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A server that wasn't meant to exist
407 jaypatelani 146 5/14/2025, 3:50:30 PM it-notes.dragas.net ↗
We once got audited by a government agency. Said government agency had been extensively burdened with restrictions in its operation by lobbying from the NFP space.
After completing the audit, the gentleman running the government agency had a press release more less saying "I think it would be best if we were allowed to release our findings where they pertained to the expectations citizens have for the not for profit space, and not just where we find outright illegal behaviour. People should be able to understand exactly how much of a charities funding is used for its actual charitable purpose, and how much of its funds are effectively gifts for directors and staff"
Which sort of sums it up. Graft goes on it just finds a legal path.
Covers full charities, and other legal statuses like public beneficials etc.
There is no requirement to disclose financial or charitable donations under law, and the company pays no corporate taxes as a result of being owned by the Foundation.
Some amount of creative disruption is needed to incentivize innovation, but there are roadblocks against that created by the families who ancestors took advantage of creative disruption 50-70 years ago.
Bosch, Thyssenkrupp, Aldi, Lidl, Bertelsmann, etc all do that.
[0] - https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=f1b666a8-1257...
Here's a refresher: What you spend is your measure of failure. What you get is your measure of success. What I get is not a whole lot (and yes I value and want to see social goods like great healthcare, education, transportation, etc, because those things are good for me and good for my business) and what I spend is at atrocity levels, which makes this a situation that incentivizes me to lobby and otherwise legally manage those expenses.
Spoken like a true philanthrope!
I personally hate to see homelessness in society, especially child homelessness,and I personally give to charities that I think are efficiently working to end that. It's not obviously rational in the same way my preference for everyone to have access to high quality health care, high quality education, high quality transport is. It still breaks my heart when I see government spending money on "affordable housing" that is actually still just overpriced housing that is subsidized, instead of doing cost effective and intelligent things to the policy they control that is causing a massive chunk of the housing price bubble.(i.e. the cost of just interest on the loans to go from owning the land to occupancy are approaching 100k a door in many places in Canada, why are you spending 30 million to build 25 door of "affordable housing"? spend 30 million getting the permitttime to weeks from years so that interest costs per door are a tiny fraction of what they are and incentivize massive more supply pushing all housing costs down for way more benefit for everyone. Once you stop the stupid you are directly responsible for then consider building affordable housing for the fraction of need that is left.
Its also my experience that the reverse is true, small charities tend to be staffed by true believers who are working as hard as possible towards their goal.
Same.
I did some consulting for a separate branch of the same organisation.
They only had ~4 full time staff, people who had been promoted out of the volunteer pool. There was a small amount of nepotism, but everyone getting paid was absolutely crazy about the purpose of the organisation. And IIRC the salaries were very low.
Compare that to the branch I existed in, and it was chalk and cheese. Layers and layers of do nothing management drawing spectacular wages and finding ways to send themselves to fabulous parties and media events.
There was a component of the business focused on rehabilitation, and it operated for 3-4 years with only 6 or so staff. They would go on fantastic rehab holidays to demonstrate the benefit of their programs. Unfortunately for those first years they struggled to find volunteers for their rehab programs, so they were constantly sending their own staff on tours of europe or sailing adventures etc.
Large dis-organizations with many stakeholders have the same dynamics.
Governments at least are inclined to help people whereas enterprises aren't.
But my "And in this crazy company we had multiple competing teams with different management responsible for IT infrastructure" stories pale in comparison with his "Well we have 12 teams in 3 separate lines of business technically spanning 2 ministries" stories.
They get well kept mind. But they never "own" the proceeds. IIRC one of the directors of mine was found with 3 corporate vehicles assigned to him.
Now on the flipside, being upper management in the same charity was a goldmine. Upper 6 figure salary, no expectations, vendors taking you on substantial holidays and meals to get your business, low 6 figure bonus every 12 months.
Different worlds tbh.
This is incorrect and dishonest. The restrictions come from government employees and elected officials. The lobbyists cannot force them to do anything. These are facts, not opinions.
If your decision makers are corrupt and not acting in your best interests, then you need to hold them accountable for that. I've never heard a single person on HN (or real life in my country) say "I was tracking the bills that my senators voted on, noticed they voted for something bad, and sent them a letter", or voted against them next election cycle, or anything similar, because almost nobody does it.
This is a failure of democracy, on the part of the citizens, because democracy isn't just voting - it's monitoring the behavior of those you voted for and holding them accountable. (I'm not saying anything about people you didn't vote for, for obvious reasons)
If you are not keeping track of what your representatives are doing, and voting for them anyway, you are actively making the situation worse.
Sure, lobbying needs to be much more regulated or outright banned in many countries (including my own) - but even an individual of below-average intelligence can see why even if lobbying is banned, all of the above still applies - if you're not keeping track of your representatives actions, even if they're not being lobbied, they can and will continue to act in their own interests and sacrifice yours, and you're failing your country.
