Embezzlers Are Nice People (2017)
stimmel-law.com
stimmel-law.com
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> College?
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.
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.
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.
Prospect theory predicts people are more likely to gamble to prevent a sure loss.
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.
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?"
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.
For the working class, it is a moral failure. Or in the case of student loans not allowed.
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
There is a tension between protecting the innocent and the reformed from their past on one side, and protecting potential victims on the other.
SBF also will probably end up being able to pay people back, but it's jail for him too.
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.
That attitude is touched on near the end.
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
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".
See most people who use the phrase "virtue-signaling" pejoratively.
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-...
I've worked for/with a number of narcissistic sociopaths. They love to surround themselves with two types of people:
1. Loyal fawning adorers who give them narcissistic supply.
2. Other narcissistic sociopaths.
2 was a surprise to me when I figured it out. Why would they want to be around their competition?
Because they actually believe there are only those two types of people in the world. And Type 2 are "their tribe." Anybody who claims not to be one of those two (i.e. "Type 3") is obviously a lying hypocrite and is not to be trusted. We Type 3s make them very uneasy.
If you find Dracula lore amusing, it's astonishing how these 3 types map:
1. Humans (i.e. food)
2. Vampires
3. The Van Helsing family (i.e. vampire slayers)
I think it's an expression of the natural human tendency to think that our personal experiences and attitudes are representative of the mean.
To say that a victimless crime is wrong requires a more deontological approach to morality.
There's no independent judiciary, those in power are not going to jail ...
"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.
Funny, but I have observed this with regards to lying.
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.
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.
[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.
At the end of the day - people make mistakes, helping people out of those mistakes results in recidivism less often than you'd suspect.
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.
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.
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.
They just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop being lazy. I mean this stuff is kinda robber-baron 101.
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.
It was really unfortunate when all 3 companies found out at the same time and he was fired from all 3. Not unfortunate that he was fired, but unfortunate that his talent went to waste.
He was brilliant. But also a con artist.
Edit: I was his direct manager, and when I say he "was brilliant" I mean that he was extremely smart, extremely good at thinking about architecture, all the characteristics of a great engineer, etc. But he simply didn't have the time to execute because he was secretly splitting his time between 3 companies. So he was fired for low productivity, even though he had all of the skills needed to be extraordinarily productive.
Since the eighties we've generally trended towards executives making awful decisions in service of the great number in the sky - irrational and arbitrary layoffs, consistent undercompensation, wealth hoarding, underinvestment in long term profits... these are all common place or expected in your standard 9-5 corporate America job.
It's so that they are dependent on them and they have the leverage.
It's also because no matter what he delivers and how happy they are with it, they always think they could have pushed him to deliver more, if they squeezed more of his hours.
Like a crappy restaurant owner who makes the waiters also mop the floor or do whatever when no patrons have arrived yet, because they can't fathom paying them to "sit".
Disregard what the Overlords might tell you; 2 is way more important, because when it comes to 1, the military program offices are VERY open to revisiting the charge schedule, if it means they get transparency and a better chance of something that might work. Those non-managerial pay ceilings were laughable pre-Covid, and now it's gotten just surreal, still based on a flat national average of what they consider the job role to be, something that's also gotten surreal, with Kinkos employees being included in sw engineer pay codes.
It's worsened by the fact they can't really take advantage of remote workers, somewhere with less CoL, in Alabama or Pakistan or whatever. Everything's on site, and it really does seem like every defense company I've ever worked is sited in some random shitty place where the local economy - if there is one - is composed of the company and three Applebees-like chains that service it.
They’re high, but not Meta high.
Employers in this industry could pay more out of overhead but then their numbers wouldn’t look as good as their competitors, the stock would underperform, and access to favorable credit terms would be restricted and in an industry with such astronomically (heh) high capital costs that’s very bad.
Most large contracts are cost-plus. Contractor direct costs + some agreed upon margin.
Fuel and similar commodities may look kind of like a cost+ contract, but it’s market price + X$ not market price * some profit margin so the incentives are different. It’s a net win for both sides if such variables are removed from the equation.
He was highly skilled, but also was not well liked by his peers. He knew how to suck up to no end, deflect blame for his own mistakes, and how to get out of work (presumably so he could do his other jobs) and get it dumped on others.
