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Xerox "Routine Backup Test" Leave 17 States Without Food Stamps
An anonymous reader writes "People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves temporarily unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday, after a routine test of backup systems by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure. Xerox announced late in the evening that access has been restored for users in the 17 states affected by the outage, hours after the first problems were reported. 'Restarting the EBT system required time to ensure service was back at full functionality,' spokeswoman Jennifer Wasmer said in an email. An emergency voucher process was available in some of the areas while the problems were occurring, she said. U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Courtney Rowe underscored that the outage was not related to the government shutdown."
Backups don't always work - that's why you test them. This time they did not work - much better that you experience problems when you anticipate them than when everything else is going wrong, too. It's unfortunate that the system was down, but it seems they got it back up in a reasonably quick time frame. Moreover, merchants are supposed to have manual means of recording EBT payments for just such a scenario.
Douglas Whitaker
People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves temporarily unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday,
Why is it that a convenience -- our credit cards, are able to weather a failure like this by simply allowing all purchases, but our food stamp cards simply stop working? Credit card systems are, at every level, designed to cope with a failure by simply authorizing the purchase. Only a very small number of transactions would have been failed anyway for insufficient funds, etc., and these are reconciled when that part of the system is restored to service... meaning there's very little loss to the provider for this.
For that matter, if they've decided to design the system in this fashion, where were the redundancies? If a routine backup can result in failure on this scale, then it begs the question of where and how the backup of the actual systems, not just the data, got overlooked.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
There Are 3 Unemployed People Competing For Every Job Opening
Let me remind you all of Senator Obama's words from 2006 regarding the raising of the debt ceiling. He voted against raising the debt ceiling at that time.
"The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government can not pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally."
Source
How true are those words? I only wish President Obama still believed what he did as Senator.
In the late 1990s, the company I worked for was one of many processing EBT card transactions for grocery stores in New Mexico when they first switched to it from paper food stamps. The bank that was the approving authority for them (the next higher link up the chain from us) had a system problem and had been down for about 45 minutes.
I got a call from a very stressed sounding manager at a store in a bad neighborhood of Albuquerque and explained that the outage was statewide, and I'd already called the next highest level.
His response: "You don't understand! These people carry guns."
I really didn't have a good answer for that one, but certainly sympathized.
They later changed the rules so that when the statewide system was down, they could approve it at the store and then take out any overuse from later payments. That got abused, but it made some store managers a lot less nervous.
The local Walmart was lacking in any backup method. They had at least 50 buggies packed full of food sitting around the registers and a lot of pissed off customers. Glad they got it back up, I don't look forward to that riot.
Ye gods, the crowd could get ugly...
Too late.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There Are 3 Unemployed People Competing For Every Job Opening
But is this a measure of people competing for jobs in good faith, or is it merely the number of people unemployed divided by the number of jobs? From TFA, I see it's the latter.
This doesn't take into account people like, for instance, my sister, who hasn't worked since the mid-nineties and is grimly determined to do whatever it takes to remain on government assistance for the remainder of her life. Justified by "I had bad things happen to me in my youth; society owes me a comfortable living in the manner and place of my choosing as a result."
I'm pretty sure she's not the only one.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It is exactly because natural rights are violable that it is important to protect them.
Your "right to life" is not a directive to the rest of us to keep you alive, it is a directive to the rest of us not to actively try to kill you.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
But is this a measure of people competing for jobs in good faith, or is it merely the number of people unemployed divided by the number of jobs? From TFA, I see it's the latter.
1. To be counted as unemployed, you must be actively looking for a job. If you aren't, you are officially a "discouraged worker" and removed from the unemployment rolls. So, for example, if your sister hasn't worked since 1995, an hasn't even been trying to get a job, she isn't one of those 3 people trying to fill a single opening.
2. Even if, say, 1/3 of people who are counted as unemployed are really bums trying to mooch off the government, that still means that half of the people legitimately looking for work are coming up empty.
