I used to work for a not for profit. The level of legal graft was enormous.
We once got audited by a government agency. Said government agency had been extensively burdened with restrictions in its operation by lobbying from the NFP space.
After completing the audit, the gentleman running the government agency had a press release more less saying "I think it would be best if we were allowed to release our findings where they pertained to the expectations citizens have for the not for profit space, and not just where we find outright illegal behaviour. People should be able to understand exactly how much of a charities funding is used for its actual charitable purpose, and how much of its funds are effectively gifts for directors and staff"
Which sort of sums it up. Graft goes on it just finds a legal path.
People usually call i t NGO for non-government organisation. Not For Profit is just another euphemism. In casual conversation people usually say nonprofit. Or if they feel fancy, a 501.c3 nonprofit. In the US. Not sure how these work in other countries.
Try the likes of the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, the beneficial owners of Rolex who operate under the guise of a charity.
There is no requirement to disclose financial or charitable donations under law, and the company pays no corporate taxes as a result of being owned by the Foundation.
Tbf, that's a common bordering on default corporate setup in DACH in order keep ownership within the family [0], and in my opinion, symptomatic of why a number of German industries have been falling behind.
Some amount of creative disruption is needed to incentivize innovation, but there are roadblocks against that created by the families who ancestors took advantage of creative disruption 50-70 years ago.
Bosch, Thyssenkrupp, Aldi, Lidl, Bertelsmann, etc all do that.
To me, it just looks like the natural consequence of the NFP space being the last stop on the chain of tax avoidance tools used by the moderately to very rich to avoid insane tax levels. (refresher: Trust(s)-> custom large whole life policies -> whole life policies fund new trusts and new life insurance for the next generation -> remnants of old trusts that can't be evacuated tax efficiently are donated to family controlled charity that funds family controlled not for profits).In a setup like that, the NFP becomes just another bucket of tax privileged cash to use to further your interests by way of cushy appointments to staff/board positions or, rarely, charitable work that furthers some economic goal of the family. In that setup what you see as graft is the real value and what you see as charity is the cost paid in lieu of taxes on the pot of money. The actual graft is unfortunately the behaviour enabled at charities that actually take average person cash through fundraising.
It means high enough above their perceived benefit from said taxes to strongly incentivize tax avoidance and lobbying to create loopholes. For example, the top marg*nal tax rate in my province is 49% and it is insane to me because the program choice of the levels of governments does not align with program choices i would make with that money and all the spending is conservatively inflated 15 to 20% above the cost i would be able to get if i was said programs. I am getting potholes, mediocre schools and mediocre healthcare for the cost of first class all those things.
Thats my suspicion. I'll never understand how this ends up disconnected in peoples minds that the society you live in is the one that let you thrive, and you have to contribute back to it to keep the ecosystem healthy, no different than anything else
It's more that you are utterly disconnected because you associate spending more with contributing back, when spending more on failure incentivizes failure. You seem to think I don't want to contribute back when my complaint is I'm contributing a ton and seeing poor results for that contribution. My desire is for the ecosystem to be healthy and for my country and the world to thrive and throwing money in non stop and seeing it wasted is not healthy or sustainable.
Here's a refresher: What you spend is your measure of failure. What you get is your measure of success. What I get is not a whole lot (and yes I value and want to see social goods like great healthcare, education, transportation, etc, because those things are good for me and good for my business) and what I spend is at atrocity levels, which makes this a situation that incentivizes me to lobby and otherwise legally manage those expenses.
This is literally what all people are doing. Some of us do it consciously, some of us are ignorant. Selfishness drives all your decisions and choices, however each of us have preference sets at least partially driven by our evolution so you see people preferring things that are not immediately rational in a risk neutral way all the time because that preference probably out performed the rational choice enough that the genetics that drive the base of that preference became highly prevalent.
I personally hate to see homelessness in society, especially child homelessness,and I personally give to charities that I think are efficiently working to end that. It's not obviously rational in the same way my preference for everyone to have access to high quality health care, high quality education, high quality transport is. It still breaks my heart when I see government spending money on "affordable housing" that is actually still just overpriced housing that is subsidized, instead of doing cost effective and intelligent things to the policy they control that is causing a massive chunk of the housing price bubble.(i.e. the cost of just interest on the loans to go from owning the land to occupancy are approaching 100k a door in many places in Canada, why are you spending 30 million to build 25 door of "affordable housing"? spend 30 million getting the permitttime to weeks from years so that interest costs per door are a tiny fraction of what they are and incentivize massive more supply pushing all housing costs down for way more benefit for everyone. Once you stop the stupid you are directly responsible for then consider building affordable housing for the fraction of need that is left.
> Said government agency had been extensively burdened with restrictions in its operation by lobbying from the NFP space.
This is incorrect and dishonest. The restrictions come from government employees and elected officials. The lobbyists cannot force them to do anything. These are facts, not opinions.
If your decision makers are corrupt and not acting in your best interests, then you need to hold them accountable for that. I've never heard a single person on HN (or real life in my country) say "I was tracking the bills that my senators voted on, noticed they voted for something bad, and sent them a letter", or voted against them next election cycle, or anything similar, because almost nobody does it.
This is a failure of democracy, on the part of the citizens, because democracy isn't just voting - it's monitoring the behavior of those you voted for and holding them accountable. (I'm not saying anything about people you didn't vote for, for obvious reasons)
If you are not keeping track of what your representatives are doing, and voting for them anyway, you are actively making the situation worse.
Sure, lobbying needs to be much more regulated or outright banned in many countries (including my own) - but even an individual of below-average intelligence can see why even if lobbying is banned, all of the above still applies - if you're not keeping track of your representatives actions, even if they're not being lobbied, they can and will continue to act in their own interests and sacrifice yours, and you're failing your country.
Lobbying is not the root problem - corruption and lack of accountability are.
>This is incorrect and dishonest. The restrictions come from government employees and elected officials. The lobbyists cannot force them to do anything. These are facts, not opinions.
I disagree in part.
You are correct that politicians should share some of the blame, but as we know the breed of insect known as politician lacks any kind of spine, they tend to bow down to any lobby that is large enough to cause them any electoral fright.
In this instance, we had a government scrap this regulatory body entirely, and the next government restored it but "upon consultation" left the teeth out.
Everyone sucks here as they say on reddit.
>If you are not keeping track of what your representatives are doing, and voting for them anyway, you are actively making the situation worse.
