Well you can work on the problems or just work on having a nice life anyway, or some of both. Knowing about issues can help you protect yourself.
Encouraging intellectuals to have rationality and debate policies is my best idea for improving the world. To me, that’s pretty hopeful. Even just one really good advocate other than myself (the inventor of the idea) could potentially be quite effective.
Oh. Rewatching it I can see that. Transcribing it using subtitles:
Yeah, Arthur Anderson’s employees felt a range of emotions, from resentment to anxiety to a level of unbridled exuberance best described as “Price is right contestant who just won a Honda civic” And they were right to be concerned. Anderson being convicted of a felony meant they lost their accounting license which, for an accounting firm, is generally not great for business.
“meant they lost their accounting license” I guess from how he was talking about the employees before saying that it sounded to me like we were talking about employees, but the part about an accounting firm after makes it sound like it was talking about Anderson, the company, all along. I feel like its still kinda unclear, though saying it was talking about the business makes more sense. Is this a me issue? or is it unclear?
That’s true. Also I guess just cause I know theres a lot of bad things in the world doesn’t mean I know how they are bad and what kind of way they are bad. Like off the top of my head a company like Nestle, at least to my knowledge, gives me safe drinking water. The type of bad things I’ve heard about them is stuff related to slave labor and exploitation in third world countries (I haven’t verified any of that). I think that kind of knowledge of how a company is bad is different from knowing that a certain company puts a certain dangerous chemical in my food. That kind of bad thing/information is different?
What would a really good advocate consist of? Someone as smart as you? Or someone whos smart enough? Or just someone whos meh with ideas but is popular? Or a bit of both?
Very competent and knowledgeable about debate policies, plus something extra: especially energetic, smart, rich, charismatic, pretty, able to get a lot of social media followers, good at art, friends in high places, or some other advantage.
Oh yeah that reminds me of those fake countdown timers on scammy websites.
Seeing an item priced *more*(!) when they’re claiming it’s on sale is a new one. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before. That’s not only not true but the opposite of the truth. I guess stores think that they’re taking advantage of people being in a buying frenzy due to ostensible discounts and Christmas coming up. Also I’ve heard of people who save up money so they can spend more during this time of year. So stores are taking advantage of that kind of thing too.
I wonder why I don’t see stuff like this being prosecuted. It seems like there should be bipartisan consensus that it’s bad. But I don’t even hear leftists talk about it. Instead, from what I’ve seen, they talk about other stuff like breaking up Amazon or taxing billionaires or whatever. And rightists will boycott brands for trans stuff (e.g. Bud Light) but not for stuff like this.
One thing from the video I didn’t understand was the $500 off gift card looking thing. I wasn’t sure what that was about or what was supposed to be scammy about it.
I did a quick search to see if it actually is prosecuted and this article published yesterday came up:
[A store called Officeworks] was selling the monitor for $188 until November 14 […] Recently, it returned to $188 – marketed … under a headline “Top Picks For Black Friday”.
[…] The ACCC [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission] said price changes that misrepresent discounts could be illegal, potentially leading to legal action and penalties.
[…]
‘Sale’ or ‘special’ prices could also be misleading under the Australian consumer law if the ‘sale’ price is actually the normal price.
ACCC spokesman
At the bottom of the article it says the ACCC took action against two companies including Dell Australia, with Dell Australia being ordered to pay $10 million in penalties.
So apparently it does sometimes get prosecuted.
Also, the article said this:
Pieces of luggage had the highest share of deceptive deals: 61 per cent were found to have Black Friday specials advertised at prices above what they had previously sold.
So apparently charging more for a product while claiming it’s on sale isn’t as rare as I initially thought. Maybe I’m just out of the loop or perhaps the fact I didn’t know this already suggests that something is wrong with the media.
Well, Amazon does this (fake discounts) too, and it is one of the many things people are mad at Amazon for.
On a related note, I’ll highlight a better company:
Known for selling DRM-free games, GOG also provides price history information next to sale prices:
Also that countdown timer is real. Some of their games go on sale pretty frequently but they do go off sale too.
Not often enough, with large enough penalties, to stop it from being widespread, I think.
Some quick thoughts:
I think there is some general consensus this is bad. It does get prosecuted (though there are a lot of ways not to get prosecuted, courts are overburdened, and the government’s focus is elsewhere like immigration and drugs for example).
I think a big thing is people are used to this kind of thing. These aren’t exceptional evil things thats going on. This is seen as standard, but bad, business practice.
When I watched the original Honey scam video, I wondered whether switching affiliate cookies is technically fraud. I liked MegaLag’s explanation of how they’re taking credit for a sale that they didn’t generate. (I.e., Honey wasn’t the one who referred the customer to the store or promoted the product.) Effectively taking credit for a sale seems like fraud.
I think the rest of the stuff is pretty obviously fraud. (E.g., promising the best deals but deliberately giving worse coupons.)