It was even worse a few years ago, when the ration was more like 5 unemployed people to 1 job. In that situation, you could be demonstrably good at your profession, and still not be hired because they could get the best-of-the-best for a pittance in that economy.
I am officially gone from
you increase the top earner's rates on income over a certain amount. In the 50s and 60s we had the highest growth in real wages and middle class incomes the country (maybe even the species) has ever seen with a 90% top tax bracket. How? Because that 90% wasn't a flat "Give us 90% of your income" it was "90 % over 1 Million" or about $9 million in todays money. So if you made over $9 million dollars in a SINGLE YEAR then you paid 90% of that to the gov't. This kept wealth inequality in check and forced top earners to really work for that money over $9 million. If you wanted to be filthy, stinking rich you really had to work at it (people still did). Meanwhile gov't programs redistributed the wealth. Maybe not evenly, but it's better than phoney job creators hording it and holding up human progress by sitting on their fat rears with all the money in the world...
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I've known people on gov't assistance. It's a few hundred dollars a month and you have to be making about half the poverty line to get it. If you're sister is on gov't assistance for real then there's something wrong with her. I don't mean that as an insult. I mean there really is something wrong, and she needs the help. You don't get enough from the gov't to live, you get enough so that if your family is giving you a lot of help you can just barely eat.
Is this an astro turfer or something? I'd like to believe noone is this much of a jerk in real life...
We've talked about this in various Slashdot threads. Yes, there is something supposedly wrong with her. My sister purports to have "agoraphobia". This means that she can't go shopping, can't hold down a job, can't drive. Open spaces purport to cause panic attacks. Moreover, she purports to have various medical conditions, including crippling arthritis and a heart condition, which prevent her from working. (This is not the only way she works the system -- more on that later.)
Yet, she has a recreational vehicle with which she takes camping trips, and a 4-wheeler with which she joyrides out in the desert in Nevada. But these are parked out of sight when her social worker visits her single-wide, at which time she uses a walker to get around. Oops, scratch that, she now has a motorized wheelchair acquired at government expense. When she's not under scrutiny, she doesn't need any of these things. (I know this from personal observation.) Yes, it's open fraud. But so far she has gotten away with it. (I pay my way, and she has stuff I could never afford... You know, just never mind.)
She owes money to basically everyone, has no intention to pay any of it back, and has developed coping skills to avoid same. Her house has been in default (or in and out of default; I don't follow it that closely) since at least the late nineties. She's been on the edge of repossession since at least the turn of the century, but somehow the house never quite gets repossessed.
Yes, I'm perfectly willing to stipulate that there is something wrong with her. What is wrong with her is that she has decided that there is no moral reason not to game the system. And by "the system" I mean several systems -- various types of government care, and the collective ineptitude of various companies in trying to get their money back from her. We haven't even talked about how she managed to acquire a foster child, and what a fiasco that's been.
A few years back she talked our elderly mother into putting her (my sister) on the lease for the family homestead, ("for tax purposes") and promptly took out a loan against her own mother's house. Not to pay off her charge cards, or anything practical, but to take a cruise and buy herself stuff. That started a legal battle that she eventually lost. After several complicated transactions and some expense the house is free of the debt and I'm the sole owner. (My mother still lives there, and I will call the local sheriff if her daughter ever shows up.) Since then, my sister calls me on random days at 3:00 AM to cuss me out. She knows that I'm on call and have to pick up the phone. Eventually she gets tired of me hanging up and I'm good for two or three more weeks. (I also have a drunken aunt that calls me in the middle of the night, but that's a different story.)
The point is, just because someone is on government assistance doesn't mean they deserve it. I'm sorry if that bursts everyone's bubble, but it's true. Sometimes, all it means is that they found a way in, and decided that getting a check from the government beats the hell out of actually working for a living.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You are my new favorite person.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Yes, the top rate was 90%. BUT NOBODY PAID 90%!!! There were all sorts of write offs, loop holes, etc and people paid close to what we paid today.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson