Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

The controls summarized in the CNBC piece seem reasonable, or, if not that, then at least not all that onerous.

The controls in the actual proposal are less reasonable: they create finable infractions for any claim in a job ad deemed "misleading" or "inaccurate" (findings of fact that requires a an expensive trial to solve) and prohibit "perpetual postings" or postings made 90 days in advance of hiring dates.

The controls might make it harder to post "ghost jobs" (though: firms posting "ghost jobs" simply to check boxes for outsourcing, offshoring, or visa issuance will have no trouble adhering to the letter of this proposal while evading its spirit), but they will also impact firms that don't do anything resembling "ghost job" hiring.

Firms working at their dead level best to be up front with candidates still produce steady feeds of candidates who feel misled or unfairly rejected. There are structural features of hiring that almost guarantee problems: for instance, the interval between making a selection decision about a candidate and actually onboarding them onto the team, during which any number of things can happen to scotch the deal. There's also a basic distributed systems problem of establishing a consensus state between hiring managers, HR teams, and large pools of candidates.

If you're going to go after "ghost job" posters, you should do something much more targeted to what those abusive firms are actually doing, and raise the stakes past $2500/infraction.

Making people able to sue for anyone feeling bad about not having gotten the job is a path you should not take. We have something similar in Germany and its horrible for companies. Leeches bleeding you dry.

Maybe it would be simpler to just impose a nominal tax on the total number of job openings a company creates throughout the year. Maybe as a % of the role's salary. You could even rebate it against employer payroll taxes so they get the money back when they actually hire someone.

You should never tax things you want people to do, like posting legitimate job openings

i'm so glad that companies don't have feelings tho. Would you mind sharing with everyone else what you are talking about, its very vague with the descriptor of "something similar" doubly questionable with you use of calling humans leeches, when the only leeches i've seen in the business world were the companies that require labor to make money and then pay back a less than equitable amount to the people doing work.

I'm not familiar with the process of passing a law. Is it one of those situations where the ask is open to negotiation? Like, if I want to be given a finger I first need to ask for the whole arm kinda deal? If it's the case, then as you said, perhaps the real ask is what's in the summary.

not every company is some large mega corp

We tax things we want people to do all the time.

We want people to buy things, yet we have sales taxes.

We want people to work productive jobs and earn money, yet we have income taxes.

There's no real process with respect to what the statute would end up saying; it would be intensely negotiated (and unlikely in this political climate). The simplest thing to go on is what the actual proposal says.

To refute the parent, you have to argue that it's a good idea, not just that it's done. It's not hard to find plenty of things that people do which are terrible ideas.

They all want to be, though. All business want to be big-time like Amazon, but not all of them are so lucky.

I don't understand the making of excuses for small businesses as though they are somehow morally better than large businesses.

Every business owner, regardless of the size of the business, wants free labor.

I don't think it's unreasonable or onerous to shift the burden of hiring onto companies well-suited and minimally impacted by this process compared to individuals.

The fines should definitely be proportional though, with larger companies facing very severe infractions.

No they don't. This kind of mustachio-twirling caricature isn't a helpful mental model of how business works.

Businesses are just large bunches of people, each trying to maximize various metrics given the incentives they interact with. None of those people, including the owner, is automatically pro-slavery, which is the other word for "wants free labor."

Everybody wants to maximize their money received and minimize their money and work expended to whatever degree possible. This isn't evil nor is it specific to "businesses," "business owners," or "rich people" either.

There are rules like this in other countries around the world, and the impact is that it's much harder to change full-time jobs, because companies work around them by replacing full-time roles with contract positions, something that's much harder to regulate.

But the big thing here is: obviously there's a cheering section for any rules that make things harder for hiring managers, because most people here are on the other side of that transaction. Ok, sure, whatever. But none of this has anything to do with the "ghost job" phenomenon, where job postings are literally fig leaves satisfying a compliance checkbox so that roles can be sourced to H1Bs.

> posting legitimate job openings

You want to incentivize them FILLING job openings. Nobody cares how many jobs are posted. And posting 100 openings and filling 50 is the stated problem trying to be solved here.

