[HN Gopher] Be critical or be corrupted
___________________________________________________________________
Be critical or be corrupted
Author : kiyanwang
Score : 201 points
Date : 2022-09-23 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cenizal.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cenizal.com)
| deathanatos wrote:
| One of the ... things ... that the article gets towards is that
| there is "make customer's problem disappear" and "fix the root
| cause/bug". And so many companies fail to make the distinction.
|
| E.g., Azure: there's customer support, but they _only_ do the
| "make customer's problem (or really, the ticket) disappear" side
| of it. Woe be unto you should your problem be caused by a bug in
| Azure: _they have no means of dealing with that._ Eventually the
| ticket dies -- usually because my patience has limits -- and I am
| sure they count that as a "win". Ticket closed, after all ...
| even if my problem is no longer a problem b/c I've just abandoned
| ship.
|
| And the amount of software/stuff out there with no means to
| report bugs/defects is rather astounding.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For excellent insights into the use, misuse, and gaming of
| statistics, from the source, I'd strongly recommend David Simon's
| lecture "The Audacity of Despair", presented at UC Berkeley on 10
| December 2008. It's long at 70 minutes, but quite solid.
|
| I'd seen this several years _before_ watching the series, and it
| was this lecture specifically which sold it to me.
|
| <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw>
|
| The bit on statistics starts at about 8m20s.
|
| Nutshell: _If you want to find out where the dirt is done, parse
| some statistics.... I learned as a reporter to start despising
| statistics and to regard anything that was ever cited to me in
| advance of an argument as dubious just because somebody was
| pulling it out and using it. I was that cynical about it. As I
| got better as a reporter I realised that as soon as any of our
| institutions create a means of measuring how things are going in
| terms of quality, someone will run behind them within the
| institution to destroy that statistic as a meaningful measurement
| of anything._
|
| There's exposition around this both ahead and after, and again,
| there's a ton of meat in this talk.
| bergenty wrote:
| I was looking for a solution to the problem posed but found none.
| inquist wrote:
| Strive to clarify fundamental goals.
|
| Consider possible second-order effects of policy decisions.
|
| Reevaluate intermediate goals after observing their effects.
| kashkhan wrote:
| The system of employment is the problem. Drug dealers and
| police are employees and they cannot win. While the system has
| power employees have none.
|
| Mike, Bubbles, Bunny, Omar, Hauk, etc are not employees or get
| out and they win or at least get out to live their own lives as
| they want.
|
| Independent Entrepreneurship is the only way out. It may not
| work, but you have a chance,
| lupire wrote:
| Bubbles is a desperate addict. Omar is dead before 40 and was
| hiding his sexuality.
|
| These are not successful lives.
| kashkhan wrote:
| Everyone dies. Better to live free and die young then have
| a long life as a slave.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| All addicts are slaves. Don't glorify it.
| kashkhan wrote:
| better an addict than a slave to another man.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| I assure you, it is better to be a housed and healthy
| 'wage slave' than a homeless heroin addict.
| woodruffw wrote:
| There are many valid interpretations of The Wire's themes,
| but I dare to suggest that "hustle grindset" is not one of
| them.
| kashkhan wrote:
| Its not hustle grindset. Its be out and do what you want.
|
| Wage slaves usually work harder to survive. You could go
| out and live in a van and not hustle at all.
| woodruffw wrote:
| These are your views, which are not particularly
| reflected in the show: Bubbles spends most of the 4th
| season being brutalized because he's "too" independent.
| Hauk is tossed around by political winds, while his
| friend Carter advances while doing _good police work_ in
| the context of a larger department. Omar, as another
| commenter point out, just dies. Bunny is spiked and left
| out to dry by the bosses, and is mostly characterized by
| his own nihilism in the 3rd and 4th seasons.
|
| Not all survive, and those that do do not particularly
| thrive.
| kashkhan wrote:
| like i said, there is only a chance on the outside.
| inside there is no chance, but most people are happier on
| inside and too afraid to leave.
| robocat wrote:
| > Independent Entrepreneurship is the only way out
|
| Entrepreneurs are systematic slaves too - that is one point
| of The Wire.
|
| Everyone is embedded in a society, a system, and our choices
| take us down paths that control the rulesets that apply to
| us. You can escape certain rules, but you get other rules in
| exchange (in my experience).
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Herc is not a character to be emulated. He is a brutal and
| vicious officer when he is a cop and when he gets out he does
| private security for an organization that causes ever more
| harm to society.
| kashkhan wrote:
| He goes to a better job. Terrible person, but successful
| employee.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I'm really not sure that is worth looking at positively.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| It's an analysis and I find the comparison with The Wire quite
| interesting. There is no rule or law requiring a solution to be
| proposed with every analysis of a complex problem.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "There is no rule or law requiring a solution to be proposed
| with every analysis of a complex problem."
|
| Exactly. I much prefer a good analysis without a proposed
| solution.
| cjcenizal wrote:
| Hi, author here! I wish I had a solution to this problem! The
| idealistic side of me wants everyone to "think critically". Of
| course if all humans were critical about the decisions they
| made and their effects on the systems around them
| (organizations, society, environment), we probably wouldn't
| have wars and global warming.
|
| So that won't scale beyond the individual, which might be
| acceptable from a Stoic perspective but I doubt that's the
| solution you're looking for.
|
| Oren Ellenborgen shared my post in today's edition of Software
| Lead Weekly [1], and in his summary of the post he suggests
| using Key Failure Indicators (KFIs) to counterbalance Key
| Performance Indicators (KPIs). From what I understand, the idea
| is that you observe metrics of success but you also observe
| metrics of health, and take action if the former starts
| degrading the latter.
|
| For example, if you want to deliver features more quickly, you
| might measure the time between a change is submitted for review
| and the time it's deployed. But if you're concerned that this
| could degrade quality, you could also measure the number of
| defects that are identified. If defects increase as delivery
| time decreases, this indicates the success metric is causing
| some undesirable behavior. Hope this helps.
|
| [1] https://softwareleadweekly.com/issues/513
| dredmorbius wrote:
| You might care to listen to David Simon's own take on
| statistics and measurement:
|
| <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw>
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Believe in the false dilemma or else?
| draw_down wrote:
| mdip wrote:
| OH how I can relate to the sentiment expressed in "Rise of the
| Rotation".
|
| On the surface it sounds perfectly reasonable. As the author
| explains, it's falls apart quickly. There's still going to be
| people that will make the argument that, given the author's
| specific example, that "it gives everyone a more complete
| understanding of the product to work that way". It's wrong (I'll
| elaborate if required). But I can hear it.
|
| This affected me in a way, though, that is even _more_
| unreasonable -- "The Wire" rotation example, it'd be like ... I
| don't know ... having the person who designed the guns the
| department uses participate in the "murder investigation
| rotation".
|
| Due to a company acquisition, I found myself kludged into an
| Architecture Engineering team ... I was/am a developer. This
| happened because Infrastructure[0] didn't want to lose their
| developer (me[1]) and my role at this place over 17 years had
| expanded to the point that I fit on any team and no team. I
| gathered I was put in Arch due to my elevated title (and a
| misplaced concern of insulting me) and because that specific team
| because it had "unix guys"[2], they often know how to write shell
| scripts, which are kind of ... oh, and this other guy is a
| developer in Ops, too -- completely different
| language/framework/tech -- but ... it quacks like a duck?
