Children with Cancer Scammed Out of Millions Fundraised for Their Treatment

Anyway, yes, direct donation is always better, be it to some random guy down on his luck in the street (unless they have just missed their bus and need ticket money for the next one and so for 3 years in the same bus station) or to some trusted person/group who actually does deliver the stuff to the area. Way too many random NGOs have popped up in Europe promising to do good things, just transfer money to their bank account and they will take care of it all for you.

I always tell people to donate as local as possible. Ideally local Shelters, Churches (that take in everyone) etc...

I mean it does feel like that should be standard operation for journalism on bigger stories but I think our expectations from journalists have really fallen over the last 5 years with all the slop coming in.

If you have content which is removed, or a moderation decision you wish to dispute, you can go to one of these bodies to get it reviewed. It cannot go to dev/null.

This doesn’t address whether flagging scams resulted in action. The bigger picture is the mismatched incentives for tech. Platforms are not quite incentivized to care about responding to user complaints, and do not give out information that lets us know what is happening independently.

To get to the point that complaints are actioned, those incentives need to be realigned. The ODS pathway, if used more frequently, increases that revenue and market pressure.

The ODS system is new, and I expect it will have tons of issues to discover. I wouldn’t be surprised it it is already weaponized.

On the flip side, platforms haven’t been tested or queried in this manner before.

- People who want to work in tech because it was a stable and/or lucrative career

- People who just want/love to code

- People who loved tech / think tech is cool

There’s also a degree of counter-culture that used to be part of the mix, which got jettisoned as tech became mainstream and mapped out.

The current state of Tech is unpleasant and alarming.

Why does anyone think a brilliant mind would enjoy that? So they could make a little bit more money?

Do you honestly think brilliant people, the smartest of our generation, care about money?

IME, Google software devs aren't even the brightest minds in the parking lot.

Completing large engineering projects says nothing about individual capability, and nothing about how Google deploys shitty AI moderation and about how Google employees insist it's great and perfect and never does anything wrong gives me any reason to believe they are even competent.

It's literally a meme that people started repeating in earnest without a second thought.

Don't you think a brilliant person would work somewhere, like, interesting?

In economies where you aren't rewarded for individual competency (because software management couldn't pick out individual competency if it screamed at them), highly competent people aren't going to play the game, they are just going to find something to pay the bills and work on hobbies.

The smart people are often where the money isn't, because they are rarely driven by monetary pursuits.

However it's also a tricky business to be the adjudicator of what is and isn't a scam. You're going to have to deal with a lot of complaints from "legitimate businessmen".

They are not the brightest, just the ones who sold out others and grabbed the money, with ethics and morals not being sufficient personal barriers.

Calling them the brightest just feeds their belief that they merit the money, and they don't have to ask the real reason they have so much money.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-tolerates-rampan...

Let’s say I have a bag of bread, and I pass them down one by one expecting people to only keep one. You decide to keep two.

The human’s reasoning is often bulletproof:

I don’t have enough. You do. I’d didn’t steal from the person next to me, I took it from someone with plenty

^ No where in that reasoning is the possibility that in the aggregate, if enough people do that, you steal from each other.

We’re not billiard balls. We have agency. Nothing causes a human being to choose to commit immoral acts vs. immoral acts. A human being may be put in a situation that may entice that person’s corrupt desires (we used to call this temptation), and responsibility while mitigating culpability is possible when someone’s rational faculties are overwhelmed, but the choice remains.

Blaming systems for theft is scapegoating and an evasion of responsibility. (To make this clearer by distinction: a starving man taking bread from an overstocked warehouse during a famine is not choosing to commit an immoral act; he isn’t stealing in the first place, as some share of that bread is his).

There are plenty of capitalist nations that provide public healthcare on a large spectrum of coverage and quality.