A lesson they teach in $IVY_LEAGUE, "you all know whistle blowers don't end up well." Direct quote from $INFLUENTIAL_DUDE in response to $PUBLIC_THING.
Trust your gut. When it says leave, leave. Even if others encourage the opposite. Even if your extended family depends on your income.
Make the effort to build and maintain a strong social circle. Filter for integrity. Assiduously avoid those who distort truth for personal advantage.
The government->business pipeline is older than any living president. It's not like all the companies who founded Silicon Valley on government contracts lucked into it.
In particular, a sufficiently advanced business looks like an undemocratic, authoritarian, central-planning government. Basically, the problem with large corporations is that they are communist dictatorships.
And here I thought that once you include boards and shareholders, you get something isomorphic to democracy :).
If we're considering corporations to be "undemocratic, authoritarian, central-planning (...) communist dictatorships" inside, then so are all democratic governments. The "voice of the people" part of a democratic government is just a surface layer, the tip of an iceberg. Or, more charitably, a rudder of a ship - the part that sets the course, but is nevertheless insignificant in mass compared to the rest of the ship.
The bulk of every government is a top-down hierarchical structure, because it can't really be any other way. You can't hold votes on whether a particular clerk is supposed to be in a particular building on Monday 09:00, and whether they're supposed to approve the form you're trying to submit.
In a representative democracy you get a voice on who executes the orders regardless of whether you are rich or poor or smart or stupid or went to business school with who-knows-who.
Are they? Corporate shareholders have power of on-demand accountability and enough competency to grasp the goings on of a board meeting, that is not what a random _demos_ in a representative democracy is composed of and it changes the whole game, that's not a minor detail. Even besides the competency/knowledge problem, American citizens cannot, amongst themselves, zero external mediation, vote an elected official out of office as far as I'm aware.
If we were in Plato's perfect Republic where all the uninitiated adults were purged from the polis and there were only citizens trained since childhood to seriously consider matters of state, now we'd be in the same sport, if not ballpark.
That's true, and IMO, it's pretty much entirely the function of size. Modern governments are what you get when you try to organize millions of people - so it's not really surprising that, as a company grows, it starts to look like a government from the inside. It couldn't be any other way.
How would you feel if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission soft-balled Mr. Burns, then one of its commissioners jumped ship to work at Springfield Nuclear?
Even if that commissioner was an enlightened patrician of high moral character, it would create the appearance of corruption. And that alone is corrosive to the rule of law.
People with less integrity, people downstream in industry, might interpret that as a signal that regulators are a joke. They may go on television and say things like "I don't respect the Nuclear Regulatory Commission."
Part of the issue, IIRC, is that you want regulators who are experienced with what an industry does, and practically speaking the easiest way to get that is to hire from within the industry. We should probably keep that bit of the revolving door working.
The bigger problem is the reverse; we should really have the government do something like finance's "garden leave", where leaving employees are paid while banned from industry employment, so that whatever competitive info you had is outdated by the time you can take a job in industry again.
>How would you feel if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission soft-balled Mr. Burns, then one of its commissioners jumped ship to work at Springfield Nuclear?
If I'm from New Hampshire, Ohio, Maine, South Dakota or somewhere else government is still kinda sorta accountable I'm Outraged(TM).
If I'm from Massachusetts, Louisiana, California, New York, or somewhere else government has been unaccountable for generations I shrug and move on with life.
> it’s a brand new account calling out people in the Obama administration for corruption and ignoring all of the much more recent corrupt Republicans
To be fair, its possible that the poster was merely meaning that the template is “Hire the available ex-regulators of the party currently in power”, but was communicating that by applying the template to the current situation, where we are in the first year of an Administration, so the available supply of regulators meeting that description will generally be from the last Administration of the same party.
When Jamie Dimon discussed the warm relationship between Obama officials and tech in a public speech at Stanford, I assumed it was (1) common knowledge and (2) socially acceptable to discuss in public.
I think the current administration has made excellent personnel choices in the regulatory agencies. I am hopeful for the future.
But I don't think I "called out" anyone. I understand that expression to mean "seeking to direct reflexive mob anger toward a specific individual". It's the practice that's troubling, not the people.
I actually believe that most of the people engaged in this practice (revolving door) have impeccable moral character.
Unfortunately many people call out Obama specifically as a way to take a partisan political jab at the left especially on forums. Trump’s White House was full of crooks who really were there based 100% on who they knew since many were otherwise unqualified. It makes going back a president feel like cherry picking an example but I see you could have done it as Biden would draw from Obama’s sphere more.
I am not aware of the specific Dimon speech you mentioned. Ajit Pai had a close relationship with the ISPs and Telecommunications companies with all their attacks on net neutrality etc. so I do find that the argument that Democrats are so much cozier with tech to be a bit oversimplified.
I agree with your comment overall, just shedding some insights on my thinking
The recent Microsoft signed rootkit has specific requests for collecting CPU-ID. That says something about the state of device fingerprinting, but I'm not sure exactly what that is.
The burner model provides little security in North America. Big box retailers record device serial number to prevent return fraud. It is known that retailers sell transaction information. It is also known that retailers use facial recognition, wifi, app location data, and bluetooth beacons to identify customers, even customers who pay in cash.
It stands to reason that retailers link transaction information--including serial number--to unique individual identifiers. It is possible this data is traded.
It is depressing that people in Western democracies have to worry about authorship identification via printers the same way people in the DDR had to worry about authorship identification via typewriter. But here we are.
There are numerous commodity markets in which indirect purchases are commonplace.
These might be informal (e.g., used appliances) or organised (straw purchasers or organised purchasing of burner phones, the latter was a subplot of The Wire.
Of course, utilising previously used devices might itself lead to traces for those printers, though that's probably a relatively low risk: the likelihood of any given printer producing output that's generally identifiable is relatively low.
That said, a fair point and consideration for anyone facing this threat model.
Trust your gut. When it says leave, leave. Even if others encourage the opposite. Even if your extended family depends on your income.
Make the effort to build and maintain a strong social circle. Filter for integrity. Assiduously avoid those who distort truth for personal advantage.