Just not, you know, accurate enough that you have any, like, actual evidence, to support it, right?
I have no clue what the source of that picture is, aside from the obvious http://images.huffingtonpost.com. Are you under the impression that the Utah State Legislature is in the habit of approving images posted by HuffPo? You said “someone apporved this chart” but have not yet supplied any evidence to back up that claim. I have no reason to believe you, and neither do any of our other dear readers.
There you go making claims without any evidence again. “it deliberately misled the public”. Really? Who? When? What, precisely, did they say? How did you determine it was deliberate and not just accidental? How did you determine it was the Utah state government and not HuffPo? You don’t know, but here you are making asinine claims anyways.
We’d all be better-served by a press that didn’t just take what they were told by the government at face value and run with it. I thought that was obvious, but maybe not to you?
Well you got your wish, because I’m responding to all of it now. Are you going to reciprocate? Will you answer all my questions now?
I’m not the least bit worried about running out of people to engage with. The Internet is chock full of 'em.
I trust that a neutral observer is more intelligent than that.
I don’t have any evidence that the misleading materials were ever “approved … to be disseminated to media outlets” by any elected officials at all. It wasn’t a claim I made. That’s your claim, remember? You are the one that’s supposed to supply evidence to support it.
Did you see at the bottom of it where it says “Source: Comprehensive Report on Homelessness State of Utah 2014”?
Once again, my evidence is in the chart that was put out by your government.
So, are you saying that the media needs to create new bureaus, a labor bureau, a homelessness bureau and so on, to duplicate the efforts of the government? When the BLS comes out with a jobs report, do you say “fake news”?
If so, then I understand where you are coming from, but is there anything at all that you can trust at that point?
Don’t I always?
I trust that most neutral observers are intelligent enough to see who answers posts, and who avoids doing so by taking a single line out of context to respond to.
The numbers on that graph were approved by your state govt.
The director of the program took credit
How do you not see this as misleading information? If he is taking credit for an effect that apparently does not exist, is that really honesty to you? Now, to be fair, this guy is not an elected official, he is just appointed by elected officials. So it is possible for elected officials to distance themselves from the lies that he purports.
Have any of the utah politicians that you voted for done so?
These statements suggest that HuffPo’s chart was made by the State of Utah. That is, AFAICT, a blatant falsehood. Even you seem to realize that, because you’ve modified the claim to this now:
Here is my question for you: When they published those numbers, did the State of Utah give any additional background / nuance / details that the NYT / WaPo / HuffPo failed to relay to their readers? If they did, who was “lying” and whose fault was it that those additional pieces of background information and details did not make into HuffPo’s chart? The obvious answer to me is: the media.
It’s a damn good thing that this horrible reporting was done by the FAKE NEWS[sup]TM[sup] liberal press and not by a reputable organization such as Fox News or anything, right?
Of course, it would be really embarrassing if the conservative LDS Church News were to repeat these blatant lies.
I’m sure we could all be entertained if I bothered googling even more examples of conservative news sources reporting this story, but you should get the point. The end result is that it shows that WaPo isn’t your boogeyman.
I’ve been following this story for the last several years because I have someone who is personally affected. Utah officials have been pushing this story every chance they could make
What a piss poor attempt to blame “liberal” news for actions by conservatives.
That is the statement in the Utah report immediately above the chart containing the disputed numbers. Note that the chart in the report created by Utah is different than the Huffington Post one in that it presents the number of chronically homeless in bar chart form instead of line. It also includes data claiming the percent of homeless who are chronically so has dropped dramatically.
You can decide for yourself. The data is on page 8 here.
As for your quibble about the source of the chart (which is obviously irrelevant as long as the numbers match the source), the chart posted by WaPo is identical to the one on page 9 here.
Let me get this straight: you went and looked it up, found the chart (well, not the chart, because that one was apparently made by HuffPo, but a chart anyways) posted about it, but couldn’t be bothered to include a link to what you’re talking about? :dubious:
Hmmm, something doesn’t seem right here. I don’t remember voting for any of those people. At least at first glance, they don’t seem to be elected officials at all. I don’t even know if they’re Republicans. Do you?
Would you rate k9bfriender’s claim that the data was compiled by “the republican office holders in utah” / “the people you elected to represent you” to be mostly true, or mostly false?
