Yes, this reason is airlines trying to make more money through customer segmentation.
I’m perfectly fine with sabotaging their efforts in this regard.
Are you also fine with making it more expensive for other people to fly, for your convenience?
How about file sharing to sabotage the efforts of authors, musicians, etc. to “make more money”?
I’m not saying your position is wrong—just asking whether it’s consistent.
In any case, promoting the use of self-defeating strategies is either foolish or evil. Either you’re foolish because you don’t realize you’re going to lose use of the loophole yourself, or you’re evil because you’re deliberately creating a tragedy of the commons, destroying multiple sources of value for multiple parties. (When the fares or authors go away, everybody loses, not just the airlines or authors.)
If you find an anti-inductive loophole, for heaven’s sake don’t talk about it.
The first rule of anti-inductive loophole club is that you do not talk about anti-inductive loophole club.
Are you also fine with making it more expensive for other people to fly, for your convenience?
Yes. I do the same thing every time I price check an item and buy it from the cheapest vendor, every time I use a coupon or a promotion, every time I wait for a sale. Welcome to capitalism.
I do the same thing every time I price check an item and buy it from the cheapest vendor, every time I use a coupon or a promotion, every time I wait for a sale. Welcome to capitalism.
Wait, what?
First off, buying things from the cheapest vendor only harms other people if you’re destroying the market for higher-quality goods. And it isn’t harming the vendor at all!
Second, buying from the cheapest vendor doesn’t involve deception.
Skiplagging or whatever you call it is buying an airline ticket under false pretenses. It’s like telling a girl in a bar you’re interested in a long-term relationship (full trip ticket) when in fact your goal is to get laid (go to the hub) and you don’t plan to call her again after you skip out (abandon trip at the layover).
IOW, you may engage in a deception because you don’t care about the other party’s welfare, but it doesn’t make you any less of an asshole or a contract breaker. And promoting to other people that they should deceive others for their personal short-term benefit makes you even more of an asshole.
When somebody offers to do something for a specific group of people, and you pretend to be in that group, you’re obtaining their consent by fraud. Not liking the somebody in question doesn’t give you a license to be an asshole, and neither does a feeling of entitlement that the girl or airline “ought” to give you the terms you want.
We can all dislike airline price segmentation all we want. But lying to the airline to get a better deal is fraudulent, and the moral justification for fraud ought to be considerably more substantive than, “welcome to capitalism!”
Firstly, I’m not at all sure that lying to a person should carry the same moral weight as lying to the (useful!) legal fiction of a corporation-as-person.
And secondly, I don’t find it obvious that fraud that harms someone is the same as fraud that doesn’t harm the corporation. Comparing the case where you get off at the layover point to the case where you don’t, it’s hard to see what harm you’ve caused to the airline. Obviously they would like to compare to the case where you bought the higher priced ticket. However, there are clearly four relevant scenarios (buying ticket from A->B and flying A->B, buying A->B and getting off at C, buying A->C and flying A->C, and them selling you the A->C ticket at the price you could buy the A->B ticket for). Obviously whoever gets to pick what single counterfactual scenario to compare to can decide how the comparison comes out.
No one is saying “I will fly these routes”; they’re saying “I will buy these tickets”.
...tickets which the airlines have offered to sell to people traveling from point A to point B, and under terms which expressly prohibit jumping off at point C. Terms that you generally have to check a box saying you’re agreeing to.
In any case, the part that makes it deception is that the seller wouldn’t consent to the sale if you told them what you were up to. If your general approach to interacting with people is that you’ll happily deceive them in order to get better terms in your deals, then by all means proceed.
If you want to say, “well, I don’t think an airline is an entity deserving of weight in my moral calculation”, fine. But let’s not pretend that the act itself is not a matter of obtaining consent through false pretenses, one that we would roundly condemn in another context, where our moral intuition is more inclined to see the object of the deception as a powerless victim instead of a powerful entity that can afford to be deceived.
At the very best, you could maybe say that what you’re doing is Not Technically Lying.
In any event, my other point still stands: telling other people how to exploit anti-inductive loopholes is a dumb idea, even if your moral calculus doesn’t cover the entities upon whom the loophole is being practiced.
PUAs, for example, became victims of their own success when they promoted canned pickup routines to the point that every bar-going female in an area began hearing the same routines regularly from different men, and every stock market strategy destroys itself if it becomes popular enough. Presumably both PUAs and traders—even if they don’t place any moral weight on the welfares of their respective “prey”—do not benefit from having their techniques become irrelevant, and having to develop new ones.
(OTOH, I suppose people who train PUAs or traders actually do benefit from the churning of methods that results… so I guess the rule should be, “you do not talk about anti-inductive loophole club, unless you stand to profit more from its promotion and eventual replacement than you do from the loophole itself”. But that’s getting a bit longwinded and off-point.)
