How could no one have foreseen the potential abuse and pitfalls of a system like this? Without even reading any further than "Giving Doctors Grades..." I immediately conjured images of a bunch of doctors huddled around each other saying, "I don't want that one." "Well I don't want that one either. My feedback is back at 85% and I can't risk another death screwing me over."
People did foresee it, but that doesn't mean the decision-makers decided against it.
Doctors knew that having hospitals professionally administered as a business would be a nightmare with lots of deleterious effects on patient care, but it's still how the profession has evolved.
The fact is that unless you personally know people who are familiar with a doctor's skill from a medical perspective, it is fundamentally *impossible* to tell if they're any good. And none of those people will talk outside their profession because it's a very private profession in a lot of ways.
I've known about surgeons with world-class reputations who were terrible in the operating room and others who don't have great reputations because they don't publish a lot but are amazing with patients or have amazing surgical skill. You just don't know 99% of the time, so you make the best decision you have with the information you can get. And if it's a major surgery, you don't go to whoever it is your HMO suggests you go to--you actually do some research and ask intelligent questions and consider options and get a second opinion on how best to proceed and reject a doctor who can't answer a basic question or is flustered at being asked and so on.
A neutral rating system is a good idea but it has to be able to normalize for the extent of the diagnosis, and that is a hard problem that apparently wasn't done well here. There are metastasized cancers that are curable and ones that are not, and a whole range of treatability, and lumping them into N3 or N4 after a certain point is going to discourage doctors from operating on harder N4s or harder N3's, for example.
You can also get a really aggressive cancer or the like that a good surgeon can tell under the microscope is incredibly aggressive, that needs to be treated quickly and radically, and the system is really bad about penalizing people for spending the money to do that because the system will say "it just fits into type X," an early-stage small cancer, for example.
So threatening you with a gun is ok? As long as I don't actually shoot you? Now substitute a drone.
No officer I wasn't shooting anyone, or even threatening them, I was just flying around my armed killer robot.
Threatening you with a gun is assault (i.e. threatening you with physical harm) and you can get arrested for it. You can also get sued if you have done an intentional act that is a legal and but-for cause of putting someone in apprehension of imminent bodily harm.
If you assault someone with your killer robot, it's still assault. If you do something stupid but intentional with the robot and it makes people afraid it will hurt them, they can still sue.
We don't actually need new laws to go after people who do something bad with a robot.
Ummm - my credit line is not at all related to my bank balance, or my investments. Two or three completely separate, unrelated numbers.
Separate, yes; unrelated, not so much. I hypothesize that not many people with $300 in their bank account have a $250K line of credit, for example.
We advertise based on bank account and related value metrics all the time, of course. The specific information might be protected to some extent by laws, but the media kit for most good advertising mediums gives you income and net worth type information about your target audience.
Obviousness rejection, anyone? Still, we're not very good about those.
You are assuming sarcasm. I don't hear genuine sarcasm so much as ignorant making-light-of-evil because I hear people rationalize this kind of behavior. It is how modern-day slavery, gun-running, and old-people scams continue to happen. So if I don't hear OP as sarcasm, it's because it usually *isn't sarcasm,* and being sarcastic about it is ignorant.
Yes, all true with differing caveats. There are some kinds of stupid that can't be cured or are harder to cure because of the receptivity of the patient. Sometimes other avenues work (changes in social attitudes coming from their friends or co-workers) and create a useful feedback loop to correct some of the stupid. And sometimes, absolutely, kids are raised with habits that are intended to keep them ignorant or deluded. (See, e.g., going to religious service once a week).
You can't fix some versions of stupid, but sometimes you can make it better or less bad, either for that person, or in preventing the next guy from being the same kind of stupid.
That's nearly $14k per woman/victim. Where do I get me a cougar sugar momma?
Fuck you you piece of shit. That is exactly the thinking that leads people to do this, and to engage in human trafficking, gun-running, etc...
Humans are great at rationalizing crime. "Of course it's too bad these people are getting taken advantage of by me," they say, "but it's not like there's a better option."
