Comment by bravura | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bravura | Hacker News Reader

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I have a friend living in Argentina. His father-in-law is a businessman with a factory. Like many successful people in Argentina, he is a master at exploiting chaos for personal benefit. The father-in-law praised inflation, explaining it was a useful tool for people like him, and offered the following story:

I was walking down the street and found my wares being sold in a shop that doesn't retail for me. Doing some digging, I found incontrovertible proof that my foreman of ten years---ten years!!!---had been stealing from me.

Did I fire him? No. It is impossible to fire your employees, even for provable malfeasance.

Did I sue him? No. You lose 95% of these kinds of cases.

Did I tell the police? No. You can't get the police involved with anything important, like my business, they are too corrupt.

So what did I do? I simply told him I would never give him a raise again. And he understood that---due to radical inflation---his salaried buying power would keep dropping and dropping, until it was chiseled away to nothing. So he quit.

[edit: I am in no way suggesting that FIL was the moral actor in this story, I don't know if he was or wasn't screwing his foreman into poverty before the theft. What I found fascinating about this story was how things were systematically fucked in across so many possible dimensions, that individual instances of corruption and inefficiency and lack of faith are intertwined. i.e. there's a whole rat's nest of problems to untangle and a point intervention is unlikely to prompt broader change. Also see interesting discussion below about root causes of the inflation, which connect to some of the anecdote above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30101931]

> So what did I do? I simply told him I would never give him a raise again.

It is true that salary have been always losing purchasing power but don't forget also that employees have compulsory raises. This comes from two sources: 1. minimum wage raises 2. believe it or not, unions negotiate with the gov the raises, those are called here "paritarias".

Everything is broken here, laws favor the employees always and that's why no one wants to start a business. When you talk with small businesses this is their number one fear.

Half of the population is convinced that business and owners are the devil, and that they need to die in fire.

And as for inflation, there is nothing to praise.

I moved from a broken society to a first-world one. I’m supremely lucky in this.

There are many interlinked systems that have to work for a society to progress. It’s nearly impossible to line up all the required factors at the same time. Makes it rather frustrating when first-worlders shit on their own cultures.

I think self destruction is human nature. more so when you don't have things to constantly worry about. like dictators or a horrible economy.

> Half of the population is convinced that business and owners are the devil, and that they need to die in fire.

That sounds like more than half of Venezuela's population.

That seems unlikely. That foreman most probably belongs to a union. Unions in Argentina are very powerful and they negotiate at the National level. Whatever increase they negotiate, your friend's father-in-law will have to pay.

Time to sell the business and move to a better country.

Easier said than done though.

This is obviously false. First, employers can't just stop giving raises. Raises are governed by law and by collective agreements (although they are often below inflation). Second, no one just quits, especially a crook. Why? Because you can always force the employer to fire you. How? In general, nothing too obvious, you just stop working too hard. Until your employer offers you to leave and is forced to make an arrangement and pay you compensation.

> Did I fire him? No. It is impossible to fire your employees, even for proven misconduct.

> Did I sue him? No. You lose 95% of these types of cases.

No, for example in IT they are connected to the "commerce union" but it doesn't include an agreement to adjust by inflation. Obviously IT has strong market forces in favor of the employee but this is an example.

Also many unions lost against inflation.

> No, for example in IT they are connected to the "commerce union" but it doesn't include an agreement to adjust by inflation.

Most factory jobs do have those agreements though.

>This is obviously false. First, employers can't just stop giving raises. Raises are governed by law and by collective agreements (although they are often below inflation).

You mean minimal wage?

I don't know about Argentina specifically, but in many countries unions negotiate salary raise percentages for the whole sector. If the country follows universal collective bargaining, this may also be a binding minimum raise for non-unionized employees in the same sector, even in companies that aren't members of the trade union that bargained the deal.

Argentinian here, I confirm that it works exactly was you described, even the non-unionized part.

Is your friend's FIL ceo of my company? This is my employers current strategy to increase profits.

Is this likely to result in employees leaving the company?

i put in my 3 week notice last week. I don't understand ceo's logic here, just counting on inertia?

You've stumbled upon the perceived-lowest-risk way to fire tech people.

It looks better on the books when people churn "organically" over the course of a year.

Is it better or worse for morale than a lay-off? Hard to say. Depends on how transparent with salaries your company is.

One "advantage" is that it's somewhat-reversible. If 2 quarters into this plan, the board finds that they don't need to cut back on spending as much as they originally believed, they can hand out raises to whatever fraction of employees remain, and give themselves a pat on the back.

Bottom line, it's a symptom of a poorly-planned hiring system, IMO, and a painful situation with no painless way out. Employee X may prefer to be told directly that the company wants them gone next month, Employee Y prefers to save face. Your CEO is, in all likelihood, very upset about the situation, too, for what it's worth.

Ha! Well there you go.

I worked for a large company that was perpetually being (and being prepared to be) sold. Three acquisitions in three years, each preceded by a company-wide dictate to increase the company's cash value by lowering costs.