Anyway, I think that some people have drawn the inference that I have a moral objection to people cheating the airlines. I think it’s more accurate to say that I think people who cheat the airlines and then talk about it in public are behaving irrationally.
IOW, I’m not so much saying OP is evil, as I’m saying OP is not evil enough. HPMOR!Quirrel’s rule number two is “Don’t brag”, after all. ;-)
If I knew about an awesome loophole of this nature, I would absolutely not post it on lesswrong. I would not even post it on a super-secret private forum for people who figure out awesome loopholes for exploiting airlines. You cannot unshare a secret.
Not every revealed loophole is as anti-inductive as stock market strategies. Ad blockers, for example, probably won’t destroy the internet unless a major browser vendor includes one and turns it on by default. But if you gain substantial value from a loophole, and you already consider your welfare more important than that of others, it’s an unnecessary risk to publicize the loophole—especially if it involves revealing to the public that you are exploiting that loophole.
It occurs to me, though, that by arguing about this, I may be making a similar meta-level error as Eliezer did when he deleted the basilisk. By arguing the point, I may have actually brought more attention to the topic, rather than less, while failing to actually educate anyone about the stupidity of the underlying ideas (either the loophole itself, or talking about loopholes).
Perhaps the more important rule is, “Do not try to silence people talking about fight club, because that just makes people more interested in fight club.”
So on that note, I’m going to abandon this thread altogether.
“tickets which the airlines have offered to sell to people traveling from point A to point B, and under terms which expressly prohibit jumping off at point C. Terms that you generally have to check a box saying you’re agreeing to.”
Pjeby, the Austrian Airlines conditions of carriage are 21 pages long, and as far as I know that is not untypical. Yes, you have to check a box saying you have read the terms and agree with them, but I think that pretty much everyone knows that everyone checks this box without reading them, and certainly without actually agreeing to them, since they do not know the terms.
And unless you read the terms yourself when you buy a ticket, which I strongly suspect that you do not, how would you know whether or not getting off at point C was prohibited by the terms?
In fact, the Austrian Airlines terms of service contain this:
“3.3.3. If you do not use the flight coupons in the sequence shown with the intention to circumvent the fare system, we will charge you the applicable price for the actual sequence of transportation you intended to take. This will be done by determining the fare you would have had to pay on the day of reserving your actual sequence of transportation. This may be higher than the originally paid cost of the flight. The cheapest available price in your booking class will be used to recalculate the changed sequence of transportation. If the booking class originally booked by you is not available for the changed routing on the day of making the reservation, the cheapest available booking class will be used to recalculate the changed sequence of transportation. Any taxes and charges for the unused flight coupon will be deducted. Please note that we are entitled to make carriage dependent on having paid the difference in price.”
Note that you are not agreeing to ACTUALLY TAKE the sequence of flights you purchase. You are agreeing to be charged for the actual sequence, so that e.g. you will have no valid complaint to a credit card company when they charge you the fare difference for getting off in London instead of going on to New York.
So if it is simply a question to keeping to your agreements, if you get off in London after purchasing a ticket from Vienna to New York via London, you are not breaking your agreement. Instead, the airline will simply be failing to carry out its threat if it fails to charge you any addition price difference for the Vienna—London ticket as opposed to the Vienna—New York. And if they do, that is more the airline failing to keep its side of the agreement, then you failing to keep yours.
This is not a secret anymore, and the attention I bring to the issue by posting it on LessWrong is pretty marginal. The fact that there’s already been a lawsuit over this is an indication that the airlines think it’s cheaper to try and suppress it that way than to change their pricing structure.
″...tickets which the airlines have offered to sell to people traveling from point A to point B, and under terms which expressly prohibit jumping off at point C. ”
That wasn’t true in Australia for Unknown, and I doubt it is true anywhere.
Think of how impractical it would be. People have plans, but plans change. People miss flights. They get sick. They’re hit by a bus. They just change their minds. So they’d all be opening themselves to litigation? That’s not why people get on a plane.
″ Terms that you generally have to check a box saying you’re agreeing to.”
Non negotiated contracts are just not treated the same as negotiated contracts.
“In any event, my other point still stands: telling other people how to exploit anti-inductive loopholes is a dumb idea”
In most cases, no. I’m often struck by the cheek of people telling other people how stupid they are in the pursuit of their own values.
You’re just making false assumptions about the values that people have. People often share information on tactical advantages that become marginally less advantageous the more other people know about them. They’re not all stupid—they’re generally just obtaining some value other than the value that comes from exercising the advantage when they communicate the advantage.
“you do not talk about anti-inductive loophole club, unless you stand to profit more from its promotion and eventual replacement than you do from the loophole itself”
No. Still wrong. You best decision is not determined by the worst case macro state on the loophole. People share deals primarily because they want to help other deal seekers win too. For many, that’s a value.