He was hated by his peers and it was no surprise (to anyone who worked with him as a peer one on one) when he got caught.
It was a similar situation where his skills were excellent when tried, but he chose to put them to use put to use to shaft other coworkers and honestly not do much at all / work elsewhere.
I ran into him later and as usual he was all about the excuses and about how he felt the folks at the company were bad people and so on, but it was like everything with him, a little truism that he bent to mean that he should get his no matter what the cost to anyone.
No. he put his skills to use to maximize his income and a side effect of that was screwing over his coworkers.
His primary goal wasn't to hurt those people, his primary goal was to make money. the hurting people was a side effect.
I see this edit added later:
>But he simply didn't have the time to execute because he was secretly splitting his time between 3 companies. So he was fired for low productivity, even though he had all of the skills needed to be extraordinarily productive.
That would be a legit reason to fire them!
Or it could be a post-facto rationalization ("he worked elsewhere too, so he couldn't have been productive"). Parent already said he was fired when they found out he working at another 2 places, which is different from the new story that they saw "low productivity".
Parent already said he was fired when they found out he working at another 2 places, which is different from the new story that they saw "low productivity".
It might take 2-4 months before you're sure enough it's never going to work out. You hope things will improve.
But if, during that 2-4 months, you find out the guy has another job, that hope disappears instantly.
This is my most charitable read of what happened, and I've heard of cases just like this.
It just seems that terminating the relationship without exploring other options is more of a jealousy/pissed-off reaction than a rational decision.
1. The person impresses everyone during the interview process with their skills and potential.
2. Initially, the person doesn’t meet the expected productivity levels. They give various plausible reasons and commit to improving.
3. Time passes but there is no significant improvement in their output. Management invests time and resources in identifying possible support and interventions to help enhance their performance.
4. It’s eventually discovered that the person is only dedicating 2-3 hours per day to their role with your company, instead of the agreed 8 hours, because they are simultaneously pulling the same scam with two other companies.
In this situation, I don't think it would be rational for a manager to try and work out a suitable working relationship. The person has already shown they are dishonest and cannot be trusted. This not about envy or anger, but about using past behaviour to predict future behaviour.
Lets be real -- a "brilliant" engineer knows what is expected, knows how to do quality work, and certainly is capable of meeting minimum output to avoid getting fired, even just putting in 10-15 hours a week. The whole story seems kind of off.
All I'm saying is:
1. The fact that someone hasn't yet been fired for underperformance doesn't mean they're meeting expectations, and will be retained indefinitely without improved performance.
2. If someone in that situation is subsequently discovered to have a secret second job, then the reason for underperformance will be obvious (they never intended to put in the effort that would be reasonable to expect for a full time job), so there's no longer any good reason to believe their performance might improve.
Exactly, which is reason to be at least a bit skeptical that this story went down as described.
> post-facto rationalization
Highly likely.
Once the entire world suddenly shifted to remote in Q2 2020, everybody and their mother thought about juggling multiple jobs, and a few went ahead and tried it. Why wouldn't a brilliant engineer give it a shot? Instead of firing this dude, management should have taken a hard look in the mirror and ask if they have failed to compensate top-tier talent sufficiently, and whether they provide proper motivation, freedom, and insulation from bullshit meetings and time-wasters.
I'm not saying don't ever fire him, but that should be an absolute last resort. The initial steps should be to figure out a way to retain his services and contributions.
When someone holds down three low-paid service jobs, we congratulate them for working their ass off. But when someone on salary does the same thing, employers cry foul.
> But he simply didn't have the time to execute because he was secretly splitting his time between 3 companies. So he was fired for low productivity...
My understanding is there could be a common law duty to the employer at play, even when the employee didn't sign a noncompete and there's nothing specifically called out in the employment agreement.
It's also my understanding that if the employee acted to the detriment of the employer, such as compromising their own ability to perform job duties (as happened here) or competed against that employer, they may be in breach of that duty and could be terminated for cause depending on the specific laws.
So, if anybody is thinking about trying this, it's probably worth checking into local laws and potentially keeping records such as the hours worked for each employer. I would assume it's slightly more cut and dry when an hourly employee is in breach, since the hours are normally already tracked.
>So he was fired for low productivity
So clearly he was only capable of temporarily pretending to have three times the value.