My quibble wasn’t about a chart posted by WaPo. It was about a chart that k9bfriender claimed was posted by the State of Utah, but it appears that he was wrong about that too. I’ll let you be the judge again. Here’s what he said originally:
What do you think? Accurate, or not?
To the broader point, looking at the 2015 version of the report, I notice notes like this underneath charts on pages 5 and 8:
[QUOTE=The State of Utah]
2013 & 2014 not including Safe Haven; 2005 to 2014 chronic count is annualized; 2015 chronic count was not annualized
[/QUOTE]
At the end of the report, in their “Glossary of Terms”, they include this definition:
Do you think those are significant details being included, or do you think the authors were “lying”?
Here’s what k9bfriender said again:
I’d genuinely like to hear your opinion on this: do you think the state of Utah, and its elected officials in particular, merit these slanderously-broad-brush attacks by k9bfriender?
I ain’t got no stake in the game, but if someone talks about a chart, what comes to mind is the data, not the literal pixels of the image. In this case, the image is different but the data is the same.
An exception would be if one chart was intentionally designed to be deceptive, like the trick of graphing values from 101 to 103 on a Y axis that starts at 100. That wasn’t the case here; the chart was just as “honest” as the original from the 2014 paper. So as far as I’m concerned, it’s the same chart (aside from the fact that the original has a second data set).
When I first saw the chart in the article that you linked, I did think that he chart itself was published by the state of Utah, so I may have been incorrect on that. The chart itself wasn’t, but the numbers that went into making the chart were, so on this extremely minor nitpick, you are correct, your state, (that I am aware of) did not actually draw the lines on the chart from the article in your op, they just put out the numbers that someone else followed to make the chart.
If there ever was a distinction without a difference, I think you just found a great example of one.
You are correct in that the people on that list are not elected representatives. And if they were hired by random people, then you would have a point. But they were not hired by random people, they were hired by your govt, which is elected by you. If one of my employees lies with my knowledge and blessing, then I have lied. I can’t just tell them to lie on my behalf, and claim that I am being honest. Have your politicians fired or otherwise sanctioned their employees for misleading the public? No, then those lies were with their blessing, and by the transitivity property of dishonesty, means that the elected officials lied to their constituents and the rest of the country.
Yes, your elected representatives lied to you when they knowingly allowed these false numbers to be published. It is possible that some of them did not know that they were lies, which means that they were dupes who were not willing to look into the claims of their colleagues and employees, that’s not a whole lot better.
Those details do not make a difference or change anything at all. It does not explain the drop in homelessness at the 2009 to 2010 mark when they changed the way they were counting them, and while it does say that 2015 is not annualized, it does not then mention that that invalidates any changes in the homeless levels. It would have been better to have either annualized it, or to have said “2013 & 2014 not including Safe Haven; 2005 to 2014 chronic count is annualized; 2015 chronic count was not annualized…[Which means that the gains reported in the numbers are only an artifact of the difference in counting, and not an actual reflection of the reality of the situation.]”
You had the head of the program bragging about being called by other states and them asking him how he got the homeless problem down. Did he reply, “Oh, we haven’t actually done anything about the homeless, we just changed the way we count them.”? If he did not, then he lied on your elected representatives behalf.
In the end, your state, with the knowledge and blessing of your elected representatives, put out information they knew to be misleading, and did not correct it even when the rest of the country was applauding their efforts and apparent success. If you don’t want to call that a lie, then you can come up with a new definition for that particular shade of dishonesty. But your attempts at defending the integrity of those you voted for are falling rather flat.
Now, not saying that politicians are always paragons of honesty, but your desire to not even consider the possibility of holding them to account (and in fact are willing to defend them) for deliberately misleading you seems a bit odd for one who wishes to actively participate in this experiment of self governance we call democracy.
Jesus Christ, guys. Utah’s homelessness policy hasn’t worked, or at least not as well as we have been led to believe. Do we really need to care whether their statistics were deliberately deceptive or not? This is the sort of nonsense that clogs up climate change debates.
You seem very eager to condemn elected officials. I think your claims that they did so “deliberately” are again being made without evidence. Moving on from that, I’d love for you to explain “the transitivity property of dishonesty” further. I’ve never heard of it, but it seems like a fucking insane definition of lying that would leave virtually every elected official in the world under condemnation for not being aware of what some underling in some minor department said or wrote. Are you sure that’s the standard you want to adopt?
