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Comment by tptacek

21 days ago

No? He dunks on Shirley. His point is that professional investigators found and documented much worse things.

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tptacek

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wredcoll  21 days ago

Except for the part where when asked for proof he laughed off the idea of using convictions as a measure of accuracy.

  • saint_fiasco  21 days ago

    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.

    • wredcoll  20 days ago

      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?

      1 reply →

  • tptacek  21 days ago

    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.

    • wredcoll  21 days ago

      My ultimate take on the article is "so what?"

      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.

      Is there something I'm missing?

      5 replies →

    • blurbleblurble  21 days ago

      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.