Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to Price Anything

Re:Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to P... by anecdatas on Sunday August 31, 2025 @12:08AM (#45080299)

Normally I'd be quippy about the plural of anecdote not being "data", but this isn't even plural. This is a single anecdote. The claim you have made is "I have encountered fraud, personally, so the system is a disaster."

Well run systems experience fraud. It's something you generally want to minimize, but like, it's not necessarily an indicator that the system is broken. Like... AWS has tons of fraud. AWS is still very much not a disaster. (Well, it kind of is a disaster, but mostly because it's a machine that chews up humans via oncall, which is unrelated to their fraud.)

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Re:Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to P... by RhysU on Sunday August 31, 2025 @08:28AM (#45082670)

As claimed, light reading confirms this observation to be data not anecdata.

"NY's COVID unemployment fraud topped $11B, partly due to system failures..."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/nys-covid-unemployment-fraud-topp...

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Re:Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to P... by anecdatas on Sunday August 31, 2025 @03:35PM (#45086334)

Look at more recent data. https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/state-agencies/audits/pdf/sga-2...

It looks like fraud rate was typically 5-10%, which might be high, might be "fine". In 2020-21 and 21-22 fraud rate jumped way up to 20%, which is obviously way too high.

But in 2023-24 fraud rate is back down below 10%. We don't have 24-25 data yet, but it looks to me like we had a couple of unusual years during the pandemic, but audit controls seem to have reigned a lot of that back in.

I'd say, evaluate this year's data and then decide if this was a blip or not, then revise your mental model with data.

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