Classic beige dictatorship. Theres no way to keep a government accountable for the small actions that are near or completely bipartisan. They just make the election about some big other thing and keep getting away with it. People are forced to judge parties as a whole, and it sucks.
>Lobbying is not the root problem - corruption and lack of accountability are.
Honestly its the entire system as designed. Theres no way to sting a government over a single issue. Especially if 90% of the voters dont care about the issue.
I have never seen a large NGO or charity where there was not a large degree of either grift, goofing-off, or a strong whiff of outright fraud of one sort or another. This has really coloured my view of all such orgs.
Its also my experience that the reverse is true, small charities tend to be staffed by true believers who are working as hard as possible towards their goal.
> Its also my experience that the reverse is true, small charities tend to be staffed by true believers who are working as hard as possible towards their goal.
The volunteers are almost always the good souls in these places. It is the "professionals" that are the problem in my experience. All the way to the top.
I did some consulting for a separate branch of the same organisation.
They only had ~4 full time staff, people who had been promoted out of the volunteer pool. There was a small amount of nepotism, but everyone getting paid was absolutely crazy about the purpose of the organisation. And IIRC the salaries were very low.
Compare that to the branch I existed in, and it was chalk and cheese. Layers and layers of do nothing management drawing spectacular wages and finding ways to send themselves to fabulous parties and media events.
There was a component of the business focused on rehabilitation, and it operated for 3-4 years with only 6 or so staff. They would go on fantastic rehab holidays to demonstrate the benefit of their programs. Unfortunately for those first years they struggled to find volunteers for their rehab programs, so they were constantly sending their own staff on tours of europe or sailing adventures etc.
Sorry but no, even medium-sized, enterprise doesn't have the exact problems that people complain about government. I can share stories with government employees and we have the same dynamics.
Large dis-organizations with many stakeholders have the same dynamics.
Governments at least are inclined to help people whereas enterprises aren't.
My mate in government and I share stories all the time.
But my "And in this crazy company we had multiple competing teams with different management responsible for IT infrastructure" stories pale in comparison with his "Well we have 12 teams in 3 separate lines of business technically spanning 2 ministries" stories.
Charity and non-profit look to me like the easiest way to finance corruption with tax evasion, while making yourself (esp. if you're a billionaire) look good.
I dunno, probably differs based on jurisdiction but the one thing that cant happen in my jurisdiction is people on the board directly profiting from the charity.
They get well kept mind. But they never "own" the proceeds. IIRC one of the directors of mine was found with 3 corporate vehicles assigned to him.
Now on the flipside, being upper management in the same charity was a goldmine. Upper 6 figure salary, no expectations, vendors taking you on substantial holidays and meals to get your business, low 6 figure bonus every 12 months.
I've seen situations like these before. This is why off-site backups are so very important. I've also been in the same position of providing data from a backup that someone was intentionally trying to destroy to escape responsibility.
This story even hints at a common theme that happens even when people aren't trying to destroy data - that some people will tear down whatever they inherit, then blame their predecessors for the problems that result.
But if you don’t blame them it can also backfire. I inherited a bad codebase once and tried my best to improve it. But there was only so much time. When I left the guy after me blamed me for the still bad parts immediately.
It's a proud tradition, to gasp silently, mutter in anger as you run git blame, and only discover that you're the person who wrote the code about 20% of the time.
It's always interesting to me how easily corruption occurs. I always assume that accounting double checks things and so on, but I've seen so many business where someone just creates an account and money goes out and ... nobody notices for years.
I've even created automated invoices for some companies and realized that some data was missing for months. And yet they got paid significant amounts. I realized that the invoices could have been for just about anything and they would have gotten paid ...
When Robert McNamara took over Ford, accounting was so messed up, they would weigh their invoices and if the amount wasn't too far off from the expected dollars/pound ratio, they would pay it.
One guy was caught doing that to the tune of $100 million to Facebook and Google. If he had stopped at $1 million or something he probably would have got away with it. I suspect others have.
I was reading this whole thread flabbergasted and wondering "where the hell are people working that this happened" when it hit me:
I did work in a place where a manager was invoicing monthly "external design work" to the company to the tune of 5x his own salary, because the company's designer was "overwhelmed".
In the end he was just paying the hired designer a little extra to drag her feet and paying a Fiverr freelancer to do some cheap mockups with Figma. And obviously cashin' in the rest.
I only found out about several months after I left. It was interesting for me to have all this revealed because this guy was actively working to undermine all other engineering teams, with gossip and by blocking work. I didn't interact much with him or at all, but he was part of why I left.
The fun part: he was only fired a few months after the BOARD ITSELF fired the CTO, CPO and CEO all in the same day.
The company was 90 employees when I joined, 900 when I left, zero in 2024, and now was sold for scrap to a micro-sized competitor.
I wish I was a writer because the stories I have of that place would be an amazing book.
How was he caught? Involving the internal designer seems like a huge mistake. Keeping the scam quiet without collaborators or actively rocking the boat could have probably persisted for a long time.
The CFO had raised it as a problem but nobody ever bothered to check.
When a new CTO started, he actually checked it out on his first week and discovered the company emitting invoices belonged to the PM.
The CTO also demanded talking with the designer from Fiverr and in the end the amount of money actually paid to him was negligible.
I never really understood the involvement of the internal designer but she was also fired on the spot together with the PM and the company's highest paid engineer (but I don't think this one is involved).
I can say that the people we hired from HubSpot were 100% frat-house-boys so I 100% believe it.
But back to the company I worked, there were very stupid shit going on:
Around #MeToo, there was a group meeting with all men in the company because of fears of sexual harassment issues. Nobody close to me had any idea about the root cause, and there were some very strangely sexist comments in the meeting. Some people (including one later fired for non-sexual harassment) made it a personal soapbox and went into rants. The CEO completely mishandled it.
Also there was once an anonymous blog about the practices of the company that was totally blown out of proportion by management, and all employees had to attend a meeting to talk about it. Once again the CEO mishandled it, first by paying any attention and second for being incredibly awkward and super-defensive.
This was the main reason the CEO was ousted.
After I left the company there was a string of CEOs that acqui-hired all the competitors and basically drained the company's coffers. And of course the over-hiring, getting to 900 people on a pyramid scheme.
I forgot to tell the main product the company made: SEO blogspam. Yep.
Last year it collapsed because of our mutual friend, ChatGPT.
