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Comment by estearum | Hacker News Reader

The linked article doesn't even come close to suggesting money laundering. It really just argues that Wikimedia is similar to virtually every other successful organization on earth and that its bloat grows with its resources.

Wow insightful.

The mere existence of The Mythical Man-Month or Peopleware does not prevent this behavior. Turns out it's actually super, super hard to avoid. It's pervasive enough to have several books written about it, and several more angry blogs written about specific companies' failure to achieve the allegedly "easy, obvious" thing that very, very few companies actually succeed at doing!

Makes me wonder if it's not so obvious or so easy... hmm... Nah, probably everyone else is malicious and/or stupid.

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Money laundering has become a default catch all term for "monetary misuse / suboptimal allocation". At least among the general public.

I worked in AML tech for a bank earlier in my career. I put up a fight against this misuse of terminology for a while, but eventually just gave up. Just embrace that everything is money laundering to many people and life is easier.

What is government giving money to foundations that donate to other foundations that in turn lobby the government but money laundering?

Or worse, government giving favorable regulatory decisions to companies that donate to foundations that in turn lobby the government to do things that it has no public support to do?

These are all actual money laundering, and the salaries (and resumes) of the people who are involved reflect this. This is not "I don't like how they are spending money" or "they are incompetent." They're not hiring white shoe union busting law firms because they're dumb, petty, or short-sighted.

Post evidence of your claims please. The linked post above does not even allege this, never mind provide evidence of it.

Otherwise it seems like you're just describing abstract forms of malfeasance which is very uninteresting.

Words in general don't really mean much anymore, online anyway.

It reminds me of when health fads take off. Everyone "has OCD" or whatnot. I'd talk to people and they've given me a rundown of who they claim they were, but lol, they weren't that person.

Everyone can identify and use words however they want. Once it goes viral the meaning of the word changes. It's difficult to parse who people are nowadays cuz of it.

There's no sense fighting it. Someone will tell you you're wrong, you're out of touch, you just don't get it, or "your vibe isn't right".

I gave up when they changed the definition of literally to mean both literally and not literally, resulting in the word having zero purpose at all anymore as it is impossible to know the intention of the person saying it.

> Money laundering has become a default catch all term for "monetary misuse / suboptimal allocation".

No it definitely has not

Among the generally misinformed public, which I was clearly referring to, yes, it absolutely has. Everything is money laundering.

Do you think I was literally saying the financial definition has changed?

I don't think he thought that, he was probably expressing the view that he doesn't think the representative person's understanding of the term is the same as yours.

I have to confess, I've never heard anyone talk about money laundering in the way you suggest.

The root of this thread literally uses it in the way I observed. So...never? It's literally right there! I see similar uses everywhere (speaking specifically of the general public, not financial industry professionals), calling every misallocation, misspend, or even simple fraud money laundering. Reddit, HN, Facebook, LinkedIn...everything is money laundering.

Again, I'm kind of an expert in AML, so I probably pay attention to it way more than you do, and probably have a much better perspective on this. I constantly see people refer to almost all misuse or misallocation of funds as money laundering.

Maybe you just don't know what money laundering actually is? Because the vast majority of the public certainly doesn't.

Personally (n = 1), this thread was the first time I've seen the term "money laundering" used hyperbolically like this.

It's very very common. Look at the social media comments on any video that relates to fraud, grift, scams, or even a poorly run business. People say any use of money they don't like is "money laundering".

I think this does extend to fraud, grift, scams, and other illegal behavior. I have never seen "money laundering" extended to just "being bad at business."

On posts about companies spending so much money on AI (datacenter buildouts, tokkenmaxxing, etc.) comments wonder why they are doing this and replies say "money laundering", "definitely money laundering", etc. I'll post an example if I come across another one.

