Marshall Brain died hours after alleging retaliation at NC State
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Sure, there is technically a process for reporting wrongdoing, but there's no process for reporting wrongdoing and keeping your job, and keeping your job is more important. What isn't your job is taking moral stances on things, having political opinions, provoking what others might see as unnecessary conflict, in any form.
Sure, you could spend some time ensuring accessibility standards are being met, but really you shouldn't unless someone complains, because although you think it's good practice, you're being paid to put visible results on the screen, unless you can make a business case for it that's sufficiently compelling and rewarding that it's worth pursuing. You'll lose your job for not getting the thing shipped, but probably won't for it not being theoretically good enough, unless you're a real doctor or real engineer
Don't stick your neck out unless you control the outcome (for positive or negative), and figure out what you're really being told to do or asked to do, and keep your effort to that. Don't go above and beyond, it's out of scope and you're better off sleeping. Not joking. If you can't do that, you might struggle to stay employed, and it's not worth your personal risk.
At work, keep your opinions to yourself, nearly all the time, they're rarely important, just get the work done and go home, work isn't that important either, don't pretend like you're saving the world.
This is wrong, and how you end up with flying drone face recognizing skullpopping murderbots. "I just work here" is an abdication of adult responsibility to self, family, and society.
It's not some idealistic stance, it's the truth. It's how we ended up with concentration camps in the USA multiple times, and why many companies are gearing up to build more right now.
In America, we've built our culture around collective abdication of responsibility for anything and everything, on almost any axis imaginable. The only way anyone with wealth and power ever faces justice is if they injure those with even more wealth and power.
It's easy to say, "if enough people just stood up for what was right, things would change", but how do you get from here to there without asking countless people to sacrifice their families on the altar of "maybe it will get better if you do, but don't count on it". At least in America, I think it will take widespread pain among the public before risking change becomes worth it.
It's awful to think about, but I think that's the heart of it: we (Americans) have built is a system where it is so easy to go from having everything (by historical standards) to having nothing (by current standards) that hardly anyone is willing to risk rocking the boat, even as it sinks and we all drown.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t take that stand anyway, it’s just frustrating and doesn’t bring any actual benefit to the people impacted by the thing you refuse to do.
Yours is a particularly extreme example I guess, but I didn't say it was a happy reality, I don't agree, and I agree.
It's not your job unless it's your job, but otherwise it's not your job, that's basically it, and sometimes in life it's your job to make the war machine, or if it's in your power to not make the war machine, then don't. If you're taking care of kids, it's your job to take care of kids, not have a moral stance on what your labor is going to. You're not the Angel of Death, and ideally you should do whatever you can to not be. These are the tricky bits of life.
Edward Snowden stuck his neck out, and while he may have won a virtue medal and might be chilling these days with a wife and kids as Russians, what he probably should have done was nothing, that's a sacrifice you make for an overvalued sense of personal heroism imo. Now he's beholden to Putin.
If you've already ascended some ranks and can make decisions that are good for people more broadly, great, that's part of your job.
Sucks for him, and it can't possibly be good for the US either.
But the Obama administration should have known better before pushing him into that hole.
Generally good advice but I would caveat it. Sometimes the org doesn’t know it wants something, or doesn’t know that you are the right person to ask. For example, I’ve had good success when finding ways to save millions of dollars. And other, more domain-specific things that make management happy.
Granted, you don’t need to do this if your position is stable and that’s enough for you. But if you are early in your career, trying to move up, or just want to be on the keeper list when there are layoffs, simply doing what is asked may not be enough.
> you shouldn't unless someone complains … unless you can make a business case for it that's sufficiently compelling and rewarding that it's worth pursuing
> Don't stick your neck out unless you control the outcome (for positive or negative)
If there’s moral questions surrounding your employment and no structures to tackle them, then quit.
If there’s a way to garner support for a proposal in a way that will incur a significant cost to the organization if rejected, then leverage those closest to the top who you believe will understand this.
Basically, “If you come for the king, you best not miss”
e.g. A literal supergenius can behave very erratically nearly every week of the year, 40 years straight, and still achieve notable successes in life, such as Kurt Godel
But a regular genius pretending to be a literal supergenius and trying to do the same, is well at best going to be perceived as a clown.
