Xerox "Routine Backup Test" Leave 17 States Without Food Stamps

An anonymous reader writes "People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves temporarily unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday, after a routine test of backup systems by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure. Xerox announced late in the evening that access has been restored for users in the 17 states affected by the outage, hours after the first problems were reported. 'Restarting the EBT system required time to ensure service was back at full functionality,' spokeswoman Jennifer Wasmer said in an email. An emergency voucher process was available in some of the areas while the problems were occurring, she said. U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Courtney Rowe underscored that the outage was not related to the government shutdown."

Re:GET A JOB YA BUMS

[Anonymous Coward]

There Are 3 Unemployed People Competing For Every Job Opening [huffingtonpost.com]

Re:Fail-safe

[dwhitaker]

One of the news articles mentioned that merchants were supposed to record transactions manually and allow purchases up to $50. Not ideal, and not the same as allowing all purchases, but it is a provision of the system that is supposed to ensure people aren't deprived food and necessities during a short outage. Now, whether retailers actually followed protocol is an entirely different matter (and one that does have implications for the way the system is run).

Re:Senator Obama on raising the debt ceiling

[Ksevio]

However, when Obama was a senator, the administration had turned a budget surplus into a budget deficit. That was the result of reckless spending on tax cuts and wars.

That contrasts with the current administration which was given a large deficit to start with (made worse by declining tax revenues due to the recession) that has cut government spending.

Re:GET A JOB YA BUMS

[dkleinsc]

But is this a measure of people competing for jobs in good faith, or is it merely the number of people unemployed divided by the number of jobs? From TFA, I see it's the latter.

1. To be counted as unemployed, you must be actively looking for a job. If you aren't, you are officially a "discouraged worker" and removed from the unemployment rolls. So, for example, if your sister hasn't worked since 1995, an hasn't even been trying to get a job, she isn't one of those 3 people trying to fill a single opening.

2. Even if, say, 1/3 of people who are counted as unemployed are really bums trying to mooch off the government, that still means that half of the people legitimately looking for work are coming up empty.

It was even worse a few years ago, when the ration was more like 5 unemployed people to 1 job. In that situation, you could be demonstrably good at your profession, and still not be hired because they could get the best-of-the-best for a pittance in that economy.

Nobody paid those rates, dumbass

[acoustix]

Yes, the top rate was 90%. BUT NOBODY PAID 90%!!! There were all sorts of write offs, loop holes, etc and people paid close to what we paid today.