GVIrish

The claim was that giving the delete PIN constitutes lying or making a false statement. If someone complied with what was asked, they would not be guilty of lying, even if a reasonable person would judge that the action did not meet the intent of the ask. And it doesn't appear that they are charging him with making a false statement.

The fact that the feds are using an obscure law to argue that he destroyed property to prevent it from being seized shows that they're reaching here.

It would depend on precisely what the ask was. Did the officer ask, "Give me the pin to unlock the phone."? In that case the command was complied with.

Starts with how you evaluate employees for bonuses and promotion. Do you evaluate people on the impact of what was delivered? How fast they delivered feature work? The quality level of what they delivered? How well they worked with others?

The answers to basic questions like that already starts to shape behavior. If you pay zero attention to how people behave, and only look at impact of what was delivered you may promote people who optimize for their own work, but make others miserable. If you don't properly weight quality, especially now with AI code gen, you'll promote people who move fast break more things than is reasonable.

We can easily find examples of suboptimal behavior that arises out of poorly shaped rewards incentives at companies. Empire building is one behavior that is the result of managers getting promoted based on headcount. Stack ranking can and has led to people limiting collaboration with peers because someone has to fail in order for someone else to get a favorable rating. Or people avoid riskier work because failure can put you on the hot seat.

> Maybe. Anonymity is where bad actors play.

The problem is when the government changes the definition of 'bad actor'.

That hasn't been my experience over 20 years. I've worked in multiple SCIFS that didn't handle SCI at all.

So you're using the word 'compromised'. In this context that would mean malware, unauthorized access, circumvented logging, etc. If someone thought this was happening the answer would be to lock the system down, perform forensic audits, and prosecute anyone who compromised these systems.

If you're talking about fear of leakers, the response to that is to tighten the distribution of information and start a counterintelligence investigation.

In any case the simple risk calculus is, what is the risk of adversaries getting a hold of this information and causing grave and lasting damage to national security and death vs the risk of political rivals leaking something. Pretty simple decision there and one that any cabinet member should get right.

SCIFs are for viewing TS materials, whether or not they are SCI. Even then, SCIFs are often employed for processing things that are only marked Secret or systems only handling Secret. But yes, if we want to be specific, Secret has a lower bar and can be worked on outside of SCIFs but still not in public or at home.

That doesn't really make sense. If they had strong reason to believe that the secure comms systems they were supposed to be using were compromised, using personal phones to communicate outside of SCIFs is very, very far from what any competent person who understands and is briefed on the threat environment would do. Note that none of the people involved are making that argument because it would make them look even more incompetent.

Using Signal in this case is wrong and foolish full stop, and the extremely likely reason they did so is so they could escape standard government record keeping compliance (NARA).

To start with, classified information is ONLY supposed to viewed in a SCIF. Secondly, it should never be loaded onto private devices. The private phones of national security leadership would be prime targets for every hostile intelligence agency in the world. It matters little if the information was encrypted in transit if the host device is compromised.

One would have to be a fool to not trust all of the classified tools and safeguards the US government uses only to then use a commercial app on commercial phones to communicate classified data in public while stateside and abroad. Just the fact that someone could accidentally add an unauthorized person to the chat is but one reason it was crazy for them to do this.

> but to attack the core idea as essentially wrong is anti math, science, and rationality

The way Microsoft implemented stack ranking was anti math. You're supposed to measure the data then calculate the level of fit to a distribution, not artificially shoehorn the data into buckets to create the curve. If you analyze the data honestly you may find you have a bimodal distribution, or a heavily skewed distribution, who knows.

Stack ranking just clumsily says, I'm gonna give x% a bad score, y% a middle score, and z% the top score.

That's not the point. The test giver has free discretion to say either answer is correct or incorrect. You could argue that if the intent was to underline "word" that it would have quotes around it, but it doesn't matter because the test is not supposed to be fair or consistent.

Things like this were at the heart of what Jim Crow was in America. Selective and capricious enforcement of the law to disenfranchise and disadvantage black people at best, enable unaccountable violence against them at the worst.

Microsoft pay isn't the best in the industry so if compensation is the only thing that matters to someone, Microsoft shouldn't even be in their top five.

> People refuse to acknowledge that their conservation efforts for a year are undone by some guy in Texas in five minutes

I don't think that's a good way to look at things. Some guy in Texas is polluting a lot more than you, ok, but would it be better if that guy keeps polluting and you pollute just as much? We can't get hung up on, 'well some person/company somewhere else is undoing my savings'. That kind of gets into tragedy of the commons thinking.

It is disheartening to see parts of the country going in the opposite direction than we should be going for sure. And well-meaning but not very useful policies can be a pain. But I try not to be disheartened at backward thinking in other locales, I try to look at the places making advances (for example, India is ahead of schedule in the shift to renewables) to be find some optimistic amidst the bleakness.

Typically you're not asking for a price(salary) upfront. Ideally you've done a bit of homework to figure out what positions can pay in the ballpark of what you want. Then you get their offer at the end of the interview process and negotiate as appropriate.

Yeah you may go through hours of interviews and not end up with an offer in some cases but think of it this way: you could potentially earn tens of thousands to over one hundred thousand extra dollar per year off that time investment in interviewing.

Attempting to line up multiple interviews and balancing offer timelines is hard, but the payoff can be huge. Considering that people spend 4 years or more working in college to get into their career, making a time investment of a few weeks to get a potentially large raise is nothing.