I've worked with both. The simple items are nicer in ansible but when there are a lot of custom roles and functions ansible isn't much better than chef from what I've seen in practice.
Might want to look at how that has worked at the state level. The state of Michigan has this and it has only exacerbated issues held in check because people had incentives to help people and get re-elected. Michigan now squarely gets its policies from lobbyists and special interest groups because at the end of their terms that is who will hire them.
Term limits do exist and are called elections. Every single election is a chance to vote someone out of office who hasn't done a good job. The thing that has essentially broken elections as term limits is partisan gerrymandering.
As someone working in a customer facing role for a lot of my tech career, most of it is sound advice. The one missing item that isn't is deescalating urgent situations by not assigning blame during the interaction.
Just have to add that in circumstances like this a corporate death penalty seems appropriate. Equifax is an entity that you are not able to be removed from in any way. When you look at the financial and security ramifications of the breach and what was released and the response, seems appropriate. The kicker is that Equifax also offers credit monitoring for fraud prevention as a product to line their coffers.
I hope you're being specific in your wish for Equifax to be shut down and not the whole consumer credit reporting industry. That industry solves a very, very real problem for consumers, and countries without credit reporting also don't have consumer access to credit, making, among other things, finding mortgage loans virtually impossible.
The privacy angle is minuscule compared to the human costs of not having consumer debt.
I am someone who believes the world would be better off without these companies. My argument generally goes like this:
- Credit existed before reporting agencies
- It's possible to verify creditworthiness without a reporting agency
- Reporting agencies aren't particularly good at their job anyways
You may dislike the first two arguments, because obviously they make debt more expensive. I don't think that's the worst thing in the world. So, I'll focus on the last point.
Credit reporting agencies often have incorrect info. Here's an FTC study that says one in five have wrong info that was corrected. [0]
You may argue that I should use the other number, ie. people who still had errors after fixing it: 2.2%. But, it oftentimes by the time you fix an error, the opportunity to get the thing you want (ie. job, apartment, car, house, etc) has passed.
But even if the data was correct, the way they generate the score manipulates people into taking on more debt than they should and take on worse debt.
Getting and using one or more credit cards is the easiest ways to improve your credit score, and this is honestly bullshit. Credit cards encourage bad spending habits and trap people in debt. The credit card companies rely on people carrying a balance and a really good way to make that happen is to make sure everyone uses their credit cards for everything.
Meanwhile, things that should improve your score often don't. For example, rent and utility payments only count if they are reported and a lot of landlords or companies don't report or only report if you don't pay.
Maybe it's not the credit reporting agencies' problem if people don't report good behavior. And, I don't know what efforts they've made at getting more people to report. But my bias tells me that they probably just don't care.
Is it a bad thing that getting a loan requires you to go to church? Yeah, kind of.
Edit: Now I don't know what I'm responding to. You agree that someone's history in repaying debts is legit to use as an indicator. You agree in augmenting the lending decisions with algorithms. That's what credit reporting is!
And yet somehow that's a defense of your conclusion that "therefore it should be more based on whether your social circles include the people with money" (which no one would scream bloody murder about for being anti-minority)? I'm lost.
We seem to have talked past each other. I have no issue with credit reports per-se. Rather, I believe that they systemically mis-categorize bad behavior as good and underreport good behavior that is non-traditional.
Also, I have no idea what you are talking about with Church things. I never mentioned Church or basing lending on social ties.
>I am someone who believes the world would be better off without these companies. My argument generally goes like this:
>Credit existed before reporting agencies
So, you like credit reporting, but not credit reporting agencies? Can you see how I might have missed this subtlety, since you never even tried to justify it?
Upon examination, your position isn't even against "credit reporting agencies", but "having wrong credit information". Great, everyone agrees, but it's unclear what you're saying should be different from the current system, now that you say you like "credit reporting".
>Also, I have no idea what you are talking about with Church things. I never mentioned Church or basing lending on social ties.
Or you forgot already. The Church came up because I pointed out that, yes, lending did exist before credit reporting agencies, but only based on these informal social cues, like whether someone "seems like a good Christian man" (gender intended) or whether your went to the same church (yes, church specifically). Then we had this exchange:
>>[lending was based on] whether the banker knows you from church as a good C̶h̶r̶i̶s̶t̶i̶a̶n̶ ̶m̶a̶n̶ person
>Is that supposed to be a bad thing?
Now you're acting like none of that happened, and also calling me a troll.
If there's a clear argument, I'd like to engage with it, but I can't discern what it is from your comments.
You're first comment suggested that I wanted to go back to some glorious past where credit reporting was better. I didn't say this and if you misinterpreted that from "Credit existed before reporting agencies", that's a shame.
It seems what you jumped to was that I think that it's better in the past, which I didn't say and don't mean.
What I meant is that it is possible to evaluate peoples credit one-by-one without having it all pre-gathered up front by a central reporting agency. This is more expensive, but I am fine with that.
The way it would work is similar to how it already works with underwriting. You submit a lot of paperwork on your account histories, rent payments, any leases or other contracts you are in now or recently, etc. These documents establish your creditworthiness.
For example, this is how I got a car loan. I had no credit score at all, but a bank was willing to give me a loan because they saw a bunch of docs saying I pay stuff on time and that I have a good job that pays enough to pay off the loan.
