123 replies
1d1h
And, almost always, most would have made more money and had a more profitable career if they had simply stopped stealing and starting working honestly.
I mean, figure it out. An embezzler has to not only do his or her job well so that no one is looking over his or her shoulder but has to do their job so well that they can steal for months or years and it won’t show up.
Performance and pay aren't 1:1, and sometimes quite far from it. That imbalance or perceived imbalance could certainly drive some to embezzle. Bit of a just world fallacy there.
I recall some research that indicated that embezzlers are far more likely to think that "everyone does it" as well.
That attitude is touched on near the end.
Had multiple leech brother in laws.
One was a lawyer who defrauded his elderly clients and the other just only worked for his parents his whole life after getting kicked from university for cheating and then attached himself directly to the teat after they retired. Once his father died he took over the life of his mother as she was descending into Alzheimer's and looted her assets with the help of his brother before he was disbarred.
Both thought that everyone else was doing it too- it was just about not getting caught. They literally couldn't comprehend the idea that others weren't just hypocrites.
I read a book once [0] that claimed sociopaths (who come in more-boring flavors than just Hollywood villainy) have a similar confusion: Since certain norms aren't as intuitive/automatic, it's as if everyone else is secretly playing a game with a set of unspoken barely-explained rules.
Some of them end up concluding it's all a cynical manipulative scam, and everybody else is the same as themselves except absurdly dedicated to keeping up the fiction.
[0] "The Sociopath Next Door" by Martha Stout
See most people who use the phrase "virtue-signaling" pejoratively.
I use the phrase virtue signalling pejoratively to refer to things like https://www.shell.com/sustainability/nature.html. It's precisely because of the existence of real virtue that virtue signalling is able to be differentiated.
I suppose I should have specified when the pejorative is directed towards individuals. Companies are amoral, and have no values by definition.
So then it sounds like you agree that an identifiable subset of advocacy is only faking virtue, you just disagree with the scammers on which subset that is.
I think most behaviors in both corporate and actual politics are pretty much that of psychopaths. I don't believe this is true in general. Am I the psychopath?
If you cynically believe no one ever is truly empathetic towards an outgroup, or can hold altruistic values on the basis that you yourself do not, then I think it's a sign of something - perhaps not rising to the level of psychopathy - but it certainly shows a lack of imagination.
“Virtue signaling” absolutely designates a natural, useful category that, in no way, rejects the need for real virtue:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23474142
A friends mom always said, "There are rules, you just dont know them yet"
But are they? Or are they just conventions backed by people with various degrees of certainty about them?
Why are you asking me?
That's exactly what rules are.
That's exactly how I feel lol biggest reason why I minimize my interaction with most of the society
Anyway, I think that people in general assume that others behave in a way similar to theirs, which works if you're average, but doesn't if you're not. You can see this when two cultures with opposing attitudes meet: both of them think "obviously I'm normal, it's them who's acting weird".
I think that general feeling -- of playing a game where the majority of players know the rules and you don't -- is something most people have felt at one point or other. I've certainly felt like that in foreign countries or at new jobs. Friends report a similar feeling while starting the process of buying a house, or getting married, or re-entering the dating scene.
I used to feel like this when I was a teen. Now I think everyone are mostly clueless trying to make do with what they have.
See also Three Christs of Ypsilanti
I ... can actually sympathize with that, even as I don't try to scam people (at least, I don't think I do). It can be infuriating to see others get what they want in a way that's "what??? Why does that work?" It can feel like the real rules are being deliberately concealed from you, and you are just fighting back by using the hacks that you think everyone else is.
I remember having this feeling hit me hard when I read the part of the Richard Feynman book when he calls a woman a selfish wh--- and that results in her adamantly wanting to sleep with him.[1]
If you can shuck the siren's call of the mob, you can sympathize with the incel and MGTOW crowd who felt they weren't taught the right model.
I've kind of taken it on as a life motto: "No cheat codes." If there's something that magically works, it deserves to be exposed so everyone can use it, and also learn why it works. That is, everyone deserves the same hack. Yes, even when it costs my information monopoly.
