[hansvm]

The problem isn't just short-term thinking. You alluded to another point yourself:

> Looks great on the outside

Consumers aren't often equipped to evaluate quality, partly due to skill issues, partly because the corners are cut in places which are hard to spot before purchase. Price doesn't work as a discriminating factor (except to filter out a portion of the worst inventory) because of the number of brands explicitly trying to pass off junk as high-quality luxuries.

If you really can't tell which one is better, and you're as likely to get scammed buying something expensive, why not put less money on the line for something that has a chance of being good enough?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> Consumers aren't often equipped to evaluate quality, partly due to skill issues

Maybe, maybe not. But regardless, in parallel to this, we have corporations whose modus operandi is at worst to lie to consumers about quality, and at best to mislead. And not just about specific products, but about quality as a general concept.

[hansvm]

I'm pretty sure we're in total agreement.

E.g., with the right training you can tell the difference between the sort of particle board flooring that will balloon up and be destroyed when a drop of water lands on it, the sort of particle board flooring that resists minor water infiltration, and various grades of "real" floors, but most people don't have that training.

Separately (and I _think_ my messaging was clear about this -- talking about the corners being cut being ones that are hard to discover and describing the companies doing that shit as scammers), yes I totally agree; corporations are absolutely not passive participants in consumers being unable to make educated decisions. Even major brands will actively defraud consumers (e.g., Garmin revoking a bunch of lifetime licenses on Navionics software and trying to whitewash public opinion by claiming it was for the customers' own good, or Atlassian blatantly ignoring the CCPA because it's a fairly toothless law), and there exists a plethora of maybe-legal-but-obviously-wrong behavior from most successful companies, including but not limited to "lies, or at best misleadings."

[wanderingstan]

This is a key factor: businesses have learned to “optimize” by cutting corners wherever people can’t perceive the deficit. The product just has to last long enough.

[hansvm]

In the off-chance this is a good place to ask, how does a consumer (or, ideally, the existing governing body) fight back? I'll briefly walk through a hypothetical scenario to have something concrete to talk about, then ask about the normal alternatives?

Say you have an IoT device. It's marketed as a device capable of doing a task (e.g., scanning car OBD codes). That task can be done offline. The device initially does that task offline. The app had a backdoor, and the owning company used that backdoor to force logins on previously happy users. Later, they restrict functionality-which-could-be-completely-offline-and-used-to-work to people who pay for a monthly subscription, or maybe they go out of business or otherwise just decide to shut down the servers (see the recent Spotify debacle).

With that backdrop:

- The ToS usually ban class actions and require arbitration.

- The fraud in question is on the order of $20-$200 -- not worth being pursued for most people.

- The ToS are somehow magically invoked when you buy the product, regardless of whether you even saw a warning message suggesting that there might exist a legal agreement which you should read.

The usual outcomes are (1) you get a default judgement and are unable to exercise it because the company goes bankrupt or does some sort of shenanigan which requires a lawyer costing more than the damage in question (a common solution is spinning off a subsidiary owning all the bad debt and responsibilities, keeping the assets elsewhere, kind of like what Johnson and Johnson tried after the talc/cancer debacle), (2) despite the company's best efforts you get a class-action judgement, and the company settles for much less harm than they inflicted, happily pocketing the difference, (3) other more complicated and/or less desirable situations.

What does an individual do to limit their liability in a world where that sort of fraud seems to be condoned, and what options do we have as a society to reduce the overall problem?

[20after4]

It seems hopeless to me. Clearly the company restructuring to separate assets from liabilities should be criminalized and corporate directors / executives should be subjected to criminal prosecutions but that very rarely happens.

The entire concept of corporations as a shield from liability is actually really dubious in my opinion.

[fragmede]

Hero pill dispenser is currently pulling this play. They're pairing a monthly service fee with a device that doesn't need one.