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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Someday this is going to be in an engineering ethics class.

Microsoft literally broke every anti trust law, but the DOJ was too incompetent to prosecute them properly due to the lack of education.

A lot of these decisions remind me of SV companies: if it’s not specifically, illegal it’s fine; Ex: Goog/Fb invasive Tracking users across the web, even if the user requests not to be. I hope every person that works for these companies is someday ashamed of their time there.

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Ashamed? The opposite, usually they’re proud.

“It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It.”

Also see current AI doom debates. See Yann LeCun tweets. He has some the silliest metaphors, like comparing AI development to aviation development. As if the two are similar in order of magnitude of downside risk.

Salary and income are one of the most powerful decision making and ethics shaping factors. The flow of money literally defines everything for 95% of people, including their ideological and political preferences.

Sad but true.

When was the last time you took a political stance that cost you your income (ie. flow of money)? For the majority of people, money is a fair proxy for quality-of-life; it makes sense that it permeates their ideology and politics.

Money is the indicator to us that what we're doing is valuable to someone else. That seems useful.

The auto complete black box is just soooo dangerous haha you better regulate all the risky other ones, mine's cool though d/w chief

> “It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It.”

see also: cloud

Yes, incompetent, and not due to as of yet unknown payoffs to key officials. With that much money at stake, in a far less transparent world than we live in today, briefcases full of cash worked a lot better. How would you even deposit that today without some sort of money laundering scheme?

Briefcase cash is so gauche - you just hire them when they “retire” from public service. Much more proper and you don’t even need to explicitly offer - everyone knows how the bread is buttered.

> you don’t even need to explicitly offer

Which has the added benefit of plausible deniability.

Defense contractors seem to have this down to a science.

Also, speaking fees are, funnily enough, not campaign contributions.

There's also great laundering fun to be had with your book, too!

Tell your parents to sell their house, but the contract includes lifetime tenancy and guaranteed maintenance and renovations. Surely that's not bribery.

It's not bribery if you just happen to visit a new friend's mansion in Hawaii any time you want a vacation.

Perhaps your spouse would be a good choice to be VP of Something Boring at this non-political non-profit charity. Isn't it nice that the employees of TotallyNotCorruptCo always make sure to donate so much money each year? Did we mention that the VP job comes with a car and driver? And can be done from home except for the fund-raiser galas. Totally not a bribe.

Microsoft didn't need to bribe anyone in the 80s and 90s because our country was still snorting that "woo hoo free markets fix everything" pixie dust. We weren't allowed to interfere with big business anymore. Clearly they knew what was best for us.

Plus when Bush took over, looks like he had the DOJ drop the case. At least under Clinton they were trying, though incompetently as you said.

IIRC the ruling was under Clinton, but the 'punishment' under Bush was that Microsoft gave free copies of Windows to schools (which were a Apple bastion at the time).

The two primary parties any country generally votes for:

1. Corrupt over there and incompetent everywhere else

2. Incompetent over there and corrupt everywhere else

Finally, a reasonable definition of the left/right dichotomy!

Except the left are green.

My father was a staunch Democrat, former union (UAW) guy. He always said "both parties are going to steal from you, the only difference is that Democrats believe you have to have something to steal first." I think that's a largely true observation even today.

The older I get the less optimism I have that it's possible for any system to avoid corruption and a class system of haves and have nots where the haves just amass power to keep gathering more and more...

The DOJ competently prosecuted Microsoft for its illegal monopolistic practices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

But then Bush took over as president and ordered DOJ to effectively drop the case. Microsoft got away with a slap on the wrist. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-07-mn-43010...

I hope the people who make these kind of decisions will get prison time. It's much easier saying sorry than asking for permission and some people exploit it on the back of the society, no less

> DOJ was too incompetent to prosecute them properly due to the lack of education.

It was not the lack of education. It was a political policy choice that tied DOJ's hands.

Reagan era changed US antitrust into so called Borkism. Robert Bork's "The Antitrust Paradox" (1978) criticized the US United States antitrust law and solidified the thinking of University of Chicago school of economists.

Borkism has very narrow view into monopolies. It has created monopolies in ever sector of the economy.

That microtracking made a lot of tiny and very cool niche consumer packaged goods brands a lot of money in the early 2010s. They can't afford to use untargeted TV advertising like the mega brans unfortunately, but Facebook did a great job helping them connect with their niche. It's much harder for new brands to get started these days.

Which anti-trust law says you harm consumers by giving them free stuff?

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