Many years ago, I arrived to my half-height cubicle at a Fortune 100 company to see that my desktop PC case was ajar. I set the CRT aside, opened it, and realized that the RAM had been removed. My neighbor explained what must have happened: another employee must have needed to double their RAM from 8 to 16 MB. Requisitioning an upgrade was a weeks-long bureaucratic process that required approval by one's manager and IT, perhaps prompting a review of per-team resource allocation. Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.
Sounds like the neighbor could have just taken the RAM from their own computer out and claimed someone stole it and then called IT to provide them with replacement and then opened it back to and put theirs in. Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.
> Sounds like the neighbor could have just taken the RAM from their own computer out and claimed someone stole it and then called IT to provide them with replacement and then opened it back to and put theirs in.
That would be the ideal way _if_ that person had a couple of hours to spare. In my meaningless anecdotal experience someone that would need to resort to this likely wasn't planning to do it.
More likely they were working on their TPS reports and it got so big they couldn't finish the work before their middle manager would be expecting it in 45 minutes so I'm a panic they sneak in and grab the extra RAM leading to them finishing the report with 1 minute to spare saving the company from insolvency!
> Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.
On principle I agree but it's not the only option! The real pro wouldn't have just taken the RAM and walked away, they would have taken the RAM and then submitted a ticket letting them know you noticed another employee's PC case open and when you looked noticed the sticks were missing.
Bonus points if they include a blurb highlighting the importance of that person's PC being functional before they get in the office since that PC has the super important customer files needed for the big meeting in an hour and if they don't have them the company is going to have to make cuts and will likely start with the IT department.
> More likely they were working on their TPS reports and it got so big they couldn't finish the work before their middle manager would be expecting it in 45 minutes so I'm a panic they sneak in and grab the extra RAM leading to them finishing the report with 1 minute to spare saving the company from insolvency!
I don't think it's more likely that this single action saved the company from insolvency than they were just impatient and selfish. I honestly don't really believe you do either.
> On principle I agree but it's not the only option! The real pro wouldn't have just taken the RAM and walked away, they would have taken the RAM and then submitted a ticket letting them know you noticed another employee's PC case open and when you looked noticed the sticks were missing.
Yes, that also immediately occurred to me. Being less selfish is good, but not being selfish at all is better.
Just to be clear, I'm more or less playing devil's advocate here as an exercise for myself. There's simply not enough context in the story to be able to have a concrete opinion on it for me personally and creating hypotheticals like the one in my reply have been a great way for me to explore concepts more thoroughly so I can form a more nuanced opinion to apply in the real world when the need arises.
> I don't think it's more likely that this single action saved the company from insolvency than they were just impatient and selfish. I honestly don't really believe you do either.
Come on, that was obviously a made up scenario for the purposes of illustrating a point complete with a small nod to the TPS reports from Office Space movie.
The point was that, in my experience, the people in these environments that engage in this sort of act typically do so because they believe their individual situation justifies the action despite the effects it will have on someone else's ability to perform their function.
> Yes, that also immediately occurred to me. Being less selfish is good, but not being selfish at all is better.
That assumes that the selfish action is inherently "bad" or "negative" and that it's being done in a vacuum.
Sure, the worker taking the RAM is benefiting at the expense of the other workers time but you can imagine any number of scenarios where the benefit/cost of the act are greatly outweighed by the overall importance of the outcome that the act produced.
> The point was that, in my experience, the people in these environments that engage in this sort of act typically do so because they believe their individual situation justifies the action despite the effects it will have on someone else's ability to perform their function.
Yes, and we have a word for people who think that their needs outweigh those of others: selfish.
> That assumes that the selfish action is inherently "bad" or "negative" and that it's being done in a vacuum.
I don't even know what this means. Being selfish is bad and negative, yes.
> Sure, the worker taking the RAM is benefiting at the expense of the other workers time but you can imagine any number of scenarios where the benefit/cost of the act are greatly outweighed by the overall importance of the outcome that the act produced.
I can imagine them. I don't think they're particularly likely compared to someone being selfish, because there are many selfish people in the world, and almost no circumstances where getting more RAM immediately by stealing it from someone else is warranted.
The other way to do this, which I literally did n that era, was to just go buy an extra stick of ram out of pocket (Ram used to not be expensive!) and just guerrilla upgrade my work pc myself, IT none the wiser, and just a lot easier and faster than all the BS time and bureaucracy it would have taken otherwise.
I remember even trying this with a cheap HDD->SSD upgrade as well, but by that point they had implemented drive encryption so that foiled that effort.
In this context it's not one individual stealing from another. This is a temporary reallocation of a dormant resource within the system to a more critical process that requires those resources to perform its function and ensure the system remains stable. In this framing I'd be inclined to argue not taking the RAM would be the unethical choice.