I can’t help but notice that only one of your comments on this article has actually addressed (let alone disputed) the substance of anything I’ve said. All the others just bring up something new (and at best tangentially related), with applause and boo lights attached. So I’m going to stop replying to you now.
There is no substance. You have certain moral intuitions—which I do not share—that you wave about in indignation. I can’t help you with your morality and I don’t think you can help me with mine.
Again, what is the argument that shows that people are going to be worse off if airlines are prevented from setting this kind of price?
I don’t see much analogy with software piracy and so on, since this would be more like sneaking onto a flight without buying a ticket. But even in the case of piracy, while it is clear that the author suffers in comparison to that very person paying, it is not clear that the author overall suffers from the existence of piracy. For example, it is quite likely that Microsoft has overall profited from piracy of Windows, since without it they would never have established their monopoly. Some open source operating system would have the monopoly instead.
I don’t see much analogy with software piracy and so on, since this would be more like sneaking onto a flight without buying a ticket.
Software piracy isn’t theft, so sneaking on without buying a ticket isn’t actually analagous. (And in any case, you’re thinking about the receiving end, not the giving end.)
When you redistribute something that’s sold under terms that say, “don’t copy and distribute this”, you are breaking the contract you entered into with the seller. And if you intended to do it when you bought the thing, then you entered into that contract fraudulently.
This is analagous to fraudulently entering into a ticket contract to go from point A to point B, when you actually intend to go to the intervening point C.
In both cases, the seller would never have consented to the purchase at the offered price if they knew what your intentions were, which is what makes your purchase fraudulent.
This is analagous to fraudulently entering into a ticket contract to go from point A to point B, when you actually intend to go to the intervening point C.
There is no contract to go anywhere. You are buying options to take rides on planes.
My relationship (as a buyer) with the seller is simple and short-term: we exchange things of value and we’re done. That, by itself, is a great engine of progress—all you need to buy things is money. You do not need to be of a particular religion or a social class, you do not need to show good moral character, you do not need a license from authorities...
If the seller wants a full-blown contract where I obligate myself to, for example, not to do certain things with his products, he is welcome to offer me such a contract (these obligations, of course, would impact the price I’m ready to pay).
If I am looking for a cucumber to use as a dildo, do I really need to fully disclose that fact to all the little old ladies at the farmer’s market? I am pretty sure they would not sell me cucumbers for that purpose X-D
If the seller wants a full-blown contract where I obligate myself [...]
But the seller does, and that is in fact what you are being offered, in both the cases we’re talking about[1]. When you buy a ticket for air travel there’s a big long list of terms&conditions that you have to say you’ve read and agree to before you can actually buy the ticket. When you “buy” a piece of software there’s again a big long licence that (among other things) clarifies that you do not in any useful sense own the software—you haven’t bought it, you’ve bought a licence to use it in particular ways—and again there are lots of conditions on it.
And yes, no doubt these obligations impact the price you’re ready to pay—just as they impact the price the seller is ready to accept.
In the intellectual property case that’s basically irrelevant—I can download a piece of software or, say, a movie without agreeing to any contract, but it still will be illegal for me to redistribute it.
With the air ticket you do agree to a contract, but here you need to dig a bit deeper.
Not all contracts are created equal. There are basically two kinds. The first kind is a contract you actually negotiate and fully understand, one where what lawyers call “the meeting of the minds” occurred. Let’s call it a negotiated contract. The other kind is known as an adhesion contract and let me quote:
A standard form contract drafted by one party (usually a business with stronger bargaining power) and signed by the weaker party (usually a consumer in need of goods or services), who must adhere to the contract and therefore does not have the power to negotiate or modify the terms of the contract.
These two kinds of contracts are different, both legally and morally. Courts, for example, are generally hesitant to rewrite the terms of negotiated contracts, but have much less scruples about changing or just throwing out parts of adhesion contracts.
Generally speaking, adhesion contracts are not so much about setting out rights and obligations of the parties to the contract, but rather about shifting the balance of power in the possible future disputes.
Most everyone breaks adhesion contracts all the time because they are essentially designed to be broken so that the consumer always ends up the guilty party and pressure can be applied to him. It’s just exercise of power, is all.
I can download a piece of software [...] without agreeing to any contract
Well, sure. And if someone wants to sell you a car but only if you sign a contract saying you’ll never drive it over 40mph or something, you can always steal it instead. (I am not suggesting that illegal software copying is the same as theft in any respect other than that both are illegal.) Why is this relevant?
adhesion contract
Yes, I agree, adhesion contracts are icky and often unreasonable and widely ignored. But it is still the case that with both software and airline tickets, the seller is offering you not a straightforward sale but a contract with all kinds of terms on it, and they are setting their price on the basis of offering you the one rather than the other.
