No, the criminals are extremely smart. Its just that these were amateurs who didnt know that in Anglosaxon common law, you have to avoid being honest about anything and even deny any wrongdoing even if you get caught the act of murdering someone. Then you can exercise plausible deniability, claim incompetence or mental incapacity and you can negotiate your sentence. Any kind of honesty works against you in the US law as a result. That's how you end up with people who are total experts in their field testifying in courts that they "didnt know" that something they did would cause so much harm to something or somebody or the society.
As of this very moment, thousands of much, much bigger corporations are actually destroying the entire US society in a real way and not like these amateurs who were just shuffling some funny money. But the real psychos know how common law works. There wont be any trail of their wrongdoing, and when there is, there will always be plausible deniability in that trail...
> these were amateurs who didnt know that in Anglosaxon common law, you have to avoid being honest about anything and even deny any wrongdoing even if you get caught the act of murdering someone
Ignoring the "Anglosaxon" buzzword here, none of this is unique conceptually to US law, or foreign conceptually to anyone who's told a lie when younger. It's instinctual for many when they know they've done something wrong. Trying to paint human nature as a unique problem that US law faces, or promotes, is itself dishonest.
> claim incompetence or mental incapacity
Neither of these get you "off the hook"; that's a misconception.
> That's how you end up with people who are total experts in their field testifying in courts that they "didnt know" that something they did would cause so much harm to something or somebody or the society.
It can be either dishonesty, or lack of omniscience by the expert in question. Unless you're a mind reader, you have no idea. This is why testimony is evaluated along with other aspects of a case, and not alone.
> There wont be any trail of their wrongdoing, and when there is, there will always be plausible deniability in that trail...
Plausible deniability does not shield you from all liability.
The 'Anglosaxon' term is a long-standing political science, history and diplomacy term. Its not something that can be ignored, especially because...
> none of this is unique conceptually to US law
... it is.
The common law derives from the medieval !Anglosaxon! feudal law, which is based on contracts, agreements, negotiations and precedents. It can be 'interpreted' by the judge, who takes on the role of the feudal lord of the earlier times, and he or she can 'interpret' the law or precedents. The persecution or the defendant can negotiate any outcome. This trait of the common law system causes all the parties to open the 'bargain' from the maximum bets that they can imagine, assuming that it will be 'negotiated down' eventually. Which obligates the need for lying and denying that was mentioned earlier - if you deny any kind of wrongdoing even when caught red handed, you have a better chance of negotiating something better than if you were honest. The only sizable countries that use this law system are the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, and NZ if you count as sizable. Along with a number of smaller island states.
The ENTIRE rest of the world uses the civil law system that descended from the Napoleonic law, which descended in turn from the French Revolutionary principles. It does not rely on agreements, contracts, negotiations or precedents. It cannot be 'interpreted' The law is made by the democratic parliamentary authority and it clearly outlines crimes and punishments and there can be no negotiation made. Even the reductions in sentencing or the modifications that can be done to the final decision on anything are clearly outlined. Including the benefits that confessing a crime brings. Whereas lying is penalized further. There is no 'negotiation' that can be done in any way. That is why civil law encourages confessions and telling the truth in contrast to the common law which allows you to negotiate.
Which is also the reason why the lawyers get upper middle class salaries and income in entire rest of the world but make obscene, irrational income in the US - when the legal system allows outrageous decisions, reparations, sentences that can only be negotiated through professional lying, posturing, playing down or up, personal relations in between the lawyers, prosecutors and judges, it encourages the mess that one can see in the US to happen.
In Europe, judges and lawyers and prosecutors function more like clerks - the law is clear and solid. The rewards and punishments are the same. Has someone done what he or she shouldnt have done? Yes. What is the penalty for this? This particular thing. That is applied. There is no 'negotiation' anywhere in the process.
This difference not only makes the Anglosaxon legal system quite different from entire rest of the world, but it also causes the social, economic and political life in the Angloamerican world and the rest of the world to be very different. A corporation can get away with destroying the environment or killing hundreds of thousands people with their product or the new drug. Even if they know beforehand what will happen and start to repress information and bribe experts to lie on their behalf to sell their product. Because, when they get caught, what will happen will be an eventual negotiation. In the rest of the world that does not happen - there is no way to negotiate down any sentence that may befall on your corporation, but most importantly, you, the perpetrator...
