok So, the first three numbers they're called what the area numbers, yes, And like you said, they were originally from northeast to west. So like if you were if you lived in New Hampshire, you your first three numbers were going to be zero zero one. Then they figured out that, well, that's stupid, Like we're going to have fifty states top, so there's a whole
number that we're not using. Eventually we're gonna need it because Social Security numbers aren't recycled, they're retired after the person dies, right, that is true. So then they started assigning them to zip code, so that started using up a lot more numbers, right.
Yeah, zip code on the mailing address on the application form, which didn't necessarily indicate your residence. It's just wherever the mailing address was where you applied.
Right, exactly when you were living, right, And it doesn't, Yeah, it doesn't. Mailing in residence is not the same address most times, it is, sure, but even still, like the place where I was born is not where I live now. Oh yeah, so right, So I mean you have a lot of weird numbers for.
The beginning, correct in the early seventies, since seventy two is when they started the zip code. So I believe that I actually in one of the last years since I was born in seventy one, last people to get the one based on the state. Cool, So I'm old timing.
Seriously, that is something.
Yeah.
The next two numbers are group numbers, so you have your area number, and then the area number is broken into groups zero one through ninety nine.
Yeah, and this makes sense.
So the two numbers in the middle are the you are that group of that zip code or that state, depending on how old you are.
Yeah, it was just a means to break it up and make it simpler for accounting and filing and all that stuff.
Right, because instead of just one group sure from an area or what nine hundred and ninety nine possible areas, Yeah, you now have ninety nine groups of nine hundred and ninety nine possible areas, ninety nine groups each, which allows for a lot more because the eight ball that the Social Security number is always behind is basically running out of numbers.
I don't think it'll happen. It will well eventually, but there's what they say, a billion combinations.
There's a billion combinations. But consider this, there's been more than four hundred million numbers issued since nineteen thirty five. Yeah, so what sixty five seventy seven years, right, I have a feeling that does take into account the baby boom that ate up a lot of numbers, But I mean I have a feeling that we could we could reach that and what another one hundred, one hundred years, the US will be around I'm sure longer than then, hopefully.
Hey you never know, Yeah, China is rising. Well it'll be at the very least not in our lifetime.
Oh no, so who cares. I would have agreed with you. You qualified it like that.
Yeah. Well, what they'll probably do is, and I'm guessing here, but they'll probably start reassigning numbers from dead people.
Which will be weird. I use social Security number.
Yeah, I imagine they'd go back. I mean, it would make sense to me that they would start from the beginning again almost. Yeah, so like you're using someone's number from nineteen thirty five in the year it's twenty one fourteen. Yeah, you got a stinky old mothball number.
It's like a wicker wicker wheelchair or something like that, or like leather leg braks. Is something weird, like from the thirties?
What are you talking about?
You know exactly what I'm talking about Okay.
The last four digits are the serial numbers, and they number consecutively from triple O one through nine nine nine nine.
So that's just saying, well, we're going to extend the number the possible numbers we can come up with exactly even more as a billion. And you know what, you don't even necessarily have to recycle even if you add like an extra attempt digit. How much would that change everything?
I mean, they'd have to rewrite all their programming and all their accountings.
But then we wouldn't have to recycle numbers.
Yeah, good point. Okay, Luckily they have people much smarter than that's deciding how to handle that.
I don't know, we're pretty sharp, all.
Right, Josh, common questions, these are actually pretty good.
Okay, Chuck, here's a question for you. Does everyone have to have a Social Security number?
If you're over eighteen, then yes, you do. And if you receive an income and you're over eighteen, okay, if you're interested in starting up a bank account, being a deduction on your parents' income taxes, all sorts of things like that, metal getting medical coverage, taking advantage of government services, then you're going to need that.
So there's a lot of people who dispute that that you have to have that right. Practically speaking, you do, like any bank can be like I'm not doing business with you, and then you say, oh, okay, well I can't force you to buy law, but I'll try your competitor, and you go on down the line and maybe you find a bank. From what I understand, there's banks that are set up in the Midwest for people who don't have Social Security numbers, who have said I'm not going
to have one. I don't trust the government, I don't want to have a serial number, and I'm not going to have this now.