And it gets even more lopsided as you go down. Someone merely very smart pretending to be a literal genius is never going to earn anyone’s respect around the table.
As someone prone to idealism, you need to careful of the external consequences of work that runs into conflict with institution politics, government goals, and foreign/domestic intelligence services (professional thieves.)
I am probably just a clown, but often had to consider the escalation of coercion stages in the context of personal resolve. You will be evil one day too... Best of luck =3
You can say anything, stand up to anything, etc., at a meeting but have differing underlying motives that is unsaid.
While I agree and even accept this answer in theory, I have a hard time putting it in practice. Just today it seems I unnecessarily ruffled some executive feathers by pointing out some -- otherwise clear -- issues no one dares to mention and I am wondering now if that was even worthwhile. After all, I am not paid for extra for it. Regardless of the choice made by executives, the only thing that would change is the amount of support work I would do for it.
I know for a fact that 9 out of 10 it is better for me ( and my career ) to stay quiet, but sometimes I just can't stay out of my way.
Up to a certain point. That answer didn't hold up well at the Nuremberg trials. After a point there's also dignity and morality, not just "keeping the job".
Which people? The Europeans were occupied or liberated under effectively caretaker governments. Americans didn't need pacification.
> the agreements that came out of those trials
The trials inspired some agreements. It didn't create any, other than the precedent of holding leaders accountable for crimes against humanity.
They were occupied but they weren't entirely busy: while "low" people were happy to kill ex-Nazi collaborators themselves, it's the post-war governments (all of them, USA's included) who needed, with those trials, to manifest a re-establishment of the rule of law once again. 80 years later we can see it's been a hypocrite farce in every part of it, but it saved lives, those that were worth of living, although spared Nazis, fascists and sometimes communists too.
Do you have a source for this having been the motivation?
I’m admittedly most familiar with the French and American perspectives. Those weren’t concerned with pacification but creating an international sense of the rule of law and legal basis for the occupation and restructuring of those societies.
Plenty? All whistleblowers, and the magnitudes larger group of people who were not able to whistleblow but did instead decided to quit their job for ethical reasons?
that's just winners were punishing losers.
In alternative reality, those who dropped nukes were facing trial in Nuremberg.
Whether it's winners punishing losers, or e.g. the FBI/FDA/DEA/IRS/whatever punishing some company exexutives and employees, the potential for this to be a bad defense remains constant.
Nuremberg had nothing to do with insurrections and revolutions. It also judged the Nazis according to standards that didn't exist when they committed their crimes; the ICC was created after Nuremberg as an imperfect system. Imperfect, however, is still better than nothing.
Like how some well known companies are implicated because of government contracts with that short lived regime in the 1930s
and its like thats not really a deterrent because you don't really know what a government will do, and accountability requires a multi coalition invasion, losing, and subsequent leaking of state records
the threshold for that to occur is so high, like for one, that government has to actually lose, and the one everyone is mad at typically doesn't
makes more sense to contract with all parties in all countries and just collect the checks
I think that specific example is a perfect choice to undermine the specific lesson you were aiming for
You're claiming that real life is always as in this episode; and so, I guess, that you should never oppose someone at an higher position? Or with more power?
It's healthy to be aware of the possibility that things could go this way, but it's definitely not a guarantee that they will; in some environments it's more likely to happen, in others more likely to not happen.
But if we always acted as selfish cynics, then yeah, real life would be guaranteed to be what you describe
Our society, whatever the internal dynamics, has a revealed preference in the extreme, a preference so forceful it’s an idee fixe, a singular objective.
We will sacrifice anything: arbitrary loss of life, arbitrary suffering and indignity, arbitrary damage to the planet to transfer wealth upwards constantly to the maximum extent that we can blow past the feeble speed bumps that our institutions represent.
This upwards wealth transfer is in two senses of the word “up”: from poor to rich, and from young to old. We openly advertise targets for the economy like “the stock market” (US equities overwhelming held by boomers and rich people), or GDP growth (real wages at the median, go back to Venezuela commie). We don’t even pretend we’re optimizing for anything else.
