6 ms·

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 u

by zaroth 6y ago

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.

treis 6y ago
>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.
- staplers 6y ago
  This means that ultimately, all tax-paying citizens are that whale. Even the very consultants/vendors doing it.
  - dmm10 6y ago
    Oroboros
- sdoering 6y ago
  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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- oivey 6y ago
  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.
  - DethNinja 6y ago
    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.
maxerickson 6y ago
It's ~$100 per US resident. Given how much bigger the economy is than that, how much money moves in and out of the country per year? Which isn't to say that automated systems couldn't catch more of it, I just wonder what the scale is.
j_walter 6y ago
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.
mrkurt 6y ago
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.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
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.
ajmadesc 6y ago
Florida's unemployment system was build to fail. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/florida-unemployment-system-coronavirus-applications https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/florida-unem...
lazyjeff 6y ago
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.

by zaroth 6y ago

treis 6y ago

>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.

staplers 6y ago
This means that ultimately, all tax-paying citizens are that whale. Even the very consultants/vendors doing it.
- dmm10 6y ago
  Oroboros
sdoering 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
oivey 6y ago
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.
- DethNinja 6y ago
  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.

maxerickson 6y ago

It's ~$100 per US resident. Given how much bigger the economy is than that, how much money moves in and out of the country per year? Which isn't to say that automated systems couldn't catch more of it, I just wonder what the scale is.

j_walter 6y ago

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.

mrkurt 6y ago

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.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

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.

ajmadesc 6y ago

Florida's unemployment system was build to fail. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/florida-unemployment-system-coronavirus-applications https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/florida-unem...

lazyjeff 6y ago

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.