[1] Blog post summarizing it: https://geekfeminismdotorg.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/feynman-...
Old Dutch saying: ‘As the host is, he treats his guests.’
Casual embezzling on all levels of society was extremely common in communist Czechoslovakia (and probably other Eastern Bloc countries). For example construction workers might steal material from their job site to build their own house (often during work hours as well). There was even a popular adage normalizing this behaviour: "One who doesn't steal steals from his own family".
Stealing from work in the USSR was so normalized that people just referred to at as "carrying out". Workers sometimes picked careers based more on how much they could steal than on the nominal salary. An engineer had a higher monthly salary than a waiter, but a waiter could effectively earn more than the engineer by stealing food.
https://youtu.be/Jz4lD76nbds?si=iUXoDEAZI8SMJ8z4
Not to totally discount embezzlement, but I think people underestimate just how poor these countries were after world war 2.
Usually people are talking about the 60s-80s when sharing these stories since that’s what grandparent/parent generations remember. USSR did experience significant growth at least at the beginning of this period and most of that theft/embezzlement was certainly committed to later sell/exchange those goods for profit (e.g. working at coffee shops was were lucrative since you could just reuse the same ground coffee for 5+ cups and steal the rest).
If you own the means of production, is it really “stealing” though? /s
That's very much how it was justified. There was a saying in USSR:
"Tащи с работы каждый гвоздь - ты здесь хозяин, а не гость."
translating to:
"Grab every nail from work - you're the master here, not a guest."
essentially parroting the Soviet cliches about how proletariat was in charge etc.
Years ago I recall a guy in Russia who documented over several years the continuous announcement of a given local road being improved. Every year trucks, supplies and such would show up at the appointed time, local news would show up with a local authorities and they'd point at things and film. Then the next day everything was just left in place, no workers, eventually each night the construction equipment would slowly vanish, and finally other trucks would come and slowly collect the supplies. Then next year same thing again, same spot, they'd dig up the same ground for TV, wash rinse, repeat.
This is why punishment for any non-trivial corruption by officials should be a life sentence. So they would know, if they are caught, it will be maximum possible penalty. Because, unlike usual theft, embezzlement affects lives of many people.
How would that work in Russia?
There's no independent judiciary, those in power are not going to jail ...
This was a case in Poland as well. And the reason was simple: communist countries were in a constant supply crisis. Even when you had money you couldn't just go and buy material to build your own house, you had to steal it, otherwise you'd never get your house built. That's why all those great construction projects of communism like factories, power plants, etc. were so expensive: half of the material never made it to a site, being stolen along the way.
Or as I like to say: Eastern bloc communism was often so bad that it makes Objectivism look like a reasonable philosophy.
In USSR similar adage was: “No matter how much you steal from the State, you can’t get even.” (Сколько у государства не воруй — все равно своего не вернёшь.)
You see a similar phenomenon with propensity for litigation and pushing to limits of the letter of the law in the US. "everyone"'s doing it, which leads to people feeling like they have a right to and like they're missing out if they don't. But in the end most people lose out overall.
"Everyone does it" is an incredibly common statement to justify all sorts of bad behavior, whether legal or not.
I think it's an expression of the natural human tendency to think that our personal experiences and attitudes are representative of the mean.
Another common one is "if I don't do it, someone else will". Which completely misses the point that even if true, it doesn't mean that it's ok to do it.
I think it is a utilitarian argument - if its true that someone will inevitably commit the crime then the fact that I commit the crime is victimless or at least had no additional victims than there would have been without my action.
To say that a victimless crime is wrong requires a more deontological approach to morality.
embezzlers are far more likely to think that "everyone does it" as well
Funny, but I have observed this with regards to lying.
It's just far more likely to get you in trouble if you steal from the more powerful, IMO
I'm a goody-two-shoes yet I also think all successful people must cheat. I don't see how anyone can compete against cheaters. It's like running a race where some people start at the halfway mark... You know for sure who the winners are going to be.
