The absolute worst scenario happened • Hacker News Board

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#511

Post by jessaustin » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 1:02 AM UTC

kbelder wrote: post #293

raffraffraff wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I buy expensive eggs, milk and cheese is that I know that the supermarkets fuck over the farmers. I never buy the supermarket brand, unless it's the last one on the shelf. The price difference is sometimes 1.5x but unless you're really "broke" broke, you don't notice the difference. It's a few cents a week.

I always buy the supermarket brand, even though I can easily afford more. It's not because I want to save a few pennies on each purchase; it's helping to drive prices down on all overpriced goods, helping out those really in need. Same reason I avoid organic whenever possible. We don't need boutique food.

That doesn't even make sense in neoclassical economics. One person's effects on the market are necessarily tiny, but if buying more of Brand X has any effect it will be to drive up the price of Brand X. You're actually harming "those really in need", and you should feel bad about it.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#512

Post by yellowapple » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 1:03 AM UTC

criddell wrote: post #261

Accujack wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's slightly more complicated than that, depending on how much time has passed since the creators of the system left, but you're correct in general. Usually, since admitting that they were stupid to let all the knowledge of the system walk out the door requires more emotional and intellectual flexibility than managers who let this sort of thing happen possess, the biggest obstacle isn't even the money... it's gettin…

The person who started the thread added this comment: > The company that built this ERP solution went bankrupt 6 years ago, and we don't have the source code. It uses PostgreSQL and MySQL, and also has a built-in key-value database for which none of us has any credentials. We don't have the source code for this software (it's built in C and delivered to us as compiled packages..). Sounds like finding their old employ…

> and hope they kept a copy of the source code

Which from a legal perspective might be fraught with peril, at least in theory. In practice, if the company folded then it'd depend entirely on the litigiousness of the current owner of the copyright, which could range from "nobody" to "some holding company consisting almost entirely of lawyers chomping at the bit to eat you for dinner".

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

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Post by nate_meurer » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 1:18 AM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #494

DubiousPusher wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market answer to that is, the seller underpriced their services to begin with, regardless of the personal motivation for increasing the price. To clarify, the market would likely not allow this specific work to be sold at this price normally. But the buyer wasn't just buying specific work they were buying specific work to be completed by a specific date. The work in isolation does not have this value but the work…

Bullshit. The way the story is told the price doubled after and because of the CEO screaming. The market has nothing to do with that except the good old "The fair price is the one that god paid, uh.” I suppose.

> "The fair price is the one that god paid, uh.”

This is literally the definition of price discovery in a free market. If the price was not worth the service the company was to receive, they would not have paid it.

The fact that they did pay it clearly indicates that the first price was far below what the "market" would bear.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

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Post by perl4ever » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 1:22 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #338

FireBeyond wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of years ago, a serial offender food producer was raided, multiple times. 600+ undocumented workers were found, and all spoke of management knowing their status. The workers were detained, deported, and so on. After several raids, not so much as a misdemeanor was levied against a single person, nor a fine to the company in general.

See Postville Raid [1] That was in 2008. The company owners were some prominent Jews, and the political fallout was so severe that immigration raids pretty much stopped after that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postville_raid

I don't know anything about it, but from the Des Moines Register, it seems like a lot of people felt there was a miscarriage of justice:

"There was false testimony and willful manipulation, and that makes this a shocking case of prosecutorial misconduct."

"An unprecedented letter, recently sent to Kevin Techau, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, signed by 107 former high level Department of Justice officials, FBI directors, federal judges and prestigious law professors attests to the extraordinary prosecutorial misconduct which exacted the most possible punitive sentence for Rubashkin"

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/i...

Trump commuted Sholom's sentence in 2017, apparently.

I'd suggest a different phrase than "prominent Jews"; the family are "ultra-Orthodox Jews of the Lubavitcher hasidic movement" not representatives of some sort of Jewish privilege in general.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

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Post by xupybd » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 1:39 AM UTC

ycombinete wrote: post #322

tofuahdude wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this with all my heart. You did exactly the right thing at every step.

Funnily enough it made me sick to my stomach. I manage a small company and the idea of being extorted in such a blasé and psychopathic fashion terrifies me to even think about.

I hear what you are saying, but it's a bad place to be in when one person can be so critical they can charge that much for four days work.

I feel for them but they failed to protect themselves.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

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Post by stubish » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

shakna wrote: post #505

ihsw wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being paid $5/hour farming in Australia vs $0.50/hour assembling shoes in Malaysia. Wow, such exploitation. "Exploitation" is a relative term, some people would rather be exploited in the countryside of a first-world nation rather than the countryside of their homeland.

