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Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

bitsaboutmoney.com

101–110 of 221 posts

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#101

The reason that "the left" is rolling eyes at the fuss being made over this fraud is: 1. The fraud is in fact being investigated, people are being charged and convicted. Despite this, rightwing media institutions are acting as if fraud is being ignored and maybe even covered up and encouraged because 2. This is just another example of the decades long project by those who have lots of money and don't want to see it g…

> The fraud is in fact being investigated, people are being charged and convicted.

And as explained in TFA, this is inefficient and ineffective even in theory:

> So-called “pay-and-chase”, where we put the burden on the government to disallow payments for violations retrospectively, has been enormously expensive and ineffective. Civil liability bounces off of exists-only-to-defraud LLC. Criminal prosecutions, among the most expensive kinds of intervention the government is capable of doing short of kinetic war, result in only a ~20% reduction in fraudulent behavior. Rearchitecting the process to require prior authorization resulted in an “immediate and permanent” 68% reduction.

> Despite this, rightwing media institutions are acting as if fraud is being ignored and maybe even covered up and encouraged because

Which is a reasonable characterization of the situation given the scale of the fraud and the fact that it's still going on, in such a blatant manner.

We're talking about total fraud on the order of $10b, and some significant fraction of that money has presumably been sent back to Somalia. We're talking here about amounts that would represent a significant percentage of Somalia's entire GDP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalia#Economy).

> This is just another example of the decades long project by those who have lots of money and don't want to see it go to takes to paint social programs as a money-pipe from good hardworking people to fraud and waste.

"The left" clearly has a vested interest in that not happening; therefore, it is also in their interest to take appropriate actions against fraud as they might learn about from the financial industry.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#102
post #71

Look, this is a mostly reasonable, if slightly vague, article about investigating fraud and mechanisms by which you do so. What it lacks is any concrete suggestion as to what should change, beyond some vague allusions that perhaps racial/ethnic profiling should make a comeback. The real problem here though is that the entire article ignores the duty[1] the government owes its citizens. It's "fine"[2] if stripe or vis…

> [2] it becomes rapidly less fine when the company essentially has a monopoly over a system requires to participate in modern life, but that's a different topic... That's the real thing here. Concentrated power is scary-- whether it's the federal government, Visa/Mastercard, Google, etc. At least power concentrated under the control of a government might be held accountable to the people. With private, concentrated…

I'm working on making it a thing, but my theory is that power can't be destroyed, merely transferred, and in most cases I'd rather have the power be vested in a democratic government.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#103
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, to all of this. Talking about the largest fraud scheme in the history of the midwest without taking on all of Washington corruption doesn't make you a "gish gallop" or "Banon's flood" (whatever that is). In fact, it's kind of the opposite of a gish gallop. It's a single coherent argument. If you can rebut it, do so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone A critical part of media literacy is not just evaluating a piece of work at face value, but considering who wrote it, why they wrote it, why they wrote it now, what they didn't write etc. The article itself is actually not really interesting, but why this person wrote this article now is interesting.

Please speak plainly, and show your work. In your own words, who do you believe "this person" is, and why is that significant? Why do you suppose he wrote "this article", "now", and what is your reason for believing thus? What other articles by the same author are you aware of, and how does that square with the bias you are trying to allege?

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#104
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh, reminds me of the classic appeal. "If you don't do now, the real fascists will take over!"

Is auditing state-subsidized service providers fascistic? From this piece, it seems like the state auditor detected some fraud, but there was little follow-up from either the state or 'responsible journalists', so the sensationalists came in with a (predictably) extreme take, after which everyone started slinging mud. The sensationalism could have been forestalled by better auditing by the state, or journalism by lar…

to aggressively detect and interdict fraud

is fascistic, because being aggressive hurts those that want to do it right but are not trusted. an aspect of fascism is to not trust its own people.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're beating it around the bush going offtopic and ignoring my question: How does having a camera impact the daycare having a misspelled sign and boarded up windows?

> You're beating it around the bush going offtopic and ignoring my question: No I'm not, you just don't like the answer. But at least you've edited to remove the "3 guys yelling at you" portion as I think even you can see how that might be a reasonable thing to do to a creep going around you business filming everything. > daycare having a misspelled sign and boarded up windows? The answer to this question is simple,…

[flagged]

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're beating it around the bush going offtopic and ignoring my question: No I'm not, you just don't like the answer. But at least you've edited to remove the "3 guys yelling at you" portion as I think even you can see how that might be a reasonable thing to do to a creep going around you business filming everything. > daycare having a misspelled sign and boarded up windows? The answer to this question is simple,…

[flagged]

Now you are going off topic. I suspect because you don't like a reasonable answer that doesn't fit your fraud narrative.

Men can work at daycares but also we have no clue what those guys relationship to the business was.

Just think about it for 3 seconds.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#107

Yeah, the fraud’s been around for a while and the Biden DoJ was investigating it. One of the guys got fingered trying to bribe a juror¹ but he stole half the bribe money. The politicization of the issue means that Democratic Party aligned people continually flag any reference to the scam on HN though. If anyone else said that someone broke in and stole all the records from a daycare days after it was accused of fraud…

Rather than stating, without data, that Democratic Party alignment led to flagging of the story here on HN, one can look at the numerous overt statements by some of the most active users. These users claim they spend significant time flagging all political stories not tied to computing or science. These statements are trivially found using https://hn.algolia.com .

Typing “Trump” into that trivially reveals disparate outcomes. Then again perhaps “Trump says Maduro captured” is computing and science to these people. I have no peer-reviewed evidence that they don’t think that so I must admit it as equally likely as anything else.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone A critical part of media literacy is not just evaluating a piece of work at face value, but considering who wrote it, why they wrote it, why they wrote it now, what they didn't write etc. The article itself is actually not really interesting, but why this person wrote this article now is interesting.

Please speak plainly, and show your work. In your own words, who do you believe "this person" is, and why is that significant? Why do you suppose he wrote "this article", "now", and what is your reason for believing thus? What other articles by the same author are you aware of, and how does that square with the bias you are trying to allege?

Reread my OP, I was pretty clear upfront and it answers all your questions.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#109
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [2] it becomes rapidly less fine when the company essentially has a monopoly over a system requires to participate in modern life, but that's a different topic... That's the real thing here. Concentrated power is scary-- whether it's the federal government, Visa/Mastercard, Google, etc. At least power concentrated under the control of a government might be held accountable to the people. With private, concentrated…

I'm working on making it a thing, but my theory is that power can't be destroyed, merely transferred, and in most cases I'd rather have the power be vested in a democratic government.

The best option is it being decentralized and diffuse and operating through market mechanisms.

If that leads to bad outcomes, then government is a next best choice.

(Of course, all the special cases, natural monopoly, etc etc etc-- government has a role in addressing the bad outcomes associated with those).

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cryptoracist

So it's a made up term from people who want to discredit people they don't like by calling them "secret racist" without having any proof.

I should warn you that the user you are replying to is a crypto-paedophile. Be careful. There is no evidence to describe how he might retaliate.
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