Capitalism Means Policing Big Companies

Elliot Temple
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Started watching/listening to this saga. Here’s the original first video of this saga without a reactor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wscQpkcwgNU&t=4924s.

Bricks and minifigs, a lego reselling(?) company, is trying to steal 200k worth of legos from one of their “customers” (are people who use a service like this customers? I think so). There’s a lot of police and legal corruption. I don’t know too many details so far, I just know it’s become a big thing.

One comment Ludwig made that I thought was good was that he pointed out that its better to go to the court of public opinion for a lot of things than the actual courts. the only reason things have somewhat been going good for the original family is because this has blown up. in fact, someone at bricks and minifigs said that the lawyer fees it would cost to fight and get back his legos wouldn’t make it worth it (which is why he reached out to a YouTuber to help).

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Note that this is a type of fraud.

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In true capitalism would this be easy or hard to prove in court as fraud? It seems to me it shouldn’t be too difficult.

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They can post from VPNs but if they’re linking their own websites to promote themselves then you can find them…

I guess the harder part is arguing the posts are low enough quality (or actually false) to count as spam or fraud. It might be easier to just sue them for terms of service (contract) violation since you can put some more specific rules there which would be easier to prove. I don’t think this should be very hard in a good legal system for blatant cases like are happening currently.

The lawsuits could come from sites like Reddit, from AI companies, or a class action lawsuit from consumers. Today it’d be reasonable for the government to sue them too, but in real capitalism maybe not.

For many years, Google hasn’t seemed to vigorously try to stop SEO BS or save the quality of its search results or the internet, and I haven’t heard of any big lawsuits by Google about it. I don’t know if Reddit cares either; it might just be mods for individual subreddits that care.

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With all the evidence you’ve been posting I’ve been wondering why fraud isn’t punished more currently. Why aren’t current fraud laws enforced? Shouldn’t leftists want to punish big companies at least? Wouldn’t there be politicians and lawyers who could make careers out of punishing fraud? Is compensation too low? Are politicians more interested in lobbying for their own interests and trade favors where some of it is turning a blind eye to fraud? If there already are laws why should we expect saying “real capitalism wouldn’t allow it” to actually fix it? Could there be incentives and structural reasons that are inherent to real capitalism that cause fraud to go unpunished?

Do you expect better competition in (real) capitalism would make the top companies care more about stuff like this?

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CEOs rationalize away their responsibility for what they built and the decisions they made:

The same tool that is used for positive X is used for negative Y is the mental framework he used and what he said in the speech. So to him it’s as if he only presided over the construction of the tool part. He only was responsible for Google the search engine. He wasn’t responsible for Google the advertising company, Google the data collection company, Google the behavioral modification, AB testing, whatever you want to call all of that dark pattern layer. Somehow he just built a search engine and wow, look at all the crazy terrible things that started to happen downwind of that.

I liked this comment on AI getting booed at commencement speeches:

Why doesn’t he see that the thing that people are afraid of with artificial intelligence is not just technology in the abstract. It’s that they saw what Eric Schmidt and his cohort of Silicon Valley decision makers did the last time they were given a new technology to guide.

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Why would low quality make it fraud? Wouldn’t that just make it poor quality advertising? I thought the fraud would be false information and posing as real people, not being transparent that it’s advertising.