>It can be 'interpreted' by the judge, who takes on the role of the feudal lord of the earlier times
The judge is separate from the prosecution (who are referred to in court as "the state" or "the government"). This is called "judicial independence".
>The persecution or the defendant can negotiate any outcome...
...provided that outcome is preferable to having the jury decide.
>Which obligates the need for lying
No, that's perjury if done under oath. Or, in the case of prosecutorial misconduct, grounds for a mistrial.
>The ENTIRE rest of the world uses the civil law system
No, it does not.
>which descended in turn from the French Revolutionary principles.
No, it's even older than that.
>It cannot be 'interpreted'
You have never been sued in France, and you have never seen the inside of a US courtroom except on TV.
>Which is also the reason why the lawyers get upper middle class salaries and income in entire rest of the world but make obscene, irrational income in the US
The average US lawyer makes less money than the average web developer in the Bay Area.
>In Europe, judges and lawyers and prosecutors function more like clerks - the law is clear and solid.
Europe, equipped with legal technology far in advance of what the Anglophone world must deal with, has eliminated ambiguity in language to such an extent that the legal profession there is now a form of bookkeeping. Soon, the Sorbonne law faculty will be replaced by Droite-GPT (which will still take the month of August off, because reasons...)
>In the rest of the world that does not happen - there is no way to negotiate down any sentence that may befall on your corporation, but most importantly, you, the perpetrator...
The Code Napoleon has eliminated corporate malfeasance in the non-english-speaking world. Quite remarkable.
> The 'Anglosaxon' term is a long-standing political science, history and diplomacy term. Its not something that can be ignored, especially because...
Well, being perhaps overly pedantic, but it should be written Anglo-Saxon, and there's a reason that it's hyphenated.
> The common law derives from the medieval !Anglosaxon! feudal law [...]
I have literally heard no one refer to it as "Anglo-Saxon" law before--it's "common law" or sometimes a formulation like "in the Anglosphere" or "English-derived law." Calling it Anglo-Saxon, in fact, would be wrong, because it's not Anglo-Saxon--it's Norman. (And, we're getting incredibly pedantic here, Anglo-Saxon rule was never feudal.) Even Wikipedia's page listing other terms for common law never suggests Anglo-Saxon, the closest being Anglo-American.
> The ENTIRE rest of the world uses the civil law system that descended from the Napoleonic law,
LOLNOPE. Actually, I think a majority of the world population might not even be on the civil law system (whether derived from Napoleonic code or not). There's a lot of Islamic law and customary law going on in several countries, especially several populous ones. Not to mention that many civil law countries never incorporated the Napoleonic code or any of its descendants.
> The persecution or the defendant can negotiate any outcome. This trait of the common law system causes all the parties to open the 'bargain' from the maximum bets that they can imagine, assuming that it will be 'negotiated down' eventually. Which obligates the need for lying and denying that was mentioned earlier - if you deny any kind of wrongdoing even when caught red handed, you have a better chance of negotiating something better than if you were honest.
Uh... I mean, by this point, it's pretty clear to me that you have at best a superficial understanding of how common law legal systems work, because this is confusing as heck, and it's muddled to the point that I'm not sure what you're trying to argue.
I think you're starting by talking about plea bargains, which is a concept that only exists for criminal prosecutions, and a quick perusal of Wikipedia suggests that some civil law countries do have facilities that are similar to plea bargains. But we're not talking about criminal prosecutions here, we're talking about civil disputes, and both civil and common law jurisdictions allow parties to settle out of court to resolve a dispute.
Long standing in what circles? I've only seen it in Russian derived or connected media, political think, and institutions. The primary source of papers using that term to refer to US law seems to be the Russian State University of Justice.
I don't think I've seen an authoritative source elsewhere use it, because it would be like pretending the Norman conquest never had an effect on legal proceedings. As if there is some unbroken historical lineage.
