anon_
1d ago
Yeah, you try to bribe them with $50K and they're gonna laugh. Their annual bonus is 5x that.
anon_
1d ago
Give it a day or two, but I predict a lot of "Why did you spend $50K of taxpayer dollars to try to entrap a high-level Republican on the basis of 'an unrelated investigation'?" takes.
The obvious answer is that they did the same for Menendez and Jefferson, despite the D in their name.
anon_
1d ago
It's a good chunk of most Americans' annual income, but it's not a lot in the tier of people we assume are running the upper end of world's most powerful government.
Your landscaper probably does a lot more work for a lot less money in the normal course of business than a corrupt public official does
Indeed. But the idea that he's doing so with capital worth more than the corrupt public official costs is the jarring part.
anon_
2d ago
DHS Secretary Homan was alleged to have been caught on video taking a bribe from undercover FBI agents. In the fog of war politics, who knows if this is actually true, maybe eventually we'll see the video and can make an informed judgment.
But forgetting whether or not it happened, the thing that always gets me on these cases is the paltry sums involved: $50K. By comparison, my landscaper drives an F150 Raptor, an $80K truck. Hard to imagine that he's driving around in something more expensive than a Cabinet member in the US government.
That got me into a rabbit hole of bribery cases across the political spectrum
- MA State Senator Dianne Wilkerson: an amount of cash that fit in her bra (really)
- USC basketball coach: $4100
- Mayor of Portage, Indiana James Snyder: $13,000
- US Representative Michael Myers: $50,000
- US Representative William Jefferson: Found with $90K cash in his freezer
The lack of ambition here is starling. I've heard cases of embezzlement in the billions (e.g. 1MDB) or at least the mid-millions.
Not sure I have an actual point here, but I guess it's that if someone is going to bribe you, insist on a real sum.
anon_
2d ago
Still has Major Questions problems though
Which is silly because the law already allows the administration to set the salary floor for H1Bs and you can easily convince yourself that you can raise exactly the same revenue that way, using authority you already have.
One of the most common tools of effective leadership (LBJ was famous for this) is deciding what you want to do and then finding an existing legal authority for doing it.
anon_
2d ago
Indians were much more willing to put up with crappy conditions and lower pay
The solution to that is the salary floor. Given that the modal diploma mill graduate isn't that smart, if you put the floor in the right place, firms won't pay that for what they get.
anon_
2d ago
As usual, the Trump admin picks a real problem and then decides on the most retarded possible solution and executes it with the finesse of a linebacker. Plus half of it is walked back already.
If the goal was to raise $100K over the 3 year term of an H1B, then raising the salary floor to about $200K or so which would easily raise $35K/pp/y. That's far simpler, fixes the corruption around the marginally-paid and aligns everyone.
anon_
5d ago
it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.
It will also be against the wishes of the Kirk, who notably thought South Park making fun of him was hilarious.
Not that the dead necessarily get a vote, but it's quite a strange thing to honor a man by doing the opposite of what he would have wanted.
anon_
6d ago
I think the cast of characters is a bit wider than that. Trump certainly isn't the same player as Cruz or Rubio.
anon_
6d ago
The only consistently free speech people have been the centrist democrats (Liberals who want higher taxes) and centrist republicans (Liberals who want lower taxes).
I dunno, Al Gore was a southern democrat and his wife was pretty clear about how she felt about naughty song lyrics.
anon_
6d ago
The point isn't about the best strategy knowing your opponent's strategy. If you knew your opponents strategy then just copying their move is the best.
The usual metric for rating success is one that works against the success-weighted average set of other strategies.
anon_
6d ago
The canonical solution to the prisoners dilemma is tit for tat with forgiveness.
I think we’ve got the tit for tat part. I’m not sure if we’re down with forgiveness yet.
anon_
8d ago
Yes. It also means that it is impossible to run the bank system with the priorities currently decided by the regulators without giving the banks discretion on who to serve.
Those two things can be true concurrently!
anon_
9d ago
I think the heavy regulation is not working in the direction you imagine: that regulators decided (for better or worse) that the tradeoff would be that consumers are protected from deadbeats and that banks would eat those costs.
anon_
9d ago
For political requests it gets a bit thornier and requires some nuance. How do you seperate 'illegitimate' govt requests (eg Trucker protests) vs 'legitimate' govt requests (eg financial sanctions on Russia)?
Indeed. And a third category is "predictive" in the sense of Epstein give that he was apparently in government favor until a point where his line went out and then they hung him out to dry.
In some sense, this is kind of the worst of all worlds: dump a politically connected guy today and get flamed by his friends. Keep him and then the moment he's out you'll be smeared along with him. No business wants to be in flapping in the political winds like that.
anon_
9d ago
This is not true. The financial industry provides normie customers will significant protection against various kinds of frauds in a way that is incompatible with allowing credit risks to continue to bank. It is not a ledger, it is a ledger with a complicated system of dispute resolution w.r.t entries on that ledger and the implicit line of credit that covers the total potential cost of those disputes.
You could imagine an "all transactions are absolutely final no matter what" kind of a financial system, akin to a blockchain. This is broadly incompatible with current expectations regarding fraud and disputes. It's also broadly illegal (see CFPB Reg E) to offer to consumers in the US. And having reasonable experience in adjacent fields, I'm pretty sure it's not a great idea.
anon_
9d ago
This is right, but it does then raise the obvious next question of how we can actually operationalize a distinction between the two.
anon_
9d ago
I think the majority of those decisions aren’t social pressure, they are vanilla business decisions based on risk.
When does a regular credit decision become a judicial matter?
anon_
9d ago
Those are focused on the fear of specific, articulable harm.
It's not something like "this business is dodgy and we don't want to take a risk that they welch on their debts and leave us to make all their customers whole at our expense".
anon_
9d ago
But he did have a lot of control over Wexner's money and was able to spend it as if it were his own, in turn enabling him to present the façade of really, really wealthy guy
Which in turn would let him get more private finance business.
After all, when choosing finance guys, it's an important indicia of competence that the guy himself isn't broke.
Of course, this can be gamed -- lots of those guys are in deep debt to fund an appearance of wealth that they wish to parlay into business opportunity. And many are indeed a house of cards.
There’s no way there’s enough information for this to be clearing.
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