A billionaire enters a gas station. Seeing the "Leave a penny, take a penny" dish on the counter, he scoops up all of the coins and pockets them.

"I'm a genius," he says to the protesting clerk. "I earned this money. Anybody could have taken it, but only I had the vision to see what was possible."

@maxleibman when I was a student, and you can tell from the prices of coffee how long ago that was, I used to buy a cup of coffee at the station every morning on the way in to university. A black coffee cost £1, a coffee with milk cost £1.20. You'd pay at the counter and everyone no matter what they ordered got handed a black coffee, then you added your own milk from a jug by the door on your way out on an honesty system.

One morning a guy in a fancy suit pushed into line in front of me, which annoyed me enough to make me pay attention to him. He ordered and paid for a black coffee then added milk to it. And this guy singlehandedly taught me a lot about the sort of people running the world.

@maxleibman The honesty system worked better for everyone. The people serving didn't have to worry about handing out different types of coffee so everything went faster and everyone got the amount of milk they wanted. I would never have dreamed of cheating like this, not just because it wouldn't be fair to the independent cafe owners but because if everyone did that they would have had to move away from the honestly system. But I bet this guy thought he was cleverer than everyone else for having figured out a way to save himself 20p, and in his mind the rest of us were clearly only following the rules because we were stupid enough to think they were enforced not because we realised they made things work better for everyone.

I think about that man a lot. He's probably running a company by now.

@afewbugs @maxleibman

people like him are why there is CCTV everywhere nowadays and I bet his company has Hikvision AI cameras everywhere, even inside the offices - he's probably got them *inside* his own family house too.

This something which seems surprisingly common amongst middle class folk worldwide as you can even see it on "funny dog/cat videos" from the camera position and timestamps on the footage - these aren't the pet cameras you can get, but actual CCTV in the corner of the living areas..

@vfrmedia @afewbugs @maxleibman People like him are the ones pushing for CCTV because they can’t imagine others to be any better than them.
@slotos @vfrmedia @maxleibman this is it exactly. People assume everyone works the same way they do. Nice people build tools with no safeguards to stop people abusing them because they wouldn't abuse them themselves. Managers believe no one would work without threats of losing their job because they themselves wouldn't work if it weren't for the threat of losing their jobs