This is why I labeled it a buzz word, it's a phrase with a specific (negative) connotation attached to it, used by specific media, as a catch-all for describing institutions in the US.
Long standing in history, long standing in diplomacy, long standing in actual freaking Louis XIV administration communique, long standing in practically everything.
No offense but just because you people have a beef with Russia at the moment and they are using the term, the rest of the world is not going to change how they speak so that you dont get offended.
> I don't think I've seen an authoritative source elsewhere use it
> Long standing in history, long standing in diplomacy, long standing in actual freaking Louis XIV administration communique, long standing in practically everything.
That's neat, the dead are welcome to their opinions. That doesn't change where or why it's used primarily by certain parties in their English facing media.
> No offense but just because you people have a beef with Russia at the moment and they are using the term, the rest of the world is not going to change how they speak so that you dont get offended.
I never asked them to-- if that's the phrasing in their native language, then so be it. Same reason why we can call Germany the name "Germany".
But it clearly has a different meaning in English.
> Obviously you are not a student of history.
I'll admit error if you can find a source, that's not Russian, that uses it to refer to modern US law-- even if it's just a translation from another language.
The problem is I'm having a hard time finding one on my own.
> That's neat, the dead are welcome to their opinions. That doesn't change where or why it's used primarily by certain parties in their English facing media.
How does this justify removing an actual historic term from the vocabulary.
> But it clearly has a different meaning in English.
It doesnt:
> I'll admit error if you can find a source, that's not Russian
It amazes me how someone that claims any insight in the matters of law can ask for 'sources' for such a thing. It just feels crazy. Here you go:
Its not about the law, its not about the history, its the actual term used in an Anglosaxon source about how French saw the !rise of Anglosaxons! in 20th century.
This paper of the actual university of Cambridge is actually named "The Rise of the Anglo-Saxon: French Perceptions of the Anglo-American World in the Long Twentieth Century". It is the Anglosaxons using the actual scientific term to refer to the actual historic and political science concept.
> The problem is I'm having a hard time finding one on my own.
Thats amazing now. The above was the first google result for me, an avid student of history. You were unable to find anything maybe its because you dont have much interest in that direction. Or, more likely, you were totally inundated with the actual propaganda war that very Anglosaxon establishment is waging against the actual historic term just because its current enemy used it to describe, well, itself...
An entire article describing the: absence of its usage in scholarly contexts outside of specific cultural domains, and also simultaneously points out its usage as a ideological label.
I'll admit my error in being unable to find this, but it's not legal analysis specific, and the paper probably isn't what you were hoping for.
The problem with writing that your company is knowingly committing a crime in an instant message to colleagues has little do with "negotiation" and everything to do with evidence, which funnily enough is taken into account in most legal systems influenced by Napoleonic codes...
It may surprised you to learn that criminals also commit crimes and lie about them in countries whose legal system is not based on common law.
> civil law system ... does not rely on agreements, contracts, negotiations or precedents. It cannot be 'interpreted'
betrays that they've never examined legal proceedings in either system.
Contracts apparently don't exist in civil law, and when asked to explain the differences between "Jurisprudence Constante" and "Stare Decisis", I guess "Jurisprudence Constante" means precedent doesn't exist!
I think they're confused on the differing weight and roles of case law in rendering decisions between the two systems, and over corrected.
This does sound like insincere debate. Where does in my comments it says that contracts dont exist in civil law. It says civil law is not BASED on contracts, agreeements and precedents. The common law is.
And no, the complications that are so beautifully and 'respectably' named in the common law dont exist in civil law. The law is always clear - if something is not covered by an immediate law, it is covered by a broader law that affects those cases.
> The common law derives from the medieval !Anglosaxon! feudal law, which is based on contracts, agreements, negotiations and precedents
This is the !very first! statement of the opening paragraph of my comment. Why are you saying that I have not said it. Have you not read the actual comment?
> Why would they exist conceptually if they're not relied upon?
Why would they be relied upon if they exist, even further, why would they be the basis of the actual law?