But they're still paying in.
Uh yeah, yeah, I think they're still paying in, but they don't have a Social Security number, so.
That means they're not going to get benefits at the end.
I don't think they think they're going to get benefits anyway. I could get that, but yeah, they don't have a Social Security number. I think there are there are people
who don't pay Social Security as well. It's like a whole Yeah, there's like a whole topic along the fringe of whether or not you need to have one, whether or not you actually do have to pay in the constitutionality of it, all that stuff, but for all practical purposes, your life is exponentially easier if you have a Social Security number.
Right, And you also said you have to pay because you can't tell the government, you know what, I'm setting up for my own retirement, and I want to take all the available money that I make to do that because my retirement plan is much better than whatever U yokals are working on.
Yeah, because I mean, if you you have to pay you in fifteen point three percent. I don't know if that's current. I haven't looked, but as of the writing of this article, it was fifteen point three percent, seven points sixty five percent paid by you out of your gross pay and seven point sixty five paid by your employer.
It is staggering how much we pay in taxes in this country.
So if you took fifteen point three percent of your gross pay and put it into a four oh one k over the same course of years, you would have so much more money. Yeah, barring another stock market catastrophe before you could get your money out of your four oh one k, right, you would have way more than you have from the Social Security administration as benefits.
You know, what I meant to look up is if the government uses this money for other things in the meantime, or is it strictly like here, it's in this little pool and all we're doing is paying people out with it.
Well, supposedly, before the baby boom problem arose, it was going in and right back out. Okay, And I'm sure any surplus was invested in treasury bonds. Now all of the surpluses invested in treasury bonds, which is just such a shell game. It's so crazy, and no one has any idea if this is gonna work. I swear to God, I'm not paranoid.
Yeah.
I don't live in the Midwest. I'm not a fringe dweller. This is not something I like keep up with a lot. I don't read WorldNet daily. There's nothing like that in my life. Yeah, but I'm telling you this is like there there's no guarantee that this social Security I guess bandage for the baby boom population spike, if it's gonna work, it's it's really at the very least, it's interesting.
Yeah, in the troubling, I would say, at the very least, sure, Okay, they but you they make it real easy for you to slap a number on your little, brand new baby.
Yes, do you have to have a number for your child?
Well, like I said, if you want them to get medical coverage and open up a savings account in their name for like their future college or trade school, or travels around the world, or.
You want to claim it was a deduction on your tax.
Filing, yeah, then they're going to need one, and they make it pretty easy on you to get one for your new, little smelly baby.
They do. Again, I'm not a fringe dweller, but they have the very sinister sounding Enumeration at Birth program.
That's pretty bad. Yeah.
It was started in nineteen eighty nine and basically just made it very easy for you to get a Social Security number for your infant as part of their birth record forms. Right Enumeration at birth.
You know, I used to I think I mentioned this before. I used to carry my card around on my wallet when I was a teenager because I thought it was I don't know, I thought it made me legitimate or adult, like it's interesting. Everyone else is everyone else is out drinking and I was like, no, no, I got myself a security card.
It keeps the urges away.
That's right.
Hey, speaking of social Security cards and wallets, do you want to talk about that, lady? Oh?
Yeah, I can't kill this Witcher.
Yeah.
This in uh nineteen thirty seven, dude named Douglas Patterson had a wallet company.
I'm sorry, h Ferry.
Yeah, he was the vice president and treasurer of this wallet company, and he said, you know what we should do. We should include a fake social Security card and every wallet.
But we'll make it look really, really realistic by copying yours secretary.
Yeah. He basically assigned these little fake cards that like, you know, you get a picture frame with a fake picture in it. Yeah, they gave out wallet or they sold wallets with a fake social Security card with a real number. I don't know why he thought that was a good idea or why.
She went along with it. Yeah, what was her name, Hilda Strader Witcher? She went along with this? Did she go along with their boss?
Maybe she didn't know, No, she knew she did.
Yeah, And I guess she didn't feel like she could assert herself at the time. But what over forty years, something like forty thousand people used her social Security number?
Yeah, they gave her newing.
