I'm well aware of the common cognitive dissonance whereby a system which you are not familiar with seems like it should be trivial. But I'm having a hard time understanding where the complexity of these systems actually lie.
State and Federal employment records already exist with your social security number, address, employer address, employer ID number, and amount of taxes that have been withheld. I can retrieve my own copy of this record online from the IRS and my own state relatively easily.
Someone should not be able to [automatically] claim unemployment benefits for past income on which taxes have not been withheld, or estimated taxes have not been paid. That seems trivially fair. Even people making minimum wage will have payroll taxes withheld. Calculating an upper limit on the amount that can be processed automatically should therefore be trivial.
Next is the question of where to send the payment. DMVs cover a large percentage of the population. Beyond the DMV, there's voter registration, credit reports, address of record for where the last tax refund was sent, utility bills, phone records.
When I had a larger than typical refund last year, my state sent me a letter asking for copies of my and my wife's social security cards, passports, and utility bills before they would issue the refund. I felt that was pretty burdensome considering I was requesting the refund to the same exact bank account number which I had been paying them from for the last 5 years.
It's obvious the state is just totally incapable of running even the simplest of validation rules. It's just helicopter money dropping from the sky, and they don't really care who gets it, because it's not their money. It's not like anyone is going to lose their job or not get re-elected because of it.
The fact that's it's so easy to funnel all this money out of the country is a pretty wild indictment of FinCEN and the like.
>I'm well aware of the common cognitive dissonance whereby a system which you are not familiar with seems like it should be trivial.
I build these sorts of things and while it's not trivial it's also really not that hard. It's just insane the amount of money the government will spend on crap.
The field I work in is pretty small and I know a decent amount of the developers that use it. One project I worked on for the government, I showed up on day one and ran into a few people that had either no desire or no ability to do development work. And they were in team lead/senior roles.
Then, come to find out that you can't do anything for the project until you have a background check. And, by anything, I mean anything. No meetings, e-mails, or anything with an armed guard enforcing it. So there was an office full of people billing out at $200+ an hour for months doing literally nothing.
Then, come to find out that the way they wanted the software couldn't do. Like within an hour of hearing the requirements and what they were building I knew that it (1) wasn't possible and (2) the design they chose had fundamental flaws. Several years of effort and 10s of millions of dollars later they gave up on it.
The government is just a big whale too dumb, corrupt, and/or lazy to defend itself while a gigantic swarm of consultants/vendors are ripping off hunks of its flesh like the sharks they are.
I think the public focus on cost has paradoxically led to this situation. If you’re a good engineer, why work for the government? The compensation is extremely poor compared to industry, especially in tech. The lazy/incompetent people at the top have remained there because they’re too lazy/incompetent to leave for much greener pastures. If you fired them, their replacements will be at least as bad (on average, there are some passionate and competent people), since now the pay is poor and evidently there isn’t even job security.
We’ve built a system where we refuse to pay public servants. We shouldn’t be surprised when a system designed to attract below average people leads to projects with below average results.
Have you ever worked on a federal contract? The compensation really is not poor, unless you’re comparing it to say FAANG compensation, which is not really normal. They make as much, if not more, than current market rates.
There is significant job security (contract with three year period of performance is essentially guaranteed work for 3+ years), annual bonuses, etc.
The idea propagated by many here that engineers who work as government contractors are somehow less than is nauseating and untrue. Believe it or not, a whole world of talented people exists outside of the bubble you live in.
Yes, there are bad apples, as with every industry, and we are all just throwing out anecdotes, but the vast majority of people I worked with in government were A) hard workers, and B) overqualified for their positions, and C) highly educated/talented.
> Have you ever worked on a federal contract? The compensation really is not poor, unless you’re comparing it to say FAANG compensation, which is not really normal. They make as much, if not more, than current market rates.
I think there is a disconnect here. Public employees--people who are actually employed by the government--have fixed, low salaries (relative to the tech sector). Contractors for the public sector--people employed by private companies--actually have pretty decent salaries. These two sets of people are different categories, but a lot of people hear "government" and may be failing to realize the distinction between actual government employees versus contract employees.
It is very rare that the government hires engineers outside of contractors. I would argue compensation really is not that bad even for public employees (I was a GS federal employee, work in private sector now). A couple of years in, you essentially have a job for life, more than fair compensation, pension, 401k matching, etc. BLS' estimate of average salary for a software engineer is 107k per year. It is not all that challenging to make that much as a government employee in the DC area (GS-13 step 2 is about what is comparable).
GS-13 is a significant amount of experience and 107k isn’t a competitive wage for an engineer of that experience level, especially in tech.
How can the government provide adequate technical oversight of its contractors if it doesn’t hire engineers? Answer: it can’t, and you can routinely see the results.
GS-13 is possible within two years of experience and depending on the agency, sometimes quicker. Yes, I can personally attest to this and it will depend on the agency. To reiterate though, outside of a few agencies, most engineers in government are contractors, not civilian employees. Their compensation is much higher.
Just to be clear, GS-15 is the absolute highest pay grade for regular federal employees. A GS-13 is supposed to require at least a Masters and a GS-14 a PhD. If you got 13 after a year, you have very little potential growth for the rest of your career. $107k really is not a very high wage relative to the labor market for high end engineers, especially in tech.
Again, why would a good engineer work for the government? If the government can’t and won’t hire engineers, how can they create informed requirements for contracts or provide technical oversight of their contractors? You can see this playing out in boondoggle after boondoggle. The government poorly specifies a contract, a contractor bids on the contract, the government changes requirements over and over because the lack of technical expertise implies they have no idea what they want, the contractor rakes in tons of money due to direction changes, and eventually the contractor delivers something shitty because the people at the government also had no idea how to evaluate whether the contractor was meeting milestones.
Ok, just to be clear, a GS-13 is comparable to a masters and a GS-14 is comparable to a PhD IF you are using education as your sole means of qualifying for the position. I was hired as a GS-11, promoted to GS-12 after one year, GS-13 after another, received two qualified step increases the year after, plus a regular step increase. So in a matter of three years, I was effectively promoted six times. Once you are on a career ladder there are no education requirements.
In terms of GS-15, their pay goes up to 170k, so its not like GS-15 step 1 is the end of the road. Federal employees have also been receiving above-inflation pay raises and COLA adjustments the last few years.
So why would a good engineer work for the government? Honestly, if pay is your only metric you use to choose your place of employment, then I would not expect them to. However, as I have mentioned, there are plenty of people in the world who choose their place of employment based on many factors other than compensation.
Is government work frustrating? Sure. I'm sure the same can be said of for the engineer developing a CRUD application and has a shitty senior engineer overseeing them. Government work can also be incredibly rewarding and unfortunately, the majority of the time you only hear about the government failures instead of its successes. The federal government issues in excess of 500 billion in contracts per year...I assure you, there are successes in there and I have seen some federal agencies that have implemented acquisition processes and development practices that are competitive with some SV companies.
Not everyone is driven by money, but I think its fair to say that most people would take a job in industry where you can make 2-3x over a government job. I think this is born out in your own admission that it is very rare for government to hire engineers. Above inflation / COLA pay raises are table stakes for good engineers. If a good engineer in industry has only managed to get COLA pay raises over the last 5 years, they should quit.
I've not claimed that government can't do anything right, and I strongly believe in government. I do however believe that current public policy is designed to cause government to fail. Lots of contracts in that yearly $500 billion are successful, but things like the F-35 program, the Littoral Combat Ship, the Space Launch System, Healthcare.gov, the fuck ups in this article, and more are big enough that they eat pretty significantly into that $500 billion budget. The government has some serious issues procuring engineering work. Some pork politics certainly contribute, but lack of technical expertise at federal agencies is, I think, a significant factor.
I don’t agree with you that it is safe to say if people could make 2-3x more money they would take the opportunity. It is equivalent to saying people who become teachers, who make far less than most professions of similar educational requirements, would jump at an opportunity to make 2-3x the pay or are somehow incapable of performing comparable functions. It’s just not true.