Unless this company was actively working against humanities survival, then the ethical thing to do would be to steal the RAM and not use it!
You're spending a ton of effort to try to craft implausible scenarios like the RAM only being "temporarily" taken or the work it was used for being critical. I could just as easily claim that the one who's RAM was taken had critical humanitarian work that didn't get done in time because their RAM was stolen so their coworker could play the latest game that required 16 MB. The actual facts that have been established make neither of these less likely than the other because they're both incredibly unlikely, and it's kind of bizarre that you seem to think otherwise.
Ethics aren't binary. The amount of harm caused to a company needing to allocate an extra 8 MB of RAM a single time is a lot lower than the amount of harm caused to an individual by forcing them to lose 1/4 of their workday.
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?
Reminds me of the kids in my high school who stole individual 4MB 72-pin SIMMs out of a bunch of computer lab desktop PCs to upgrade their approximately equivalent generation motherboard/CPU home systems to whatever was their max capacity, in an era when a 16MB RAM desktop PC was a high performer. Shortly after all the PCs got locks on them.
Yeah, I've never been in IT, so I didn't know when tools were available to remote into nodes on the network. The low RAM sizes was precisely what led me to ask
Back then, if computers needed to be centrally managed, they'd give employees terminals and run everything on mainframes or X servers. Personal computers were often not even networked.
>Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.
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.
Selling 105,800$ worth of compute for 39*200=7800$ is similar to theft I've only encountered in the third world.
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.
The copper theft thing happens in western nations too. There's videos of people driving up in cars, license plates and faces showing and just to add to the stupidity they use bolt cutters to remove live power cables from EV charging stations.
The damage they do is well over $1000 from the multiple they hit so a major federal charge qualifies. The scrap value once you pull out the copper is less than $5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqmythK_b6Y
The amount of effort to reward doesn't come near even a minimum wage job. Similar to the above. The guy sold $7800 over the course of more than a year and not to factor in this was a swap so he bought replacements. Stupid.
Hang on, 105 800 / 46 = $2300 per machine. Good heavens, when I was partially responsible for hardware refreshes in a UK public sector organisation with around a thousand endpoint PCs we budgeted something like £600 a box. Have prices really gone up that much in a decade or so, or is this some maximalist prosecution claim?
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.
>when I was partially responsible for hardware refreshes in a UK public sector organisation with around a thousand endpoint PCs we budgeted something like £600 a box.
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.
There's been ~40% inflation accumulated over the last decade. On top of that, storage and RAM prices have recently doubled or even tripled, as demand has outpaced supply.
A quick look on Dell's web page shows an entry-level Core i3-14100T system with 8 GB RAM for $747.74, which would be under £600. A $2,230 system from their Alienware brand currently gets you a Core Ultra 7 265F, GeForce RTX 5070
and 32 GB of RAM.
I can't imagine most office workers would need more than the entry-level system, although corporate purchases are known for overprovisioning, especially so when it's a government body, so it wouldn't be unheard of to spend $2,300, especially so if that includes paying an IT worker to set it up.
Corporate computers often have a 4 or 8 GB VRAM brand GPU that sits idle only running the desktop animations. If you have an HDMI port for the iGPU or however the monitor connection for laptops work, it is almost a victimless crime.
Maybe even one stick of ram in two stick setups.
If you steal the CPU yeah someone is bound to notice even if it is an atom.
For the same reasons fortune 500s will spec the same for their office workers. Labor is expensive compared to hardware. It is often cheaper to spend a little bit more on hardware to avoid supporting multiple configuration, exceptions, more frequent updates, support tickets from power users, etc
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.
Border Patrol’s IT department more forward looking than the rest of the government..? sign me up! I’ve been using the same laptop for nearly 5 years now. It’s painfully slow and does not meet the needs of the latest Teams updates.
We are on 3 year refresh cycles at my office. I always feel guilty when I am forced to get a new machine to replace the perfectly working but 3 year old one. At least a 3 year old machine will still sell as surplus.
You seem to live in a bit of a bubble, personally I've never seen anything other than penny-pinching on corporate laptops and everybody everywhere complaining about the same.
(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)
I work in e-waste recycling. Most of the PCs and laptops I see are corporate IT decommissions. Most of those have i5 CPUs, and only a handful are i7. Few are cruel enough to afflict their wage slaves with an i3 or less.
i7 CPUs have been used for all sorts of PC configurations. Your standard library at a university or college, the office worker desktop who does nothing but use web based applications for their job, and so on.
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.
At a certain scale, the relative complexity (both in terms of inventory management and dealing with upgrade requests / approvals / etc) tends itself towards picking a baseline spec that can work for the overwhelming majority of your fleet.
At certain point people just don't care about saving money. You get a budget and then get quotes and pick one that matches what you are allowed to spend. If there is multiple with same spend go for one with bigger numbers.