Perhaps I’ve lost track of what your actual argument is here. I think what it boils down to is this: “Contracts of adhesion are nasty and unfair, and I therefore consider myself free to ignore them. The restrictions on how I can use an airline ticket or a piece of software are contained in contracts of adhesion. Therefore there’s no moral objection to my ignoring them.” Is that right?
(For my part, I dislike contracts of adhesion as much as anyone, but am unconvinced that their unpleasantness is much justification for ignoring their terms.)
Whether I feel free to ignore certain terms of adhesion contracts depends. There is no bright line and I tend to deal with these issues on a case-by-case basis.
The seller has no business knowing my intentions or trying to discriminate on their basis.
I’ll take this to mean then, that you will happily lie to people to get them to have sex with you as well, since you don’t believe people should be allowed to condition their consent on accurate information about your intentions.
Yes I have no explicit knowledge of Lumifer’s sex life. If Lumifer is asexual then my statement is strictly incorrect.
If Lumifer, however, does have sex at all, they probably have to negotiate sex with a partner… which means that there is some exchange—most likely just the exchange of like-for-like (ie the other person gets sex too)… which is a purchase in kind… which was my point.
Also I should point out that my comment was intended as just as facile as the comment I was replying-to. That was why I used that form. Lumifer was’t engaging with the point of the previous comment and just throwing up a random thought-stopper. I intended to throw up a facile comment that was to make them think again about what they’d just said.
Asexual, unmarried and with traditional scruples about sex, simply not in a relationship at present and not inclined toward casual sex, in a strictly monogamous relationship with a partner who is currently travelling … there are really quite a lot of possibilities.
I agree it’s more likely that Lumifer does have sex sometimes, and no doubt there is some give and take involved. However, this need have nothing to do with what any normal person calls “buying sex”. (There is an argument to be made that, e.g., in some cases marriage can be viewed as buying sex, and no doubt there are other things in relationships that can usefully be thought of that way. But that’s far from what would have to be true to justify claiming, in the absence of any actual information, that Lumifer buys sex.
I don’t agree that Lumifer was failing to engage with the point of the previous comment. I think the previous comment was in fact where the rot set in. Lumifer expressed a particular opinion about how buying and selling should work. (As you might guess if you happen to read the whole discussion, I am not very sympathetic towards this opinion, but that’s irrelevant here.) pjeby then threw out a needlessly inflammatory and logically incorrect generalization, to which Lumifer replied with the contempt it deserved.
(Needlessly inflammatory and logically incorrect because: 1. the position Lumifer was espousing was specifically one about commerce, and there is no reason to assume that the same principles govern commerce as personal relationships; 2. Lumifer was not in fact defending lying, and one might reasonably think differently about lying versus letting someone believe something incorrect; 3. bringing sex into any discussion is liable to elevate the emotional temperature, doubly so when you start making accusations about the other party’s sex life.)
The particular remark Lumifer made was pointing at objection 1: the distinction between commercial and personal interactions. The fact (assuming it to be one; I haven’t checked that Lumifer wasn’t lying and it’s none of my business) that Lumifer’s sexual interactions with other people aren’t commercial is entirely to the point and not at all a “random thought-stopper”.
And no, the give-and-take in typical romantic/sexual relationships is not of such a character as to make them just like typical commercial buyer/seller relationships, which is why it was in no way appropriate in this context for you to claim that Lumifer does buy sex.
To be clear, I’m not in any way discussing your sex life, I’m discussing how little taryneast knows about your sex life. Your actual sex life, if any, is plainly no business of mine.
It is my understanding that pjeby’s comment was not specifically about sex, but about conditioning consent upon correct intentions… the sex example was simply an easy example to give where it is clear that deliberate concealment of bad-intention causes lots of nasty things.
My feeling was the fact that Lumifer then engaged with the sex-example, rather than what pjeby was actually trying to convey about informed consent, meant that he was evading the intent of the comment.
and the side-track we’ve gone down about whether I actually think that lumifer buys sex is likewise irrelevant to the original point.
personally—I think that the difference between personal and commercial transactions (from the point of view of whether intentions matter to them), is in practice fairly small.
You make a contract—whether physical or verbal, whether backed by the government, or backed by your future goodwill and status. There is an exchange—whether or fiat-currency or expectations of future return in kind, or just more goodwill. If somebody later finds out that the intentions were lies… people try to get recompense—whether by taking the person to court, or by shunning them in future, or telling all their friends that they lie for self-gain.
The fact that commercial vs personal exchanges are held to be separate magisteria is, I think, the point here—and while I agree there are differences… the idea of informed consent is important in both.
Are you also fine with making it more expensive for other people to fly, for your convenience?
