But sometimes I have a paranoid notion that the managerial and legal class have constructed systems where they contain some liability into a black box, then hire someone unknowing to live in the box. The people outside the box are just designing the process and “relying” on the box to behave as expected. The people inside the box don’t know about the context and therefore don’t have mens rea. Nobody is guilty of a crime.
The story in this thread tickles that paranoia. I can imagine a person on one side who has implemented a compliance checking system, where as long as nothing gets flagged by the black box, the system reads “compliant”. It turns out the person in the black box is deleting the non compliant records. But they don’t realize that they are allowing someone to falsely fulfill their compliance certification, they are just making the box work.
The vendor says that for records of type A, characters 12-17 represent a unique ID or something else that is very boring. For records of type B, characters 15-25 represent another ridiculously dumb thing that I do not care about, but the vendor says it will never be missing and will always validate with a checksum algorithm.
I'm being pretty opaque on purpose.
For this particular SPAC merger, there is always something wrong with the record. And I, being someone who neither built the system nor is authorized to change it, must go in, read the stupid text about the buzzword-filled company description, count 723 empty spaces on a single line to find where the error is located, verify that something is missing, and go have a little meeting where we discuss whether to ask the vendor to fix and resend, edit the file to put dummy data in, or just delete the damn record because nobody on our end cares if it exists.
I mean, I guess that could be nefarious, but it's really not. We have to pay extra to get only the stuff we want, so we just get it all and let the hapless developers deal with it.
It seemed like someone else was trying to express the same thing I had thought and not succeeding, and I felt inclined to share and maybe help them and myself to be understood.
Having been forced to read the various filings by this company, it makes me angry that it could one day be in people's retirement index funds. How that is even possible is worthy of many cynical and potentially paranoid thoughts :)
Lawyers get paid to advise people how to avoid legal liability.
Managers get paid to handle problems, and sometimes to recognize which problems the people one level up would rather not know the details of.
I don’t think it’s off base to say that managers and lawyers would be involved where there is a scheme like I describe.
Legal class is a little strange, as that is a group of people that are mercenary: They won't really be in on anything, they'll just be paid to facilitate it. They're like a cloud or a tiger: It rains, it eats other animals. That is what it's for.