Customs and Border Patrol has been granted huge budget increases this year.
Bureaucracies generally need to spend all their entire budget to show that they "need" it to avoid losing it next year, so they are certainly going to spend it. (Also, expect increased corruption)
45 security apps cut the ram and CPU performance in half out of the gate, then you have Win11 with its web gui and users who complain about any slowness so i7 or r7 is about the norm most places / bulk big 3 oems make for business.
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...
I would also say in general that the federal government's software contractors are likely building tons of complex HTML5 / WebRTC / webassembly software packages that will choke a cheaper desktop PC. Ever viewed 20 cameras simultaneously in one browser tab in Frigate and seen the CPU usage? Now imagine something like that but for watching border sensor cameras and stuff...
I remember my parents working for a company in the 90s and the mailroom was one the most common places things went missing… aka theft. I recall my mom had her purse stolen at her cube… theft from within similar to security exploits from within seem to be the most real security vulnerability to be focused on. That sshd that can only be accessed from a few specific ips with the right port knocking is not how you get hacked… at least not normally
If you've ever driven through the land crossing border in either direction at Calais, Maine (and St. Stephen, NB), they're both really tiny and sleepy places. It's astonishing to think that he wouldn't get caught. Like, you cripple the PCs of a place where your colleagues use them on a day to day basis and think nobody is going to notice? Real genius move there, bud.
The border guys are there are really aggressive too. I canoed the st croix up around there and you are warned not to paddle north of the halfway line in the middle of the river… agents will literally pop out of the woods and start reproaching you
obviously this isn't official advice, but are they misinformed and don't like you doing legal things that bother them?
> 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.
I'm fairly sure you need to at least be a Permanent Resident to get hired, which makes you a US Person (it's a distinct legal definition). Permanent residents are also able to join the military and have been able to do so for a long time. There's enough of them that during the peak of the Iraq War they even held in-country citizenship ceremonies at major bases for people who had filed and completed their citizenship paperwork.
US person is a tax definition, folks without permanent residency that meet the substantial presence test are also US people. For immigration purposes you use resident alien / nonresident alien.
US Person is not a tax definition, it is a security definition. holds up access badge with US Person written on it Taxes do not care if you're an American or not, you're still paying them.
For the same reason that foreign nationals can join the military, including the Coast Guard that has an overlapping mission: it's a nation of immigrants and for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.
> for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.
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
I think you're conflating naturalization/citizenship with immigration.
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]
> But, yes, most immigration was Europeans and African slaves but probably that was because it was expensive unless you effectively sold yourself.
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?
Lol no. For almost the entire 20th century, until 1992, Filipinos could just join the Navy or Coast Guard at foreign recruiting posts, without even being American residents, then get fast-tracked for citizenship.
I've heard of some people on the lam who wanted to join the French Foreign Legion, a military that gives a no-questions-asked grant of citizenship at the end.
That's not how it works, and I have firsthand experience, and hasn't been for at least three decades. The very first thing that happens when you show up in Fontenay-sous-bois is that they run Interpol checks and other checks in your country of residence or anything notable in your passport.
Gone are the days of accepting any criminal openly.
They do however, if you either complete your contract, or are injured, deem you eligible for French citizenship "by spilled blood".
former squid here, can confirm. filipinos were very common until the USN pulled out of the bases in the Philippines in the early 90s.
they couldn’t get clearances easily if at all so a lot of filipinos worked in the galley (kitchens) which sometimes resulted in unexpected menu items. if it had been lumpia and chicken adobo that would have been great but usually it was stuff like spaghetti sauce with liver
That’s not an answer. Their comment didn’t mention whiteness at all. You believe that the whiteness of these immigrants is so important that leaving it out constitutes misrepresentation. Why is it so important? Come on, you obviously think it’s a key part of the story, so spit it out.
I'll summarize the conversation up to this point to you: The story is about a Chinese national working as a supervisor in CBP.
geetee asked why is CBP hiring foreign nationals.
jeffbee answered that it's because the US is a "nation of immigrants that for centuries recognized the value of recruiting foreign people".
I corrected him that those "centuries long" attitudes only applied to whites, and excluded the Chinese national subject of the article. This directly debunks his assertion that American values until recently meant his acceptance.
My beliefs are only relevant in so far as it is against my beliefs to lie. Why is that so strange to you? You seem to believe debunking lies requires one to have some fringe beliefs. What does that say about what you think are mainstream beliefs? What does it say about yours? I've only referred to widely-known facts of US history, that I don't believe you're ignorant of. Why did you not only not correct the lie, but attacked the person that did? The only conclusion I can make is that you are so at odds with truth, that you see correcting obvious lies as an assault on your worldview.
I corrected the actual misconception in another comment: CBP is not hiring noncitizens.
