[Apreche]

Even though I have very high moral standards and refuse to work at shady places, almost every place I have ever worked, and places people I know have worked, have committed some kind of fraud. I don’t know if they all met the legal definition of fraud, but they are all fraud in my book.

I’ve seen fudging analytics and subscriber numbers to lie to ad buyers. I’ve seen people intentionally hold items over from one quarter to the next for accounting purposes. I’ve seen events use dubious counting methods to inflate their attendance figures. I’ve even heard stories about hospitals moving patients from failed surgeries back to their floor before they die in order to fudge the surgery survival stats.

A lot of this is Goodhart’s law in action. But also, when these very tiny frauds go unchecked in a competitive marketplace, everyone becomes forced to do them. If law enforcement won’t punish them for being evil, the market will punish them for being good.

[aprilthird2021]

Bingo. This is why in the latest writers guild / SAG strike, the studios would not budge on transparency for streaming residuals. They've lied too much to let the true numbers of streams for their content be seen.