> Ford Motor Company was hemorrhaging millions of dollars every month. It was impossible to give an exact number because there was no accounting system. “Can you believe it?” Henry II later remembered. “In one department they figured their costs by weighing the pile of invoices on a scale”
Or perhaps the dimension was length, rather than weight?
> the corresponding receipt, then pinned them together and sent out a check, usually a few months late. To figure out how much money the company owed, they stacked up all the bills, measured them with a ruler, and through a formula of unknown provenance turned feet into dollars.
That's how he got to DOD in the first place, by being the stereotypical "businessman who will clean up government." DOGE was not the first time politicans have talked about this kind of thing; it comes along every 20-30 years.
The Fog of War is definitely worth a watch. It was a fairly harrowing experience when I saw it. Actually, it is probably one of the hardest films I have watched. He clearly details the war crimes he presided over, and is open about the fact that he would have been tried as a war criminal had they lost.
He also pioneered the use of seat belts while at Ford. Which does make the morality-math a little more unusual.
To be clear, while McNamara was an advocate for seat belts, he wasn’t particularly instrumental in their development or adoption. In 1955 he introduced a paid option for Ford vehicles that included seat belts. But the option wasn’t popular with consumers, only 2% of new Fords the following year had it installed.
Saab was the first to include them as standard equipment in 1958, with Volvo introducing the modern 3-point seatbelts as standard equipment the following year. They remained unpopular in the US until after Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe At Any Speed which became a bestseller and prompted congress to pass the National Traffic & Motor Safety Act in 1966, and ultimately were made compulsory by states (presumably under a lot of lobbying pressure from insurers) starting in 1970.
Lee Iococca from Chrysler wrote his seatbelt campaign can be countered by an anecdote of a person safely ejected into the grass and car falling off a cliff. I swear some brands are thriving on warm feelings.
The larger the usual bills, the larger the rounding-error-level amounts. I've had some fun time with a vendor recently where they just forgot to bill a few $k for months, but remembered when asked for quota increase.
The invoice route happens all the time and is seldom caught. Recently the former city manager of La Cañada-Flintridge CA was charged with fraud. The scheme was he would send invoices to car insurance companies with city letterhead to cover damage to city property. Only he pocketed the money.
A couple years ago someone was also sending invoices to FB, Google, etc. Scammed them out of $100m.
I think I missed something. They later offered the guy the world to solve problems. He declined and then complains they wouldn’t provide the tools he needed.
Part of “name your price” should include whatever tools - up to and including ownership of processes.
Yeah I think something was missed. My wild speculation is that the person thats "causing issues" has a privileged position with the owners. The owners are unwilling to completely cut this person out of the business, and that is what he means when he says that the owners won't provide the tools he needed.
I’m the author of the post. I hinted, in a cryptic sentence near the end, that I necessarily had to leave out the worst parts of the story. No, no organized crime. But yes, there were people who appropriated resources that weren’t theirs and used every tool at their disposal to avoid scrutiny. To keep it vague, let’s just say some of the people involved had means that could seriously harm the businesses and their owners. And since these were primary businesses, that would have been a serious problem. The owners, knowing this, tried to find solutions but couldn’t really “afford” to remove the people involved. To be specific, in the end the owners themselves were aware of what was happening, but hoped to resolve it with a few more checks. Eventually, I realized that as long as there was enough money for everyone, they were okay with the ongoing theft.
Sounds like very straightforward tax evasion. The business brings in lots of cash, doesn't pay taxes, obscures the books enough so that there's no smoking gun. Some of the people participating in the scheme are skimming, but maybe less than the taxes would be, or maybe the owners are also implicated and would face criminal penalties themselves, so it's better for everyone just to keep it going and keep the books messy. Don't need mafiosos from TV for that.
You can have this kind of fraud without tax evasion, by abusing invoicing, business expenses and reimbursements. That's a reason people like when accounting doesn't work properly.
Not saying there was zero tax evasion, but this seems like a separate issue.
Great read! Yeah, these days if I get asked for technical advice, I’m always glad to put good effort into suggestions. But as soon as you tell me “well I want to follow some of your advice, but I want to do this other stuff the wrong way”, I usually say “Good luck with all that!” and away I go.
Author's note: Many readers, understandably struck by the severity of the events, have speculated about the involvement of organized crime. I want to clarify that, while the situation was extremely problematic and dishonest, that wasn't the case. The "worst parts" I alluded to referred to other internal dynamics, abuses of trust, and improprieties that I prefer not to detail further for privacy reasons and to avoid weighing down the narrative.
> I even worked on translating Archivista’s interface into Italian, since it wasn’t yet localized, just to make it easier for users.
A certain Italian-speaking area is legendary for its organized crime syndicates. Would anyone be surprised if that was the case here? Kinda hard to imagine it not.
Organized crime would be more... organized. There would be servers, infrastructure and documentation. Designed to say exactly the right thing to whoever was looking.
This is garden variety, SMB fraud.
"We trust Tim, and never had a problem so we don't need to invest in all these controls. Tim is really vehement that the controls are useless and he's refusing to participate. No we won't make him comply. No we don't see any conflict here. Please continue to fix the problem anyway."
How you gonna leave out the good parts like circa<year> so we can gauge the tech available then? Also, what about the tools you used to sync/backup to owner's house? My personal query, why did you move to freebsd? was it a different application/use? This is an awesome story, our modern approach would be to install nextcloud/owncloud with collaboration and rsync/syncthing to an offsite NAS (owner's house).
As for your decision, I would have agreed to a directorship and hired a local MSP to do things the way I wanted. This would have allowed you to have your cake and eat it too. A lot of times, in these situations, all you need is trusted eyes and ears from outside the corrupted fold. This principle is used in the military and diplomatic core, there is a staffing structure, and then there is an XO, who is hired and controlled from HQ. This XO answers to HQ, not the local structure.
We're talking around 2009 — I don't recall the exact period, but that’s the era. For backups, I used rsync-based syncs and kept history by using hard links and rsync on top of those. I also had a Perl script that automated the whole thing, but I’ve long since forgotten its name.
As for the rest — I hear you, and I totally agree. But at the time, I was young and more focused on building things with healthy clients who genuinely wanted to create something good, rather than trying to salvage a situation that, honestly, was nearly beyond saving.
I switched the ALIX to FreeBSD for other tasks, and FreeBSD (with its native read only support) was perfect for the new workload.
Can you elaborate at all as to why you didn't make the phone call you eluded to that made the other person change their tone? I assume out of respect for the deceased/leaving skeletons in the closet?