How about file sharing to sabotage the efforts of authors, musicians, etc. to “make more money”?
I’m not saying your position is wrong—just asking whether it’s consistent.
In any case, promoting the use of self-defeating strategies is either foolish or evil. Either you’re foolish because you don’t realize you’re going to lose use of the loophole yourself, or you’re evil because you’re deliberately creating a tragedy of the commons, destroying multiple sources of value for multiple parties. (When the fares or authors go away, everybody loses, not just the airlines or authors.)
If you find an anti-inductive loophole, for heaven’s sake don’t talk about it.
The first rule of anti-inductive loophole club is that you do not talk about anti-inductive loophole club.
Yes. I do the same thing every time I price check an item and buy it from the cheapest vendor, every time I use a coupon or a promotion, every time I wait for a sale. Welcome to capitalism.
Wait, what?
First off, buying things from the cheapest vendor only harms other people if you’re destroying the market for higher-quality goods. And it isn’t harming the vendor at all!
Second, buying from the cheapest vendor doesn’t involve deception.
Skiplagging or whatever you call it is buying an airline ticket under false pretenses. It’s like telling a girl in a bar you’re interested in a long-term relationship (full trip ticket) when in fact your goal is to get laid (go to the hub) and you don’t plan to call her again after you skip out (abandon trip at the layover).
IOW, you may engage in a deception because you don’t care about the other party’s welfare, but it doesn’t make you any less of an asshole or a contract breaker. And promoting to other people that they should deceive others for their personal short-term benefit makes you even more of an asshole.
When somebody offers to do something for a specific group of people, and you pretend to be in that group, you’re obtaining their consent by fraud. Not liking the somebody in question doesn’t give you a license to be an asshole, and neither does a feeling of entitlement that the girl or airline “ought” to give you the terms you want.
We can all dislike airline price segmentation all we want. But lying to the airline to get a better deal is fraudulent, and the moral justification for fraud ought to be considerably more substantive than, “welcome to capitalism!”
Firstly, I’m not at all sure that lying to a person should carry the same moral weight as lying to the (useful!) legal fiction of a corporation-as-person.
And secondly, I don’t find it obvious that fraud that harms someone is the same as fraud that doesn’t harm the corporation. Comparing the case where you get off at the layover point to the case where you don’t, it’s hard to see what harm you’ve caused to the airline. Obviously they would like to compare to the case where you bought the higher priced ticket. However, there are clearly four relevant scenarios (buying ticket from A->B and flying A->B, buying A->B and getting off at C, buying A->C and flying A->C, and them selling you the A->C ticket at the price you could buy the A->B ticket for). Obviously whoever gets to pick what single counterfactual scenario to compare to can decide how the comparison comes out.
Neither does this. No one is saying “I will fly these routes”; they’re saying “I will buy these tickets”.
...tickets which the airlines have offered to sell to people traveling from point A to point B, and under terms which expressly prohibit jumping off at point C. Terms that you generally have to check a box saying you’re agreeing to.
In any case, the part that makes it deception is that the seller wouldn’t consent to the sale if you told them what you were up to. If your general approach to interacting with people is that you’ll happily deceive them in order to get better terms in your deals, then by all means proceed.
If you want to say, “well, I don’t think an airline is an entity deserving of weight in my moral calculation”, fine. But let’s not pretend that the act itself is not a matter of obtaining consent through false pretenses, one that we would roundly condemn in another context, where our moral intuition is more inclined to see the object of the deception as a powerless victim instead of a powerful entity that can afford to be deceived.
At the very best, you could maybe say that what you’re doing is Not Technically Lying.
In any event, my other point still stands: telling other people how to exploit anti-inductive loopholes is a dumb idea, even if your moral calculus doesn’t cover the entities upon whom the loophole is being practiced.
PUAs, for example, became victims of their own success when they promoted canned pickup routines to the point that every bar-going female in an area began hearing the same routines regularly from different men, and every stock market strategy destroys itself if it becomes popular enough. Presumably both PUAs and traders—even if they don’t place any moral weight on the welfares of their respective “prey”—do not benefit from having their techniques become irrelevant, and having to develop new ones.
(OTOH, I suppose people who train PUAs or traders actually do benefit from the churning of methods that results… so I guess the rule should be, “you do not talk about anti-inductive loophole club, unless you stand to profit more from its promotion and eventual replacement than you do from the loophole itself”. But that’s getting a bit longwinded and off-point.)
Anyway, I think that some people have drawn the inference that I have a moral objection to people cheating the airlines. I think it’s more accurate to say that I think people who cheat the airlines and then talk about it in public are behaving irrationally.