In civil law, the law always supersedes anything else, including any agreement that any party makes among themselves. The agreements, contracts that parties makes in between themselves cannot affect the law and its decrees in any way, and actually any contract itself must be made precisely as how the law outlines them to be made and what permits them to have. To put it in historic terms, in civil law contracts exist because the law says they can exist and tells precisely how will they exist and to what extent, whereas in common law the contractual agreements that the parties made among themselves all the way going back to Magna Carta are the basis of the entire body of law - with Magna Carta being a contractual agreement in itself.
I will respond to that comment here because HN rate limits me, making any productive discussion totally infeasible, which is why I almost totally stopped participating on this platform. Seeing how it makes actual discussions impossible, I should altogether stop participating here. But here goes the reply:
> the paper probably isn't what you were hoping for.
The term exists, its an important term in history, political science, diplomacy for a very long while, the very Cambridge university uses it itself. At this point you should be aware that even you would be able to find many references using the term. So dont sweat it. The rest of the world is not going to stop using it just because you people have a beef with some country that uses it.
...
At this point, seeing that you have claimed that I said various things I have not said and also claimed that I didnt say things that are the very first things that I said, I have no other option but to conclude that you are an insincere debater. Which concludes our discussion since I will spare both of us of a potential unproductive discussion by disengaging...
> This is the !very first! statement of the opening paragraph of my comment. Why are you saying that I have not said it. Have you not read the actual comment?
> Why would they be relied upon if they exist, even further, why would they be the basis of the actual law?
I said you didn't use it in the statement describing civil law.
I didn't bother tackling "common law is based ..." because frankly if I tackled every inaccuracy in your statements, I'd be here all day.
You were opining on the merits of civil law, by describing an "ideal" model of system which doesn't exist in any of the countries you've mentioned.
You attempted to exclude principles, which even if they don't exist in the same form, that are still present in those other country's judicial apparatus-- just with different weights and state supervisory organs.
> I will respond to that comment here because HN rate limits me, making any productive discussion totally infeasible, which is why I almost totally stopped participating on this platform. Seeing how it makes actual discussions impossible, I should altogether stop participating here. But here goes the reply:
The site is actually having problems at the moment for many, including me, you're likely not being targeted specifically-- unless you're getting an explicit error indicating so.
> The term exists, its an important term in history, political science, diplomacy for a very long while, the very Cambridge university uses it itself. At this point you should be aware that even you would be able to find many references using the term. So dont sweat it. The rest of the world is not going to stop using it just because you people have a beef with some country that uses it.
They used it to describe how it goes un-used, outside of France in this specific instance, don't misrepresent the article.
> At this point, seeing that you have claimed that I said various things I have not said and also claimed that I didnt say things that are the very first things that I said, I have no other option but to conclude that you are an insincere debater. Which concludes our discussion since I will spare both of us of a potential unproductive discussion by disengaging...
Where? Don't blame me for your inability to articulate.
Nowhere in my comment it says that criminals in other countries do not lie. Or the admission of guild is not considered evidence. It clearly outlines the differences in the legal systems and how the competent criminals navigate the former. If Binance people had any experience, they would be talking by using well rounded and vague words even among each other like how any exec in the US does, and they would avoid providing any such evidence. Moreover, they would easily be able to claim ignorance and deny any wrongdoing.
And it wont work until California can stop what is called 'The Greyhound Express'. That's what some people in other states call the practice that some states have - offering their homeless a one way ticket to California or jail. They export their problem to California, and they criticize California for it.
Concentration also causes less energy to be sent to the digestive system because the energy gets diverted to the brain. Concentration is an evolutionary 'fight or flight' adaptation. Therefore when you are highly concentrating, its possible that your digestion gets impaired. Couple this with shallow breathing, then you would have even less energy available for digestion.
Which causes the food to be badly digested, leading to gas and even various syndromes that cause irritation & inflammation in the intestines and even the body in general. Because when a non-digested piece of food enters the intestines, the body can easily trigger the immune responses of the body, thinking that 'a foreign substance has entered the digestive system' (which is natural). This kind of digestive problems, IBS etc seem to be common in tech circles.
Yeah, they dont. Contradictorily so, since the part of the Turkey that is geographically in Europe is larger than many European states both in respect to surface area and also in respect to population.