I should probably clarify that there are some federal agencies that hire engineers as federal employees. For example, NSA, NASA, JPL, etc. To your point, they do have better success when it comes to engineering. However, they are also agencies that have a primary mission/function which requires it. For other agencies, it’s not all that easy for them to justify career engineering employees when the roles are tertiary functions. It’s not to say they don’t have them, but it is to say that they have far less of that expertise. That is why entities such as 18F and USDS exist though, to help fill that role.
While it seems like you are not keen on giving it a try, I highly encourage you to give government work a shot even if only on a temporary basis with somewhere like USDS or 18F. Only way to help make positive changes to the way government does business is through people with the drive and talent to do so. There is plenty of opportunity to influence those types of changes, even at lower ends of the employment hierarchy.
Appreciate the conversation and you offering your perspective!
Well, there's probably 100-200k engineers combined working at FAANG jobs, who have the option of the FAANG salary or the government salary. FAANG pays so /many/ paychecks that the expectation really is that high for people who can pass a FAANG interview. There are a lot of people who /can/ pass the interviews but choose not to, effectively taking a pay cut to go work on things they're passionate about; only a few of these end up working in 'boring' parts of government. The US Digital Service was meant to make it a broader/better path, though.
Your people description (B) is worth considering, too: I (personally) am unlikely to take a job I think I'm 'overqualified' for unless it's in a specific problem area I really, really care about. And 'overqualified' sounds near synonymous with 'few growth prospects': if the opportunities are there, why haven't they been taken? And if they aren't, why should I take a pay cut to work in a space with fewer opportunities for growth?
The level of compensation is not normal for engineers, that was the point I was making. There are a lot of talented engineers out there who A) have zero interest in working for a FAANG, B) are perfectly talented, C) have jobs that pay just as well. Yes, that applies to those in government too.
In terms of qualifications, people have different things that motivate them to work in certain fields/jobs. People value things other than money as well, such as power and influence, ability to impact change at scale few organizations can match, feelings they are contributing to a meaningful mission/cause, etc. It's not just about money and overqualification is many times because of the way career ladders work in government and the educational, training, internship opportunities the government pays/provides for that you are unlikely to experience in the private sector. Government will sponsor employees to work an internship in the U.S. Senate for 2+ years, or attend a postsecondary education at Georgetown/Harvard/GWU, etc. Not just for senior level employees, for mid-career ones.
Government is competing with FAANG for employees. There isn’t a good reason to exclude them from comparison. Even so, working for a startup without equity is often more lucrative than working for the federal government. The situation is even worse at the state and local level where you also have to fear your pension being raided via government bankruptcy.
I’m talking about actual government employees, not contractors. The actual government employees who manage those contracts are not paid well. You can see the results of this too in things like the F35 program where the government had no idea what it wanted and repeatedly redirected and added crazy requirements (to be fair, Lockheed is also incompetent).
You’re right though, painting even a majority of public employees as incompetent isn’t fair.
Government employees who manage contracts can be paid very well, depending on their grade. A GS-14 makes over $120k base, with pension, significant healthcare contribution, etc. A GS-15 is $152k base. I get that that may not seem like much, but it is 2-2.5x the median household income in the US.
Aside from that, a contract manager/Contract Officer is typically not an engineer and if you're lucky, may be someone that can fill more of a product owner role. It's not really comparable in those terms.
F35 really isn't a great example of poor engineering talent, that is an example of a crap acquisition strategy in general and was pretty much destined to be problematic from the start due to politics, conflicting/competing requirements, etc. You could have hired the best engineers in the world and they would have likely ended with the same results, because the majority of the issues with the F35 had little to do with engineering.
I had a friend that was a fracking engineer and made big bucks working on drilling sites. Constant travel, awful hours, "culture" of working all the time.
He took a big paycut to start working for the state government but he has good benefits, good retirement, and normal hours that you can actually raise a family with. And while all of his peers have scattered the nation looking for jobs when natural gas prices crashed, he's still sitting pretty with his same steady job.
So there is a lot more than just salary to working for the government.
> Have you ever worked on a federal contract? The compensation really is not poor, unless you’re comparing it to say FAANG compensation, which is not really normal. They make as much, if not more, than current market rates.
Yes. It was OK pay, but not better than market. Annual bonuses weren't a thing. There was no path for career advancement beyond senior engineer. The supposed stability was not nearly as good as you describe.
There's a bunch of reasons I stopped doing defense contracting.
I don't doubt they are hard workers and intelligent. But if OP is judging them by SV standards of talent then it's not exactly fair. Building a successful company requires a certain drive, risk appetite, and revolutionary zeal that are not easily found in government (and to a lesser extent, academia). There are smart people everywhere but most would never make a significant impact.
It requires a difference of priorities and ambitions. What draws people to the DC area is not the same as what draws them to SV. It’s not a disparity of capability. Aside from that, your point really is not accurate. There are plenty of companies and entrepreneurs users in the DC area that generate FAR more value and revenue than SV startups. Take a look at the wealthiest counties in the US. Loudoun County and Fairfax County have been the top of that list for a while. Or Montgomery County for that matter.
Would you truly consider old money, government regulatory capture/lobbying and defence to be in the same category as startups? They are completely different types of innovation. There job is done once a specific policy is achieved. Overarching changes to the system is often not their priority.
Most tech employees in even in the valley aren’t founders or early employees risking it all. There is probably some element of drive for commercial products or something but I think you’re vastly overestimating the degree to which that is a factor vs compensation.
It's not the amount of pay. It's that results (good or bad) don't really impact your salary. Nobody missed a bonus for the project failing and nobody would have gotten one for it succeeding.
The consultants have even worse incentives. The better they do the less they get paid. Meaning, it's better for them if the project drags on than delivering something on time.
There's a ton of research out there on this. To simplify it basically if someone is doing mindless work like putting a cap on a bottle on an assembly line, then bonuses increase performance in the long term. But if they are doing complex work like writing software they decrease performance in the long term.
Is it really true that government jobs pay less than their private counterparts? In Canada government jobs are actually provide far more compensation than private ones but I guess it might be different for USA.
A GS-9, which is roughly a freshly-minted graduate with a Master's degree, starts at $45k/year, growing to about $60k/year (although this is also adjusted by locality). This is well below prevailing tech sector rates.
I don't see how your argument fits the situation, the government is clearly not focusing on costs if it's wasting millions of dollars on obviously not viable projects and paying consultants $200/h to sit around for months waiting for a security clearance...
There's definitely a focus on cost. It is just misguided. Short of not having security clearances, I'm not sure how you can avoid paying people to wait for them. Simple projects, like properly paying people unemployment benefits, have become not viable for the government to execute. There are many reasons why this has happened, but I think the erosion of technical expertise in the government is a big contributor. Rather than paying market rates for engineering talent, the government hires a bunch of individually cheaper non-engineers to oversee technical projects. The government could save a lot of money by hiring a handful of competent engineers rather than a ton of nontechnical management.
Relatedly, I think the government could probably save a ton of money with some in house technical talent to execute basic projects like the systems in this article rather than going through the crazy procurement process. It isn't clear to me that contractors are providing any added value to justify the added cost for their profit.
Step 1: Fire all engineers on government money, to decrease "overhead" and let "industry" do it
Step 2: Parent post
Step 3: Government is inefficient, inept, if not outright corrupt, we must gut it further! Goto Step 1.
The other day I was getting data from the USGS, and it was remarkable how well structured, sorted, searchable the data was, how it came in high quality, with a custom-built downloader applet that worked very nicely actoss multiple machines. I went from zero to complete solution in QGIS in one day. It's not all that bad.
The saddest thing I witnessed were consultants like you describe bragging about how easy it is "to milk the cow" (to quote one). They bragged that they never earned their bonus in such an easy way.