Given that, I don’t know what to do with the rest of this. Knowing about the racial makeup of past immigrants is apparently super important for a bad answer to a question based on faulty assumptions.
And I guess you dropped in that little parenthetical about politicians promising that law wouldn’t change white-only immigration just as a fun little reminder about how people in the 1960s were super racist.
> I corrected the actual misconception in another comment: CBP is not hiring noncitizens.
If you want to imply that what I corrected wasn't a misconception, why don't you say so directly? Is it because doing so would make it too obvious you're trying to deflect from the truth?
Your statement is far too broad to be correct in any case. Thousands of Chinese and other non-white people immigrated long before 1965. Ironically, some of the earliest Chinese people employed by the federal government were employed by Customs, decades before 1965.
Yes, my broad statement about US immigration policy is incorrect because of a few exceptions. It's impossible to talk about trends and averages because there's always a counter-example somewhere that, by your logic, disproves the whole thing. This gas is not hot - look at these ten molecules, they're moving slow! I guess China is open and welcoming too, because they have thousands (1.4 million!) of foreigners living there?
(0.1% of China's total population, but why let statistics get in the way of anecdotal reasoning?)
Are you really incapable of thinking statistically, even this little bit, or are you just playing dumb because it lets you avoid engaging honestly with the question a little bit longer?
You’re the one who can’t fathom that a general answer to a very broad question must be a lie (not merely incomplete, not merely wrong, but a lie) because you think the answer to a broad, general question must include “although our immigration policy was racist as heck until the 1960s so this specific guy would have had a hard time before then” at the end. I’m not the one incapable of engaging honestly here.
Yes, saying it was part of US historical culture to accept people like this guy, when the culture explicitly rejected them, is a lie. Nothing you said so far disproved this.
But I was more polite, and merely said he "forgot to mention" that aspect. That's all it took to draw your objections. I'll leave you to your word games now.
Edit: Fine, you get one more reply.
> The question was “foreign nationals,” not “people like this guy.”
But the topic was this guy.
> And it’s a specific choice to consider race as part of “like this guy,” not a law of nature.
Yes, a specific choice that the US made, from its founding up until 1965. But you are more comfortable talking in vague abstractions divorced from real world implementations, talking about words without thinking what those words refer to, so I get why you're confused. It's just a way of thinking I find repellent, and refuse to humor. As I said, enjoy your word games.
The question was “foreign nationals,” not “people like this guy.” And it’s a specific choice to consider race as part of “like this guy,” not a law of nature.
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.
US nationals are a tiny corner case that applies to people born in certain US territories. They’re functionally equivalent to citizens aside from not having the right to vote in federal elections.
As far as I can tell, “those who owe allegiance to the US” doesn’t include anyone beyond citizens and nationals and is just there as boilerplate.
That's what I assumed, and found strange that the referenced article refers to him as a Chinese national. That said, that publication is also probably not very credible because I can't find anything backing up that claim.
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.
And how much did this investigation cost, when you account for all the hours spent by investigators, lawers, judges, etc?
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".
IMHO a bigger worry is if they were opening the case then they could have modified it for spying or changing contents. I'd have thought stuff like this should have case alarm notification and inventory change alerts.
Sure, that'd be more "cost efficient", and for a small one-off, probably better. But law enforcement and justice is not a profit center.
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.
Many years ago, I arrived to my half-height cubicle at a Fortune 100 company to see that my desktop PC case was ajar. I set the CRT aside, opened it, and realized that the RAM had been removed. My neighbor explained what must have happened: another employee must have needed to double their RAM from 8 to 16 MB. Requisitioning an upgrade was a weeks-long bureaucratic process that required approval by one's manager and IT, perhaps prompting a review of per-team resource allocation. Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.
Sounds like the neighbor could have just taken the RAM from their own computer out and claimed someone stole it and then called IT to provide them with replacement and then opened it back to and put theirs in. Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.
> Sounds like the neighbor could have just taken the RAM from their own computer out and claimed someone stole it and then called IT to provide them with replacement and then opened it back to and put theirs in.
That would be the ideal way _if_ that person had a couple of hours to spare. In my meaningless anecdotal experience someone that would need to resort to this likely wasn't planning to do it.
More likely they were working on their TPS reports and it got so big they couldn't finish the work before their middle manager would be expecting it in 45 minutes so I'm a panic they sneak in and grab the extra RAM leading to them finishing the report with 1 minute to spare saving the company from insolvency!
> Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.
On principle I agree but it's not the only option! The real pro wouldn't have just taken the RAM and walked away, they would have taken the RAM and then submitted a ticket letting them know you noticed another employee's PC case open and when you looked noticed the sticks were missing.