I remember a story of a bank branch manager who got into embezzling because of his gambling debts in this classic book
https://www.amazon.com/Crime-Computer-Donn-B-Parker/dp/06841...
I would not say he had a master plan but was making it up to go along and figured he’d win big at the track one day and pay everyone back, (We had someone like that who stole $750k from our county’s bus operator because of gambling too.)
Boy if these people were cogs in the machine and probably didn’t see a lot of upward mobility. The perp told the author of the book that he’d “learned his lesson” and that he came across as sincere but FBI agents told him that people like that (gambling addiction + embezzling) will reoffend almost always if given the chance. (One reason I think the European “right to be forgotten” is a problem is because it is a shield for people who use their social skills as a weapon.)
There was a case in Brazil recently where a medicine student in a top university embezzled from her graduation party funds (she was at the party committee) to invest in cryptocurrency, make profit and return the money to the fund keeping the profit. But she lost money on crypto. Then she tried to gamble (playing a lot of money on the lottery) to earn what she lost. Lost everything and got caught. Expelled by the university.
She had a lot of potential for upward mobility as a doctor from the most prestigious school in Brazil. Still did it.
Potential, and after couple more years of exhaustion and suffering (as graduating from a medical school is typically only first half of the journey)?
If potential far-away reward like this didn't discount to approximately 0 for most people, the world would've looked entirely different.
Strawman that indicates either extreme boredom and desire for interlocution, or a misanthropic streak. To see it, who are there all these rubes who stay in middle school even though most people discount far-away reward to 0? High school? College?
More like offering a potential counterpoint, motivated by general experience that people generally aren't stupid - even the most seemingly dumb behavior tends to have a motivation that feels reasonable(ish) to the person doing it. I don't think playing Devil's advocate is misanthropic.
Do you even remember middle/high school? Obviously, kids stay in it because the law mandates so, and tolerate it because they meet other kids there and have some degree of autonomy over their social life. Consequences and rewards are both immediate.
Compare with: "you need to learn because it will be useful for you in the future / will help you get good job", an argument that's well-known to work on nearly zero teenagers ever.
Mixed motivations, but the fact that social life gets taken up to 11 definitely doesn't hurt :).
It's easy to keep long-term motivations in mind when following the path towards distant reward keeps yielding smaller rewards along the way. Take that away, and people check out or burn out.
I feel like you're very close to the realisation/philosophy that I hold here, which is that hard work doesn't pay off.
In the sense that you cannot willpower your way to a goal that requires a great deal of sustatined effort. You simply can't. People dont become olympic athletes by training hard so they can win. They become olympic athletes by training hard because they like training. They have friends there, and feel good at it, and get fulfillment from it, and found all sorts of little tricks to make it easier and not exact a psychological toll from them.
This all is to say, if you want to make a change in life, its not enough to try really hard. You have to set up structures, often social structures, to help it become fun.
hard work is a necessary but not sufficient factor to achieve success.
Yes, but more importantly, "hard work" is unsustainable on its own, and leads to a burnout.
To use an engine analogy, it's not enough to supply fuel for the engine to burn and do work; you also need lubrication for the moving parts and cooling for the whole assembly if you want the engine to keep going.
You're right and I think you could go further. There's a carrot and there's a stick. You can join communities where change happens by force. Think of the guy who runs someone over in his car then becomes a priest to atone. He's not necessarily having fun. Think of slaves: they're not having fun, but the social structure ensures they'll remain slaves. As we speak there are teenage boys fighting each other in the Middle East and Europe - not because it's fun but because their society ensures they'll be thrown in jail or killed if they don't fight.
Masterfully phrased :) i.e. you agree you were bored and looking for an interlocutor.
Yes.