“There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get.
And that’s government.”
-Milton Friedman
I also worked on a state unemployment system, and it was much the same. Took a couple weeks to get my laptop, but I still had to come in and sit in a chair and read the physical newspaper. When it did arrive, it took the better part of an hour to run the build.
That was the last government work I ever did. I lasted about 3 months.
The system is intentionally complex and high friction, like most social programs in the US. We spend a lot of time trying to make sure people who "don't deserve" help can't get it. It's a political win for both parties.
The tricky part is as a society, we haven't trained many people for jobs where you build sociotechnical systems: processes and systems that have a major human element in it, and a major automated/computation element in it.
We have computer scientists who can make robust pure software systems with theoretical guarantees, and work well at scale. And we have political and administrative professionals who can converge on decisions and policies with actors with different motivations and rationality. But it's hard to do both really well at the same time, especially on the first try.
The government intentionally diffuses responsibility for all the same reasons corporations do.
The government does not have much incentive to work efficiently because of use it or lose it budgeting. You ever notice how you only ever see stories of efficiency coming from cash strapped departments and poor cities? This is why
We don't want the government to have all the databases interlinked. There's too much potential for abuse and when you're talking about state or nation scale programs your "rare" edge cases result in tens of thousands or millions of people being shafted.
You would also think that an unemployement claim might have a red flag thrown if it's still reporting unemployment taxes because the person is still working. My company had many individuals that were notified the state had been paying out claims in their name...but they had been receiving paychecks the entire time. Washington had an auto-accept policy without any verification until things could be verified, but by that time hundreds of millions were gone.
The unemployment schemes in Colorado and California have been a total disaster. I received a unemployment debit card in the mail - as well as a claim number. Called the state, filed a FTC report, and called the bank. None of them really cared or did anything about it.
In California - the scale of the graft was so bad that they have had to pause the program multiple times.
I’m a bit surprised at CO being incompetent, and I’d like to hear more. Generally my observation has been that states with one party rule have been less effective than states where both parties have to compete for the approval of the electorate. Based on the last time I lived in CO, I would’ve put it in the latter category.
This happened to me in CO. I received two debit cards in the mail earlier this Summer to a previous address, one for the one CO uses to distribute unemployment benefits, one for an Internet-only bank based out of CA. I think the fraudster got my info from CO's voter registration record, which is public by default. The address on there hasn't been updated.
I had to fight the CA bank over the course of several weeks before they would close my account, and only after I had filed a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Pro tip: do this for any financial disputes; financial firms will be very responsive to your issues.
I also called the bank CO uses to distribute unemployment benefits and they were much more amenable to my request to close the account.
For CO's part, the only link they provided on the CO Dept of Labor's site to report fraud (a Google form) had language to basically say that I am reporting myself as the fraudster and I would be subject to perjury in filing the report. For obvious reasons, I didn't fill it out. (It took them months to change the form.) I then called their main phone number and the only way I could talk to anyone was to schedule a callback 2-3 months later.
Ended up freezing all of my credit bureau accounts.
BTW, I don't place this fault entirely on CO. It was a hectic and uncertain time and they were trying to distribute funds into people's hands as quickly as possible. I don't expect them to be able to change such a complicated process overnight, or even months. It's a clear example of fraudsters being well ahead of regulators.
I know the form that you mention for reporting fraud in CO. Even better than the fact that it is a google form, is that is also asks for your Social Security Number.
My mom got an unemployment card (US Bank handles it in CO) in the mail and she’s never worked; she’s a disabled senior. My dad called the bank and they didn’t care, and he called the state and they didn’t care either. This was around 3 weeks ago
They only care come tax time or years later when they try to accuse you of fraud. Sadly I've seen it happen and it's pure hell for the person, especially when they tried to make it right from the beginning.
I’ll be curious to see analysis on which states performed better here.
But to be fair to CO, there is a good faith reason for governments to not care if they send cards to extra Americans. So long as the federal money printer is still running, spreading money around to Americans will keep the economy alive during the pandemic. Who cares if you give a bit of extra to people who don’t deserve it? Chances are they’ll spend it on local food and what not which’ll help keep other people off unemployment. This is especially true in cases where speed is of the essence, since you’d happily accept some level of errors to get the aid out immediately.
We moved into a new house a month ago, after we lost our old one in a fire. Since we've been at the new address, we've received probably 50 letters from Unemployment addressed to many obviously fake names. About half look like they contain checks. We're trying to get in touch with our state unemployment office, but they're nearly impossible to contact right now.
> Is it too much to ask for a government that both governs and is actually competent?
This is the question put to the voters at every election, and at every election the voters vote no to this type of government. So it isn't too much to ask, but it isn't what the people want.
It just seems that asking antiquated unemployment systems to handle a huuuge increase in users in a time of pandemic where employees are getting sick or staying home just seems like a monumental scaling task.
I still believe that in times of crisis it's easier to go for a simple solution (just giving automatic, direct, unconditional cash to people) than to try to make a complex solution even more complex (changing the rules on who is considered unemployed, where millions now had to figure out how to use a system they've never used before).
Why couldn't they just take that $600 extra per week and distribute it to every adult in the country?
Each party is dedicated to making sure that their constituents and only their constituents get money. After all, if the other guys can write endless checks for you, why on earth would they vote for the other guy.
Also, sooner or later the US dollar's reserve status will disappear, and all of a sudden, all of the money supply we have flushed into the economy will manifest as inflation.
I'm not sure how you're getting 9 trillion dollars. If there's approximately 250M adults in the US, at $600/week/adult, that would be $150B/week, or $600B/month. So far, over the course of 10 months, that would be $6T.
Also, that would be the max amount so far and could ask people who don't need the money to either opt out of receiving it or to donate it to an org or person they think needs it.
> Each party is dedicated to making sure that their constituents and only their constituents get money. After all, if the other guys can write endless checks for you, why on earth would they vote for the other guy.
Fair points. I think often political parties can get so insular they miss the point that for some problems, we are all on the same team.
> Also, sooner or later the US dollar's reserve status will disappear, and all of a sudden, all of the money supply we have flushed into the economy will manifest as inflation.
I don't know too much about what you mean here regarding the reserve status and how it prevents inflation, but I'm curious to learn more, so thank you for mentioning that.
Do they have to also steal the debit card for this scam to work? I'm a little confused with how they get money out of this if the debit cards go to your real address.
I suspect they would have control of the account that the state set up to distribute benefits since they had enough information to file the claim in the first place; but the non-mailing contact info would be email and phone number that they control. Once the funds have been distributed, they'd be notified and then make the transfer to the second account set up at another bank. From there...poof...
This is probably why a second bank account was opened up in my name. This bank's KYC controls were so lax that they didn't even bother to do a credit inquiry on me, which would have resulted in a notice to me from a credit monitoring service that I use.
> Is it too much to ask for a government that both governs and is actually competent?
Evidently yes. They can barely govern let alone manage technical infrastructure. Just look at the abysmal vaccine roll-out. 9 months to plan for it; that's an eternity in the software development world where we're constantly faced with logical and logistical issues on the daily. We can have millions of people streaming gigabytes of data all at once, millions of people submitting their tax returns, millions of packages being delivered every hour and yet we couldn't pull this off in 9 freakin months? I don't buy any of their excuses. It's just sheer incompetence and it makes me so mad.
That's not to say they don't have challenges. Outdated systems, obsolete programs, hell even outdated employees; I know so many rejects that end up managing government systems because they couldn't cut it in corporate. One of them is a good friend of mine. He got let go when he tried to replace a modern web-app with a WinForms app. He's actually a very good person and intelligent, but a horrible dev and I've no idea how he ever got into software development, but the government gig he has loves him.
> We can have millions of people streaming gigabytes of data all at once, millions of people submitting their tax returns, millions of packages being delivered every hour and yet we couldn't pull this off in 9 freakin months?