Yeah, and people were still using as recently as nineteen seventy seven, there were twelve people using that as their own because of this wallet.
Yeah, in defense of the dude. He did have the word spitchimmen on the bottom of it Spaceman specimen, but it was, you know, in small print, and it looked like the real deal. It had the little emblem that who was the guy who designed that?
Fred Happle?
That's right? And what else did he design?
The flying Tiger's logo?
Yeah?
Which what was that? Like a B two bomber logo?
Well, who knows? World War two? I guess some sort of gunner plane or something. Okay, that'd be my guess.
The fighting Hellcats, Yeah, flying hell Fish, the Hellfish.
The Hellfish was the Simpsons. Yeah, okay, Josh, can you get a new number?
Yes, but only in very extreme cases.
Like stalking, like stalking or fraud, a bad case of fraud, I guess yeah.
I would imagine that the FBI can probably get you on if you're part of the Witness Protection program. Oh sure, which we've talked about.
Yeah, yeah, you don't have to pay for that, there's no fee from the SSA, but you what you should be wary of as companies that claim that they can get you a new number to absolve your credit, like, hey, have you led an awful bad life, become a new person. We'll get you a new Social Security number.
Which is hilarious if you think that that that's crazy fallowing for that. It's like buying an elevator pass in high school as a reshmen or something like that, except way.
Worse when you have a single floor high school.
Because I'm sure they're like, not only do we charge you a fee, but give us your sub security number because we have to go in and like make sure that it's wiped out.
Right, geez, where are we here? You know? The title of this section was why does it matter if someone knows my Social Security number? I think it's pretty obvious. Yeah, Identity theft, Yeah, it's a big problem these days. Back in the old days, it wasn't as much.
It's actually gone down since this article.
What four hundred thousand years what they said here, right.
It's like two seventeen. Now, oh that's good. Well that's the ones that the FTC gets reports of, which are probably the lion's share of them. Right, But it was supposedly increasing, like by some crazy percentage.
Yeah, forty percent per year.
It's up eleven percent. Okay, so it's gone down some. I think people have just gotten scared of it, more wary about it. But I mean it's still obviously a pretty big problem.
Sure.
Part of the problem though, is that we shouldn't be using social Security numbers for identification for a reason. They're just way too publicly available.
Even the last four digits. Don't use that as like your pin number.
No, but I mean, even if somebody asks you your last four digits, how many people have your last four digits? How many companies do a lot? A lot, And they also have your birth date, They also have where you were born, your mother's maiden name. It's just kind of
like it's all out there, I know. And basically there's no really good scheme to I guess uses as a pass code, as a past basically a way of saying I am me right, because if we all just relied on some other number or something like that, then people could find that out. There's really no good way to do it. But social Security numbers are definitely not the answer. Yeah.
I always get a little creeped out when some business, you know, what are the last like Comcast or something like my cable company. Yeah, we'll see what are your last force of your social and I'll spit it out and they'll go, okay, Right.
You can say I don't want to tell you, I want to answer everything else, and they'll they'll run you through your paces.
But they know it because they're asking you for identificing, like right for verification.
Exactly because you've given it to them already. You don't. There's basically most companies don't have any legal right to ask you what your Social Security number is, right, But they can also say, well, we don't trust you, so if you don't give it to us when you open your account or whatever exactly, then you're out of luck.
With government agencies. You can ask for the Privacy Act of nineteen seventy four disclose your notice, which says like, hey, we have a legal right to ask you this or we don't, right, and then you can say you can't ask me that, bob.
But yeah, all the protection advice that given here is pretty basic. You know, don't carry your card and your wallet, cancel credit cards you don't use, don't share.
It way, don't necessarily repute that one. What don't we just cancel credit cards you don't use. There are things you should do, like keep an eye on your accounts, your credit card accounts, even though you don't use them. But that's not necessarily good advice, especially credit wise, because there's this thing called the available credit to debt ratio, one of the ratios that they figure your credit score with.
And if you have a clean credit card you're not using that has like five or ten grand of available credit on it, sure that counts, and that makes you very attractive to people who are selling you houses or cars or whatever. That's true, So don't necessarily go do that. Keep them in a safe deposit box, keep an eye on all your accounts even if you're not using them.