People aren't usually born ignorant. They pick up stupid ideas from people who don't question what they've "learned" or overheard. Racist kids learn to be racist, either from parents or friends or both. Religious people learn their fictions about an all-powerful being who happens to love them unconditionally and have created them in his image because people *tell* them those fictions. People believe chronic lyme disease should be treated by massive and long-term IV antibiotics because they hear it from a doctor or friend who hasn't seen that the risks, on average, outweigh the gains. (I suppose it might work if you *knew* you were dealing with some of the more highly skilled medical professionals in the world, but enough goes wrong with most medical professionals that studies have shown it's not worth it.) Anti-vaxxers are afraid of needles because somebody who felt sick after a vaccine told them "I felt sick after a vaccine!" and they've learned about data, but not about anecdotal data. People learn their country is better than other countries because somebody tells them.
Learning is the cure for ignorance. Not learning the stupid, and learning the smart.
that's not news. It would be news if the systems were even reasonably secured, if that's possible. How do you secure a system from when the proverbial cat is out the bag?
You close the barn door after the cows come home in case they try to go through it again.
A common response to a successful major response is not just to try to repair the damage, but to capitalize on the moment to drive security reforms that people have been hesitant to embrace before, or that simply haven't been priorities for an organization. The capture of the OPM data was a major coup for China, but the detection and publication of the detection will be used effectively to convince thousands of employees and policy-makers in government that they actually have to care about security.
The big question is whether state misreporting of employees and IC's is a big deal. Anonymous poster sees gross hypocrisy by his government and is told by legal counsel that it's not a big deal, wants others to weigh in so that he can better conceptualize how he should feel about this--he's looking to third parties for feedback on something that strikes him as morally suspect and affects his life. That's actually an incredibly healthy, rational, and unusual attitude.
Is it a big deal? Yes and no. It's common to have people misrepresent employees as ICs in order to avoid the legal responsibilities of employment--that's *why* the IRS and various states crack down on it. So it's certainly not an *unusual* deal. And if you're making bank, it may not affect you much personally.
But it may affect a lower-income worker who gets treated the same way by the state and is denied overtime benefits, or the woman who's discriminated against by the state's hiring process and finds it much harder to sue, or the corrections officer who doesn't get a pension, for example. So there's some reason to call the state out on it for the public good.
There's *also* a strong argument that they should be called out on it because *they should have to put up with* the employment rules everyone else follows. They're the ones who change the rules, so they should experience having to live with them.
So there are reasons to responsibly disclose, but not much personal benefit to you. You risk a whistleblower sign over your head for the rest of your career unless you do it intelligently. You could sort of go a middle-ground, where you don't go to the press, for example, but do include a note on your taxes that the state has deliberately misclassified you as an independent contractor as part of a systemic process that affects many thousands of employees. I have no idea if the IRS would do anything with it (I'm guessing not), but you would be reporting it. Ah, here we go, the IRS has a way to report fraud:
The FBI goes after thoughtcrime, ideas and tools that _may_ be used to commit a crime who would have thought.
How about guns?
Almost all crimes have a thought element. It's not a crime to take someone else's car by accident because you're color blind and someone left the key in it. It's not even illegal to break in and hotwire the car thinking it's yours. (Good luck convincing a jury of that, of course.) Crimes have thought elements.
Tools which are designed to commit crime and are primarily used for that are regulated. I should probably be able to pick up one of those locksmith's guns because they're really cool and I'd enjoy playing with one, but they're still prohibited because they let anyone break into most houses on the block with a minimum of skill and noise. My wanting to play with it isn't a good enough reason to let everyone pick them up at walmart.
Hey, there's nothing wrong with hacking. But a market for malware is about as fucked up as you can get. It's a marketplace for products designed to hurt people without their consent. It's not like bittorrent where there's a legitimate use and an illegitimate one; there's pretty much just an illegitimate one.
"No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company." --Alan Turing
Do you have any evidence that is happening? lots of innuendo gets thrown around, but I've seen no evidence of such action.
I am making an educated guess based on knowledge about what motivates Congress Monsanto's acumen. Monsanto has very good lawyers, lobbyists, and PR people, so it is highly likely they are bribing Congress in one way or another, even though openSecrets only shows about a quarter million in bribes. Excuse me, "donations."
Still, assume it's not happening. Now is having Congress pass laws so that Monsanto will be able to hide the fact that people's food is engineered okay? The answer is still no.
Every GMO sold in the U.S. has undergone extensive pre-market safety testing. What specifically about this process do you feel to be deficient. Especially in light of the fact that many other tools, such as random mutagenesis via radiation, do not require any pre-market testing depite having actually made people sick (unlike any GMO in the last 20 years).
I have no problem with putting well-tested GMO products in the supermarket. I have a problem with a multibillion dollar corporation bribing my Congresspeople so that they will be able to hide the fact that the products are engineered.
Silly. Reading the article doesn't change my position; like I said, even in that case, a civil fine and not an arrest is the most that is justified. And then maybe you'll read to the next sentence of my comment, which covered that case.
Why would I read TFA when I can just put a default case at the bottom of my switch statement?:)
Your absolutism costs lives. It locks people up who shouldn't be and follows them around for the rest of their lives. It also creates marginal deterrence problems. Proportional responses to violations of malum prohibitum "crimes" are called for. Proportional responses to malum in se crimes are even called for, but for malum prohibitum crimes there is no justification for absolutism.
To plug your phone into the wall should not be to get arrested, unless there is a gigantic sign saying "PLUGGING INTO THIS IS PROHIBITED." Even then, it should get a $50 civil fine and nothing on your record. What's more, it *shouldn't* be prohibited unless it creates problems.
My overall impression is that public transport as implemented here is that it is the very least we can get away with, regardless of the harm done.
I don't think we should be looking at it with an eye to making it incrementally better, either. It's a black hole that sucks very large amounts of money and returns nothing of new value. No one with an actual comprehension of the risks prefers public transport -- I think the most common case by far is that people use it because they have to use it.
There are a lot of areas we can improve, but "a black hole that sucks very large amounts of money and returns nothing of value" really just shows you don't understand its value. It has a massive value. It lets people trade time for money, and not everybody has the money you do to drive everywhere. It also lets them do things like work places they couldn't work or couldn't afford parking. It makes everything in the cities cheaper because it makes labor cheaper in the cities. It makes the engine of commerce run more smoothly--a massive number of people use it every day and they are doing that because it returns value. It also returns value to others in the form of reduced congestion (I'm looking at you Seattle) and air pollution.
It would be profoundly stupid if any of it could be traced to one person, but that's not how big corporate partnerships work. When you are a corporation you are not going to get arrested, and your lawyers will indeed advise you to risk killing people if the added revenue is likely to surpass the payout costs.
You are unlikely to, hence "tiny risk." But still risk. It does, however, look really unsympathetic in a lawsuit and raises those payout costs.
Step 1: Distract driver with advertisements Step 2: Collect revenue from auto repair shops and lawyers Step 3: Collect federal grant money to work with insurance companies to improve safety
This is actually the kind of strategy that any good lawyer will tell you is profoundly stupid. Not only does it risk wiping out your gains for the year through lawsuits, it creates a tiny risk of getting you arrested for involuntary manslaughter. Not to mention you're killing people, and your lawyer will usually advise you not to kill people.
He is 18. "Have you ever been arrested" gets checked on lease and job applications if he is in the wrong state. His chance of employment drops maybe 20% even if he's good at explaining what he did, and it follows him around *forever*. Available housing market likewise drops.
The current system only seems good in terms of letting people in his situation off without too much trouble because it can make a LOT more trouble for people; unless he's lucky he's still getting a lot more trouble than he probably deserves.
Slashdot Mirror
How could no one have foreseen the potential abuse and pitfalls of a system like this? Without even reading any further than "Giving Doctors Grades..." I immediately conjured images of a bunch of doctors huddled around each other saying, "I don't want that one." "Well I don't want that one either. My feedback is back at 85% and I can't risk another death screwing me over."
People did foresee it, but that doesn't mean the decision-makers decided against it.
Doctors knew that having hospitals professionally administered as a business would be a nightmare with lots of deleterious effects on patient care, but it's still how the profession has evolved.
The fact is that unless you personally know people who are familiar with a doctor's skill from a medical perspective, it is fundamentally *impossible* to tell if they're any good. And none of those people will talk outside their profession because it's a very private profession in a lot of ways.
I've known about surgeons with world-class reputations who were terrible in the operating room and others who don't have great reputations because they don't publish a lot but are amazing with patients or have amazing surgical skill. You just don't know 99% of the time, so you make the best decision you have with the information you can get. And if it's a major surgery, you don't go to whoever it is your HMO suggests you go to--you actually do some research and ask intelligent questions and consider options and get a second opinion on how best to proceed and reject a doctor who can't answer a basic question or is flustered at being asked and so on.
A neutral rating system is a good idea but it has to be able to normalize for the extent of the diagnosis, and that is a hard problem that apparently wasn't done well here. There are metastasized cancers that are curable and ones that are not, and a whole range of treatability, and lumping them into N3 or N4 after a certain point is going to discourage doctors from operating on harder N4s or harder N3's, for example.
You can also get a really aggressive cancer or the like that a good surgeon can tell under the microscope is incredibly aggressive, that needs to be treated quickly and radically, and the system is really bad about penalizing people for spending the money to do that because the system will say "it just fits into type X," an early-stage small cancer, for example.
So threatening you with a gun is ok? As long as I don't actually shoot you? Now substitute a drone.
No officer I wasn't shooting anyone, or even threatening them, I was just flying around my armed killer robot.
Threatening you with a gun is assault (i.e. threatening you with physical harm) and you can get arrested for it. You can also get sued if you have done an intentional act that is a legal and but-for cause of putting someone in apprehension of imminent bodily harm.
If you assault someone with your killer robot, it's still assault. If you do something stupid but intentional with the robot and it makes people afraid it will hurt them, they can still sue.
We don't actually need new laws to go after people who do something bad with a robot.
Ummm - my credit line is not at all related to my bank balance, or my investments. Two or three completely separate, unrelated numbers.
Separate, yes; unrelated, not so much. I hypothesize that not many people with $300 in their bank account have a $250K line of credit, for example.
We advertise based on bank account and related value metrics all the time, of course. The specific information might be protected to some extent by laws, but the media kit for most good advertising mediums gives you income and net worth type information about your target audience.
Obviousness rejection, anyone? Still, we're not very good about those.
Wow, you too are insane.
Wonko? Is that you?
Thanks for all the fish!
You are assuming sarcasm. I don't hear genuine sarcasm so much as ignorant making-light-of-evil because I hear people rationalize this kind of behavior. It is how modern-day slavery, gun-running, and old-people scams continue to happen. So if I don't hear OP as sarcasm, it's because it usually *isn't sarcasm,* and being sarcastic about it is ignorant.
Yes, all true with differing caveats. There are some kinds of stupid that can't be cured or are harder to cure because of the receptivity of the patient. Sometimes other avenues work (changes in social attitudes coming from their friends or co-workers) and create a useful feedback loop to correct some of the stupid. And sometimes, absolutely, kids are raised with habits that are intended to keep them ignorant or deluded. (See, e.g., going to religious service once a week).
You can't fix some versions of stupid, but sometimes you can make it better or less bad, either for that person, or in preventing the next guy from being the same kind of stupid.
That's nearly $14k per woman/victim. Where do I get me a cougar sugar momma?
Fuck you you piece of shit. That is exactly the thinking that leads people to do this, and to engage in human trafficking, gun-running, etc...
Humans are great at rationalizing crime. "Of course it's too bad these people are getting taken advantage of by me," they say, "but it's not like there's a better option."
There is no cure for absolute fucking stupidity.
Yes there is. Education.
People aren't usually born ignorant. They pick up stupid ideas from people who don't question what they've "learned" or overheard. Racist kids learn to be racist, either from parents or friends or both. Religious people learn their fictions about an all-powerful being who happens to love them unconditionally and have created them in his image because people *tell* them those fictions. People believe chronic lyme disease should be treated by massive and long-term IV antibiotics because they hear it from a doctor or friend who hasn't seen that the risks, on average, outweigh the gains. (I suppose it might work if you *knew* you were dealing with some of the more highly skilled medical professionals in the world, but enough goes wrong with most medical professionals that studies have shown it's not worth it.) Anti-vaxxers are afraid of needles because somebody who felt sick after a vaccine told them "I felt sick after a vaccine!" and they've learned about data, but not about anecdotal data. People learn their country is better than other countries because somebody tells them.
Learning is the cure for ignorance. Not learning the stupid, and learning the smart.
that's not news. It would be news if the systems were even reasonably secured, if that's possible. How do you secure a system from when the proverbial cat is out the bag?
You close the barn door after the cows come home in case they try to go through it again.
A common response to a successful major response is not just to try to repair the damage, but to capitalize on the moment to drive security reforms that people have been hesitant to embrace before, or that simply haven't been priorities for an organization. The capture of the OPM data was a major coup for China, but the detection and publication of the detection will be used effectively to convince thousands of employees and policy-makers in government that they actually have to care about security.
Thank you to the Slashdot team. Bringing systems back up like that is emergency-mode-fun, but a lot of work, and we appreciate it.
That's gotta have some interesting ramifications when you are driving on a slope, especially if you are accelerating over a small rise in the road.
The ramifications might include your breakfast.
...what's the question?
The big question is whether state misreporting of employees and IC's is a big deal. Anonymous poster sees gross hypocrisy by his government and is told by legal counsel that it's not a big deal, wants others to weigh in so that he can better conceptualize how he should feel about this--he's looking to third parties for feedback on something that strikes him as morally suspect and affects his life. That's actually an incredibly healthy, rational, and unusual attitude.
Is it a big deal? Yes and no. It's common to have people misrepresent employees as ICs in order to avoid the legal responsibilities of employment--that's *why* the IRS and various states crack down on it. So it's certainly not an *unusual* deal. And if you're making bank, it may not affect you much personally.
But it may affect a lower-income worker who gets treated the same way by the state and is denied overtime benefits, or the woman who's discriminated against by the state's hiring process and finds it much harder to sue, or the corrections officer who doesn't get a pension, for example. So there's some reason to call the state out on it for the public good.
There's *also* a strong argument that they should be called out on it because *they should have to put up with* the employment rules everyone else follows. They're the ones who change the rules, so they should experience having to live with them.
So there are reasons to responsibly disclose, but not much personal benefit to you. You risk a whistleblower sign over your head for the rest of your career unless you do it intelligently. You could sort of go a middle-ground, where you don't go to the press, for example, but do include a note on your taxes that the state has deliberately misclassified you as an independent contractor as part of a systemic process that affects many thousands of employees. I have no idea if the IRS would do anything with it (I'm guessing not), but you would be reporting it. Ah, here we go, the IRS has a way to report fraud:
http://www.irs.gov/Individuals...
The FBI goes after thoughtcrime, ideas and tools that _may_ be used to commit a crime who would have thought.
How about guns?
Almost all crimes have a thought element. It's not a crime to take someone else's car by accident because you're color blind and someone left the key in it. It's not even illegal to break in and hotwire the car thinking it's yours. (Good luck convincing a jury of that, of course.) Crimes have thought elements.
Tools which are designed to commit crime and are primarily used for that are regulated. I should probably be able to pick up one of those locksmith's guns because they're really cool and I'd enjoy playing with one, but they're still prohibited because they let anyone break into most houses on the block with a minimum of skill and noise. My wanting to play with it isn't a good enough reason to let everyone pick them up at walmart.
Hey, there's nothing wrong with hacking. But a market for malware is about as fucked up as you can get. It's a marketplace for products designed to hurt people without their consent. It's not like bittorrent where there's a legitimate use and an illegitimate one; there's pretty much just an illegitimate one.
"No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company." --Alan Turing
s/Congress Monsanto/Congress and Monsanto/;
Do you have any evidence that is happening? lots of innuendo gets thrown around, but I've seen no evidence of such action.