Lina Khan is trying to enforce laws already on the books and is deemed dangerously radical.
You think these sociopaths won’t kill people? They’ll kill millions of people if they have to, they’ve done it before.
This is overly simplistic. Truer: we will sacrifice a lot to maintain our relative standard of living.
My standard of living ten years ago was so high it was honestly gross, I imagine it was easily in the ballpark of a BlackRock quant. The year I quit was my second highest earning year in which I made an amount that is shameful given that my job was to sell digital fentanyl.
I will sacrifice my standard of living up to and including not living because I feel a deep identification with the abstraction I call “my fellow person”.
A lot of people will sacrifice their principles to preserve their standard of living. In what is looking to be a rough decade or two those people are a liability to that same abstraction.
The line where principles outweigh personal interests (alternatively, where individual interest should be suppressed for the group) vary from person to person, group to group. But they are universally ahead of where those who’d prefer humans weren’t flawed, in their view, imagine them to be. The easy excuse is to conclude everyone is evil. The hard work, that granted few of us are cut out for, is making do with the world we have. (The fun, in exploring the richness these “flaws” produce.)
Note: I’m not asking anyone to settle for a lower moral rung. I’m saying: see the world as it is, not as you judge it to be. Would spacefaring be simpler without gravity? Yes. But the universe’s beauty, ourselves included, could not then exist. Human ambition and aspiration and yes, greed, are not aspects of ourselves I’d ever wish away. Even if it would make some problems easier.
I actually wish I had acknowledged several very astute points that I strongly agree with.
I’m not a RenTech quant, but I’ve spent enough time around heavyweights to know one when I see one.
I’d like to have a dialog. If you feel the same please email me at b7r6@b7r6.net
We will render arbitrary people homeless to constrain the supply and push up real asset prices for homeowners.
We’ll tolerate flagrant cartel monopoly and flagrant securities fraud and all manner of evil to drive equities up?
Qui bono? Not the working person at the median.
Each person's. It's an individual determination.
> We will render arbitrary people homeless to constrain the supply and push up real asset prices for homeowners
Yes. Because from the homeowner's perspective, they're maintaining their real standard of living.
Crafting good policy requires being very careful about whose relative standard of living you're sacrificing for the greater good. Because no matter how privileged you think someone is, for them, it's the baseline.
> We’ll tolerate flagrant cartel monopoly and flagrant securities fraud and all manner of evil to drive equities up?
No, not really. Shareholders win in the aftermath of antitrust action and trusted equity markets. We tolerate those things, the first much more than the second, but not for the reasons you presume.
But that tired toy example from game theory shows that everyone loses if both grass the other up. Countless studies of both human beings and computer programs in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma show that the wining strategy is not in fact to drive housing prices so high that the homeless problem eventually wrecks your property value.
This smash and grab, “how much can you carry” mafia capitalism has been tried before and the result was a guillotine.
No, I'm saying loss aversion is often misunderstood [1]. Both in its existence and strength. And the fact that it operates in relative terms, i.e. someone who is materially better off than they were 10 years ago may still throw their toys out of the pram if their neighbor is much better.
> the wining strategy is not in fact to drive housing prices so high that the homeless problem eventually wrecks your property value
Sure. The point is you also can't drive home prices down, because that hurts homeowners and activates them as a political bloc. (The solution is real home price growth as close to zero as possible amidst rising real incomes.)
People say that the without arbitrary incentives for arbitrary wealth that hard work and innovation won’t happen. Demonstrably false! The Internet that the current cartel is looting was a public private partnership! The best software these days is done substantially by passionate hobbyists!
People point to Silicon Valley and say “this wouldn’t be possible in Europe”. Then they point to the market capitalizations of the vampire megacorps that the world would be far better without as the success story.
People make other arguments slightly craftier: punitive taxes on the mega wealthy wouldn’t raise enough revenue to matter. True, but that’s not the point of a punitive wealth tax: the point of a punitive billionaire tax is to deprive billionaires of godlike power to restructure society in their own interest.
Anyone outside a few narrow bubbles can see that this is going very badly.