IOW, I’m not so much saying OP is evil, as I’m saying OP is not evil enough. HPMOR!Quirrel’s rule number two is “Don’t brag”, after all. ;-)
If I knew about an awesome loophole of this nature, I would absolutely not post it on lesswrong. I would not even post it on a super-secret private forum for people who figure out awesome loopholes for exploiting airlines. You cannot unshare a secret.
Not every revealed loophole is as anti-inductive as stock market strategies. Ad blockers, for example, probably won’t destroy the internet unless a major browser vendor includes one and turns it on by default. But if you gain substantial value from a loophole, and you already consider your welfare more important than that of others, it’s an unnecessary risk to publicize the loophole—especially if it involves revealing to the public that you are exploiting that loophole.
It occurs to me, though, that by arguing about this, I may be making a similar meta-level error as Eliezer did when he deleted the basilisk. By arguing the point, I may have actually brought more attention to the topic, rather than less, while failing to actually educate anyone about the stupidity of the underlying ideas (either the loophole itself, or talking about loopholes).
Perhaps the more important rule is, “Do not try to silence people talking about fight club, because that just makes people more interested in fight club.”
So on that note, I’m going to abandon this thread altogether.
“tickets which the airlines have offered to sell to people traveling from point A to point B, and under terms which expressly prohibit jumping off at point C. Terms that you generally have to check a box saying you’re agreeing to.”
Pjeby, the Austrian Airlines conditions of carriage are 21 pages long, and as far as I know that is not untypical. Yes, you have to check a box saying you have read the terms and agree with them, but I think that pretty much everyone knows that everyone checks this box without reading them, and certainly without actually agreeing to them, since they do not know the terms.
And unless you read the terms yourself when you buy a ticket, which I strongly suspect that you do not, how would you know whether or not getting off at point C was prohibited by the terms?
In fact, the Austrian Airlines terms of service contain this:
“3.3.3. If you do not use the flight coupons in the sequence shown with the intention to circumvent the fare system, we will charge you the applicable price for the actual sequence of transportation you intended to take. This will be done by determining the fare you would have had to pay on the day of reserving your actual sequence of transportation. This may be higher than the originally paid cost of the flight. The cheapest available price in your booking class will be used to recalculate the changed sequence of transportation. If the booking class originally booked by you is not available for the changed routing on the day of making the reservation, the cheapest available booking class will be used to recalculate the changed sequence of transportation. Any taxes and charges for the unused flight coupon will be deducted. Please note that we are entitled to make carriage dependent on having paid the difference in price.”
Note that you are not agreeing to ACTUALLY TAKE the sequence of flights you purchase. You are agreeing to be charged for the actual sequence, so that e.g. you will have no valid complaint to a credit card company when they charge you the fare difference for getting off in London instead of going on to New York.
So if it is simply a question to keeping to your agreements, if you get off in London after purchasing a ticket from Vienna to New York via London, you are not breaking your agreement. Instead, the airline will simply be failing to carry out its threat if it fails to charge you any addition price difference for the Vienna—London ticket as opposed to the Vienna—New York. And if they do, that is more the airline failing to keep its side of the agreement, then you failing to keep yours.
This is not a secret anymore, and the attention I bring to the issue by posting it on LessWrong is pretty marginal. The fact that there’s already been a lawsuit over this is an indication that the airlines think it’s cheaper to try and suppress it that way than to change their pricing structure.
″...tickets which the airlines have offered to sell to people traveling from point A to point B, and under terms which expressly prohibit jumping off at point C. ”
That wasn’t true in Australia for Unknown, and I doubt it is true anywhere.
Think of how impractical it would be. People have plans, but plans change. People miss flights. They get sick. They’re hit by a bus. They just change their minds. So they’d all be opening themselves to litigation? That’s not why people get on a plane.
″ Terms that you generally have to check a box saying you’re agreeing to.”
See Lumifer’s discussion of contracts, presumably in Common Law jurisdictions: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lne/how_to_save_a_lot_of_money_on_flying/bxo2
Non negotiated contracts are just not treated the same as negotiated contracts.
“In any event, my other point still stands: telling other people how to exploit anti-inductive loopholes is a dumb idea”
In most cases, no. I’m often struck by the cheek of people telling other people how stupid they are in the pursuit of their own values.
You’re just making false assumptions about the values that people have. People often share information on tactical advantages that become marginally less advantageous the more other people know about them. They’re not all stupid—they’re generally just obtaining some value other than the value that comes from exercising the advantage when they communicate the advantage.
“you do not talk about anti-inductive loophole club, unless you stand to profit more from its promotion and eventual replacement than you do from the loophole itself”
No. Still wrong. You best decision is not determined by the worst case macro state on the loophole. People share deals primarily because they want to help other deal seekers win too. For many, that’s a value.
Next thing you’ll be telling me that by running adblocker software I’m destroying the internet.