Yeah I'm an economics college dropout from nowhere with a 2.8 GPA who couldn't make it to class. I flushed a 1560/1600 SAT and 173/180 LSAT down the toilet (read: Ivy League tier standardized test grades). I ended up working for Google as a SWE. How? After dropping out, I worked as a waiter, thought that rumored iSlate thing sounded pretty cool, and maybe I should make a restaurant app for it. Taught myself programming, launched after 2.5 years, sold it after 4, interviewed for Google expecting to fail.
To peer poster's point: everyone is smart and stupid at the same time, about different things at different times.
Someone who experienced the changing and flippant tides of fortune...
You learned your numbers at least mostly meant nothing, and seemingly learnt the valuable lesson of hardwork and luck (and a brain cell or two to rub together).
Maybe, someday you will be able to notice the rest of the drab populous, some of whom have no braincells, some that never learnt to work, or have never managed to have lady luck on their side, instead courting her cousins disease and malady, and you may regret your shortsighted and uninformed comment(s).
The road to riches is not lined with short term rewards, but with trials and many a tribulation, hardly any of it deserved...
I'd say it's both. It's like a simple board game[0], where you race on a line of steps, and the line is littered with bonuses and penalties, and each turn you move along according to the roll of the dice. A couple lucky rolls, you can be half-way to finish line in few turns. A couple unlucky rolls, and you quit playing, or plain lose to your lucky friend. If you somehow avoid both the bonuses and penalties, well the line is long and the game is fucking dull and you'll probably get bored half-way.
(Bonus point for making the line into a loop, so the game can take arbitrarily long, and initial advantage grows superlinearly, making the game beyond boring, a source of real-life conflicts between friends and families. Yes, I believe that game is called Monopoly.)
--
[0] - Like the ones we used to play as kids, not the modern Board Games that Board Gamers love to play at social events and Board Game Cafes.
More like offering a potential counterpoint, motivated by general experience that people generally aren't stupid
I would say that everyone is smart and stupid at the same time, about different things at different times. Being a smarter person is attaining greater competence at keeping the stupid in check.
Most countries other than the US don't have such rigorous training for doctors. After graduating medical school (which is typically done while others are doing their bachelors), you have your medical license and can start practicing. Medical school is 6 years in Brazil as opposed to the required 4 years of undergrad, 4 years of medical school, and 3-7 years of residency (not counting any fellowship that you may opt to do afterwards).
Which is all to say that she was right on the finish line before deciding to throw it all away.
Where do you get this notion?
If Brazil is anything like Argentina -- and I bet it is in this context -- the study and internship stages of doctor training are positively grueling. Many doctors in training do drugs to cope. They work long hours and make all sorts of mistakes. Many are in terrible moods. And patients and people can get really rude and impatient with them.
It can be a really thankless, grueling job. I wonder why people choose it at all.
Used to be a desire to help people. Today, in countries like Brazil, mostly money - a doctor makes on average 20x the minimum salary, easily 40x.
To answer my own question, I do think people do want to help other people.
My question was mostlt rethorical, more of a reflection on the difficult life they choose for themselves. But thankfully some people do think of others!
There's an excellent essay on Anarchy Unbound about this. It analyses inter-group transactions and methods to not be cheated. Essentially, cheaters are defined as people who discount future transactions as 0. Therefore, I've easy to filter them out it's to require an upfront cost for any unknown person to transaction with you.
The thing that blew my mind was you can use non-monitary costs. E.g. if someone from an out group learns your language and your culture, that's a moderate investment. To recoup that, they need to make multiple transactions and are therefore less likely to cheat.
It's by no means a perfect metric - and it works much better in smaller, tribal settings - but it's still a fascinating analysis
In a different day and age (and with a bit more luck) she would have gone on to invent fractional reserve banking.
And if she had taken the govt route, she would have gone on to invenst quantitative easing.
I'd add that in the Brazilian these medical schools frequented by the children of the elite, graduation party funds add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Students are expected to pony up a sizeable monthly sum starting from the first year of the graduation.
Momentary emotions often trump long term rational planning in certain types of people.
Think of it as one of life's many filters - better such person didnt become a doctor, we wouldn't be talking about money being lost due to her stupidity.