I’ll agree with you this far: it’s going to be a tall hill to climb to get people with homes worth 20 times what they paid and 401ks to vote for a sane future. But this is a comparatively recent phenomenon: older people used to be obsessively concerned with the prospects of younger people for trivial biological reasons.
These days? That “blood boy” transfusion thing Thiel is always on about? It’s a terrifying metaphor for the bigger picture. The procedure was pioneered so a father could keep his daughter alive at great risk to himself.
For some reason we now tolerate if not celebrate the vampire ideal of running that backwards.
This complaint is old as civilisation. Cato complained about the price of pickled fish exceeding that of ploughmen, and that was hundreds of years before even the Republic peaked.
> punitive taxes on the mega wealthy wouldn’t raise enough revenue to matter
Who said this?
I’m a fan of higher (not necessarily punitive) taxes on billionaires. But you can’t trade that for middle-class income taxes 1:1; the former is far more volatile.
No tax on the wealthy is worth its weight in paper unless it breaks the back of fluid fungibility of money into policy. We have any number of ways to raise revenue, most of which would be trivial if Bezos cast one ballot like anyone else.
Directly or indirectly bribing legislators or regulators should be a capital offense.
These are separate policy fronts. You've got a water leak in your engine and are trying to solve it by banning rain.
> Directly or indirectly bribing legislators or regulators should be a capital offense
Define this as loosely as Redditors consider lobbying and you essentially shut down democractic involvement to all but those who can afford the trip to D.C. to advocate in person. Or, to Cato, the Tribal Assembly. Bet you'd get a lot of rich people on board with that rule!
“Trust me, I’ll get you over the barrel even more easily if you try to stop me. Shhh, just let it happen.”
I think it’s a bluff.
Society worked just fine without IO/PO striping, it worked just fine without K Street as an institution.
I don’t make this case because I take any joy in what will happen to Marie Antoinette. It’s my aim to persuade the investor class to cut a deal before it gets ugly.
It worked fine without anyone in tech, too. Or crypto.
Agree on K Street. But Trump's 2024 campaign is praxis in disintermediating K Street. We need more precision.
> I don’t make this case because I take any joy in what will happen to Marie Antoinette. It’s my aim to persuade the investor class to cut a deal before it gets ugly
This strikes me as idealistic, maybe arrogant. Marie Antoinette didn't have a private jet or wireable funds.
Even then, most of France's aristocracy fled and lived fine. Violent revolution is not a romantic reset. It's a civilisation bowing out of the competition. They only fester now, post Industrial Revolution, because it's no longer profitable to invade unstable neighbours. The July Revolution, for example, was checked by the threat of foreign intervention. Hell, the "Westphalian" sovereignty Putin talks about was actually a contract permitting the great powers to invade the HRE to guarantee its Constitution.
There are more of us than you think who walked straight out no education and no connections and trivially operated at comparable levels to privileged and credentialed peers.
But the values are different: when you combine a street kid’s skepticism of our magistrates and noblemen with the first hand experience of seeing how utterly bankrupt the whole artifice is you get implacable enemies with extreme tolerance for adversity who play for keeps in a way no one can who ever benefitted from the system.
Underestimate us all you like.
I’m saying they can get away and get their resources out faster than before, and even before they were mostly fine.
> you get implacable enemies with extreme tolerance for adversity who play for keeps in a way no one can who ever benefitted from the system
These are never the beneficiaries in revolution. Ever. That doesn’t stop revolution. Folks say “fuck you” when enough is enough. But again, it’s not rebirth—it’s bowing out of the civilisation game. The “revolutions” we romanticise preserved preëxisting power structures.
To the extent America stands on the precipice of revolution, it’s in the molds of Cæsar and Augustus.
A Reaper drone with Hellfire missiles can go just about anywhere that bilateral money laundering legislation and agreements can’t. If Bill Gross or Larry Summers manages to get gold bullion into the DPRK? Yeah, maybe he’s beyond the long arm of the American public.
I’m reticent to even mention this peripherally because it’s a troll magnet but the example is too compelling to pass by. I’m not a native of the region and I don’t feel fit to moralize about it, but I am an avid student of asymmetrical multi-axis warfare with an emphasis on countermeasures to state-sponsored digital surveillance and militarized domestic police forces because the only way the peace will be kept is if the arch-Randian villains back down after a robust force assessment.