Bonus points if they include a blurb highlighting the importance of that person's PC being functional before they get in the office since that PC has the super important customer files needed for the big meeting in an hour and if they don't have them the company is going to have to make cuts and will likely start with the IT department.
> More likely they were working on their TPS reports and it got so big they couldn't finish the work before their middle manager would be expecting it in 45 minutes so I'm a panic they sneak in and grab the extra RAM leading to them finishing the report with 1 minute to spare saving the company from insolvency!
I don't think it's more likely that this single action saved the company from insolvency than they were just impatient and selfish. I honestly don't really believe you do either.
> On principle I agree but it's not the only option! The real pro wouldn't have just taken the RAM and walked away, they would have taken the RAM and then submitted a ticket letting them know you noticed another employee's PC case open and when you looked noticed the sticks were missing.
Yes, that also immediately occurred to me. Being less selfish is good, but not being selfish at all is better.
Just to be clear, I'm more or less playing devil's advocate here as an exercise for myself. There's simply not enough context in the story to be able to have a concrete opinion on it for me personally and creating hypotheticals like the one in my reply have been a great way for me to explore concepts more thoroughly so I can form a more nuanced opinion to apply in the real world when the need arises.
> I don't think it's more likely that this single action saved the company from insolvency than they were just impatient and selfish. I honestly don't really believe you do either.
Come on, that was obviously a made up scenario for the purposes of illustrating a point complete with a small nod to the TPS reports from Office Space movie.
The point was that, in my experience, the people in these environments that engage in this sort of act typically do so because they believe their individual situation justifies the action despite the effects it will have on someone else's ability to perform their function.
> Yes, that also immediately occurred to me. Being less selfish is good, but not being selfish at all is better.
That assumes that the selfish action is inherently "bad" or "negative" and that it's being done in a vacuum.
Sure, the worker taking the RAM is benefiting at the expense of the other workers time but you can imagine any number of scenarios where the benefit/cost of the act are greatly outweighed by the overall importance of the outcome that the act produced.
> The point was that, in my experience, the people in these environments that engage in this sort of act typically do so because they believe their individual situation justifies the action despite the effects it will have on someone else's ability to perform their function.
Yes, and we have a word for people who think that their needs outweigh those of others: selfish.
> That assumes that the selfish action is inherently "bad" or "negative" and that it's being done in a vacuum.
I don't even know what this means. Being selfish is bad and negative, yes.
> Sure, the worker taking the RAM is benefiting at the expense of the other workers time but you can imagine any number of scenarios where the benefit/cost of the act are greatly outweighed by the overall importance of the outcome that the act produced.
I can imagine them. I don't think they're particularly likely compared to someone being selfish, because there are many selfish people in the world, and almost no circumstances where getting more RAM immediately by stealing it from someone else is warranted.
The other way to do this, which I literally did n that era, was to just go buy an extra stick of ram out of pocket (Ram used to not be expensive!) and just guerrilla upgrade my work pc myself, IT none the wiser, and just a lot easier and faster than all the BS time and bureaucracy it would have taken otherwise.
I remember even trying this with a cheap HDD->SSD upgrade as well, but by that point they had implemented drive encryption so that foiled that effort.
Plot twist: that's what happened in this case.
I like the way you think.
Maybe. Anyway, let us not forget that both of these actions are unethical.
In this context it's not one individual stealing from another. This is a temporary reallocation of a dormant resource within the system to a more critical process that requires those resources to perform its function and ensure the system remains stable. In this framing I'd be inclined to argue not taking the RAM would be the unethical choice.
Unless this company was actively working against humanities survival, then the ethical thing to do would be to steal the RAM and not use it!
You're spending a ton of effort to try to craft implausible scenarios like the RAM only being "temporarily" taken or the work it was used for being critical. I could just as easily claim that the one who's RAM was taken had critical humanitarian work that didn't get done in time because their RAM was stolen so their coworker could play the latest game that required 16 MB. The actual facts that have been established make neither of these less likely than the other because they're both incredibly unlikely, and it's kind of bizarre that you seem to think otherwise.
Ethics aren't binary. The amount of harm caused to a company needing to allocate an extra 8 MB of RAM a single time is a lot lower than the amount of harm caused to an individual by forcing them to lose 1/4 of their workday.
Sure, theft is theft.
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?
Was this explanation given with a wink and a nod, or did your neighbor always have 16MB of RAM?
Reminds me of the kids in my high school who stole individual 4MB 72-pin SIMMs out of a bunch of computer lab desktop PCs to upgrade their approximately equivalent generation motherboard/CPU home systems to whatever was their max capacity, in an era when a 16MB RAM desktop PC was a high performer. Shortly after all the PCs got locks on them.
then they learned how to pick/shim locks
This was common at our East coast Amazon site circa 2019 as well, but for monitors.
Was this before IT had the ability to look at all of the machines to see which suddenly had a different RAM config?
