You didn't make an argument. You just made an unsupported claim. You did not compare fraud rates, you did not measure costs or benefits, you did not account for the urgency of the established by the context or make any attempt to assess relative feasibility. You made no argument.
More importantly, embedded in your claim is the assumption that comparing two different states with multiple order-of-magnitude differences in size and complexity should be accepted without question. Imagine deploying a solution for a class of 32 students in two weeks. Now imagine you have to do that for an entire university community of 8,000 people including all faculty, staff, and administration. You must account for on-campus and off-campus students; part-time, full-time, and remote employees; labor-oriented staff who do never use computers at work, multiple languages, bureaucratic restrictions to account for, politicking within different departments, and so on. Here's the kicker: you still have the same two weeks you had for the classroom project.
It's an absurd comparison that should never be made without clear disclaimers, caveats and careful specificity about the point.
So is this an argument? You're not comparing any real data either, just making a hypothetical comparison. Can I do that too?
Imagine if every state issued their own digital ID that was part of a national federated system of PKE. That is, each state trusts the certificate authority in each other state, and the fed trusts the states. There's some mechanism to sign into a federal website and to transfer money to a bank account, or perhaps a mechanism involving showing up to a postal office, who knows. Compare this to dispersing funds quickly but without any verification of identity.
By doing the work up front to be able to quickly verify identities it means that the fraud prevention happens before the fact.
Do you think the $76 billion would have been better spent on digital infrastructure or written off as fraud? And what about the next time there's a need for helicopter money?
You know the DoD is fazing out CAC and there's a lot of very cheap tooling around PKE digital IDs...
I think it was the bull market combined with specifically a "hiring bubble" caused by aggressive, competitive hiring and acquisition practices as a risk-mitigation strategy to prevent disruptive competition
Exactly. It was a best effort move to reduce fraud and exploitation while still providing the desired benefits. You had to wager that the loan would be forgiven and you had to be approved for the loan by an established lender.
Heart-breaking stories aside, it would have taken far more time and money to roll out a new government bureaucracy merely to duplicate a vetting service banks already provide.
> The whole PPP process was a sham [...] it was designed up front to be a giveaway to business owners.
Yes. The goal was to put money into the economy to help absorb the shock caused by short-term COVID restrictions that would otherwise have caused businesses to fail permanently. The point was to allow more businesses to "weather the storm" than otherwise. You can argue about the extent to which businesses should invest in "pandemic insurance" (however you want to define that), but the government does have an interest in stability and preventing a vicious cycle leading to economic collapse.
The obvious point was to leverage the resources already available at banks to vet loan applicants and to reduce the total number of applicants in the first place. It's not perfect, but it's a reasonably good idea given the urgency. Sometimes it's reasonable to accept that some people are going to get away with cheating the system. Do the best you can and move on.
Can you imagine how much MORE it would have cost and how much more money would have gone to waste, had the government just said up-front that it was free money for businesses? How much would it have cost the government to arrange for approving applicant businesses? Was it even feasible given the desired timeline?
His type of behavior and language brings out hate and revulsion in even the kindest people.
From what I see, the hate and revulsion is brought out primarily by confirmation bias due to (a) subjective reporting on his behavior and language and (b) gaps in factual knowledge.
I assume there are people who are legitimately repulsed by his behavior, but I never see people actually explain themselves clearly. They always engage in question-begging and other fallacies and misdirection, as you are now. You state that Trump's behavior is reprehensible, but do not allow that position to be challenged and provide no argument at all in support of your statement.
If you don't know how to apply discipline and empirical methods to have a discussion in a detached and productive manner, then yes you are going to have a very hard time with conversations with people who don't share your biases. And if you can just downvote, censor, and otherwise dismiss/marginalize/deplatform the person challenging your bias, you will never learn the truth.
If anyone is honestly questioning why people hate Trump (even a large portion of his own party hates him for his crass and dangerous behavior), there's been plenty of coverage over the years and it's easy to find. Claiming that people only have such opinions because of subjective journalism is simply wrong, because you don't need investigative reporting to find out about his bad behaviors - plenty of it has been recorded. You can determine a lot about the man's character just by watching some of his public appearances.
Anyone who has paid attention and isn't disgusted by Trump's behavior is either an immature, racist, or sexist person themselves, and sees it as normal and preferred, or they ignore it and it's ramifications because of some political goal.
It's quite telling how you're being downvoted when proper evidence is presented that destroys the leftist narrative. They accuse their opponents of putting their heads in the sand, where they are doing exactly the same. Quite ironic really.
I suspect the confusion here is that too much market-centered thinking, while essential for doing good business, can lead you to lose sight of "use value" in the big picture.
If Google search and Facebook were to disappear tomorrow, my life would barely change at all (it might even improve). Contrast Google and Facebook with: packet-switched networks, the internet, cellular and wireless networks, sattelites, DNS. These things disappear and your life changes dramatically.
So in terms of market, yes, you can get some good ROI for research, but you're not getting flying cars (or various other technologies with such intrinsic potential to be life-changing) without a LOT of effort.
That's untrue and not really relevant to the point anyway. Spending changes are small relative to the total spending, and have been increasing, for the most part.
NIH budget for example increased from $32 billion in 2016[1] to $41.68 billion in 2020. Trump has proposed a 6% cut for the 2021 NIH budget but that is not finalized yet.[2]
NSF budget increased 2.5% from 2019 to 2020, to $8.3 billion. [3]
Google's page might be better-looking and have more sophisticated features than DuckDuckGo, but in terms of the quality of the service I am trying to use? Google is unquestionably inferior to DDG.
Fun fact, on my android device, Google has ZERO results visible at first. I have to scroll past an ad to get to the results. (Often, there are multiple ads that must be scrolled past to get to the content).
Maybe only dinosaurs like me actually use web search to search for web pages rather than to have a guided AI-driven experience, but that's the product I'm looking for. DDG delivers that, Google does not.
This is all outside the greater issue of the web in general and searched-web especially becoming massively clogged with low-quality, overly ad-laden content. If anyone remembers the state of the web when Google first came onto the scene, the problems were similar. Most advertising was obnoxious, intrusive, and costly in an era when bandwidth was scarce. Google came on the scene offering (a) the best search product and (b) discreet, polite, often relevant ads that didn't trigger all sane people to install ad-blockers.
The difference is that in 2000, the internet ad market was tiny compared to today. The audiences were different, also.
To be fair, the narrow question would have been far more compelling 10-15 years ago, when these companies were both less-huge and had largely unvarnished reputations as being the best large companies for software developers to work. 10 years ago, sour grapes would have been a lot more obvious and valid answers would have been quite interesting. Today, not wanting to work for Google or Facebook is rather mundane.