Seems like startup senior management potential to me.
I realize there are other tax burdens but you are hard pressed to get higher than 45%
(Incidentally, I don't approve of working multiple jobs simultaneous like this without your employers knowing, I think it's unethical. But also... let's be real, many supervisors and companies don't in fact seem to notice or fire people with low productivity, and productivity varies wildly between people who aren't secretly working extra jobs too)
Why is that unethical? I don't think it's my employer's business what I do with my time outside of work hours. Where "work hours" should be a flexible thing, especially for knowledge work, outside of required meeting attendance.
Ultimately as long as I get my job done to my employer's satisfaction, that should be all that matters. Seems like that was the real problem with the guy who got fired upthread; the discovery of the multiple-jobs thing was a convenient way to fire him without having to deal with documenting the low performance, a PIP, etc.
What I think is unethical is companies making employees sign a "I won't work anywhere else while employed here" thing when they start work.
Having a solid reason can mean instead of PIPs etc you just immediately terminate
> even though he had all of the skills needed to be extraordinarily productive.
Why should he want to be productive? Does your company reward such a thing proportionally?
I still think he is ahead of where he would otherwise be.
Companies rely on at least a minimum level of productivity from their employees. He had the skills to be extraordinarily productive, but he probably only needed to be 'ordinarily' productive, and according to GP, he was not.
https://old.reddit.com/r/overemployed/
When I read the stories I question the payoff matrix a bit - it seems like most have 2-3 $150K/year jobs, but if you're really good at one job and aggressively switch to the highest-payoff opportunities, you can easily make into the millions per year. But it makes a lot of sense for people that are stuck at the bottom of the company ranks and want to generate more transactions for themselves that actually result in more dollars.
My wife had two poor performers who she fired this year because they were over-employed and doing shitty work.
I used to be the type to make loyalty to my great exalted employer first and foremost, sacrificing chunks of my personal life beyond what my salary required. Then I wised up and now view it as how much I can extract as quickly as possible. Coincidentally, the quality of my work shot up when I viewed myself as mostly a mercenary, consistent raises, consistently good reviews even though I care less and less. So I see where he is coming from and I wish more people thought like him.
People work for satisfaction as well as money. You even give your own examples of a non-financial motivation before you got "wise". Only caring about money sounds like hell to me. Look at everyone that chooses a calling or career that doesn't pay well like teaching or much of our health system. Please don't assume they are stupid people making bad decisions - they often know exactly what they are doing (e.g. my extremely smart teacher friends) and part of their gross income is the non-financial payoffs of the job.
Personally I think society depends strongly on people chasing satisfaction from their jobs, and sectors which only chase the money have a rather sick ambiance (although perhaps necessary sectors?). Every good tradie is proud of their work.
There are a lot of taker/user jobs and bosses - perhaps avoiding those is the trick if you want satisfaction.
I've been in jobs with nothing to do. It sucks.
Work is an important component of a happy life. If I ever get tired of software maybe I'll go garden or something.
In a lot of ways the "overemployment" thing comes down to treating full-time jobs like agency clients. Which I'm all for in theory and I'm a lot happier when I'm working with clients instead of employers. But I can't personally handle the dishonesty required.
“We gave him the max 5% raise” doesn’t come close to cutting it.
The decision to just fire this brilliant guy without considering other options seems so short-sighted and sub-optimal (for the company).
Yes, it was very clearly stated that he was a liar. A "con artist" is a significantly bigger liar than a mere "liar".
> You're projecting.
Hmm. "It's not OK to do X. I refuse to do X and you should not tolerate people who do it." That's projecting? I think you need to look up what that word means. Unless you're literally accusing me of being a liar specifically because I am against lying? Some kind of "takes one to know one" Grade-school jab? What exactly are you on about?
I'm saying you're projecting because you assumed he lied in some way, when the story doesn't say that.
Any contract purporting to prevent an employee from earning money elsewhere is an illegal restraint of trade. Indeed the company would be the criminal if they tried to write this into their employment agreements.
"Exempt employee" has to do with overtime, not moonlighting. It's not relevant to this discussion.
So take it with a grain of salt.
I don't think this has any bearing on the whether the story itself is fictitious or not. I imagine all of the real names have been substituted in all of the stories, to prevent any unnecessary conflict/drama/liability/etc.
