Comment by patentatt

I think one place where Abrahamic religions steered us wrong ethically is a philosophy that being a good person is a lot of work and being an evil person is easy.

When I look around, it seems more the case that being a better person or a worse person both take a lot of work. "Chaotic neutral" is probably cake by comparison.

If you want to be a billionaire you have to practice, practice practice taking more than your share, and some days that'll count for a percentage of your goal. Or put more simply, it's not about the $50k, it's about the muscle memory.

You'll risk jail. And never having an honest job again. And having to hang out with the sort of people who enjoy the company of con artists. And lying through your teeth all day. And actively spending your creative energies making the world worse. And deliberately stealing money from people who might have used it for something useful. And gaining the lifetime hatred of these people. Who will want to punish you personally, financially or even commit acts of violence against you.

If you've really thought through it and still figure it's a good idea, I'd honestly like to stay as far away from you as possible. Because I'm pretty sure that would represent a judgement that's at best very unsound, and in the more likely case indicates a personality that's dangerous to their surroundings.

There are many would be con artists that have not gone further than counting cards at the local tribal casino. I would argue these men are equally unethical but success at this scale requires persistence, hard work and talent. In this case, the talent is lying convincingly.

There's a reason why sociopaths are over-represented at the highest levels of business. It's a culture that self-selects for these traits.

> ...it’s the small-time fraud you have to slog through to make it to the big-leagues of scams.

Not just that. It is still a very, very big world to ply their scams upon. While it has gotten a little better with the Net, there is still plenty of room to work with.

There are still tradespeople that still rack up a pile of pissed-off clients and lawsuits, then walk away to another province/state.

How many utterly toxic managers have you worked with that completely trashed a department to glorify themselves, collect the big bonus check in Year 3, then walked off to the next company before the entire rickety house of cards comes crashing down? Until business culture attitudes change on short-tenures, swapping long-term stability for short-term gain remains the easiest scam to run for easy gains.

How many minus-X engineers have you worked with who were extremely good at socializing with management, held up process and procedure as a shield to ward away anyone from asking them to do anything, then pushed to the front of the crowd when a delivery milestone is achieved?

How many products and services outside of your area of expertise have really good marketing, even good "reviews", but upon actual real world use are complete wrecks, or have critical defects that sit unaddressed for years or even decades? Our socio-political-economic system is extremely good at broadcasting the availability of goods and services at light speed, but we're still stuck in the Bronze Age of speaking individually with each other in the market bazaar literally word of mouth to find out the worth of those economic transactions.

There is an entire industry thriving within Amazon's ecosystem doing exactly this, drop shipping from China factories spewing schlock that only marginally works long enough to prevent monetary clawbacks. Personally, there is an entire product category I've tried 7 different vendors all with great Amazon ratings where every single unit has failed within six months of use: Lightning audio splitters (you can split a Lightning port into either two Lightning ports, or a standard mini audio jack and a Lightning port, typically to plug in a headset and keep an iDevice powered at the same time...like needed for regular marathon web conferences where Bluetooth headsets don't last long enough). I made a Franken-dongle comprised of an Apple-branded Lightning-to-HDMI converter, HDMI audio extractor to RCA audio plugs, and RCA audio plugs to female mini jack audio plug to work around this.

It takes a large amount of effort to find reasonable comparisons between products and even then, many manufacturers change up quality when they "reach the top" and want to cash out on "winning" the quality-value race. Todd at Project Farm exemplifies the absurd amount of work it takes to compare pedestrian tools and supplies. The many, many posts in neighborhood chat groups/forums asking for recommendations for a good electrician, HVAC, plumber, dentist, etc. exemplify the general failure to set up non-gamed, non-compromised review systems integrated into the economic system.

And illustrate the general failure of capitalist transactions as we know them today to convey granular merchant-to-customer information like say, a market butcher with a cook: the transactions lossy-compress away all the time-bound and quality-bound attributes of the transaction itself into a single number, and then lossy-compress away again that single number into a multitude of streams of numbers (revenue/income/profit/loss) inaccessible to customers except for the largest publicly-traded entities at the grossest levels, and then lossy-compress away on top of that with credit availability to mask and obfuscate real-time effects. Customers are left with a huge latency between actual supplied quality in real-time to rough reputational "feel" from aggregated opinions over a long period of time.

Fraud is not a bug of such a system, it is a vital operating feature for far too many economic actors.