Lobbying is not the root problem - corruption and lack of accountability are.
I disagree in part.
You are correct that politicians should share some of the blame, but as we know the breed of insect known as politician lacks any kind of spine, they tend to bow down to any lobby that is large enough to cause them any electoral fright.
In this instance, we had a government scrap this regulatory body entirely, and the next government restored it but "upon consultation" left the teeth out.
Everyone sucks here as they say on reddit.
>If you are not keeping track of what your representatives are doing, and voting for them anyway, you are actively making the situation worse.
Classic beige dictatorship. Theres no way to keep a government accountable for the small actions that are near or completely bipartisan. They just make the election about some big other thing and keep getting away with it. People are forced to judge parties as a whole, and it sucks.
>Lobbying is not the root problem - corruption and lack of accountability are.
Honestly its the entire system as designed. Theres no way to sting a government over a single issue. Especially if 90% of the voters dont care about the issue.
Yes, politicians do lack spine and are manipulated, but there's ample evidence that they can get "electoral fright" directly from the populace. We had an example of that just a few months ago when Musk threatened to fund advertisements against Republican senators who voted against some of Trump's bills. That's a specific, concrete, recent example of congressmen being afraid of their constituents' voting power - and there are many others.
"Beige democracy" is a term that I've never heard before, and searching for it lead me to Charlie Stross' article[1], which is extremely interesting and I'm glad that you brought up. I don't fully understand this concept, I'll have to think about it more.
I partially agree with
> Theres no way to keep a government accountable for the small actions that are near or completely bipartisan.
because,
> They just make the election about some big other thing and keep getting away with it. People are forced to judge parties as a whole, and it sucks.
...but I don't agree with it completely. It's still possible to use voting power to discriminate between candidates in a party - that's what primaries are for, after all - such that the citizens don't (always) have to choose between "betraying their party" (even though that's a concept which I think is somewhat harmful to democracy) and forcing their representatives to be non-corrupt and address a particular issue.
Sure, it's harder with the system that we have, but definitely not impossible.
I think that the root of the problem is this:
> Especially if 90% of the voters dont care about the issue.
If people cared, we could have ranked-choice voting and get out of this vicious cycle of polarization that we're in. If people cared, they could threaten to vote out their representatives when they don't do the right thing - and they only have to do that once or twice a generation for it to work! If people cared, they'd could make "goodness lists" of how many times their representatives betray them. If people cared, they could bundle a bunch of small issues together into larger political movements that could get enough traction to get implemented.
I agree the system is "working as designed", but that the system's behavior is a function of the effort that the citizens invest (and the general moral character of the society (and other things), which is rapidly failing, but that's separate), and that the perverse behavior we're seeing is because the value we're plugging into that function is "people REALLY do not care".
Lobbying enables that more, sure, and I'm supportive of cutting it back, but the root problem is so much more important to address, that it's almost better to intentionally leave lobbying the way it is in hopes of forcing the populace to confront the root issue, because solving that is so incredibly important.
Thoughts? Thanks for the great comment!
[1] https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/politic...
This story even hints at a common theme that happens even when people aren't trying to destroy data - that some people will tear down whatever they inherit, then blame their predecessors for the problems that result.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/195lc8/whe...
(Reddit, because Dilberts creator and his website have gone off the rails)
I've even created automated invoices for some companies and realized that some data was missing for months. And yet they got paid significant amounts. I realized that the invoices could have been for just about anything and they would have gotten paid ...
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/25/706715377/man-pleads-guilty-t...
I did work in a place where a manager was invoicing monthly "external design work" to the company to the tune of 5x his own salary, because the company's designer was "overwhelmed".
In the end he was just paying the hired designer a little extra to drag her feet and paying a Fiverr freelancer to do some cheap mockups with Figma. And obviously cashin' in the rest.
I only found out about several months after I left. It was interesting for me to have all this revealed because this guy was actively working to undermine all other engineering teams, with gossip and by blocking work. I didn't interact much with him or at all, but he was part of why I left.
The fun part: he was only fired a few months after the BOARD ITSELF fired the CTO, CPO and CEO all in the same day.
The company was 90 employees when I joined, 900 when I left, zero in 2024, and now was sold for scrap to a micro-sized competitor.
I wish I was a writer because the stories I have of that place would be an amazing book.
When a new CTO started, he actually checked it out on his first week and discovered the company emitting invoices belonged to the PM.
The CTO also demanded talking with the designer from Fiverr and in the end the amount of money actually paid to him was negligible.
I never really understood the involvement of the internal designer but she was also fired on the spot together with the PM and the company's highest paid engineer (but I don't think this one is involved).
Fun story, which likely has versions everywhere of someone bilking the company through fake contract work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disrupted:_My_Misadventure_in_...
I can say that the people we hired from HubSpot were 100% frat-house-boys so I 100% believe it.
