100% this: if you go every axis of what differentiates staff from senior one will see deep down it is about asking questions: either yourself or helping others ask the right questions (e.g. mentoring, impact/are we solving the right problem, etc.)
It used to be illegal to bribe. Used to... Make a law impossible to enforce, and you suddenly transform the act to a totally legal one, at the expense of people losing trust in the system (specifically the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress). And at some point, the system breaks.
Don't you see, someone just has to say "this is not a bribe", and, like magic, they can finagle their way out of their corruption. "Bribery" has a very narrow definition, which conveniently doesn't apply to the corruption in question.
Does that work? Congress is so broken now that nothing happens. Sayings like “act of Congress” describing slow progress it would be simple for the lobbyist to just back another candidate to eliminate this “would be a shame” threat
Are there any countries that don't use the quid pro quo definition of bribery? At best, they try to keep a lid on it by capping campaign contributions, but that's not really "bribery is illegal" (if we accept the more liberal definition), more like "there's a limit on how much you can bribe".
The Ottoman Empire kind of acknowledged the futility of trying to suppress corruption, opting instead to codify it and set thresholds for excessive abuse.
Progressive for its day, it only partially succeeded since enforcement was no less prone to corrupt influence.
As the romans famously said, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
Literally: “Who will guard the guards themselves?”
It's why the 3 branches of government worked so well for the US for so long. They each want to protect themselves, and are effectively at odds with each other unless there is almost universal agreement on something.
However that has completely fallen apart with a toothless Congress, and a executive branch that can stack the 3rd branch with similar minded idealogues.
There are "bribes" and then there are "bribes as recognized by the law".
We all know bribes happen, but for the law to recognize a bribe as a bribe basically requires the two parties to have a signed and notorized legal document statating that they are knowingly entering into a quid pro quo, and that both parties are aware it's illegal to do so. Anything less than this, and it will never be prosecuted.
As Matt Levine points out, the revolving door often works in more interesting ways.
If you are a bureaucrat, the way to maximise your next paycheck is often to be especially tough on companies (and on the margin push for more complicated rules that you can be an expert in). Simplified, the logic is "See how tough I am, you better give me a good paycheck to make sure I'm playing on your team."
The beauty is: the bureaucrats at the regulator don't even need to consciously think this way. They can be tough out of the ideological and conscientious conviction at the bottom of their heart, and the mechanism that gives them comparatively higher pay afterwards still works. Being tough also raises your profile, when you are but a junior or middling drone.
The logic you are describing might work, but only for the most senior appointees who already have a high profile.
the logic they describe does work. A lot. The Rollback of Dodd-Frank [0]. Recent malpractice reform (in the wrong direction) [1]. Drilling leases [2]. Asbestos. And so on and so on [3].
Tiger's in the house, y'all. And the roof is on fire. And the water is unavailable because it all got sold to nestle [4].
But anything more than 1 vote assigned for your usage is quid pro quo (since you will get to enjoy policies that you "paid" for) when others only get a single vote.
San Fran historically saw a ton of investment from the Navy, not the Army. The article provided -- which has wayyyy to many underlined links, hideous article -- only goes back to the ~60's, but the USN and USMC were heavily involved in Cali developments long before.
The general point -- the DoD puts a lot of money into Silicon Valley research -- stands, however.
I had the same question, but I can only speculate at the moment.
The cynical part of me thinks in a similar line: create an artificial differentiation and push people to upgrade.
If anyone has any real clues that they can share pseudonymously, that would be great. Not sure which department drove that change.
They definitely do that. You could get 64gb ram without going up to the top spec of the Max tier of CPU in the M1 and M2 generations, but with the M4 Pro you can only do 24 or 48gb, while on the lower spec M4 Max you can only do 36gb and nothing else, only the absolute best CPU can do 64, therefore if you were otherwise going to get the 48gb m4 pro, you'd have to spend another ~$1200 USD to get another 16gb of ram if all you cared about was ram.
There may be a technical explanation for it, but incentives are incentives.
you can get 64GB on the mini with M4-Pro so that lays credence to no technical reason, but at the same time if the business reason was strong, why allow it on the mini but not in a macbook? I think this is equally likely to be due to reducing SKUs or something. E.g they found that most people buying 64GB ram do also buy the upgraded processor.
Ya, what you're talking about did spread a bit on the various forums when it became clear they were aggressively segmenting that market.
> E.g they found that most people buying 64GB ram do also buy the upgraded processor.
It seems like the way they've divided them, there's at least one more SKU than there would otherwise be, because of that base M4 Max with only 36gb of ram (can't get it with 24,48,64,96), so if you want the extra few cores, you now have to go to the max Max to get any more ram.
It took me a while to commit to the purchase, because I felt like an idiot implicitly telling them I'm okay with that bs pricing ladder, but at least I didn't over extend and go for the Max. They already charge comically too much for ram and storage.
This. The industry is a hot-pot of gut feelings/seat of my pants mixed with true engineering and mathematical rigor.
It is all hit or miss. Everyone claims they do high-quality, critical software in public, while in private, they claim the opposite, that they are fast and break things, and programming is an art, not math.
And then you have venture capital firms now pushing "vibe coding."
Software development is likely the highest variance engineering space, sometimes and in some companies, not even being engineering, but "vibes."
It is interesting how this is going to progress forward. Are we going to have a situation like the Quebec Bridge [https://colterreed.com/the-failed-bridge-that-inspired-a-sim...]. The Crowdstrike incident taking down the whole airspace proved that is not enough. Market hacks in "decentralized exchanges," the same. Not sure where we are heading.
I guess we are waiting for some catastrophe that will have some venture capital liable for the vibe coding, and then we will have world wide regulation pushed on us.
Veteran Cryptographer and Distributed Systems Engineer with multiple large-scale, high-value distributed systems delivered. (incl. byzantine fault tolerance & consensus protocols.) Experience bringing secure and private machine learning to production, from low-level code to engaging B2B customers and directing projects on a global scale (U.S., Europe, Asia). Passionate about leading, mentoring, and providing high-impact.
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