Yeah, I wonder how the EU will deal with people who use that law to hide evidence of their misdeeds...
There some people who I've only tangentially heard about who, while not being charged with anything, definitely left a trail of broken promises, messes, blathering, whining, and excuses in their wake. Not that such people usually get called out by name in a blog post, but when they say "X is true" online and then someone else proves them wrong, I'd hope they can't use that law to just sweep their foolishness under the rug each time.
Some people need to have such things remembered, so others have an objective historical record, rather than only having subjective bluster to listen to.
Here in the US, we elect them to public office.
The other day I was testing out an input form with an autocomplete which led me to this group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Solutions_for_Winning...
which was run by politician Newt Gingrich which he had let go bankrupt and get evicted from its offices in 2011 so he could run for president in 2012 and I must say it boggles my mind that he didn't think this would have an effect on "do I trust this guy to be President?" or even "do I want to donate to his campaign?"
Bankruptcy is just a smart business decision for the privileged.
For the working class, it is a moral failure. Or in the case of student loans not allowed.
Right now, at least, the Wikipedia article states that the law required him to leave the organisation. It doesn’t sound like it was insolvent when he left, just that without him it found it hard to get additional donations. It also sounds like it was evicted after it was dissolved, many months after he terminated his relationship with it.
Lacking any other details, it sounds strange to blame him for what happened after his required-by-law departure.
But they paid for said misdeeds, it's not that important that they pay forever, is it ? I mean it sounds annoying to allow an embezzler to be an accountant again, but I mean, he did his time, he's supposed to have reformed, what are we gonna do ? Consider that never again in his life he's gonna be honest ?
Does the right to be forgotten apply to the legal system as well? I thought it was more about online privacy etc
Similar to how you can get criminal convictions expunged so it doesn't affect employment etc but any terms of the expungement still hold
Disclaimer: not only am I not a lawyer, I'm also incredibly lazy and haven't even Google searched right to be forgotten laws
The legal system doesn't forget about you. The issue is more that if you google a potential business partner you might treat them differently if you find old articles about their conviction for embezzlement. Which is both good and bad.
There is a tension between protecting the innocent and the reformed from their past on one side, and protecting potential victims on the other.
it does for minors once they become adults?
Yeah but the right to be forgotten is because there's a perceived imbalance between now and 70 years ago: before, people would forget you, and nobody found it weird. Today, you're labelled forever in permanent databases, and it's hard to get a redeeming chance.
We believe, in Europe, that it's better to have a criminal re-offend, than to have no criminal being given a second chance, and that's totally a choice and we can change our mind later anyway. But for now, we want to try it.
Martin Shkreli was doing that, and he actually did win big enough to pay back and still went to jail.
SBF also will probably end up being able to pay people back, but it's jail for him too.
the bank manager sounds like "Owning Mahony"
Contrarian counterposition: perhaps the problem rather is that so many people become easily bewitched by social skills? I do believe that even if there was no "right to be forgotten", such people would easily be capable of using their social skills to "wipe away" the warning signs of the criminal past.
Here the bank CEO was being scammed and allegedly embezzled: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-13/-pig-butc...
Prospect theory predicts people are more likely to gamble to prevent a sure loss.
Having met people like this, it's exactly like it's said here. It's compulsive for them, they have to do it. Pretty sure the reasoning is ad hoc.
So a better approach would be therapy instead of prison, I suppose?
Nope. Therapy produces results only when based on a sincere desire to make change.
Addiction is weird, though. A lot of the time, the addict doesn't actually want to be addicted.
Conversely they will often only go to rehab at the threat of imprisonment or abandonment by friends and family. I'm sure there's an underlying logic to addiction, but it creates behaviors that are extremely contradictory.
I'm not an expert, but as far as I know, the logic is just a failure of long-term planning to dominate over short-term planning. "I know I shouldn't smoke, but this one cigarette will feel so good".
That's definitely one way people get addicted, but I suspect not the most common.
