12 ms·

> 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 m

> 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.

kranke155 2y ago
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.
- nine_k 2y ago
  So a better approach would be therapy instead of prison, I suppose?
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    Nope. Therapy produces results only when based on a sincere desire to make change.
    - munk-a 2y ago
      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.
      - ohyes 2y ago
        That’s one flavor of embezzler, there probably a sociopath flavor as well. Sending a sociopath to therapy generally doesn’t work.
        munk-a 2y ago
        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.
        lelanthran 2y ago
        > 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.
      - forgetfreeman 2y ago
        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.
        PythagoRascal 2y ago
        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.
    - nine_k 2y ago
      Don't at least some of them want to gain control of their impulses?
    - SkyBelow 2y ago
      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.
      - lelanthran 2y ago
        None of what you said is quantitative and/or objective data.
        jacobgkau 2y ago
        A "sincere desire to make change" isn't quantifiable in the first place.
        lelanthran 2y ago
        > 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.
        jacobgkau 2y ago
        > 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: > All we can do when treating sociopaths is to release them into the world again and judge their actions, not their self-reported feelings. What's the purpose here, to treat the condition of being a sociopath, or just to enforce enough structure on them that they don't cause other people harm? My problem with what you said is that the entire idea of "sociopathy" is that a person lacks what the diagnoser considers to be "emotion" and is simply "pretending" to be a "normal" human by copying how they see other people behaving. That diagnosis isn't quantifiable in the first place; it's the diagnoser deciding they know what's happening in a patient's head by (guess what?) observing their words and actions. Farther up-thread, people were arguing sociopaths should go to prison and not receive therapy (particularly if they say they don't want therapy, but more generally if they've committed a crime). You're now taking that farther by saying even if they express a desire to make change, that shouldn't be taken into account when determining any treatment/punishment, because that's only an observation of words coming out of their mouth-- but that's the same route they were diagnosed via in the first place, so I find that hypocritical. If you're just saying criminals should be punished without regard for their mental health/conditions simply because their victims were victimized regardless, that's a valid utilitarian view. But realize (it at least sounds like) you're essentially arguing that therapy for mental conditions is generally impossible/pointless.
    - stavros 2y ago
      Addiction is weird, though. A lot of the time, the addict doesn't actually want to be addicted.
      - aidenn0 2y ago
        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.
        stavros 2y ago
        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".
        swores 2y ago
        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.
  - kranke155 2y ago
    In the cases I've witnessed, therapy would be pointless. They are sociopaths, pure and simple.
- brk 2y ago
  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.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > embezzler spots an opportunity to get back some of what they are owed, they strike, and are successful. Then it spirals from there. 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.
  - aidenn0 2y ago
    > 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. 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.
    - wholinator2 2y ago
      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).
- Teever 2y ago
  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?
redrove 2y ago
Sounds like he was underpaid by all 3!
duxup 2y ago
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.
- msikora 2y ago
  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".
  - duxup 2y ago
    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.
    - xvilka 2y ago
      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.
      - duxup 2y ago
        How would that work in Russia? There's no independent judiciary, those in power are not going to jail ...
      - 2y ago
namaria 2y ago
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.
PaulHoule 2y ago
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/0684155761 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.)
- NortySpock 2y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - linuxlizard 2y ago
    >Yeah, I wonder how the EU will deal with people who use that law to hide evidence of their misdeeds... Here in the US, we elect them to public office.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      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_the_Future 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?"
dkarl 2y ago
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.
- amelius 2y ago
  > Many people have a sense that they could perform much better, given the right opportunities, the right environment, etc. 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.
  - dkarl 2y ago
    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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
more_corn 2y ago
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.
xmprt 2y ago
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.
K0balt 2y ago
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.
WalterBright 2y ago
My method for cheating on exams was to learn the material.
karmakaze 2y ago
All things equal, one is far more exciting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceijkZQI1HM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceijkZQI1HM
jongjong 2y ago
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.
tsunamifury 2y ago
No justice in life but what we make…
Madmallard 2y ago
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.
citizenpaul 2y ago
>stopped stealing and starting working honestly. 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.