That streaming wasn't rolled out instantly. It took years of building network infrastructure to get to this point.
You might say that rolling out the vaccine is trivial in comparison. But the vaccine requires building a minus-80-degree cold chain. That's... not a trivial task.
> That streaming wasn't rolled out instantly. It took years of building network infrastructure to get to this point.
In its inception yes, because that was new. It's much much quicker now and certainly far quicker than 9 months. Vaccinating people is not new and the technology to assist in making that process smooth is also not new. What's new is the restrictions upon which the vaccine can be stored at certain temps and the scale at which they can produce the vaccines. Neither of which are really logistical problems, at least not in the areas they're currently falling short on. Which brings me to:
> the vaccine requires building a minus-80-degree cold chain. That's... not a trivial task.
That's not where it's failing though. They knew that part well ahead of time and knew where to distribute them. The failure is occurring at other junctions along the way. In fact at Stanford, one of the biggest issues was a software algorithm (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/stanford-apologizes-doc...)
In a functioning democracy the top bosses are ultimately the voters. The voters are free to reject the next slate of incumbents coming up for re-election and choose individuals that express technical command of policy.
Not really. The only elections that really matter are the primaries. In California and CO, once you have that locked up, the party machinery will make sure that no other canonicate gets elected.
36 billion is an almost comical number without some sort of meaningful supporting evidence. I think it warrants serious consideration if this HN article should be flagged or not.
agree, and .. wondering out loud how much "fake - look over THERE" is going on to cover actual corruption within the USA over these benefits, by those connected to the US system somehow
1) US foreign aid generally consists of money earmarked to buy goods from specific cronies in the US for specific elites in the target country. This lagniappe creates influence over those elites that greases other private import/export political/banking schemes between that country and large US firms.
2) That aid is generally also contingent on not taking aid from designated US state enemies like Russia and China, who are often eager to create the same relationship with the target country. Our eternal aid to Egypt, for example, would be happily replaced almost instantly if we withdrew it, along with any Egyptian weapons and infrastructure contracts with US firms.
My uncle works in cybercrime for a city PD. He says people in his city are regularly tricked into sending their life savings via bitcoin ATMs to Nigerian scammers.
It’s a good idea, but unlikely to move the needle very much. According to the article Nigerians are taking in ~$18B in unemployment scams. This dwarfs the money coming from foreign aid. In a country with rampant corruption the scammers will simply bribe the authorities and continue as normal. The government will respond to international pressure by making a few high profile arrests for publicity, without taking serious measures to stem the problem. Meanwhile the vulnerable systems of state governments will still be vulnerable. Better to just pay the cost of
a software upgrade for the first time in 40 years.
Chances are the officials don’t want to stem the problem. $18B is a non trivial amount of money to inject into a country like Nigeria with a GDP of $448B (2019). No sane politician is going to purposefully cut off 4% of the GDP, especially when the costs are externalized to another country.
18B? Just how many of persons doing this in Nigeria could there be? I somewhat doubt that the figure can be that high. That is millions of individual cases, which would mean that there is thousands or tens of thousand people involved and even more with processing the money on the way...
Nigeria is the largest country in Africa. The population is ~200M (~60% of the population of the US). 1M people is only 0.5% of the total population of Nigeria, so it is not a stretch to imagine that number of people engaged in cyber-crime. When you consider that Nigeria's population skews young, and the country is filled with a lot of very intelligent, well educated people, who don't have a chance of landing a six figure salary working for a FAANG company, it does not seem unreasonable to expect people to make a living doing something that is not totally ethical (even people with all the opportunities in the world go on to work as corporate consultants).
If withdrawal of aid isn't sufficient you can use sanctions against the nation in question or even against nations that opt to trade with that nation. It logically wouldn't take much to tip Nigeria into a further clusterfuck.
At 8% of the 2019 GDP, a lot of that $36B is going to eventually make it back into government hands in the form of taxes.
In 2019 the Nigerian government’s budget was 3.4% of the GDP. If that $36B gets taxed like the rest of the economy it’ll raise $1.22B for the government. Even assuming that fraudsters are dodging their taxes at a higher rate, the tax revenue alone from $36B might outweigh foreign aid for the year.
Also consider the Nigerian government current receives aid money, plus whatever amount they're able to tax from this fraudulent money (which is probably pretty low as you mentioned, fraudsters are unlikely to be on the up-n-up with their taxes, especially when the income came from illicit activities).
So chopping nearly $1 Billion in aid is going to hurt badly, even if the fraud continues as normal.
Foreign aid is never intended to help the people of a nation. It's used by high-income democratic nations to support autocratic policies and resource extraction.
I doubt very much of that 793M makes it to any of the people pulling these scams. It's typically used as legal bribes for the governments of those countries, who distributed it to all their cronies at the top, in order to maintain power and sell national resources to the US/EU and others at very low prices.
The Dictators Handbook by Mesquita and Smith go into more details on how this works.
That's kind of the point - hold the 'foreign aid' funds from the nation, until said nation does something to combat the fraud.
You can't actively police your laws inside a foreign nation, but with some level of control (i.e. $793M/a in "foreign aid" held over their heads), you can tell the nation what you want them to do about things affecting you. Chances are good they're going to comply.
If we accept the assumption that $36b really is in actual Nigeria based scammers, and the government were able to comply and threatened or started to comply, they could also tax scam income 2.5% for government to have the same funds from this one scam alone. But without taxing scams directly, there are massive trickle down effects that probably amount to more than 2.5% being siphoned off to taxes.
How is collective punishment the issue? Is cutting off aid for an entire country acceptable because of a few bad actors? If anything, wouldn't cutting off aid just increase the need for wealth transfer? If I'm Nigeria, and I'm scamming to the tune of billions, why do I care about small sums?
When the country in question isn’t taking action against this widespread issue then I’d say it’s acceptable. It’s not just a few bad actors. People are regularly being scammed out of their life savings.
I don't think Nigeria, or many African countries, have the capabilities to enforce justice properly. Both technologically, institutionally and political will. Governments over there are not like governments here. You ask the Nigerian government to round up "internet scammers" and innocent people get targeted, political enemies end up in jail, a few high profile arrests and little happens.
You have a very high opinion of African governments if you think we can send them a list of suspects.
I know it’s different areas and backgrounds, but it would also make sense to start promoting/helping them grow other areas including technology and security.
Technology is an area that would help a ton and services/products can be exported fairly easily.
It's so stupid that they mail recipients for legal liability after the crime, but couldn't mail them and notify that unemployment is beggining before payments are made.
step 1) Verify the unemployed mailing address is the same as on the bank account you are sending to. If it is not the same for legitimate reasons,
step 2) Mail a pin code to the local address.
step 3) Collecting unemployment requires entering that pin.
I'm sure there are some edge cases to work out, but this isn't rocket science.
And meanwhile my unemployment payments sit at 0 nearly four months after filing. Just sitting at pending a determination. Can't get anyone to answer the phone or e-mail.
I have a friend who works as support staff at a school. She was out of work from March when the schools closed to August when they reopened. She still hasn't gotten a cent.
I'm sorry this is happening to you. Unfortunately there will be no consequences for anyone responsible.
In Washington state, the unemployment agency has been hindering investigations to the point that a public warning has been issued to the agency's leaders about it from the investigators (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/washingto...). The head of this agency recently claimed that $357M of $600M has been recovered. However, it is hard to trust this figure because the agency has already been called out for misstating financial impact (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/sta...).
What's really damning is the level of incompetence. Washington state's unemployment agency went an entire year without standard anti-fraud checks, leaving them broken that entire time. They only fixed it this year, seemingly because this unprecedented level of fraud caught the public's attention. The agency's leader, Suzi LeVine, was picked by Governor Jay Inslee to lead this agency as a "natural fit". But the reality is that it was a nepotistic appointment - LeVine was a Sales and Marketing executive at Expedia and then US ambassador to Switzerland. Her early career work experience at Microsoft was more technical but it was too long ago and too limited to give her "tech credentials". However, she was a prominent DNC fundraiser and donated significantly to Inslee's campaigns (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/how-democ...), so here we are.