Yeah. Boy, my credit rating is so good right now.
That's awesome, dude.
It's like top five percentile somehow. Oh yeah, and that is I say that as a testament to you out there who may have bad credit. You can hear it over time.
Yeah, you and Emily did good.
Huh uh. Well yeah, she's the one that helped me get my good credit back. That's good as CFO.
Congratulations, man, that's a big deal.
Thank you. It is good and my debts, you know, from the past were I don't want to get into it, but they had less to do with me and more to do with.
Like bookies, heroin, No, like dog fighting.
Bad roommates and getting screwed over by you know, like, hey, you were supposed to pay this Georgia power bill eight years ago and it's still in my name and I didn't even know about it. That kind of thing, gotcha, And just being lazy in college, like miss, yeah, I missed my credit card payment. No big deal, I'll just pay it next month.
Right, I'm just gonna go buy some heroin instead. I know you're doing in college, Chuck, not that, So I guess that's about it. Huh.
Yeah. One more piece of advice, which is actually good. Every few years, go to the SSA website and request a copy of your earnings and Benefit Estimate statement.
Yeah. Have you heard of this before? No?
And I've never done it, and I'm gonna go do it today.
All right, let's go do it together. We'll both go do years together.
And we'll be like what, I've been working since I was thirteen, So I imagine I'm doing pretty good.
Nice. Oh, we didn't talk about that. The system is waited. The whole reason it was instituted was to help make sure that people don't fall through the cracks or whatever. Yeah, and to help the poor more than the wealthy. Although you get more money out the more money you put in right.
Which is based on your income, so the right you make, the more you ban.
But it's also disproportionately weighted so that the people who are earning the least get a disproportionate amount out to help them, correct, Amanda, which is great. It's socialism at its finest, as you said. So, uh yeah, that's about it. That's social security numbers and pretty much social security. I don't think any to do that again. Okay, hats off the FDR, Pharah, new deal, great society.
Chicken in every pot that was Hoover a number on every forehead.
Nice Chuck, thank you. We'll end it with that one. If you want to know more about social security numbers, you can read this exhaustive article about them by typing in social security in the search bar at HowStuffWorks dot com. Which means it's time for a listener mail.
Josh, I'm gonna call this following up on zero. That one got a lot more attention than I thought. All the math nerds came out you were like zero, very happy that we did that. And one such nerd emailed this. This is Stephen, and he says, I think I might be able to put your mind to rest on a couple of those zero properties. And a lot of people try to explain this, and I think he did the best first, dividing by zero. I find it helpful to
think of division as separating objects into containers. See this guy is like talking up my alley. Yeah, yeah, I can visualize stuff a lot better this way. So if you have five objects and five containers, you would put one object in each container. You still have the same number of objects, but divided evenly across containers. Now, if you have five objects and no containers, in other words, dividing by zero, you still have all the same objects,
but they have not been put anywhere. You can't say that you'd put zero per container because it's not a lack of items, but rather a lack of containers. So dividing by zero means you have things but nothing to contain them, so a ratio cannot be formed.
Awesome makes sense.
Right, Yeah, As for the raising to the zero zero power. This is one because our basis of numerology is the number one. All things larger are functions of how many ones it holds, and all things larger define how many need to be combined to form a one. This, combined with the fact that exponents don't describe a multiplication, but rather a number of times a base measurement will be multiplied by a factor, means that if the base measurement is never a multiplied by the factor, you are left
with the base alone. So there you have it. It's tempting to think of these numbers as one to the power, but unfortunately this is wrong.
Over that again, No, I can't.
That is from Stephen, a junior software engineer. Thanks Steven, so I will take him at his word.
Yeah, he sounds like he's got it down.
Yeah, the containers. That makes total sense to me now. Yeah, So there you have it.
So thanks Steven, junior software engineer. We are looking forward to you becoming a senior software engineer, likely in the near future. From your email, and if you have some sort of illumination about a previous podcast, doesn't matter how old it is. We always like hearing new stuff about old stuff. Sure, You can send it in an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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