But when your corporate policies put weeks/months for an upgrade, and you can do it in 3 hours by reallocating to the same business (no theft), that's just using broken business practices to people's advantages.
And also, what ethical frame work are you using? Or is this the 'feels' framework?
Except that even IT would know that a missing 8MB RAM stick is not a defect, it's (petit) theft, since RAM stick have no legs to just wander around by themselves. If it's gone, then an employee stole it.
Defect is when that 8MB stick would be ... defective.
My boiler's copper water supply lines were vandalized for scrap. Their total value was 1540$ but the thief sold the copper for a grand total of 20$. The police and I went to the local scrap market, asked for anyone with a great deal on copper supply lines, and the perp was caught.
RAM thefts: Birmingham UK, Jewellery Quarter, St Paul's Square. Some may remember the solicitor's office on the corner that had 'RAM removed from PCs overnight' etched on the street level windows pre-millenium. Has been converted into posh flats now.
Same here in EU mainland, at every org I worked we used to get budget notebooks to do SW dev on, also in the 600-800 Euro range.
I think because the US is so much wealthier and can afford to spend more on tech without breaking a sweat. Hence the "Europoor" meme where Europeans can't comprehend the material abundance and spending power of the US.
You forgot to mention that, for those centuries, US immigration was effectively whites-only, until the 1965 Hart-Celler act (that politicians promised wouldn't change this!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart-Celler_Act
The Naturalization Act of 1790 (and subsequent) acts said you had to be white and have lived in the US for X years already to become a citizen. [1]
However, per your cited article a law was passed in 1882 to decrease Chinese immigration (who famously immigrated and helped build our railroads). [2] The Chinese immigrants couldn't become citizens but there was nothing (at the time) stopping them from moving and living and working in the US. [3]
Anecdotally and more recently: my Mexican grandmother, who married my World War 2 veteran grandfather in Mexico, legally immigrated just fine in the 1950s.
But, yes, most immigration was Europeans and African slaves but probably that was because it was expensive unless you effectively sold yourself. [4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th-century_Chinese_immigrati...
[4] https://www.history.com/articles/u-s-immigration-before-1965...
You don't think it had anything to do with the Naturalization Act of 1790 that limited citizenship to whites, or the fact that even in 1965, congressmen felt the need to lie to the public and promise that law would not change US demographics? It was just because it was "expensive", that people from Europe immigrated, but not from South America?
It’s not even a US-specific thing. Many countries recruit foreigners to their militaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_militaries_that_recrui...
Race baiting bullshit allows people to poo all over the discussion and avoid having to confront the actual reality of what kinds of people we make good immigrants and citizens and why, because the answers to those questions are gonna cast some shade domestically. Any correlation to skin tone is mostly coincidental or just a figment of how the cards fell historically.
If by not fitting in you mean that they will continue to look different and retain some links to their ancestral culture then sure.
If you pinch pennies buying a spec that exactly meets today’s needs, and next year MS Teams releases a new update that requires more resources, you don’t want to buy a whole building full of new computers.
(I don't mean that IT departments hand out bottom-of-the-barrel plastic laptops which break every five minutes, but rather fairly low-spec Thinkpad/HP/Dell business laptops with just enough RAM that their bloated Windows 11 installs are barely not swapping when idle and just enough SSD space that Windows Update doesn't fail)
The pricing difference between an i5 and an i7 aren't really that big when you go to Dell and tell them I need 4,000 desktops. DHS isn't paying the same pricing difference as we would be when purchasing a boxed CPU.
personally I have an i7 in the lab that turned into a crawl on Youtube because they started sending VP9 video by default, but i7 doesn't have hardware decode for it. Got a plugin to force h264 (h264ify) and it's back to normal.
Then you have situations where a software update adds a CPU instruction dependency and straight up doesn't work anymore.
Had to install and force-retain an old version of Spotify client on a bench lab PC because the new versions require AVX-1/2. It's a streaming audio player...
> Any small pleasure vessel leaving a United States port into international or foreign waters, without a call at a foreign port, does not satisfy the foreign departure requirement. Therefore, certain fishing vessels, cruises to nowhere, or any vessel that leaves from a United States port and returns without calling a foreign port or place, has not departed the United States.
Dunno how much emphasis to put on the word "port"
https://www.cbp.gov/travel/pleasure-boats-private-flyers/ple...
While it's a more inland water, Large vessels effectively can't transit through Windows/Detroit shipping channel without multiple border line crossings: https://i0.wp.com/niche-canada.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/1...
But you’re right. That’s poor reasoning because this kind of thing is easy to create fake news around. I’ll delete original. I shouldn’t have relied on it.
My guess is it was a huge net loss for the taxpayer.
The more effective move for the nation would have been for this guys boss to have confronted him and said "computer parts keep going missing on your shift. You have 2 weeks to make sure all the computers are back to their exact original config or we're gonna investigate and you could end up in prison".
Merely making the threats like you specify and even having it restored encourages more crime by making the crime effectively zero-risk — either he gets away with it, or simply needs to restore things to the way they were and the only cost to the criminal is the wasted effort. Makes it so crime pays.
And no, the investigation of watching a bunch of videos to observe the perp opening the computer cases, and writing up a complaint, is probably lower cost than the multiple thefts.
