dangrossmanFraud investigation is believing your lying eyes
> To the extent that Bits about Money has an editorial line on that controversy, it is this: if you fish in a pond known to have 50% blue fish, and pull out nine fish, you will appear to be a savant-like catcher of blue fish, and people claiming that it is unlikely you have identified a blue fish will swiftly be made to look like fools. But the interesting bit of the observation is, almost entirely, the base rate of the pond. And I think journalism and civil society should do some genuine soul-searching on how we knew—knew—the state of that pond, but didn’t consider it particularly important or newsworthy until someone started fishing on camera.
Does Patrick want to address the fact that this happened during school break and that Nick Shirley didn't prove much of anything?
Except for the part where when asked for proof he laughed off the idea of using convictions as a measure of accuracy.
My bicicle got stolen a long time ago and I never recovered it. The perpetrator was never caught.
From this we can conclude many things. Maybe the thief was very crafty. Maybe the local police are incompetent. Maybe everyone is trying their best and the job of going after bike thieves is very hard.
But you cannot ever convince me that an appropriate conclussion could be "your bicicle didn't actually get stolen". I saw it. I can't identify the thief, there will never be a conviction, but don't tell me it didn't happen.
A conviction in a court of law is very important to be able to confidently say "so-and-so has committed fraud". But requiring a criminal conviction just to be able to say that fraud has happened is lunacy.
Yes, but we're not talking about whether or not bike thefts happen, or medicare frauds, we're talking about what actions we're going to take in the future.
I too have had a bike stolen and it was an incredibly awful experience, but I'm not going to vote for a law requiring us to execute people accused of bike theft.
This is what is so incredibly frustrating about these types of conversations because so frequently you have one side proposing fact based strategies developed via reaearch and experiments and historical analysis and so forth, but that makes them quite complicated to explain in 30 seconds on tv, and on the other side you have some asshole going "all these problems are caused by <subgroup> and if you give me power I'll be cruel to them and everything will be better".
The latter's simplicity seems to be highly appealing and attempting to argue against it using facts and logic requires A) the listeners to actually respect facts and logic and B) and lot more effort to research/cite/develop the facts and logic.
So again, it sounds like fraud happened. This is bad. Some people were imprisoned because of it. Now what?
I keep asking this basic question because that's whats actually missing from the article.
Is there a specific person who should be in prison but isn't? Is there a law that could be passed to make fraud harder? What, specifically should be done?
The entire story of what happened in Minnesota, as agreed on by basically everybody involved including significant chunks of the government of Minnesota, is that convictions are not a reasonable measure of accuracy here. The story is that they didn't pursue fraud prosecutions in proportion to their severity. Responding to that with "but there weren't convictions" is literally just begging the question.
It's very annoying that I feel like I have to say this but: I'm a committed Democrat, and I feel like my anti-Trump anti-racism bona fides, including on this site, are quite solid. The Minnesota thing happened. We can debate the scale, but it happened.
For the record, your "anti-racism bona fides" are not in anyway "quite solid". I'm on record for pointing out the shocking racism in the ways you have denigrated Palestinians on this site, for a couple years now! I can link to multiple examples of this, its not hidden and you did not stop (unless you have gone back and deleted the comments, haven't checked yet!), on the contrary you had dang threaten to ban me.
Also worth pointing out
1) that the shared the religion of many of these Somalis and Palestinians
definitely makes me wonder about your own feelings here
2) the person whose article under discussion, which is very much a white wash of a racist provocateur who is not a "journalist", is one of your own former business partners.
You are free to whine to dang again and get me banned now, but I repeat, you are not in any way someone who should get to stand on your "anti-racism bona fides" especially when the people in question are brown muslims.
As I posted in my last comment to you, and dang, I approached your racism exactly how you ostensibly would want, I gently encouraged you to reconsider, to examine other sources, etc. Hasn't really seemed to have any effect! You still post genocide propaganda and out and out racism, like "All Palestinians actually should just live in Jordan".
Also worth pointing out
1) that the shared the religion of many of these Somalis and Palestinians
definitely makes me wonder about your own feelings here
2) the person whose article under discussion, which is very much a white wash of a racist provocateur who is not a "journalist", is one of your own former business partners.
You are free to whine to dang again and get me banned now, but I repeat, you are not in any way someone who should get to stand on your "anti-racism bona fides" especially when the people in question are brown muslims.
As I posted in my last comment to you, and dang, I approached your racism exactly how you ostensibly would want, I gently encouraged you to reconsider, to examine other sources, etc. Hasn't really seemed to have any effect! You still post genocide propaganda and out and out racism, like "All Palestinians actually should just live in Jordan".
> (unless you have gone back and deleted the comments, haven't checked yet!)
Minor point: I'm pretty sure that HN comments cannot be deleted/edited after about an hour. Very different from most web forums in this regard, and worth keeping in mind when digging into past discussions! Maybe the rules are different for a superuser like tptacek here with lots of karma, but I doubt it.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Nobody can go back and delete comments the way that person is claiming. What a weird thing for him to have said.
I can't help but notice that said other person's profile claims "out of here"; and before this thread, had not commented since October 2024 — in that case also to get in an extended political argument with you specifically. That's quite a grudge to hold.