"accidentally" doesn't sound like some asshole is just going around ruining kid's days with a demon boat. it's not too far fetched to imagine someone in the SFMYC accidentally hitting another boat and that not making the news. they're not the WWCC, which would go around sinking each other's ships and is active at Maker faire.
SF model yacht club western warship combat club
https://www.baydesignassociates.com/article/website-redesign...
Mostly relatively dry discussions, but they do seem a lot better structured than the average blog post, and (thankfully) not AI garbage. He is a good writer.
The story OP posted is tagged with "War Stories", and these do seem to be far more literary, with first-person perspective and novel-like dialogue.
https://www.stimmel-law.com/en/articles/category/lessons-com...
I suspect the same writer really has written all of these. It may be the actual person credited, Lee Stimmel, but it impossible to know if it's a ghostwriter without other samples of Stimmel's writing. But I don't think the technical details of the law would be well captured by a ghostwriter. There is a distinct change of style between both kinds of articles, but to me it feels like the same person writing.
I mean, the site is apparently a real law firm in San Francisco, so even if it's fictional (the names definitely should be!), the stories are probably based on real events.
Unless one of the partners has a side hobby of writing fiction on stories about law!
The stories are fascinating though, spent a couple hours reading some of those.
As far as I can tell, these type of fraudsters are deeply wounded narcissistic people who were utterly twisted by their caregivers as children.
Please don't be too quick to blame parents - remember we used to blame autism on refrigerator mothers: https://en-wp.org/wiki/Refrigerator_mother_theory -- society tends to victimise mothers and without knowing the people involved nasty stereotypes are unhealthy.
Mayo clinic says:
Although the cause of narcissistic personality disorder isn't known, some researchers think that overprotective or neglectful parenting may have an impact on children who are born with a tendency to develop the disorder.
1. The fraudster is really, really nice and often has a disarming appearance. Often it's pretty or handsome. The one that got the most, an book keeper who got $143,000 via petty cash looked like everyone's Grandma.
2. The money is always spent quickly and on things that were not obvious to others at work. Vacations, gifts for family members, luxury items... One guy spent it all on guitars and amplifiers.
3. When caught, the fraudster/embezzler admits it readily and cooperates with everyone... The reason every one gave was right out of a Michael Chrichton book, "The Great Train Robbery":
Judge: Now, on the matter of motive, we ask you: Why did you conceive, plan and execute this dastardly and scandalous crime?
Edward Pierce: I wanted the money.
Because that's where the money is
I know from personal experience that having no life, you get in a strange space, start thinking strange thoughts. Ridiculous things become plausible. Take the money? Why not! It's not like things can get worse for me.
Same with most of those "good guys" businessmen he constasts him with - who wouldn't hesitate to exploit, take advantage of, backstab, pull shady or even illegal shit on competitors, cut margin by selling shit, and of course, fire employees whenever they want to look good on paper and not give a fuck about it.
Like Zuck did to the Winklevoss twins and Saverin, and the billions of people the platform mind fucks with its algorithm to sell ads and collect data.
Or like Bill Gates and the Microsoft he run.
Or like Larry Elisson.
Or like Musk.
Or like Bezos.
Or the WeWork guy.
Or the Uber guys.
The list goes on.
Eddie can speak poetically in court. Cool. But he thinks that fact alone makes him better than other people. “Your courts are not used to hearing an honest statement, are they?” You're a professional con artist, bud, don't go patting yourself on the back for "honesty."
"Necessities of life are the proper destination of grim jobs with little men working at little desks." This guy is a stereotype of a Smug Rich Villain. If a movie character talked like that, you'd think it was a little over-the-top.
There is at least some overlap with the meaning of "nice", though, as in "nice guy", where it refers to a kind of person who is not genuinely courteous or kind for the sake of another's good (the benefit for them being spiritual reward), but someone who does it with an ulterior motive, to get something (typically unspoken, as it is underhanded) in return. The "nice guy" is likewise a conman, because his whole dishonest performance is to ingratiate himself with someone, as if doing so entitles him to something in return (think of the "nice guy" who tries to please women in order to receive attention, affection, or sexual favors, and then either pouts and whines, or becomes nasty, either overtly or in passive aggressive ways, when he doesn't receive them).
