[ebbv]

There's a lot more to these sites than this article goes into. I'll say right up front; these sites are total scams who target poor people who usually have a poor understanding of economics, statistics and math.

One of the features of these sites is that they will put up credits on the site as an item for bid. So the person who spent "$3500" bidding might have won a "10,000 site credit" auction at some point for $190.00 "winning bid" where a bunch of people actually spent "$50,000" on it. Which in turn might have had some site credits involved, etc.

These sites have been around for a while now and the fact that they've never been regulated is a great sign of how dysfunctional our government is and its inability to protect poor people from being ripped off.

[brianwawok]

Conversely it shows that we need to protect ourselves and not depend on a government to keep us safe... And no matter how many laws are made, scammers will always be 1 step ahead.

[nkrisc]

It is in our best interest to keep as many people safe as is possible. Society as a whole is better when there isn't an underclass perpetually exploited and predated on by others.

[green7ea]

I could also be argued that education is the best way to keep them safe. Unfortunatly, most people (myself included) don't like to hear that what they are doing is retarded.

[blahi]

This seems to contradict Darwin.

[Nursie]

The theory of evolution is not a guide to morality or even to action, simply a description of how animals have evolved.

Social Darwinism, with the implication that the weak are exploited and left to rot, is widely seen as an awful idea.

[some1else]

Maybe the way forward isn't being a better predator, but a better society.

[brianwawok]

Sure. And part of that is education.

You should sometime in your life learn "If it's too good to be true, it probably is".

See a $180 tablet for $18? Assume it is a massive scam. Only after a TON of googling and talking to people should you even consider it, but even then, it is too good to be possible and you should just skip it. Either save the $180 to buy the real thing, or don't have one.

So many scams are not possible of the end user is not greedy. Nigerian Prince, etc. etc.

[blahi]

They are not getting slaughtered. If they are so stupid to spend my taxes on greedy scams like this, why shouldn't I collect it back?

[nkrisc]

> If they are so stupid to spend my taxes on greedy scams like this

Then our society has collectively failed in educating them. We could just let everyone fend for themselves and eat the weakest, but I don't mind my time and money directory or indirectly going towards helping others. Call it altruism.

[Natanael_L]

Poverty is costly for the rest of society too.

[logfromblammo]

Darwinian evolution only explains the propagation or elimination of random genetic mutations via sexual reproduction.

It does not explain economic/memetic evolution. Ideas can be created by one person working alone, or millions working in concert, even asynchronously, where someone might synthesize a line from the epic of Gilgamesh with a line by an 18th century poet, a drawing from a 19th century industrialist, and an article by a 20th century biologist, to create something useful to a 21st century customer.

As humans now employ that mode of development, we do not need to produce offspring to test the fitness of a new strategy. It is actually in our best interest to throw every conceivable idea at the wall to see what sticks, yet still preserve every failed idea on the off chance that it could be made to work under different circumstances.

We use specialist economics now. Every person, no matter how fit, can still advance human society as a whole by exclusively doing the one thing they are best at, and trading for everything else. The only limiting factor is the cost of keeping a human body healthy enough to perform useful labor. Because of that, the endpoint of specialist economics is single-purpose machines performing all labor, and humans inventing new labors for the machines to perform.

Stephen Hawking is fit enough by genetic evolutionary standards to have three children. But by memetic evolution, he has thousands of students that have read his work, and millions who know just a bit more about the universe--and black holes in particular--as a result of it. Without the support assistance of human civilization, he would have died long ago. It was in our best interest to hook him up to whatever machines were necessary to let him do the one thing that he could still do best: think.

Therefore, there are no unfit organisms to be culled in a civilization of generalists who may reprogram themselves into specialists. Every living human can dream up something new and unique that can be done. But our knowledge and creative capacity is finite. Every moment of effort spent solving and re-solving the problems of human necessities cannot also be spent dreaming up ideas not immediately relevant to survival or happiness and researching them into reality.

If we had more people allowed to dream and do, instead of pressing their faces to the grindstone, we would have more impossible dreams coming true. And some of those dreams will coincidentally benefit the Darwinian fitness of all Earth species, because they will become multiplanetary species.

This is why Social Darwinism is crap. We have not only horizontal meme transfer, but vertical as well, from written records. Every new idea may be combined with any, all, or none of the old ideas. This creates a combinatorial explosion of possibilities, where the unfit ideas must be culled, not the unfit thinkers. This means that it is in society's best interest to debunk lies, unravel obfuscations, and aggressively destroy deceptions as early as they may be detected, lest they become an immortal influence on all ideas that will follow.