Sure, I can say this. The person I would have called, someone very close to me, would have been extremely disappointed to learn what was happening. They were very proud of having helped, during difficult times, the very person who was now threatening me. And since this person close to me was facing serious health issues (though still had authority), I chose to avoid causing them further pain that, ultimately, would have been pointless at that moment.
Yeah, that's really a strange choice for formatting and makes it very hard to read. Not the typical practice to insert a <br> after every sentence... (that said, the post itself is a great read!)
The goal of truncating the sentences in that way was precisely to increase the suspense a bit, but I believe I miserably failed, making it just less readable.
Definitely not the end of the world - no worries! It just feels a bit uh, haphazard in a way. My eye is leading forward for the next words only to find I need to skip to the next line. I usually read very fast so I'll be a bit more sensitive to variations in formatting like that, I guess? All good though, like I said a great read anyway!
If you have a wide screen, you won't notice it so much. Try reading on a narrow screen in just about the wrong resolution and it will look like the author used notepad and hit enter every time they were too close to the edge instead of letting the program do the wrapping.
Not exactly. Just a few people who were diverting large amounts of the company’s money into their personal bank accounts, taking advantage of the fact that that type of business, at the time, had a particular tax regime and no direct tracking of the amounts received in payments.
In the healthcare industry, there have been instances where vital patient data was either lost or improperly handled due to lack of proper systems and oversight. In one case, a hospital that had relied on outdated paper records for years faced a crisis when an employee accidentally deleted critical data. It wasn’t until the hospital implemented an integrated digital system that could track and back up data that they regained trust with patients and stakeholders.
One of the reasons why having boxes in a data center would be good.
If there was big(?) money flowing through the company regularly,
Keeping the server at the office and the backup in the owner's house
seems like a shoestring budget.
Which was way more common in the past years, esp in small companies
when "IT" was to be cheap cheap, even if there was.
But it seems that the client in this story did not worry about cost.
Want a new server? No problem, A second one (windows) no problem?
Was stuffing the box into a data center ever brought up?
They didn't seem to state a year this was occurring in, and from what is written it sounds like the internet connection was insanely slow.
Back in the 95-2010 range so many places outside of towns had pretty much no internet. Maybe you'd get a meg or two up and down. Can't do much offsite with that.
It sounds like one of the VMs was a samba file server, to serve shared files for the workstations in the office. That was a common thing to run locally in the office, to keep latency down.
This is needlessly negative. It’s clear that dishonest people do not always win. Disproving such a claim requires finding only one case of a successful prosecution for fraud.
The only useful definition is “breaks the rules of the game”. Using this definition one honest victory in a perfect information game disproves the assertion.
Not any individual one - a particular dishonest person might only win 20% of the time - but in aggregate - the winner is almost always a dishonest person.
Even when a game rewards honesty, dishonest people are willing to be honest if that's truly what gives them the greatest chance of winning, so they still win.
I believe they are saying that there are multiple rounds, each with different games - some with honest optimal strategies and some with dishonest optimal strategies. A dishonest person can always choose the optimal strategy for each game, but the honest person can only choose the best honest strategy. So in aggregate the dishonest person comes out ahead.
I used to work for a not for profit. The level of legal graft was enormous.
We once got audited by a government agency. Said government agency had been extensively burdened with restrictions in its operation by lobbying from the NFP space.
After completing the audit, the gentleman running the government agency had a press release more less saying "I think it would be best if we were allowed to release our findings where they pertained to the expectations citizens have for the not for profit space, and not just where we find outright illegal behaviour. People should be able to understand exactly how much of a charities funding is used for its actual charitable purpose, and how much of its funds are effectively gifts for directors and staff"
Which sort of sums it up. Graft goes on it just finds a legal path.
What's "the NFP space"? I googled but all I find is random local clubs and companies called NFP, none of which look like powerful lobby clubs.
Not for profit.
Covers full charities, and other legal statuses like public beneficials etc.
NFP = Not For Profit
People usually call i t NGO for non-government organisation. Not For Profit is just another euphemism. In casual conversation people usually say nonprofit. Or if they feel fancy, a 501.c3 nonprofit. In the US. Not sure how these work in other countries.
Try the likes of the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, the beneficial owners of Rolex who operate under the guise of a charity.
There is no requirement to disclose financial or charitable donations under law, and the company pays no corporate taxes as a result of being owned by the Foundation.
Tbf, that's a common bordering on default corporate setup in DACH in order keep ownership within the family [0], and in my opinion, symptomatic of why a number of German industries have been falling behind.
Some amount of creative disruption is needed to incentivize innovation, but there are roadblocks against that created by the families who ancestors took advantage of creative disruption 50-70 years ago.
Bosch, Thyssenkrupp, Aldi, Lidl, Bertelsmann, etc all do that.
[0] - https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=f1b666a8-1257...
To me, it just looks like the natural consequence of the NFP space being the last stop on the chain of tax avoidance tools used by the moderately to very rich to avoid insane tax levels. (refresher: Trust(s)-> custom large whole life policies -> whole life policies fund new trusts and new life insurance for the next generation -> remnants of old trusts that can't be evacuated tax efficiently are donated to family controlled charity that funds family controlled not for profits).In a setup like that, the NFP becomes just another bucket of tax privileged cash to use to further your interests by way of cushy appointments to staff/board positions or, rarely, charitable work that furthers some economic goal of the family. In that setup what you see as graft is the real value and what you see as charity is the cost paid in lieu of taxes on the pot of money. The actual graft is unfortunately the behaviour enabled at charities that actually take average person cash through fundraising.
What exactly are insane tax levels we are talking about here? I don’t understand the characterization
It means high enough above their perceived benefit from said taxes to strongly incentivize tax avoidance and lobbying to create loopholes. For example, the top marg*nal tax rate in my province is 49% and it is insane to me because the program choice of the levels of governments does not align with program choices i would make with that money and all the spending is conservatively inflated 15 to 20% above the cost i would be able to get if i was said programs. I am getting potholes, mediocre schools and mediocre healthcare for the cost of first class all those things.
I think "insane tax levels" means having to contribute back to the society that made their success possible in the first place.
Thats my suspicion. I'll never understand how this ends up disconnected in peoples minds that the society you live in is the one that let you thrive, and you have to contribute back to it to keep the ecosystem healthy, no different than anything else
It's more that you are utterly disconnected because you associate spending more with contributing back, when spending more on failure incentivizes failure. You seem to think I don't want to contribute back when my complaint is I'm contributing a ton and seeing poor results for that contribution. My desire is for the ecosystem to be healthy and for my country and the world to thrive and throwing money in non stop and seeing it wasted is not healthy or sustainable.
