It’s ironic. In the USA they freak out over the idea that someone might receive more unemployment than they are entitled to, but they will happily waste millions of dollars paying someone to do a shitty job.
Tangent: during my last stint on unemployment, there was this class we were required to attend. In that class, they repeatedly told us that we are not entitled to unemployment benefits. They didn't exactly offer an alternative vocabulary.
It certainly fits the government's definition of an entitlement[1].
It's also structured as a non-optional, government-ran insurance scheme predominantly funded through explicit payroll tax obligations[2], which employers aren't entitled to opt out of.
As long as you meet your states particular flavor of requirements, you're entitled to your unemployment insurance benefits. Despite any statements to the contrary states may push in their mandatory unemployment class.
That's absurd. They take it out of your paycheck every month, it's paid entirely from employee wages, it can't be spent on anything but unemployment, and you get benefits proportional to what you contributed. It's literally your own money that they're giving back to you that they took for the sole purpose of forcing you to save money for if you lose your job at some point. It's like if I asked to borrow a pen, then when you asked for it back pretending like it was some benevolent gift.
It's definitely not a line item on paychecks in my state. It's structured as an insurance premium paid by companies to the state. The company's premiums increase when there's a claim against the "policy." Smaller companies like to try denying claims in an attempt to prevent this increase.
One could certainly argue that if this 'premium' didn't exist, it could be paid out in salaries.
That's right, I recall something like that. I think states administer their own unemployment system even though it's mandated by the federal government. It's a payroll tax where I live. It's calculated based on your wages and paid based on the amount of insurance you've funded regardless of whether the regulations/company decides to display it on the calculation or not. It might also get buried under something like "state and local taxes," too.
Unemployment costs are handled by the employer. It is the State Unemployment Insurance (SUI) tax. All employers are experience rated based on age, number of claims, and win/loss rates in claim protests. It is not taken out of employee paychecks.
Your link doesn't support your claim. The article indicates a crime syndicate was responsible, a group who had already stolen lots of money. The weakness here is not in a UBI-type system at all; money was being stolen regardless of the source.
> The fraudsters took advantage of states that were already struggling to process a flood of jobless claims amid the COVID-19 pandemic and related government shutdowns.
To me, this reads as a negative mark against the US federal government for denying the existence of the threat. Not a result of the aide programs themselves.
> In the USA they freak out over the idea that someone might receive more unemployment than they are entitled to,
There isn’t an infinite amount of unemployment money available. If you allow fraud to run rampant in these systems, there is less money available for those who actually need it.
Enforcing rules and regulations is a good thing for everyone.
Furthermore, many people are earning more on the current USA unemployment system than they did from their original jobs. The system was designed to overpay some people for the sake of quickly delivering the system. (Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-gett... )
It's embedded in the human psyche. Thousands a day will step over a street beggar to begrudgingly buy a barely palatable coffee from the kiosk they're sitting beside.
Who is "they"? I don't think anyone but corrupt politicians and their cronies are happy about wasting millions of taxpayer dollars. Certainly not the taxpayers.
If the government hired developers directly and promoted those developers to levels of seniority, it would in fact spend taxpayer dollars more efficiently than outsourcing to shitty consultants and contractors whose primary goal is to keep the same zombie contract going year after year.
The government at least has incentives to make the best product they can on a local level. There might be politicking at the higher up, but their goal is to make a product. The incentives for larger consulting companies is to make money and often does so at the cost of cutting corners or delivering broken products. The reason why they can get away with it is because the larger consulting companies operate at a different scale than smaller ones, which is often needed for major projects. Which means then you're forced to work with scumbag consulting companies.
The fact that one extreme is false does not make the other extreme true.
That being said, at some point if you're cutting, or if you don't know where you're cutting, at some point you will hit bone. More money is not a panacea but neither is less.
I guess I don't understand your position other than "just make it run better." What concrete steps do you want to see occur to make the government run more efficiently, and will they grow or shrink the government?
If the government is going to contract out work it at least needs to have the capability to audit the results of such work on an ongoing basis, rather than just get left with a flaming bag of crap after the fact.
To that end the government needs to attract, develop, and keep in-house talent, starting by actually offering competitive compensation.
The obvious question nobody is asking is: why is the government obligated to pay for a broken service that should clearly be in violation of the contract? And if delivering a broken service doesn't violate the contract, why are these contracts being written so one-sided? There's more at play here than a lack of auditing. In the real world, if you don't deliver what you promise, you don't get paid.
