Microblog Memes

Here's the one that convinced my dad that connecting everything is bad:

Your smart fridge knows what's inside and knows you just added a 12 pack of soda and donuts to the shopping list. They sell that data to a bunch of companies, including your insurance company. They know you have diabetes.

Your insurance rates just went up for the fifth time this year because your insurance company knows what you're eating.

And it's a good thing you don't drink beer or your car insurance would have gone up 'due to increased risk factors.' too bad you wanted to buy a new car this year.

Not only can you not afford it now, the price went up because they know you want a car. I'm sure they would make a payment deal with you though.

And every company will know all about the deal, the beer, the donuts, and all it took was sending money to whatever company had the information, and they were more than happy to sell it.

The more we allow companies to freely operate like this without regulation and without proper punishment for breaking the rules, we will continue sliding toward the hellscape of Ferenginar. For the non trekkies, it's a hyper-capitalist species of profit-driven assholes.

Protip: Before buying a laptop, google "homeless shelters in Detroit".

In a past life I wrote the software that did this.

It’s not just about charging more when you’re desperate. It’s also things like charging you less to keep you addicted, or getting you hooked. Exploiting your emotions and behaviour to make it effective. A small loss on you now could be a long time gain for them.

Some more scenarios:

• you’ve decided to quit alcohol. Your social media accounts are used to identify you’re looking for advice. They advertise more, and send you heavy, heavy discounts a few days in to keep you on the wagon.
• Your cars insurance tracker has picked up your erratic driving. Your phone has tracked more forceful interactions, your works email provider has revealed you’ve been in a minimum of three meetings all day; You’re having a shit, stressful, day. They can’t give you discounts on your cigarettes but they do know they can get you to buy two packs instead of one by serving you ads that suggest stock levels are low. You buy two and chain smoke all day, your daily average goes from 0.5 to 0.7 packs a day.
• You go to a chain restaurant often. They know they can get you to buy more in the long run if they increase the volume you eat gradually. Every visit they goad you into buying more. Didn’t do it last time? Steeper discounts next time. Until one day you buy the extra side. That’s now your new baseline. A few weeks of that and back onto the stair climb. A little by little. You’re spending more and more.
• you’re on holiday. everyone knows you’re not coming back anytime soon so they charge full price. But move to a new city? Everyone has discounts for you to get you in the door.

The data available back then was pretty minimal, effectively only the data we generated. But it was still enough to prey on your lizard brain. With data brokerage I’ve got no idea what level of evils we could have done.

Okay so fast-forward ~~ten~~ two more years beyond that (it doesn't matter how much - all of this is already in the past anyway:-P): virtually everyone (from your area) has an internet presence. But for you, all "they" see is a tiny stream of encrypted traffic to servers outside of your home country. Or maybe a large stream, whatever - are you downloading child pornography perhaps? Or are you a terrorist, trying to evade detection by the "legitimate" establishment, who is simply trying to "help" you to set the price for fixing your laptop?

Bam, they charge you the maximum amount for the repair anyway, then tack on a fee for the extra effort involved in having to investigate you further, making the final price double what it would have been. And this happens for every single item you buy, plus you cannot get a job b/c you don't have a FacedInLinkThread account. The best sheeples get the best pricing structures...

This isn't something that individuals can fight easily, without a rather extreme amount of effort involved. Hence we should fight it together.

I think something got lost in translation, this isn't literally about google raising your prices but about dynamic pricing + corporations having all your data. Google is just for the example.

Google "I have way too many laptops and they all work great."

Google aggressively reduces prices on laptops to tempt you to buy more of them anyway.

You buy 3 more to go with your ever increasing pile

If smart TVs knew what we liked, I don't think 90% of what's in the "most popular" sections of every streaming service in existence would be filled with random shit nobody has ever heard of. Unless they know what we like, and then just refuse to give us what we actually like... 🤔

this is why everyone should stop using google

Let me put on my MBA hat and propose to only show the user websites selling new notebooks and suppress repair shop or repair guide pages.

Pretty sure that's very illegal here on Europe.

I'm going to engineer an llm which continuously complains on social media that I don't have enough money to buy a new laptop until it drops below x price

The economics term for this is price discrimination. Nothing to do with racial discrimination, it's discriminating based on willingness to pay.

But usually it's not done by raising the prices above normal it's done by setting the regular prices higher and then offering a discount to people who aren't willing to pay less. People tend not to get upset when it's done that way. Student discount at the movie theater is a form of price discrimination. People accept it because they're being nice to people that don't have a lot of money. Seniors discount? Also being nice, I guess. But the reality is they know everyone else is willing to pay more so they charge more.

And this has already been happening online. About a decade ago I noticed what when I searched for flights from an airline then went to facebook, I'd get an ad from that airline offering a discount. Not as sophisticated as attempting to determining the exact price I was willing to pay, but it's along the same lines.

But the problems with these schemes is that people quickly figure out the system. I just made it a habit to search for a flight, then go onto facebook to look for the discount even when I'd be willing to pay even if there was no discount. But why not trick the system into thinking I didn't really care about booking the flight and get that discount?

guess what insurance companies make money off of ?

Memes are supposed to make me laugh.

This just makes me sad, and existential.

They also serve you the ads with the most JavaScript bs and crypto mining so you think your laptop is obsolete and you need a new one.

This definitely happens with ridesharing services. Whenever you look up a location it usually quotes you, but if you come back to the app like in 5 minutes, it raises the price in a funny way.

This is only a problem if the service provider is a monopoly (or if every service provider illegally coordinates price fixing).

I might be willing to pay up to $800 to fix a $1000 computer (a more expensive repair might cause me to look to buy a replacement rather than repairing). But if it's a 1 hour job requiring $100 of parts, then all the computer repair shops would be competing with each other for my business, essentially setting their hourly rate for their labor. At that point it's like bidding at auction up to a certain point, but expecting to still pay the lowest available price.

So the problem isn't necessarily perfect pricing information from the other side, but lack of competition for pricing from the other side. We should be fighting to break up monopolies and punishing illegal price fixing.

Meanwhile I just noticed that my mobile provider (Congstar Germany) will be completely phasing out their online customer center in favor of their app. They already removed functionality from the site, like seeing how much data you have used this month. Why? The answer is in their huge list of third-party cookies I assume.

I agree with the broad premise that your information has value, but I wouldn't worry about Google increasing prices just for you. Companies still control their own websites and they aren't going to allow another company to change what they change directly.

What Google sells is the ability for a company to get their website in front of your eyes. They sell the top spaces in your search results. A company who doesn't pay Google gets pushed to page two.vor three. Now in a sense that increases your prices because the cost of the companies increased ad budgets is passed on to you.