[dwohnitmok]

> Hopefully next time we'll do it smarter.

I'm not sure how much smarter you can get. Fighting fraud and security in general is a cat-and-mouse game with a fundamental trade-off of convenience/expeditiousness vs. preventing fraud. When you need to get large amount of money out to a nation in a very small span of time, there might just be an unavoidably high floor on the amount of fraud that will happen.

Because otherwise you get flooded with all sorts of heart-breaking stories of people who were denied money due to some bureaucratic inconvenience put in place to fight fraud.

[Jcowell]

Doesn’t help when the administration makes it hard to do effective oversight[1]

1. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/07/trump-removes-indep...

[Goladus]

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.

[williamcotton]

Estonia has a robust digital government infrastructure that made payments easy and much less apt for fraud.

[Goladus]

Estonia has a population the size of Maine.

[williamcotton]

That’s not an argument against digital government infrastructure.

[Goladus]

You made no argument for it.

[williamcotton]

I did, it makes distributing government payouts harder to scam.

[Goladus]

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.