|
| They had a two-week on-call rotation between 5 (now 7) men. I
| managed to hold off being worked into it for half a year using
| the same argument: "I support write software in .NET for Windows,
| your legacy team supports software on Unix/Linux. I expect to be
| woke up at 3:00 AM if anything of mine fails, all the time and
| nobody on your team is qualified to log into the box let alone
| troubleshoot it ... and vice versa".
|
| The first few days of my first on-call rotation consisted of
| being woken up at 2:00 AM for some server-or-another, me finding
| someone capable of resolving it, then finding their off-hours
| contact info, and about 20 minutes later apologizing to them,
| repeating what I was just told and going back to sleep. My
| toddler (at the time) could have done that part of my job. I
| repeated my difficulties in "actually being useful on-call" to my
| manager during that week at our 1:1 (to which I was brushed off,
| again), but included my difficulties in "finding people to call"
| ... he must have thought he found an easy win, there, because he
| nearly cut me off half-way through with a "Just call my cell if
| you run into trouble with that." So my _new_ on-call work flow
| became: (1) Wake up at 2:00 AM to a ringing phone, (2) Write down
| the ticket number, (3) wake up my boss to find out who to call,
| (4) thank him, finishing the call off with "He's more likely to
| answer if you call, would you mind relaying the ticket number to
| him for me?" It reduced my TTRTB (Time-to-return-to-bed) from
| 10-15 minutes to far less than 5.
|
| That insanity was the biggest factor in why I left but _not_
| because of the apologizing /dislike of it all. My boss knew he
| was operating in a tricky spot. If his boss knew I was even
| slightly unhappy with being on-call, I'd be taken out and he'd
| have taken grief. His options were (a) explain to the rest of the
| team that "this guy and this other guy don't do anything
| resembling your work so rather than add them as one more delay to
| waking you up (or worse, breaking something), they're going to
| manage on-call for their own apps amongst themselves and not be
| part of our on-call" or (b) continue to accept calls from me at
| 2:00 AM reminding him of how dumb it was to put me on call. He
| chose the latter. And as I evaluated their (much larger than the
| company I had come from in the merger) IT operation, I saw a
| pattern of "because that's how we have always done it" and
| similarly ridiculous -- astronomically expensive at times --
| operational choices. That culture was pervasive throughout IT
| because the merged company had far more people (2:1?) that made
| up the new organization because -- despite the companies having
| similar IT services/quality -- we operated better ... with far
| fewer people.
|
| [0] We basically had Infrastructure/Architecture and Development.
| Technically Infra/Arch were two distinct VPs reporting to
| whatever the title was of the interim person considered "the
| C-Level over IT" during those months of the integration.
|
| [1] And I wanted _nothing_ to do with "Enterprise Development"
| at this place.
|
| [2] I wrote nothing that ran directly on Linux/Unix at that time.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > The department measures crime in terms of felonies, so they
| show a reduction in crime by reclassifying felonies as
| misdemeanors, thus letting violent criminals off the hook.
|
| This threw me for a loop.
|
| I asked a contact on the PD of a neighboring town some years back
| how Naperville, IL is consistently the lowest general crime rate
| and "Safest Town in America", and this was the answer.
|
| Having lived there and heard the stories about police
| interactions with victims, I believe it.
| civilized wrote:
| Okay article, but lacking depth, especially in the
| recommendations of what we can do.
|
| > We can carefully design our metrics and think critically about
| the behaviors we expect them to incentivize
|
| In The Wire, the metrics _are_ carefully designed. Homicide
| clearance rate is a great, practical metric. _Everyone_ is
| thinking, _very_ critically, about the behaviors they expect the
| metrics to incentivize.
|
| > We can extend self-awareness and critical thinking to all
| decisions made within an organization.
|
| In The Wire, everyone is _very_ self-aware and thinking _very_
| critically about the decisions made within the organization.
|
| > We can look beyond metrics by qualifying success and failure.
|
| In The Wire, _everyone_ is looking beyond the metrics.
|
| The problem with the BPD in The Wire isn't a lack self-awareness
| and critical thinking. It's that so many people are using their
| self-awareness and critical thinking to maximize their self-
| interest rather than the mission of the organization.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Corruption is within all power structures without exception... It
| is often not a character trait as many wrongly assume.
|
| In general, compartmentalizing a few clear limited-scope areas
| for each team member is an effective management task. In this
| manner, there is direct accountability when something goes wrong,
| and a user-base focuses attention on a flaw... a growing number
| of regression tests helps some do their job properly... rather
| than sidetrack the rest of the team.
|
| This can be brutal to laggards getting hazed, but a blessing to
| senior staff now avoiding spending half the day reverting
| garbage. ;)
| woodruffw wrote:
| This is a good summary of a _specific_ motif in The Wire, but I
| think it misses the larger message of the show: that there is no
| _institutional_ or even _individual_ difference between the two
| recurring groups in the show (Baltimore 's police and drug
| dealers).
|
| In the show, both groups of individuals are subject to their
| institutions: power figures come and go (and bring changes that
| superficially alter the state of affairs), but the game
| fundamentally remains the same. This repeats itself in every
| explored institution: industry, schools, news, &c.
|
| In other words: there is no avoiding "corruption," only moving it
| around. The show's few "good" characters are characterized
| primarily by the ways in which their _personal_ corruption does
| or does not affect the corruption of the larger institution they
| belong to (Daniels ' FBI investigation, for example, or Kima's
| personal descent.)
| pphysch wrote:
| > there is no avoiding "corruption," only moving it around.
|
| American culture, and to a lesser extent Western culture in
| general, encourages this kind of corruption. If your culture
| elevates individualism and freedom above social responsibility
| and harmony, then your institutions will be systemically
| corrupted by selfish individuals.
|
| So yes, _given a culture that prioritizes individualism above
| all_ , corruption is unavoidable.
|
| In other news, a former CCP top government minister was just
| sentenced to death for corruption. Incentives at work.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| Except that those individualistic countries in the west have
| some of the lowest rates of corruption and lowest perceptions
| of corruption in the world. The supposedly less
| individualistic countries of the east lag behind, including
| China.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
|
| The Asian countries that _do_ match the west for low levels
| of corruption (Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore)
| largely have a very obvious trait in common - wealth. The
| least corrupt countries are all among the world 's
| wealthiest, and the most corrupt all among its poorest -
| regardless of how "individualistic" the country is.
|
| The poorer a country is the more necessary are the advantages
| to be gained by gaming the system. The weaker a country's
| institutions the easier it is to get away with corruption -
| hence the worst offenders being failed states like Syria and
| Lybia. It's honestly fairly simple even without considering
| culture.
|
| If anything a more collective society is _more_ susceptible
| to corruption (and I say this as proponent of big
| government). The reason China hands out death sentences for
| corruption is that an individual at the top of the
| governmental organisations in China can do an _enormous_
| amount of damage since the government directly controls the
| apparatus of the economy and has a huge stake in every major
| company. No governmental official in the west has as much
| control over the societal purse as a high ranking official of
| the CCP.