A huge proportion of drug addicts (and I suspect addicts of sex, gambling etc I'm just less familiar with those addictions) started taking their drugs because of how tough their life was. And even if you know that starting to take opiates or whatever drug of choice might not be a sensible plan long term, if you feel so bad that you'd rather kill yourself than live in your head sober, it's possible to actually want to keep using what you re addicted to because you don't believe that life without that drug can be any better.
I don't know how common this is, but anecdotally I've known two people who used high dose prescription painkillers (obtained illegal) to give them enough positive feelings to be able to work on their mental health problems, both who would've been described as problematically addicted by most medical professionals, but who managed to use the opiates to work on their core mental health issues until such a time that they felt ready to not need opiates, at which point they found it relatively easy to stop. Because as horrible as it is to get the withdrawals, it's actually not very last longing and it can be considerably less painful than the pain of having such severe mental health issues that you were desperate to kill yourself before you started the drug use, not because you started the drug use. (Of course there's also people who get addicted because they think it will be fun, and end up suicidal because of it. And I also wouldn't recommend using opiates to work on your mental health, because despite my two anecdotes I believe the almost universal knowledge in medical circles is that it's much more likely to worsen your mental health than to improve it.
Yes, that agrees with the addiction theory of Johann Hari, who has a TED talk and a book[0]. Experiments with rats show a rat will quickly be addicted when the choice is only between water and an opiate. But give the rat something other than a stark lonely existence, like exercise and sexual partners and rat friends, and they hardly use the drug. Similarly, many US servicemen in Vietnam became addicted to heroin while in country, but almost all simply stopped heroin when they were back home around friends and family.
[0] Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Scream-Opposite-Addiction-Con...
I think this may be ahistorical, or at least vastly overstated. See Jeremy Kuzmarov’s research, published in “The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs.”
Ah, yes, I'm not talking so much about how they start, but about why it's hard to quit. The short term pleasure is always more compelling than the long term benefit of not being an addict.
But my point is that's not the only way people find it hard to stop.
If you're addicted because your life was roughly fine, but you discovered that a drug make you feel amazing, keep taking it too much, and get to the point where withdrawal is so painful that it's impossible to resist taking another dose to feel good again, then that's exactly how you describe it.
But if you're using heroin or whatever drug as a mental health treatment, e.g. because if you hadn't started using you would instead have killed yourself, then sure you'll still have the nasty withdrawals when you stop, but it's a totally different equation. For many addicts, taking illegal drugs is the only way to feel OK about life. Some of these people never manage to get clean, but the ones with this reason for addiction who do (or who try to) get clean, it can be surprisingly easy to deal with the withdrawals, because they're aware of how shit life was before they first started using the drug, and the idea that the rest of your life will be as shit as before you started using drugs can be a far more scary thought than someone who's life was basically good except for their getting hooked on a drug.
To quote one of the all-time great TV shows, and surely the best about authentic portrayals of drug users, dealers, and cops - The Wire - Waylon, a former addict and narcotics anonymous sponsor, says “Getting clean’s the easy part. And then comes life.” I guess that's true for both types of addict I've talked about, but it's even more true for the addicts who turned to drugs because they hated their lives than for people who had lovely lives until they accidentally got addicted to a drug that they thought was fun to try.
I was once told that the difference between a behavior being an addiction or the same behavior not being an addiction is that the non-addicted do the thing for some positive physical or psychological effect. The addicted do the thing in order to avoid a negative physical or psychological effect.
In this view, for example, people start using an addictive drug because it makes them feel good, but once addicted they use the drug in order to avoid withdrawal symptoms.
Going to rehab means to stop using, which brings withdrawal. I think this view explains why some addicted would only do it when they'll incur an even greater negative effect than withdrawal.
TIL I am addicted to flossing.
Yeah and we could have a pretty interesting conversation on the success rates of court-mandated rehab programs.
If someone is caught in a vicious spiral not only does Therapy sound like a better option than prison but even just a one time bailout might allow them to self-correct... I still think it'd be a good idea to have the therapy in place though.