It is hard from the article to see where they pull the $36b headline number from...
“California officials drew headlines recently for announcing they suspect as much as $2 billion was paid out in improper payments. Other states have reported lower losses: $242 million in Massachusetts, $200 million in Michigan, $18 million in Rhode Island, $8 million in Arizona and $6 million in Wisconsin.”
California is about 15% of US GDP, so even if many other states were hit much worse, getting to $36b is hard.
This seems to be indicative of the great problem of the future. If a small percentage of the world’s population are devious and seek to ruin things for everyone else, how does the global society punish that? If it’s only just 1% of the population, that’s still over 70 million folks spread across thousands of jurisdictions... The ultimate free rider problem. And will likely grow exponentially until we come up with some way to change the structure of the world, or if the fraction grows, until they consume all the productive surplus.
This doesn't need a global solution I think. Just make a requirement that people need to get a one-use access code in-person from a government office after presenting some ID (DMV or whatever). Alternatively allow this one-use access code to be delivered by mail within the US.
That would instantly cull a giant amount of international electronic fraud but does carry some user friction points to figure out.
The easiest way to cull a scaling problem caused by technology is to inject some kind of geographic-limiting or human-required action into the process.
Maybe not at the beginning of the pandemic because of all the unknowns. Over the summer though? Yes. We know how the disease works. If we can keep grocery stores open I'm sure you can put up plastic barriers & enforce mask wearing in government offices. The DMV is open today (as other other government offices that can't work remotely).
Again, I'm not saying this is a perfect system, but it should be sufficient to significantly cut down fraud. If you want a system that scales better, you have to have a reliable national ID system but Americans historically have been very loathe on a functional version, instead using social security numbers for that which fail on many many fronts.
This attack vector was created by gigantic, centralized, and ineffective bureaucracies. I’m not sure if it follows that a new international bureaucracy is needed to stop the damage.
And yet certain countries will need a ‘gigantic, centralized, bureaucracy’ regardless of any other factor because of the existence of WMDs, so to get rid of such is an impossible option for the globe.
What other options are there once the existence of such ‘gigantic, centralized, bureaucracy’ is preordained on this planet for the foreseeable future?
I frequently read that the problem with government is that we just need more of it. That they just don’t have enough money and power to be effective yet.
"Eventually, the [Washington] state’s computers started to flag anomalies: out-of-state banks, duplicate email addresses and multiple names using the same bank accounts. But there and elsewhere, antiquated state computer systems failed to flag foreign IP addresses, repeated computer serial numbers and techniques to mask that number."
The current version of WA employment security dept software was deployed in 2017. It was a boondoggle that cost taxpayers ~$50mm.
If I recall correctly it is also a third party solution provided by a private company. Oregon plans to adopt the same software after not being able to make payments at all for quite some time due to their own antiquated software [0].
From an article I read at the time:
Keiser said Fast Enterprises has since blamed ESD for the lack of fraud protection because the ESD “didn’t purchase additional security” that Fast Enterprises could have offered. [1]
Seems unbelievable given the expense. At the time I wrote OPB and said.
While I think it is a good thing to choose readymade software rather than developing something new and potentially fail to deliver anything, I feel that Oregon is not paying attention to what is happening on the other side of the Columbia river and is potentially making the same mistakes as Washington.
Just throwing this out there - any highly regulated and/or political entity has the bottom-dollar solution for tech/IT. Got out of the education software sector because of it myself.
The problem is that it takes real budgets and effort to build these highly complex systems. It requires teams of competent engineers that are willing to take the extra steps to ensure the systems they're building/connecting are managed in a security-positive manner. When these sort of projects are bid out it's usually the bottom-dollar bidder and/or whoever has the most "good ol' boy" connections; this often doesn't correlate to the previously stated need for technical competency.
Also there's the problem of talent. Private vs. public sector development firms typically pay out on different scales for similar work/stress loads.
All of this is anecdotal but I'm so not surprised.
I competed for some gov projects before. The one-trick that produces such bad outcomes is requiring the RFP winners to have done similar projects before.
This often freezes out local innovators in favor of large national contractors that specialize in fubar government projects.
A mere 50 mil on a website? I think the developers should get a presidential medal of freedom for bringing it in at such a low cost. Consider that healthcare.gov cost 40x that much.
The solution to this seems to be to make software companies liable for the damages their errors cause. Zero day in Windows allows massive theft? Microsoft's on the line. Your web app let someone drain the state unemployment benefits? Guess who's on the line for that, too. If your company could obviously not cover the kind of problems that could arise, you have to be bonded.
Many (many) years ago, in Illinois, in order to collect unemployment, I had to visit a state employment office and meet a state employee and explain the circumstances around how I'd become involuntarily unemployed. No big deal, the checks came.
So I wonder: would the additional cost of employing humans to vet unemployment claims face to face cost less than the corruption of an automated system?
The biggest assumption with this sort of solution is that all state governments will act in good faith. I've had people wait weeks just to get an appointment with the welfare office in Texas.
Texas (and other states) routinely cut funding for departments that support social safety nets. Because the politicians in charge are diametrically opposed to the very idea of social safety nets.
Instead of putting more effort into combating and preventing fraud, these politicians would rather push for further cuts. The argument being that by making it less profitable to commit fraud, there will be less fraud. All the while ignoring people who actually need the social safety neet.
But for people arguing from a position of bad faith--people disagree with the very idea of unemployment insurance or social welfare of any kind--it makes all the sense in the world. "Look at these people stealing all this money. We can't have that." Then they slash budgets further.
People still talk about Reagan's imaginary welfare queen 4o years later to justify cutting social welfare programs. They'll use any excuse they can find.
Go look at how much toll booth collectors used to make and the various scandals (usually along the lines of politicians using their influence to hand out the jobs as favors) before they got automated.
In a perfect world you'd be right. But in the real world it winds up hemorrhaging money at every turn.
This is why universal programs are better. If you have gatekeepers you incentivize corruption. If you have tests you incentivize cheating. There's just too many knobs and dials (programs).
Something like UBI is much simpler and therefor has far fewer attack vectors. The only test is to verify citizenship. A process to handle claims of non-receipt would be easy if a cheque can be expired and a new one sent.
Who cares if wealthy citizens also get a pittance (to them)? It's more fair that they do anyway! Expire the cheques after like a year, so people can simply opt out by not cashing them before they expire.
> Eventually, the state’s computers started to flag anomalies: out-of-state banks, duplicate email addresses and multiple names using the same bank accounts.
There are also entire markets of compromised remote protocol computers, sorted by location and bandwidth, payable in cryptocurrency.
This allows you normal, dynamic residential and office IP addresses that even flagging VPNs will allow people to get around.
It is likely these are used as well, and gives state agencies a false sense of security. I don't consider those organizations having any solution.
I worked for a big tech company in the Seattle area when the pandemic started. I had previously received notifications of my PII being misappropriated in attacks against my company's medical insurance administrator, as did all of my co-workers.
The Washington State unemployment web site only required that you type in the right PII when registering, which pretty much was just your name and SSN. Maybe the address would need to match too, but regardless it was all the stuff that would have been available to any breach such as the ones that hit Equifax or Anthem.
Several weeks into the pandemic I got a letter in the mail from the Washington State Employment Security Department (ESD) referencing a claim number and giving me advice on how to start up a tech business or something. I was like, "Um, why is there a claim number on this letter?" I went to the ESD website and tried to register with my SSN, only to be greeted with something like, "Sorry, looks like you're already registered with email address *[email protected]."
I knew right away what was going on, and I alerted my co-workers that they should go check out to see if their SSN was associated with some random email address they didn't recognize. Sure enough, about a dozen others in Washington state reported that they were hit too.