| somenameforme wrote:
| It's a _perceptions_ index, carried out by a Western
| organization, polling almost exclusively other Western
| organizations, that deemed Western nations are just
| awesome. I am not suggesting that e.g. China is not corrupt
| (nor that Denmark is not awesome), but I am suggesting that
| it 's as objective as poll of Eastern organizations on the
| same question - which is to say, not at all.
|
| The unfortunate thing is that corruption is in many cases
| all but impossible to prove or quantify. And in some cases
| there is a mixture of corruption and genuine interest. As
| one example a war that furthers national interests, but
| also ensures rich rewards for companies of which you will
| receive returns from (indirect or otherwise) ends up in a
| balancing act of trying to measure immeasurables -
| perceived self interest vs perceived national interested.
| pphysch wrote:
| Those Western "Corruption" ratings are deeply unserious.
| Washington is totally, systemically corrupt. Lobbying,
| insider trading, and the revolving door are all corrupt
| practices that practically _define_ the Beltway.
|
| Try winning even a local government seat without being
| buddy-buddy with local "employers", media, and other
| unofficial power brokers. That's not democracy.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| The fact that your prime examples of corruption in the
| west is Washington corruption and corruption in local
| government indicates you don't have a grasp of what truly
| endemic corruption is like in developing countries.
|
| - Do you have to personally slip a DMV official several
| times the actual required fee whenever you get your
| license renewed to get them to even look at the
| application?
|
| - Do you have to directly bribe police officers to get
| them to respond to your complaint? If you were pulled
| over for a traffic offence would your assumed way out of
| it be to personally slip something to the police officer?
|
| - Do truckers have to routinely bribe state officials
| when crossing state lines?
|
| - Do local officials routinely illegally procure land via
| the government purse for their own personal use?
|
| - Are government officials ever bribed to declare someone
| dead to allow someone to erroneously claim the totally-
| not-dead person's property?
|
| These are all pretty much regular occurrences in India -
| a country that is basically _middling_ in terms of
| corruption on a global scale. And don 't worry, they have
| all of the high level local and national legislative
| corruption that the US has as well, with the bonus of a
| civil service and judiciary that are corrupt from the top
| down to their roots.
|
| Outside the west corruption isn't just government
| officials making bad choices to satisfy their doners and
| special interests (as bad and dysfunctional as that is).
| In most developing countries it's a fact of day-to-day
| life - if you are on the lower rungs of the social ladder
| _you have to personally engage in corruption in order to
| survive_. Getting a home, a business licence,
| governmental documentation etc etc pretty much always
| come down to either who you know or who you bribe. And if
| you 're higher up you might be lucky enough to benefit
| from it.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I'm dual citizen Brazilian / American, so I understand
| what you mean about endemic corruption. That said, I
| think the GP has a point that there is a more subtle
| higher-level corruption of leadership that is potentially
| even more damaging over the long term. This form of
| corruption gets papered over and obfuscated precisely
| because the beneficiaries are few, rich, and well-trained
| in politics and PR.
| andrepd wrote:
| Absolutely spot on. What is the consequence of the fact
| that in the US there is virtually no correlation between
| the opinions of the bottom 80% poorer citizens about a
| given bill, and the likelihood that bill is adopted?
| While the correlation for the 0.1% wealthier is nearly
| perfect? Is it less harmful than having to slip a tenner
| to low-level officials.
| noasaservice wrote:
| - Do you have to personally slip a DMV official several
| times the actual required fee whenever you get your
| license renewed to get them to even look at the
| application?
|
| No, but rich companies can use "We are a job creator" to
| get permission to ignore taxes for terms that are
| effectively "indefinitely". We all end up paying more for
| the top-end bribes. You just don't see it.
|
| - Do you have to directly bribe police officers to get
| them to respond to your complaint? If you were pulled
| over for a traffic offence would your assumed way out of
| it be to personally slip something to the police officer?
|
| If you don't have property of any serious concern, the
| police do not care. Nor are they required to fill out a
| police report. What ends up happening are the middle and
| upper classes with houses get the respect (no bribes),
| and the lower monetary classes get laughed at.
|
| - Do truckers have to routinely bribe state officials
| when crossing state lines?
|
| - Do local officials routinely illegally procure land via
| the government purse for their own personal use?
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2021/10/
| 25/...
|
| So yeah, it's called Asset Forfeiture, and is how you get
| abuses like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v
| ._$124,700_in_U...
|
| Why need bribes when cops legalized blatant theft?
| pphysch wrote:
| It's an interesting phenomenon: the dwindling middle
| class in the West frowns upon corruption even as it is
| the lifeblood of the ruling classes.
|
| Who do I gotta donate to? Which ZIP code do I gotta live
| in? Which special "membership plan"/recurring bribe do I
| have to pay to get access to decent social services?
|
| America in particular has institutionalized corruption so
| that it no longer resembles the bespoke form practiced in
| developing countries. Media portrayals plays a big role
| in this. After all, what is corruption but allowing
| market forces to rule over human rights, justice, and
| essential public services?
| twblalock wrote:
| Living in a certain zip code is not corruption, and
| Americans don't need to bribe social services, or the
| police, to get on with their daily lives without being
| molested. There are many countries where that is not the
| case.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| I saw it described as:
|
| The West is corrupt, but in a different way. Politician
| can be bought for certain projects, people who control
| the flow of money can be encouraged to let it flow more
| one way than the other, etc. But trying to bribe a
| policeman can land you in serious trouble. It's better to
| pay a $50 fine than try to bribe them with $30 off the
| books. In other words, in Western society, middle-class
| corruption is perhaps not really worth it (on average).
| The stakes have to be much higher than that.
|
| Developing countries have more widespread corruption, in
| that it is part of everyday life. If you want your
| passport renewed, you have to bribe the clerk, otherwise
| it will take 1 year. If a policeman stops you, they may
| well be looking for a bribe and you can make things go
| much more smoothly by acquiescing.
|
| I'd argue that low-level corruption is more immediately
| annoying to everyday life, but it is the high level
| corruption that is the real pervasive worldwide issue. In
| the same way that pickpockets are annoying, but a single
| corrupt government can plunder the public finances and
| run the country into ruin.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Hah! Rich people outright buying political influence at
| the federal level and lower, setting the agenda of the
| whole nation: not bribery. No: having to bribe policemen
| and petty officials is _true_ corruption...
| Aunche wrote:
| It's easy to believe that rich people "outright buy
| political influence" when you only pay attention to
| examples of when they happen to get what they want, and
| don't care about the examples of when they don't:
|
| - Bloomberg spent almost $1 billion dollars in his
| presidential campaign and barely got any delegates
|
| - Google constantly gets blocked from rolling out Google
| Fiber, despite being richer than all the telecom
| companies combined
|
| - Facebook really wants to outsource moderation decision
| making, so they can point their finger at something when
| it comes to unpopular moderation decisions. To do so,
| they created an independent oversight board that cost
| them $130 million, which is more than their total
| spending on lobbying. If they could outright buy
| political influence, they would have Congress make rules
| instead, which would not only give them more distance,
| but would have the added benefit (for Facebook) of
| creating regulatory capture.