I am making an educated guess based on knowledge about what motivates Congress Monsanto's acumen. Monsanto has very good lawyers, lobbyists, and PR people, so it is highly likely they are bribing Congress in one way or another, even though openSecrets only shows about a quarter million in bribes. Excuse me, "donations."
Still, assume it's not happening. Now is having Congress pass laws so that Monsanto will be able to hide the fact that people's food is engineered okay? The answer is still no.
Then I will pick up the torch.
Every GMO sold in the U.S. has undergone extensive pre-market safety testing. What specifically about this process do you feel to be deficient. Especially in light of the fact that many other tools, such as random mutagenesis via radiation, do not require any pre-market testing depite having actually made people sick (unlike any GMO in the last 20 years).
I have no problem with putting well-tested GMO products in the supermarket. I have a problem with a multibillion dollar corporation bribing my Congresspeople so that they will be able to hide the fact that the products are engineered.
"unless there is a gigantic sign saying "PLUGGING INTO THIS IS PROHIBITED"
From the linked article:
"Electricity sockets on Overground trains are clearly marked with the words: “cleaners use only and not for public use”
Thank you! That makes it less absurd to punish him, although I still think a civil fine is more appropriate than an arrest.
Silly. Reading the article doesn't change my position; like I said, even in that case, a civil fine and not an arrest is the most that is justified. And then maybe you'll read to the next sentence of my comment, which covered that case.
Why would I read TFA when I can just put a default case at the bottom of my switch statement? :)
No story here.
Your absolutism costs lives. It locks people up who shouldn't be and follows them around for the rest of their lives. It also creates marginal deterrence problems. Proportional responses to violations of malum prohibitum "crimes" are called for. Proportional responses to malum in se crimes are even called for, but for malum prohibitum crimes there is no justification for absolutism.
To plug your phone into the wall should not be to get arrested, unless there is a gigantic sign saying "PLUGGING INTO THIS IS PROHIBITED." Even then, it should get a $50 civil fine and nothing on your record. What's more, it *shouldn't* be prohibited unless it creates problems.
My overall impression is that public transport as implemented here is that it is the very least we can get away with, regardless of the harm done.
I don't think we should be looking at it with an eye to making it incrementally better, either. It's a black hole that sucks very large amounts of money and returns nothing of new value. No one with an actual comprehension of the risks prefers public transport -- I think the most common case by far is that people use it because they have to use it.
There are a lot of areas we can improve, but "a black hole that sucks very large amounts of money and returns nothing of value" really just shows you don't understand its value. It has a massive value. It lets people trade time for money, and not everybody has the money you do to drive everywhere. It also lets them do things like work places they couldn't work or couldn't afford parking. It makes everything in the cities cheaper because it makes labor cheaper in the cities. It makes the engine of commerce run more smoothly--a massive number of people use it every day and they are doing that because it returns value. It also returns value to others in the form of reduced congestion (I'm looking at you Seattle) and air pollution.
It would be profoundly stupid if any of it could be traced to one person, but that's not how big corporate partnerships work. When you are a corporation you are not going to get arrested, and your lawyers will indeed advise you to risk killing people if the added revenue is likely to surpass the payout costs.
You are unlikely to, hence "tiny risk." But still risk. It does, however, look really unsympathetic in a lawsuit and raises those payout costs.
Step 1: Distract driver with advertisements
Step 2: Collect revenue from auto repair shops and lawyers
Step 3: Collect federal grant money to work with insurance companies to improve safety
This is actually the kind of strategy that any good lawyer will tell you is profoundly stupid. Not only does it risk wiping out your gains for the year through lawsuits, it creates a tiny risk of getting you arrested for involuntary manslaughter. Not to mention you're killing people, and your lawyer will usually advise you not to kill people.
The OPM Will be an attendance at the auction in the hope of updating their encryption technology.
He is 18. "Have you ever been arrested" gets checked on lease and job applications if he is in the wrong state. His chance of employment drops maybe 20% even if he's good at explaining what he did, and it follows him around *forever*. Available housing market likewise drops.
The current system only seems good in terms of letting people in his situation off without too much trouble because it can make a LOT more trouble for people; unless he's lucky he's still getting a lot more trouble than he probably deserves.