I can’t speak for the others that you mention, but truthfully the WIC programs were actually fairly well fleshed out and the transitions introduced a lot of much needed changes to make the program more efficient. There were just a lot of moving parts and every state handled things a little differently.
Most of the friction was coming from the fact that the changeover introduced a lot of validation and oversight that customers and retailers were not used to with the older systems.
How the machines work vary depending on the machine and POS setup. There are some that scan the check and ping the associated bank account to perform payment routing in an eCheck format, but the vast majority that I worked with just franked the check (which if you didn’t know is a glorified stamp with the transaction and deposit information for the bank to indicate the check was a part of a retail transaction). With the lower end printer models, you could run a blank piece of paper through it and it wouldn’t know the difference.
I worked in the tech space for grocery during the period where a lot of states were converting from paper WIC checks to an eWIC or SmartWIC setup and jesus is that system just an obtuse mess for everyone involved. It was confusing for customers, it was confusing for employees, and it was confusing for the retailers. It was damn near impossible to support and troubleshoot issues.
I always hate any viral math post for the simple reason that it gives me PTSD flashbacks to my Real Analysis classes.
The blog post is fine, but could definitely be condensed quite a bit across the board and still effectively make the same points would be my only critique.
At it core Mathematics is the language and practices used in order to communicate numbers to one another and it’s always nice to have someone reasonably argue that any ambiguity of communication means that you’re not communicating effectively.
I watched this probably a thousand times as a teenager and I have to admit that…yeah it aged really poorly. Donald Glover and Bobby Moyniham are still entertaining, but without the cultural relevance of the time it’s rough to watch as an adult.
This is how I do it as well. In general, understanding the overall bias of each news organization is more important to keeping yourself informed. You can combat the echo chamber effect by knowing what the biases of each source is and using differing sourcing to try to get as complete a picture as you can.
I would add to your list to check BBC, Al Jazeera, and NPR if you’re US focused.