Comment by observationist
Comment by observationist 5 hours ago
It's crazy that the marketplace seems to be an ongoing experiment in maximizing the number of times a company can defect, minimizing consumer anger, and exploiting assumptions of trust and good faith as frequently as possible without causing the consumer to defect completely. And it appears they've optimized that; we put up with shrinkflation, industrial waste repurposed as filler, processed ingredients derived from industrial wastes, high quality products debased and degraded until all that remains is a memory of a flavor and the general shape, color and texture. Big AG factory farming, pharma, healthcare products, all the rest - you think you can trust that a thing is the thing it's always been and we all assume it is, but nope.
Scratch any surface and the gilt flakes off - almost nothing can be trusted anymore - the last 30-40 years consolidated a whole lot of number-go-up, profit at any cost, ruthless exploitation. Nearly every market, business, and product in the US has been converted into some pitiful, profit optimal caricature of what quality should look like.
AI is just the latest on a long, long list of things that you shouldn't trust, by default, unless you have explicit control and do it yourself. Everywhere else, everything that matters will be useful to you iff there's no cost or leverage lost to the provider.
That profit optimal caricature is what we call moral hazard in risk management. When a system is optimized purely for short-term extraction it offloads the long-term tail risk onto the consumer or society. We see this with cheap IoT devices that have zero security updates the manufacturer saves $0.50 on a chip and the consumer eventually pays for it in identity theft or botnet attacks. It’s an externality that isn't priced in.