> If, after reading this, anyone is still nodding their head and entertaining the idea that their internet company is in the same league as Blackwater, then they have some pretty strange value judgments.
We can get really philosophical about this if you want. Is it worse to kill 1 person or dismember 100? Is it worse to bankrupt one person or steal $1 from a million? If the perpetrator is a single entity, then courts have precedents to punish appropriately. But what if it is a systemic theft where a million people are involved in making hundred million others suffer slightly? Is that somehow "less wrong" than 5 people killing 25?
What if one of the hundred million suffering slightly, missing school work, or work assignments because of bandwidth theft, and loses grade or job and consequently, a chance at productive life? Every time my home internet goes down, I lose a chance at being productive, meeting my deadlines, and making money.
We have started placing a lot more importance over the last few decades on violent crimes committed against a few over white collar crimes that marginally impact millions. Violent crimes against a few will never stop as long as humans continue to be humans. However, by excusing the white collar crimes that steal pennies from everyone, we are slowly chipping away at our standard of living. Banks charge fees incorrectly and get away with it. Cellphone companies do the same. Insurance companies do the same. Since nobody in a large company can be held guilty for distributed crimes, every large company engages in them without consequences.
An EDI error at my wife's health insurance company caused a refusal in her invoice. The doctor's office said "Sorry, the insurance company said they won't cover it." Only after I read through the fine print and contacted all parties involved, did we find out that it was an automated electronic processing error instead of an outright denial by a human or algorithm. Nobody got blamed for this. There is nothing I can do about this to prevent future instances. And I am 100% certain, there are many many many others who have just paid the $200 without putting up a fight. And then someone of them stop getting the treatment because $200 is too much, and then suffer despite having insurance.
You might still put outright murder in a different league than bandwidth theft, but my point is that scale matters and we continue to ignore it because we solely look at individual instances and go "Pfft! It's only bad 10% of the time for 5% of the base so who cares?", ignoring that the base is 100 million people.
This should be the top comment overall. The mods should sym-link it into the root thread or something.
From a leadership perspective, understanding that seemingly minor decisions have can horrible consequences, and how often that happens, is what makes good leaders.
Here's one: Bancroft Hall at the US Naval Academy lacked air conditioning until 2004. Even after plans were made, the funding was cancelled because alumni complained that "it would make the students weak".
One admiral had the temerity to re-fund the work and got A/C installed. In reality, not only did performance improve, 25% fewer midshipmen got sick throughout the summer months. A total of over 500 fewer diagnoses. Multiply that by the last 10 years, and you're quite possibly saving a life in that 5000 illnesses.
The medical director's assessment at the time: the students were probably enjoying improved immune function due to better sleep.
When you're in charge and trying to save money for your Ferrari, don't forget that life sucks at the bottom. Maybe you should spend that money on bigger monitors for your help desk people instead.
Because, in truth, you're not successful only because of your hard work and personal risk and sacrifice early on. Plenty of people worked hard, took risk, and made sacrifices to make the organization what it is. You just won the CEO lottery.
"A total of over 500 fewer diagnoses. Multiply that by the last 10 years, and you're quite possibly saving a life in that 5000 illnesses."
Not to mention the delays in people taking time to get diagnosed, extra costs in diagnosing, delay in treating more serious complaints, and the cumulative effect of all of that over years.
Well said! From a purely utilitarian perspective it could easily be argued that large scale corporate collusion is worse than the deaths of a few individuals.
When looking at which company is more hated in the US I would completely agree that ISPs are towards the top of that list. Not only because of their large scale poor performance and price gouging but also because unlike Blackwater many people are directly affected.
If AT&T wasted just 8 hours from everyone in America, that's about 270000 person-years of lost time.
If Xe/Blackwater outright murdered 20 people, wasting every moment they might have had for the rest of their lives, that would only be about 1000 person-years of lost time.
I know that AT&T has wasted more than 8 hours of my time so far, I expect them to waste more of it in the future, and I'm not even a current customer.
If I were running life through a performance profiler, companies like AT&T and Comcast are short routines, frequently visited, inside inner loops, whereas companies like Xe might have a very expensive operation that is seldom performed. Total impact is severity multiplied by frequency.
Logically, we should be focusing on improving the customer experience from companies with the broadest surfaces exposed to the public. Instead, we heavily weight severity and heavily discount frequency. We spend billions fighting terrorism, and all but ignore crimes that collectively cost us all many times that amount in lost equity.
We know this is ridiculous. We always optimize our inner loops before messing around with once-run functions. But other people are not like us. They have illogical, emotional preferences and biases, and never realize that the most evil companies in the world never seem all that bad to one individual, in isolation.
Consider for a moment a cost-cutting measure undertaken by many companies. They choose to titrate their customer service staff such that none of their employees are ever idle while on the clock. The tradeoff there is that this means that customers who need something must always wait a certain amount of time before they can take care of their business. That's wasted time. (And they avoid hiring additional employees to do it, which may or may not be economically neutral, depending on how you look at such things.) They make a conscious decision to externalize some of the costs of providing customer service to the customers themselves. You pay with your time.
That 15 minutes waiting in line at the only open checkout register in a row of 20 point-of-sale terminals is a cost that you pay, that does not appear on your sales receipt. The 30 minutes spent waiting on hold for a call center employee is a cost you pay, that does not appear on your billing statement. The natural opponent to these incursions is the one entity that people created to ensure that costs and benefits for the individual could be subordinated to the collective cost and benefit to the whole--the government. But being composed of individuals, it suffers from the same biases: severity is more important than frequency.
Nickel-and-diming is therefore a profitable strategy, and we will continue to see it, and be diminished as a result. I see no solution that is both ethical and able to be accomplished by a minority of the consumer base from where I'm sitting.
What if one of the hundred million suffering slightly, missing school work, or work assignments because of bandwidth theft, and loses grade or job and consequently, a chance at productive life?
Really? We're now calling degraded bandwidth or service outages excuses for an unproductive life? What about the missed appointment because of a traffic jam? Are we making that the city planners' fault because they didn't build enough road capacity? Are we blaming the automakers because the jam was caused by a broken-down car?
What about the millions of hours of productive time that are wasted on social media? What about the student who fails a class because he wasted time on Facebook instead of studying? Or the employee who gets fired because he didn't complete a work assignment because Google Docs was down, and lost a chance at a produtive life. Are all online service providers now responsible for their users' life outcomes?