|
| - Abortion rights got rolled back despite being
| overwhelmingly championed by billionaires. For example,
| Warren Buffet has donated over $1 billion to pro-choice
| charities, and Mackenzie Bezos has donated $300 million.
|
| Of course, there are plenty of examples of large-scale
| outright corruption in American politics, but you're
| naive if you believe that it would be any better than in
| countries where you can bribe police officers.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| It's easy, just redefine terms so that the same
| activities can be legally/socially classifiable as
| lobbying rather than corruption and the problem is solved
| - Voila, no corruption!
| themitigating wrote:
| Yes, you're right and if you'd like to change that vote
| for the people that will make it illegal
| themitigating wrote:
| Winning requires money which is considered free speech.
| andrepd wrote:
| > The Asian countries that do match the west for low levels
| of corruption (Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore)
| largely have a very obvious trait in common - wealth.
|
| Okay, then an honest comparison would be wealthy
| "individualist" countries vs wealthy "collectivist"
| countries (not that that distinction is quite meaningful,
| but still). Poor countries have higher corruption that rich
| countries, that much is obvious and not very interesting.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> If your culture elevates individualism and freedom above
| social responsibility and harmony, then your institutions
| will be systemically corrupted by selfish individuals._
|
| While I don't disagree with your general comment, I would
| point out that the words you are using can be interpreted
| multiple ways. For example:
|
| "Individualism and freedom" does not have to mean
| shortsighted individualism and freedom. Any thinking person
| should realize that social cooperation and wealth creation
| through specialization and trade is in their individual,
| "selfish" interest. And that being the case, any thinking
| person should realize that "individualism and freedom" must
| include supporting and preserving social institutions that
| facilitate social cooperation and wealth creation through
| specialization and trade. That is what "Western culture" is
| supposed to be about, and the fact that many Western cultures
| don't do a good job at this doesn't mean "individualism and
| freedom" are bad; it means that many Western cultures have
| forgotten what "individualism and freedom" is actually
| supposed to mean.
|
| Conversely, "social responsibility and harmony" does not have
| to mean preserving social institutions that facilitate social
| cooperation and wealth creation through specialization and
| trade. The Soviet Union's leaders and official media outlets
| like Pravda were constantly talking about "social
| responsibility and harmony", but what they meant by that was
| absolute obedience to the Party and its leaders, even as
| those leaders killed millions of their own people and sent
| millions more to gulags. Similar remarks could be made about
| the present government of China; yes, they _claimed_ that
| they executed a former top minister for "corruption", but
| given their history, what that actually means is that this
| former top minister was purged for reasons which most likely
| had nothing at all to do with actual corruption in the sense
| we use the term.
| projectazorian wrote:
| > In other news, a former CCP top government minister was
| just sentenced to death for corruption. Incentives at work.
|
| This doesn't mean much. Selective enforcement of anti-
| corruption rules is a common method for national elites to
| eliminate potential rivals. It's especially common in regimes
| with pliable judicial systems.
| themitigating wrote:
| That death sentence shows me that China cares about stopping
| corruption. When was the last time an elected official in the
| US was severely punished.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Well, I don't think the intended message of The Wire is
| "adopt the CCP's anti-corruption measures." That's
| editorialization on our part as viewers.
|
| I also don't think the show has a particularly anti-
| individual message: individual police officers and drug
| dealers are repeatedly shown as struggling within a
| _collectively_ dysfunctional system, and individual members
| of each group are shown as themselves corrupt while being
| _protected_ by the collective. The show is more nihilistic
| than proscriptive, other than the small handful of
| "successes" that occur (like Hamsterdam).
| pphysch wrote:
| _The Wire_ is radical, but not quite radical to the point
| of openly questioning the foundations of modern American
| culture. That would be crazy in ~2002.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Right. The show is even conservative, by some measures:
| the police are generally shown deference by the show's
| writers (even when individual cops are openly
| characterized negatively).
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> In other news, a former CCP top government minister was
| just sentenced to death for corruption_
|
| Maybe it's a cynical view, but I wouldn't be surprised if
| anticorruption laws were used to get rid of someone for other
| reasons, especially by corrupt people.
| pphysch wrote:
| That's certainly possible -- lawfare definitely happens in
| the West (Russiagate, anti-Corbynism and Lava Jato come to
| mind).
|
| But if it was simply about political maneuvering, death
| penalties are wasteful and severe. So that suggests that
| there is more to it.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| And because it was the CCP, we'll never know if that news is
| state propaganda or truth... .
|
| He might have just been the honest fall guy who promoted too
| much social harmony to the detriment of his superiors
| lifestyles
| behaveEc0n00 wrote:
| The US relies on private propaganda to normalize attitudes
| to its goals. Given how chummy politicians and
| "journalists" and corporate owners are off camera it's
| laughable to think there is a real separation of power.
|
| Our biology evolved for thousands of years before language
| was invented. To suggest our language influences our
| biology is nonsensical. Our biology influences language.
| Propaganda is all about setting a biological mood not
| embedding a specific chant. Media had been stoking the
| right moods until the internet enabled an unfiltered
| emotional meta-mind.
|
| They intentionally wrap news in titillating music and
| graphics. It's all research based effort in the fields of
| behavioral economics, public relations, etc.
|
| An educated minority are leveraging that education against
| the majority to optimize for themselves. "Because that's
| the history of our society!"
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| For a time, propagandizing US citizens became illegal.
|
| We lost that in the Obama administration. Not that it
| would have mattered....
|
| Language does certainly influence biology and vice versa.
|
| I agree we are living in precarious times and there's no
| benefit to promoting an equally opaque system built for
| an elite class
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > American culture, and to a lesser extent Western culture in
| general, encourages this kind of corruption. If your culture
| elevates individualism and freedom above social
| responsibility and harmony, then your institutions will be
| systemically corrupted by selfish individuals.
|
| Which culture are you suggesting does not get systematically
| corrupted by selfish individuals?
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| American culture is much less corrupt when compared to the
| rest of the real world, instead of being compared to a
| hypothetical corruption-free world.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| You gonna back that up? The "rest of the world" contains
| various European, Asian and even a neighboring North
| American country with plenty of readers who would be
| delighted to see your evidence
| fragmede wrote:
| https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021/index/usa
|
| 27th isn't too bad!
