One point of difference I've noticed between myself and some other people around is that I'm a lot more suspicious, generally, of some business behaviour than other people I know. SIM locking, drip charging, various forms of microtransaction-based revenue models, limits and restrictions on insurance coverage, slot machines, free trials if you remember to cancel, free credit if you don't mess up your autopay.
I think some of this is that under a simple model of trade, any time you interact with a person consensually, and they agree to voluntarily give you money, presumably mutual benefit was obtained, and you are reasonable to be making a living by engaging in those interactions.
Under a still simple but slightly more complex model, you can acknowledge this isn't necessarily always true but hold politically that it's always a mistake for any third-party to second guess it.
On the model I tend to work with, though, both respectable and disreputable ways to make a living exist and are fairly recognisable. Making a living by engaging in positive sum interactions that leave the world better off is respectable; making a living by leaving other people worse off for having known you is disreputable. I think this would benefit from a more extensional definition so a long unsorted list of takes:
Making a living by cleverly finding a way to make something more cheaply so people get it more easily is respectable; making a living by shifting some of your revenue from the headline price to a later fee so people find you at the top on comparison websites for the same or higher price is disreputable.
Making a living by doing things an employer believes to be useful and worth your pay is reputable. Making a living by finding a job where no one is checking what you're doing and doing no work is disreputable.
Making a living by working on software you expect to be an improvement for users is respectable. Making a living by working on software you expect to wow decision-makers but be no better or worse for actual users is disreputable.
Making a living by charging in exchange for helping with medical needs is respectable; making a living by charging slightly less for help in an emergency so you win deals away from the first person while drafting fine print or deliberately creating supply constraints so you surprisingly don't have to pay out is disreputable.
Making a living by offering mobile phone contracts is respectable. Making a living by offering slightly cheaper mobile phone contracts to undercut the first company but charging huge fees for international use while blocking the customer from taking out an additional contract with someone else for this is disreputable.
Providing someone a service in exchange for an upfront fee is reputable. Providing someone a service for free so long as they don't screw up (in which case you charge a much larger fee), because your analytics and modelling department says they screw up more than they think they would is disreputable.
Making a living by creating and marketing a spare part is respectable; noticing that some people are buying it even though it's the wrong part for their equipment and buying Google Ads on the name of that wrong equipment, is disreputable.
Making a living by selling a game to someone for $300 is respectable; making a living by giving a game away for free initially and then drip charging them to continue such that they pay $300 overall, when they wouldn't endorse that spend in retrospect as a better use of the money than all the other games they could buy, is disreputable.
Making a living by trying to find ways to be helpful to people around you is respectable; making a living by trying to find ways to talk bureaucracies into giving you money decoupled from anyone being benefited is disreputable.
Making a living by producing research reports that you hope to inform the world is respectable. Making a living by producing deliberately biased reports for Philip Morris to muddy the water on whether tobacco causes cancer is disreputable.
Being out to make cool things, positive sum deals and split the surplus fairly is respectable. Being Out to Get You is disreputable.
You can come up with galaxy-brain models in which everyone just has weird preferences and no trades actually look disreputable. Maybe the people who aren't paying attention to whether you do any work are getting value out of you in some sense! Maybe people would endorsedly prefer being drip charged to upfront fees. Maybe people... value... having ineffective comparison websites... These models are probably occasionally true. But I think they're usually wrong. Gaps between incentives and the good aren't that rare, counterparties are cognitively bounded, and most things that look like a gap between incentives and the good are.
And I'm pretty sympathetic to people getting by in less respectable ways without a choice. If it's hustle or go hungry, then really I'd rather fix it by offering better choices. But if you're a smart, functional person who could be contributing to the project of civilisation and instead you're choosing to drive wedges into the gaps between incentives and the good because it's mildly convenient, then I judge that. Not all disreputable things are as bad as each other but still.
I'm ambivalent about the extent to which politically it's effective to try to prevent bad trades by regulation; freedom to trade overperforms in surprising ways and regulatory agencies tend to underperform in surprising ways relative to their intent when established. I think it is nevertheless probably ever a good idea but probably less often one than seems to be the political equilibrium.
But I think it's a big deal. I think possibly one of the significant problems of modern times is people getting better at gaming incentives faster than incentives are adapting, the simple market model can't recognise when this is happening at all, and I'm inclined to at least notice and be judgey about it.
Some practice (?) art of these idiots. They could be friends me thinks, only bc of money ofc. Idk how to feel about my art style, lowkey been hating my art for a while lol.
Craziest IRL Call of Duty lore just dropped, and I don't even know how to talk about it, as I don't know how to approach any discussion that includes Epstein and the horror his regime has caused.
But if you went back in time, and told younger me that the takeover of microtransactions in Call of Duty was be caused by a supervillain billionaire pdf-file, I think I would've killed myself
I'm honestly sick to my stomach when it comes to any of the Epstein, Trump, and US government shit
Also... the in-game currency being call Cod Point, abbreviated to CP, makes so much more sense now
decided to start playing animal jam again for the first time in like? 7 human years? for the sole purpose of getting inspiration for outfits for my animals characters and wow i literally do not understand anything that's going on
"juno lost all of their memories--" same
anyway whipped up something in AJ art program. i dont have enough sapphires to buy it as a den item...
First we got 4chan's /pol/ being started due to Moot meeting Epstein, now uh, apparently he was the one responsible for lootboxes existing/becoming prolific.