From those who weren't popped, we learned that just by providing your name and SSN, the web set would spill out your income to whoever's using it and then let them register for unemployment benefits in your name to whatever random bank account you want to link. The fraudsters probably just went through their Equifax or Anthem dumps and selected the higher-income ones in the tech industry.
A few weeks later my HR department reached out to me with, "Hi, we got a notification that you're collecting unemployment benefits. You're not planning on leaving the company are you?" To which I replied (in more civil terms), "No, you dipstick, it's the same thing that's happening with the dozens of other employees in Washington state right now, of which I'm sure you're aware. Why aren't you mentioning anything about the massive amount of identity fraud going on with your Washington state employees?" It was radio silence from HR from that point on.
I tried calling the ESD fraud hotline, but it was so overwhelmed that it wouldn't even let me get in a queue. It just said, "We're too busy, bye bye" and hung up. I figured the system would work it all out eventually, and about a month ago I got a letter informing me that their investigation into the fraud was completed and that everything was cleared up.
Much of it is assuredly going to organized crime, just as always when a lot of government money is moving around at once. The similarities between the bad loans bailed out during the Savings and Loan Crisis and the Financial Crisis have convinced me of that.
Maybe the answer is a push model vs pull model for money? Cryptographically secure money has its own new set of problems, but at least someone can't "pull" any amount of money from you with nothing but an account number.
The real story is we could have trivially stopped this fraud by issuing 2FA tokens to every American less than the cost of this fraud.
We could also have required debit cards in place of direct payments to random banks be sent to the address on file with the IRS for the majority with correct info on file and handled the minority of exceptions by in person appointments at a government office including for example post offices where you would show government issued photo ID to receive your debit card.
The (very reasonable) comment this reply was originally threaded with is now dead, so I’ll post it here:
Some level of fraud in a social welfare system is absolutely acceptable, if tightening controls to eliminate the fraud would mean that otherwise eligible people didn’t receive benefits they qualified for, or even if it meant that accessing those benefits became much more onerous. I don’t doubt that $36bn is too high, but this kind of analysis is almost never present in these articles and politically in this country the spectre of fraud is usually used as an anti-welfare cudgel
Definitely. I can trivially design an unemployment system that has zero fraud: we just never give out any money at all. We have to balance fraudulent payments against deserving recipients who don't get the money.
The basic problem they addressed was that a lot of people who qualified for food stamps didn't get them because it was too hard to apply. You either had to fill out an intimidating set of paper forms or a quirky and intimidating set of web versions of paper forms. GetCalFresh basically just applied the lean startup playbook: make something very simple, drive people to it with ads, and, as Paul Graham suggests, they did things that didn't scale. Initially, they filled out the paperwork by hand. Then they kept adding automation for filling out and faxing in PDFs. They talked with users, removing barriers and solving problems. Rolling out county by county, they've made a huge difference. Average online application time dropped from 45 minutes to 8. Last I checked, they were helping tens of thousands of people per month.
I think it's fantastic that all of these people previously going hungry are now getting fed. But for years they weren't, and there are still plenty of deserving recipients who aren't. A lot of what GCF is doing is taking information the government already has and giving it back to them. Why is that necessary at all?
I get why unemployment is still a mess. But given the power of networked computers, eventually I'd like to see all safety-net programs get rid of the need to apply at all. For a lot of pandemic layoffs, it would have been possible for state governments to contact people who were probably eligible, have them confirm a few details, and start sending them the money. And as a bonus, a proactive system like that would be much harder to scam.
There is certainly a contingent on HN who belong to the camp of "we need tamper-proof national ID secured by technobabble." I'd just point out that it took me two tries to get a new RealID license because, even as a homeowner and passport holder, I didn't quite bring all the required forms of identification and proof of residency the first time.
Personally, I'm just fine with a system that has some cracks and limitations.
Agreed. There should absolutely be anti-fraud mechanisms, but those are not the same as what people tend to start talking about when they start talking about welfare fraud.
You can protect against fraud of this scale without adding more rigorous means testing, or mechanisms that really just hurt the people who need the most help.
That's exactly right. The total in the headline (I didn't read through to do a serious accounting) comes to about a 10% overhead vs. CARES act funding. That's bad. States should work to make the process more efficient. But efforts at stopping fraud like this by increasing bureaucratic friction can easily end up cutting out 10% of entitled recipients who just don't have the right paperwork.
In fact, most state unemployment systems reliably and measurably shortchange their citizens by being needlessly restrictive. They need to be easier to qualify for, not harder.
Edit: I misread this originally—but please don't copy-paste comments on HN. It strictly lowers the signal/noise ratio.
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I can't tell what comment you were referring to, but please don't copy-paste [dead] comments on HN, or any comments. If there's a [dead] comment that shouldn't be dead, you can vouch for it as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html, or email us at [email protected].
It is 1% of all US federal tax revenue. It is not insignificant.
Also, insane that your health plan costs as much as the average citizen's share in all federal taxes (which also include corporate taxes, tariffs and whatnot).
> Also, insane that your health plan costs as much as the average citizen's share in all federal taxes (which also include corporate taxes, tariffs and whatnot).
That's pretty typical for a quality health insurance / month.
Good health care plans in America are expensive. My employers have always broken out how much they are contributing towards my health insurance each month, ~$1000 is typical.
Looked, since we just did insurance elections- my semi-monthly cost is $580 and the company's is $735 for my family HSA plan. $280 of that is the cash contribution to the HSA, which will get spent, since all costs except checkups go directly against the deductible.
But removing the HSA contribution, that is $600 a month by myself, for the premium and $1470 by the company.
As is often said, 33% of US health care costs are the overhead from billing.
I always admire the efficiency of dentists, somehow they can get an instant quote from my insurer as to exactly how much is going to be paid for.
Eye doctors are the same way. No nonsense, "here is what it costs, here is what your insurance pays, here is what you owe us."
I can have a little of of sympathy for insurance cos though, I once had a podiatrist bill my insurance $2000 for work that he obviously didn't do, and another doctor I visited recently either accidentally or purposefully submitted what was plainly the wrong billing code to the insurance company.
Veterinary service is interesting, pretty much the exact same medical technology, but the billing is up front, and they even offer package discounts on tests!
> somehow they can get an instant quote from my insurer
Because dentists are doing routine work. Doctors like to charge for each and every little thing, rather than by time like most professionals do. So each diagnosis, each procedure, each conversation can have different costs which can't be known up front. If a doctor wanted to provide you the codes they will be using, they easily could. They simply choose not to, to give them the freedom the charge whatever later on, in case they are able to based on what happens during your visit.
I love the "new patient" charge code, which is utilized anytime you change to a new doctor. How the hell that differs from a regular "consultation" code for a yearly checkup is beyond me. The same time is spent analyzing and talking to you, the content of the discussion is the same. Surely, the doctor doesn't remember you from last year anyway so they need to spend time going over your notes.
And yet, you get the honor of paying an extra $150 to $250 simply for talking to a different doctor.
To some degree. On the other hand, I had a crown a few years back and the temporary would not stay on. I lost it 2 or 3 times. (Like actually lost.) Pretty sure he lost money on that one.
I don't disagree. But when things are often not covered by insurance or when coverage is very partial, providers find they have to often give an upfront price.
Same thing with contractors for many types of jobs (or software consultants)--though there are pros to fixed-price vs. hourly.
It originates with the CMS, Centers for Medicaid and Medicare, sets the codes and there’s a committee of doctors that assigns relative value units to different types of work (“RVU”s). It’s all very complicated and opaque.
The US has this crazy amalgamation of taxpayer funded healthcare and private insurance funded healthcare where the each entity is trying to exert maximum pressure to either minimize expenses or maximize income, and it’s in a constant state of flux.
Thinking about the amount of man hours that are wasted on this endeavor resulting from a desire to not simply provide everyone a simple taxpayer funded system is disheartening.
Last year ~6 million people were eligible for unemployment.