My director told me their most powerful cost-cutting lever by far was to lower headcount. So that's what they did. Then after the sale they'd be desperate to hire and train new engineers. The churn killed productivity for years afterward, due to the technical nature of the work. After a year there I still wasn't up to speed.

Sometimes the folks in charge are just shortsighted and incompetent.

> Doing some digging, I found incontrovertible proof that my foreman of ten years---ten years!!!---had been stealing from me.

> I simply told him I would never give him a raise again. And he understood that---due to radical inflation---his salaried buying power would keep dropping and dropping, until it was chiseled away to nothing. So he quit.

Just to play devil's advocate here, and I'm not saying that stealing is wrong by any means, but this just makes me feel like the reason he was stealing to begin with was that his income was too low to live off of.

There's plenty of well off people that steal because they want more. The fact someone is stealing doesn't lead to the conclusion that they don't have enough income to live off of. And if things in Argentina are really as bad as the business owner claims where you can't fire employees and you can't go to the police, theft is probably seen as an extremely low risk activity. For many people, increasing your income by a significant amount through actions that are highly unlikely to have a negative outcome wouldn't require much consideration.

> things in Argentina are really as bad as the business owner claims where you can't fire employees and you can't go to the police, theft is probably seen as an extremely low risk activity

This we call Monday in Argentina

> There's plenty of well off people that steal because they want more.

Fair counter-point. I suppose as a foreman he was probably getting paid better than most of the workers he managed.

My family ate beef/chicken leftovers (from butchers and such) when they moved to my city.

They never stole.

Stealing is never OK.

We should all be clamoring that stealing is never OK. But NOT with examples of poor people scraping for food.

Stealing is a deep problem in our society, and poor people have nothing to do with that.

I would argue that the real issue is being in a position where you would need to steal food during a time of relative prosperity. I know no one should be forced to be a charity but there should be a line somewhere that as a society we do not cross.

Stealing is sometimes okay, but usually the kinds of people who try to justify it do so because they infantilize criminals, which is maddening.

Stealing food to survive and not die of hunger while there's abundant waste all around is not "ok"?

I'd imagine that strong allcaps viewpoint would change in certain circumstances.

Dumpster diving or getting "waste" to survive is not stealing, is being resourceful. It is like "hacking" vs. "cheating" the system, subtle difference.

Nobody "owned" it since it was thrown away - unless you think racoons have rights...

It's still owned by the person while it's in their trash can, til the trash is collected.

It's stealing; just not stealing the owner is likely to care about. Sometimes they do, and put locks in their dumpsters though

No most countries consider trash abandoned property and free for anyone to grab.

Maybe they lock dumpsters because of liability https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/if-i-give-a-homeless-pers...

Around here, dumpsters are often locked to prevent dumping. The apartments across the street are plagued by dumpers who come at all hours and fill the dumpsters, mostly with construction debris it seems. Residents end up just piling shit on the ground around them.

Yeah stealing food so that you can sell it on the black market lol.

Most poor people are not thieves, they are decent hardworking people and don't want to be associated with crime thank you very much. Stop glamourising theft

You can't imagine any circumstance where it's okay?

Being tolerant is not always a virtue. I visited countries before with very agreeable people living absolute disparity. Had they been less agreeable, they may have overthrow their inept and corrupt governments decades ago. For their own good. People in Cuba still have to line up for hours to get pitiful food rations from the government stores. Blows my mind that nonsense is still going on, decades after near everywhere else Communism has been abolished.

You wouldn't steal a sandwich if you were literally starving to death on the streets?

My family nor me ever did when so.

Never advocated that stealing was okay. I'm just making an observation...

Stealing is okay in all sorts of situations. Many things in life are more important than the rule of property.

Scale up this mentality, you have South America

But I didn't say all stealing was okay, I said some stealing definitely is okay. I still think that's true. Some things in life are more important than property.

> Some things in life are more important than property.

If the property isn't important, why are you stealing it?

Personally I don't really care whether you think it's moral or not to steal, as long as you acknowledge that a victim of theft has an equally moral right to "steal" back what was taken, and to use a similar justification to steal a proportional (additional) amount from perpetrator. "Turnabout is fair play" and all that.

> If the property isn't important, why are you stealing it?

Because I'm starving so I'm stealing a sandwich ?

Because I don't have the money to buy something that would save my life (Medical treatment for instance) ?

If these things are important to you, they could be equally important to whoever you're stealing them from. It doesn't justify the theft. In the end, though, the morality of it is something you'll have to decide for yourself. It's your conscience. Just understand that if you do make that choice you are in no position to object if someone else does the same to you, and it's rather hard to survive—much less improve your circumstances—in a world where anyone can take whatever you've managed to save up at any time without recourse.

Please specify some of these important things that you clearly feel would be okay having stolen from you personally.

Or did you mean it's okay to steal as long it's from other people?

Out of curiosity, what are some things that are not more important than property rights in your opinion?

Intellectual property rights?

Good one, I agree.

Like what? Having a nice watch? Some Nike shoes?

