Interesting Links for 27-02-2012
Feb. 27th, 2012 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- Paypal forces publisher to censor themselves
- On feminism
- Scotland and Ireland in the British Parliament
- Spain will not veto an independent Scotland joining EU
- Kripke resigns as report alleges that he faked results of thought experiments
- New figures show low level of benefit fraud
- What happens to the cocain in Coca-Cola?
- Labour still pushing the Digital Economy Act. (And, for this and numerous other reasons, not getting my vote)
- Measuring fragmentation in Android
- When misunderstanding slang causes a massive waste of resources
- Would you like a phone with a 50" screen?
- FBI Turns Off Thousands of GPS Devices After Supreme Court Ruling
- One of my favorite book-related stories ever
- Like music? Go vote in the Rock And Roll March Madness. (This is the anchor post, click on to see more)
- A Steam Train on the London Underground
- The Flying Baby Photos
- Why I’m Not Discussing Politics Much Right Now
- The Racist Tree, a parable
Tags:
- academia,
- android,
- awesome,
- baby,
- bartcalendar,
- benefits,
- books,
- censorship,
- cocacola,
- cocaine,
- copyright,
- eu,
- feminism,
- fraud,
- funny,
- gps,
- independence,
- ireland,
- labour,
- law,
- lgbt,
- links,
- london,
- manufacturing,
- mobile_phones,
- music,
- paypal,
- philosophy,
- photos,
- politics,
- privacy,
- projector,
- racism,
- satire,
- scotland,
- slang,
- software,
- spain,
- story,
- technology,
- trains,
- transport,
- uk,
- usa,
- video,
- welfare,
- writing
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 11:09 am (UTC)Best. Headline. Ever.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 11:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 11:19 am (UTC)PayPal forced him to stop accepting PayPal payments for subscriptions because they thought it violated their obscenity clause in their Terms Of Service.
Another client was running a site where dudes could post reviews of male escorts (mostly so that before they set up a date they could figure out if the guy was going to try to rip them off and/or actually looked like the photo in his add and/or had not photoshoped his dick pick) and PayPal cut his payment processor off as well.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 11:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 11:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-19 01:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 11:51 am (UTC)Anyone who lives in social housing will tell you that fraud is pretty rife. The flat I used to have in London was in a block of 52, with six on my floor. During the eight years I lived there, seven different tenants on that floor were fiddling their benefits. Three were single mothers that weren't single, two were subletting at enormous profits, and two were were working cash in hand whilst claiming benefits.
I reported both the subletters, but they weren't prosecuted, they simply lost the tenancies of the flats they were living in anyway, which is standard procedure and does nothing to curb what is a growing problem, and increasingly one of teh activitie sof organised crime rings.
My neighbour shopped two of the single mothers with partners. He was then harrassed, and flat was then burgled and trashed while he and his wife were at work. It was the only one of the interior flats that burgled in the whole time I lived there and he was told by the police that it had to be an inside job.
I find the discussion about this issue intensely frustrating, because the people who claim that the extent of benefit fraud is hugely exaggerated or some sort of evil Tory myth, aren't the ones compelled to live with it. I only shopped the ones I knew would not result in any comeback for me - and I could have moved out, as I was renting my flat from someone who had bought it.
The honest council tenants didn't dare raise any problems, because they knew it might result in them having to move and that would mean Southwark council taking months to relocate them to another estate (possibly one that was much less convenient for their jobs or their kids' schools).
In the school I just worked in, where each child costs the taxpayers of that county as much as a place at Eton, there were similar stories. The traveller boy I taught, who was one of the most well provided with expensive clothes and kit told the otehr boys he thought their families were suckers for working 'normal, loser jobs' and claimed - I suspect his Dad had been reading the Guardian, and appropriating the relevent language - that it 'wasn't part of traveller culture to pay taxes'.
Going back to when I worked in SOuth Wales at the end of the last recession, there was a huge EU-funded project to be bring tech production companies to the valleys. The Uni I worked in worked with WDA and other bodies to provide training for Japanese and Korean factories. These jobs paid very very well by local standrads, and our training programme was pitched at the long term unemployed - i.e. those who had been on benefits for over a year. We were deluged by enquiries by men on long term sickness benefits, who were not eligible for the scheme. They were quite open about the fact that there weren't suffering from the condition they were signed of with - usuaully depression or back trouble - but there had been so few job opportunities for so long, that they knew they would get significantly more money on sick bens, so that was what they had opted for. This was often with teh tacit collusion of teh benefits agency, because that took them off the unemployed register which wewre better for their statistcsm, and also meant they didn't have to keep sending these poor buggers on jobstart programmes etc that were of absolutely no use to them.
I have every sympathy for those men, given their circumstances, but significant numbers of general shirkers in much more affluent areas of the country switched to sick bens in the late 80s pnwards, when Jobcentres and benefits offices were combined, when there was a lot of pressure on them to demonstrate they were actually seeking work.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 02:19 pm (UTC)And even the simplest hoops to jump through end up getting rid of some of the most needy, while still being easy for fraudsters to get through. One example I always bring up is from when I was working for the Job Centre. We were meant to be signing people up for a new scheme (at the time) where people would get vouchers for interview clothes, travel to work and work clothing (chef's whites or whatever), to help remove barriers for work.