The rebating idea resolves this quite neatly though. Make posting a job opening that eventually gets filled free after rebate[1], and posting a "dangling" job opening that never fills incurs tax.

Now, I can think of a dozen loopholes to get out of this[2], but it's not that it's going to disincentivize hiring.

[1] or maybe even better than free (puts a little tax incentive for hiring and keeping people beyond the typical probationary period).

[2] Can job listings be revised? Just recycle the ghost job listing in bulk before the deadline and convert it to a totally different position (Software Engineer -> Cashier) Can they not be revised? That seems like overreaching ridiculous Soviet red tape.

You're arguing with me, but this statement...

> Everybody wants to maximize their money received and minimize their money and work expended to whatever degree possible.

...is exactly in agreement with what I said above.

The ideal business is one where you take in money and have no expenditures. E.g., If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements.

I would also accept the other direction. That is, a tenant wants use of a property for no rent, ideally.

My point was that small businesses aren't noble somehow. They want money for free just like everybody else.

I find generally the most helpful thing you can factor in when trying to work out how a business is thinking is "what set of things would make my viable business predictable". If there's a factor HN threads tend to miss in these discussions, it's determinism.

Nothing like this is ever going to happen. It would be incredibly expensive (on both the employer and the government side) to administer, and it would be portrayed as a tax on hiring, because that's exactly what it would be.

Rules about what a job posting can and cannot say can definitely happen, and have happened (see: salary ranges, because of Colorado's requirements). That's what CNBC depicts this proposal as comprising. Unfortunately, under the hood, it's closer to what you're talking about.

I completely agree that there isn't any legislation that will "fix this problem" (other than perhaps abolition of H1B).

If it helps soothe the feelings of those who think hiring managers are demon spawn out to get them, I can add, as one of those who spent a whole season this year doing basically nothing but conducting first-round interviews all day, to hire four open SWE seats, it's misery out here for us, too.

It was a mix of laughably unqualified people; people in India lying and pretending to be in the US ("Which neighborhood in NY do you live in?" - "I live by the Statue of Liberty"); people sending ringers to do their coding exercises for them including different ringers or two ringers at once (oops); and entirely made-up resumes (we have your resume from an application 3 years ago but your entire life history has changed since).

> The ideal business is one where you take in money and have no expenditures.

> property but no rent

I mean, I guess sure, but... only lunatics think that exists legally and sustainably.

Certainly no one who has managed to get a business degree, or attain any leadership role, thinks so foolishly.

Normal businesspeople know that if you pay minimum wage you can expect only a weak effort, and also they don't waste their mental energy fantasizing about anybody 'working for free.'

As a manager, I fantasize about getting everyone under me paid enough to hold turnover very low (because turnover sucks), but not so highly that my team becomes a poor ROI that economically should be replaced with (AI, an offshore team, a couple people from a consulting firm, etc.) -- and I'm sure the CEO and any non-crazy shareholders want that equilibrium as well.

I agree with you that what I described can't and won't happen.

> people sending ringers to do their coding exercises for them including different ringers or two ringers at once (oops)

Found this part mildly fascinating. That it's more lucrative for a significant portion of the population to be so highly skilled at programming that they can regularly serve as "ringers" to falsify entrance exams, than it is to simply complete such an exam and get a job in America. Must make great money as exam falsifiers.

Quick check on Google says it runs upwards of ₹50,000 ($570) for valuable falsifications (data is mostly from Indian exam falsification though). If you can actually manage to get one per day it's $200,000 USD in India.

> Every business owner, regardless of the size of the business, wants free labor.

Yeah, no.

I’m no longer an entrepreneur - ran out of runway - but it was always my goal to have aggressive profit sharing as part of my company. Acceptable salaries - years of those salaries saved “in the bank” and profit-share the rest.

I never wanted free labor. In fact, the reason I didn’t have employees is because I couldn’t afford them at the rate they deserved. People deserve to be treated as people. People deserve to be treated well.

Alcohol Tax, Nicotine Tax. Good taxes on bad things.

>i'm so glad that companies don't have feelings tho.

Nobody is concerned about companies being sad, they're concerned about making the labor market in an give jurisdiction hostile enough that companies opt out entirely.

