> They've checked with their peers and lawyers, and decided it's a perfectly acceptable risk to have the founders and staff of a company they're already invested in do illegal things and potentially end up in jail ...
No legitimate business person I have ever met holds this position, if for no other reason than criminal acts pierce the corporate veil[0].
> ... so long as the investors and their staff are all insulated from the illegal behavior and jail time risks.
> > ... so long as the investors and their staff are all insulated from the illegal behavior and jail time risks.
> There is no such thing.
Sure there is. You can never request an illegal act, never commit an illegal act, but create a culture where others become incentivized to do illegal acts. This can be done in sufficiently subtle ways that it's impossible to prove it was intentional.
> You can never request an illegal act, never commit an illegal act, but create a culture where others become incentivized to do illegal acts. This can be done in sufficiently subtle ways that it's impossible to prove it was intentional.
I disagree. So do many state and federal RICO[0] laws. They were enacted for precisely this situation.
If you are familiar with RICO, surely you are also familiar with how notoriously difficult they are to prosecute. But in your words, "you do you" I guess.
And if you are also familiar with RICO and think prosecution difficulty will save anyone from same...
EDIT:
Just so I am properly understanding your position, are you advocating for engaging in activities which would qualify as RICO crimes due to "how notoriously difficult they are to prosecute"?
Advocating? What? No, I'm not "advocating" for crime. I'm just pointing out that there are ways for crime to happen, to even be encouraged, without really risking the investors. Your "no such thing" comment, while maybe true in a nonexistant legally ideal reality, does not reflect how things play out in real life.
RICO is hard to prosecute on a good day. If an organization is usually law-abiding and occasionally structures things such that some lower manager has a near-impossible goal to hit that is made easier with crime, then one gets crime occasionally.
And that's also not counting all the crimes like environmental dumping, which consistently yield zero prosecution and slap the company with a fine that's 4% of what the company saved by dumping their waste in a river.
> Advocating? What? No, I'm not "advocating" for crime.
I didn't think so, but had to ask in order to ensure we have a common baseline.
> I'm just pointing out that there are ways for crime to happen, to even be encouraged, without really risking the investors. Your "no such thing" comment, while maybe true in a nonexistant legally ideal reality, does not reflect how things play out in real life.
I agree, there is always a way for criminal acts to be perpetrated, sometimes for years on end. My disagreement is with the encouragement portion having no risk to investors. As mentioned previously, criminal activities pierce the corporate veil[0], which can and do ensnare investors as well.
The complete quote to which I made my "[t]here is no such thing" comment is (with my initial quotation being the post-hyphenation fragment):
They've checked with their peers and lawyers, and decided
it's a perfectly acceptable risk to have the founders and
staff of a company they're already invested in do illegal
things and potentially end up in jail, if it makes the odds
of that company being a 100x exit - so long as the
investors and their staff are all insulated from the
illegal behavior and jail time risks.
Call me naive, but I do not consider my interpretation as being "a nonexistant legally ideal reality" that "does not reflect how things play out in real life."
Prosecutors are not stupid, nor are they robots incapable of reasoning and deduction. Quite to the contrary, they share many of the problem solving skills software engineers possess. And given a "big enough" problem, they will solve it via investigation and prosecutions.
As to what is chosen to prosecute and when, well, that is an entirely different discussion of which I am wholly unqualified to have.
> No legitimate business person I have ever met holds this position
Well, sure, that's true. But only because that's a no-true-scotsman fallacy in incubation. All these perps are "legitimate business people" until they aren't. And they cross that rubicon, almost to a person, still believing that they're legitimate business people and that this is all a clever hack.
It looks obvious only in hindsight when you're looking at the indictment.
What gets them in trouble is the clever hacking, not a fundamental moral flaw. Or conversely, we need to start treating clevery hackery with a lot more suspicion. It's fine to "cheat cleverly" in software design. Outside that world it's got some pretty ugly externalities.
>> No legitimate business person I have ever met holds this position
> Well, sure, that's true. But only because that's a no-true-scotsman fallacy in incubation.
Which, by your own admission, makes it not a no-true-scotsman fallacy since it does not exist.
> All these perps are "legitimate business people" until they aren't.
This is a strawman fallacy[0] when considering the assertion to which I replied, which reads thusly:
They've checked with their peers and lawyers, and decided
it's a perfectly acceptable risk to have the founders and
staff of a company they're already invested in do illegal
things and potentially end up in jail ...
Note the explicit knowledge of illegality. This invalidates the premise of participants being "legitimate business people" as, by definition, they are engaging in illegitimate activities. Unfortunately, the rest of your argument is inapplicable due to the aforementioned strawman[0].
> What gets them in trouble is the clever hacking, not a fundamental moral flaw.
I think you've got that backwards. Crims gonna crim. A clever hacker will evaluate ALL the risks, whereas a moral flaw blinds people to risks. Doesn't mean somebody can't have both attributes.
I quite literally stole an education, and there's a college transcript to prove it. I was a clever hacker, and I worked hard; I was aided and abetted by the college administration, inducted into the Masters candidate ghetto as an honorary member. When they made it a felony I quit that path, and following Hunter S. Thompson's advice [0] I went into business so that I could continue learning "on the job". (Nowadays they call it "OPT". Served today with a very thin glaze of sarcasm.)
During that tenure I met people who wrote theses for a living, who appreciated my industriousness and offered to admit me to their fold. I drank with foreigners ("muslims") who wanted information I might have or be able to obtain; I suggested that they get their home countries to forge documents and and then get admitted as students.
I've quit jobs after an appropriate "honeymoon period" when I still hadn't been furnished documentation demonstrating that we had customers' permission to be doing what we were doing. I've quit jobs when government compliance was considered a game rather than a minimum standard of performance. [1]
I pass government background checks just fine; no reason I shouldn't. I get the "dgaf" attitude, but I strongly suggest getting it in writing. Doing things off the books is a cancer; and it's contagious, like that 10,000 year old dog cancer which now moves from host to host.
[0] "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
[1] If you need somebody who takes risk assessment seriously, we should talk.
Once more, this is a no-true-scotsman argument hanging on your added adjective "clever". All the frausters and criminals in the linked articles were "clever hackers" until they weren't. You probably are too.
Introspection and humility are among the hardest skills for hackers to develop (probably harder for us than for the general population, honestly, as our cheating gets rewarded!), and they're exactly what are being demanded here to keep us out of jail. And I'm pointing out the fallacies inherent in all the "it would never happen to me" argumentation.
No legitimate business person I have ever met holds this position, if for no other reason than criminal acts pierce the corporate veil[0].
> ... so long as the investors and their staff are all insulated from the illegal behavior and jail time risks.
There is no such thing.
0 - https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2014/03/27/the-three-justifi...