Fraudsters pardoned by the current administration don't make public service and welfare fraud in Minnesota any less grave or important, and it's super weird that people across this thread keep implying otherwise.
I frequently follow Patrick's tweets. He hasn't said a single goddamn thing about this corrupt administration but keeps talking about Gavin Newsome's vaccine policy that was in effect for 2 months in 2021
Patrick ran VaccinateCA and has lots of reasons to have opinions on how California (in particular) managed vaccination rollout. But I'm more struck by the notion that he somehow has an obligation to use his Twitter account to support your political commitments. What a weird critique.
This isn't responsive to anything I just said. You premised your critique of Patrick on his own criticism of California's vaccine rollout, not understanding his motivation or distinctive qualification to do so, and instead of acknowledging that, you just come back with personal attack.
> To the extent that Bits about Money has an editorial line on that controversy, it is this: if you fish in a pond known to have 50% blue fish, and pull out nine fish, you will appear to be a savant-like catcher of blue fish, and people claiming that it is unlikely you have identified a blue fish will swiftly be made to look like fools. But the interesting bit of the observation is, almost entirely, the base rate of the pond. And I think journalism and civil society should do some genuine soul-searching on how we knew—knew—the state of that pond, but didn’t consider it particularly important or newsworthy until someone started fishing on camera.
Does Patrick want to address the fact that this happened during school break and that Nick Shirley didn't prove much of anything?
My bicicle got stolen a long time ago and I never recovered it. The perpetrator was never caught.
From this we can conclude many things. Maybe the thief was very crafty. Maybe the local police are incompetent. Maybe everyone is trying their best and the job of going after bike thieves is very hard.
But you cannot ever convince me that an appropriate conclussion could be "your bicicle didn't actually get stolen". I saw it. I can't identify the thief, there will never be a conviction, but don't tell me it didn't happen.
A conviction in a court of law is very important to be able to confidently say "so-and-so has committed fraud". But requiring a criminal conviction just to be able to say that fraud has happened is lunacy.
Yes, but we're not talking about whether or not bike thefts happen, or medicare frauds, we're talking about what actions we're going to take in the future.
I too have had a bike stolen and it was an incredibly awful experience, but I'm not going to vote for a law requiring us to execute people accused of bike theft.
This is what is so incredibly frustrating about these types of conversations because so frequently you have one side proposing fact based strategies developed via reaearch and experiments and historical analysis and so forth, but that makes them quite complicated to explain in 30 seconds on tv, and on the other side you have some asshole going "all these problems are caused by <subgroup> and if you give me power I'll be cruel to them and everything will be better".
The latter's simplicity seems to be highly appealing and attempting to argue against it using facts and logic requires A) the listeners to actually respect facts and logic and B) and lot more effort to research/cite/develop the facts and logic.
So again, it sounds like fraud happened. This is bad. Some people were imprisoned because of it. Now what?
I keep asking this basic question because that's whats actually missing from the article.
Is there a specific person who should be in prison but isn't? Is there a law that could be passed to make fraud harder? What, specifically should be done?
The entire story of what happened in Minnesota, as agreed on by basically everybody involved including significant chunks of the government of Minnesota, is that convictions are not a reasonable measure of accuracy here. The story is that they didn't pursue fraud prosecutions in proportion to their severity. Responding to that with "but there weren't convictions" is literally just begging the question.
It's very annoying that I feel like I have to say this but: I'm a committed Democrat, and I feel like my anti-Trump anti-racism bona fides, including on this site, are quite solid. The Minnesota thing happened. We can debate the scale, but it happened.
Yes, fraud is bad. I agreed before I read the article.
I've learned (from the article) that there was apparently some fraud in Minnesota, some of which was successfully prosecuted and, possibly, some that wasn't.
If pressed, I would say the take away from the article is that the fraud investigators should have been more willing to use race/ethnicity and accept a lower standard of evidence before taking action.
My take-away from the article is a bunch of fraud-identifying and fraud-thwarting tips.
Ideally, state programs should:
1. not pay out until a beneficiary's bona-fides are first verified. Paying out first, with no verification, and only retrospectively trying to claw back fraudulent claims, only after expensive investigations, is ruinous on the state budget.