But back to the company I worked, there were very stupid shit going on:
Around #MeToo, there was a group meeting with all men in the company because of fears of sexual harassment issues. Nobody close to me had any idea about the root cause, and there were some very strangely sexist comments in the meeting. Some people (including one later fired for non-sexual harassment) made it a personal soapbox and went into rants. The CEO completely mishandled it.
Also there was once an anonymous blog about the practices of the company that was totally blown out of proportion by management, and all employees had to attend a meeting to talk about it. Once again the CEO mishandled it, first by paying any attention and second for being incredibly awkward and super-defensive.
This was the main reason the CEO was ousted.
After I left the company there was a string of CEOs that acqui-hired all the competitors and basically drained the company's coffers. And of course the over-hiring, getting to 900 people on a pyramid scheme.
I forgot to tell the main product the company made: SEO blogspam. Yep.
Last year it collapsed because of our mutual friend, ChatGPT.
> Ford Motor Company was hemorrhaging millions of dollars every month. It was impossible to give an exact number because there was no accounting system. “Can you believe it?” Henry II later remembered. “In one department they figured their costs by weighing the pile of invoices on a scale”
> the corresponding receipt, then pinned them together and sent out a check, usually a few months late. To figure out how much money the company owed, they stacked up all the bills, measured them with a ruler, and through a formula of unknown provenance turned feet into dollars.
From _The Fires_ by Joe Flood (2010) Cited in https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/18z6i09/comment...
But I could not find a quote in the Macnamara interviews from the _Fog of War_ https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html as cited by https://forum.woodenboat.com/forum/the-bilge/28529-the-film-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(Department_of_Defen...
He also pioneered the use of seat belts while at Ford. Which does make the morality-math a little more unusual.
Saab was the first to include them as standard equipment in 1958, with Volvo introducing the modern 3-point seatbelts as standard equipment the following year. They remained unpopular in the US until after Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe At Any Speed which became a bestseller and prompted congress to pass the National Traffic & Motor Safety Act in 1966, and ultimately were made compulsory by states (presumably under a lot of lobbying pressure from insurers) starting in 1970.
Is it unusual? A surviving driver from a car wreck needs a new car. Dead ones don't.
A couple years ago someone was also sending invoices to FB, Google, etc. Scammed them out of $100m.
Part of “name your price” should include whatever tools - up to and including ownership of processes.
Not saying there was zero tax evasion, but this seems like a separate issue.
Cue @patio11: The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero [0]
0. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
- if they really accepted the theft then normalize it and pay the thieves more and get them to stop thieving
- sell the businesses and let the theft be someone else's problem
- get the authorities involved
"I even worked on translating Archivista’s interface into Italian, since it wasn’t yet localized, just to make it easier for users."
A certain Italian-speaking area is legendary for its organized crime syndicates. Would anyone be surprised if that was the case here? Kinda hard to imagine it not.
This is garden variety, SMB fraud.
"We trust Tim, and never had a problem so we don't need to invest in all these controls. Tim is really vehement that the controls are useless and he's refusing to participate. No we won't make him comply. No we don't see any conflict here. Please continue to fix the problem anyway."
As for the rest — I hear you, and I totally agree. But at the time, I was young and more focused on building things with healthy clients who genuinely wanted to create something good, rather than trying to salvage a situation that, honestly, was nearly beyond saving.
I switched the ALIX to FreeBSD for other tasks, and FreeBSD (with its native read only support) was perfect for the new workload.
For my anecdote, it worked for me and I didn't even notice the spacing until they pointed it out.
If there was big(?) money flowing through the company regularly, Keeping the server at the office and the backup in the owner's house seems like a shoestring budget.
Which was way more common in the past years, esp in small companies when "IT" was to be cheap cheap, even if there was.
But it seems that the client in this story did not worry about cost. Want a new server? No problem, A second one (windows) no problem?
Was stuffing the box into a data center ever brought up?
Back in the 95-2010 range so many places outside of towns had pretty much no internet. Maybe you'd get a meg or two up and down. Can't do much offsite with that.
Maybe it was modified in the last two hours, but at least now it says "About 16 years ago".
They successfully designed for the failure mode experienced.
If you want to fantasize about design perfectionism no need to make it about how wrong they must have been.
Man, I've been running my Linux firewall/router & AP's off these machines for years. They are rock solid.
Let me fix this for you… Because always, dishonest people do win.
Good read and it would make a good short film :-)
Dishonest people almost always win.
Not any individual one - a particular dishonest person might only win 20% of the time - but in aggregate - the winner is almost always a dishonest person.
Even when a game rewards honesty, dishonest people are willing to be honest if that's truly what gives them the greatest chance of winning, so they still win.
If you win by being honest that’s not dishonest.
honest when it benefit you is not truly honest
According to you. But why can’t the opposite be true?
> honest when it benefit you is not truly honest
Show me a person who has never been dishonest.
because they are honest people
"Show me a person who has never been dishonest."
My mother always honest with me