If you find Ad-blocker blockers annoying, install a chrome extension and read the internet on your own terms.
See Also:
1. The Washington Post is blocking people with ad blockers from reading its articles –Business Insider
2. Equality of Information Access
Corporations have pulled some pretty dick moves, what with the Financial Crisis and all.
How come no one goes to jail for this stuff?
Because corporations have money, and it serves the public interest to negotiate a big fine rather than throw someone in prison.
Wait, why not both? Jail and fine?
Corporate cases frequently involve a deferred-prosecution agreement or non-prosecution agreement.
It is difficult for underfunded government agencies to police giant corporations, so they work together to find a solution. In exchange for lenience, the corporation institutes reforms to monitor its future behavior.
But what about the execs running the criminal enterprise? What happens to them?
Usually nothing. How do you pin corporate wrongdoing to an individual1?
After BP exploded an oil rig and dumped 36 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, most people agreed that Tony Hayward was kind of a dick and should probably be punished.
The standard for a criminal charge is guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Easy to prove for crimes like drug possession or loitering, harder for things like selling bad mortgages.
Can we prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that Tony Hayward personally caused an oil rig to explode? Probably not. So prosecutors go after low-level workers. That’s why two of the guys aboard the oil rig are still being tried for involuntary manslaughter. Everyone else walked.
There’s enough evidence for billion-dollar fines, but not enough evidence to convict the people in charge?
We’ve tried.
In 2005, KPMG got a deferred prosecution deal for some accounting fraud. Nineteen former executives were charged. KPMG offered to pay their legal fees, capped at $400,000.
Thirteen of the indictments were thrown out on Sixth Amendment grounds. The judge ruled that the defendants had effectively been denied counsel, because $400,000 is nowhere near enough to pay for white-collar defense, silly2.
With Enron, Kenneth Lay’s defense cost $25 million and Jeffrey Skilling’s cost $70 million.
Salary for SEC enforcement lawyers, by the way, range from $117,568 to $184,097.
You get what you pay for3.
In other words, we’ve got a limited budget, and there’s a bigger degree of difficulty in going after big banks with powerful lawyers. Therefore the SEC shouldn’t give in to the “temptation” of tangling with big banks because, rhetorically speaking, those shots are harder to make. Better to go for uncontested dunks and lay-ins than heave deep threes at the buzzer.
This is coward’s language. No true cop would ever think like this.
1Sometimes it’s easy, like when the corporation is called “Bernard L. Madoff Securities LLC”.
2There are more technicalities. KPMG attorneys allege that prosecutors pressured the firm into capping the fees. The prosecution denied this, either way it was a display of incompetence.
3Court-appointed attorneys make $94 an hour, with max pay of $7000. That’s way less than I paid my lawyer.
Books I Read Over Labor Day Weekend:
For sensationalized stories, read Matt Taibbi’s The Divide. For data and case studies, read Garrett’s Too Big to Jail.
See Also:
Overcriminalization of the 99%, Undercriminalization of the 1%
If you’re in California and want to rent an elephant, just text Magic. We’ll make it happen. pic.twitter.com/CmSwm3A52A
— Magic (@magic) July 5, 2015
My coworkers use a concierge service called Magic. It’s not a concierge so much as a personal bitch who caters to your every need. At a price, but that price is expensed to my company.
Need to pick up your lunch order? A Magic Bitch will do it for $20. Need to feed the parking meter? Magic Bitch will do it for $15. For an intern’s birthday, we told Magic to fetch us a cake and balloons. Nothing says “We appreciate you as an employee” like birthday shit delivered by a minimum-wage contractor.
The math works out. Based on my compensation*, I cost my employer $80 an hour. I assume my coworkers cost at least as much, because I was too stupid to negotiate my salary. To outsource a 15-minute task like feeding a meter actually saves the company money.
And yet I feel like an entitled piece of garbage using Magic. Do I deserve a Personal Bitch just because my employer pays me more than Magic pays its contractors?
This level of entitlement only exists where there is a massive wealth gap. With a shortage of mid-wage jobs, people who would be earning middle-class salaries have no choice but to become low-wage contractors.
Where have all the mid-wage jobs gone? Blame robots, Chinese outsourcing, VC bubble, whatever. If economic trends continue, more people will fall into contracting careers. On-demand Personal Bitch services will proliferate. And people will stop thinking of it as entitlement, but just how the world is supposed to be.
*Basic salary + employment taxes + benefits generally amount to 1.25 to 1.4 times the base salary. Divided by 40 hours per week x 49 weeks.
See Also:
Silicon Valley’s Biggest Worry Should Be Inequality, Not a Bubble –wired
I disagree! Silicon Valley thrives on inequality. If it goes away, so will all these on-demand startups!
I asked my boss’s boss if I could help with business development.
No, he said. We need more developers.
Developer. I hate that word. It’s a term used by liberal arts majors who don’t know what the people building the product actually do.
The guy making the iPhone app? Developer. Systems engineer? That’s a developer. The CTO? Developer. QA test automation? Another developer. The sysadmin? Such a developer!
Later I was debating with two founders, both technical, whether a good engineering employee must care about the company’s product.
Of course, one said. Otherwise why would they bother working?
No, the other argued. Some good engineers enjoy building for the sake of it, regardless of the product.
I know engineers who enjoy building for the joy of building. Most good engineers are like this. Unfortunately, there aren’t many job opportunities for these engineers.
A position for an engineering-driven engineer needs to be challenging, with room for growth. The job must require constant learning. Good engineers who aren’t learning turn into bad engineers.
Anything less, and you need an engineer motivated by the product. Or a developer, whatever that is.
I am currently running a reverse raffle to give away the items in my storage unit. A reverse raffle is one in which I pay YOU to take a ticket. In exchange, you are obligated to take possession of any prize you win.
I told my coworkers to sign up but they all declined. My boss called this is a terrible idea. The fact that you have to pay people to accept prizes means it’s stuff that no one would want, he says.
That’s not true! Because of the endowment effect:
Suppose you ran into a new parent who offered to sell you their snot-nosed child for a dollar. Or give it to you for free. Would you take it?
Then suppose that, after a night of heavy drinking, you unwittingly conceive. Nine months later, you have a crib lizard of your own. It looks much like the previous child, because all babies look the same.
Do you drown it in the bathtub? Sell it on the street for a dollar?
Probably not. We value things that we own more than identical things that we don’t own.
So my raffle prizes are like children, or a left gonad — you don’t really want the thing at first, but then the concept of ownership grows on you and after a while you can’t imagine living without that item.