The official method for estimating fraud rates is take a very small sample of claims, review the paper work and conduct an interview. of course this is never going to catch the majority of fraud!
Of course they'll never be perfect, but the official estimate would need to be off by at least an order of magnitude for it to matter vs. the harm done by government.
If it's that far off, there's at least half a dozen editors of major UK papers that'd be rubbing their hands in glee at the opportunity to further demonize benefits claimants by exposing more benefits cheats and/or by exposing flaws in the reporting. That this isn't happening despite both commercial and ideological gain to be had in doing it if they could, is to me a strong indication that the numbers aren't that far off.
I think the suggestion is that they'd be unable to detect it in many cases. And that's a fair point - of course some portion of fraudulent claimants will succeed in hiding it. I just don't think it's likely to be a sufficient portion to make much difference.
he would have learned it regardless of his dad teaching him - because he is smart. education can't do much to change the population distribution of intelligence.
I don't know about that. "Being smart" isn't a big enough hammer, sometimes.
I'm "smart". I taught myself how to program, and now I'm an architect-level developer that's respected by everyone I've ever worked with. But I'm also a college dropout. I had a terrible education ("Christian" "school" with no qualified teachers) and my parents were no scholars themselves; and I gave up on college because I couldn't get a CS degree without making it through Calc 1, which I didn't even get to until my second year of college because my whole first year (and the summer prior!) was spent in remedial math.
I worked every night in the math lab with the smartest tutor I've ever met. I stayed up until 2a every night trying to get my Calc 1 homework done. But it wasn't enough. I didn't have a strong enough foundation to pull it off. It was too little, too late.
Years later, I think I'd do much better, as learning how to develop enterprise-grade data warehousing and ETL solutions has taught me /how/ to learn. But at the time, I had no good "tools" to use - I just knew how to memorize, memorize, memorize. And it just wasn't enough.
If my stupid, fucking, batshit insane religious-maniac parents had just let me go to a public high school - like I begged them to - all of this could have, and would have, been avoided.
you are smart. the vast majority of the population is dumber than you. the average person will struggle to master basic algebra and simple programming concepts.
people ate loads of sugar before modern processed foods. the consumption of sugar is not something that was forced upon us by evil corporations.
taxes don't make sense because people will just substitute sugary foods for other types of food. isocaloric exchange of sugar for other nutrients doesn't lead to weight loss. so the end result is that consumers pay more for something they enjoy (sweet food and drink) without any public health benefit.
There's a lot of criticism levelled at the CAPM, including significant methodological challenges (measuring the market portfolio, etc.), but the basic intuition underlying it is sound.
It's what is taught, but I wouldn't say it's entirely accurate though unless the market is fully 'efficient', which we know it's not, or at least not all the time.
The risk free rate of return is reduced because people want to leverage short term cash flows. A 99% chance of gaining 5% is not necessarily worth a 1% chance of losing 5%. EX: Collage tuition is paid before teachers salary's are paid, so collages want somewhere to stuff money for a weeks, but losing money is vastly worse than some minor gains.
If you model the stock market by say buying evenly from all stocks and selling in 50 years repeat. Then some outliers like dell at IPO going up 500x more than makes up for losses. But, you can still lose a lot of money over say 5 or even 20 years and people can't necessarily wait 50 years.
As far as science goes, a certain amount are arsenic doesn't have any negative health consequences either.
But the next time you are at the grocery store look for sugar in every thing you buy. You will be surprised. When I stopped eating refined sugars, my shopping list was cut by about 90%. I don't feel that's an exaggeration either.
Keep in mind there are a dozen or so different names for the various types of refined sugars. They have been trying to hide it for years now.
