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Comment by bena | Hacker News Reader

No offense, this is a cool story but I don't really see what it has to do with the topic at hand?

He's asking for stories about people who believed they had staunch morals or principles but then someone came in with a wad of cash and then they betrayed those principles.

Shady people exist, we all know that.

"Everyone has a price" is typically used when someone rejects an offer due to some claimed reason.

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>stories about people who believed they had staunch morals or principles but then someone came in with a wad of cash and then they betrayed those principles.

Running a shop to repair something that weighs north of forty tons implies you're a fairly ethical person. Large tanker trucks for example hold a capacity of 11,000 gallons (14.6kl). This can be anything from milk to salsa, or more typically gasoline or Methylene Chloride. Hacking around in the internals of the computer that controls the engine is generally a dangerous idea as trucks use their engines to slow themselves on hills, or control themselves during ascents much more than their brakes.

I guess 'everyone has a price' in my field is the greased palm you take when someone asks you to compromise your ethics. Sure, you made way more on a routine service overhaul than you normally would have, but gojo doesnt make a hand cleaner to wash off what happens when your work is directly attributable to a major accident or fatality.

> Running a shop to repair something that weighs north of forty tons implies you're a fairly ethical person.

Eh. I wouldn't put that into the necessary column.

Not to mention, there's also the chance that these people saw nothing morally wrong with what they did. They see all these safety features and regulations as nothing more that the government "playing nanny" or whatever.

Or maybe the truckers do and some guy decided he can make a good living off of catering to their particular whims. Also whoever did the modification believed that he knew what he was doing.

Ethics are also a very fluid thing. This guy may show up to work on time every day, great boss, great employee, faithful to his wife, great dad to his kids, pays his taxes, volunteers at the soup kitchen, etc., but thinks that as long as no one is directly hurt by his actions, taking money to perform these modifications is a-ok.

> Running a shop to repair something that weighs north of forty tons implies you're a fairly ethical person

Wait, so the weight of the machines someone repairs is somehow directly related to how ethical one it? Would a heavy industrial crane mechanic be even more ethical then? What about someone who works on a boat? A large cargo ship, maybe? And does it work the other way - someone who repairs cars is less ethical? And a wrist-watch repair man would have no ethics at all, I assume?

Agreed, I didn't understand that remark at all.

You're taking that phrase too literally. He's saying that someone in charge of operating or maintaining something as potentially deadly as a semi truck should hold themselves to higher standards of ethics, not that there's some sort of direct correlation between weight and ethics.

Then he shouldn't have used the word 'implies' as a conjunction, he should have said 'ought to mean', or 'should require you to be' instead.

There's no discernible consequence to him not satisfying your hyper-literalism, so why "should" he use your preferred phrasing?

I'd hardly call it hyper-literalism, since he's the one not using the English language properly - that is, he failed to communicate his ideas accurately.

Most of the replies to this post seem to misunderstand this saying. An otherwise ethical person might initially refuse to do a thing, but give in when the reward gets large enough. The saying basically claims that every person has a price point at which they throw their principles out the window for money. That's the sort of story I was expecting when I clicked this post.

It's just as valid for people with first-hand experience to post stories about when they refused to cave to the increased reward. I think many here would, rightly, not want to share stories about the times when they had compromised their own morals and ethics for money.

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