Being "nice" is not the same as being "good". We should always be good, never nice.
> “Eddie’s just more honest than a lot of the business men I know... They grab a nickel here and lose a dollar in the long run.”
I have seen this so many times, over and over. People burning bridges over relatively small amounts of money, discounting the longterm relationship, and most disastrous of all, ignoring that everyone has their own network and whisper to everyone what "really happened". You get a reputation as an asshole and then you wonder why everyone else seems like they don't treat you fairly.
I think in general there's immense power in the narratives people tell themselves. "I am too good/smart to be a straight-forward worker" can then land you in a significantly worse scenario than you can actually attain as a "straight-forward worker."
But it's not like the ego is doing those ROI calculations.
This is where "Eddie's" argument falls through imo. Never assume your system works perfectly. Use every piece of supplementary information you have. Including knowledge of whether someone is willing and able to break the system.
Otherwise you would piss everyone off.
Anything and everything you asked him, he was: - always the victim - going to get his lawyers - subtly threatening violence - demanding something strange or bizarre, like documents he didn't need access to.
For people not used to it, it was a shock. He seemed affluent by every standard.
Once you realize just how firmly you're on the side of Moist and how identical Gilt is, then you can meditate for awhile on the world.
Terry Pratchett was always great at making you empathise with flawed characters. Also, he was exceptional at creating "bad" or "evil" characters with believable and complex motivations, which never excused their actions.
Truly a phenomenal author. It's fun to watch how his one-dimensional parody characters take on a life of their own over the series; you can really tell he has a love for them, even if they're not his cup of tea.
And your other point also hits home, I've read or listened to pretty much all of the discworld books at least three times by now and I love it when I come across a character without a name who is just used as a throwaway joke in an earlier book, and then to realise that they are fully fleshed out in the later books.
"Me, i think. I've fallen into good ways. I keep thinking I can give it up any time I like, but I don't. But I know if I /couldn't/ give it up any time I liked, I wouldn't go on doing it. Er. There is another reason, too --"
"And that is -- ?"
"I'm not Reacher Gilt. That's sort of important. Some people might say there's not a lot of difference, but I can see it from where I stand and it's there.
It's like a golem not being a hammer."
"He was the company's chief engineer. He'd come with the company, and had hung on because at 58, with twinges in your knuckles, a sick wife, and a bad back, you think twice about grand gestures such as storming out."
Reminds me of special someone y'all know caught snoozing in a court room this afternoon.
Feel like I can oddly relate to this quote; not sure what that says about me, hah.
I really hate these takes. Yes she was stealing a shit ton of money so she didn’t mind paying for stuff for friends and giving expensive gifts so people thought she was nice and generous.
Take away the money and likely she would have been seen as greedy and nitpicky.
It’s like people going “yea, he did steel a lot of cars, but I still think he was a pretty decent guy who always showed up in a nice looking car”
The real point of the interview was the reassure the narcissist that he was still smarter, still more significant, and still more of an operator than the lawyer who convicted him.
At the very least he got his prosecutor to turn up, which must have been a small consolation thrill.
And, since we're on HN, I think it's fascinating that many of us have the same mentality, except with computers/systems rather than people/money. (One of YC's application questions is how you hacked a system to your advantage.)
That being said, I did find the dialogue to be quite beautiful. "I spent it on sweet, stupid things that make life an appropriate journey. Little things with some elegance attached."
> Of course I spent it. Why else take it? Money taken like that should not be spent on necessities of life but on luxuries of life. Necessities of life are the proper destination of grim jobs with little men working at little desks.
sucked the tear right back in.
Most of us live grim lives and little desks, when there is so much in the world to offer. We are the ones being wronged, not because we shouldn't do the work, but because they will never offer us enough to experience the other side.
"Scott says he was kind of overworked and unhappy with his job, so everything felt a little less important. Maybe that had something to do with it. But he says crossing over that line was somehow just not as hard as it should have been."
- Planet Money, Episode 671: An Insider Trader Tells All https://www.npr.org/transcripts/460689797
I knew a guy who was a cashier. The company he worked for decided to save a few bucks and got rid of the person who cashed him out each night and verified his transactions. He decided that he could steal a few bucks since no one would know. He started small and increased a bit. It was never a lot but he did it regularly. He continued and eventually, he got caught. What's interesting is that it wouldn't have happened had he not had the easy opportunity of take the cash.
