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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I remember a story of a bank branch manager who got into embezzling because of his gambling debts in this classic book

https://www.amazon.com/Crime-Computer-Donn-B-Parker/dp/06841...

I would not say he had a master plan but was making it up to go along and figured he’d win big at the track one day and pay everyone back, (We had someone like that who stole $750k from our county’s bus operator because of gambling too.)

Boy if these people were cogs in the machine and probably didn’t see a lot of upward mobility. The perp told the author of the book that he’d “learned his lesson” and that he came across as sincere but FBI agents told him that people like that (gambling addiction + embezzling) will reoffend almost always if given the chance. (One reason I think the European “right to be forgotten” is a problem is because it is a shield for people who use their social skills as a weapon.)

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> ”probably didn’t see a lot of upward mobility”

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.

> She had a lot of potential for upward mobility as a doctor from the most prestigious school in Brazil.

Potential, and after couple more years of exhaustion and suffering (as graduating from a medical school is typically only first half of the journey)?

If potential far-away reward like this didn't discount to approximately 0 for most people, the world would've looked entirely different.

Strawman that indicates either extreme boredom and desire for interlocution, or a misanthropic streak. To see it, who are there all these rubes who stay in middle school even though most people discount far-away reward to 0? High school? College?

> Strawman that indicates either extreme boredom and desire for interlocution, or a misanthropic streak.

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.

More like offering a potential counterpoint, motivated by general experience that people generally aren't stupid

I would say that everyone is smart and stupid at the same time, about different things at different times. Being a smarter person is attaining greater competence at keeping the stupid in check.

> I don't think playing Devil's advocate is misanthropic.

Masterfully phrased :) i.e. you agree you were bored and looking for an interlocutor.

> Do you even remember middle/high school?

Yes.

> 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.

Yeah I'm an economics college dropout from nowhere with a 2.8 GPA who couldn't make it to class. I flushed a 1560/1600 SAT and 173/180 LSAT down the toilet (read: Ivy League tier standardized test grades). I ended up working for Google as a SWE. How? After dropping out, I worked as a waiter, thought that rumored iSlate thing sounded pretty cool, and maybe I should make a restaurant app for it. Taught myself programming, launched after 2.5 years, sold it after 4, interviewed for Google expecting to fail.

To peer poster's point: everyone is smart and stupid at the same time, about different things at different times.

Someone who experienced the changing and flippant tides of fortune...

You learned your numbers at least mostly meant nothing, and seemingly learnt the valuable lesson of hardwork and luck (and a brain cell or two to rub together).

Maybe, someday you will be able to notice the rest of the drab populous, some of whom have no braincells, some that never learnt to work, or have never managed to have lady luck on their side, instead courting her cousins disease and malady, and you may regret your shortsighted and uninformed comment(s).

The road to riches is not lined with short term rewards, but with trials and many a tribulation, hardly any of it deserved...

> The road to riches is not lined with short term rewards, but with trials and many a tribulation, hardly any of it deserved...

I'd say it's both. It's like a simple board game[0], where you race on a line of steps, and the line is littered with bonuses and penalties, and each turn you move along according to the roll of the dice. A couple lucky rolls, you can be half-way to finish line in few turns. A couple unlucky rolls, and you quit playing, or plain lose to your lucky friend. If you somehow avoid both the bonuses and penalties, well the line is long and the game is fucking dull and you'll probably get bored half-way.

(Bonus point for making the line into a loop, so the game can take arbitrarily long, and initial advantage grows superlinearly, making the game beyond boring, a source of real-life conflicts between friends and families. Yes, I believe that game is called Monopoly.)

[0] - Like the ones we used to play as kids, not the modern Board Games that Board Gamers love to play at social events and Board Game Cafes.

I feel like you're very close to the realisation/philosophy that I hold here, which is that hard work doesn't pay off.

In the sense that you cannot willpower your way to a goal that requires a great deal of sustatined effort. You simply can't. People dont become olympic athletes by training hard so they can win. They become olympic athletes by training hard because they like training. They have friends there, and feel good at it, and get fulfillment from it, and found all sorts of little tricks to make it easier and not exact a psychological toll from them.

This all is to say, if you want to make a change in life, its not enough to try really hard. You have to set up structures, often social structures, to help it become fun.

You're right and I think you could go further. There's a carrot and there's a stick. You can join communities where change happens by force. Think of the guy who runs someone over in his car then becomes a priest to atone. He's not necessarily having fun. Think of slaves: they're not having fun, but the social structure ensures they'll remain slaves. As we speak there are teenage boys fighting each other in the Middle East and Europe - not because it's fun but because their society ensures they'll be thrown in jail or killed if they don't fight.

hard work is a necessary but not sufficient factor to achieve success.

Yes, but more importantly, "hard work" is unsustainable on its own, and leads to a burnout.

