ChickenOverlord
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User ID: 218
It looks like the recent expose on child care center fraud has led to actual action in response: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/12/30/hhs-freezes-childcare-payments-minnesota/87965467007/
My question is: If a 23 year old guerilla journalist (who was not particularly rigorous in his methods) was able to blow this up, then why didn't legacy media go after this low hanging fruit? I have my own ideas (mostly ideological capture of the media) but I'd like to consider alternative explanations so I'd be interested in hearing your ideas about the failures of traditional journalism here and/or the decision by HHS to cut off funding generally.
Additionally, given that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and Defense are the lion's share of the federal budget, and much of the recent fraud has been Medicare/Medicaid fraud to the tune of billions, how much will this affect attempts at welfare reform? From both sides, both the people pushing UBI and the people trying to eliminate or reduce welfare generally.
we don't want being Catch-22'd to be a death sentence because of stupid bureaucrats/senior management
My favorite recent prominent example of this is the president himself catching a felony because he didn't use campaign funds to pay hush money to a mistress. I realize this isn't an exact description of what happened in that case, but it's close enough for government work.
I commit the same "falsification of business records" every damn week because retarded tax laws around software development require me to precisely track exactly how much time I spend on development of new features vs. maintaining existing applications and I can confidently say that absolutely 0 software devs are accurately reporting how their time is divided between these things.
Cases like Trump's definitely put a "3 felonies a day" sort of fear in me if I ever piss off the wrong DA politically.
My main question is how the hell did they pull this off?
If regulators are willing to turn a blind eye (potentially because of some greased palms) it's incredibly easy. My goto example is a green energy scandal. A company was (on paper) the second largest producer of biodiesel in the US. They were producing 0 gallons and just making numbers up in a spreadsheet to sell to other companies as green energy credits. The EPA had actually inspected their facilities and saw it was obvious they were producing nothing and did... precisely jack shit about it.
The only reason they were caught is because they were parking their sports cars all over their neighborhood, pissing off local families. The local families thought they were a drug dealer, and this triggered an investigation by local LEO that ended up blowing the whole thing up:
An episode of the TV series American Greed covers the scandal in detail.
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
a single federal employee, who got fired for their actions, deciding not to help political opponents during a disaster.
And her underlings who complied with her directions
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
Also provably secure software limits you to a certain subset of the features available in most programming languages, since a lot of things in software/math/logic are inherently unprovable.
ChickenOverlord
4d ago
For a more recent example/counterpoint (though still relatively ancient) look at the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. The Chinese got their asses wrecked in a month or so, where it took the US a decade to withdraw.
ChickenOverlord
4d ago
The modern right doesn't like woke progressives in "peaceful times", but I would imagine that after a natural disaster like a fire or hurricane, that most people, left or right, tend to put their differences aside and help each other out.
That depends on if the "FEMA tells employees to avoid houses with Trump signs" story was an isolated incident or not.
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
Eh, my employer is paying for it and occasionally I learn something new and interesting that I didn't already know.
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
Yes, going back to school for 3 years (to learn things I already know, mind you) is just what I want to do when I'm 40.
I'm 37 and that's what I'm doing. Getting a mostly pointless master's in comp sci since my undergrad degree is in the humanities.
ChickenOverlord
6d ago
I also imagine cell based approaches will be more popular among righties. Even though it's less capable of coordinated action, it's far more resistant to fed infiltration.
I'm sure there's some amount of truth to what you're suggesting, but not for the reasons you're implying. If Christian churches run by Heritage American citizens were committing similar kinds of fraud, most people wouldn't consider it as big of a deal because Heritage Americans would likely be committing such fraud at significantly lower rates (using facial crime rates as the baseline) and because we didn't intentionally import those scammers into the country for the express purpose of disrupting and replacing Heritage Americans.
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