I've worked at a bunch of orgs and no one is bothering to look at ram size changes they just note what it's at when they get a call.
> from 8 to 16 MB
Yes
Yeah, I've never been in IT, so I didn't know when tools were available to remote into nodes on the network. The low RAM sizes was precisely what led me to ask
Back then, if computers needed to be centrally managed, they'd give employees terminals and run everything on mainframes or X servers. Personal computers were often not even networked.
We’re talking about ~’94 here…
IT tech was probably the one who suggested the approach.
>Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.
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.
Selling 105,800$ worth of compute for 39*200=7800$ is similar to theft I've only encountered in the third world.
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.
The copper theft thing happens in western nations too. There's videos of people driving up in cars, license plates and faces showing and just to add to the stupidity they use bolt cutters to remove live power cables from EV charging stations.
The damage they do is well over $1000 from the multiple they hit so a major federal charge qualifies. The scrap value once you pull out the copper is less than $5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqmythK_b6Y
The amount of effort to reward doesn't come near even a minimum wage job. Similar to the above. The guy sold $7800 over the course of more than a year and not to factor in this was a swap so he bought replacements. Stupid.
Not only in the third world i would say?
Same but for a flexible thin-wall a/c refrigerant line :(
Hang on, 105 800 / 46 = $2300 per machine. Good heavens, when I was partially responsible for hardware refreshes in a UK public sector organisation with around a thousand endpoint PCs we budgeted something like £600 a box. Have prices really gone up that much in a decade or so, or is this some maximalist prosecution claim?
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.
>when I was partially responsible for hardware refreshes in a UK public sector organisation with around a thousand endpoint PCs we budgeted something like £600 a box.
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.
There's been ~40% inflation accumulated over the last decade. On top of that, storage and RAM prices have recently doubled or even tripled, as demand has outpaced supply.
A quick look on Dell's web page shows an entry-level Core i3-14100T system with 8 GB RAM for $747.74, which would be under £600. A $2,230 system from their Alienware brand currently gets you a Core Ultra 7 265F, GeForce RTX 5070 and 32 GB of RAM.
I can't imagine most office workers would need more than the entry-level system, although corporate purchases are known for overprovisioning, especially so when it's a government body, so it wouldn't be unheard of to spend $2,300, especially so if that includes paying an IT worker to set it up.
I thought this would be about GPUs.
Corporate computers often have a 4 or 8 GB VRAM brand GPU that sits idle only running the desktop animations. If you have an HDMI port for the iGPU or however the monitor connection for laptops work, it is almost a victimless crime.
Maybe even one stick of ram in two stick setups.
If you steal the CPU yeah someone is bound to notice even if it is an atom.
Bured lede: i7 CPUs for border patrol.. why?
For the same reasons fortune 500s will spec the same for their office workers. Labor is expensive compared to hardware. It is often cheaper to spend a little bit more on hardware to avoid supporting multiple configuration, exceptions, more frequent updates, support tickets from power users, etc
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.
Border Patrol’s IT department more forward looking than the rest of the government..? sign me up! I’ve been using the same laptop for nearly 5 years now. It’s painfully slow and does not meet the needs of the latest Teams updates.
We are on 3 year refresh cycles at my office. I always feel guilty when I am forced to get a new machine to replace the perfectly working but 3 year old one. At least a 3 year old machine will still sell as surplus.
You seem to live in a bit of a bubble, personally I've never seen anything other than penny-pinching on corporate laptops and everybody everywhere complaining about the same.
(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)
Poorly run IT organizations certainly exist, even in F500. I’m telling you why it’s done, not that it universally is.
I work in e-waste recycling. Most of the PCs and laptops I see are corporate IT decommissions. Most of those have i5 CPUs, and only a handful are i7. Few are cruel enough to afflict their wage slaves with an i3 or less.
i7 CPUs have been used for all sorts of PC configurations. Your standard library at a university or college, the office worker desktop who does nothing but use web based applications for their job, and so on.
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.
At a certain scale, the relative complexity (both in terms of inventory management and dealing with upgrade requests / approvals / etc) tends itself towards picking a baseline spec that can work for the overwhelming majority of your fleet.
At certain point people just don't care about saving money. You get a budget and then get quotes and pick one that matches what you are allowed to spend. If there is multiple with same spend go for one with bigger numbers.
Customs and Border Patrol has been granted huge budget increases this year.
Bureaucracies generally need to spend all their entire budget to show that they "need" it to avoid losing it next year, so they are certainly going to spend it. (Also, expect increased corruption)
Because it runs Windows hehe
It's just a typical enterprise PC configuration. Probably because nobody writes efficient software these days.
