231–240 of 495 posts
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Then again, maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent. Laws can be based on ethics, but moral judgments really should not be involved in their application. Unless you want to live in a theocracy, of course.
The jury pronounces the sentence. What do you think sways the jurors - legalese complexity or straight up morality?
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Local man embezzles $20,000 meant to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine.
Orphan crushing machine operator: "If I don't do it, someone else will"
The root cause of the problem is that parents and children need to raise funds for cancer treatment in the first place.
I am curious: how else would you fund them? I sometimes donate & follow such cases and cancer treatments are expensive , especially experimental, custom ones. Worse, the rarer and more aggressive the disease - the more expensive the treatment and the slimmer the actual chances.
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Expensive health treatments can easily bankrupt any western government. None of those developed countries can afford to spend their money indiscriminately on them. So instead they turn to waiting lists, death panels and very often saying no but not in your face (since that is politically frowned upon) but thought delays and countless committees and bureaucracy until the patient expires...
I am yet to see any western nations go bankrupt for universal healthcare. I have three second-hand cancer experiences from family here in Australia (Dad, Mum and my half-sister - under 35/yo). All three were detected early thanks to regular checkups and screening (covered under Medicare), treated in major hospitals (Dad was in a rural hospital, Mum and half-sister in Metro major city hospitals) and are all alive and…
Boy are you in for a ride. France will be first and Germany is on a good track for it within the next two decades.
Really makes me think that the justice system should have a wide margin for discretionary sentencing. I get that in some sense fraud is fraud, but there is one thing preying on people's greed, and another preying on compassion, charity and vulnerable children in desperate need. Scams based on greed (or other vices) are in some sense limited crimes, since their success punishes what is low, but scams based on what is…
I have reported these ads to YouTube multiple times, because I tracked down their scam websites, but YouTube didn't delete them anyway. Common pattern they had was: - similar or same domains - same messaging on their website YouTube could have taken action, but it choose not to
I'm still waiting for the tech world to wake up and realise that the online ad machinery and user tracking software that the brightest minds of our generation have been working on are just a way to efficiently connect scammers with their unsuspecting victims.
- People who want to work in tech because it was a stable and/or lucrative career
- People who just want/love to code
- People who loved tech / think tech is cool
There’s also a degree of counter-culture that used to be part of the mix, which got jettisoned as tech became mainstream and mapped out.
The current state of Tech is unpleasant and alarming.
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Yes, which is one of two reasons why I use a blocker called adnauseum. It an adv locker that “clicks” on every single ad it sees, as well as hides it from my view. This makes my ad profile useless, and also costs them money.
Won’t Google ban your account if they notice this
The root cause of the problem is that parents and children need to raise funds for cancer treatment in the first place.
The fact that families have to crowdfund lifesaving care creates the vulnerability but it doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it
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Is there even standard practices to audit the effectiveness of charity? No accountability means they will always operate like a black box, and I’ve always thought black boxes create misalignments. Money goes in, and good feelings come out. It certainly serves a purpose, but not the intended one.
Yes, it's called Form 990 and it is a requirement to publish it on a yearly basis to retain non-profit status. You can search for any US-registered NGO here for example: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/ To put it in HN terms, this is what people here like to use to shit on Mozilla for how much they pay their executives while having zero insight into how much Firefox's for-profit competitors pay their execu…
Is the bottom line roughly:
Money received: 1000
Money used for good: 800
Labor: 200
Is that it?
Because I can assure you, that will not turn out well.