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| It's my opinion based on my personal experience in
| various countries around the world.
|
| There's plenty of corruption in Europe, Asia and
| Mexico/Canada.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > American culture is much less corrupt when compared to
| the rest of the real world,
|
| Does this mean that it's the least corrupt place in the
| world?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Western culture is not built _only_ on individualism and
| freedom, it 's also built on Judeo-Christian morality. The
| Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments.
|
| _We have no government armed with power capable of
| contending with human passions unbridled by morality and
| religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break
| the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes
| through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral
| and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other._
| -- John Adams
|
| Our culture is predicated on _not_ elevating individualism
| and freedom above responsibility. They go hand-in-hand. When
| morality becomes relative, and "whatever feels good" is the
| standard of acceptable behavior, you see the sort of social
| decay that is happening all around us.
| pphysch wrote:
| American culture has transformed over the centuries, but
| the most recent dominant form is hyperindividualist. Ayn
| Rand over Jesus Christ.
|
| Just look at our most recent leaders -- a couple of highly
| corrupt guys with no serious religious conviction.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| CCP China is your example of an uncorrupt culture?
|
| From my personal experience in China I can tell you that it's
| standard practice to hand paper bags full of cash to
| government officials (and CCP members) in order to get
| government contracts.
|
| Xi targeting his political rivals with "corruption" charges
| hasn't changed this culture.
| AyyWS wrote:
| My family member who runs a company in China avoids bribes
| by pretending to be a dumb American.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Is that why all the local governments are collapsing under
| their off the books debts?
| canes123456 wrote:
| I doubt there less corruption in the CCP than in the US.
| Corruption is an easy justification to arrest or kill anyone
| in China.
|
| Also, corruption is absurdly high in Venezuela since they
| moved away from individualism and toward collectivism.
| floxy wrote:
| Isn't the morally ambiguous protagonist _the_ American TV
| /movie trope?
| woodruffw wrote:
| It is indeed: American audiences _love_ characters that are
| basically just conduits for "does the ends justify the
| means"-type plots.
|
| I think The Wire is a bit better than that, though: the moral
| ambiguity in The Wire seldom boils down to justifying the
| means: plenty of characters are _just bad_ in an individual
| capacity while doing good in their professional capacity, or
| vice versa.
|
| The Omar character is probably the most straightforward in
| terms of the trope, but even he does not act for the sake of
| the ends: he does it because it's all he knows.
| Upgrayyed_U wrote:
| Sure, it is now, but was that the case 20+ years ago when The
| Wire first aired?
| floxy wrote:
| Han shot first. Also, like every movie starring Clint
| Eastwood?
| woodruffw wrote:
| I think it's become more common, but the subgenre of
| "surveillance" media has always had elements of this.
| Compare The Conversation (1974)[1], for example.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation
| jonnybgood wrote:
| I think the exception is Omar. I don't see Omar as corrupt. I
| think many people see him as one of the "good" ones, relatively
| speaking. He didn't move around what he was and what he was
| about. He stayed completely true to it. He didn't have a larger
| institution as you say. He was his own institution.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| And yet, after his death he is replaced.
| treis wrote:
| Who replaces Omar?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Michael. He is robbing dealers in the last episode.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| In the last episode, doesn't Bubbles see a couple of the
| kids from the highschool going to buy drugs and
| recognizes a younger version of himself and his friend
| from the 1st season? That whole episode was about the
| cycle of drugs, violence and poverty repeating itself.
| Floegipoky wrote:
| And his killer is a young child, a replacement for the
| previously exploited child-murderer (who was killed by
| Michael).
| kahrl wrote:
| Omar comin.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The Cheese stands alone.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Omar doesn't fit as easily into the mold, but you can see
| ways in which his amoral characterization establish his roles
| in the criminal and LEO institutions: he's an opportunist,
| stealing from those who can't go to the police to report
| crime.
|
| He's his own institution, but he isn't above his own drives
| for vengeance and thrill: later seasons characterize him as
| depressed by his own infamy, driving him to seek out new
| criminal targets to keep the heat up.
| pelasaco wrote:
| the article has no meat, so empty, that we prefer to focus in
| "The Wire" :)
| d23 wrote:
| Man, I need to give the wire another shot.
| jwlake wrote:
| The first season is slow but it really picks up.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I don't see how anyone could watch the opening scene of The
| Wire and not be compelled to watch the rest of it.
| lupire wrote:
| The show is extremely dangerous to mental health, if you
| care about living in a good world and can't handle the
| impossibility of it.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Simon's previous TV show, and his book, revolved around
| the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. I feel like
| that was already enough to squash hopes of living in a
| good world.
| lostlogin wrote:
| There is some excellent comedy in it too though. Dark for
| sure, but very funny.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Nigga, is you taking notes on a motherfucking _criminal
| conspiracy_?
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| I love that scene, it's such a great example of cargo-
| culting.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| It really is a stunning scene. As a big fan, I do wish
| they cut out a little of McNulty's repetition to the
| audience so they understand the slang but the final
| button on the scene is just so good it is impossible to
| really complain.
| lostlogin wrote:
| The re-release has upped the quality. I'm not American and
| struggled with the accents for a few episodes, but it's
| absolutely the best show I've ever watched.
| JackFr wrote:
| Funny - the first time I tried it didn't catch. Felt 'meh'
| after 1.5 episodes. Then went back and tried again and have
| watched the entire run twice and consider myself a big fan.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| It's a slow burn for sure. But so worth the investment.
| mayormcmatt wrote:
| FWIW, I restarted it last week after falling off years ago
| before finishing the first season. It was my problem, not the
| show's: I wasn't paying attention, my attention span was
| awful. This time, I'm paying attention and have trouble not
| watching three or more episodes per night. What a riveting
| show!
| MobileVet wrote:
| It is daunting at first, if for no other reason than the
| shear number of characters. It probably takes 3 episodes just
| to understand who is who, despite the amazing acting.
|
| There is no show that I have seen before or after The Wire
| that puts such a lens to American culture in the inner city.
| It is a masterpiece of story telling. The writing and acting
| are just spot on and the story... it's brilliant.
| ep103 wrote:
| Man, this is NOT the main message I took away from the show.
|
| The main message of the show, as I viewed it, was:
|
| The drug trade is fundamentally an outgrowth of a society that
| thinks in individualist terms, but lacks either the social
| collective and moral knowledge or the social collective and
| moral willingness to think outside of those individualist terms
| and individualist responsibilities sufficiently far enough to
| fix the issue.
|
| This is because everyone in the show is acting as a rational
| agent following their own personal incentives. And in
| aggregate, these personal incentives become social forces that
| guide the actions of the institutions these people create in
| order to further their pursuit of these personal incentives.
| These are collectively referred to as "the rules of the game".
|
| The show goes to extreme length to show, over and over again,
| that so long as everyone is following their individual
| incentives, IE following the rules of the game, it is NOT
| possible to solve the drug trade. The drug trade is itself a
| natural outgrowth of following personal incentives. (Why
| hamsterdam fails, why jimmy can't solve all crimes, why cedric
| can't reform the station himself, etc)
|
| The show then makes very, very overt points to show that we all
| still have individualist responsibility, and our individual
| choices can and will make positive and negative impacts on the
| wider community and the people within our sphere of influence.
|
| It then goes further and shows that by making the correct moral
| choices, by looking outside of our own individualist
| incentives, you CAN change the rules of the game for the people
| within your sphere of influence (Carter teaching humane police
| work, or opening a gym in a bad neighborhood). Similarly, doing
| the opposite and doubling down on personal incentive more
| ruthlessly will likely make the drug trade worse, but may
| personally benefit you more in the short term (Marlo, the
| journalist).
|
| Phrased another way: if the drug trade could be solved by
| individual action, it would have been so already. The issues
| that plague Baltimore are issues that result from individualist
| thinking, and not being able to see outside of that.
