51–60 of 106 posts
The real headline is that the IRS is hackable.
If this were a company, the headline would have been "IRS hacked; tax information stolen from 100,000." Instead the IRS was able to spin it to The Washington Post. The headline is "thieves stole tax info." Thieves! The real headline is that the IRS is hackable.
They spun it even better than that. The headline is "thieves stole tax info from 100,000 people" (i.e. not from the IRS, but from the people themselves)
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USPS is rumored to be working on such a system actually. http://securekey.com/press-releases/securekey-technologies-w... SecureKey IIRC is used by Canada. USPS is in a unique position in that they have a ton of employees literally who can verify mailing addresses by brute force. Every day (except holidays). Rain, Snow or shine. Having USPS in charge of the US's future "online identity" would be a good way of transfor…
This is/should be the main offering of the USPS - secure identity location verification. It's too bad their hands are so tied by Congress (and a malicious one at that - having to pay pension fund 75 years early)... they might have made this move a decade or so earlier.
I started "working" a few hours a week teaching programming at my kids' school. When they put me on the payroll I was astounded by the number of forms I had to fill out. I counted 15 forms requiring my signature, no less than 5 of which required my SSN. Lo and behold, there was a data breach of employee and volunteer records. Volunteers had to have background checks, which required the SSN. Thousands of people had th…
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Just a talking point--empirically that's not true.
> empirically that's not true Feel like expanding that point? I mean shrinking government and changing society so people depend on it less is literally part of the national GOP platform. Is your argument just that they're not willing to sabotage things for political advantage? (and, if so, how are we to explain the billions spent shutting down the federal government as a negotiating tactic?)
A short-term sabotage is not out of the question.
Actually, I have a graph showing how gov actually increases more under GOP control than democrats. Hold on.
I believe that this actually happened to me -- which tells me the 100,000 number is way too low. To be more precise: when we went to electronically file our 2014 return, it was rejected because our return had already been filed (not by us, of course). I (like 80+ million others) am a victim of the Anthem breach, and I have assumed that my fraudulent return was part of that breach. (Regardless, I have opted into the i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just a talking point--empirically that's not true.
> empirically that's not true Feel like expanding that point? I mean shrinking government and changing society so people depend on it less is literally part of the national GOP platform. Is your argument just that they're not willing to sabotage things for political advantage? (and, if so, how are we to explain the billions spent shutting down the federal government as a negotiating tactic?)
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This happened to a few people I work with. 100k seems low. They found out by the IRS rejecting their return as they had "already filed". You'd think we'd have a better system by now than a short-ish unique number which never changes during your lifetime as the key for much of your financial / credit-related authorization.
USPS is rumored to be working on such a system actually. http://securekey.com/press-releases/securekey-technologies-w... SecureKey IIRC is used by Canada. USPS is in a unique position in that they have a ton of employees literally who can verify mailing addresses by brute force. Every day (except holidays). Rain, Snow or shine. Having USPS in charge of the US's future "online identity" would be a good way of transfor…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> empirically that's not true Feel like expanding that point? I mean shrinking government and changing society so people depend on it less is literally part of the national GOP platform. Is your argument just that they're not willing to sabotage things for political advantage? (and, if so, how are we to explain the billions spent shutting down the federal government as a negotiating tactic?)
literally part of the national GOP platform So you really think whatever they tell you is true? The GOP has not actually shrunk the government. Even when they had full control over the senate, house, and the presidency, they did not shrink the government... in fact, they made it bigger.
1. Most young scientists are leaving research due to budget cuts at NIH, NSF, NASA, etc. They're unlikely to ever come back so we've lost a large chunk of an entire generation of research in most fields. Sure, many of them are going to industry but I would submit that a crop of data scientists selling ads is less productive for the country long-term than all of the foundational pure research which industry rarely funds.
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The poster above is saying that it's part of the GOP's political agenda that's marketed to voters, rather than necessarily what they do once they're in office.
No he's not. It's called a "thread". He's replying to a post that says "Just a talking point--empirically that's not true." and he's saying it's more than a talking point because it's in the GOP platform.