To be clear: the children are not scammed. They're (unwitting) paid photo props. The people giving are scammed out of millions.
Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment
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Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Market economy. Capitalism is a name for the bad thing-- "the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others". Those who argue for a market economy usually claim that with their rule, it won't be accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others, with them assuring us that there will be free markets and competition. Both actual capitalism, i.e. the bad thing, and this which can plausible be argue…
> Communist distribution principles can coexist with ill-functioning market systems such as things which have degenerated into actual capitalism, whereas the socialist distribution principle can't.
You won't have to worry about distributing advanced cancer medications when they don't exist in the Communist version, because they weren't discovered. You can't fulfil a need with a drug you never risked a giant amount of funding and effort to discover.
Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment
#243To be clear: the children are not scammed. They're (unwitting) paid photo props. The people giving are scammed out of millions.
I think the kid in the article who got $27k raised in his name for cancer treatment, received $0 in cancer treatment from those funds, and subsequently died of cancer definitely got scammed.
Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Market economy. Capitalism is a name for the bad thing-- "the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others". Those who argue for a market economy usually claim that with their rule, it won't be accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others, with them assuring us that there will be free markets and competition. Both actual capitalism, i.e. the bad thing, and this which can plausible be argue…
Even in a pure unadulterated market economy that doesn't publicly fund healthcare you would expect to be able to protect yourself from high-impact low-likelihood events by means of an insurance. I find it hard to describe the US healthcare situation as anything other than a market failure
> I find it hard to describe the US healthcare situation as anything other than a market failure
The market is just reacting to the regulatory environment and all the political patches and shortcuts of same done to appease voters over the last 100 years. Fix that and the market will sort itself out.
Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment
#245Great journalism. I hope the authorities bring this person to justice and arrest them for fraud. I saw this ad a few months ago on YouTube and flagged it as a scam when I couldn’t find much information about the company. Never donate money through random sites. If you use platforms like https://www.gofundme.com/ , at least you have the option to file a complaint if you find something suspicious.
> I hope the authorities bring this person to justice and arrest them for fraud. They haven’t scammed nor inconvenienced a rich, well-connected person, so unlikely anything will happen. Remember that online fraud is effectively legal (10% of Meta’s revenue is from scam ads by their own estimates) as long as you only target the poor. These scam campaigns have been going for years with people operating in the field acr…
Tangentially related - If you aren’t aware, there are out of court settlement bodies which exist as part of the DSA.
If you have content which is removed, or a moderation decision you wish to dispute, you can go to one of these bodies to get it reviewed. It cannot go to dev/null.
This doesn’t address whether flagging scams resulted in action. The bigger picture is the mismatched incentives for tech. Platforms are not quite incentivized to care about responding to user complaints, and do not give out information that lets us know what is happening independently.
To get to the point that complaints are actioned, those incentives need to be realigned. The ODS pathway, if used more frequently, increases that revenue and market pressure.
The ODS system is new, and I expect it will have tons of issues to discover. I wouldn’t be surprised it it is already weaponized.
On the flip side, platforms haven’t been tested or queried in this manner before.
Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment
#246The root cause of the problem is that parents and children need to raise funds for cancer treatment in the first place.
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.
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Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment
#247The 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
>but it doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it
I mean almost the entirety of the US healthcare system is a industrialized scam engineered by middlemen
Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Hmmm. But who can audit the reporting? Evidently, this looks like something they can manipulate. 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.
The IRS can audit the reporting, and if you lie on egregiously you can even go to jail. Granted that is very rare, and we currently have an anti-IRS administration, but that’s the basic enforcement mechanism.
Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s so predictable by this point
Do you believe all countries should automatically extradiate every person any other country demands? Or that there should be a limit on such process?
No, but the pattern of criminals of Jewish background fleeing to Israel for protection after commiting a crime, is too often to ignore.
Same thing happened in my post communist country and the neighboring country too. Perp stole tens of millons through a banking scam in the 90s, then fled to Israel because he was Jewish and claimed persecution.
At which point should the pattern be acknowledged?
Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
With Universal Health Insurance as all other developed countries do
That doesn't say how you would fund it, only what form of insurance is in place. If the US were to shift to that model today, a country already heavily in debt would have to either take on more debt PR increase revenues in a manner that they wouldn't have been willing to in order to fund our already growing debts. The debate over whether public or private healthcare is better is all well and good, but first we should…
A Single-Payer-System would also be cheaper in the US. Nobody expenses as much on administrative cost, nobody pays so much as a % of GDP on Healthcare as you, still you have the worst health outcomes of all developed nations.
Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...