|
| The only person who really sits in a position of power large
| enough to successfully change the rules of the game, while
| acting solely as an individual, is the Mayor. But he is also
| very strongly incentivized NOT to do this, as doing so will
| require him to self-sacrifice his personal career as a
| politician. (He refuses to raise money from the suburbs, which
| are a voting block he would need to run for state Governor. He
| assumes that the suburban voters would punish him for that,
| even if he spent the money on Baltimore schools, due to their
| focus on their self-interest). So again, because he chooses to
| think in terms of personal incentives, the issue will not
| change.
|
| The show, therefore questions why America and Americans act
| this way. The show is hoping that the reason we act this way is
| because we lack the knowledge about how everyone only thinking
| for themselves results in "the rules of the game" and puts
| everyone in this situation. It HOPES that if a show like The
| Wire exists, and teaches everyone this fact, then the
| individual characters in the show might look up for a moment,
| and demand, collectively, that the rules of the game change, by
| thinking outside of their own personal station in life. You
| will notice meaningfully absent from any character in the show
| is any type of character that actively attempts to do this,
| perhaps by organizing a social movement for meaningful social
| change, collectively, at the community level. This is what the
| writers talk about when asked "what should people do."
|
| The show fears that people don't know, because they don't care.
| That people are fine with the pain and suffering that comes
| from the drug trade, so long as they get to pursue their
| individual incentives. To counter this, the show tries to point
| out that the characters that go the first path, and make the
| conscious choice to benefit their local community by thinking
| outside their own situation (the boxer guy, carter, bunny) all
| wind up happier and with better lives, than the ones who
| "succeed" at the game on individualist terms (marlo,
| barksdales, sobotka), in the long term.
| suoduandao2 wrote:
| So The Wire is a subtle endorsement of the 'game B' idea?
| ep103 wrote:
| No, thinking outside the strict confines of one's own self-
| interest is not an idea limited to just one ideology,
| including that one.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Individual moral action, fine, maybe.
|
| But the show was definitely not in any way about the reality
| of the drug trade because it didn't depict the reality of the
| drug trade, especially the drug trade in Baltimore (if
| anything, it has vague similarities to the 80s-early 90s drug
| trade in Chicago.) Yes, I know he worked at the Baltimore
| Sun. The Corner was exactly authentic Baltimore. Even Simon
| would tell you that The Wire isn't.
|
| The drug trade was a setting for making statements and
| playing out thought experiments about morality, power, and
| institutions (which you've pointed out from your
| perspective.) But if you see it as an accurate reflection of
| the drug trade anywhere, you're being deceived by fantasy
| fiction.
| ep103 wrote:
| The interview I saw with Simon, they asked him what did he
| consider to be unrealistic about The Wire. His response was
| that they needed to simplify the organization on the drug
| side. The reality was more complex, and groups were usually
| much, much smaller, but to make it work for the show they
| simplified into larger cartels the audience would be able
| to remember.
|
| As for the non-drug side, well, let me say this. I went to
| college with a number of people from the DC political
| circuit, and they would get together each week to watch The
| Wire and drink and laugh. The reason for their laughter?
| They personally knew the people in the show that the
| characters were quietly depicting, and would find their
| portrayals accurate or hilarious. There were more than a
| few articles that came out when the series first aired of
| local noteworthies accusing The Wire of slander, to which
| The Wire's writing team would respond: "What made you think
| you were this character?"
|
| But yes, ultimately I agree with you. The Wire is a fiction
| intended to be very close to reality, to make a point about
| the state of that reality. I think one of the major points,
| is the one I wrote above.
| woodruffw wrote:
| This is a great comment. I haven't viewed the show through
| this particular lens, and I'm sure that this will influence
| how I view it the next (5th or 6th?) time I do.
| treis wrote:
| This is too narrow of a focus. Yes the Wire says all that
| about the drug trade but it also says quite a bit about the
| general nature of institutions and the people in them. The
| broader point is that the whole society is like "the game"
| and people are playing various roles in it. Whether it's a
| newspaper, union, police department, drug organization,
| politics, schools, and so on there's a fundamental dynamic
| between individual success, organizational success, and the
| general good.
|
| Some care only about their success (Rawls/The Reporter who
| makes up stuff)
|
| Some care about the greater good but sacrifice it for
| personal success (Mayor Littlefinger)
|
| Some want the organization to succeed (Sgt Fatso)
|
| Some want to do good but are thwarted (Daniels & the editor
| who's name I can't remmeber)
|
| Some do bad and throw it all away trying to do good (McNulty)
|
| And there's many more. Ultimately that's what the show is
| about.
| ep103 wrote:
| Yes, The Wire is a human story. And their personal
| motivations and decisions, and the results of those choices
| are what are compelling and informative. I think "Sgt
| Fatso", has a surprisingly good number of lessons to teach
| on middle management, for example.
|
| I think, however, that that choice of these characters,
| motivations and stories fits within the larger theme I
| described above.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Change the world before the world changes you.
| brundolf wrote:
| My main takeaway from this is that I need to go watch The Wire
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| I've personally learned in life to focus on excelling at being
| corrupt.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > People fixate on the numbers
|
| I've had an unsettled feeling for some time that managers,
| perhaps many execs, are mostly liabilities... Far to often I have
| seen someone categorize _something_ as not a _something else_ to
| ensure it doesn't raise any suspicions of their superiors,
| manipulates the metrics etc. It's lead me to wonder if
| investment/effort is better invested to cultivate ethos more than
| measurement.
|
| Ethos like "We do what's best for the customer" or "We fix errors
| when we see them" instead of "Did we hit the SLO?"[1] or "How
| many open bugs are in the system"[2]
|
| Anyone else felt this, or am I just the burnt out, toxic,
| outlier?
|
| [1]: people start to categorize things as not downtime
|
| [2]: People start to chastise those who open JIRA bug tickets as
| "too many!"
| pklausler wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
| cjcenizal wrote:
| > People start to chastise those who open JIRA bug tickets as
| "too many!"
|
| I know what you mean. I've seen teams treat a backlog's growth
| as being a root problem. They responded by closing issues with
| the explanation "We probably won't ever get around to this" or
| by creating scripts that will auto-close any issue after a set
| period of time.
|
| I'm still on the fence about whether this is productive or not.
| I guess it depends on the team's context. A growing backlog
| indicates strong demand for features and/or many defects being
| found in the product, at a rate which outpaces the team's
| ability to respond. My instinct is to make changes to any part
| of that system but the backlog itself, since it is _real data_
| with _real value_. My strong opinion weakly held is if you
| manipulate this data, you 're just putting blinders on.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| One of my teams is going through this currently. Our Scrum
| Master keeps on wanting to erase our backlog as she thinks it
| makes us look bad to management.
| ip26 wrote:
| The best argument I've heard in favor of culling like this is
| that if it wasn't worth doing two years ago, and wasn't worth
| doing one year ago either, it's probably never going to be
| worth doing. In this view, legitimately good ideas that never
| quite make the cut are dangerous because they eternally
| distract & waste time for no value.
