> Never heard of decoy effect. Always referred to this phenomenon as “anchoring”
Correct. The example they gave is anchoring.
Anchoring typically looks like $10-$25-$50, and they want you to buy the $25 item. Sometimes the presence of the $50 item can have zero sales, but the $25 item will sell better than if the options were just $10 and $25.
Decoy would be more like $10-$40-$50, and they want you to buy the $50 item and the $40 item has less than it’s sticker value. Decoy is commonly used to encourage people to buy at the top of their budget range (as one example).
"During the Russo-Ukrainian War, Dotcom has repeatedly spread anti-Ukrainian falsehoods, and Russian government propaganda. Critics accuse him of spreading Russian Federation propaganda such as: claims of Nazism in Ukraine, Ukrainian attacks on Russian-speaking minority, claims of American "biolaboratories" in Ukraine, and accusing the US of causing the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine."
As with all Wikipedia refs, review their sources yourself.
> Critics accuse him of spreading Russian Federation propaganda such as: claims of Nazism in Ukraine, Ukrainian attacks on Russian-speaking minority, claims of American "biolaboratories" in Ukraine, and accusing the US of causing the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine."
At least the claim regarding nazism is very valid. Heck, Ukraine has a whole bataillon using that emblem[1], featuring a rune-like SS symbol and the freaking black sun! People having been accused of nazism in the US or Europe for way less than that.
The implication of US in the Maiden Revolution, which is one root of the problem, is also documented in serious newspapers[2].
The claim is that Ukraine is controlled by nazis and therefore Russian intervention is needed to free the Ukrainian people from nazi control, not that there are nazis in Ukraine (which is obviously true, the same way it's true that there are nazis in Russia, Germany, the US and many other places).
— Alexey Milchakov, field commander of the Rusich neo-Nazi paramilitary group in russia.
The war was never about Nazism. The russians use the word “Nazi” to describe anyone who opposes russia. The official russian position on WWII is that it started in 1941 (when Operation Barbarossa started, and not the invasion of Poland), and russia’s official position is that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact never existed.
Russia is full of Nazis, and the russians were allied with Nazi Germany in WWII.
I think we often forget that Russian propaganda is also often aimed at Russians and not the west.
Nazis invaded Russia and calling their neighbors Nazis is meant to invoke fear and imminent danger to the Russian people. It’s a completely different vibe than calling right wingers Nazis in the US
The Russians have a strange relationship with Nazism. They enthusiastically partnered with Hitler in 1939 to take over Europe and only went 'anti nazi' when Hitler turned on them.
They now call their opponents nazis when they behave more like the German nazi party than any other country on earth. I can't help but think it's a propaganda thing to call the enemies nazis to distract from behaving that way themselves.
I mean who rolled tanks into Ukraine to grab the territory for themselves and drive their 'lesser people' into submission? Putin's invasion is pretty much a copy of Hitlers.
The exact protocol was kept secret. But the alliance itself was no secret at all -- the whole world knew about it, and there were open "victory parades" in major cities like Brest, Lwów, and Grodno. They even built elaborate "Victory Arches" with swastikas and red stars side by side.
If that doesn't count as a signal of "enthusiasm", I don't know what does.
To be fair if legal paperwork follows a standard process with standard information, a "robot" can complete many orders of magnitude more than any human lawyer. (I'm also not a lawyer and have no idea if this line of thinking is applicable.)
I guarantee it’s going to be impossible to compete as a lawyer in most fields without doing most of the work with LLMs, probably within a few years.
I expect the benefits of increased efficiency will be seen as temporarily zeroed inflation for legal services (prices actually going down? LOL) and a bunch of rents, forever (more or less, from the perspective of a human lifetime) to whichever one or two companies monopolize the relevant feature sets (see also: the situation with digital access to legal documents). Lawyers will be more productive but I expect comp will stay about the same.
And I think that as someone fairly pessimistic about the whole AI thing.
I agree that would be a valuable proposition were it to be true (no idea, IANALE). But what I found impressive was the claim that said "robot" could do it even more similar to a human's work than a human lawyer could!
"In 2021, Browder reported that DoNotPay had 250K subscribers; in May 2023, Browder said that DoNotPay had “well over 200,000 subscribers”.
To date, DoNotPay has resolved over 2 million cases and offers over 200 use cases on its website. Though DoNotPay has not disclosed its revenue, it charges $36 every two months. Given this, it can be estimated that DoNotPay is generating $54 million in annual revenue, assuming that all 250K users subscribe for 1 year."[1]
$193K seems like a pittance compared to the money they're making off of this.
>$193K seems like a pittance compared to the money they're making off of this.
I don't have any special knowledge of this specific case, but it's important to note as a general principle that often the point of these fines is as the start of a process. It creates a formal legal record of actual damages and judgement, but the government doesn't see massive harm done yet nor think the business should be dead entirely. They want a modification of certain practices going forward, and the expectation is that the company will immediately comply and that's the end of it.
If instead the business simply paid the fine and flagrantly blew it off and did the exact same thing without so much as a fig leaf, round 2 would see the book thrown at them. Defiance of process and lawful orders is much easier to prove and has little to no wiggle room, regardless of the complexity that began an action originally. Same as an individual investigated for a crime who ends up with a section 1001 charge or other obstruction of justice and ends up in more trouble for that than the underlying cause of investigation.
So yes, not necessarily a huge fine. But if there weren't huge actual damages that seems appropriate too, so long as the behavior doesn't repeat (and everyone else in the industry is on notice now too).
This is founder-raising-funds math (or VC looking for liquidity math). 200k subscribers might not mean paid subs and it certainly doesn't mean 1-year of paid subs. This could be $9M (a single-month of 250 paid subs) or lower.
Their point still stands though. If the output should be reviewed by a lawyer, then the penalty should be all the profits (and maybe also the wages of the CEO) to deter others from doing the same, and ensure that they don't continue in the belief that an occasional 1-2% is perfectly acceptable 'cost of doing business'.
I think we need to start taking this sort of thing beyond money. I'm not sure if it's warranted in this case, but in general I'd like to see more shareholders going to jail for things their companies did.
If my dog bites somebody, that's on me. It should be no different with a company.
The main product actually works, this is for additional claims that were misleading. It isn't right to compare the settlement to the entire company revenue. Better to compare to the benefit gained by wrongdoing, or the amount of harm caused.
Pedophilia & child-predation have been an open secret to anyone socially involved in ROBLOX for the longest time. The amount of random 18+ people interacting often and without guardrails with 13/14/15 year-olds is "normalized" to those in the communities.
Thanks for pointing that out. I think that will be useful for me too, even without the finance background, that I guess you back your understand up with.
In my limited experience, people tend to gamify any numeric metric readily apparent to them.
Anecdotally, total game time (in hours, usually) is used to convey experience in video games (WoW, CS:GO, PUBG). I've seen people create & run 3rd-party software to artificially inflate these types of metrics.
And some metrics aren't just a "game", but are gamed for very real benefit (e.g., gaining admission to a college, getting a promotion, being more employable) in ways that are counterproductive to pretty much all other goals.
So, when something like HN has goals, and you create, say, something akin to a contest and link it to real-world benefits (e.g., people expect a recruiter or hiring to use that "who knows what" info), then many people will modify their behavior, probably to the detriment of original goals.
We're trying to stay away from karma for that reason and focus on what people are saying within the community to find trusted voices. How can we do better?
Why? All my game times are inflated because I either don't shut it down when i go away or I alt tab out of it, do something productive and forget about it :)