2. work with private industry to identify alleged fraudsters
3. require much more verification of alleged fraudsters before agreeing to pay anything out
4. snoop around to find fraudsters' abettors because they're easier to find than the fraudsters
Other than one section saying that fraud investigators should expect to find ethnic clusters (because fraudsters of all ethnicities use their families and friends), there's nothing about ethnicity being a "flag". The biggest flag is that the same person previously committed fraud, and the article laments that civic government often gives a "clean sheet" to known fraudsters, in a way that the finance industry never would.
There was also the point about lack of granularity and follow-through.
The government has the power to ruin your whole life, so it's reasonable that they have high standards of evidence to ruin your life. But if they can't secure a conviction they do nothing, they'll let you open another NGO and apply for another government grant as if nothing happened.
A business has the power to inconvenience you by refusing to do business with you. That's less ruinuous than what the government does so it's OK that their standards of evidence are lower.
But perhaps there should be something that the government can do in between nothing at all and ruining your life. Otherwise the same frauds will happen again and again.
I agree, but you've already mentioned the issues with the government having a punishment system that isn't based on the courts. We all know how great the secret no-fly list is.
Did you read the actual report? The part about how a single investigator didn't like how some daycares were run, the level of supervision, and then used that to extrapolate a hypothetical invalidation of all payments to those facilities as "fraudulent"?
Democrats have rationalized much worse things than this, for example the ethnic cleansing (genocide) in Gaza. So with all due respect frankly I'm not at all assuaged by your caveat.
> (unless you have gone back and deleted the comments, haven't checked yet!)
Minor point: I'm pretty sure that HN comments cannot be deleted/edited after about an hour. Very different from most web forums in this regard, and worth keeping in mind when digging into past discussions! Maybe the rules are different for a superuser like tptacek here with lots of karma, but I doubt it.
I can't help but notice that said other person's profile claims "out of here"; and before this thread, had not commented since October 2024 — in that case also to get in an extended political argument with you specifically. That's quite a grudge to hold.
Eh, that part's not so weird. Not weird to forget that HN is weird in this particular way. I just wanted to clarify it for myself & for anyone reading.
This will continue until people actually get hurt. Trump is exactly what decadence looks like: people willing to vote for "their team" against any better judgement because nothing really every happens to hurt them.
The defense is that the status quo has become archaic and self-serving instead of serving the public so the current operations people doing some house cleaning and tossing a few rooms to see what’s going on in there is overdue, changes need to happen and power structures need to be shaken out a bit to make sure they are not getting in the way of the people they were created to act on behalf of, and scatter the ones who are “helping themselves” to the public coffers.
This just needs to happen every across all government, it’s like brushing your teeth to kick out the bacteria, but each individual institution needs a different kind of “floss” depending on the nature of the ways they have strayed from their original purposes.
there’s just a lot of partisan media outlets that are trying to make it look this way because it’s the corruption paying to try and stop it so they can keep power
I don’t see evidence of corruption all I see is a system already heavily steeped in corruption and regulatory capture that is using fake and ironic anti-establishment narratives to try and keep it.
That sounds nice, but I don't think there is much evidence that the above is actually what the current administration is doing, or even attempting to do.
Having blatantly political messages blasted across websites for national parks and on airport security video screens during the shutdown, for example, doesn't seem like a move towards "serving the public", but rather a move towards consolidation of direct control to the politicians at the top of the executive branch.
I used to rely on this, and still mostly do - but you’d be surprised how quickly this has entered the normal vernacular! I hear people using it in conversation unprompted all the time.
At Amazon, level is public. Microsoft, only the title (Senior etc) is visible not the precise level is visible is my impression. At Google, it can be public but apparently can also be hidden. At Facebook it's always hidden.
I'm interviewing engineers right now, it is tough to judge what their current level mapping is especially if they come from Facebook. You can guesstimate from their resume accomplishments and tenure but the rest is just interview performance or asking directly - there are staff engineers that get there from 3 years out of college and there are seniors that are at that level for a decade.
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