The non-technical people use PCs. Macs are extremely expensive for an overwhelming majority of the world population. So when someone needs a 'computer', its a Wintel laptop.
Depends. A lot of techies still use Windows (AMD or Intel, depending), including in Europe where the purchasing power is higher. Apple people seem to be a certain subsegment of computer users even in Europe, and they may not necessarily constitute the large part of any significant engineering segment anywhere - unlike the US, where Apple usage is quite high in certain subsegments among the technical people.
Normal people around here (W Europe) dont even know about 'Windows'. They know about their 'computer'. And 'the Internet', which is actually the web browser in their laptop. These are not uneducated dumb people either. Any normal, non-techie person, including other white collar professionals. They mostly know about various software that is heavily used in business though - Excel, Word, Powerpoint etc. Or SAP etc, if they are more specialized professionals.
...
What Im thinking is that the reduction in demand of computers and laptops is because existing hardware has developed quite beyond the needs of the majority of users. An average, 75%ile gaming laptop that comes in for ~1500-1700 euros these days, is capable of running most AAA games with good quality visuals and performance. They are capable of running any game from the last decade and earlier. And they are as cheap as an equivalent desktop - which may or may not bring any visible performance and quality improvement. This is the most taxing application that the majority uses and other stuff like business software are in no way anything demanding compared to these, so why someone who bought a new laptop 2-3 years ago need another one today...
This could only change with a new paradigm like consumer-grade, locally installed AI applications or virtual reality bumping up the hardware requirements. Or, through (probably soon to be illegal) planned obsolescence.
> Gaming laptops are terrible and a bad deal... They will. Either cheaper or better performance for same price.
I found them pretty competent. An Asus ROG G17 easily gives at least ~80% performance of what the components would give if they were in a desktop. (RTX 3070, Ryzen 9). And does it with almost ~50% less power consumption...
Climate is not the air that you have inside your refrigerator. Its a system. If one part of it changes, the other parts will change in different ways to keep the system stable. So something cooling off somewhere does not mean that it will also cool where you are. It may rain more, it may be dryer, it may be much more hot, it may not have any effect or any combination of all of that may happen.
Climate change is basically pulling the levers in a slot machine. Better not to pull the lever at all.
Moving to a cheaper location allows them to cut a major % of the salary requirement due to living costs. Companies are already saving billions by creating satellite offices in cheaper states and providing remote work in that state or region - some even without requiring any days in the office.
When the salary requirement is reduced by cutting out the cost of living like that, what ends up being the salary minimum is not so much different from what the overseas dev would want. Its not like top talent in that country will work for the American companies for dimes so that American shareholders can have a payday. You either pay that dev something that will make it worth for him to not go for a major local company and lose the social status and perks associated with it (very important in many local cultures), or he will just take a more traditional career route and work for the local giants.
And its not like sloppy copy-paste work from juniors who accept $10-15/hour when they start their career was not available before. If any company that is worth its salt was not able to run a major tech business with such juniors before, they wont be able to run it now either.
Therefore what remote work in the US hurts is basically the outrageous real estate sector and its margins. Which is why they put pressure on companies for RTO through the politicians it backs...
> what ends up being the salary minimum is not so much different from what the overseas dev would want
This is FUD. Based on both qualitative data - my company, which pays Canadians much less than the cheapest US workers, and Latin Americans less than Canadians - and quantitative comparison of median total comps:
American workers, who think they can live in Midwest on SV salaries are delusional. If they think they can live in Midwest on 80% of SV salaries, time to know that it's not 2021 anymore. Your competition is with Toronto (proficiency of English, cultural compatibility etc) and depending on what your company wants, you are competing with Bogota and Sao Paulo.
> Therefore what remote work in the US hurts is basically the outrageous real estate sector and its margins.
Tell that to my American colleagues who were by and large replaced by foreign colleagues in the last year.
