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There was a thread here not too long ago about employees getting fired because they were cheating on their expense accounts. C-level execs cheating on pretty trivial amounts. And others brought up star athletes getting paid millions, then getting busted placing thousands of dollars on insider bets. There's a lot of irrationality in these decisions.
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Greed knows no limits. That's how polls showed the happiest people earn around 60-80k a year, and both the people below and above that threshold, reported to be less and less happy the less they made and also the more they made.

It's as if the more money you make, the more you need to feel fulfilled, so people start stealing and scamming to cover a self inflicted psychological money deficit.

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But the poster said that that was basically his yearly salary. He fled the country and has to spend the rest of his life worrying about extradition (and/or having people find out he's a felon) for a year's pay.
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I don't know, the very same comment mentions that the person was earning 6 figures. Less-than-a-year's-salary is definitely a weird thing to throw a comfortable 6 figure income out the window for - it's not like 95k is "never work a day in your life" money.
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> I don't know, the very same comment mentions that the person was earning 6 figures.

What does that mean for where and how the person live though? How much money were they realistically having left at the end of the month? 6 figures surely means a lot in some places, in others not so much and maybe they didn't have much left after all. Even with 1K left in a month on average, that's 95 months (~8 years) of saving for the same amount, maybe it was always the plan to just get the fuck out once they got close to 100K or whatever.

Humans do rash things, especially when some shortcut appears. But all this is also speculation and hypothesizing, who knows the real reasons behind it for sure.

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> What does that mean for where and how the person live though?

It means they lived somewhere where a 6-figure income is feasible, which already puts it on the expensive end of the spectrum. If they are fleeing to somewhere where 95k looks like retirement money, that's not going to be a place where replacing that 6-figure income is feasible (especially with a default judgement against them blocking access to the whole US-influenced banking network)

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People can earn six figures and still be living paycheque to paycheque, and up to their ears in debt.
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Now he's up to his ears in debt and a felon in his original country, plus he's not likely to get another six-figure job from any country willing to do a background check. I hope that extra $95k was sufficient to set him up for life.
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I don’t think that changes the equation any? If you are underwater on 100k/year, you sure as shit are going to end up underwater on 95k for the entire rest of your life…
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If you're so financially fucked that you can't live on 100k/year then you're still be fucked even with an illicitly obtained extra 95k.

Crazy how many people try to find excuses for crime. There's people living on fractions of that that don't commit crime. No, income is no excuse.

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Indeed, a lot of HN readers don't realise their good luck in life. It takes a dose of poverty to bring perspective.
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