Even though I read ET’s stuff about big companies being bad, I was surprised that PayPal would engage in stuff this blatant. Despite feeling convinced by ET’s claim that big companies are bad, I guess I still felt that they’d be way more subtle and not this flagrant.
I was surprised that even Microsoft(!) allegedly did affiliate cookie switching via their Edge browser. Microsoft is at times the world’s most valuable company and I think is pretty well-regarded these days. (Also, Bill Gates is acclaimed as a philanthropist.) If even Microsoft does this kind of stuff, then I suppose I should be way more pessimistic about all the other big companies.
MegaLag’s new video also made me wonder whether abusing coupon codes is technically fraud. I guess using a coupon code intended for, e.g., veterans or employees is kind of fraudulent (if one’s not actually a veteran or an employee). An analogy that comes to mind is sharing one’s Netflix password with friends so that they can use Netflix for free. According to Perplexity, that might be illegal:
In the UK, the Intellectual Property Office has said that password sharing can breach copyright law and might, in theory, attract civil or criminal sanctions [Perplexity’s source]
(Besides, I’d guess it violates Netflix’s ToS.)
Maybe you should look into some of the many complaints about Amazon or read Careless People about Meta.
As to Microsoft, their early history isn’t great, including basically tricking someone into selling DOS for cheap and getting rich without providing big value or having any big accomplishment. They also copied the Mac GUI and allegedly stole code from Apple’s QuickTime in order to help build their own video player. Recently their attitude to Windows 10 has obsoleted tons of functional PC hardware (some estimates claim 400 million PCs made obsolete, over half of which will end up in landfills as a result). Bill Gates’ philanthropy has some problems too.
Thank you for the book recommendation 
In case anyone’s curious, I looked it up and found this:
Paul Allen negotiated an agreement with SCP [Seattle Computer Products] owner Rod Brock in January, implying that Microsoft had a whole stable of customers eager to run 86-DOS. The deal would essentially allow Microsoft to act as middleman — or, if you like, retailer — in these transactions. For each customer to whom they sold a license for 86-DOS, they would pay SCP $10,000, or $15,000 if the license also included the source code. They would also pay SCP an initial fee of $10,000 to begin the agreement. For SCP, a much smaller, hardware-focused company without the reach or marketing skills of Microsoft, the agreement sounded great — especially because business lately had not been particularly good. Microsoft seemed convinced that they could sell quite a few licenses, bringing in effortless money for SCP for this operating system Paterson had begun almost on a lark. One clause buried in the contract might have raised a red flag: “Nothing in this licensing agreement shall require Microsoft to identify its customer to Seattle Computer Products.” Brock later said, “That seemed strange to us, but we agreed to go along.” In reality, of course, Microsoft had no stable of eager licensees. They had just one, the biggest fish of all: IBM. Microsoft sold just one license under the agreement, acquiring IBM’s operating system for them complete with source for just $25,000. […] MS-DOS, purchased for [a total of] $50,000, was earning Microsoft more than $200 million per year by 1991.
I think that’s contrary to principles like win-win or informed consent—let alone something like TCS-style common preference finding lol. (It reminds me of the idea of creative adversaries which I think is a great concept/discovery.)
I initially thought that both Apple and Microsoft copied Xerox, but looking into it, it seems that Apple made substantial innovations:
Jobs’s software team took the graphical interface a giant step further. It emphasized “direct manipulation.” If you wanted to make a window bigger, you just pulled on its corner and made it bigger; if you wanted to move a window across the screen, you just grabbed it and moved it. The Apple designers also invented the menu bar, the pull-down menu, and the trash can—all features that radically simplified the original Xerox PARC idea.
Whereas Windows 1.0 didn’t even have proper windows. And when Microsoft added proper (Macintosh-like) windows in Windows 2.0, Apple sued them.
Yikes. Looking it up, it seems that Apple only settled because they were on the verge of bankruptcy in 1997.
I suppose this is an instance of planned obsolescence and another example of Microsoft trying to get money “without providing big value or having any big accomplishment.”
This is especially messed up because Windows 10 was originally presented as the last version of Windows. They claimed to be switching to a system of “Windows as a Service” with perpetual incremental updates, with just one Windows OS for all PCs.
I watched this video and the one he released shortly after it.
One small thing I wanted to mention because it came up as I skimmed through the video to get to the part I wanted to comment on: around ~31:43 there’s a video of someone who I assume is from honey having a polygraph test done on them. I find it weird that polygraph stuff is so common when I thought the common knowledge was that they’re unreliable. When I google it Gemini says this:
No, polygraph (lie detector) test results are generally not admissible as evidence in U.S. courts because they’re considered unreliable and not scientifically proven to detect lies accurately, measuring stress instead of deceit, but they can sometimes be allowed if both prosecution and defense agree beforehand or for specific purposes like impeaching a witness’s testimony, though state laws vary significantly.
