81–90 of 197 posts
> "An audit showed that the tax authorities focused on people with “a non-Western appearance,” while having Turkish or Moroccan nationality was a particular focus". This has nothing to do with algorithms, mates. It had to do with how it wasn't tested and monitored. It appears that it was just rolled out live. > "Fraud prediction and predictive policing based on profiling should just be banned" And here are the usual…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why do people need to receive hundreds of thousands of Euros for children daycare? It's not about "daycare", it is about assisting families in the (massive) expenses that raising a child incurs. Why? Because unlike the American pension system which is mostly backed by the stock market, European pension systems depend on young and healthy workers to pay the pensions of the current pensioner generation. Obviously thi…
>Why? Because unlike the American pension system which is mostly backed by the stock market, European pension systems depend on young and healthy workers to pay the pensions of the current pensioner generation. Which IMHO the European pension system is massively flawed as it's basically a Ponzi scheme that requires more and more people to keep the system going, more people that will consume more resources and need mo…
Once upon a time I made the mistake of incorporating a startup in the Netherlands. Never. Again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> […] in order to acquire illicit benefits or abuse power for one's personal gain. There was no personal gain nor illicit benefits gained by the civil servants responsible. For something to be corruption, the perpetrator has to gain something.
Would a promotion (or not losing your job) count as a gain?
This scandal and the issues at the dutch tax office runs much deeper than just this one set of issues, they also maintained illegal lists of 'potential fraudulent people' on which 100's of thousands of people that had done nothing wrong, such as having the 'wrong' surname. It's rotten to the core and to date there have been zero consequences for the perps and the damage continues to pile up. Our government has fallen…
On the other hand one of the main triggers for this whole operation was the mass fraud by people from Bulgaria who netted a lot of benefits by gaming the system. They traveled to the Netherlands, applied for benefits and then went back to Bulgaria and used Dutch bank accounts and debit cards to get the cash. The tax office never wanted that to happen again and started this program to find fraudsters but ended up clas…
But what would all the important middle men do for a living then? /s
Once upon a time I made the mistake of incorporating a startup in the Netherlands. Never. Again.
What went wrong?
Also, it's not discussed much but the Netherlands has a very serious "old boy network" problem where white douchebags who didn't achieve much during their studies except boozing with other white douchebags keep failing upwards.
It's the reason why me and my mixed ethnicity background do not regret emigrating either, despite the superior bike infrastructure and hagelslag.
By reading, seems that the algorithm is just a scapegoat used in the title. This is racial discriminations dating way back, purposely introduced in the algorithm, and supported for 6 years. > Having dual nationality was marked as a big risk indicator, as was a low income. >In 2020, Trouw and another Dutch news outlet, RTL Nieuws revealed that the tax authorities also kept secret blacklists of people for two decades,…
No fly lists too, no algorythms involved
All "algorithm" means is "a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations"- computers don't need to be involved, nor does "AI".
The no-fly list is a process of looking up people in a list of names when calculating whether they can fly. That fits the definition as much as anything else the media calls an algorithm.
This is news I'd expect to hear from a backwater country I'd never heard off. But I'm afraid it is just yet one data point of how wrong I was and how bad things have gone in the heart of EU and maybe the whole western world.
By reading, seems that the algorithm is just a scapegoat used in the title. This is racial discriminations dating way back, purposely introduced in the algorithm, and supported for 6 years. > Having dual nationality was marked as a big risk indicator, as was a low income. >In 2020, Trouw and another Dutch news outlet, RTL Nieuws revealed that the tax authorities also kept secret blacklists of people for two decades,…
> "An audit showed that the tax authorities focused on people with “a non-Western appearance,” while having Turkish or Moroccan nationality was a particular focus". This has nothing to do with algorithms, mates. It had to do with how it wasn't tested and monitored. It appears that it was just rolled out live. > "Fraud prediction and predictive policing based on profiling should just be banned" And here are the usual…
It should've been (and almost surely was) some specific person's job to sign off on this thing being at least reasonable before deploying it, which they failed to do. Successfully redirecting attention from that specific person's failure to do their job (and their manager who failed to ensure they were doing their job, etc) to the abstract idea of Algorithms is some exceptional accountability judo.