[Someone1234]

> I suspect it's straight-up malicious

Hanlon's razor: "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice."

It doesn't even make rational sense for a business creating cables to intentionally damage equipment. They'd just get sued, tons of bad PR/reviews, and gain nothing obvious.

More likely they just had production line issues, lack of QA, and poor training for staff. Resulted in malfunctioning equipment being sold. Most people that build cables don't understand how the cable works, they just follow instructions they're given (e.g. "red cable into position #1, white/black cable into #2, yellow into #3," etc).

Ultimately this might just be one incorrectly assembled cable; but the issue here is that they don't QA cables before they leave the shop. Electrical testing on most cables is quick, inexpensive, and automatable. They likely saved a few cent per cable by skipping it, but in the cable industry that might be significant savings.

[latj]

My money is on incompetence too, but it certainly could be malicious. For example, imagine a small company run by two frat brother entrepreneur guys. They bribe some factory supervisor in Taiwan for the designs to a product. They cant understand anything about it but they decide to tweak it to make it cheaper. Their greatly underpaid sole engineer discovers his girlfriend is cheating with the main entrepreneur guy. This is pretty disgusting because engineer man is a good guy and main guy has an underage girlfriend living in a plywood loft built inside a storage unit. One day engineer man says "fuck this I'm going to be a fucking farmer now". He modifies the designs to suck before grabbing a check from the middle of the stack in the printer and heads out the door. Six months later the factory in Taiwan wants the designs for the new product. Main guy digs around on the file system and finds the modified stuff. His new engineer just started and isnt really an engineer but rather an engineering student- he says he will "do the needful". Instead of looking over the designs new engineer plays rocket league and smokes weed. Another six months later engineer guy is growing organic carrots and heritage lambs with his new gf who has kind of fucked up feet and not great teeth but she's nice to him and is good at farm chores. At night he goes to read /r/girlsgoodatfarmchores and at some point sees a link to a video of a cable frying the shit out of the thing its plugged into. "Huh, I really ought to clean this shit out from under my fingernails" he thinks.

[obelisk_]

>This is pretty disgusting because engineer man is a good guy and main guy has an underage girlfriend living in a plywood loft built inside a storage unit. One day engineer man says "fuck this I'm going to be a fucking farmer now".

If engineer man does that, then he is not a good guy.

If engineer man does that, then he is a scummy asshole.

[rrauenza]

You've mis-parsed the parent. His ...story contains an 'engineering man' and a 'main man.'

[obelisk_]

Ah, yes, I see that now. Thanks for pointing that out.

[Mikhail_Edoshin]

Can you make this into a movie script? :)

[TeMPOraL]

Given all the other problems with this cable, it seems to be yet another case of an "entrepreneur" trying to make a quick buck, except this one happened to (probably accidentally) add destruction to fraud.

I still wonder, what's in the minds of people who sell this kind of crap, and where did their conscience go? I wish we'd have a reliable way of getting rid of such vendors.

[dawnbreez]

My point is that it may be more complicated to assume stupidity, because the process of getting someone that incredibly dumb into a position where he's dictating the wiring pattern of the cable, with nobody telling him he's an idiot in the process, is far more complex than most forms of stupidity. Hanlon and Occam may be at odds here.