Lets say that the manager's incontrovertible proof proves to be incorrect and neither party has committed a moral fault. The system the manager has leveraged for enforcement is protected from any sort of rebuke (I assume you can't sue someone for failing to make CoL adjustments in Argentina) so freezing someone's salary essentially just comes down to a form of wage theft.

Bear in mind that in America, I'm not certain about Argentina, wage theft is the most expensive crime (summed across all instances) worse than burglary, stealing office supplies, or even robbing your employer.

I agree that stealing is generally not OK - but maybe lets start by addressing the most prevalent form of stealing - by the powerful against the powerless.

With that logic the one doing the wage theft is the goverment for causing the inflation in the first place and not allowing other currencies to be used.

No, if CoL adjustments were not built into an employment agreement, then it's not wage theft in any sense.

Difficult to say without having background for such situations. As a latin american myself I think it's not far fetched to say that in LA there is an ominous sensation that there is always someone taking advantage of you: your boss, your employer, your government, your politicians, the police, etc., so taking advantage yourself, although immoral, is "par for the course". Theory of broken windows and a way to carry on.

This perspective of blaming the motive of the perpetrator instead of the perpetrator itself leads to blurred lines of judgement that makes establishing common rules impossible. If you have ever caught someone doing something evil, you would know just about any crime can be morally justified for a cause of some sort.

This is a Hispanic country, so the traditional morals and ideologies of regular people are not the same. I come from a hispanic country and lived in Miami almost my whole life. (take a guess where I'm from lol).. Basically what I'm trying to convey is that hispanics are hustlers, almost by nature. Due to living in relatively poor countries and forced to figure out new ways to survive. Not saying that Argentina is so terrible that you need to be hustling this hard, but sometimes people want a bit more. For example, my friend which was born in Argentina recently went to visit and explained to me how prices for goods that come from the U.S. are extremely expensive but rent+food is extremely affordable. Just from that little bit of detail alone, I'm guessing anyone who is hustling for more money. Is doing it because they want to live a more 'luxurious' life style. Less humble maybe?

I think your comment is shamelessly racist and ignorant, to be honest, have you been to every hispanic country to treat hispanics like that? you'll see hustlers everywhere and in every culture and country, also Argentina is not the only Hispanic country so please try to make more educated comments, and if you feel the way you describe it as for Hispanic people, please talk about yourself and don't generalise.

I am from Spain. May I introduce you to the old "picaresca" from The Lazarillo of Tormes?

We Hispanics gave the world great people, but we got lot of hustlery and bribery since the Roman Empire. Italy is like that too.

A lot of great Spaniard writers said that they were fed up of Spain and the Hispanic culture as a whole, from Pio Baroja to Estaislao Figueras.

https://wikiless.org/wiki/P%C3%ADo_Baroja?lang=en

And Pio Baroja should be the ultimate Hispanic figure, the one who put all the Christian bullshit away and fully embraced Humanism and scientific Enlightenment from the 16th Century as the students in Salamanca did, but, you know, we might have been cursed, because even if Spain was the proto-embracer of Humanism and Enlightenment, (even before Lutherans, y'all HN readers please look up "school of Salamanca"), we burned our crap down three centuries later.

I'm Chilean and I read Lazarillo de Tormes when I was 12 at school, do you know that the Roman Empire also influenced the British isles and every place they conquered? What's your point? Christianity also isn't particular to hispanics countries, robbery was a way of life in northern tribes too. The statements here I've read are really ignorant, you can't generalize hustlers and bribery 'cause in every part of the world you'll see people doing that, educated and uneducated, the lack of values is not a cultural thing, saying that is racist, you can vote me down all you want, that won't change the level of ignorance I'm seen here in HN.

>the lack of values is not a cultural thing

More than the lack of values, the "getting away with that". I am not saying we are all thiefs, but little rascals/rogues doing "alegal" stuff.

It happened in every side of politics, no matter left or right, rich or poor, smart or fool.

OFC there's corruption in Middle Europe, I could say a lot of the French and the Germans, along Icelanders and the Danes. But at least they keep the ethics and resign. Here the Spanish verb for resign "dimitir" it's a Russian name, right? Because no politician would do their shit when they are caught.

Here in Spain by mouth everyone hates the cheating politics, but IRL, in the back, everyone agrees with them and they admit they would do the same in they had their place.

If Spain fixed it shit together, it would be a torch of Enlightenment for the whole Americans. But we need a slight change of mentality.

No, I don't mean we should became Nordics, as we are great in many terms, we are the 1st country doing organ donations. We should be like that on corruption, denouncing every crap, no matter left of right.

People gets politics in Spain as if they were a soccer match. And that's ridiculous.

And yet Spain (and Italy) are relatively stable first world countries. Damn, I live in the US, and I would say there is way more hustlery here than back in Spain.

I'm Hispanic and born in Cuba. So I know a lot about other Hispanics.. also wasn't trying to be "racist". Never mentioned Blacks, whites or mixed. Another important note, I lived in Miami basically my whole life. The diversity in Miami is like no other place. So calm down before you jump to conclusions about "shamelessly being racist" or whatever.. you can't be racist against your own culture lol.. at most you're being prejudice against yourself/your culture.

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