|
| As a methodical person it's hard to digest, but I'm starting
| to find it holds water.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Except that it might have always been worth doing, but the
| team is underfunded. ie, the ROI on doing it was
| positive/high
| rufyfhrj wrote:
| Azkar wrote:
| Yep. I've found that the ticket or tech debt isn't
| important until it becomes on fire and must be fixed
| ASAP. It doesn't matter that the possibility for the bug
| to happen has existed for 2 years, the organization
| doesn't find the investment worth it until it's burning
| down the house.
| johngalt wrote:
| It is the inherent conflict between authority and
| accountability. It's unfair to be accountable for something we
| have no control over, but if we have control over it, we can
| unduly influence it. There is no bulletproof answer to this
| problem. Fixes are mostly about allowing for the _possibility_
| of success.
| musingsole wrote:
| > managers, perhaps many execs, are mostly liabilities
|
| Reminds me of adages about parenting and children as well as
| government and the economy: more can be done to screw it
| up/make it worse than can be done to control let alone improve
| it.
|
| The role should be defined by restraint and temperance.
| deathanatos wrote:
| "JIRA bankruptcy", is what I've heard it called. It's an
| idiotic way to sweep problems that still exist under the run. I
| have no idea why its so hard for suits to just ignore a list of
| bugs that isn't even intended for them in the first place.
|
| ... I also had to fight (and mostly lost) the argument that
| "time to page getting resolved" was not meaningful. People
| would be chastised for having pages open too long. But, then,
| e.g., one page was because the underlying problem was _real_ ,
| and it was a problem in our cloud provider -- one that our
| _cloud provider_ couldn 't fix. (They wanted us to just abandon
| the instance of that service we had, and migrate everything out
| of it. Problem was is that that was difficult, and expensive.
| Several months of work. We ended up having to do it. But that
| destroys a Goodhart "mean time to resolve" metric.) But people
| can process "you have to look at it on a case by case basis,
| and see if there was a good reason for it", as, Christ, that
| requires _thinking!_
|
| There was also metrics around hitting SLO, and the SLO was
| bananas. In theory, we were supposed to do a post-mortem if we
| missed the SLO. But the SLO got missed so often that, in
| reality, nobody did the PMs. (And in fact, it effectively
| _killed_ the culture of "writing PMs" that had existed... and
| now problems don't really get addressed.)
|
| ... and I agree about the managers/PMs. When engineering has no
| authority, the resulting crap isn't surprising.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to
| be a good measure."
| Haleyborough wrote:
| Thanks https://www.pointclickcare.me/
| noasaservice wrote:
| I work in system engineering/architecture. My job is some of
| hardest to even tell if we work.
|
| I've been back and forth with multiple managers and C levels that
| any metric chosen can and will be gamed. But they again and again
| want some quality assessment to use.
|
| For a while, they used tickets closed. So we all started
| submitting BS tickets to do tasks like "send email". You all can
| imagine the inanity of that.
|
| From my experiences there is no good way to track... Well,
| perhaps having a grab bag of conflicting performance metrics, and
| then choosing one at random? (But again, even that can be gamed)
| NAHWheatCracker wrote:
| At the level you're talking about, it sounds like you should
| use similar metrics those managers use. Revenue/expense of the
| systems they oversee or business value of initiatives under
| your purview.
|
| Not that that would be useful for anyone. Managers will get
| away with saying they "grew revenue by $10 million per year" or
| "reduced expenses by 20%" despite that being mostly BS
| unconnected with their actions or choices. I don't see why you
| couldn't get the same level of credit.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I'm convinced at this point that the real way to manage an
| organization is to only manage some small number of people you
| can track in your head, maybe 10, and they do the same.
| Instead, I see all these insanely complicated work-tracking
| tools that are somehow supposed to tell someone levels up who
| I've scarcely met how I'm doing.
|
| You could look at my team's tickets all day and never
| understand how things are going. Or you could interview anyone
| on the team for 5 minutes and get a real answer. Massive
| projects are inputted as full-on DAGs of tickets, but the real
| tracking is done in a way simpler text doc or spreadsheet
| somewhere, or in someone's head.
| wmeredith wrote:
| "they again and again want some quality assessment to use"
|
| It sounds like they want something quantitative _not_
| qualitative. They both have their place, and one sort of
| measure without the other is missing a big part of the picture.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| The solution is to never reveal the metrics used and to rely on
| many metrics to evaluate.
|
| Singular metric evaluation, like the growth model insanity, is
| how we end up with massive companies making no profit but
| somehow subsidizing their services to users.
| deckard1 wrote:
| In my experience metrics aren't used to evaluate. They are
| used to _justify_ decisions management has already made.
|
| Management will never tell you, but they almost certainly
| have hidden metrics (or, simply, biases). But the discovery
| of such hidden metrics would destroy the image of the
| egalitarian work environment they like to promote. Much like
| in _The Wire_ , you come to a conclusion and then work
| backwards with the metrics to find your support.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Yeah, I can see that.
|
| Golden parachute, just gotta get some nice stats on the
| resume
| gbjw wrote:
| "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will
| not reason and compare: my business is to create." - William
| Blake
| digdugdirk wrote:
| Just wanted to comment to share how much I was struck by this
| quote.
|
| And as a bonus, William Blake himself seems like a delightful
| research rabbit hole to fall down later today.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Here you go, friend: http://blakearchive.org/
|
| Note that the search identifies both text and images within
| the illuminated texts.
| nathias wrote:
| the game's the game
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's funny how corruption gets defined and re-defined by so many
| competing interests.
|
| Milton Friedman, for example, famously said that 'Corruption is
| government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of
| regulation.'
|
| This mentality, when applied to the food / medicine / drug trade,
| has some curious results. On one hand, it suggests we eliminate
| all criminal penalties for buying, selling and consuming all
| drugs, while on the other the normal criminal penalties for theft
| of drugs would apply. Note also that sellers could adulterate
| their product (no regulations, remember?) in any way they saw fit
| as long as it maximized their market efficiency (profit margins,
| basically), based on the belief that customers could shift to
| other producers if they didn't like the product.
|
| The real result of criminalization of drugs, rather than
| regulation of drugs, is that a black market develops,
| characterized by violent conflicts between sellers over access to
| that market, control of production and supply, etc. This is why
| decriminalization makes a lot of sense, coupled with things like
| public health campaigns aimed at reducing usage, bans on
| advertising drugs and marketing drugs to children, etc.
| didericis wrote:
| At an even more meta level, whether interests are even
| competing is itself something subject to differing definitions.
|
| Take the word "regulation". According to wiktionary, it comes
| from "rego", which means "to keep straight, direct, govern,
| rule".
|
| Direction requires a desired destination. We would like to
| steer the environment away from highly adulterated/dangerous
| drugs, away from harmful drug use generally, away from
| territorial violence, and away from drugs being sold to
| children.
|
| Those that advocate for "deregulation" as well as
| decriminalization are really advocating for emergent peer to
| peer regulation instead of regulation by fiat. They generally
| think the best way to keep systems accountable and moving in
| the desired societal direction is for individuals to have as
| much freedom and direct feedback as possible about the
| consequences of their actions, which they argue leads to better
| individual decision making due to that better feedback.
|
| Those that advocate for government regulation generally think
| it's easier to keep systems accountable if you concentrate the
| most competent and responsible people into an explicit,
| transparent enforcement organization, which they argue leads to
| better decision making due to that better guidance and
| enforcement.