Sylvia Bloom, master of insider trading, disagrees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Bloom
Sylvia Bloom (c. 1919 – 2016) was an American legal secretary. By copying her bosses' investment decisions she secretly accumulated a significant fortune and donated the bulk of it—US$8.2 million—for scholarships for underprivileged students upon her death. She lived modestly in a rent-controlled apartment, and even her closest friends and family did not know about her wealth.
There is a long history of embezzlement and snake oil salesmanship in the United States.
The hardest form of embezzlement to put a check on is is things such as when you promise that GPUs, if they are powerful enough, will one day produce AGI by running code because intelligence is a "property of matter". Kind of "if you compute it, it will show up".
In one of the Star Wars movies, Luke takes a starfighter and flies to another planet, pursues training with Yoda etc. I'm pretty sure the other timelines in the movie don't reasonably match up and I don't recall this causing a big hullabaloo.
What people will blithely accept in a popular movie tells you something about their mental processes. It tells you something about how tolerant they will be of half-truths and stories not quite adding up IRL. And some people like exploiting that fact for some reason.
They usually have an excuse -- "I'm some minority group or other and we never get a fair shake." But the reality is, as the author says, they just like it for some reason.
Most people have partial info and make decisions based on simple rubrics, not comprehensive overviews of some unknown future. People routinely see what they want to see -- "Look! Free money -- again!" -- and blithely ignore inconvenient truths -- "Oops! Arrested again."
Comments suggesting "right to be forgotten" is problematic are correct. It typically just teaches people they can get away with it.
Super nice guy and I thought his business/offering was really compelling, it just wasn't right for me at the time.
Like 6 months later it comes out that he had stolen like $25 million from clients over the year (money that was supposed to be used to pay payroll taxes).
Never would've guessed it.
> He became exasperated. “Didn’t you tell your client you have to create checks and balances in the company and watch each and every employee?”
> “Yes, but…”
> “And don’t you insist on systems being created in every company so that no one can get away with cooking the books or taking from the company no matter who is in charge?”
> “Yes…”
> “Then what difference does it make if someone you don’t trust is involved? You don’t trust anyone anyway. If your systems work, they work. I am not any more of a danger to you than any other person. I don’t see the problem.”
Eddie would have made a good security consultant.
Or I can pet my dog that won’t even think to try.
Which should I do?
I was given the advice early in my career of being mindful of very nice people. I misunderstood it as "be a disgusting person".
You need to be nice and be a honest person of integrity. That's the magic. Not "OR" but "AND".
To paraphrase the great writer John le Carre they do not take risks because they enjoy life they do it because they are dead inside. By the way, John le Carre had the very bad luck to have a psychopath for a father and he suffered greatly for it. But he did get a very good book out of that experience — “the perfect spy”, one of the best descriptions of a psychopath in literature. Much recommended.
Unfortunately the lack of feeling translates to a complete lack of compassion towards others so that leads psychopaths to do so much damage to innocent people.
In their desire to feel something anything, psychopaths tend to gamble and do stimulant drugs. They also tend to think they’re special and the rules of society do not apply to them.
So if you meet a charismatic person that likes to take big risks and do crazy stuff and/or gambles, stay away.
I say that having fallen victim to a vile disgusting psychopath and still trying to get him to leave me alone. So beware, it is not fun.
Eh, what? Don't most rich self-made people, and people at the top of big corps, think this way? (Not all, but a good-size majority?) I can assure you that the majority of such people worry only about the appearance of honesty and morality, not the substance.
The 'elderly businessman' he quotes in the next paragraph has it pretty much right.
We live in Hobbes' world. Or rather, we created it, by allowing such people to gain power and influence, and even seeing it as a good.
(Btw, I'm not defending the subject's behavior, he clearly deserves a long spell in jail and needs to make right what he's done. But his argument that "everyone does it" isn't too far from the truth.)
It's very hard to know! (It's not like you can send a survey around and ask.)