At the end of the day - people make mistakes, helping people out of those mistakes results in recidivism less often than you'd suspect.
That’s one flavor of embezzler, there probably a sociopath flavor as well. Sending a sociopath to therapy generally doesn’t work.
Yes - but it's very difficult to tell whether someone is a sociopath if they're good at it. I think it'd probably be safer to err on the side of therapy and let the therapist's recommendation or repeat offenses dictate whether jail time is justified.
Repeat offenses as a signal? Sure!
Therapist's recommendation? I'm skeptical. Their primary data is whatever the subject self-reports, and their secondary data is their somewhat subjective opinion on whether the subject has improved.
If the subject does not want to stop and they are smart enough to figure out how to embezzle or to get high enough to embezzle, there's very little chance that the therapist would see through them.
It's like EQ tests - the subject can make the test results say whatever they want the test results to say.
Lots of things sounds like a better option when you remove the constraints of actual human behavior (see also: economics). Unfortunately human behavior is what it is regardless of whether your strategy accounts for it or not. So again, for the cheap seats, therapy is a complete waste of time in 100% of instances where the individual in question isn't genuinely pursuing change.
Yes, and an individual's convictions remain static forever and cannot be influenced by others. You can't convince me otherwise.
Your argument sounds tautological.
K. You probably shouldn't pursue a career as a therapist or have kids then unless you enjoy staggering around in a haze of cognitive dissonance.
I know of an employer at which one of the finance people had embezzled about 50K over the course of one or two years (from their employer). And at the same time they also embezzled 5K from the community sports league for which they did volunteer accounting/finance stuff.
They ended up being arrested and convicted for stealing from the sports league, and they went to jail for a few months but they had some arrangement where they could leave every weekday morning to go to work and then return to jail in the evening.
Their arrest and conviction was well known by and within their employer (from which they were known to have embezzled the 50K) since they needed to request leave to show up to court and also because the local papers covered it extensively due to it impacting the sports league.
They were not fired, presumably because their employer did not want to run the risk of tarnishing its sterling reputation of properly managing its finances.
Given the number of possible things wrong with a human that leads to bad behavior, it seems like an extreme claim to suggest that desire to make a change is a necessary component in any successful therapy. Part of therapy can be building that desire.
For example, therapy for issues stemming from learned helplessness are a counter example, as learned helplessness implies lacking a desire to make a change as they have already been conditioned to seeing it as impossible. The therapy involves building up that desire by having minor successes that end up breaking down the mental block which formed.
None of what you said is quantitative and/or objective data.
A "sincere desire to make change" isn't quantifiable in the first place.
Well, that's my entire point: why use it as a metric or target? How do you tell if you achieved the objective when the target metric is unmeasurable?
When the goal is (in GP's words) "building that desire to make a change", you can never tell anything about progress towards your goal: when you've achieved the goal, when you've not achieved that goal, when you're making progress, when you're making it worse - those things are all subjective.
All we can do when treating sociopaths is to release them into the world again and judge their actions, not their self-reported feelings.
Don't at least some of them want to gain control of their impulses?
In the cases I've witnessed, therapy would be pointless. They are sociopaths, pure and simple.
Alternate anecdata: Having met people like this the initial incidents are usually to try and right a perceived wrong. Being slighted on a bonus when another employee was over-compensated (from the perspective of the embezzler). An earned sales commission that was unpaid or underpaid. Things like that.
The embezzler spots an opportunity to get back some of what they are owed, they strike, and are successful. Then it spirals from there. Sometimes they get 'forced' to continue, the initial fraud case involved a fictitious vendor, or a subscription, or some other thing that is expected to be ongoing and would raise suspicious to suddenly stop.
In other cases I've seen the root cause just be straight up drugs and gambling addictions. An employee needs fast money, and probably need to hide it from family members, so a little embezzlement gets the job done. Then of course that never goes the way they intended, and they wind up doing it again and again until the whole thing implodes.