Your qualitative data refutes your own argument: Leaving aside that you are using the average wages as a comparison, so that the wages of the guy in Sao Paulo or Bogota cannot be directly compared to - holy hell - the salary of a guy in San Fran, the numbers outright say that there isnt so much difference in between sending a job to Toronto vs sending it to some underutilized American state. To boot, the Midwest is not the only American region and the midwest is not so poor in technology sector, especially Texas. And amazingly, populated and highly talent-rich India is missing from that list, a top outsourcing location, and instead a random Bogota is in. Why not pick Aleut Islands - the average pay of a dev there would be much, much lower there due to the scarce presence of devs.
So who do you think that you will employ in Bogota and how many of them are there? All the top-tier talent that those countries have historically been producing before was flowing into places like San Fran or other tech hubs as immigrants. You think that if the kind of remote work offshoring that you imagine happens, you will be able to grab ~200,000 people from top talent tier in those countries? A number way above the population of many cities of those countries?
No. In such a situation, either the top immigrant talent now in SF will flow back to their homeland, still not reducing the price of the talent in those countries because there is no way in hell the education systems of those countries can churn out hundreds of thousands of tech graduates a year. So basically its another case of relocation of talent - this time, the immigrant talent goes back to their own countries to work for the same companies from there just like the American talent goes back to another US state to work for the same companies from there.
Take India as an example instead - a country that can actually educate that much talent and already has a large tech sector that is not only advanced but segments of it were actually geared to do the very specific thing that you are prophesizing doom about - getting the outsourced jobs of richer countries.
Did that change anything? Has the average pay in SF constantly increased over the last 2 decades or not? Has India been able to get American companies to outsource all development jobs?
...
Long story short, you are prophesizing doom about something that was already prophesized to happen, and just did not. Its not that American companies were not able to outsource to Bogota or Trinidad or Tobago before. They were. And it did not change anything. It seems like the already present reality of remote work stayed outside your radar for whatsover reason. But it existed, and it did not cause doom.
> Tell that to my American colleagues who were by and large replaced by foreign colleagues in the last year.
$300k/year salaries and positions in SF may suffer until remote work brings down cost of living in the hellish real estate landscape and general prices, there is no doubt about it.
However I doubt that the loss of such positions are related to remote work - all the layoffs that we saw in the past year has been due to the companies trying to shore up stock prices due to the loss of the zero interest economy. Its not like they laid off 200,000 people and then hired 200,000 remote offshore devs in their place...
> It hasn't really been a reality the way it is today
Holy hell you seem to be spamming this around.
It may not have been a reality for you and the company that you work for. It has been a reality for a lot of people and none of the 'new factors' that you used in your comments to argue that 'this time it is different' are actually new. There isnt anything new about this remote work. A lot of companies were already doing it way before, including outsourcing overseas. The new situation and trends do not change that - in fact, it makes it easier for American devs to compete by avoiding living in expensive metropolises like SF and NY. Which is helpful to those who live in such metropolises too since it would put a downward pressure on the price of everything there. Something which the real estate sector would definitely hate, I gather. Hence the pressure on the major corporations regarding RTO from that industry and the politicians they back...
> [remote work] hasn't really been a reality the way it is today. During covid, we were forced to implement norms and tools for remote working (like Zoom).
Sorry to break it to you, but those tools were around and the companies that were outsourcing were already using them heavily way before. So that's not a factor for anything being different either.
What? You seem to think that offshoring/outsourcing => only hiring an external company to do the work. It isnt. Companies have been setting up local subsidiaries in offshoring countries to hire local talent there and offshore the work to their own subsidiaries. It didnt bring down salaries. Neither did contracting out dev work to external companies overseas.
No, the criminals are extremely smart. Its just that these were amateurs who didnt know that in Anglosaxon common law, you have to avoid being honest about anything and even deny any wrongdoing even if you get caught the act of murdering someone. Then you can exercise plausible deniability, claim incompetence or mental incapacity and you can negotiate your sentence. Any kind of honesty works against you in the US law as a result. That's how you end up with people who are total experts in their field testifying in courts that they "didnt know" that something they did would cause so much harm to something or somebody or the society.
As of this very moment, thousands of much, much bigger corporations are actually destroying the entire US society in a real way and not like these amateurs who were just shuffling some funny money. But the real psychos know how common law works. There wont be any trail of their wrongdoing, and when there is, there will always be plausible deniability in that trail...