"bribes" have a specific meaning. It requires quid pro quo. Otherwise donating to get your preferred politician elected wasn't illegal, nor was altering your stance on a given position to maximize donations you'd collect.
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.
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?”
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
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].
Isn't that what organizations like the ACLU are for? Except ACLU fights for civil rights whereas your hypothetical organization fights for consumer rights. The reason why it doesn't exist is that it suffers heavily from the free rider problem. Any individual's donation of $20 or whatever is unlikely to get them $20 worth of returns, because the lawsuit is either funded or not. Moreover you'd benefit regardless of whether you donated or not, so there's no incentive to donate.
The buyer at the university could just be doing their job, signing contracts to ensure (ideally) stable vendors and a good price by signing such a long contract term.
Coca-Cola is sort of like the Apple of cola in that they're the upmarket brand almost everywhere around the globe. Unless Coke has a sales, marketing, or branding angle (see, e.g., Disney deal mentioned elsethread), they won't discount nearly as deeply as Pepsi, which is perennially in second-place at best (Mt. Dew notwithstanding). Pepsi is the obvious choice for any outlet where your customers are captive (e.g. sit-down restaurants) and you don't otherwise care about looking cheap for not offering Coca-Cola.
I worked as a buyer in edu, oh the grease is built in to the system from the vendors who will frequently shower you with coffee and donuts to much friendlier offers to get sales.
Why is it so hard to imagine people who work in education would have flexible ethics for personal gain?
>shower you with coffee and donuts to much friendlier offers to get sales.
If I was working a cushy admin job, I'd need way more bribery than $5 worth of coffee and doughnuts to intentionally select a worse vendor, especially if the decision would negatively impact my colleagues and get me flak.
>Why is it so hard to imagine people who work in education would have flexible ethics for personal gain?
Because if you read the other comments, there are perfectly reasonable explanations that don't involve graft. Jumping to "bribe" every time there's bad behavior is just lazy thinking and means you don't actually figure out what the root of the problem is.
>Because if you read the other comments, there are perfectly reasonable explanations that don't involve graft. Jumping to "bribe" every time there's bad behavior is just lazy thinking and means you don't actually figure out what the root of the problem is.
Right. I'm sure, in spite of this and the decades of overwhelming evidence, this was all just a silly coincidence, and they can lower food prices now.
Edit: I'm shitlimited to five posts per X number of hours, so I'm going to respond here: the evidence is in TFA, thanks.
>in spite of this and the decades of overwhelming evidence
Where's all this "overwhelming evidence"? So far the only that's presented is "my university is pepsi only so there must be something shady going on" and "vendors buy me coffee so there must be administrators corrupting themselves and risking their 6 figure jobs for $5 worth of inducements"
edit:
>Edit: I'm shitlimited to five posts per X number of hours, so I'm going to respond here: the evidence is in TFA, thanks.
Searches for "bribe" and "kickbacks" don't turn anything up. If you're talking about the unsealed FTC complaint, that's anti-competitive behavior, but not the "kickbacks" that OP was talking about (ie. some administrator abusing their position of trust to personally enrich themselves). Both are bad, but they're not remotely comparable. For one, in the case of kickbacks, the organization and its members are harmed (through worse contracts), whereas for whatever walmart and pepsi agreed to, both benefited.
> shower you with coffee and donuts to much friendlier offers to get sales.
By bringing this up in a thread talking about kickbacks, it sounds as if you're trying to equate the two. Please don't equate this to a "kickback." It's not what that is. There's real standards to what denotes bribes and kickbacks and that's not what those are.
> flexible ethics for personal gain?
If you let the donuts influence your judgment, that is an ethical problem -- I agree. But if you operate in your organization's best interest you can enjoy the coffee and donuts without remorse.
>If you’re requesting certificates from our tlsserver or shortlived profiles, you’ll begin to see certificates which come from the Generation Y hierarchy this week. This switch will also mark the opt-in general availability of short-lived certificates from Let’s Encrypt, including support for IP Addresses on certificates.
Does that mean IP certificates will be generally available some time this week?
Now all servers can participate in Encrypted Client Hello for enhanced user privacy: if clients open TLS connections with ECH where the server IP is used in the ClientHelloOuter and the target SNI domain is in the encrypted ClientHelloInner, then eavesdroppers won't be able to read which domain the user is connecting to.
This vision still needs a several more developments to land before it actually results in an increment in user privacy, but they are possible:
1. User agents can somehow know they can connect to a host with IP SNI and ECH (a DNS record?)
2. User agents are modified to actually do this
3. User agents use encrypted DNS to look up the domain
4. Server does not combine its IP cert with it's other domain certs (SAN)
>Even if the general takes seen on water use is wrong, it's correct in that these companies don't have the best in mind for the average person.
That just sounds more like cope than anything else. eg. "AI companies sucking up all the water might not be a real issue, but I still think they're evil for other reasons".
If we apply your logic, would you say it's fair to go around and say "all teachers are bastards", when referring to teacher unions that make it hard to fire incompetent teachers? Or maybe "all doctors are bastards" when referencing how the american medical association (the trade association for doctors) makes it hard for more doctors to be admitted?
Sure, but one key difference is that if either of those groups steps outside the law, you can recourse to the law to check them.
Since police are part of the law, when they don't hold their own accountable, there's no recourse. And that's a real problem. This is before one even starts unpacking the knapsack of how much law is designed to protect the police from consequences of performing their duties (leading to the unfortunate example "They can blow the side off your house if they have reason to believe it will help them catch a suspect and the recompense is that your insurance might cover that damage.")
>Since police are part of the law, when they don't hold their own accountable, there's no recourse. And that's a real problem.
I don't see how this is a relevant factor for the two cases I mentioned. Sure, it's bad that are part of the justice system, and therefore you can't use the justice system to correct their misbehavior, but you're not going to involve the justice system for incompetent teachers, or not enough doctors being admitted. For all intents and purposes the dynamic is the same.
you are definitely going to start involving the justice system if teachers and doctors start physically abusing people, illegally detaining them and killing them!
I am not at all joking when I make the claim that police committing sex crimes is a problem that is frequently swept under the rug by both police internal affairs and the judicial system.
Your friends don't find it uneasy that you can be tunneling illegal activities through their internet connection and have the FBI knocking at their door in a few months?
Exactly, I have friends from other countries. Friends I really like, I would not give a VPN access to my internet connection to most of them. They have to be the perfect intersection of technically competent (so that their computer doesn't get turned into a botnet) and fully trustworthy.
I do actually give VPN access to my mother that is not technically competent but I have full access to her computer and locked her down as much as possible
Across 3 VPN providers I use, none of them have issues accessing reddit anonymously. There are nodes/regions that are blocked, but finding a working server isn't hard.
>And they often do not even allow registration from desktop:
You probably have a super suspicious browser fingerprint and/or IP reputation and they're using those measures as a mitigation without denying outright. Use a normie browser and a normal internet connection and account creation works fine.
There are BYOD prepaid providers that are even cheaper than that. The lowest you can get is ultra mobile's $3.50/month plan, but you need to jump through some hoops to get it working, like getting a physical sim in person. Tello is $5/month and you can activate online.
"bribes" have a specific meaning. It requires quid pro quo. Otherwise donating to get your preferred politician elected wasn't illegal, nor was altering your stance on a given position to maximize donations you'd collect.
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