|
| The former worry most about ineffective or bad actors in
| government enforcement systems distant from
| feedback/information. The latter worry most about ineffective
| or bad actors in the populace that are allowed to grow without
| coordinated enforcement/ability to organize.
|
| I don't think a lot of the arguing over different solutions to
| drug problems are really arguing about incompatible approaches,
| they're just focused on different parts of the problem.
|
| In my personal view, I think the BIGGEST problem from all camps
| is a lack of desire to really confront the core issues/invest
| the time and effort needed to actually solve these problems,
| which is a lot more about sitting down with people in very
| unpleasant situations/doing a lot of very difficult therapeutic
| communication, dealing with personal anger at irresponsible
| people, dealing with our disgust, not liking what we see
| reflected about ourselves, not liking to admit how much we
| actually DON'T control, not liking to acknowledge our own
| hypocrisies/how we contribute to the problem, not liking to
| acknowledge vast experiential differences and how important
| close connections are, not liking to admit how many people
| don't prioritize themselves or others and are
| ungrateful/resentful, etc. We'd like to simply "get someone
| else to deal with it", whether that be the government, the
| immediate family/individuals themselves, an app, a magic pill,
| some kind of secret drug problem destroying machine, etc.
| danjoredd wrote:
| My main problem with Milton Friedman's philosophy is the
| assumption that people actively investigate every product they
| consume. For example, if something says baby formula on the
| tin, most reasonable people will believe that it is baby
| formula, and not something terrible like drywall dust.
|
| If the parent investigates the company and realizes that the
| company is fraudulent, of course they will switch to a company
| that is safer for their child. But will they do the same for
| every other product they take into their home? Of course not!
| There isn't enough time in the day for that.
|
| Even if its just a little bit, some government oversite has to
| happen to protect the rights of consumers. Not to the point
| where it keeps the free market from innovating, but enough to
| make sure people aren't eating literal plastic and putting
| radium in makeup.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| People like Friedman are either paid mouthpieces or complete
| loony-toons ideologues. That's the only way to make
| "libertarianism" make sense.
| didericis wrote:
| A libertarian would argue that competing services like
| consumer reports emerge to handle that kind of cognitive
| overhead.
|
| Libertarianism does not imply atomization. There's nothing
| preventing people from creating larger groups of people that
| facilitate cooperation. It just has to be voluntarily entered
| into.
|
| Discussions about when to grant authority to enforce things
| not specified in an explicit agreed to contract is where the
| debate about the problems with libertarianism belongs, imo.
| the_jesus_villa wrote:
| I'm not libertarian but the obvious solution is consumer
| advocacy & reporting groups and such, who certify products as
| "legit". They do the hard work of figuring out which products
| are good. But unlike the FDA, they have a market incentive to
| do this effectively.
|
| I don't propose this belief, but it's the libertarian
| solution to the problem you pose.
| ip26 wrote:
| Even most libertarians support strong contract enforcement,
| because it lubricates the free market. You can have a free
| market without, but binding contracts make it work much more
| efficiently.
|
| Truth in labeling & advertising should be grouped into that
| same category, in my opinion. It makes the market work better
| by reducing friction.
| deckard1 wrote:
| I see the difference being passive vs. active. The FDA
| would be active. Getting a bad product, finding a lawyer,
| filing a court case, getting a court date, going to trial
| would all be passive. It requires every individual to seek
| justice in an expensive manner. In addition, timing.
| Wouldn't it be better to avoid needless injury and death,
| than having to seek justice after the fact?
|
| Once a bad product enters the market, the market can be
| forever tainted. Look at China and baby formula.[1] No one
| trusts the baby formula there now. A few bad apples spoils
| the bunch. You could look at this as the FDA actually
| _protecting_ the market by keeping it at a trusted quality.
|
| [1] https://qz.com/1323471/ten-years-after-chinas-melamine-
| laced...
| Upgrayyed_U wrote:
| This is where the entire libertarian ideology starts to
| fall apart for me.
|
| Who does "contract enforcement" in a libertarian society?
| Who enforces "truth in labeling and advertising"? How do
| you scale those things without introducing regulation into
| the market?
|
| Edit: grammar
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's not falling apart. It's expressing its final form,
| which is an all encompassing world government with the
| duty of tracking the ownership of every molecule of
| matter on the planet, and of enforcing every contract
| without judgement on its contents or the conditions under
| which it was signed.
|
| Libertarians are people who believe that markets are
| natural, like trees. Markets are not natural, they are
| arbitrary sets of rules that people agree to abide by in
| order to have the agreements they make within those rules
| enforced by whatever institution is dictating those
| rules. Markets are an endorsement by the powerful, where
| at the least the loss of that endorsement will get you
| ejected from the market, but at the most it could get you
| broke and imprisoned.
|
| So the fact that they don't recognize what markets are,
| and think that they can be free (either as in speech or
| beer) forces them to make governments the ultimate
| market, but their desire for unlimited freedom and
| autonomy (or rather limited only by your property) forces
| them to deny governments the right to make rules about
| their own markets.
|
| Instead, they revert to natural rights, natural freedoms,
| _natural markets_ , social Darwinism, etc. Mysticism.
| That's why when you scratch a Libertarian for long
| enough, you eventually either find a blood & soil racist
| or an ex-Libertarian.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _Note also that sellers could adulterate their product (no
| regulations, remember?) in any way they saw fit as long as it
| maximized their market efficiency (profit margins, basically),
| based on the belief that customers could shift to other
| producers if they didn 't like the product._
|
| They could add addictive drugs [back] into 'normal' products
| without telling people, to get people hooked on their product,
| which would 'force' competing products to do the same or risk
| irrelevance.
|
| For instance, Coca Cola could quietly reintroduce the cocaine
| to their already poisonous concoction, making it even more
| addictive. Pepsi would be incentivized to follow suit.
| musingsole wrote:
| > We just have to consider every decision's second-order effects.
|
| I read that as "we just have to stop behaving in the
| characteristic way we're predetermined to forever behave in"
|
| The "corruption" related to rotations arises from the obvious
| failings of the system and a need to both work around it enough
| to get by and cope with it enough to not go insane.
|
| So long as the incentives remain perverted, so will the behavior.
| cjcenizal wrote:
| Ah, thanks for pointing out that ambiguity! The point I
| intended to make was that _people_ make decisions that lead to
| rotations and other systems. And those people need to consider
| their decisions ' second-order effects.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > Want to know what/how/why things are broken in your
| organization? Ask people!
|
| When senior engineers tell you they can't do anything without
| more headcount, maybe consider believing them.
| dirtyid wrote:
| IMO Yuen Yuen Ang's unbundled corruption index is useful model
| for evaluating different types of corruption, all are "bad" but
| not equally so.
|
| TLDR in this 2x2 matrix:
|
| https://blogsmedia.lse.ac.uk/blogs.dir/57/files/2021/02/Typo...
|
| And how countries stack up:
|
| https://i0.wp.com/oecd-development-matters.org/wp-content/up...
|
| Article: https://oecd-development-
| matters.org/2020/06/25/unbundling-c...
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