Posts by Chris Miller
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Hard News: Violence in the streets, in reply to Sacha,
Funny, coz my only experience with the justice system was after a completely random bashing when I was waiting for a bus. They didn't even ping my danger sensors as they were walking towards me, they just looked like they were heading down the street as normal. Anyone who doesn't think this shit happens needs to get their head out of their arse.
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As an interesting piece of trivia, celebrity culture was born during the reign of Henry VIII. His marital issues had the right combination of scandal and relevance (the religious beliefs of whoever he was currently in love with, for example, had a huge impact on who was likely to be victimised) to get people's interests and they haven't stopped since.
More to the point, Christchurch has ALWAYS had this problem and it will continue, and probably get worse over the next few years. The idea that he isn't allowed to celebrate with his team is ludicrous. Why the fuck should he have to stay at home while his teammates go out? Unfortunately it's just easier to blame him, since criticising celebrities is already part of the culture, than it is to change the behaviour of all the overly-macho dispossessed men in Christchurch (and in the rest of the country) who think the only thing they can do to have some power over their lives is to smash up other people.
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OnPoint: The Source, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
Fairly likely that someone in employment would do that for any number of reasons - they're underemployed (ie, have a shitty part time job only), their job is terrible, they're helping someone else, they want to move and find a new job there, they do like their job but a better position is opening up and they want to try for it.
More importantly, what does it matter whether he's employed or not?
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OnPoint: The Source, in reply to Martin Connelly,
Presumably they discussed it again in light of the fact that MSD revealed they'd been contacted by someone last week who'd "asked for money" and Ira changed his mind so they could get their side of the story out.
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to James George,
They're meant to at my job too. (Most of the actual information is stored hard copy; things like name, address, bank details, action history is in the database file.) The point is more that staff are familiar enough with the back end to know how to get around the checks and balances. Not all of them, but enough of them. External fraud has less knowledge of that sort of thing and often has a higher failure rate - we have a fair few cases that went to the courts as attempted fraud, but only a very few that actually GOT money they shouldn't have.
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to niceness,
When I say most, I would probably be talking more like 60% than 90%. It's a conclusion reached from a combination of several studies so unfortunately I can't link you to any one document, but certainly there's plenty to show that fraud by people applying for benefits is far lower than most people seem to think and a large number of confirmed frauds consist of things like staff members using the system to set up payments to people who have not been vetted (it would be extremely easy to do this at my job, incidentally, all I'd have to do would be to set up a file with junk personal information and the target bank account number, not sure what the WINZ systems are like for similar schemes). Simply put staff have far more opportunity to commit fraud while also having a higher level of trust.
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
It would be pretty shitty if you had to be a WINZ client to use those considering how many people have been booted off benefits and have no actual income. Real unemployment figures are higher than who's on unemployment.
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to James Harden,
Or from the WINZ kiosk, apparently.
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to Nigel McNie,
Agree Nigel, I don't know that you can really call it breaching the servers! He went to the File menu of a public computer and clicked Open File. Mega hax there. If he wasn't supposed to have it, surely they wouldn't have put it there, as I'm sure plenty of lawyers would argue.
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Thomas, I would love to see them go after him for this. LOVE TO. He may well have technically broken the law but public opinion if they tried to charge him for it could get very messy.
And yeah, I've seen statistics that suggest a significant amount if not the majority of benefit fraud is committed by MSD staff, so the fact that the staff can access this stuff is pretty horrifying in and of itself.