kranke155 2y ago

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.

nine_k 2y ago
So a better approach would be therapy instead of prison, I suppose?
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  Nope. Therapy produces results only when based on a sincere desire to make change.
  - munk-a 2y ago
    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.
    - ohyes 2y ago
      That’s one flavor of embezzler, there probably a sociopath flavor as well. Sending a sociopath to therapy generally doesn’t work.
      - munk-a 2y ago
        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.
        lelanthran 2y ago
        > 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.
    - forgetfreeman 2y ago
      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.
      - PythagoRascal 2y ago
        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.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    Don't at least some of them want to gain control of their impulses?
  - SkyBelow 2y ago
    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.
    - lelanthran 2y ago
      None of what you said is quantitative and/or objective data.
      - jacobgkau 2y ago
        A "sincere desire to make change" isn't quantifiable in the first place.
        lelanthran 2y ago
        > 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.
        jacobgkau 2y ago
        > 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: > All we can do when treating sociopaths is to release them into the world again and judge their actions, not their self-reported feelings. What's the purpose here, to treat the condition of being a sociopath, or just to enforce enough structure on them that they don't cause other people harm? My problem with what you said is that the entire idea of "sociopathy" is that a person lacks what the diagnoser considers to be "emotion" and is simply "pretending" to be a "normal" human by copying how they see other people behaving. That diagnosis isn't quantifiable in the first place; it's the diagnoser deciding they know what's happening in a patient's head by (guess what?) observing their words and actions. Farther up-thread, people were arguing sociopaths should go to prison and not receive therapy (particularly if they say they don't want therapy, but more generally if they've committed a crime). You're now taking that farther by saying even if they express a desire to make change, that shouldn't be taken into account when determining any treatment/punishment, because that's only an observation of words coming out of their mouth-- but that's the same route they were diagnosed via in the first place, so I find that hypocritical. If you're just saying criminals should be punished without regard for their mental health/conditions simply because their victims were victimized regardless, that's a valid utilitarian view. But realize (it at least sounds like) you're essentially arguing that therapy for mental conditions is generally impossible/pointless.
  - stavros 2y ago
    Addiction is weird, though. A lot of the time, the addict doesn't actually want to be addicted.
    - aidenn0 2y ago
      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.
      - stavros 2y ago
        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".
        swores 2y ago
        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.
- kranke155 2y ago
  In the cases I've witnessed, therapy would be pointless. They are sociopaths, pure and simple.
brk 2y ago
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.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > embezzler spots an opportunity to get back some of what they are owed, they strike, and are successful. Then it spirals from there. 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.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - wholinator2 2y ago
    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).
Teever 2y ago
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?

redrove 2y ago

Sounds like he was underpaid by all 3!

duxup 2y ago

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.

msikora 2y ago
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".
- duxup 2y ago
  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.
  - xvilka 2y ago
    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.
    - duxup 2y ago
      How would that work in Russia? There's no independent judiciary, those in power are not going to jail ...
    - 2y ago

namaria 2y ago

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.

PaulHoule 2y ago

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/0684155761 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.)

NortySpock 2y ago
> 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. 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.
- linuxlizard 2y ago
  >Yeah, I wonder how the EU will deal with people who use that law to hide evidence of their misdeeds... Here in the US, we elect them to public office.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    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_the_Future 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?"

dkarl 2y ago

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.

amelius 2y ago
> Many people have a sense that they could perform much better, given the right opportunities, the right environment, etc. 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.
- dkarl 2y ago
  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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

more_corn 2y ago

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.

xmprt 2y ago

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.

K0balt 2y ago

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.

WalterBright 2y ago

My method for cheating on exams was to learn the material.

karmakaze 2y ago

All things equal, one is far more exciting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceijkZQI1HM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceijkZQI1HM

jongjong 2y ago

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.

tsunamifury 2y ago

No justice in life but what we make…

Madmallard 2y ago

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.

citizenpaul 2y ago

>stopped stealing and starting working honestly. 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.