How about this: you go buy things as you like and I go buy things as I like?
I can’t help but notice that only one of your comments on this article has actually addressed (let alone disputed) the substance of anything I’ve said. All the others just bring up something new (and at best tangentially related), with applause and boo lights attached. So I’m going to stop replying to you now.
There is no substance. You have certain moral intuitions—which I do not share—that you wave about in indignation. I can’t help you with your morality and I don’t think you can help me with mine.
You’re free to consider me evil :-D
Again, what is the argument that shows that people are going to be worse off if airlines are prevented from setting this kind of price?
I don’t see much analogy with software piracy and so on, since this would be more like sneaking onto a flight without buying a ticket. But even in the case of piracy, while it is clear that the author suffers in comparison to that very person paying, it is not clear that the author overall suffers from the existence of piracy. For example, it is quite likely that Microsoft has overall profited from piracy of Windows, since without it they would never have established their monopoly. Some open source operating system would have the monopoly instead.
Software piracy isn’t theft, so sneaking on without buying a ticket isn’t actually analagous. (And in any case, you’re thinking about the receiving end, not the giving end.)
When you redistribute something that’s sold under terms that say, “don’t copy and distribute this”, you are breaking the contract you entered into with the seller. And if you intended to do it when you bought the thing, then you entered into that contract fraudulently.
This is analagous to fraudulently entering into a ticket contract to go from point A to point B, when you actually intend to go to the intervening point C.
In both cases, the seller would never have consented to the purchase at the offered price if they knew what your intentions were, which is what makes your purchase fraudulent.
There is no contract to go anywhere. You are buying options to take rides on planes.
That is not true. You’re breaking the law which is very different from breaking the contract.
The seller has no business knowing my intentions or trying to discriminate on their basis.
Why not?
You seem to be otherwise taking a free market as a given. Everyone is trying to get the best deal. I expect companies to do it as well.
My relationship (as a buyer) with the seller is simple and short-term: we exchange things of value and we’re done. That, by itself, is a great engine of progress—all you need to buy things is money. You do not need to be of a particular religion or a social class, you do not need to show good moral character, you do not need a license from authorities...
If the seller wants a full-blown contract where I obligate myself to, for example, not to do certain things with his products, he is welcome to offer me such a contract (these obligations, of course, would impact the price I’m ready to pay).
If I am looking for a cucumber to use as a dildo, do I really need to fully disclose that fact to all the little old ladies at the farmer’s market? I am pretty sure they would not sell me cucumbers for that purpose X-D
But the seller does, and that is in fact what you are being offered, in both the cases we’re talking about[1]. When you buy a ticket for air travel there’s a big long list of terms&conditions that you have to say you’ve read and agree to before you can actually buy the ticket. When you “buy” a piece of software there’s again a big long licence that (among other things) clarifies that you do not in any useful sense own the software—you haven’t bought it, you’ve bought a licence to use it in particular ways—and again there are lots of conditions on it.
And yes, no doubt these obligations impact the price you’re ready to pay—just as they impact the price the seller is ready to accept.
[1] Though probably not with the cucumber.
In the intellectual property case that’s basically irrelevant—I can download a piece of software or, say, a movie without agreeing to any contract, but it still will be illegal for me to redistribute it.
With the air ticket you do agree to a contract, but here you need to dig a bit deeper.
Not all contracts are created equal. There are basically two kinds. The first kind is a contract you actually negotiate and fully understand, one where what lawyers call “the meeting of the minds” occurred. Let’s call it a negotiated contract. The other kind is known as an adhesion contract and let me quote:
These two kinds of contracts are different, both legally and morally. Courts, for example, are generally hesitant to rewrite the terms of negotiated contracts, but have much less scruples about changing or just throwing out parts of adhesion contracts.
Generally speaking, adhesion contracts are not so much about setting out rights and obligations of the parties to the contract, but rather about shifting the balance of power in the possible future disputes.
Most everyone breaks adhesion contracts all the time because they are essentially designed to be broken so that the consumer always ends up the guilty party and pressure can be applied to him. It’s just exercise of power, is all.
Well, sure. And if someone wants to sell you a car but only if you sign a contract saying you’ll never drive it over 40mph or something, you can always steal it instead. (I am not suggesting that illegal software copying is the same as theft in any respect other than that both are illegal.) Why is this relevant?
Yes, I agree, adhesion contracts are icky and often unreasonable and widely ignored. But it is still the case that with both software and airline tickets, the seller is offering you not a straightforward sale but a contract with all kinds of terms on it, and they are setting their price on the basis of offering you the one rather than the other.
Perhaps I’ve lost track of what your actual argument is here. I think what it boils down to is this: “Contracts of adhesion are nasty and unfair, and I therefore consider myself free to ignore them. The restrictions on how I can use an airline ticket or a piece of software are contained in contracts of adhesion. Therefore there’s no moral objection to my ignoring them.” Is that right?