Woops. I did look up whether they were admissible in court because thats when I came to originally learn that they were unreliable I think. I guess this is just legal knowledge? I doubt it.
Anyways around ~37:00 he talks about Honey’s original pitch. I just find it interesting, first of all, how valuable data is and, second of all, I wonder how many companies are just fronts for data harvesting. Honey blossomed into so much more, seemingly intentionally, but I find it interesting that it seems to have kinda started as a front for getting your data. I would also think that if everyone is collecting my data this stuff would be cheap? then again maybe it is, idk how much data costs. the huge amount of money in this market is probably because of volume.
~one thing I’ve thought of is just companies do kinda openly do bad things but a lot of it just either: not talked about, taken for granted, or glossed over. I remember seeing a segment on LastWeekTonight where John Oliver was talking about, I think, sweatshops or something and he pointed out that every few years we talk about the bad stuff going on and then forget about it because the deals are so good or something.
I think a lot of bad stuff people just kinda don’t care and gloss over. Idk how accurate I am in saying this but part of me thinks that people (including myself) wouldn’t have cared much for this honey scandal if it wasn’t covered the way it was. He made very good, dramatic (in a good way) YouTube videos that were good to watch. If the videos weren’t as good as they were idk how many people would have cared.
Why the “if even Microsoft”? Like do you have any particular reason to think Microsoft would be better? I guess put another way: given what you may now know/have come across on the forum, is there any reason to be surprised(?) about any of the top corporations?
huh. i’ve heard of ToS violations. I didn’t know it could be outright illegal in some contexts.
Dang. That’s not surprising.
One thing that bothers me related to the video:
Recently we had another awful time dealing with insurance. A lot of lying by insurance. Due to varying reasons outside third parties got involved to support us. Initially they didn’t believe all the lying and gaslighting by the insurance companies (which I find hard to believe, they made it sound like our case was super duper rare). After we showed them the proof (a lot of it was done in writing which was surprising), they still had this odd respect for the insurance companies. I think, to an extent, they saw it as business as usual.
So when they saw my brother getting frustrated with insurance they kinda saw it as absurd almost. Idk if thats the right word, but their view was not simply that his disrespectful behavior towards the lying insurance company was impractical, but uncalled for. They thought the lies were bad and then after calling them out and getting the lies sorted out, we’re all supposed to go back to business as usual.
Yeah, that’s something I’ve done myself. I think before reading ET’s content on policing big companies (including the links he’s shared), I just sort of took it for granted—or was even biased in favor of big companies.
It reminds me of Ayn Rand’s advice about living in an irrational society: pronounce moral judgement. That’s something I failed to do. Instead of forming a moral judgement, I guess I just kind of accepted it as normal and took it for granted and as a result sort of… felt it was acceptable almost or normal.
Before reading ET’s essay, I just didn’t really think about it.
Yeah it’s easy to be passive. It takes sustained initiative to actually do something.
I think that’s accurate.
I agree with you that MegaLag (the guy who made the Honey videos) did a good job of making it dramatic and explaining why it’s bad.
It shows that moral intuitions are not automatic but are something that content creators can play a role in forming and eliciting. As Rand said:
The intellectual [including content creators I think] is the eyes, ears and voice of a free society: it is his job to observe the events of the world, to evaluate their meaning and to inform the men in all the other fields.
ET’s essay about policing big companies is a great example of this too. Before I read that, I was probably biased in favor of big companies.
I think I’d read something (ages ago) about how Microsoft had dramatically changed after the antitrust case in 2001 and was now regarded by regulators as a model company.
I guess it also just felt so weird that Microsoft would do abjectly scammy stuff like affiliate cookie switching. It’d be like if Bill Gates was caught literally pickpocketing someone’s pockets.
I mean that’s fair to an extent, but in a different sense I hope your not being harsh on yourself for failing to provide judgement on these companies. In one sense the evidence was pretty much always there, in another sense very smart people such as Elliot believed these companies were pretty good for the most part for the longest time.
Huh. Are you aware of Yaron Brook? I used to watch him. Idk if hes good or not. I think I remember someone posting some bad things he said about Elliot in the forum? Regardless, I heard through him about how after the antitrust case Microsoft went from great innovative capitalist company to a government suck-up company (which sounds bad to me). If Yaron was right in that, I wonder if they became model not because they did things right, but because they sucked up to the government right.
Thank you for the kind thought, but nah I’m definitely not beating myself up haha
Good point.
Yep. I used to watch him occasionally too. I think he’s good at explaining some finance stuff. For example, I remember him explaining why stock buybacks promote innovation (which I didn’t know) and I thought that he did a good job of explaining it.
Idk if Yaron personally said bad things about ET (or even knows who ET is), but Harry Binswanger lied about ET on Yaron’s show.
Yeah, I think that’s exactly what happened. Though I forget the details of what the article (or whatever it was) I read claimed.