Whatever the morality of this or that actor in the region, the strategy and tactics of the IDF and Mossad are basically a masterclass in flipping the ostensible balance of power over with ease and a sneer: and while the details are many people’s life’s work, the terminal game theory node is that they’ll do anything. They will always dramatically overreact with punitive collateral damage and flawless execution and there’s no upper bound. No one bluffs the IDF into accepting a status quo they don’t like over any meaningful period of time.
I’m pretty skeptical that this is a good posture for a nation state armed to the teeth, but again, not my lived experience.
It’s precisely the right posture for oppressed majorities in modern great power settings where none of the elected or appointed or confirmed officials can give Gates a parking ticket if he crashed a Tesla into Gary Gensler and somehow shouted a transphobic slur.
The Black community in America didn’t claw back some semblance of dignity via some condescending hand out: they scrupulously operated within the law until it was clear that the law was exhausted if not adversarial as a recourse and then Malcolm X and the Audubon Ballroom made it very clear that Afghanistan is a cakewalk next to Atlanta if some bargain isn’t struck. From Emmett Teal to LA 92 that community is a shining example of patriotism in both a dramatic preference for abiding the law and not fucking around on soft treatments of tyrants or collaborators when the missile goes up.
Amazon pays OSHA fines because it’s cheaper than obeying the law, there have been fatalities and countless injuries and Genghis Khan seems restrained and enlightened in terms of how those people should be handled if you want a meaningful deterrent. I’d happily settle for prison and call it a compromise. It’s difficult to point to a billion dollar line item on an invoice or a balance sheet anywhere and not see at least one moral felon giving you the finger in fucking Atherton or Los Gatos.
The rich and powerful and sociopathic can do exactly what the public will tolerate before we kill them, and not a Planck length more. They will export assets and shop for tax structures as far as they can before they cease to be a factor.
It astounds, perplexes, depresses, confuses, and enrages me that anyone anywhere would make an argument to egg them on to ever greater heights of brinksmanship with the most dangerous thing in the world: a vast public better armed than credible militaries and facing eviction via a letter from some walking atrocity like whoever does that for The Carlyle Group.
I say it here because many people in this community are a coffee break away from telling curly-haired Zuck with a chain to “lay low, let the bullshit blow over. shear a sheep don’t skin it.”
The GP is both articulate and exceptionally brazen in the standard operating procedure of Vichy pribclings with micro clout: to state as fact the inevitability of some outcome where Goldman Sachs defrauds even more customers by shorting the products they sell as fiduciaries even faster and somehow less than zero people go to jail now based on a theory of economics that can charitably be analogized to a giant clock on the inside of a sphere: exigent shock, Laffer Curve, supply side, rational agent, strong efficient. Wazy woozy fairy dust never landed not on the elemental chart. Goldman quants know this.
It’s a low key flex/threat that belongs to Weinstein or something, not our aristocracy of merit and nobility: this is happening and it’ll be a lot less painful if you just lay as still as possible.
The GP correctly states that it coming to blows will be bad for everyone, it’s wild speculation that the harm will skew a certain way, it’s not ridiculous but it’s also a sleight of hand: it’s an argument that the working public should back down before it goes to hell.
Irrelevant, spurious, adversarially stated with malice aforethought.
And also just deeply wrong at the level of a sign bit: the kleptocracy has a lot to lose and any robust pricing would see them more inclined to compromise than the recently evicted or in some places the shopkeeper who douses himself in gasoline and lights a fire that’s still burning.
This tired song is the lazy propaganda bedazzled with GSElevator wit and sneer and the implication of secret hidden knowledge. I spent a regrettable amount of time getting drunk at Catch in the Meat Packing district in 2017 and after three gin and tonics they’ll happily tell anyone who can get past the Face Kontrol how much contempt they regard the rest of us with. They think it’s fucking hilarious that we fold hand after hand.
I meant that in my small way I’m part of a larger conversation.
There are a lot of people bright enough to have been at the top of their field who for one reason or another are opposed to the status quo.
I’m just one of a lot of people who are every bit as sophisticated as anyone on Jane’s Prop desk and yet still under its boot.
