Disgraced Equifax CEO blames 145.5 million-record breach on a single forgetful flunky

While passing the cost along to the customer.

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The airline industry isn’t competitive. It’s an oligopoly. 4 companies do more than half the flights.

The reason why it’s so much easier to regulate airlines is because if you break the law with a plane the government will fucking shoot it out of the sky and you’ll be dead.

There’s consequences.

If instead you ruin a lot of innocent people financially, nothing bad happens to you.

You get millions of dollars and early retirement. As if you did everything right.

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Presumably said Equifax CEO was ok with a process in which the security of hundreds of millions of extremely sensitive records hinged on one guy not fucking up.

Sorry Equifax CEO, your disgrace is affirmed. However, the good news is Trump will probably appoint you to head the Atomic Energy Commission.

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Perhaps they could distribute the blame in direct proportion to how much each person in the failure chain was paid.

After all, the whole rationale behind paying the CEO many orders of magnitude more than the forgetful flunky is that the CEO had bigger “responsibilities.”

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While over looking why/how executives were selling off stock before news broke and devalued holdings.

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I don’t buy it. Unless the person in question had “Chief Corporate Scapegoat” on their business cards, there is no way in hell that Equifax laid all responsibility onto one person. No way.

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Inequifax

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Iniquityfax

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Equifakenews

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Modern leadership: Not just extractive and exploitative, but dodging responsibility.

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Sure, but as has been pointed out, in this instance the customer isn’t you and me, it’s the other sub-sentient conglomerations that want to use that data. Why should I care if Global Data Vacuum Inc charges Big Store Corp more for the data? Why is it a bad idea to make them pay more?

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Has Equifax posted any listings yet for new Corporate Scapegoat positions? Does it pay well?

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Isnt that the literal translation of “entrepreneur” - guy who passes the cost plus a bit onto you? French is such a succinct language.

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Eh, I know pre-9/11 is ancient history to some adults these days, but the airline industry has been regulated since there have been airlines, and it has nothing to do with terrorism, it’s to do with if you don’t practice due diligence with your airplanes they will fall out of the sky, or collide with each other, or start throwing passengers out mid-ocean to save fuel, and we don’t want to give them economic races-to-the-bottom excuses to start doing those things.

Besides, do you think it would give any airline executive pause if his planes got shot down because he skimped on psychological testing for his pilots, say? He won’t be on the plane, he has his own private jet.

(a) The term entrepreneur is difficult to render in English; the corresponding word, undertaker, being already appropriated to a limited sense. It signifies the master-manufacturer in manufacture, the farmer in agriculture, and the mer chant in commerce; and generally in all three branches, the person who takes upon himself the immediate responsibility, risk, and conduct of a concern of industry, whether upon his own or a borrowed capital. For want of a better word, it will be rendered into English by the term adventurer.

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Forgive but while I love Austrian Schnitzle, I am not entirely convinced by Austrian economics.

Since the phrase “Entre nous” means “between us”, is not possible that the most direct translation of Entrepreneur is “Go between” or literally the “guy in the middle”? I would like Nobby Stiles to be literally mean “delightful man of amazing capacities and a surprisingly large penis” in english. Sadly Im not in charge of the English language.

Note - none of the above attributes of Mr. Stiles are true.

It doesn’t matter what the von Mises institute wants. The fact remains that Jean Baptiste-Say popularized the term to mean “one who takes on risk in search of a profit.” as distinct from the capitalist or the laborer. His analysis could well be flawed; but it’s still influential.

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This is the sort of situation that arguably cannot be a single point of failure; because allowing it to be one is itself (at least) one other failure to keep it company.

It is certainly quite possible that the proximate cause was ‘dumb human error’; but the sheer inevitability if periodic instances of dumb human error, and the fact that it isn’t exactly a secret, means that anyone who wants to build a robust system of nontrivial size has to treat it as a fact rather than an excuse and design with it in mind.

Indeed, that’s sort of what the bigger-picture-stuff types are supposed to be doing to earn their premium over button pushers: implement systems(in the broad sense encompassing both tech bits, procedures, and organizational structure) that are more reliable than their parts, rather than merely as reliable as their weak links or tending to produce exciting failure cascades that make them more brittle and/or capable of dramatic error synergy between multiple erring parts.

If you can get hollowed out because one guy forgot a patch, you are certainly no better than ‘as reliable as weakest link’; and very likely in full horrific resonance Cascade of failure territory.

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(«) The term entrepreneur is difficult to render in English; the corresponding
word, undertaker, being already appropriated to a limited sense. It signifies
the master-manufacturer in manufacture, the farmer in agriculture, and the mer
chant in commerce; and generally in all three branches, the person who takes
upon himself the immediate responsibility, risk, and conduct of a concern of
industry, whether upon his own or a borrowed capital. For want of a better
word, it will be rendered into English by the term adventurer. T

But doesn’t the “T” here signify that these are the translators words? Monsieur Say used the term “Entrepreneur” which the Translator translates as “Capitalist” if I read that right. So the word was used by Say but was it really coined by him?

But really, all I was saying was that the clue is in the literal translation of the words “entre” and “preneur”. I know what you are thinking - why did Nobby bother making such a banal point? That’s the wonder of me I guess!

The english translation of Entrepreneur is Adventurer-- as distinct from Capitalist.

I am not well versed in French, or in political economy. But here is a simulateous translation of a passage.

French text
English text

“Après avoir compris que la demande des produits en général est d’autant plus vive que la production est plus active, vérité constante malgré sa tournure paradoxale, on doit peu se mettre en peine de savoir vers quelle branche d’industrie il est à désirer que la production se dirige. Les produits créés font naître des demandes diverses, déterminées par les mœurs, les besoins, l’état des capitaux, de l’industrie, des agents naturels du pays ; les marchandises les plus demandées sont celles qui présentent, par la concurrence des demandeurs, de plus forts intérêts pour les capitaux qui y sont consacrés, de plus gros profits pour les entrepreneurs, de meilleurs salaires pour les ouvriers ; et ce sont celles-là qui sont produites de préférence.”

“Having once arrived at the clear conviction, that the general de- mand for products is brisk in proportion to the activity of production, we need not trouble ourselves much to inquire towards what chan nel of industry production may be most advantageously directed The products created give rise to various degrees of demand, accord ing to the wants, the manners, the comparative capital, industry, and natural resources of each country; the article most in request, owing to the competition of buyers, yields the best interest of money to the capitalist, the largest profits to the adventurer, and the best wages to the labourer; and tne agency of their respective services is naturally attracted by these advantages towards those particular channels.”

(near the end of Book I, Chapter 15 Des débouchés/On production)

so, on first reading, he seems to differentiate the entrepreneur from the capitalist.