Comment by 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.
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.
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?
That's literally what the article is about.
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.
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?
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.
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> 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
This is not a fair or reasonable conclusion from what the article actually says.
That's what I'm getting from this article too. It's giving "Nick Shirley in the style of lots of extra words".
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.
[flagged]
> (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.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
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