Altnernate anecdata (N=1): One person I knew intimately enough definitely used a perceived wrong as a pretext to start something they had been looking to do already because of other issues.
I agree. It might not be that the person was truly wronged, only that the perception that they were slighted can be used as a pretext to excuse their own slights (getting progressively less slight).
With how comon wage theft is and how employers can conduct it with near impunity[0] Most often the perceived wrongs of people are justified.
[0] https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blog/wage-theft-the-50-bil...
This strikes me as the typical fraudster more than embezzler. Making up the gains versus having actual profits that they then steal. Madoff was a fraudster; Bankman-Fried more an embezzler.
But you only know that you've met the ones with obvious defects. How can you ever know when you've ever met the ones with no obvious, or no defects?
Many people have a sense that they could perform much better, given the right opportunities, the right environment, etc. In software development, the thoughts might be: if only the requirements didn't change, if only the codebase was more modern, if only the architecture had been designed with more foresight so we didn't have to shift the architecture while we were adding features. If only I wasn't being held back by these factors, I'd be performing brilliantly. And these factors have nothing to do with me. So don't I deserve to be paid and respected like a brilliant performer?
Conveniently forgetting that the people who perform brilliantly under actual adverse conditions have to be a lot better at the job, and work a lot harder, than someone who feels that they could hypothetically perform brilliantly under hypothetical ideal conditions.
I've never seen someone like this turn to embezzlement, but I've seen them aggrandize themselves into positions of respect through sheer confidence and then bounce from failure to failure, shifting blame to other people or external circumstances.
Many people have a sense that they are as good as they appear to be, when what gave them the edge over others is just pure luck. And perhaps their persuasive capabilities to make others do the hard work.
And sometimes people who really are extremely good at their jobs forget that how good they are has a large element of luck in it, in addition to the work they put in.
I read this as "made more money over the course of their career" which is probably true because embezzlers are rarely stealing multiples of their salary every year. That's just too brazen. And even if they manage to steal 3x their salary, that just means they move their retirement back by 3 years. They'd have to repeatedly do this for 5-10 years without getting caught before they'd break even compared to a normal career. And that's before any fines and money they have to pay back.
No justice in life but what we make…
Sounds like he was underpaid by all 3!
This just reads to me as a lawyer covering their ass. A blog post on a law firm's website saying crime pays? That's not a good look.
It’s a free market fallacy. If you’re good at business you can create value and get rich. If you play the long game you collaborate and take the big prize.
All things equal, one is far more exciting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceijkZQI1HM
I was about to quote post that exact line. I see this type of thinking everywhere. It shows that the majority of people who never tried to achieve anything have no clue how the system works.
Sam Bankman Fried was smart, raised in the US and he had decent connections too, look where he ended up.
In fact, I never met a smart totally honest person in my generation who got rich.
Yeah but that requires actual real work embezzling is actually kind of mindless once the cycle is started. Stealing is usually easier,even if you disagree on that part. The embezzling still has one thing going, its almost always faster. Why would the embezzler work for 30-40 years to be rich when they can have a chance at retiring well before they are starting to age.
I once worked somewhere that was significantly embezzled. I knew the people that did it personally. I actually had this same discussion with other coworkers there. Yeah they could have made more money honestly. However what they did instead (by our estimates from various public evidence) bank around 50-60 mil and vanish before they were 35 years old. Still in good health and young enough to enjoy life.
My method for cheating on exams was to learn the material.
Skill and pay in many fields seem pretty inversely related. You can learn software skills in a few years and make six figures. Tell that to an accompanist. There isn’t one accompanist alive that has less than a decade of serious hard work to get where they’re at. Average salary for an accompanist in California is under $40000. Even in software, game dev is considerably harder than most positions and it’s the lowest paying.
Seems like a skill issue. If they’d really apply themselves, they could have successful career as a corporate raider or one of the other many forms of embezzlement that they don’t send you to jail for.
They just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop being lazy. I mean this stuff is kinda robber-baron 101.