4 ms·

>I never want to hear about you committing any crime you can't retire on This is pretty interesting "advice", but curious how on that would have impacted my yo

• ergothus 9y ago
  I think it had a big (and net positive) impact on me, but anecdote is not data - If you think the advice would have been bad for you, I'd love to hear how - not because I think it's impossible or that you'd be wrong, but because I have no idea what is probable without more people weighing in.
  • dllthomas 9y ago
    I mean, if instead of smoking pot with friends you decided to rob a bank, that sounds like a bad outcome in line with the advice...
    • BoorishBears 9y ago
      Robbing a bank has a poor average payoff, so not likely to be able to retire on it. Becoming a CEO and indulging in embezzlement on the other hand...
      • ergothus 9y ago
        I never thought of the CEO angle (not sure what that says about my intelligence, but hopefully it says something good about my morals). I know that my thinking as a 10 year old was that if I got caught robbing a bank, my mom wouldn't have been bothered that I tried to rob a bank, she'd have been bothered that I _failed_. As an adult I realize that she'd not have been happy in either case. (I think. Probably.) But it was exactly that shift of thinking from "should I do this" (prone to peer pressure) to "is the payoff worth the risk" (which leads to "what is the risk?") that kept me from doing anything particularly stupid and why I brought the story up in relation to the article. As adults we normally relate "should I do this" to "what is the payoff" and "what is the risk". As a preteen/teen the life experiences to encourage those connections aren't there, so the decisions will be different from the average adults'. This crazy advice (my mother doesn't remember making it, so it was probably an off-the-cuff attempt at humor that altered my life) created a temporary bridge between those concepts until I had the experiences to build my own bridges. In retrospect it's actually similar to how certain religious doctrines provide reasons for moral decisions when you wouldn't necessarily have those morals on your own. mindblown.
      • bitL 9y ago
        Playing GTA too much? ;-)
      • nerfhammer 9y ago
        Just become a CEO. Embezzling after already being the CEO is just gratuitous.
    • pokemongoaway 9y ago
      Wait, what? What if you had a Coca-Cola and decided to have another every day for 30 years? Or have sex without a condom - why does it have to be marijuana leading to violent crime? Where are my laughter emoticons my adolescence has made me dependent upon! :)
      • dllthomas 9y ago
        I think you misread me. Smoking marijuana is committing a crime that one can't retire on (it's not even profitable, which doesn't really speak to whether it's a good idea but certainly means its not in line with the mother's advice). A bank robbery, at a large enough scale and if successful, could easily provide enough money to retire in some poorer non-extradition countries - but the attempt is almost certainly a worse idea than smoking marijuana with friends.
• anonytrary 9y ago
  Right, because suddenly we're positing that a pre-teen can correctly calculate how much money they would need in order to retire.