Here's a refresher: What you spend is your measure of failure. What you get is your measure of success. What I get is not a whole lot (and yes I value and want to see social goods like great healthcare, education, transportation, etc, because those things are good for me and good for my business) and what I spend is at atrocity levels, which makes this a situation that incentivizes me to lobby and otherwise legally manage those expenses.
> because those things are good for me and good for my business
Spoken like a true philanthrope!
This is literally what all people are doing. Some of us do it consciously, some of us are ignorant. Selfishness drives all your decisions and choices, however each of us have preference sets at least partially driven by our evolution so you see people preferring things that are not immediately rational in a risk neutral way all the time because that preference probably out performed the rational choice enough that the genetics that drive the base of that preference became highly prevalent.
I personally hate to see homelessness in society, especially child homelessness,and I personally give to charities that I think are efficiently working to end that. It's not obviously rational in the same way my preference for everyone to have access to high quality health care, high quality education, high quality transport is. It still breaks my heart when I see government spending money on "affordable housing" that is actually still just overpriced housing that is subsidized, instead of doing cost effective and intelligent things to the policy they control that is causing a massive chunk of the housing price bubble.(i.e. the cost of just interest on the loans to go from owning the land to occupancy are approaching 100k a door in many places in Canada, why are you spending 30 million to build 25 door of "affordable housing"? spend 30 million getting the permitttime to weeks from years so that interest costs per door are a tiny fraction of what they are and incentivize massive more supply pushing all housing costs down for way more benefit for everyone. Once you stop the stupid you are directly responsible for then consider building affordable housing for the fraction of need that is left.
> Said government agency had been extensively burdened with restrictions in its operation by lobbying from the NFP space.
This is incorrect and dishonest. The restrictions come from government employees and elected officials. The lobbyists cannot force them to do anything. These are facts, not opinions.
If your decision makers are corrupt and not acting in your best interests, then you need to hold them accountable for that. I've never heard a single person on HN (or real life in my country) say "I was tracking the bills that my senators voted on, noticed they voted for something bad, and sent them a letter", or voted against them next election cycle, or anything similar, because almost nobody does it.
This is a failure of democracy, on the part of the citizens, because democracy isn't just voting - it's monitoring the behavior of those you voted for and holding them accountable. (I'm not saying anything about people you didn't vote for, for obvious reasons)
If you are not keeping track of what your representatives are doing, and voting for them anyway, you are actively making the situation worse.
Sure, lobbying needs to be much more regulated or outright banned in many countries (including my own) - but even an individual of below-average intelligence can see why even if lobbying is banned, all of the above still applies - if you're not keeping track of your representatives actions, even if they're not being lobbied, they can and will continue to act in their own interests and sacrifice yours, and you're failing your country.
Lobbying is not the root problem - corruption and lack of accountability are.
So in other words, the bribe-giver can't force the bribe-taker to accept their money, so they are off the hook.
>This is incorrect and dishonest. The restrictions come from government employees and elected officials. The lobbyists cannot force them to do anything. These are facts, not opinions.
I disagree in part.
You are correct that politicians should share some of the blame, but as we know the breed of insect known as politician lacks any kind of spine, they tend to bow down to any lobby that is large enough to cause them any electoral fright.
In this instance, we had a government scrap this regulatory body entirely, and the next government restored it but "upon consultation" left the teeth out.
Everyone sucks here as they say on reddit.
>If you are not keeping track of what your representatives are doing, and voting for them anyway, you are actively making the situation worse.
Classic beige dictatorship. Theres no way to keep a government accountable for the small actions that are near or completely bipartisan. They just make the election about some big other thing and keep getting away with it. People are forced to judge parties as a whole, and it sucks.
>Lobbying is not the root problem - corruption and lack of accountability are.
Honestly its the entire system as designed. Theres no way to sting a government over a single issue. Especially if 90% of the voters dont care about the issue.
I have never seen a large NGO or charity where there was not a large degree of either grift, goofing-off, or a strong whiff of outright fraud of one sort or another. This has really coloured my view of all such orgs.
Yeah thats been my experience as well.
Its also my experience that the reverse is true, small charities tend to be staffed by true believers who are working as hard as possible towards their goal.
> Its also my experience that the reverse is true, small charities tend to be staffed by true believers who are working as hard as possible towards their goal.
Same.
The volunteers are almost always the good souls in these places. It is the "professionals" that are the problem in my experience. All the way to the top.
Depends on scale.
I did some consulting for a separate branch of the same organisation.
They only had ~4 full time staff, people who had been promoted out of the volunteer pool. There was a small amount of nepotism, but everyone getting paid was absolutely crazy about the purpose of the organisation. And IIRC the salaries were very low.
Compare that to the branch I existed in, and it was chalk and cheese. Layers and layers of do nothing management drawing spectacular wages and finding ways to send themselves to fabulous parties and media events.
There was a component of the business focused on rehabilitation, and it operated for 3-4 years with only 6 or so staff. They would go on fantastic rehab holidays to demonstrate the benefit of their programs. Unfortunately for those first years they struggled to find volunteers for their rehab programs, so they were constantly sending their own staff on tours of europe or sailing adventures etc.
To be fair, this describes a large percentage of ALL large human organizations, including for profit, educational, and government entities.
Sorry but no, even medium-sized, enterprise doesn't have the exact problems that people complain about government. I can share stories with government employees and we have the same dynamics.
Large dis-organizations with many stakeholders have the same dynamics.
Governments at least are inclined to help people whereas enterprises aren't.
My mate in government and I share stories all the time.
But my "And in this crazy company we had multiple competing teams with different management responsible for IT infrastructure" stories pale in comparison with his "Well we have 12 teams in 3 separate lines of business technically spanning 2 ministries" stories.
Charity and non-profit look to me like the easiest way to finance corruption with tax evasion, while making yourself (esp. if you're a billionaire) look good.
I dunno, probably differs based on jurisdiction but the one thing that cant happen in my jurisdiction is people on the board directly profiting from the charity.
They get well kept mind. But they never "own" the proceeds. IIRC one of the directors of mine was found with 3 corporate vehicles assigned to him.
Now on the flipside, being upper management in the same charity was a goldmine. Upper 6 figure salary, no expectations, vendors taking you on substantial holidays and meals to get your business, low 6 figure bonus every 12 months.