45 security apps cut the ram and CPU performance in half out of the gate, then you have Win11 with its web gui and users who complain about any slowness so i7 or r7 is about the norm most places / bulk big 3 oems make for business.
and rowhammer etc mitigations microcode updates
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...
Isn't Palantir a webapp? Full of maps and lists of stuff? Seems like a recipe for "chrome has stopped responding..."
I would also say in general that the federal government's software contractors are likely building tons of complex HTML5 / WebRTC / webassembly software packages that will choke a cheaper desktop PC. Ever viewed 20 cameras simultaneously in one browser tab in Frigate and seen the CPU usage? Now imagine something like that but for watching border sensor cameras and stuff...
That's usually a RAM limit, and only six computers had RAM swapped out of them.
I remember my parents working for a company in the 90s and the mailroom was one the most common places things went missing… aka theft. I recall my mom had her purse stolen at her cube… theft from within similar to security exploits from within seem to be the most real security vulnerability to be focused on. That sshd that can only be accessed from a few specific ips with the right port knocking is not how you get hacked… at least not normally
If you've ever driven through the land crossing border in either direction at Calais, Maine (and St. Stephen, NB), they're both really tiny and sleepy places. It's astonishing to think that he wouldn't get caught. Like, you cripple the PCs of a place where your colleagues use them on a day to day basis and think nobody is going to notice? Real genius move there, bud.
The border guys are there are really aggressive too. I canoed the st croix up around there and you are warned not to paddle north of the halfway line in the middle of the river… agents will literally pop out of the woods and start reproaching you
obviously this isn't official advice, but are they misinformed and don't like you doing legal things that bother them?
> 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 are they misinformed and don't like you doing legal things that bother them
This is generally law enforcement all over. Given the power imbalance people don't question it due to fear of arrest/violence.
Why in the world is U.S. Customs and Border Protection hiring foreign nationals?
I'm fairly sure you need to at least be a Permanent Resident to get hired, which makes you a US Person (it's a distinct legal definition). Permanent residents are also able to join the military and have been able to do so for a long time. There's enough of them that during the peak of the Iraq War they even held in-country citizenship ceremonies at major bases for people who had filed and completed their citizenship paperwork.
US person is a tax definition, folks without permanent residency that meet the substantial presence test are also US people. For immigration purposes you use resident alien / nonresident alien.
US Person is not a tax definition, it is a security definition. holds up access badge with US Person written on it Taxes do not care if you're an American or not, you're still paying them.
For the same reason that foreign nationals can join the military, including the Coast Guard that has an overlapping mission: it's a nation of immigrants and for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.
> for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.
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
I think you're conflating naturalization/citizenship with immigration.
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...
> But, yes, most immigration was Europeans and African slaves but probably that was because it was expensive unless you effectively sold yourself.
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?
And in the same era in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Immigration_Act,_1923
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_head_tax
Lol no. For almost the entire 20th century, until 1992, Filipinos could just join the Navy or Coast Guard at foreign recruiting posts, without even being American residents, then get fast-tracked for citizenship.
I remember learning about that from Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, back in the day.
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...
I've heard of some people on the lam who wanted to join the French Foreign Legion, a military that gives a no-questions-asked grant of citizenship at the end.
That's not how it works, and I have firsthand experience, and hasn't been for at least three decades. The very first thing that happens when you show up in Fontenay-sous-bois is that they run Interpol checks and other checks in your country of residence or anything notable in your passport.
Gone are the days of accepting any criminal openly.
They do however, if you either complete your contract, or are injured, deem you eligible for French citizenship "by spilled blood".
former squid here, can confirm. filipinos were very common until the USN pulled out of the bases in the Philippines in the early 90s.
they couldn’t get clearances easily if at all so a lot of filipinos worked in the galley (kitchens) which sometimes resulted in unexpected menu items. if it had been lumpia and chicken adobo that would have been great but usually it was stuff like spaghetti sauce with liver
i miss lumpia with banana ketchup so much
You forgot to mention that those people weren't considered "white" at the time.
Why is this so important to mention here?
Correcting jeffbee's misrepresentation of history is important for the same reason they felt the need to misrepresent it in the first place.
That’s not an answer. Their comment didn’t mention whiteness at all. You believe that the whiteness of these immigrants is so important that leaving it out constitutes misrepresentation. Why is it so important? Come on, you obviously think it’s a key part of the story, so spit it out.
> Their comment didn’t mention whiteness at all.
Yes, that was the misrepresentation.
Why are you dodging the question of why that even matters? Are you too cowardly to explain your beliefs?
I'll summarize the conversation up to this point to you: The story is about a Chinese national working as a supervisor in CBP.
geetee asked why is CBP hiring foreign nationals.
jeffbee answered that it's because the US is a "nation of immigrants that for centuries recognized the value of recruiting foreign people".