>when the only leeches i've seen in the business world were the companies that require labor to make money and then pay back a less than equitable amount to the people doing work.

define "equitable".

If you want these things, you're playing the wrong game

What game are we talking about?

I want to play the “game” of creating things I want created and making enough money to comfortably sustain myself and help those I care about.

If I’m hiring people, I want people that want the same things as me and are paid well, or people that are willing to exchange their labor for both a respectable base earning and also extra earning based on how we, collectively, are doing.

I am a landlord. I charge below market rent because it is enough to meet my financial goals and turning over a new tenant is annoying. I spare no expense on maintenance because I value my assets.

It's not being skilled at programming, it's being skilled at interview programming, which is very different.

Also ringers are black market, so you can be hired everywhere and not blocked by not being in the USA in the first place. You can pass the interview, but you can't find a job that hires you in the USA because of non-interview reasons or market conditions. Anybody could become a ringer because it's a purely skill based job you can self teach, while getting a job at an Indian big tech might require a degree from an ITT or even just a degree at all might be too much for you.

Honestly they would be a great hiring pool on some level if the reasons why they can't get hired had nothing to do with skill but more socioeconomic barriers like that.

I've never hired a ringer, been a ringer or even looked into it, so it's total conjecture on my part.

> Firms working at their dead level best to be up front with candidates still produce steady feeds of candidates who feel misled or unfairly rejected.

True, even the best cases have a nonzero baseline level of dissatisfaction. It reminds me of this quote, where one character publicly accused a judge of being corrupt based on rumor, and another character is asking whether she had anything except town rumor to go on.

> “Tell me, Royesse, what steps did you take beforehand, to assure yourself of the man’s guilt?”

> [...] Her frown deepened. "The townsmen applauded..."

> "Indeed. On average, one-half of all supplicants to come before a judge's bench must depart angry and disappointed. But not, by that, necessarily wronged."

-- The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

Every business owner wants to minimize costs. Every employee wants to maximize their compensation.

In other words, the Law of Supply & Demand.

Ironically small businesses tend to be the most egregious violators of labor laws and humanity in general.

Mega-corp isn't typically evil, it just wins a lot by being incredibly advantaged in whatever it pursues. Teams of lawyers, armies of engineers, rows of consultants.

Small businesses on the other hand tend to be the ones dumping oil in the river, firing employees that they don't want to back pay, bankrolling family vacations with time clock funny business, etc.

When I worked for my first mega-corp after years of small business jobs, I was blown away by how by-the-book it all was.

> It's not being skilled at programming, it's being skilled at interview programming, which is very different.

I'm not so sure about that. I'm suspicious of the existence of skilled programmers who cannot handle writing small programs, and vice versa.

> We tax things we want people to do all the time.

True. But why not think about ditching those taxes, and replace them with taxing things we don't want people to do? There's a double benefit - tax revenue is raised, and people do less of those things undesirable to society.

For example, "sin" taxes.

For other examples, taxing pollution. Taxing the conversion of forest land to a parking lot. And so on.

How is that at all unreasonable? Why is misinformation somehow ok when it directly harms workers? Don't like it that you have to change your behavior because of some abusers? Sorry but that's how society works for the rest of us.

Most economists agree that income tax and corporate profit tax should be eliminated and replaced with capital gains tax. Politically impossible, of course.

As a small business owner, I spend a lot of my time doing things by the book.

I get confused by other small business owners who complain about this because it’s all stuff you’d need to do anyway.

I use a double entry accounting system in an ERP. This isn’t terribly complicated. I took courses on corporate accounting in college and I took the ERP training. Even if I didn’t have all of that, I’d still have to actually do the accounting in a double entry system because of the legal jurisdiction and corporate structure.

I think that this is a byproduct of the economy being filled with small businesses owned by people who aren’t competent at operating their business as a business, which isn’t the same thing as being successful at making money.

Some people, curiously, believe that business is only valid if it operates as a caricature of the worst traits of modern corporate America.

That’s the game, and some people believe it’s the only game.

I’m with you though. For me business isn’t a channel for hoarding all possible resources and assets. It’s a combination of a craft and a means to an end. I’d still do it if I needed no profession, because it’s a craft I enjoy.