Different worlds tbh.
I've seen situations like these before. This is why off-site backups are so very important. I've also been in the same position of providing data from a backup that someone was intentionally trying to destroy to escape responsibility.
This story even hints at a common theme that happens even when people aren't trying to destroy data - that some people will tear down whatever they inherit, then blame their predecessors for the problems that result.
But if you don’t blame them it can also backfire. I inherited a bad codebase once and tried my best to improve it. But there was only so much time. When I left the guy after me blamed me for the still bad parts immediately.
Ah that reminds me of a classic Dilbert comic, The code mocking
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/195lc8/whe...
(Reddit, because Dilberts creator and his website have gone off the rails)
Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2013-02-24>
He would blamed your new code if you rewrote. People who blame are juniors. You are not really a senior if you blame.
Juniors blame. Seniors silently judge.
It's a proud tradition, to gasp silently, mutter in anger as you run git blame, and only discover that you're the person who wrote the code about 20% of the time.
It's always interesting to me how easily corruption occurs. I always assume that accounting double checks things and so on, but I've seen so many business where someone just creates an account and money goes out and ... nobody notices for years.
I've even created automated invoices for some companies and realized that some data was missing for months. And yet they got paid significant amounts. I realized that the invoices could have been for just about anything and they would have gotten paid ...
When Robert McNamara took over Ford, accounting was so messed up, they would weigh their invoices and if the amount wasn't too far off from the expected dollars/pound ratio, they would pay it.
Even Google evnetually caught a few people who just cold sent in invoices and found that Google would pay.
One guy was caught doing that to the tune of $100 million to Facebook and Google. If he had stopped at $1 million or something he probably would have got away with it. I suspect others have.
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/25/706715377/man-pleads-guilty-t...
I was reading this whole thread flabbergasted and wondering "where the hell are people working that this happened" when it hit me:
I did work in a place where a manager was invoicing monthly "external design work" to the company to the tune of 5x his own salary, because the company's designer was "overwhelmed".
In the end he was just paying the hired designer a little extra to drag her feet and paying a Fiverr freelancer to do some cheap mockups with Figma. And obviously cashin' in the rest.
I only found out about several months after I left. It was interesting for me to have all this revealed because this guy was actively working to undermine all other engineering teams, with gossip and by blocking work. I didn't interact much with him or at all, but he was part of why I left.
The fun part: he was only fired a few months after the BOARD ITSELF fired the CTO, CPO and CEO all in the same day.
The company was 90 employees when I joined, 900 when I left, zero in 2024, and now was sold for scrap to a micro-sized competitor.
I wish I was a writer because the stories I have of that place would be an amazing book.
How was he caught? Involving the internal designer seems like a huge mistake. Keeping the scam quiet without collaborators or actively rocking the boat could have probably persisted for a long time.
The CFO had raised it as a problem but nobody ever bothered to check.
When a new CTO started, he actually checked it out on his first week and discovered the company emitting invoices belonged to the PM.
The CTO also demanded talking with the designer from Fiverr and in the end the amount of money actually paid to him was negligible.
I never really understood the involvement of the internal designer but she was also fired on the spot together with the PM and the company's highest paid engineer (but I don't think this one is involved).
Ah, so the scam was likely detected for being an aberration, but staff was too busy/lazy to investigate.
Fun story, which likely has versions everywhere of someone bilking the company through fake contract work.
I wish you were a writer too, I'd love to read that book!
There is a similar book about Hubspot, a "sister company" of the place I used to work. It was published around the time I was there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disrupted:_My_Misadventure_in_...
I can say that the people we hired from HubSpot were 100% frat-house-boys so I 100% believe it.
But back to the company I worked, there were very stupid shit going on:
Around #MeToo, there was a group meeting with all men in the company because of fears of sexual harassment issues. Nobody close to me had any idea about the root cause, and there were some very strangely sexist comments in the meeting. Some people (including one later fired for non-sexual harassment) made it a personal soapbox and went into rants. The CEO completely mishandled it.
Also there was once an anonymous blog about the practices of the company that was totally blown out of proportion by management, and all employees had to attend a meeting to talk about it. Once again the CEO mishandled it, first by paying any attention and second for being incredibly awkward and super-defensive.
This was the main reason the CEO was ousted.
After I left the company there was a string of CEOs that acqui-hired all the competitors and basically drained the company's coffers. And of course the over-hiring, getting to 900 people on a pyramid scheme.
I forgot to tell the main product the company made: SEO blogspam. Yep.
Last year it collapsed because of our mutual friend, ChatGPT.
From _Go Like Hell_ by A.J. Baime (2010):
> Ford Motor Company was hemorrhaging millions of dollars every month. It was impossible to give an exact number because there was no accounting system. “Can you believe it?” Henry II later remembered. “In one department they figured their costs by weighing the pile of invoices on a scale”
Or perhaps the dimension was length, rather than weight?
> the corresponding receipt, then pinned them together and sent out a check, usually a few months late. To figure out how much money the company owed, they stacked up all the bills, measured them with a ruler, and through a formula of unknown provenance turned feet into dollars.
From _The Fires_ by Joe Flood (2010) Cited in https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/18z6i09/comment...
But I could not find a quote in the Macnamara interviews from the _Fog of War_ https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html as cited by https://forum.woodenboat.com/forum/the-bilge/28529-the-film-...
I had no idea that piece of shit was associated with Ford at all.
That's how he got to DOD in the first place, by being the stereotypical "businessman who will clean up government." DOGE was not the first time politicans have talked about this kind of thing; it comes along every 20-30 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(Department_of_Defen...
GWB was another one. The period seems to be shortening in the modern era.
He talks about it in The Fog of War (which is not going to make you change your ideia about him).
The Fog of War is definitely worth a watch. It was a fairly harrowing experience when I saw it. Actually, it is probably one of the hardest films I have watched. He clearly details the war crimes he presided over, and is open about the fact that he would have been tried as a war criminal had they lost.
He also pioneered the use of seat belts while at Ford. Which does make the morality-math a little more unusual.
To be clear, while McNamara was an advocate for seat belts, he wasn’t particularly instrumental in their development or adoption. In 1955 he introduced a paid option for Ford vehicles that included seat belts. But the option wasn’t popular with consumers, only 2% of new Fords the following year had it installed.
