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The average consumer has gotten dumber in regards to tech over the last 40 years. People have treated computers like appliances. When I meet a 70 year old that can't email, it's not 1995, they were 50 in the year 2000. People's heads are in the sand and want tv apps. Good they can pay the price for thier stupidity.

Sorry for the rant but, seriously?

4 comments

If I spent enough time before every transaction or interaction I make to ensure I'm fully informed about the product/service, the company providing it, support and other options to remedy a disagreement or misunderstanding, and asking (and figuring out how to trust) the experience of other people who have dealt with this company in the past I would have literally no time to do anything else.

Stop blaming the consumer for not working their way out of an impossible situation.

I don't agree at all.

Profiting from people who can afford stupid only encourages stupid. Then we end up with stupid being promoted as what people want because it's profitable.

>Profiting from people who can afford stupid only encourages stupid. Then we end up with stupid being promoted as what people want because it's profitable.

Welcome to startup country.

Only people who can afford to be stupid are stupid. You're right. People who can't afford, or otherwise choose to be frugal don't tend to fall into these traps. You'll find people who study consumer reports, read up on several companies before purchasing big products, weigh the costs and benefits of different insurance companies, phone plans, etc, frequently. It's good financial sense.

Some people do not want to put the time and effort into learning about household things. And sometimes that's OK. Even consumers who are aware of routers being rented probably don't view they are "losing $150 yearly" to Comcast or Verizon - it's a convenience for them and allows their ISP to manage upgrades, replacements, and allows lower techs for those ISPs who do house calls to debug a router (since it's what they are trained on).

Sure, run your own home cloud, but i bet the article doesn't say "consumers losing X a year because they subscribe to Dropbox" or "X a year because they pay for website hosting", when they could use a free host like github for basic html files.

> Only people who can afford to be stupid are stupid. You're right.

No, I didn't say "only people who can afford to be stupid are stupid".

> Profiting from people who can afford stupid only encourages stupid.

How? It would seem like a disincentive to being "stupid" (naive is a better word for it).

How people live isn't entirely their own decision -- it's also determined by the world they're a part of. We've given profit-seeking systems a lot of control over how this world is structured.

How, exactly, would that be a disincentive to being stupid?

Customer gets what they pay for and provider gets free money. Where's the disincentive here?

I don't think we should demean those who don't know any better. Instead, we should rage against policies that take advantage of people, even if those people don't know any better.

It would be nice if humans behaved that way, but in the game theoretic sense, it's not a equilibrium based on commonly observed human behaviors. And I personally think policies that expect to exist at a non-equilibrium point are doomed to fail. By far the more advantageous route is to educate people into not being duped.

You're preaching to a generation that only knows phones, right? If it's not wireless, it doesn't exist. Email? What's that?