It’s fun to share that craft, and it’s good to share that craft on generous terms.

The subtle irony is that the version of the “game” as referenced in that other comment is the same, expect that all those niceties only apply to executives and people who already have lots of money. A socially perverse arrangement, to be sure.

> The ideal business is one where you take in money and have no expenditures.

This isn't a business. And if you found a way to do this, you'd be subject to endless audits and AML/CTF suspicions because actual businesses don't look like this.

Business owners come in a range of personalities, just like everyone else. Some are selfish and unreasonable. Some are altruistic and generous. Some are purely in it for the money, others really love building teams and working in a friendly environment. Some have global ambitions, others just want to get by with as little effort as possible.

as a freelance software developer working from home my expenses are practically zero.

The problem is that employers and prospective employees will disagree about what is and isn't "misinformation", and only a trial can resolve that question when the law gives a cause of action for it.

The devil is in the details. There is one interview process that is bulletproof but it's NEVER going to be adopted in mass by private companies: university / police academy admission exams.

Basically you have a set number of places, say 50 jobs and accept candidacies up to a certain date, when ALL candidates (say 1000 candidates) take the SAME exam, under the SAME conditions. They all get marked from 0 to 100% and top 50 of them get the job. If anyone of them drops out, the next in line is admitted. There can be litigations filed to dispute the mark and it's objective because the criteria is the same for everyone.

The perfect system already exists, and it's used here and there. My first intern job,out of the university, was such an exam at a small business. We were some 10 candidates, 5 or so were hired. My current big corporation employer uses the exact same approach for hiring interns, only now in today's shit market it's still some 5 jobs but 500 candidates.

The real problem is that the IT domain got filled and every year the universities and bootcamps and all churn more candidates. Gotta face the fact that most people who want to become cops, who compete at the cop entry exam, will never become cops. IT is the same now.

Then you're not doing your tax returns properly.

You can claim depreciation on all your hardware (including your desk and chair).

You should be claiming some of your rent/mortgage as office expenses. And, obviously, your broadband cost, your electricity bill, your heating bill (if different), etc.

You can claim all the coffees you buy potential clients.

Having zero expenses is absolutely not what you want to efficiently run your business.

Instead of taxing good behavior, we could just criminalize bad behavior. Besides, companies spend billions on advertising. In a weird indirect way, "ghost jobs" are advertising.

> because companies work around them by replacing full-time roles with contract positions, something that's much harder to regulate.

Yes, then a regulator sniffs on that, company is unable to prove absence of employment-like relationship, then is fined and owes backpay on all the unpaid taxes with interest.

A simple tweak here is that the tax refund can be larger than the deposit.

If you post a fake job and hire a H1B, you get automatically and inescapably slugged with a huge tax.

If you post a real job and hire someone, you get a tax refund.

The topic set is very different and the conditions are very artificial. There are many engineers who are amazing, but are absolute shit about writing code, under pressure, while someone is looking over their shoulder, to a leetcode medium that they haven't practiced for. Their brains go blank.

Like seriously, go to leetcode, pick a random medium+ problem and solve it within 15-30m without bugs under pressure, on coderpad, without code execution or being allowed to look up syntax. Make sure you've never seen or been asked the question before. Now do 10 more. You'll see it's something you need to practice for specifically. Make sure you throw in a few binary search questions while you do it.

Anybody going for a leetcode interview without doing prep work first is not a good candidate to start with.

I coached a newly minted PhD engineer into spending 3 weeks studying leetcode prep materials before the interview, telling him that per-hour it would be the best investment of his career. Shockingly, he listened, studied for 3 weeks, and absolutely nailed it. And landed the big bucks job, too.

> Their brains go blank

Anyone with a degree has undergone exams that were critical to graduation. I know all about time pressure, high stakes exams. After all, I attended Caltech. I learned how to deal with them. Study the material beforehand, work all the problem sets beforehand, make sure you have it cold backwards and forwards. That's the cure for brain freeze.

Going in without prep for a $250,000 job interview is just lazy, no matter how smart or capable you are.

A crackerjack programmer that cannot learn leetcode is not a crackerjack programmer.