Saab was the first to include them as standard equipment in 1958, with Volvo introducing the modern 3-point seatbelts as standard equipment the following year. They remained unpopular in the US until after Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe At Any Speed which became a bestseller and prompted congress to pass the National Traffic & Motor Safety Act in 1966, and ultimately were made compulsory by states (presumably under a lot of lobbying pressure from insurers) starting in 1970.
> He also pioneered the use of seat belts while at Ford. Which does make the morality-math a little more unusual.
Is it unusual? A surviving driver from a car wreck needs a new car. Dead ones don't.
Lee Iococca from Chrysler wrote his seatbelt campaign can be countered by an anecdote of a person safely ejected into the grass and car falling off a cliff. I swear some brands are thriving on warm feelings.
The larger the usual bills, the larger the rounding-error-level amounts. I've had some fun time with a vendor recently where they just forgot to bill a few $k for months, but remembered when asked for quota increase.
There's an excellent book on the subject by Dan Davies: https://www.inkwellmanagement.com/books/lying-for-money
The invoice route happens all the time and is seldom caught. Recently the former city manager of La Cañada-Flintridge CA was charged with fraud. The scheme was he would send invoices to car insurance companies with city letterhead to cover damage to city property. Only he pocketed the money.
A couple years ago someone was also sending invoices to FB, Google, etc. Scammed them out of $100m.
I think I missed something. They later offered the guy the world to solve problems. He declined and then complains they wouldn’t provide the tools he needed.
Part of “name your price” should include whatever tools - up to and including ownership of processes.
Yeah I think something was missed. My wild speculation is that the person thats "causing issues" has a privileged position with the owners. The owners are unwilling to completely cut this person out of the business, and that is what he means when he says that the owners won't provide the tools he needed.
My mind immediately went to organized crime. Money laundering for people who he rather didn't know his name.
I’m the author of the post. I hinted, in a cryptic sentence near the end, that I necessarily had to leave out the worst parts of the story. No, no organized crime. But yes, there were people who appropriated resources that weren’t theirs and used every tool at their disposal to avoid scrutiny. To keep it vague, let’s just say some of the people involved had means that could seriously harm the businesses and their owners. And since these were primary businesses, that would have been a serious problem. The owners, knowing this, tried to find solutions but couldn’t really “afford” to remove the people involved. To be specific, in the end the owners themselves were aware of what was happening, but hoped to resolve it with a few more checks. Eventually, I realized that as long as there was enough money for everyone, they were okay with the ongoing theft.
Sounds like very straightforward tax evasion. The business brings in lots of cash, doesn't pay taxes, obscures the books enough so that there's no smoking gun. Some of the people participating in the scheme are skimming, but maybe less than the taxes would be, or maybe the owners are also implicated and would face criminal penalties themselves, so it's better for everyone just to keep it going and keep the books messy. Don't need mafiosos from TV for that.
You can have this kind of fraud without tax evasion, by abusing invoicing, business expenses and reimbursements. That's a reason people like when accounting doesn't work properly.
Not saying there was zero tax evasion, but this seems like a separate issue.
I'm just speculating about what kind of fraud was happening, but it seems pretty apparent that there was some
Yes, definitely agree.
Its better to know who is stealing from you (and how much) than not - sometimes the evil you know is better than the evil you dont.
> as long as there was enough money for everyone, they were okay with the ongoing theft.
Cue @patio11: The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero [0]
0. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
They had other options:
- if they really accepted the theft then normalize it and pay the thieves more and get them to stop thieving
- sell the businesses and let the theft be someone else's problem
- get the authorities involved
if you weren't getting paid for this - why get involved in the first place?
I've been paid for doing my job: creating the infrastructure, configuring stuff, etc.
Alright, I was thinking this was just the case of helping a friend
This looks like a clue:
"I even worked on translating Archivista’s interface into Italian, since it wasn’t yet localized, just to make it easier for users."
No, that's not a clue :-) I've just replied, clarifying this part, to the previous comment
Got it, it was disorganized crime, not organized. ;)
Yes, exactly :-D
It wasn't a laminates company, was it?
I thought that just means they're buying him out?
Great read! Yeah, these days if I get asked for technical advice, I’m always glad to put good effort into suggestions. But as soon as you tell me “well I want to follow some of your advice, but I want to do this other stuff the wrong way”, I usually say “Good luck with all that!” and away I go.
Author's note: Many readers, understandably struck by the severity of the events, have speculated about the involvement of organized crime. I want to clarify that, while the situation was extremely problematic and dishonest, that wasn't the case. The "worst parts" I alluded to referred to other internal dynamics, abuses of trust, and improprieties that I prefer not to detail further for privacy reasons and to avoid weighing down the narrative.
> I even worked on translating Archivista’s interface into Italian, since it wasn’t yet localized, just to make it easier for users.
A certain Italian-speaking area is legendary for its organized crime syndicates. Would anyone be surprised if that was the case here? Kinda hard to imagine it not.
Organized crime would be more... organized. There would be servers, infrastructure and documentation. Designed to say exactly the right thing to whoever was looking.
This is garden variety, SMB fraud.
"We trust Tim, and never had a problem so we don't need to invest in all these controls. Tim is really vehement that the controls are useless and he's refusing to participate. No we won't make him comply. No we don't see any conflict here. Please continue to fix the problem anyway."
No, It wasn't organized crime.
How you gonna leave out the good parts like circa<year> so we can gauge the tech available then? Also, what about the tools you used to sync/backup to owner's house? My personal query, why did you move to freebsd? was it a different application/use? This is an awesome story, our modern approach would be to install nextcloud/owncloud with collaboration and rsync/syncthing to an offsite NAS (owner's house). As for your decision, I would have agreed to a directorship and hired a local MSP to do things the way I wanted. This would have allowed you to have your cake and eat it too. A lot of times, in these situations, all you need is trusted eyes and ears from outside the corrupted fold. This principle is used in the military and diplomatic core, there is a staffing structure, and then there is an XO, who is hired and controlled from HQ. This XO answers to HQ, not the local structure.
We're talking around 2009 — I don't recall the exact period, but that’s the era. For backups, I used rsync-based syncs and kept history by using hard links and rsync on top of those. I also had a Perl script that automated the whole thing, but I’ve long since forgotten its name.
As for the rest — I hear you, and I totally agree. But at the time, I was young and more focused on building things with healthy clients who genuinely wanted to create something good, rather than trying to salvage a situation that, honestly, was nearly beyond saving.
I switched the ALIX to FreeBSD for other tasks, and FreeBSD (with its native read only support) was perfect for the new workload.
thank you for the clarification and more details, love it!!