(For my part, I dislike contracts of adhesion as much as anyone, but am unconvinced that their unpleasantness is much justification for ignoring their terms.)
My actual argument is here :-)
Whether I feel free to ignore certain terms of adhesion contracts depends. There is no bright line and I tend to deal with these issues on a case-by-case basis.
I’ll take this to mean then, that you will happily lie to people to get them to have sex with you as well, since you don’t believe people should be allowed to condition their consent on accurate information about your intentions.
I don’t buy sex.
Yes you do… just not with money
I bet you have no knowledge at all of whether Lumifer has sex with anyone at all, never mind what motivations his partner(s) may have.
I think Less Wrong is better without this sort of facile cynicism.
[EDITED to clarify wording a little.]
Yes I have no explicit knowledge of Lumifer’s sex life. If Lumifer is asexual then my statement is strictly incorrect.
If Lumifer, however, does have sex at all, they probably have to negotiate sex with a partner… which means that there is some exchange—most likely just the exchange of like-for-like (ie the other person gets sex too)… which is a purchase in kind… which was my point.
Also I should point out that my comment was intended as just as facile as the comment I was replying-to. That was why I used that form. Lumifer was’t engaging with the point of the previous comment and just throwing up a random thought-stopper. I intended to throw up a facile comment that was to make them think again about what they’d just said.
Asexual, unmarried and with traditional scruples about sex, simply not in a relationship at present and not inclined toward casual sex, in a strictly monogamous relationship with a partner who is currently travelling … there are really quite a lot of possibilities.
I agree it’s more likely that Lumifer does have sex sometimes, and no doubt there is some give and take involved. However, this need have nothing to do with what any normal person calls “buying sex”. (There is an argument to be made that, e.g., in some cases marriage can be viewed as buying sex, and no doubt there are other things in relationships that can usefully be thought of that way. But that’s far from what would have to be true to justify claiming, in the absence of any actual information, that Lumifer buys sex.
I don’t agree that Lumifer was failing to engage with the point of the previous comment. I think the previous comment was in fact where the rot set in. Lumifer expressed a particular opinion about how buying and selling should work. (As you might guess if you happen to read the whole discussion, I am not very sympathetic towards this opinion, but that’s irrelevant here.) pjeby then threw out a needlessly inflammatory and logically incorrect generalization, to which Lumifer replied with the contempt it deserved.
(Needlessly inflammatory and logically incorrect because: 1. the position Lumifer was espousing was specifically one about commerce, and there is no reason to assume that the same principles govern commerce as personal relationships; 2. Lumifer was not in fact defending lying, and one might reasonably think differently about lying versus letting someone believe something incorrect; 3. bringing sex into any discussion is liable to elevate the emotional temperature, doubly so when you start making accusations about the other party’s sex life.)
The particular remark Lumifer made was pointing at objection 1: the distinction between commercial and personal interactions. The fact (assuming it to be one; I haven’t checked that Lumifer wasn’t lying and it’s none of my business) that Lumifer’s sexual interactions with other people aren’t commercial is entirely to the point and not at all a “random thought-stopper”.
And no, the give-and-take in typical romantic/sexual relationships is not of such a character as to make them just like typical commercial buyer/seller relationships, which is why it was in no way appropriate in this context for you to claim that Lumifer does buy sex.
I find the fact that LW decided to discuss its perceptions of what could theoretically be my sex life to be highly amusing.
Do carry on.
To be clear, I’m not in any way discussing your sex life, I’m discussing how little taryneast knows about your sex life. Your actual sex life, if any, is plainly no business of mine.
To be clear—neither was I
It is my understanding that pjeby’s comment was not specifically about sex, but about conditioning consent upon correct intentions… the sex example was simply an easy example to give where it is clear that deliberate concealment of bad-intention causes lots of nasty things.
My feeling was the fact that Lumifer then engaged with the sex-example, rather than what pjeby was actually trying to convey about informed consent, meant that he was evading the intent of the comment.
and the side-track we’ve gone down about whether I actually think that lumifer buys sex is likewise irrelevant to the original point.
personally—I think that the difference between personal and commercial transactions (from the point of view of whether intentions matter to them), is in practice fairly small.
You make a contract—whether physical or verbal, whether backed by the government, or backed by your future goodwill and status. There is an exchange—whether or fiat-currency or expectations of future return in kind, or just more goodwill. If somebody later finds out that the intentions were lies… people try to get recompense—whether by taking the person to court, or by shunning them in future, or telling all their friends that they lie for self-gain.
The fact that commercial vs personal exchanges are held to be separate magisteria is, I think, the point here—and while I agree there are differences… the idea of informed consent is important in both.