Just for fun, I found among my dad's papers the written tests he had to pass before he could even sit in the cockpit of an F-86 Sabrejet. They were quite comprehensive and full of minutia. For damn sure the AF wasn't going to let anyone fly one of those monsters without proving they could study and learn everything about them by heart. No excuses about brain freeze is going to fly (pun intended).

One day, he was flying along in his F-86 over the Arizona desert when the engine conked out. He radioed the situation to the tower, who advised him to bail out. But he knew how to figure out hour far he could fly given his speed, altitude, weight of the fuel, wind speed, etc. and calculated that he could make the strip. And he did, with a few feet to spare.

There's no way I would even dare fly one without mastering all that stuff, either.

This process only works when you're hiring for an entry-level role and also don't care about differentiating for anything that isn't on your exam.

I don't think it's possible to create such an exam for senior or leadership roles, where a candidate's (professional) background is the key differentiator. Say you have two candidates for a C-suite role. One was formerly with company X and demonstrates A, B and C attributes. The other was formerly with company Y and demonstrates D, E and F attributes. How would you have created an exam that differentiated between the two, without the benefit of hindsight?

> replace them with taxing things we don't want people to do

Because your tax revenue will collapse if people actually stop doing those things?

It's not possible for people to not pollute, for example.

depends on the country. the value of doing all that work is simply not worth the money i would get back. so why bother?

I would say, when you have 2, 3, 10 candidates, you don't need an exam. Problem is when you need to be machine gunning waves of assault soldiers. An exam seems better than the usual and increasingly sick alternatives: have people waste their time talking to AI, when it's obvious all that time goes down the drain.

"Companies" are organizational paradigms that people use to pursue their goals. Everything is people.

>When I worked for my first mega-corp after years of small business jobs, I was blown away by how by-the-book it all was.

Big organisations tend to accrete rules as they age until it's almost impossible to do anything apart from the core function.

Well yes, but if you reduce pollution by 50% then you need to double the tax and so on and so forth.

If it’s not something that’s enforced globally you will either end up destroying certain industries and or having massive inefficiencies.

My point is that sin taxes might be a good way to discourage certain behaviors but not as good as a consistent revenue source.

Also there is a risk of perverse incentives like what happened in Tsarist Russia when most government revenue was coming from alcohol taxes.

Sure, but the threat of having to spend money on a trial should incentivize employers to be factual and clear in their advertisements. Edge cases will get sorted out by trials at first, but then there will be case law that will discourage people from bringing questionable cases.

> making the labor market in an give jurisdiction hostile enough that companies opt out entirely.

At some point you'd have to realize that continuing to give companies what they want out fear of them leaving, will only incentivize companies to be scummier and scummier.

Second of all, how would you imagine companies opting out of a jurisdiction? Wouldn't that create an enormous hole in the market for other less-scummier companies to jump in, albeit at perhaps lower margins?

> As a small business owner, I spend a lot of my time doing things by the book.

You are an exception.

> I use a double entry accounting system in an ERP.

Not only this requires someone knowledgeable enough but it is also time/energy consuming. If you force this on every small business, you'll probably kill something like 95% of hair-dressers.

Honestly, I don't think this is a problem. If we are scrutinizing a bakery, I'd rather the scrutiny to be put on health/food concerns rather than employee hiring practices. That is assuming the bakery employs less than 6-7 people.

So... I don't get the point here?

>Wouldn't that create an enormous hole in the market for other less-scummier companies to jump in, albeit at perhaps lower margins?

If non-scummy companies realize that even trying in that region will lead to lawsuits by malcontents and losers, they'll leave too. You're left only with the scummy ones, because they figure they'll have skipped town before the lawsuits come rolling in. And if your regulatory framework discourages that heavily enough to dissuade them, they'll stay away too.

When circumstances are hostile enough, no one wants a piece of it. Always lower-hanging fruit elsewhere.

I think you're leaving out a few "all things being equal" and other caveats. Compensation is not necessarily monetary (especially in the US), costs are more than just salary, etc.

>If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements.