Sure. They should do more. My point is “watch out, you’ll wind up headless” is more self soothing than a threat. If America flips over, the billionaires will be fine. Maybe a couple unlucky or stupid millionaires will lose their coin or lives. Most will, at worst, preserve their wealth; more likely, they’ll get more wealthy and powerful.
> Jane’s Prop desk and yet still under its boot
Nobody at Jane Street is wealthy enough to be politically relevant outside its founders. (Unless they’re trading from a very small town, and you’re in it.)
I agree that the present oligarch class is every bit as powerful in relative terms as any before them. They also have the advantage of modern technology: ubiquitous domestic surveillance and militarized police are clearly not designed to prevent petty crime.
And the last thing I want to see is chaos and bloodshed. But I do want working people to regain some level of bargaining power, and with an elite as insular and vulgar as this one, that probably means a credible threat at least in abstract.
Extreme military power has failed against motivated populations almost without exception in all asymmetrical scenarios this century: it is not a foregone conclusion that oppression lacks an upper bound.
The end state on the current trend lines would be a catastrophic failure of our civilization.
I’m not yet prepared to accept that as inevitable.
When has this worked in practice to the benefit of those making the threats?
(Versus bargaining for more rights by dividing the elite.)
> Extreme military power has failed against motivated populations almost without exception in all asymmetrical scenarios this century
Internally? Each of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, et cetera seem to be doing fine.
> end state on the current trend lines would be a catastrophic failure of our civilization
Sure. But a revolution just speed runs that. (And we aren't the only civilisation on the planet.)
> I’m not yet prepared to accept that as inevitable
It's not even probable. Going back to the original comment, Americans' standards of living have been rising across almost every class. On an income and wealth scale, a positive-sum game, almost every category of American is better off than before.
What's changed in the last 50 years is on the relative standard. And in the political domain, a zero-sum game, that's led to some issues. But nothing terminal, not even close--ordinary workers still swing elections.
Housing, energy, healthcare, education. All off the charts inaccessible relative to 60 years ago. The Boomers are the Worst. Generation. Ever. Full stop.
When the LAPD beat Rodney King half to death on camera and all of the officers wielding the batons were acquitted?
Los Angeles burned.
Detroit. Watts. Harvey Milk was assassinated for a reason.
I will always strongly prefer a negotiated settlement between classes of society.
But one guy self-immolation in Tunisia kicked off regime change in 11 countries.
I abhor violence but I make no difference between violence in person and violence by economic or policy proxy.
I grew up in San Diego, half the guys I grew up with are former JSOC and even angrier than I am. Private equity people operate at our pleasure if it really came to it.
Brilliant guy, but cynical in a way that I never saw as his best self. He did well for himself and then kind of stopped worrying about the larger world.
But earlier, when he was younger, he constantly advised me to do things by a code more robust than self-enrichment.
I love and admire the guy, but I miss him trying to make the world better.
Saying "directly or indirectly bribing" encompasses all democratic interaction. I indirectly bribe my electeds with votes when they do what I want. You need to be more precise than that language to make a point.
More pointedly, your issue is with money in politics. Not bribery, which is already illegal. Not paid lobbying, I don't think, unless we should outlaw the EFF. Not rich people per se, most of whom have the sense to shut the fuck up.
The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act was better thought out by a long way. I was being informal given this is HN.
We all know the moments in time when the public got knee-capped: Brooksley Born was highly on task preventing 2008 via her completely legitimate powers via the CFTC before Summers and Greenspan popped a cap in her ass.
The same is about to happen to Gary Gensler and worse Lina Khan.
This capture is a wratchet until it isn’t. And the Robespierre interlude is something we all hope to avoid.
You sir are clearly educated and astute and traveled, a cut above by far the typical HN apologist for contemporary Friedman shit.
If even you are willing to argue to the bitter end then I’m very sad about how brutal things will soon become.
There’s a reason these assholes are building compounds in rural New Zealand.
But we went through the Enron thing, at a high level?
Because the public tolerates it. We have a financial sector where routine financing is run through permutations and combinations and evasions that in the default capital raise the legitimate entities would be far better served by some version of what YC does with e.g. the SAFE docs. When you apply string theory people to bond pricing you get one of two things: socially negative complexity / garish externalities and whatever the hell Medallion is doing.
