171–180 of 241 posts
I wonder how similar bribery culture is to tip culture. In the US where we tip restaurant workers, restaurant wages are often much lower than comparable positions in industries that don't have tipping, so much so that the difference is often explicitly included in minimum wage laws. Do countries with more bribery experience a similar effect, where the wages of police officers and other bribery-prone worker are much l…
That reminds me of when my university kept sending me a $0 bill every month after I graduated. They kept sending them, so eventually I wrote a $0 check and sent it back in the business-reply envelope. I guess they were happy I had paid my bill because they finally stopped sending them.
Or you might be remembering this story from an email your mom forwarded to your MSN account in the mid '90s? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zero-dollars-and-zero-sens...
http://the-eye.eu/public/Books/SciFi_Fantasy/Fantasy/Dickson...
(Computers Don't Argue, Gordon Dickson, 1965)
That reminds me of when my university kept sending me a $0 bill every month after I graduated. They kept sending them, so eventually I wrote a $0 check and sent it back in the business-reply envelope. I guess they were happy I had paid my bill because they finally stopped sending them.
Worked with a guy that was fed up with the phone company, so he kept like a $0.11 balance due in his account, knowing that sending him the letters asking for him to pay the bill would cost the phone company more than the total was worth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> how we have a functioning society with such underfinanced and overworked police, even in the well to do urban areas. The answer is that we don't. If we did have better functioning police systems, you would see a lot more growth in a lot of Indian cities. The biggest cities escape the tyranny of local powers simply because people living in these cities accumulate vast financial resources to essentially circumvent Go…
Interesting, India reads like a libertarian paradise. I'd expect it to be an economic powershi.
That reminds me of when my university kept sending me a $0 bill every month after I graduated. They kept sending them, so eventually I wrote a $0 check and sent it back in the business-reply envelope. I guess they were happy I had paid my bill because they finally stopped sending them.
I once read a similar apocryphal narrative. Someone, kept receiving 0$ credit card bills and the company sent repeated reminders with warnings. The person called, sent letters to discuss the situation but to no avail. The person finally gave up and wrote a 0$ check and they stopped sending letters. However, it led to a computer systems crash as the credit card company software encountered a "Divide by Zero" error due…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I find it surprising how we have a functioning society with such underfinanced and overworked police, even in the well to do urban areas. At the risk of being downvoted, I feel compelled to offer a foreigner's perspective here. As a foreigner who has lived in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai for 2 to 6 months many times, I have to agree with the other commenter that I did not find a functioning society. Thi…
For the most part, a functioning government is non-existent in India. The primary activity of both the federal/central and state governments in India is theft (through bribes as well as taxes), and being a drag on the economy. It's not unlike a Mafia-run protection racket. If you don't pay bribes or taxes, you either get in trouble, or don't get basic services. A good chunk of the tax revenue is robbed by at various…
This is just nonsense. Taxation has nothing to do with theft.
> If you don't pay [...] taxes, you either get in trouble, or don't get basic services.
As you should. Not getting in trouble for tax evasion would be a sign of a dysfunctional government.
> A good chunk of the tax revenue is robbed by at various points due to corruption, and rarely does the majority of it actually get used for public services.
> So is this, of course. Up until around 1990, the governments agenda was perpetual poverty
People who are pointlessly evil, not just egoistic and corrupt, are rare. I don't think the Indian people managed to elect them into government for decades.
I wonder how similar bribery culture is to tip culture. In the US where we tip restaurant workers, restaurant wages are often much lower than comparable positions in industries that don't have tipping, so much so that the difference is often explicitly included in minimum wage laws. Do countries with more bribery experience a similar effect, where the wages of police officers and other bribery-prone worker are much l…
You've touched on one of the ways I think a country can end up with an ingrained police bribery problem. The government knows they need a larger police force but that would cost more than the government can afford. How can you have the police force you require without breaking the bank? Easy, just pay the police poorly but let it be known that you will look the other way when they top up their income. Once this relia…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
Trier made €0 notes with Karl Marx images on them to celebrate his 200th birthday... Which they sold for €3 each. https://www.thelocal.de/20180418/karl-marxs-birth-city-sells...
It's the zero-euro commemorative banknotes. Purely collectible items. I have a couple from France and Italy, and they were €1 each. https://eurocommemorative.com/en/13-0-banknote
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's that terrible win-win to everyone situation and that makes it very hard to destroy. It does make it sound like there's a bribery-free equilibrium really close by though. Like imagine all of these things happened as part of a single reform: - Policeman and management salaries go up. - Fines go down. - Taxes go up. - Anti-bribery enforcement goes way up. The idea would be to acknowledge that regardless of the br…
People don't respect police, so when government would want to massively increase their salaries, people would protest against it. Fines go down is a good thing for sure, but it'll reduce amount of money going to local budgets, so people in government will protest against it (because they'll need to find money to replace those from reduced fines). Taxes go up: nobody likes it. Anti-bribery goes way up: when everyone's…
Apply Peelian principles? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles)
(I've no idea how.)