That tool sounds a lot like rsnapshot, I'm still using it
It was StoreBackup: https://www.nongnu.org/storebackup/en/
Italia. Money is not a problem, still they don't hire any consulting company. No organized crime involved. Sure ;-)
No, it wasn't organized crime.
Can you elaborate at all as to why you didn't make the phone call you eluded to that made the other person change their tone? I assume out of respect for the deceased/leaving skeletons in the closet?
Sure, I can say this. The person I would have called, someone very close to me, would have been extremely disappointed to learn what was happening. They were very proud of having helped, during difficult times, the very person who was now threatening me. And since this person close to me was facing serious health issues (though still had authority), I chose to avoid causing them further pain that, ultimately, would have been pointless at that moment.
Why the hell is there a line break after every sentence?
Yeah, that's really a strange choice for formatting and makes it very hard to read. Not the typical practice to insert a <br> after every sentence... (that said, the post itself is a great read!)
The goal of truncating the sentences in that way was precisely to increase the suspense a bit, but I believe I miserably failed, making it just less readable.
Not OP: for what it's worth I understood your intent, and it didn't bother me
Definitely not the end of the world - no worries! It just feels a bit uh, haphazard in a way. My eye is leading forward for the next words only to find I need to skip to the next line. I usually read very fast so I'll be a bit more sensitive to variations in formatting like that, I guess? All good though, like I said a great read anyway!
Worse, the formatting failed. Lines are breaking before the sentence is over, leading to two words in the next line, then a new line. (Linux, Chrome)
Just because they didn't see your vision doesn't mean it wasn't good. You clearly had an intent with it.
For my anecdote, it worked for me and I didn't even notice the spacing until they pointed it out.
If you have a wide screen, you won't notice it so much. Try reading on a narrow screen in just about the wrong resolution and it will look like the author used notepad and hit enter every time they were too close to the edge instead of letting the program do the wrapping.
I think it’s called ventilated prose. More commonly found in code comments.
Probably originally written for LinkedIn. The whole pointless "moral lesson" when they didn't actually achieve anything vibe fits too.
No, it wasn't written for LinkedIn. It was written for my blog, and I just wanted to share something that happened, as I often do. That's all :-)
Hello my high school research paper teacher
Reading through it I had a feeling it was in Italy. I was bit sad to confirm it.
Italy, but no organized crime involved
But tax evasion, right?
Not exactly. Just a few people who were diverting large amounts of the company’s money into their personal bank accounts, taking advantage of the fact that that type of business, at the time, had a particular tax regime and no direct tracking of the amounts received in payments.
Particular tax regime? Was it a cooperative?
Not a cooperative - but they had a specific regime because of their business. I'm sorry, I can't say more otherwise they could be easily identified.
Yeah no worries. I was just curious.
Odd observation: Many stories like this involves NetBSD for som reason.
Fantastic war story. There's always like these dozen hangers-on who've made their fortune parasitizing successful people.
In the healthcare industry, there have been instances where vital patient data was either lost or improperly handled due to lack of proper systems and oversight. In one case, a hospital that had relied on outdated paper records for years faced a crisis when an employee accidentally deleted critical data. It wasn’t until the hospital implemented an integrated digital system that could track and back up data that they regained trust with patients and stakeholders.
Probably there was a lot the family did not know about the deceased father.
PCEngines!
Man, I've been running my Linux firewall/router & AP's off these machines for years. They are rock solid.
One of the reasons why having boxes in a data center would be good.
If there was big(?) money flowing through the company regularly, Keeping the server at the office and the backup in the owner's house seems like a shoestring budget.
Which was way more common in the past years, esp in small companies when "IT" was to be cheap cheap, even if there was.
But it seems that the client in this story did not worry about cost. Want a new server? No problem, A second one (windows) no problem?
Was stuffing the box into a data center ever brought up?
They didn't seem to state a year this was occurring in, and from what is written it sounds like the internet connection was insanely slow.
Back in the 95-2010 range so many places outside of towns had pretty much no internet. Maybe you'd get a meg or two up and down. Can't do much offsite with that.
It sounds like one of the VMs was a samba file server, to serve shared files for the workstations in the office. That was a common thing to run locally in the office, to keep latency down.
> They didn't seem to state a year this was occurring in
Maybe it was modified in the last two hours, but at least now it says "About 16 years ago".
Dude, who cares, why does it matter?
They successfully designed for the failure mode experienced.
If you want to fantasize about design perfectionism no need to make it about how wrong they must have been.
with the wrong admin access, cloud data can be wiped just as easily :-(
good read.
Creepy
> Because sometimes, dishonest people do win.
Let me fix this for you… Because always, dishonest people do win.
Good read and it would make a good short film :-)
This is needlessly negative. It’s clear that dishonest people do not always win. Disproving such a claim requires finding only one case of a successful prosecution for fraud.
Disproving “winners are always dishonest” would be a bit trickier! (Mainly because nailing a definition of “dishonest” is just too hard)
The only useful definition is “breaks the rules of the game”. Using this definition one honest victory in a perfect information game disproves the assertion.
> Because sometimes, dishonest people do win.
Dishonest people almost always win.
Not any individual one - a particular dishonest person might only win 20% of the time - but in aggregate - the winner is almost always a dishonest person.
Even when a game rewards honesty, dishonest people are willing to be honest if that's truly what gives them the greatest chance of winning, so they still win.
Is this some kind of inverse no true scotsman?
If you win by being honest that’s not dishonest.
I believe they are saying that there are multiple rounds, each with different games - some with honest optimal strategies and some with dishonest optimal strategies. A dishonest person can always choose the optimal strategy for each game, but the honest person can only choose the best honest strategy. So in aggregate the dishonest person comes out ahead.
Life has a lot of iterated games. A reputation for dishonesty can sometimes end up following you around.
That just means a given individual might get found out, opening up an opportunity for a different dishonest person.
Ok but people are both honest and dishonest so how do you decide what type a person is?
If a person chooses to be dishonest when that benefits them, they're a dishonest person.
Nobody is perfectly honest so this definition isn’t useful without further qualification.
because dishonest people can choose to be honest
honest when it benefit you is not truly honest
> because dishonest people can choose to be honest
According to you. But why can’t the opposite be true?
> honest when it benefit you is not truly honest
Show me a person who has never been dishonest.
"According to you. But why can’t the opposite be true?"
because they are honest people
"Show me a person who has never been dishonest."
My mother always honest with me