But for what it's worth, I think this is overblown. It's not that it's not a thing. But I don't think it's as much of a thing as people tend to think. I think most people, including fancy business people, want to be the hero of their own story, and that a smaller-than-imagined proportion of people find "the only rules [are] do not get caught if you can and make all the money you can[, a]nd trust no one" to be compatible with their own heroes journey.
> a smaller-than-imagined proportion of people find "the only rules [are] do not get caught if you can and make all the money you can[, a]nd trust no one" to be compatible with their own heroes journey.
I just truly don't think this sort of thing is as common as the cynical-people-on-the-internet crowd seems to take it as obvious fact to be. I think it's more often reached for as a convenient simpler explanation for human behavior that is actually more complex and nuanced.
You can embezzle for some of the reasons listed above, and not others. Or something completely different, like a conviction that the victim (which could be an employer or government agency or cofounder) owes you for some real or imagined damage or injustice.
And some people do it for love.
There was a case a few years back involving a nebbish CFO at an old-school family-run firm, Alden Shoe Company. This guy was utterly besotted with a former TV news anchor who was trying to start her own entertainment brand, and embezzled millions to fund her business and impress her as a moneyed knight in shining armor.
He stole the money from a reserve account and family trust, and wasn't particularly smart about it:
In 2011, according to criminal and civil court filings, Hajjar started writing checks to himself from that Santander account and depositing them in his personal bank accounts. That year, he wrote himself eight checks totaling $585,000. The next year, 17 checks for $1.2 million. He also transferred money from the cash reserve to a defunct Alden trust account, and then over to his personal accounts. In 2013, he used this method to take $1.2 million, and again to steal $4 million in 2014—the same year de la Garza started Lucky Gal Productions. ...
At the end of each year, Hajjar simply moved money from an Alden line of credit into the Santander account, so everything looked copasetic for the year-end review. Then, after a successful review, he returned the borrowed funds to the Alden line of credit and no one was the wiser that the Santander account was missing money.
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2021/07/13/richard-hajja...
The theft totalled $17 million. He didn't try hard to cover his tracks, and when the CEO of the shoe company figured it out, he admitted it right away.
I don't think this guy was a born con artist or serial grifter or particularly brilliant. He'd been with the same company his entire career, and there wasn't any evidence of earlier embezzlement until he met the TV personality.
I think he got 5 years in prison.
If you are going to be a successful embezzler the lag between pushing a boundary (from small office supplies, to stealing petty cash, to full on corporate embezzlement) must be pretty long. By the team the punishment comes, there is enough time to disconnect the action from the result and create alternate justifications. This gives a people a long time to escalate. Being a likable person likely gives you even more time.
In the corporate world the lines are also a bit fuzzier. Is expensing a not-quite business dinner with overpriced wine embezzlement? Depends on who you ask. But doing so will surely embolden your next action. These people probably also display some level of narcissism/sociopathy. Minimizing victims by calling them "small people." Nonrecognition of emotional damage. I wonder how many of these people surround themselves with a cadre of enablers who are more willing to look the other way. And when its all said and done, they are on to the next thing.
the darker and longer is it's cast."
In a lot of cases we're too lazy to do it ourselves. Or we need it NOW. Or we're too stupid to care or we're overwhelmed by other emotional factors. All these things and more impede our ability to make a clear distinction between value, cost and need.
It's really hard to tell the difference between late stage capitalism and fraud. They're only divided by a thin legal line full of semantics and double speak. Words dont seem to have meanings. ie) Guaranteed, Free, Unlimited, etc. We've become entrapped in a web of tort law and legal ridiculousness.
So in the end this guy tells it like it is... He's the known known, the honest thief.
I have no idea why you want to twist that into dark desires and laziness.
Is selling a candy bar that is half the size of the packaging yet the same cost as it was before they shrank the product fraud or is it just business?
It fits the definition of fraud more than anything...misrepresenting the outcome by hiding the facts. Seems pretty fraudulent to me...
But most Americans don't work at large corporations and that most companies are not large.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/county-employment-and-wages/estab...
The parent post said that most businesses are fraudulent and pointed at practices by large businesses.
Insurance Banking Finance Media Energy Software
All are infused with opaque business practices and layers of legal protections hiding behind 1000 page contracts.
And it's also true that most Americans don't work at large corporations and that most companies are not large.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/county-employment-and-wages/estab...
