Tuesday, October 18, 2016

CPS gets too much money

Robert Franklin of the National Parents Organization does a lot of good work, but I cannot agree with this:
The latest scandal out of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services had barely been made public last week, when the top echelons of state government swung into action. ...
Gov. Greg Abbott and other state leaders ordered the Department of Family and Protective Services Wednesday to ramp up efforts to protect endangered foster children and curb the backlog of ones waiting for homes.

Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus released a joint letter to department Commissioner Hank Whitman directing him to immediately develop a plan to hire and train more special investigators to take up the backlog of at-risk kids who have not had a face-to-face interaction with Child Protective Services. ...
In short, Abbott, Patrick, et al are trying to look tough on the issue of child safety while doggedly refusing to do the one thing that’s unquestionably required to do a better job of protecting children at risk – pay caseworkers more.
No, paying caseworkers more will not help.

I don't know about Texas, but California CPS (child protective services) workers are extremely well paid. They have 6-figure salaries, and seem to have a lot of excess time on their hands. The more they make, the worse job they do.

No, a much better approach would be to keep cutting CPS funding until they focus only on what is necessary.

Wednesday, October 05, 2016

Google demands that I correct a violation

Google just emailed me this notice:
Hello,
This is a warning message to alert you that there is action required to bring your AdSense account into compliance with our AdSense program policies. We’ve provided additional details below, along with the actions to be taken on your part.

Affected website: angry-dad.com

Example page where violation occurred: http://blog.angry-dad.com/2015/02/choosing-moms-sex-on-birth-cert.html

Action required: Please make changes immediately to your site to follow AdSense program policies.

Current account status: Active

Violation explanation

As stated in our program policies, sites displaying Google ads should provide substantial and useful information to the user. Users should be able to easily navigate through the site to find what products, goods, or services are promised. Examples of misguided navigation include, but are not limited to:

False claims of downloadable or streaming content
Linking to content that does not exist
Redirecting users to irrelevant and/or misleading webpages
Text on a page unrelated to the topic and/or business model of the website.
For more information, please review Google’s Webmaster quality guidelines and the AdSense program policies.

How to resolve:
If you received a notification in regard to page content, we request that you immediately remove Google ads from the violating pages. If you are unable to, or unsure of how to remove the ads from these pages, or would like to continue monetizing the page with Google ads, please modify or remove the violating content to meet our AdSense policies.

If you received a notification in regards to the way ads are implemented on your site, please make the necessary changes to your implementation.
You do not need to contact us if you make changes. Please be aware that if additional violations are accrued, ad serving may be disabled to the website listed above. You should immediately take time to review your pages with Google ads to ensure that they comply with our policies.

Additionally, please be aware that the URL above is just an example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of this website or other sites that you own. To reduce the likelihood of future warnings from us, we suggest that you review all your sites for compliance. Here are some useful resources you might be interested in.

AdSense policy FAQs
Using site: search to find violations
Recommended solutions for policing your content
Content filtering
For more information regarding our policy warning notifications, visit our Help Center.

We thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team
What is going on here? Can anyone help me out?

What could Google possibly have against this web site or that particular web page?

Just what am I violating?

I have no idea whether this is a mistake, or if I can committed some sort of micro-aggression that offends Google, or what.