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Scott Adams' had a great line: "Whenever people have the opportunity to commit fraud and there is no monitoring, you can assume they are committing fraud."

btrettel 4mo ago
Are you loosely paraphrasing here? The closest thing I could find by Scott Adams was "Whenever you have a lot of money in play, combined with the ability to hide misbehavior behind complexity, you should expect widespread fraud to happen." https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10213582-whenever-you-have-a-lot-of-money-in-play-combined https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10213582-whenever-you-have-... (I didn't check the book, though.)
ZeroGravitas 4mo ago
I sometimes think of this from the other direction. Don't put people in situations of great temptation, like access to company cash with no oversight. They'll often fall for the temptation and ruin their lives in the process. It's a slightly different framing from the "evil people will take advantage and get away with it" but they both lead to putting some kind of process in place to prevent abuse.
- AndrewOMartin 4mo ago
  This is like when store-bought locks are able to be picked by a novice, or broken with a hammer, or bypassed with a magnet. The phrase used is "it keeps good people honest", rather than "it keeps absolutely all bad guys out".
  - roysting 4mo ago
    The irony here being that we are so beyond healthy that the vast majority of people are well beyond even realizing or recognizing that the very need for locks everywhere is self-evident of an unhealthy society. Imagining a condition where you had to lock away your valuables in your own home out of concern for them being taken by people in your own home probably makes it a bit more apparent to some people who can mentally model alternatives. If you were ever to go to places where the rich are in what are effectively little oasis, kind of like “green zones” where they hide away from the chaos and misery they cause the wider society, no one locks their doors even though the homes are all full of stuff that is worth more than the average person will ever even earn in their whole lifetime and they walk around with jewelry and clothing multiple times more expensive than the average house price. They literally, by various mechanisms and methods “keep absolute all bad guys out”, effectively, without locks on every door. What we’ve long lost was systematic secure systems architecture and we replaced it with extremely costly, expensive and risky brute force, hard coded illusion of saver of the kind you refer to that is ironically not even necessary in most cases either. Locks don’t keep good people out at all, good people aren’t emoted and wouldn’t enter a place that isn’t locked without permission in the first place; hence my above point of locks being a good indicator of the health of a society and the failure of a government, i.e., the cluster and quality of the people left in control of things.
picofarad 4mo ago
Adam Carolla says that people aren't evil, but if you wave some money in front of them, they'll do things they wouldn't normally

btrettel 4mo ago

Are you loosely paraphrasing here? The closest thing I could find by Scott Adams was "Whenever you have a lot of money in play, combined with the ability to hide misbehavior behind complexity, you should expect widespread fraud to happen." https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10213582-whenever-you-have-a-lot-of-money-in-play-combined https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10213582-whenever-you-have-... (I didn't check the book, though.)

ZeroGravitas 4mo ago

I sometimes think of this from the other direction. Don't put people in situations of great temptation, like access to company cash with no oversight. They'll often fall for the temptation and ruin their lives in the process. It's a slightly different framing from the "evil people will take advantage and get away with it" but they both lead to putting some kind of process in place to prevent abuse.

AndrewOMartin 4mo ago
This is like when store-bought locks are able to be picked by a novice, or broken with a hammer, or bypassed with a magnet. The phrase used is "it keeps good people honest", rather than "it keeps absolutely all bad guys out".
- roysting 4mo ago
  The irony here being that we are so beyond healthy that the vast majority of people are well beyond even realizing or recognizing that the very need for locks everywhere is self-evident of an unhealthy society. Imagining a condition where you had to lock away your valuables in your own home out of concern for them being taken by people in your own home probably makes it a bit more apparent to some people who can mentally model alternatives. If you were ever to go to places where the rich are in what are effectively little oasis, kind of like “green zones” where they hide away from the chaos and misery they cause the wider society, no one locks their doors even though the homes are all full of stuff that is worth more than the average person will ever even earn in their whole lifetime and they walk around with jewelry and clothing multiple times more expensive than the average house price. They literally, by various mechanisms and methods “keep absolute all bad guys out”, effectively, without locks on every door. What we’ve long lost was systematic secure systems architecture and we replaced it with extremely costly, expensive and risky brute force, hard coded illusion of saver of the kind you refer to that is ironically not even necessary in most cases either. Locks don’t keep good people out at all, good people aren’t emoted and wouldn’t enter a place that isn’t locked without permission in the first place; hence my above point of locks being a good indicator of the health of a society and the failure of a government, i.e., the cluster and quality of the people left in control of things.

picofarad 4mo ago

Adam Carolla says that people aren't evil, but if you wave some money in front of them, they'll do things they wouldn't normally