The same goes for our need for convenience and luxury. We could have all survived on brick phones or Blackberries, but we now employ so much of our population making slightly-more-luxurious iPhones. At some point, these impediments are what cause us to grow.
Yes, the next time you go to buy a computer or mobile phone you should just skip it because it's a scam. Just manufacture and assemble the hardware yourself and create the operating system/ecosystem of apps while you're at it. It just pure laziness not too. Or maybe consider that capitalism and the division of labor benefits you massively.
I'm glad that all these businesses exist, so that I can specialize in a particular kind of work, and they can specialize in doing things I don't do, and then I can transact with them using a standard medium of exchange to trade my special skills for theirs.
None of that has anything to do with "the weaknesses of human nature" or laziness, or false urgency, or an impeded ability to distinguish value, cost, and need. It's just a trade of my time for theirs, on terms I find acceptable.
There is nothing fraudulent about any of this. The coffee shop I bought my coffee from this morning and the restaurant I bought my lunch from this afternoon did not fool me, I just enjoyed drinking the coffee and eating the food they prepared, and considered their prices fair. No semantic legalities or double speak or meaningless words required, I just wanted some goods and services, and was happy to purchase them.
That's honest, not thievery.
The small shop owner or tradesmen, sure. The giant corp with no human connection and nothing but a walled presence? No way.
This isn't boolean math, there's a whole continuum between "everything is perfect" and "everything is a corrupt scam".
Good luck negotiating or even communicating with ATT or American Airlines or any major provider of services you think you buy... Let alone your hospital bill, your car insurance, your health insurance or your taxes... The list goes on and on and on. We're what they call "Captive customers". You literally have no choice.
It's actually astounding that you support this stuff let alone respect it. However, in a world where people put tattoos of Tesla on their bodies, it makes sense.
It would certainly be a scam if I were convinced to pay AT&T or American Airlines, and then they didn't actually build any cell towers or fly any airplanes. But that's clearly not the case! Absolutely yes, complain about poor business practices and bad provision of service, that's an important back-pressure mechanism. And yeah, it is naive to be all dewy-eyed and worshipful of a business and its leaders (like I see way too many people being with Musk, and have seen with other companies and people at other points in the past).
But your view that these businesses do nothing useful is just as inaccurate as the view of those blind worshippers. What you want to do when evaluating stuff in the world, is to draw conclusions as accurately as possible. Setting out two buckets for "good" and "bad" and tossing everything you see into one of the two of them is only going to lead you to having a distorted inaccurate view of everything.
Insurance can be a scam, when you pay premiums while the provisions for payout are so thin as to never be triggered. But it's pretty hard to run an insurance scheme that never pays and just fully pockets the premiums, without being prosecuted.
And health insurance in particular is further from a scam than most, because a huge amount of money is paid out for medical care on a constant basis, and a large portion of that is paid by health insurance companies. It can certainly be a bad deal for individual healthy people, but in aggregate, it is certainly not a scam.
What "stuff" is it astounding that I support? You want me to, what, think that it's bad that phone companies provide cell service and airlines fly planes? I don't. I think it's good that they do those things. That doesn't mean that I think everything about their business practices is good. These are not conflicting thoughts, in any way.
The best example to illustrate this principle is the unholy alliance between Big Pharma and the government, particularly the FDA.
Big Pharma lobbyist write the rules that the FDA enforces and the most ambitious people working at the FDA, after a few years, leave to work at Big Pharma.
The covid19 pandemic exposed the public at large to the way this unholy alliance works, but there have been numerous cases of abuse by the Big Pharma companies who consider paying fines like these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical... a cost of doing business.
In the context of AI, we are assisting to another of these abusive practices in the making particularly if an FDA-styled agency is created to regulate AI.
Think about the tax code as an example. We literally have to buy software or pay a professional to decipher the madness. It's by design in order to keep all these people and companies profitable!
Or shrinkflation. Is selling a candy bar that is half the size of the packaging yet the same cost as it was before they shrank the product fraud or is it just smart business?
It fits the definition of fraud more than anything...
The value arbitrage corporations get from their workers today makes shareholders embezzling from workers just the way of the world now.
He wasn't just charming -- he was nihilistically prescient. He knew where the world was going, and that other businessman at the end, he wouldn't survive in today's environment.