Litigation for breach of contract is something that states can pursue. TFA:
> Deloitte isn’t alone in its tumultuous history with benefits systems. IBM, another major player in the government IT industry, was awarded a $1.3 billion, 10-year contract to modernize Indiana’s welfare system in 2006. The state canceled the contract just three years later after complaints of erroneous benefits denials and other problems. Indiana and IBM sued each other over the dispute; the case has not yet been resolved.
> Yet in 2010, IBM signed a $110 million deal with Pennsylvania to modernize its unemployment benefits system. The contract expired in 2013, ran millions over budget, and was never completed, according to a 2017 audit conducted by Pennsylvania auditor general Eugene DePasquale. In 2017, the state took legal action against IBM for breach of contract. That litigation is ongoing.
The problem is that the wheels of justice move slowly, and in the meantime the system is still broken, and the previous system is also probably not up to par (after all, if it was working there would be no need to replace it).
Big or small, inefficient govt is inefficient. Pushing for “small govt” either misses the point, or is dishonest, possibly with an ulterior motive.
I couldn’t possibly know what that motive is, but seems clear to me that a small inefficient govt would need to spend more on private sector contracts than a big inefficient govt, if it wants to do the same work; it would also have less capacity for audit, as gp points out.
>but seems clear to me that a small inefficient govt would need to spend more on private sector contracts than a big inefficient govt, if it wants to do the same work
The key phrase here is "same work." But I don't believe a small government should be doing the same work as a big government. It should be doing less work, have less responsibilities, and taking & wasting less of everyone's money.
Really the "small government" party likes to use crony "capitalism" to line the pockets of the "private-sector" with as much tax payer dollars as they can.
> This article talks about formatting and other superficial stylistic issues.
On that note though, there is one thing that people have been doing for the past 5 or so years, maybe a bit more, with the formatting when they write online. In particular I see it often on Medium.com
They use blockquote to highlight some piece of their text. But the text in the blockquote is not a quote. Neither from elsewhere nor from their own text.
This annoys me.
AFAIK, blockquote has a history in the printed press of being used to catch your eye when you flick through a newspaper, so that you would want to buy the paper and read the article on that page. And the text in the blockquote was extracted from the text itself. Often from a part of it where a person that was interviewed said something that the editors found interesting. At least, that’s how I remember it.
Another type of use it is suitable for is to distinguish something quoted from elsewhere from the rest of the text.
But the way that it is being used now, it confuses and annoys my brain every time.
You're thinking of pull quotes, which can be confusingly similar to block quotes but are a different thing:
> It seems that many people (myself included) confuse blockquotes and pull quotes.
> The main purpose of a blockquote is to separate a large section of text — quoted from an outside source — that is relevant to the source material at hand.
> A pull quote is a section of the article pulled out of its context and repeated to give either emphasis, or to aid the reader in scanning the article.[0]
Unfortunately HTML doesn't provide a pull quote element so you have to make do with applying some CSS to a <blockquote>, or <p>, or whatever to get the desired visual effect.
I think a pull-quote might be one of the intended uses of <aside>.
(Though really, I don’t think HTML “likes“ pull-quotes — they’re a denormalization of the information conveyed by the markup. The ideal from WHATWG’s perspective would likely be some sort of intra-document transclusion reference, such that the pull-quote could “sample” the text out of where it already is on the page, without mirroring it.)
I can barely get 1-2 people to briefly look at my stream, and that’s without attempting to charge them anything at all. And meanwhile even popular people stream for free. Why should anyone pay upfront to watch a stream? Much better with Patreon, Twitch subscriptions and donations while allowing anyone to come see.
I’ve experienced sleep paralysis so many times that I’ve almost gotten used to it. Usually it happens when I have been staying awake for too long before going to sleep, or if I have been getting too few hours of sleep many days in a row.
Several times it has felt like someone was present. One of the first time I can remember the feeling of someone or something being present was maybe a decade ago or two or something. It felt like a dark shadow person standing in the corner of my room, by the door just looking at me while I was unable to move. Very creepy feeling.
Recently, I thought someone was sitting on top of me and pushing me very hard down into my bed. And I was like wtf, why is someone trying to murder me and I was very scared. And then I realized that lol it’s just sleep paralysis yet again. Still felt shaken for a while afterwards.