You guys do realize that part of money laundering is making it look like you're just bad at business, yeah? "Oops we accidentally overpaid some incompetent guys for this data center" is a smokescreen for "I am taking your data center money and giving it to my cousin"

From a strict "anti-money laundering" standpoint (how the bank thinks), money laundering is taking money that is suspected as being proceeds of criminal activity ("dirty" money) and making it indistinguishable from "clean" money. "Being bad at business" in a way that matches the definition of nepotism is not money laundering. There is a necessary component that the money is "dirty" and needs to be "cleaned", hence it is "laundered".

How about you just state clearly yes/no:

Are you accusing Wikipedia of actual money laundering?

If you are accusing them of being bad at business or bloat (which is all that's alleged in the article you linked to), then the answer is NO. So you should just say NO.

If you are accusing Wikipedia of actual money laundering, that is concealing the source of illegally gotten money, then the answer is YES.

Please reply YES or NO so we can have a single conversation about the claim being made.

Unfortunately the official definition of 'literally' now means both exact and exaggeration, so it is impossible to know what you are saying here /s

It is interesting how "enshittification" just happens because of scale.

People are really not curious enough about bureaucracy. We complain literally our entire lives about "bureaucracy" and all the bad outcomes it produces.

But I've met literally no one who thought "hmm... if there's this emergent phenomenon across virtually every single large-scale human endeavor... and that phenomenon seems to systematically produce undesirable outcomes... at the cost of billions of dollars or millions of lives... maybe I oughta inspect this phenomenon more closely!"

People have been told for so long that private companies are more efficient than government that they have started to simply believe it, as if the problems of large scale organisation aren't universal.

Some cracks have emerged in that, at least in the UK. Trains, water companies, etc, all used as solid examples of private sector waste and extractiveness.

Most people attribute that entirely to greed or monopoly rather than to it being a result of scale.

IMO its all three.

More importantly politicians and the civil service still believe that the private sector is automatically efficient and that bigger is better. Not a UK only problem either.

"Bureaucracy" has been an entire field of study for more than a century at that point. But WMF is not bureaucracy any more than the FIFA is bureaucracy. It is curruption; That of the stated ideals of the origin: non profit, decentralisation and democracy.

Maybe so, but the linked article doesn't even allege, much less prove that.

Yes. everyone kinda sucks in their own ways. Mostly not enough to matter in their lives, but in large groups, the suck adds up.

Another word whose usefulness has been degraded to just mean “bad behavior by an organization”.

With “enshittification”, Doctorow meant something specific, where a platform rises to popularity by serving its users, then betrays those users to its business partners to make more money, then finally betrays even those business partners to keep most of the value for themselves.

Anyway I guess Doctorow brought this on himself by choosing a word that’s fun to say but isn’t clear about what it refers to.

Doctorow approved the generic use. He said he never meant for "enshittification" to only ever refer to the platform lock-in pattern. It refers to any way that things get worse on purpose.

If that's really the case, people should stop using the term as though it has explanatory power.

Enshitification doesn’t just happen, it’s a choice to sacrifice quality and integrity for short term profit. There are plenty of large products and companies that haven’t gone this way.

This is called the Iron Law of Bureaucracy

Which as your article points out, is as easy to solve as reading The Mythical Man-Month. That's why it's an Iron Law. It's easy to remove!

Also, as you point out, it's actually the same as money laundering, which is an actual crime. So as it goes, every large organization is committing massive scale organized crime (to their own detriment, oddly enough), but they can stop doing so by just reading The Mythical Man-Month.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

You started the thread accusing a non-profit of actual organized crime, and then linking to (someone else's?) words, implying they endorse your claim, when it doesn't.

Not a time to flex the guidelines amigo. Maybe a time to clarify what you meant when you accused a bunch of people of a crime?

I don't think of non profit bloat as enshittification. Enshittification is gradual reduction in quality of a user facing service over time that used to be trusted. Here it's just a matter of (arguably) inefficient spending as fundraising had increased but I don't think there's any rollback in services.

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