Now, this scheme had various conditions tied to it - you had to live in a poor area, because it was being piloted, but you also had to have at least one other good reason for us to give you the vouchers. But we were being encouraged to sign as many people as possible up anyway, because this was actually the best way of getting people into jobs anyone had found -- pretty much everyone we signed up ended up with a job, because we were removing barriers to entry for those who wanted to work.
So one day we went to a local adult education college which was doing courses in catering, mostly attended by those on the dole, and signed an entire classroom up, until we got to the last bloke.
This bloke seemed a little bit thick, frankly, but obviously desperately wanted to work, and would be a very hard worker. So we go through the form, and he lives in the right area, and has never had a job, but he doesn't have any of the other qualifying things.
So we start dropping 'subtle' hints:
"Are you *sure* you don't have any medical conditions?"
"No..."
"No headaches or bad back or anything?"
"No..."
"OK, I'll just ask you one more time. Remembering that we are *handing out free money* here, that we *aren't legally allowed to check with your doctor or anyone else if you're lying*, and that we can *only give you this free money if you say yes*, do you have any headaches, bad back or any other health conditions that would not be visible to us?"
(Literally in tears now) "No. I'll just have to not get the help I suppose"
Then the teacher overhears this, comes over and says "But what about those fainting spells you have all the time?"
"Oh, I didn't think those would count..."
I'm becoming more and more convinced that the benefits system as it is at the moment is completely broken, and needs to be replaced. This is why I'm less angry about the current Welfare Bill than many of my other left-wing friends - the Universal Credit provisions may be the start of a system that will actually *work*.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 04:22 pm (UTC)I said "the Universal Credit provisions may be the start of a system that will actually *work*". I said *nothing* about the changes which will (if not modified -- the bill is still being debated) see people lose contributions-based ESA and so on. I have been, and continue to be, an active campaigner against those clauses. If nothing else, my disabled wife is one of those who will lose out.
I was talking, very specifically, about the Universal Credit - the replacement of a complex system with a simpler one, and in particular the idea of it being tapered away rather than removed altogether as one enters work.
I didn't say I agreed with the rest of the bill - in fact, rather the opposite. I said I was 'less angry' - that implies that I am still angry *to some degree*. Which I am. I just don't see the bill as an unalloyed disaster, since having seen the benefits system from all sides (I spent most of my early 20s unemployed, I've worked for the JobCentre, and my wife's attempts to jump through the bureaucratic nightmare that is claiming ESA are the kind of thing I could write a book about) I can see just how broken it is. What I want is for the bill to be amended so the bad parts of the bill can be removed while the good parts - the parts that will actually help fix a broken system - will remain.
Quite how you get from that to me wanting poor and disabled people to fuck off and die, I have less than no idea.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 04:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 02:33 pm (UTC)For some reason - I can't possibly think why - the Government keep including DLA alongside out-of-work benefits, reinforcing the idea that people who claim it are only disabled because they are out of work, and if they just got off their arses and got jobs, their disabilities would vanish. Never mind that there are plenty of disabled people who do work and/or study, or that there are thousands upon thousands of carers who would cost the government far more than is lost to fraud if they were paid fairly for the care work they do. It's much easier for the government to use the disabled as scapegoats, because it's so difficult for the genuinely disabled to fight back.
Also, many of the people who are falsely claiming incapacity benefit/ESA are doing so due to socio-economic factors caused by the previous Tory government (not that Labour helped). I'd recommend reading Dark Heart by Nick Davies (he of the phone hacking exposé) for a good background into why so many communities are messed up.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 07:56 pm (UTC)there was rather a lot of care work I refused, on the basis that it plain wasn't worth the c£10ph I made. Nowhere near. And I took a *lot* of bad clients.
the company I worked for eventually wrote up a Carers Charter, based purely on the level of abuse I received from their clients. My boss commented that it was effectively his way of apologising for the amount of shit he'd unwittingly put me through.
Losing that job was, psychologically, the best thing that ever happened to me.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 02:32 pm (UTC)Given that no major publisher is going to touch incest porn or whatever with even someone else's bargepole, this means that for those writers and readers there is now not a single commercial avenue open to them. It points up the major problems with the internet economy - we have a de facto payment monopoly that can destroy someone else's business (those writers) with no notice, and an increasingly narrow choice of delivery channels.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 02:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 02:58 pm (UTC)(This sort of thing is why I've supported campaigns against 'extreme porn' laws in the UK even though I don't want to buy any extreme porn - and one of the reasons why Labour will never get *my* vote).
no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 03:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 04:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 08:03 pm (UTC)especially given that PayPal appear to be getting worse by the month.
[I have no idea how that'd work in the real world - I am epically not a web dev]
no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 09:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 08:10 pm (UTC)and I'm now somewhat sickened by the extent to which my willingness to indulge Labour was based purely on belief in Brown.
there is, I have oft said, a limit to how wrong you can be before it comes crashing down around you. I can only hope people like Harman figure this out before they hand Cameron a decades majority.
meanwhile, I am driven further into the arms of the SNP - who at this point don't even have to prove their own case. They just have to not be anyone else.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 09:16 pm (UTC)When I was fifteen, I persuaded my parents to spend a couple of hours driving across Italy when we were on a family holiday, so that we could visit an apparently picturesque spring that I'd read about in a letter by Pliny The Younger, written in the 1st century.
It looked exactly like he'd said, it turned out!
no subject
Date: 2012-02-28 08:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-19 01:34 am (UTC)