No, I'm in the landlord business, and they do not want this. They want mildly-high rent that covers overhead plus a healthy (maybe even a little fat) overhead. They want to do maintenance, because apparently the biggest paydays come 10 years down the line when they sell to some other investor... and if it's a slum they won't get a good price or even a sale. They want good reviews from people who pay rent on time (or hell, even the people who are occasionally late but come through in the end), and they just want to be a trillion light years away from the hoarders, squatters, and apartment-destroyers.

Seen from the other side, you'd come to realize that almost all the horror stories you've heard are, at minimum, far more nuanced than you were led to believe, and that some large fraction were just fabricated entirely by people you'd never want living next door to you.

>My point was that small businesses aren't noble somehow. T

That's the thing though. There's this gigantic middle ground between nobility and villainy which is people just trying to get along and do what they're obligated to do, but you have leftists everywhere constantly slandering them because a German miscreant two centuries ago liked to mooch off his rich friends.

I don't want money for free. I want to be able to earn it, and earn well. I want to feel like I've accomplished something. Only children want things for free (because they know no better), and it's what separates them from adults.

Again, this starts with a proposal to end "ghost jobs" and ends with... whatever problem it is you're trying to solve here. And doesn't fix the "ghost job" problem!

I believe all of this but also want to say that in my life as a renter I never once had a landlord return a security deposit without me taking them to court. There's definitely some ruthlessness.

Yes, because flying a war jet under pressure and landing it in the desert is the same as writing software over 5 months in an office. /s

Test anxiety is real. Anxiety disorders are real in general, not to mention ADHD, autism and more where these disabilities can interact in bad ways in interviews. It does not mean that people with these issues are bad engineers. If your instrument is inaccurate, it does not mean the thing it is measuring is wrong.

One of the best and smartest engineers I have ever hired had visible anxiety and objectively did not pass the interview but we pushed for it anyway and was hired as a jr engineer. He is a staff engineer now, leads various large company library projects and is the go to expert about various systems in the entire company and will probably become a sr staff engineer. He also probably hasn't changed jobs because he knows he's bad at interviews, which is incredibly sad.

Are you suggesting that being in a life or death situation as a pilot is less stressful than taking a test or writing a software program over time?

Isn't Germany the largest economy in the EU and one of the most productive workforces in the world?

> but if you reduce pollution by 50%

What a terrible outcome! LOL

I'll repeat that the cure for test anxiety is preparation, preparation, preparation. Avoiding it, like your engineer employee, won't be helpful. Keep going to interviews, and the performance anxiety will also dissipate.

The first few times I did public speaking, I'd freeze up and squeak. I speak regularly now, and it's not a problem anymore.

(Again, I attended Caltech. Most of us were nerds, and many Aspergers. I have worked with many people "on the spectrum" and am not at all ignorant of their differences.)

You may have a more reasonable stance than most landlords, but that doesn't change the essence of the transaction.

If you could get higher rent without getting punished by the market (turnover), you would do it. If you could spend less on maintenance without getting punished by the market (turnover and reduced resale value), you would do it.

Many, if not most, landlords push both of these levers to their absolute limits.

The essence of being a landlord is that you've got your name on the title of a scarce resource that is difficult or impossible in some cases to duplicate: real estate in a particular location. The fact that your name is on this title means that you can extract value from people who need a place to live and did not arrive there first so they could buy the cheap property, build the building, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I hope to be a landlord too some day. Ownership is what matters when there's nowhere else to move. I look forward to the rent checks. However, I won't be pretending there's anything noble or fair about what I'm doing. It's just how the rules of our economy are set up.

This was also my experience.

I've been a perfect tenant my entire life, and I was still always treated like trash by every landlord I've rented from. I don't think they make a distinction.

> I don't want money for free. I want to be able to earn it, and earn well. I want to feel like I've accomplished something.

Well, if that's true then I wouldn't bother being a landlord. Being a landlord just means your name is on the title of a building such that it allows you to extract money from people who need a place to live. It's not creative, it's not original, and it's only possible because they aren't making any more real estate, but they're always making more people.

I said above to another commenter: I would also like to be a landlord one day. I'm sure I'd be a decent one. But, I won't be pretending like I'm doing anything productive... I'm just extracting money from the fact that my name is on a deed. Nothing more, nothing less.

