Poster said, "I've contributed to keeping prisoners in prison."
This is in no way an inherently good thing--especially given the well-documented clusterfuck that is the judicial system in the US. Have you ever been through the wringer?
I don't think that kudos for helping that system is in order, unless it was specifically something like "I wrote software to help schedule inmate times so that violent offenders and trouble inmates were not put in the same areas at the same time as nonviolent or well-behaved inmates."
As for the second point--look, it's insurance claims. Depending on what the poster did, this ranges from "I helped people get the best claims service from their provider" to "I helped the provider service the bare minimum number of claims." Without more information on what was done, that topic has a lot of room for bad.
"Fix the base system" would be something like "I made a simpler marketplace so that care providers (doctors) can directly bill patients, cheaply and transparently."
So basically you are creating your own context based on your biases to paint the OP as evil because he didn't provide a full, encyclopedic accounting of everything he worked on.
What are you on about? How is angersock trying to "paint the OP as evil"??? He raised a very interesting and insightful question and provoked a discussion, that's all. Excessive hyperbole here isn't helping the discussion along.
(And this is saying something coming from me, given my well known penchant for using hyperbole to make a point!)
In what way is "keeping prisoners in prison" related to the "well-documented cluster-fuck that is the judicial system in the US"?
Keeping prisoners in jail is absolutely required. Determining if they should be in there in the first place is not the responsibility of the prison system, it is a responsibility of the judicial system.
It sounds to me like the OP hit the brief on the head.
In the past, jail space limitations have forced states to make hard choices about who they want to keep in jail, with the result that nonviolent offenders are paroled.
> "Fix the base system" would be something like "I made a simpler marketplace so that care providers (doctors) can directly bill patients, cheaply and transparently."
... while simultaneously violating the agreements they signed with insurance providers and putting themselves out of business?
I don't know about you, but I want prisoners to stay in prison. To make a blanket statement like "[Contributing to keeping prisoners in prison] is in no way an inherently good thing" is just madness.
To make a blanket statement like "[Contributing to keeping prisoners in prison] is in no way an inherently good thing" is just madness.
I don't understand this point of view. At least in the US a very large portion of the prison population are in jail for non-violent crimes related to drug sales and/or possession, and are being imprisoned unjustly. Some if not all "white collar" crime prisoners should probably also not be imprisoned. I for one certainly do not see jail as having any sort of innate "goodness" or nobility associated with it. It's a horrible, brutal, inelegant hack at best, and a travesty of justice in many cases.
"I don't know about you, but I want prisoners to stay in prison."
Even those innocent of any crime?
"To make a blanket statement like "[Contributing to keeping prisoners in prison] is in no way an inherently good thing" is just madness."
His statement isn't a blanket one, for reference the one you used which I quoted above is a blanket statement. For his statement to a blanket statement it would have to be phrased something like "Contributing to keeping prisoners in prison is an evil thing to do". Which is clearly neither what he said nor meant.
If there's erroneous data getting inserted in a database, you go looking for the broken part of the program that is putting it there. You don't mess with the database.
I think what he is saying is that smart people need to work on fixing the system, for example by making sure people do not get jailed unfairly, rather than propping it up by helping prisoners stay in prison. Personally, I would feel pretty bad if someone who gets jailed for marijuana possession is kept in jail with the use of software I created.
He/she probably worked on the control systems that allow cells to be locked/unlocked from a central point, or something else that mundane. Not some pie-in-the-sky system that determined guilt, which would seem to be where your problem lies.
The op should have just started an insurance industry disrupting medical insurance startup rather than get paid to work at an already established insurance company where he's somewhat guaranteed(by law) to get paid......
I used to work at a telecommunications company. Maybe I should have created my own telco company so consumers could get cheaper mobile phones instead!?!?!?
Poster said, "I've contributed to keeping prisoners in prison."
This is in no way an inherently good thing--especially given the well-documented clusterfuck that is the judicial system in the US. Have you ever been through the wringer?
I don't think that kudos for helping that system is in order, unless it was specifically something like "I wrote software to help schedule inmate times so that violent offenders and trouble inmates were not put in the same areas at the same time as nonviolent or well-behaved inmates."
As for the second point--look, it's insurance claims. Depending on what the poster did, this ranges from "I helped people get the best claims service from their provider" to "I helped the provider service the bare minimum number of claims." Without more information on what was done, that topic has a lot of room for bad.
"Fix the base system" would be something like "I made a simpler marketplace so that care providers (doctors) can directly bill patients, cheaply and transparently."