And also it wasn't what I focused on in my original comment anyways. I focused on the bad data, mis-categorization, and underreporting.
Edit:
Maybe this helps clarify things...
if credit agencies exist:
do better by...
- improving process for removing incorrect info
- stop encouraging people to use credit cards
- track rent, utilities and other good behavior better
else:
it's not a disaster because underwriting already requires all the docs needed to establish creditworthiness
The whole credit reporting industry depends on others absorbing their massive negative externalities. The companies are the equivalent of gross polluters dumping benzene into reservoirs.
> The privacy angle is minuscule
It is infuriating to see the suffering of the individual victims of identity theft dismissed so cavalierly. If the credit reporting companies had to pay for all the harm they cause they would be bankrupt many times over.
Even if credit rating serves a purpose, how does the system get reformed to bring true redress to those negatively affected by it?
And if getting a mortgage or a similarly big decision was the only time you needed a credit score, that would be one thing. Problem is in the US, a stupid number of things requires a credit score, including some mobile phone contracts (!).
Having grown up in a credit-averse and cash-focused society, I don't think they're that necessary. What people do instead in build a relationship with your local bank. Of course, once you're used to a credit-driven society it's hard/impossible to go back. People apparently hate being told "No you can't afford that new car".
In my twenties when I left the military I lost the ability to pay back my debts. It took me some 9 years to decide to clean up my credit. Living without a credit score is absolutely possible right now.
One simple way to change credit reporting is to make the process "opt-in". Credit reporting agencies can only report on consumers that agree to have their information reported. They could still collect publicly available data but couldn't report unless they have a consumer's ongoing agreement. Essentially, everyone's report is "frozen" by default and the agencies are automatically monetarily liable unless have an explicit agreement for this unfreezing.
That said, I'm not sure a world without consumer debt would be that much worse.
This is pretty much how it works already. When you sign for a credit card/loan/etc. the agreement includes language saying you also agree for it to be reported to a credit agency.
Credit reports are not frozen by default, per gp's suggestion. That would prevent those who want to inquire about an individual's credit from finding anything out without the individual taking concrete action to unfreeze the account.
The corporate death penalty here would not fix the problem. The data are already exposed.
Equifax market cap is currently $13.5B. Corporate death penalty would hurt owners of that stock, maybe funds in your own 401K account. Thousands of people would lose their jobs.
Would it have a preventive effect? Maybe but doubtful. There are too many systems with too much data that are too old and too interconnected to think that it's even possible to secure them all. If it wasn't Equifax it would have been someone else, eventually. Most of what Equifax exposed was probably already exposed in other leaks anyway.
Better solution should be developing new, secure methods of proving identity, where leaks don't matter because it's not possible to leak anything of value. All the old ways are now forever broken.
Bullshit apologism. Shareholders should lose their shirts, for the same reason Enron shareholders did. [Equifax did not commit fraud, but my point is that when a company through incompetence or malice damages 100s of millions of Americans...yeah, they should be dissolved from existence.]
Data breaches are only preventable when you have an inhumanly good security team. This is mot even possible for your average non-technically-inclined business leader.
Why don’t I have any say in all my financial transactions and “passwords” being sent to and vacuumed up by tech ologically incompetent, undeniably unethical bureau-corps?
It’s what I found so refreshing about Monero and other cruptocurrencies when I still used them (took a break from the scene). No one can steal your identity or your money withhout you yourself making a mistake.
Money is a proxy for power in society. The fines for this breach should be enormous since it wasn't just them being hacked, they were negligent in maintaining their systems.
If the consequences of losing our data was high enough, more money would be spent protecting the data. Which I think is one of the good things for GDPR, it has stiff penalties and one of the considerations for the fine is negligence.
Equifax is probably going to end up making more money now because of the breach as more people now need "better" identity verification - a service that Equifax conveniently provides.
Maybe the other credit reporting agencies and other companies would take security seriously. Sometimes breaches happen. Sometimes it's clearly negligence.
And just because it's too late now doesn't mean the law can't be adjusted to prevent it from happening in the future. If you don't learn from mistakes, that's dumb. And obviously companies can't be trusted to do it themselves.
Neither does the regular death penalty un-murder anyone. But as long as our society feels it has the right to end human lives, it should absolutely have the right to dissolve corporations; and corporations are capable of much greater harm than individuals.
Capital punishment is meant as a deterrent, not a preventative measure (well, really, it's revenge for the mob) and so it could potentially work much better with corporations than with individuals.
If a shareholder (or fund) is invested in a company, those investments should be considered at risk, without a risk component, companies may as well only return the tbill rate.
By giving equifax the death penalty, future shareholders should choose between competitors, including on who will do the better job with accuracy and data security.
Yet another reason to support any local ISP over embedded cable companies. This also would be a great time to take a look at municipal broadband or regional broadband. At least I'm glad I got to cut Comcast from my life with a local fiber company.
Indeed, Oakland County is a great example. It has happened elsewhere in the state of Michigan but not on as large a scale. When you look at Genesee county and the hole that is Flint with the its wealthier suburbs around it.
I'm personally racially mixed and feel comfortable many different races but can understand her feeling of Oakland. I personally can't speak for Sunnyvale, Santa Clara or San Bruno but do have personal experiences in Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose. Oakland has a more comfortable feeling while in the city. Oakland feels welcoming more so than the other cities to me personally.
