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Comment by agileAlligator | Hacker News Reader

> It seems like the problem is that the author has a moral objection to paying bribes

Duh?

Exactly. This is what the rest of the world usually says on the first encounter with "tips culture" in the US.

As I see it, cultures are different and one thing that is considered an absolute taboo in one culture might be customary in another. Tips in the US are customary yet at the same time they are offensive in Japan. Bribes are killing the economy in my country yet it makes economy moving in India.

PS: I personally hate corruption more than anything.

First time I am hearing about this. Could you elaborate on the Tips culture in US?

Do you have any first hand or second hand experience with it?

US waitstaff aren't covered by minimum wage laws - effectively a very large component of their income is "variable compensation" through tips. This is "expected" to be 10-20%. The culture doesn't quite come out and say "you need to put down 10% more than the number stated on your bill in order for the person serving you to make rent", but if you don't it will be interpreted as an insult.

For waitstaff at a restaurant, baristas at a coffee shop, bartenders, or people giving personalized service (for example a tattoo artist) it's customary to give a tip of ~20% extra on top of the bill. The expectation is that extra money goes directly to the staff giving you the service, and you are expected to pay it; many of these services jobs are actually legally allowed to pay less than minimum wage with the expectation that the tips will cover the difference. You are allowed to give less if you feel the service wasn't satisfactory, or if it's an especially large bill, but to give no tip at all means you are a terrible person.

From my experience most people working these jobs prefer the tips system the way it is because a lot of times it's in cash so they can fudge their tax numbers if they want (might not be true nowadays as less people use cash), and also because often they make more money through tips than minimum wage, and they think if tips were removed the restaurants would only pay them minimum wage.

> Exactly. This is what the rest of the world usually says on the first encounter with "tips culture" in the US.

I think my shock was greater when I discovered that lobbying in the US means "literal legal bribery". In a lot of the western world that word it means things "having meetings" and perhaps "organizing PR campaigns". Straight up giving money to politicians is against the law.

>I think my shock was greater when I discovered that lobbying in the US means "literal legal bribery".

This is what the internet thinking lobbying means because they just want to be angry at a thing without bothering to learn about it because that would expose their own political apathy. Lobbying in the US means the exact same things that it means in the rest of the world. Companies will donate a few thousand dollars, so that a legislature will hear them out, but the legislature doesn't have to listen to them. There is some sketchy stuff going on with campaign finance for sure, but it's no where near as bad as "legalized bribery."

> a few thousand dollars

You might want to revise that assumption.

You might want to revise your assumptions. These are the top lobbying recipients: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-recipients. All things considered it's not a lot of money. The vast majority of lobbying spending goes towards mundane expenses like payroll at lobbying firms. The reason lobbying is so powerful is that regular people don't pay attention to actual legislation, so politicians spend too much of their time campaigning and end up outsourcing the hard work of writing legislation to the lobbyists. Regardless, it's definitely not "literal legalized bribery."

Using your own resource:

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders

I believe that’s at least 4 orders of magnitude higher than “thousands of dollars”. I rest my case

...as I mentioned, the vast majority of this money goes towards things like paying people to read legislation, prepare presentations, and speak with politicians. It's not "literal legalized bribery."

This may sound like a distinction without a difference, but it is explicitly illegal to give money directly to politicians in the United States. Lobbying is giving money to their campaign committees, which get them elected or re-elected. It is also explicitly very illegal for campaign committees to use their funds to do anything for the candidate -- there are a huge[0] number[1] of politicians[2] who have been severely[3] penalized for flouting campaign finance laws. Further, there are severe restrictions on what the campaign committee can use their money for, which is largely restricted to travel for the campaign, advertising, and paying campaign staff.

These are just some recent examples of federal politicians who have run afoul of these laws, but they apply at all levels of government, as well as to staff (both campaign staff and the official staff of elected officials).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Cunningham

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_D._Hunter

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Jackson_Jr.

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Grimm_(politician)

Yes it is totally a meaningless distinction to me. On the level of “this is not gambling, because we use a virtual currency (that can be purchased with dollars)” that is prevalent on mobile video games these days. It is gambling, just with extra steps. And it is bribery, just with extra steps.

There’s a distinction to be made between a small customary bribe to an seriously underpaid state employee, and a larcenous bribe to a high official.

> a distinction to be made between a small customary bribe to an seriously underpaid state employee, and a larcenous bribe to a high official

Not really. If normalized, it's part of their expected compensation package. Practically speaking, I think I'd suck it up and pay the bribe in the author's position. But I'd know I was doing wrong.

> If normalized, it's part of their expected compensation package.

But it already is normalised. I think this is morally difficult because it is customary, expected and if you refuse you will not get anything done but also won't change anything. So what have you gained?

I don't think you can fight corruption this way, you just can't do it alone.

So it is a "tip" for quality of service.

Bribes scale up. How much is the underpaid state employee "tipping out" to his boss? Or had to pay to get the job in the first place?

They are both immoral

Not according to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).

The FCPA basically says that as a representative of a US corporation (in my case, anyone at a Staff Engineer level or above), it's illegal to bribe an official of a foreign government.

It does try to make a distinction (sort of) between the kinds of bribe you're talking about but in my FCPA training, that "distinction" boils down to "go ask your lawyer." The lawyer will just tell you how to do it in a way that doesn't look like a bribe, even though it still is.

FCPA is such a stupid law. The universal way to bribe someone as an American is to pay them a absurd day rate for consulting. These people then have to be given fake roles when all they do is hand over money to corrupt officials.

It just adds yet another layer.

Just as an FYI it’s very hard to be convicted of under FCPA if you’re just operating in a personal capacity. So don’t worry about bribing policemen in foreign counties.

In a region where bribery is customary, trying to get stuff done without bribes is a case of tilting at windmills. I applaud the author's willingness to stand up for his convictions, but realistically his options are to either pay the bribes or set up his business in a less corrupt region. An entrenched local bureaucracy can easily outlast a typical small business when it comes to a fight like this.

>> It seems like the problem is that the author has a moral objection to paying bribes

> Duh?

It's only "Duh" because you snipped the qualifier out. It's not "Duh" if you read until the end of the sentence like you normally do:

> in an area where bribery is customary

See?

I mean, isn't it extraordinarily clear that he doesn't want to pay bribes and that bribes are customary. Hence... duh?

The fact that a lot of people do it customarily doesn't preclude for it to me morally reprehensible.

To bring it to the extremes: If I found myself visiting Germany during World War 2, I would still strongly object to killing jews, even if it was "customary" there.

And since know this is a reductio-at-hitlerum, I will try again: I would not seek or consent or engage to having pedophilic sexual intercourse if I found myself in certain neighborhoods of Thailand, where apparently it is commonplace.

Perhaps a bit less extreme: I would not expect someone who is a convinced vegetarian to start consuming meat when they arrive to my country just because meat is consumed in almost every meal here.

It doesn't matter whether it is customary. I live about 200km away from where the author is, I have never paid a bribe in my life, and I never will. They make you sweat it out for 4-5 months and then eventually it gets done.

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