It's just how our economy is set up, and, like everyone, I plan to try and take advantage of it. I won't be kidding myself, though, that I'm somehow a productive or noble small business man.

>Well, if that's true then I wouldn't bother being a landlord. Being a landlord just means your name is on the title of a building such that it allows you to extract money from people who need a place to live.

And, I expect, as a point of fact... you haven't bothered to be a landlord.

>It's just how our economy is set up, and, like everyone, I plan to try and take advantage of it.

That's how you perceive it. But the reality of it is that while many are hustling, few are prospering, few enough even that reasonable people might wonder if the few successful ones are the result of luck more than having figured out the get-rich-quick thing that everyone's been trying to figure out for millennia. Good luck, I suppose.

No, that optimizing and interviewing for performance under pressure is not needed for most software engineers, while it makes sense for fighter pilots. It's is definitely more stressful.

When I worked as a firefighter/paramedic, one of the axioms was that you don't train until you get it right, you train until you don't get it wrong. That, at 3am, sleep-deprived, it's so ingrained in you what to do, you can do it automatically, leaving your mental capacity for the variables of the situation, not the bare minimum of "what do I do next?"

Tobacco tax in Australia is an interesting example. A lot of people may have stopped initially but there was a more gradual decrease over time as the tax increases annually by CPI + 5%.

The problem is not everyone will stop and they now face is that at 70% of the price it's encouraging a black market for illegal tobacco with associated crime and a decline in tax revenue.

Well yeah.. that’s my point.

If the tax works you have to keep continuously increasing it every year. At some point that becomes detrimental (I mean there are good reasons why we don’t ban the usage of fossil fuels entirely..)

So it’s not a reliable source of revenue

> Wouldn't that create an enormous hole in the market for other less-scummier companies to jump in, albeit at perhaps lower margins?

A certain amount of margin is required for the company to even try to do business. Unfortunately, when the "let's turn the screws on this company" discourse starts getting Old Testament, people stop considering that.

If you want a good real life example of this, look at CA insurance companies. The state limited the rates they could charge to the point where many of them simply stopped signing up new customers and started dropping old ones.

There were no new insurers to take their place because it wasn't profitable for them either.

Companies ALWAYS pretend that this will be the result of regulation, but that doesn't change the fact that they're sometimes right.

> calculated that he could make the strip. And he did, with a few feet to spare.

Stories like that give me goosebumps. Your dad has (had? if so, I'm sorry) just absolute balls of steel. Not to mention an incredible mind. Thank you for sharing.

Interesting, but on the other side of the coin I can tell you that in 10 years of renting I've only foregone small fractions of my deposits and always by choice (pre-departure inspection tells you what they'd charge for anything amiss, and you can choose to clean/fix/etc. or pay them out of your deposit). If you don't get a pre-departure inspection you're definitely set up for ambiguity and shadiness.

In one apartment, I even spilled some bleach in a closet, and sneakily replaced the piece of carpet from the scraps I found when they were recarpeting a nearby unit. They didn't notice or care.

Its death by a thousand cuts.

I agree with you whole heartedly that scrutiny on a business should focus on the offerings of the business.

As for whether I’m an exception — maybe. Subjectively I think I am because I perceive myself to be putting more into the “business of business” than most other business owners I know, but I also have a bit more time. The services my business provides benefits from heavily cross linking service, sales, and event/auditable data. It fits cleanly into out of box sales processes that business software assumes. When we adopted our ERP we just changed our processes instead of butchering the software. What we actually offer is, to a large extent, set-it-and-check-on-it.

I would think that is a great luxury in a way. I don’t have to do back breaking labor to make a delicious batch of croissants for the masses every day. I’d rather the croissants be tasty than the bakery’s books be perfect. As long as they’re doing what they need to stay in business.

I did have something specific in mind when I made my comment about “how hard can it be?” I think I was painting with too broad a brush. When I typed that I was recalling the FinCEN BOI filings. All of two or three pages of an online wizard asking for all the same information most secretaries of state require, and such a disproportionate outrage about even having to do it. From peers in the business community I heard a lot of “this is too complicated!” Having read the FinCEN documentation on BOI, it definitely sounded way more complicated than it ever was to complete.