Pushing that sector up into the double digits is weird: those people should be playing chess against Magnus Carlson not John Q Taxpayer. You can in fact convert genius into a gangrenous infection. And before you say that cheating is inevitable, inb4 predictable soundbyte, no it isn’t. The only two utilities of arbitrary wealth past mundane security and as much luxury as anyone can count (which is nowhere near billions) are blind “I Am The Repubkic” sociopathy and actual security in a world where the real ballers don’t feel safe on the same continent as their subjects. There are places where this is pushed even further: the City generally, let’s call it Canary Wharf is a wonder drug for international FX and outright fraud with thugs and just kind of a lesion on the Old Smoke.
Plus? Cheating is impossible or even difficult to detect or enforce or discourage to make an example of pour encorages les autres? Ask Madoff’s estate how it went to try that shit with the money of the donor dinner circuit. I recommend not fucking around and finding out on Jamie Dimon’s nest egg. You’ll wish you were never born.
Now if after all that unpleasant real talk about some but maybe not all the things you condescended via “reasons you presume” are actually a matter of the integrity of our companies and regulators and financial markets?
Then tell me you are already going through appropriate channels to bring the guilty to justice or can the TED talk and count your pieces of eight.
You seem like a really smart person with at least some basic moral instinct so I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and just ask you to not try to teach your grandfather how to suck eggs.
"I did what the University told me to do, and then these administrators ruined my life for it."
It’s frustrating how often dedicated educators are forced to navigate politics instead of focusing on teaching. The best educators are usually the least political, while those who thrive in politics often end up as administrators.
The lady he accused of ethics violations was named Dept Head around the same time he made the complaint. An "old head" raising an issue against a new rising star...
Now we have n == 2, this could be a pattern. Of course it's a similar situation outside of academia too.
I don't know the factors that lead to it though.
Meanwhile in the business world, I think market forces tend to balance a lot of this stuff out.
And I trust (quite a bit) that whatever he brought to light should be followed up on - if no other reason than to respect his memory. I hope it is taken seriously and those who retaliated find themselves w/o their positions of responsibility and power over other faculty.
I just went to it and had a look. Turned to junk now by the looks of things.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kpwebb_like-scot-wingo-ive-sp...
Well, lesson learned. Take your ethical concerns to the public/press instead. The retaliation would be just as swift as it is with The Process. Or: abandon ship and leave the system to consume itself.
Or at least above the heads of the people who are fucking around. Press might be seen as vindictive. But a sharp letter to the trustees of the university, possibly even some political offices, would not be out of place.
I get your (good) point but it could be better put considering he's dead.
Even if the loss of Brain and/or the scandal around the circumstances seem fairly inconsequential to most of you, it's a big deal for NC State's engineering program and the students there. It's also likely going to be a big deal for large donors like John Sall (co-founder of the SAS Institute, which is HQ'd in Raleigh).
2022, https://ece.ncsu.edu/2022/misra-named-to-darpa-microsystems-... & https://ece.ncsu.edu/2022/veena-misra-awarded-alexander-quar...
> (DARPA) has named Dr. Veena Misra to the Microsystems Exploratory Council (MEC) for a three-year term.. total funding with Misra either as a PI or a mission-critical Co-PI exceeds $59 million.
2023, https://ece.ncsu.edu/2023/department-head-dan-stancil-to-ste... & https://engr.ncsu.edu/news/2024/05/10/misra-named-head-of-de...
> After 14 years of outstanding leadership as head of our Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Dan Stancil will be stepping down from his position.. Veena Misra.. named Interim Head.. [May 2024] Veena Misra has been named as the permanent head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at North Carolina State University.
1. Generalised nepotism: heads-of favouring their buddies / installing crony networks, hiring/promoting only people of certain races or ethnic backgrounds, influencing supplier relationships for their own benefit (controlled by their family / friends / network), etc.
2. Toxic personality / power / ego and the political games, bullying and power plays that go along with that (to the detriment of the organisation).