To use an engine analogy, it's not enough to supply fuel for the engine to burn and do work; you also need lubrication for the moving parts and cooling for the whole assembly if you want the engine to keep going.

Most countries other than the US don't have such rigorous training for doctors. After graduating medical school (which is typically done while others are doing their bachelors), you have your medical license and can start practicing. Medical school is 6 years in Brazil as opposed to the required 4 years of undergrad, 4 years of medical school, and 3-7 years of residency (not counting any fellowship that you may opt to do afterwards).

Which is all to say that she was right on the finish line before deciding to throw it all away.

> Most countries other than the US don't have such rigorous training for doctors

Where do you get this notion?

If Brazil is anything like Argentina -- and I bet it is in this context -- the study and internship stages of doctor training are positively grueling. Many doctors in training do drugs to cope. They work long hours and make all sorts of mistakes. Many are in terrible moods. And patients and people can get really rude and impatient with them.

It can be a really thankless, grueling job. I wonder why people choose it at all.

Used to be a desire to help people. Today, in countries like Brazil, mostly money - a doctor makes on average 20x the minimum salary, easily 40x.

To answer my own question, I do think people do want to help other people.

My question was mostlt rethorical, more of a reflection on the difficult life they choose for themselves. But thankfully some people do think of others!

There's an excellent essay on Anarchy Unbound about this. It analyses inter-group transactions and methods to not be cheated. Essentially, cheaters are defined as people who discount future transactions as 0. Therefore, I've easy to filter them out it's to require an upfront cost for any unknown person to transaction with you.

The thing that blew my mind was you can use non-monitary costs. E.g. if someone from an out group learns your language and your culture, that's a moderate investment. To recoup that, they need to make multiple transactions and are therefore less likely to cheat.

It's by no means a perfect metric - and it works much better in smaller, tribal settings - but it's still a fascinating analysis

Momentary emotions often trump long term rational planning in certain types of people.

Think of it as one of life's many filters - better such person didnt become a doctor, we wouldn't be talking about money being lost due to her stupidity.

In a different day and age (and with a bit more luck) she would have gone on to invent fractional reserve banking.

And if she had taken the govt route, she would have gone on to invenst quantitative easing.

I'd add that in the Brazilian these medical schools frequented by the children of the elite, graduation party funds add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Students are expected to pony up a sizeable monthly sum starting from the first year of the graduation.

> 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.

Contrarian counterposition: perhaps the problem rather is that so many people become easily bewitched by social skills? I do believe that even if there was no "right to be forgotten", such people would easily be capable of using their social skills to "wipe away" the warning signs of the criminal past.

Here the bank CEO was being scammed and allegedly embezzled: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-13/-pig-butc...

Prospect theory predicts people are more likely to gamble to prevent a sure loss.

> 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.

>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.

The other day I was testing out an input form with an autocomplete which led me to this group

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Solutions_for_Winning...

which was run by politician Newt Gingrich which he had let go bankrupt and get evicted from its offices in 2011 so he could run for president in 2012 and I must say it boggles my mind that he didn't think this would have an effect on "do I trust this guy to be President?" or even "do I want to donate to his campaign?"

> which he had let go bankrupt and get evicted from its offices in 2011 so he could run for president in 2012

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.

Bankruptcy is just a smart business decision for the privileged.

For the working class, it is a moral failure. Or in the case of student loans not allowed.

But they paid for said misdeeds, it's not that important that they pay forever, is it ? I mean it sounds annoying to allow an embezzler to be an accountant again, but I mean, he did his time, he's supposed to have reformed, what are we gonna do ? Consider that never again in his life he's gonna be honest ?

Does the right to be forgotten apply to the legal system as well? I thought it was more about online privacy etc

Similar to how you can get criminal convictions expunged so it doesn't affect employment etc but any terms of the expungement still hold

Disclaimer: not only am I not a lawyer, I'm also incredibly lazy and haven't even Google searched right to be forgotten laws

The legal system doesn't forget about you. The issue is more that if you google a potential business partner you might treat them differently if you find old articles about their conviction for embezzlement. Which is both good and bad.

There is a tension between protecting the innocent and the reformed from their past on one side, and protecting potential victims on the other.

it does for minors once they become adults?

Martin Shkreli was doing that, and he actually did win big enough to pay back and still went to jail.

SBF also will probably end up being able to pay people back, but it's jail for him too.

Yeah but the right to be forgotten is because there's a perceived imbalance between now and 70 years ago: before, people would forget you, and nobody found it weird. Today, you're labelled forever in permanent databases, and it's hard to get a redeeming chance.

We believe, in Europe, that it's better to have a criminal re-offend, than to have no criminal being given a second chance, and that's totally a choice and we can change our mind later anyway. But for now, we want to try it.

the bank manager sounds like "Owning Mahony"

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