Sleep paralysis sucks, so I try to avoid it. Sometimes I get into a bad rhythm though and then it is increasingly probable that it will happen.
I don’t watch GoT, but I have friends who have and I know that a lot of people who were fans of the series liked to talk about the latest episode together. So waiting until later would not be an option for them.
> It might raise the quality of the content on Minichan.
Coming from an imageboard myself, I think about this often. The "serious" users keep comparing themselves to Reddit when they should strive to be more like HN, instead. Now HN is home -- literally; it's my homepage.
Anything with the word -chan never had good moderation. HN is good because of the moderation and the work dang does. He's pulled me up multiple times and it reminds me to keep discussion in-line with the vision of the website.
Look at the top post of that board. It's a different crowd - sure there might be some cross contamination but it's definitely not a site you'd expect to see the same content and level of discourse on.
Usenet is flooded with spam to the point of being unusable, and besides, having everyone use the same interface and see images alongside is different from having people use a multitude of different clients that present binary attachments in various different ways.
With a decently sized crowd from HN, there could be a lot of interesting content on a Minichan like site. The crowd would be small enough that I don’t think there would be much point in decentralizing it. Besides, with centralization then mods still have a fighting chance of keeping the quality of the posts up to par, if they felt so inclined.
The value of anonymous discussion is that every thread is a fresh start. You can express yourself about what’s on your mind without be constrained by your own desire to make everything you say fit into some bigger picture of an identity of self. If that makes sense. But also, it is different from making throwaway accounts on sites where all other people are using identities. Admittedly on Minichan there are many people that use names and tripcodes. But the ability for threads to exist where everyone is on an equal footing is valuable.
I’m thinking not so much in terms of discussion itself actually but in terms of creative potential. At their peak, chan style imageboards can be amazingly creative.
Imagine an imageboard with people from HN, where people were producing graphics and music like in the Demoscene, but together and for no purpose other than creativity itself. No names or anything. Just pure unfiltered creativity.
Yeah. I was being snarky without enough context to make myself clear there... Sorry.
> Usenet is flooded with spam to the point of being unusable,
What mechanisms do you see in place to stop this being an inevitable result for Minichan as well? It's a social problem not a technical one...
> With a decently sized crowd from HN, there could be a lot of interesting content on a Minichan like site.
Maybe. pg's recent comment about the amount of time and effort it has taken to curate this community into some semblance of civility suggest even "we, the magnificent HM community" are subject to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory as well... (I've had a few "bad days" and needed pulling into line by dang or others over the years...)
> Imagine an imageboard with people from HN
From what pg says, that'll most likely end up closer to 4Chan that HN - without several people in full time (well paid) roles who's job description includes community management/moderation (and who are good at it).
HN is a magical place _only_ because YC values it enough to have people like pg and dang and scott spend as vast chunk of their paid time making it this way. Those of us who benefit from this place owe a debt to pg's vision and YC's commitment, and are lucky it was founded by someone like pg instead of moot. (And at the same time, people who benefit from 4Chan owe similar thanks for diametrically opposed visions there.)
For me, they recur maybe once every 5-10 years or so and last about the same sort of time period?? Here since 2009. Twitter circa 2008 or so. Burningman in the early 2000s. ASR on usenet in the late '90s
Things change, they run their course - and I change and the things I want become different. Some people rant and demand things "go back the way they were", but by then the people who made it "the way things were" have moved on to a new thing, and new people have grown up and started building new things they think are better than the old people had.
Hold on to your dream, but realise that you may have to either chase it around the internet as it moves (and work out how to find it when you one day wake up are realise it's gone from the old place), or make it yourself as part of a team prepared to put in the hard work required to shape it the way you think is right.
(While I personally think 4Chan is a total shit show, I have no doubt moot invested enormous effort in making it or helping it become what _he_ wanted in the world. A whole different sort of effort than pg/deng/scott/YC/others put in here, but I have no doubt moot complained bitterly to his friends how hard it was dealing with things like lawyers and hosting companies and all the other things that become a problem when you decide you need to make a thing like 4Cahn exists in the world...)
The style="overflow-x:auto;" seems to be the default now. "Ask and thou shall receive"? I'm pretty sure it wasn't scrolling when I first tried it but I may have just started searching first out of curiosity. Several posts indicated that inline CSS was possible on GitHub. I did a quick test and I can't get the original overflow-x:visible; behavior so who knows.