3. Dangerous levels of incompetence (from the perspective of their reports), when people who shouldn't be allowed to operate a stapler are put in charge of major business units. Often everyone is fine with this if they don't touch anything, it only becomes a problem when they are influenced to make sweeping changes.
Sometimes you get the whole package in 1 person. Of course, one person's nepotistic incompetent bully is another person's charming and shrewd nephew. Usually they got into their position through the strength of their network(s) so if you go at them you're likely to have a bad day.
Allpw me to possibly explain a bit about why there is a degree of cagey-ness/intentional vagueness. A lot of the startup world focuses around exploiting opportunities where there are profits to be realized in areas of mercantile endeavor that can ne in a bit of a grey zone, as it were. Areas the big boys won't touch because it's too risky, but that can have a large payoff with just a relatively small infusion of capital. So when you're talking a lot of these places, there is certainly room for a bait-n-switch to occur. Circumstances may be wildly different from instance to instance; but in general the same threads and warning signs are there. Going into specific details, as you point out, is a great way to out yourself. Sometimes it's just enough to tell someone to look hard, and generally with the prompting they'll figure it out.
Now as far as reading the room goes... The sapd truth is this. If you didn't fund raise, you ultimately don't get to call the shots. Just how it works. Now it's best to listen to the folks you hire; don't get me wrong, but in most cases, an org does everything it can to make sure it is only steered from the top down by edict. It's not perfectly so, and there are ways to manage up (techniques no one who knows em is going to discuss in public), but at the end of the day, with power concentrated in the guy at the top, it comes down to how much trust you confer unto that person as a human being. If you're bringing up an ethics concern, and you're pretty sure it's not going to be taken well, or you've seen it ignored... Well... Adjust your trust levels accordingly.
"48 laws of power" is a book that everyone should read to understand politics. Its all ego and narcissism.
Mirror: https://archive.ph/R39hz
Have they geoblocked California too because of the CCPA?
This right here is why I scoff at “anonymous reporting systems” or stuff like EthicsPoint, for the simple reason that the only ethics that ultimately matter in an organization are those of everyone above you, and those individuals have a vested interest in preserving their political capital over acting or behaving ethically.
It’s disgusting and reprehensible if true, but it’s sadly not surprising. Those of us who behave ethically are little more than prey to those whose moral compasses are fungible.
It's kind of like your grandmother's good china: Look at it all you want but don't you dare use it.
Stuff like this is incredibly confusing to people on the autism spectrum.
Upvoted for this alone. We thrive in clearly defined systems, but the powers that be are careful to hide the actual systems of power from us. It’s infuriating to find out we’ve been playing the wrong “game”.
Some companies contract out such systems to a third party to reinforce the illusion of anonymity. But what do you think happens when the CEO says to the contractor "Tell me who wrote this or we won't hire you again"?
Ethics are supposed to be a core part of engineering, not too dissimilar from medicine. Good thing those folks are in academia where they can't hurt the rest of us.
"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law
As an aside, every professor got a brand new $4000 Dell every year because if the college didn't spend its budget, it would get less money the next year. Most of these professors just used Office to do their lesson plans and that's it. This was in the 1990s and it was a huge waste of money. I would imagine it's much worse now. That probably had something to do with it.
I recently read a quote that paraphrased went like, "bureaucracies care about following procedure over outcomes."
I hope US universities get fixed. Their current state is a great disservice to the future of the country.
This logic is flawed in that you are assuming no one else shares the same values as you do.
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Must be a skeevy website to just rather not have me than not spy on me
Tenure is a multi-year rat race with worse hours than a seed stage startup (to be fair to the startup, at least you have feedback in the form of sales and VC fundraising). The pay is bad and the politics are incredibly petty. Tick off the wrong person and your career is torched.
I don't like speaking ill of the recently deceased. But I also don't like jumping into conspiracy theories based on platitudes about "the system," when there are more obvious explanations: his last email is a work of unhinged paranoia and resentment, not truth-telling in the face of oppression. It is obvious that Brain was mentally unwell in his last few hours; I wonder how long that was going on.
HN ranking algo is really weird that way. You'd expect things to slide downwards, but they just teleport to page 10 or whatever.
The reasons why posts drop in rank are explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.