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Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

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Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#111

Post by dtornabene »

tptacek wrote: post #50
cogman10 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because when I enroll a child in a daycare I start by wandering around the facilities with a camera man and then I demand to see the children. But sure is suspicious that this place has no kids in it when I visit it outside it's posted operation hours. Nick did a day worth of shooting, didn't follow up, and didn't check basic things like hours of operation.

Right, everybody, especially the author of this piece, agrees that what Shirley did was bad and stupid. And also unnecessary, because we had documentary evidence from the Minnesota government itself showing the scale of the fraud here.

He does not in fact call what Shirley did "bad and stupid". He calls him a journalist!

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#113

Post by arduanika »

advisedwang wrote: post #27

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…

Fair enough. But the reason that "the right" is not letting go of the story is:

1. The fraud was not in fact being investigated seriously enough until this kid, even while lacking the basics of journalism as Patrick describes here, forced the issue.

2. This is just another example of the decades long trend where more and more bad patterns and outcomes can persist for far too long because the normal checks are fended off with spurious accusations of racism.

There's some variation on how "the right" would handle (2). The center-right wants to shore up our culture of color-blindness to patch these vulnerabilities. The far-right wants to do away with egalitarianism altogether, and just go back to plain old racism. If we can't figure out the former, we might well end up with the latter.

(My reading is that Patrick falls squarely in the "center-right" here, fwiw. Then again, it can be hard to decode his exact subtext from under all the polite circumlocutions. Reading his stuff is something of an acquired skill and/or taste.)

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#114

Post by amadeuspagel »

Instead of giving parents vouchers, that they then use at a fraudulent daycare, in exchange for a fake job, while they take care of their children at home, parents should just get money, so that they can stay home taking care of their children if they prefer that.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#115

Post by joe_mamba »

cogman10 wrote: post #106
joe_mamba wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

[flagged]

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#116

Post by linkregister »

renewiltord wrote: post #107
linkregister wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is a common error to misunderstand the base rate of an event. In this case, the frequency of media articles about Trump dwarf other political subjects.

Or one could assume a vast conspiracy to explain the phenomenon.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#117

Post by dtornabene »

tptacek wrote: post #66
wredcoll wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 anno…

[flagged]

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#118

Post by bootsmann »

650 wrote: post #72
wredcoll wrote: post #70

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…

This article isn't vague at all. It references various sources, and uses precise language (if you can recognize it) to convey its message. Yes, innocent until proven guilty, but the fact that the government has "lesser" educated Fraud analysts, chooses to ask for reimbursement of overbilling, and many more nuanced topics talked about in the article is not vague.

It references sources that don’t claim what it says they do. Notably the Minnesota report alleging 50% fraud does not say that.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#119

Post by arduanika »

650 wrote: post #15

Great article, ties in neatly with observations among many that fraud, grifting, and devolution of the social contract has escalated greatly since 2020.

I don't think anything in the article, or in Patrick's general work, makes strong claims about a trend. Fraud may be getting worse as you say, but that is not his beat. He tends to depict fraud as eternal, and wants to shed light on it as a technical problem to solve.

Also, there are real dangers to blackpilling about fraud. "Everybody is doing it" is exactly what one says before doing fraud oneself. In reality, there are a lot of people out there doing the right thing every day.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#120

Post by ejiblabahaba »

wredcoll wrote: post #102
mlyle wrote: 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.

Suppose an asteroid strikes the Earth and all human life becomes extinct. What power, specifically, has been transferred, and to where?
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