The fact you are flaunting your entire family's healthcare costs and using the entire US population of adults, retirees and children to justify the theft of 36 billion dollars is concerning.
Every time. Every single time there is somebody totally okay with fraud if it relates to a program he is otherwise in favor of.
Can't you just spell out, "UC is good, but fraud is bad, so let's eliminate the fraud, even if it's a mere XY billion dollars." It does not require any internal contradiction to think that way.
Retail stores, banks, corporations, all price in fraud and risk. It's a matter of trading cost of enforcement vs. impact to core mission vs. money recovered.
Some level of fraud in a social welfare system is absolutely acceptable, if tightening controls to eliminate the fraud would mean that otherwise eligible people didn’t receive benefits they qualified for, or even if it meant that accessing those benefits became much more onerous. I don’t doubt that $36bn is too high, but this kind of analysis is almost never present in these articles and politically in this country the spectre of fraud is usually used as an anti-welfare cudgel
There are many factors involved, but at a basic level there is no robust record of identity and the federal or state level. Arguably both federal and state governments should have a detailed record of who paid what taxes. Such a record could make this kind of fraud much more difficult. This might even be a context in which blockchains have some utility.
ID must be radically accessible for this to work. Very inexpensive cards and robust social systems for facilitating obtaining ID for those who face challenges getting to issuers.
Most EU countries have strong online id systems, either guaranteed by banks and two-factor (Nordics) or even national id card (Estonia). In fact you do not need a card, as SMS two-factor prevents 99% of fraud (India, AADHAAR).
AFAIK, blockchains are good for planet-scale distributed read&write access. The government is a central authority, and tax records are not generally public information. Sounds like a good application for a private-access, append-only database. What does the blockchain offer that, say, postgres can't handle?
Right now the record of identity is a social security number. True, it's not terribly robust, and, for instance, can be stolen -- but so can your wallet if somebody finds your private key.
The SSN isn't record though, it's the identifier for the record.
I had to verify my federal tax filing this year. The agent or whatever was able to pull up my taxes from past years after a couple of authentication questions.
Which that is what the GP poster is asking for, a more robust way of authenticating that a person corresponds to a record. It's a tough problem.
Sure, I should have said identifier. I'm actually having trouble identifying myself to the government right now, because I lost my records in a recent move. It's a real problem, but ultimately I found a workaround in meatspace. That is, the workaround grants me access... but there's an unresolved issue: whoever's got that box of my records has everything they need to steal my identity. Is "the blockchain" going to prevent situations like this? Replace "lose a box of records" with data loss and/or exfiltration and you're in the same situation except perhaps that the "better mousetrap" will prevent the meatspace workaround from functioning.
I also think there is a lot of risk that people start to think of official records as identity (so any flaw in the system can be used to harm people by messing up their records). But that isn't how it works, identity is an intrinsic thing and official records describe aspects of it.
I certainly don't think a blockchain is of any use here. There might be some value in publishing some information in order to establish identities for use in other contexts, but a blockchain isn't necessary for that.
Even issue cryptographically strong identity cards has a bunch of hard problems. How do you repudiate a card without possessing it, how do you obtain a new one if it breaks, etc., etc.
With Blockchain we could transfer our tax dollars in un-reversible transactions directly to the scammers, cut out all the middle men. That will show'em. /s
Bullfighting was never asserted as need, only suggested as a possible tool. In order to live in this country I must document my income in great detail and own up to any tax obligations. Then when there is a disaster the government offers aid but asks me who I am and how I can prove myself worthy. You believe it makes sense for my government to demand detailed explanation of all income and then claim ignorance when a disaster strike? Why?
Why are you getting off on Blockchains? In order to live legally I must document all income and pay substantial taxes. Then a disaster strikes and my government dares to claim it has no idea who so am or what is going on with my income. Maybe some tech like secure authorization, databases, blockchains, or other such might enable the government to operate in a competent manner? Sorry this idea offends you.
I literally do not care. The US spent almost 700 billion dollars on defense last year. If we're worried about how much the US costs, let's start there.
Those 700 billion dollars went into salaries and healthcare for over a million people. And to a less direct degree, buying US-manufactured high-tech armaments.
Maybe you think it's all a dumb thing to spend money on, but the US Army is in a lot of ways a UBI for low-education Americans. And one way or the other, the money is almost all staying in the US, stimulating some industry or another.
Sending $36B overseas to Nigeria and Cyprus accomplishes nothing. It's not even comparable.
You can still drastically cut defense spending without touching a single servicemember's pay or benefits. For instance: Instead of buying 7000 missiles, we could have saved 600 million dollars.
The federal government would save 600 million dollars, and Raytheon employees would lose them.
Entirely fair to say "well Raytheon factories should be building [tractors / ventilators / etc] instead, but it's not like the money is being shoveled into a hole and buried. The money stays in the US, backstopping US manufacturing.
Sending that $600 million to overseas scammers would still accomplish nothing, whereas "wasteful" defense spending does.
In 2020 your government has no way to identify you.
It's shocking and absurd and affects everything.
Beyond the operational stupidity ... they don't even know better.
Not a single anybody outside of the bureaucracy has even identified it as a problem.
We have the same thing in Canada: tons of COVID benefits fraudulent. They throw bazillions out the door.
Finally - though I don't want to throw smoke over the recent election in the US, it is high time that there are very open and rigorous standard for identification, there's too much at risk. If the government provided the service for free down at the DMV there'd be little excuse.
It is absurd that we can't track people at the federal government level. We could be doing things like automatic voter registration, auto-filed taxes, automatic unemployment benefits, etc. But we don't because the government can't handle the development of fundamental software infrastructure to run government functions.
Follow-up questions: what data on race and creed does the USA collect that e.g. European states generally do not? And what is the difference between enabling the state to discriminate between its citizens vs.enabling its citizens to prove they are who they say they are?
How exactly do you think the government is going to get a bunch of people on board to develop and operate a system to discriminate based on race, such that there isn't a single whistleblower? Would they just outsource it directly to the KKK or what?
Who says it needs to be a secret? The past shows that people happily let things happen out in the open. The present should show you that plenty of people still have the loyalty above all mentality and would easily be manipulated into doing whatever was desired.
Just leak demographic data to the proud boys and when they do things, low key condemn them but not really.
How have whistleblowers been working out lately? There have been many and the effects have been... underwhelming.
It can be anonymous and you will have to present an evidence that certain transaction belongs to you only when the situation requires it. Government can ensure information split at the time of registration and then dictate that only warrant can allow to link the 2.
Anyway, the ability of governments to identify their citizens is technological problem. Overall during our history we agreed to potential of being identified by governments. Tech brings new tools to them. I wish they could adopt them quicker.
Overall we shouldn't be afraid of new tech and more reliability. But what we need is the system that will be future proof in terms of balance between individual and big entities even if their technological ability to identify you is near perfect.
Assigning some bytes to a person is easy, but how do you authorize transactions? People will not keep a secret... secret. People will not remember a secret. People will lose cards. Smart phone adoption is maybe 75% in the US. Many people do not have internet access, a phone line, or even electricity! People have all sorts of disabilities, many can't read, and many still don't have permanent housing or even an address. The technology is the easy part.
"People tolerate these kinds of things as necessary evils."
They are not 'necessary evils' in any minds but those of HN commenters.
They are just 'normal artifacts' in the minds most people.
People are generally not concerned with the existence of DLs and they are generally not some kind of 'threat'.
If you literally brought up 'privacy' issues to most Americans, maybe they would say something, but I'll be $100 that most Americans, on the subject of 'Drivers License' would never bring up the issue of 'privacy' unsolicited.
An SS card with literally a photo on it, the most minor of changes, could effectively serve as a really good 'ID'.
I don't even think it needs to be free. Many US States provide a State ID for $20~$50. Even if you don't drive, it's very difficult to survive without at least a State ID (just to buy alcohol or for anything that needs legal identification ... like a job or I-9 form).
