321–330 of 409 posts
Love it, when they then have branch offices, that "exclude" one another - as in you can not be active in both countries, without violating a law of one, and obviously bribing yourselves out of that to be active in both.
At least they prevent some moral philosopher from starving, who got bribed to write this.
I’m disappointed but not surprised that the title is editorialized. It specifically leaves off “whistleblower alleges”. It’s literally one disgruntled former employee claiming this. But as usual for HN these days a tiny populations claim - in this case a population of one - is stated as fact.
My work involves a public sector organization in Brazil. In the last years there was a big push towards microsoft products at my workplace, to a point where emails with announcements from corporate IT sometimes looks and sounds like spam pushing MS products. Now I'm left wondering if that's related to bribes here too, or if it's just bad judgement/taste from IT leadership.
All the blood, sweat and tears we gave during the early 2000's to make FLOSS the standard, how we advocated for it on grounds of openness and auditability, how it would - and did! - help foster a local industry... All this work and see it being undone by the current government and their cronies.
As a note, São Paulo state, where I lived, was a very reliable income source for Microsoft.
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act should be repealed and American companies should be allowed to compete on equal footing with their foreign competitors. No other country, even if it technically has an FCPA-like law on the books, actually enforces it to the extent the US does. It means that everyone is free to openly participate in bribery to win foreign markets, markets where bribery is just how business is done, wh…
I am against that. The result could be that US companies would go all in on bribing and make the countries even more corrupt. It would make the US even more hypocritical when they preach ethics to the world.
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Finally an episode of SoBC where Nelson ends up blindfolded, kidnapped and taken to a black ops site? /s Former here, too, I found it part of "big company" overhead. Had similar things many years ago at a different European based employer.
SoBC?
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SoBC?
Standards of Business Conduct. It is a yearly required training that pics up one year after the next.
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Finally an episode of SoBC where Nelson ends up blindfolded, kidnapped and taken to a black ops site? /s Former here, too, I found it part of "big company" overhead. Had similar things many years ago at a different European based employer.
SoBC?
If its true that microsoft were doling out 40k bribes, that would be less than five minutes of what an sbc episode must cost to produce. The irony.
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It’s really not the same thing. Bribery undermines the rule of law. Lobbying helps form it. The difference may seem subtle but it isn’t. If you believe US lawmakers are taking bribes please provide evidence because that is a Big Deal. If you believe lobbying is harmful to our democratic processes please present that argument directly.
> If you believe lobbying is harmful to our democratic processes please present that argument directly. Not OP, but it is easy to understand how lobbying is too close to a quid pro quo scheme. If a politician receives donations in any form, in order to push for legislation that may benefit the donors, how is it any different from bribery?
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> If you believe lobbying is harmful to our democratic processes please present that argument directly. Not OP, but it is easy to understand how lobbying is too close to a quid pro quo scheme. If a politician receives donations in any form, in order to push for legislation that may benefit the donors, how is it any different from bribery?
The rule of law. Subtlety matters. Calling lobbying bribery is apathy, which is uninteresting. Even worse, it’s ineffective. > If a politician receives donations in any form, in order to push for legislation that may benefit the donors, how is it any different from bribery? So, should I donate to a mayoral campaign that aligns with my beliefs? Is all money in politics evil, or is it just a matter of degrees? What if…
Making it legal doesn’t make it moral or ethical.
Bribes aren’t necessarily illegal either.
> So, should I donate to a mayoral campaign that aligns with my beliefs?
There is a very clear distinction between donating and lobbying. Political donations are typically not driven to any specific end, whereas lobbying seeks to influence specific legislation.
Saying that lobbyists look to “inform” the “ignorant” legislators is naive and disregards the fact that congress and senate people have enough staff at their disposal to do the necessary research to pass legislation.
Lobbyists aren’t experts. They are marketers. It seems that to you, a lobbyist is an expert in a field, like a doctor is an expert in medicine. In reality, a lobbyist is more akin to a drug sales rep, a marketer. Do sales reps accurately inform doctors about drugs, or do they try to get them to prescribe a certain brand?
Lobbying is then legalised bribery. In fact, the US is one of the few developed countries where blatant private enterprise interference is allowed at all levels of government.