Comment by Terr_
3 hours ago
Perhaps they grew up in a time/environment where "if it was that bad they wouldn't be allowed to advertise it", and they're still using that old calibration?
3 hours ago
Perhaps they grew up in a time/environment where "if it was that bad they wouldn't be allowed to advertise it", and they're still using that old calibration?
My falther-in-law was less that and more, if I can get away with it, it's actually legal. Many know their fake, and do it because they can get away with it.
That was his justification for a satellite descrambler, they're sending me the signals, obviously I'm allowed to.
There's an old Carlin joke about "If a cop didn't see it, I didn't do it."
I can imagine many on HN having excited discussions about their satellite descramblers.
> do it because they can get away with it.
Lots of people on HN download and upload copyrighted materials. Is it really different?
They are downloading that content from a company with a $2.5T market cap. They presumably aren’t making a living by selling that copyrighted material via a retail that claims to run a legitimate business.
I think that makes a big difference.
Imagine if Amazon Video, Audible, and Kindle will all just pirate stores, where uploaders of the pirated content made money on the downloads, people paid for those downloads, and Amazon took a cut of everything. How long would that go on before they were in court and that was shutdown?
I think that's a default for a lot of the older (and some of the younger!) generation, same goes for news and media. They grew up in a time where there was a practical barrier to publishing and (largely) laws behind you doing it.
So they trust literally everything they read. I still don't think my folks can fathom you can spin up a very real looking newspaper website with fake articles in about 10 minutes.
I find younger people are more likely to trust whatever they read - social media rumors, LLM output, Reddit threads - and older people looking for credible sources.
When my kid was young I set up a basic web server and taught him how to make a VERY basic web page. I let him write whatever nonsense he wanted to and then we made it live.
It was both a gateway into learning how the web works but also that literally anyone can post anything to the internet and it doesn't make it true. I like to think he's more savvy than many of his peers but we all have our blind spots.
> time/environment where "if it was that bad they wouldn't be allowed to advertise it"
like cigarettes?
Of course, what they're missing is that laws are for poor people.
Amazon will be notified they sold something illegal and will take it down and ban the seller who will immediately launch a new store under a new name.
The purchaser, on the other hand, will be fully liable for whatever horrible thing they bought.