The arguments against requiring voter ID are silly now. Yes, at one time reading tests were required to vote in the Jim Crow era, and they were intentional to prevent blacks from voting. But we've come a long way since then. Asking someone to set aside one day and $30 to get an ID, in order to vote, should NOT be considered an unnecessary hardship. It's a bare minimum effort if you want to vote.
Some will say, "Well there are all these poor disenfranchised people who can't afford a day off work or the $30 to get an ID!" ... You've gotta be kidding me. Unless they're working under the table, how do they even have a job without ID? We cannot keep lowering the bar.
My best friend, a friend from Ecuador, talked about how some of the worst leaders in South and Central America worked on lowering voting ages down to 16 and 17, because they knew it was way more easier to influence younger people. It's straight up corruption.
State issued ID should be required to vote, period. This entire election cycle is a mess because of massive, unsolicited ballots with no chain of custody mailed out to dead people and people who have left their states. It's insane that all of Big Tech and US media is claiming there is no proof at all of fraud, when countless people are testifying in every state under oath. Just today in Georgia, people brought videos showing trucks shredding ballots. When they called the police, and even went to the Sherif, they were told law enforcement was specifically ordered not to send anyone to any voting precincts.
There is not excuse to not require Voter ID except to allow more fraud.
Huh? There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Just because someone testifies that they saw something doesn't prove it. It's just hearsay. Please stop spreading disinformation.
Many people working minimum wage jobs don't have the ability to take an entire day off and spend the money to deal with the nightmare that is the DMV. Just because they aren't a fancy software developer doesn't mean that there vote shouldn't count equally as someone who can afford to take the day off.
Regarding needing a state ID to work, you can read on UCSIS' website what is required. One can use things like school IDs, voter registration, birth certificate, and SSA card. So, no, if you don't have a state ID it does not mean that you are working under the table.
In reality, there are tons of reasons why we shouldn't require more strict voter ID laws.
Even though we don't have 'state ID' the processes overall are legit on the whole.
There is no systematic fraud.
It appears as a mess because of the messaging of the President.
That said: there are obviously antiquated and non-standardized problems - literally just yesterday, Stacey Abrahams sister, a Georgia Judge, had to rule on ballots being thrown out. It's politicized.
So having ID would not so much make elections more fair (they are effectively fair), but it would give more confidence in elections.
Also - the genie may be out of the bottle and we may be in a new era where a) people try to actually cheat and b) losers of elections refuse to concede based on lies.
So it might be a good time to modernize with ID, and it would help with those problems.
....
It 'needs to be free' because the some will otherwise believe it's voter suppression.
Having a $10 payment would actually theoretically suppress some people from voting. In practice, I don't think that would be the case, but it's enough to blow it up.
Homeless people are still 'citizens' - and 'citizenship' is not based on whether or not you have $10. Which is a fair argument (even through pragmatically a side show, because you need to have an address to vote already today).
Citizenship is a right not a privilege ... so just make it free.
Politically, they could make it an extension of SS - it's just 'SS with a photo' kind of thing.
considering we have $36B that we can afford to send to Nigeria, I think we could just make the ID free. Certainly we have all contributed at least $10 to the tax coffers at some point above 18.
Like a third to a half of the country thinks the election was illegitimate depending on how you phrase the question.
I'd call that "a mess"
It doesn't matter whether there was or wasn't fraud in this context. A government is only legitimate because the people believe it is. The appearance of fraud challenges that belief. Challenge that belief enough and people die. The system needs to be sufficiently robust that the result cannot be disputed with any sort of credibility.
If I need to pay a hundred bucks to get permission to buy a gun, DHS can search people with no reason within a hundred miles of the border, cops can seize your cash without evidence of a crime (I can go on) and the and all that's compatible with the constitution, then everyone dragging their ass to the DMV and forking over $30 for an ID should be perfectly fine.
"Like a third to a half of the country thinks the election was illegitimate depending on how you phrase the question.
I'd call that "a mess""
1/3 of the USA will believe anything the President says, whoever the are.
This is because the position of the President comes with a huge amount of legitimate authority.
When that authority is transgressed, it causes a 'mess'.
(Like if your doctor told you that 'Opium was good for you' - you might be inclined to believe them even if you thought you knew otherwise, after all, it's their job to know better).
The 'real integrity' of the election, meaning election officials, governors, tabulators, Dept. of Justice - i.e. everyone involved in the system validates it as 'being ok' - then 'it's ok'.
Don't confuse 'public perception' - which is manipulated and hugely influenced when legit authority is transgressed - with 'reality'.
The 'cause' of the 'perceived mess' is someone transgressing their leadership responsibility.
The 'perceived mess' has basically nothing to do with the election.
'Voter ID' would not materially change the quality of electoral outcomes, but would help tamp down concerns about voter fraud.
> There is no systematic fraud.
> It appears as a mess because of the messaging of the President.
We have GOP observers being thrown out of all of the critical election sites during the counting. We have tons of unsolicited ballots with no chain of custody. We have tons of confirmed cases of dead people voting, and women having votes case under maiden names. There is unmistakable, wide spread, voting irregularity. This isn't just the messaging of the president, this is a corrupt media that is on the side of establishment Democrats and Republicans that is clearly feeding a pure bullshit narrative to anyone willing to dull their senses, turn off all sources except the official industry standard media (Which got weapons of mass destruction wrong, which got Syria wrong, and which has a historic record of getting nearly everything wrong).
If you stop listening to the various Ministries of Truth (both private and government) the entire idea there was "no election fraud" falls apart. The voting machines were/are a red haring. The real issue has always been the massive amounts of ballots with no chain of custody.
This is not true, and the and a good example of conspiratorial rationalization.
Why doesn't Mike Pence, the VP back your claims?
Are you saying you have more information that him?
Why don't any GOP Senators?
Judges?
Consider if 'bad elections' claims had any merit whatsoever, the real GOP apparatus would be running full tilt at the problem.
The Supreme Court would practically be inviting cases.
Arguing that 'irregularities exist' is not an argument - because we know they exist, what matters is the magnitude and systematic efforts.
The 'conspiratorial argument' falls apart immediately under any scrutiny - and there has been a lot of scrutiny.
So we have a problem with giving out money, and appearance of problems in voting, maybe we can have 'voter ID' and get around some of the legitimacy/privacy issues.
But the elections are effectively fair.
Please try to understand that this is an issue of public communications and conspiratorial logic, and not reality.
The 'ministries of truth' have considerably more integrity - especially as a whole - then
The courts have looked at these allegations and the actual evidence is slim to none, and far from being about a big enough number of votes to change the result of the election, it's not even enough to change the result in one state.
State and Federal employment records already exist with your social security number, address, employer address, employer ID number, and amount of taxes that have been withheld. I can retrieve my own copy of this record online from the IRS and my own state relatively easily.
Someone should not be able to [automatically] claim unemployment benefits for past income on which taxes have not been withheld, or estimated taxes have not been paid. That seems trivially fair. Even people making minimum wage will have payroll taxes withheld. Calculating an upper limit on the amount that can be processed automatically should therefore be trivial.
Next is the question of where to send the payment. DMVs cover a large percentage of the population. Beyond the DMV, there's voter registration, credit reports, address of record for where the last tax refund was sent, utility bills, phone records.
When I had a larger than typical refund last year, my state sent me a letter asking for copies of my and my wife's social security cards, passports, and utility bills before they would issue the refund. I felt that was pretty burdensome considering I was requesting the refund to the same exact bank account number which I had been paying them from for the last 5 years.
It's obvious the state is just totally incapable of running even the simplest of validation rules. It's just helicopter money dropping from the sky, and they don't really care who gets it, because it's not their money. It's not like anyone is going to lose their job or not get re-elected because of it.
The fact that's it's so easy to funnel all this money out of the country is a pretty wild indictment of FinCEN and the like.