> Being paid $5/hour farming in Australia vs $0.50/hour assembling shoes in Malaysia. Wow, such exploitation. The Australian national minimum wage is $19.84/hr. Getting paid about a quarter of minimum wage is very clearly exploitation. There may be other benefits for actually working in Australia, but that's not really relevant here when you're trying to attract native Australians to work for you.

In particular, when the wage is low enough you have slavery in all but name. People working for your shitty pay staying in your shitty dormitory eating your shitty food because they can't afford not. The end result people leaving when visas run out with more debt, and headlines about people forced to pick fruit in bikinis and allegations of sexual assault, because that happens when some people gain that sort of power.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

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Post by Rendello » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

Eremotherium wrote: post #166

driton wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds very interesting, but the story seems to be behind a paywall. I found some other articles[0][1] related to the incident, however none of them seem to mention the flying of a hard drive across continents. 0: https://www.zdnet.com/article/ransomware-the-key-lesson-maer... 1: https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/when-the-screens-went-bla...

Or if you want the story as a podcast I can wholeheartedly recommend this episode (and the podcast in its entirety) of Darknet Diaries: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/54/

A similar podcast, Malicious Life, just released a two-part episode about it too:

https://malicious.life/episode/episode-106/

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

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Post by mixedCase » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 2:38 AM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #482

mixedCase wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, you know, you let unprofitable endeavors be substituted by profitable ones, and you just import food from different places where it is profitable. Just make sure not to wage war with them all. That's always an alternative to subsidies and tariffs, but it's not as politically useful.

This is how the US gave up its ability to manufacture so many goods.

"gave up" sounds like an unnecessarily ominous take on "delegate". But what's your exact point? Do you believe this is an irremediable situation or that know-how has been lost to time in the age of information?

I'm assuming you're implying a conversation about China and their manufacturing capabilities. But worst case scenario short of nuclear war, assuming US-China burns bridges and somehow for some reason now US is fully unable to import Chinese manufactured goods; how does this eliminate the US and all other countries from investing in an area that has now become more profitable? You could argue that prices would increase, but then again you aren't owed cheap manufacturing, and subsidies and tariffs are paid by either the taxpayer or the consumer (which tends to have a knock-off effect on the rest of economy, anyway). There was never a free lunch.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

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Post by wonderwonder » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 2:58 AM UTC

Leherenn wrote: post #137

wonderwonder wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does getting a new job work? You tell the new company that you have to give 3 months notice? That's some long term planning on the part of the hiring company.

Yes exactly. Sometimes they ask you if you can negotiate with your employer to shorten this period, which is often the case. Of course, they would rather it was shorter, but hiring is already a multi-months long process in most cases, so a few more months is inconvenient, but not the end of the world. If you need someone now, you hire contractors.

Interesting. Does it go for firing as well? Is it very hard to fire someone without providing the 3 months notice?

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#520

Post by yellowapple » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 3:04 AM UTC

clipradiowallet wrote: post #414

paulz_ wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought about that before. You get the call. "It's 30 minutes away. I'll be there in 10" If anyone happens to know of a career path or company that does that sort of work I would be interested to hear about it. Bonus points if the pay is half decent.

I don't know of a company that does this sort of work, but I know of some technologies that experts in receive these types of calls. The one that comes to mind is an ERP-focused database system. It's called "Progress" by "OpenEdge". IMHO, it's awful , but this has no hindered adoption in the slightest. I wrote Progress/4gl (their query language) often enough in a prior position to have it on my resume. Every 2 or 3 m…

I've gotten a few pings along similar lines for my HighJump experience (warehouse management system, for those not acquainted). And much like OpenEdge, it's pretty... rough around the edges (at its core it's basically a runtime for a VM that's programmed with a "language" (if you can call it that) driven entirely by conditional GOTOs developed entirely in a half-baked SQL-backed IDE called "Architect"; this is paired with a DB schema from hell for all data storage, and it's filled to the brim with sprocs because even fucking T-SQL is more ergonomic than anything doable in Architect). And yet, it was actually kind of fun (in the twisted, Dwarf-Fortress-esque sense of the word) to hack on that system and abuse the hell out of it.

And for some reason warehouse managers seem to swear by it, so it still gets a decent number of new customers - meaning those customers need implementers. And since it's a giant pile of hacks, the average deployment needs a whole lot of customizations - so more implementation man-hours, and a steady stream of maintenance man-hours. Thus, I get pinged every once in awhile for some long-term contract. Too bad they didn't ping me when I was actually looking for work last year, else I probably would've accepted one for the hell of it. Still tempted to; would be an interesting side job, albeit probably soul crushing.