I corrected him that those "centuries long" attitudes only applied to whites, and excluded the Chinese national subject of the article. This directly debunks his assertion that American values until recently meant his acceptance.
My beliefs are only relevant in so far as it is against my beliefs to lie. Why is that so strange to you? You seem to believe debunking lies requires one to have some fringe beliefs. What does that say about what you think are mainstream beliefs? What does it say about yours? I've only referred to widely-known facts of US history, that I don't believe you're ignorant of. Why did you not only not correct the lie, but attacked the person that did? The only conclusion I can make is that you are so at odds with truth, that you see correcting obvious lies as an assault on your worldview.
I corrected the actual misconception in another comment: CBP is not hiring noncitizens.
Given that, I don’t know what to do with the rest of this. Knowing about the racial makeup of past immigrants is apparently super important for a bad answer to a question based on faulty assumptions.
And I guess you dropped in that little parenthetical about politicians promising that law wouldn’t change white-only immigration just as a fun little reminder about how people in the 1960s were super racist.
> I corrected the actual misconception in another comment: CBP is not hiring noncitizens.
If you want to imply that what I corrected wasn't a misconception, why don't you say so directly? Is it because doing so would make it too obvious you're trying to deflect from the truth?
Your statement is far too broad to be correct in any case. Thousands of Chinese and other non-white people immigrated long before 1965. Ironically, some of the earliest Chinese people employed by the federal government were employed by Customs, decades before 1965.
Yes, my broad statement about US immigration policy is incorrect because of a few exceptions. It's impossible to talk about trends and averages because there's always a counter-example somewhere that, by your logic, disproves the whole thing. This gas is not hot - look at these ten molecules, they're moving slow! I guess China is open and welcoming too, because they have thousands (1.4 million!) of foreigners living there?
(0.1% of China's total population, but why let statistics get in the way of anecdotal reasoning?)
Are you really incapable of thinking statistically, even this little bit, or are you just playing dumb because it lets you avoid engaging honestly with the question a little bit longer?
You’re the one who can’t fathom that a general answer to a very broad question must be a lie (not merely incomplete, not merely wrong, but a lie) because you think the answer to a broad, general question must include “although our immigration policy was racist as heck until the 1960s so this specific guy would have had a hard time before then” at the end. I’m not the one incapable of engaging honestly here.
Yes, saying it was part of US historical culture to accept people like this guy, when the culture explicitly rejected them, is a lie. Nothing you said so far disproved this.
But I was more polite, and merely said he "forgot to mention" that aspect. That's all it took to draw your objections. I'll leave you to your word games now.
Edit: Fine, you get one more reply.
> The question was “foreign nationals,” not “people like this guy.”
But the topic was this guy.
> And it’s a specific choice to consider race as part of “like this guy,” not a law of nature.
Yes, a specific choice that the US made, from its founding up until 1965. But you are more comfortable talking in vague abstractions divorced from real world implementations, talking about words without thinking what those words refer to, so I get why you're confused. It's just a way of thinking I find repellent, and refuse to humor. As I said, enjoy your word games.
The question was “foreign nationals,” not “people like this guy.” And it’s a specific choice to consider race as part of “like this guy,” not a law of nature.
>Why is this so important to mention here?
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.
You have to be a citizen to work for the federal government, with a few exceptions that I don’t think CBP falls under. So the answer is, they aren’t.
The very first job listing I found refutes this: https://www.usajobs.gov/job/882256600
Open to "U.S. Citizens, Nationals, or those who owe allegiance to the U.S."
US nationals are a tiny corner case that applies to people born in certain US territories. They’re functionally equivalent to citizens aside from not having the right to vote in federal elections.
As far as I can tell, “those who owe allegiance to the US” doesn’t include anyone beyond citizens and nationals and is just there as boilerplate.
That's what I assumed, and found strange that the referenced article refers to him as a Chinese national. That said, that publication is also probably not very credible because I can't find anything backing up that claim.
I’d guess they’re saying that based on his place of birth and missed him becoming a US citizen sometime afterwards.
Robin Hood?
[deleted unsubstantiated text]
This does not appear anywhere in this article. Just sowing misinformation?
Hmm, I just googled and used what I thought was a local newspaper https://www.themainewire.com/2026/09/chinese-national-accuse...
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.
> One camera recording showed Liu using a screwdriver to scrape thermal paste off a processor
Double crime
And how much did this investigation cost, when you account for all the hours spent by investigators, lawers, judges, etc?
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".
It’s obviously not about the cost of the parts, there just can’t be any tolerance for criminal conduct in government agency employees.
IMHO a bigger worry is if they were opening the case then they could have modified it for spying or changing contents. I'd have thought stuff like this should have case alarm notification and inventory change alerts.
Sure, that'd be more "cost efficient", and for a small one-off, probably better. But law enforcement and justice is not a profit center.
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.