Again, what in the world makes his lies (granting, for arguments sake, that they were actually lies) “on your elected representatives behalf”? Most bureaucrats try to spin and oversell the benefits of whatever program they’re managing. Let’s assume for a minute that this guy did here. Is he doing so ‘on the behalf of elected officials’? FUCK NO! Bureaucrats do so on their own behalf, to try to protect their jobs, grow their budgets, and win accolades for themselves. It’s the nature of bureaucracy, and Utah isn’t immune to that.
You haven’t supplied any evidence to support your claims of “with the knowledge and blessing of your elected representatives” or “they knew to be misleading”.
Since the Temple is only a few blocks from the Road Home Shelter, I’d be happy w/ a small nuke that took everything out past the LDS business school. It would get rid of a third of the shitty drivers in this state (vans w/ 10 stick people on the rear window but no one wears a seatbelt inside), I have no doubt, w/o having to affect the better University nor the better architecture. Coordinate it w/ Pie and Beer Day, even!
Then the 3X4 block-wide smoking hole where the Temple and its profitable businesses stood can be developed into something that’s good for mankind and less like a hateful mob front.
When an elected official takes credit for the perceived benefit of their policies, when the benefit is just the way that you are cooking the books, then yes, the elected official is responsible for the erroneous statistics.
The transitive property of dishonesty, like I said, is that you cannot have an employee lie on your behalf, and call yourself honest.
Now, it is possible that these people were lying to their bosses as well, in which case, I would expect that when their bosses found out that they were being lied to by their employees about the policies they were supposed to be enacting, then they would have been fired.
Have they been fired?
As you even note in your OP, your state has been lauded over the numbers that they were putting out. If the numbers were slightly impressive, and it showed that you were doing a 5% better job than other states, and it turned out that those numbers were a bit off, no big deal.
But, when you attract national attention, when you have administrators from other states calling you up to ask you what your secret is, then it is dishonest to not look into the numbers to make sure that they are not misleading. To accept those accolades, without looking a bit deeper int the statistics that are giving you these honors is keeping up the deception.
You are correct that I do not know for sure if the reason that your elected officials allowed the rest of the nation to believe that it was doing something beneficial for the homeless problem is due to incompetence or dishonesty. It is entirely possible that your legislature is made up of gibbering morons who never even heard that they were in the national spotlight due to the perception that their program was working well, but I would not consider that a ringing endorsement for them either. The fact that the numbers that they were putting out made the whole country take notice should have had your elected officials taking notice as well, maybe do some digging, to ensure that the people that they hired were being honest with them. That they did not do even this diligence is also something that does not reflect all that well on them.
But what I do have evidence for is that your state put out statistics that the rest of the country said, “Really, that’s amazing! We should look into following your example.”, to which the honest answer of your officials should have been, “No, that’s just an artifact of the way we changed accounting methods.”, rather than bragging about getting all these calls.
Trying to look past your ugly vitriol for a moment longer, can you see that, if we were to apply your “transitive property of dishonesty” then virtually everyone who has ever led any organization of decent size is dishonest?
What, precisely, do you find to be this “ugly vitriol” you have to try to look past? It is criticism, but it’s not cruel or bitter, and nor is it sulfuric acid. Do you consider any sort of criticism of those you support to be “ugly vitriol?”
Anyone who orders or knowingly allows those under them to lie on their behalf, yes, they are dishonest. What is so out there about this idea? Are you thinking that if you tell an employee to lie to a client, then you did not lie yourself?
Now, I will say that I do not believe that everyone who has ever led any organization of decent size has ordered or knowingly allowed people to lie on their behalf. There may be instances where employees lie, but when those lies are discovered and punished, then the organization maintains its honesty. If those lies are published and lauded across the country, then that is not the same thing at all. Have any of the officials that put together the misleading numbers been held to account by your office holders? Maybe they have, and I 'm not seeing it, but I have looked pretty hard to find any sanction whatsoever against the head of the project and the authors of the report, and found nothing. You are more local, so you might have seen news that I did not, if these people were held to account by your elected officials, then I will withdraw my claim that it was your elected officials themselves that perpetuated the lie. They should be fired, but even a verbal chastisement would do. Do you have any example of that?
Presumably, HurricaneDitka wants the process to be legit because that would suggest a good faith effort to remedy homelessness thru government action did not work.
