Comment by panorama | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panorama | Hacker News Reader

Recently, Cox had an outage in the city where my parents live. My dad, close to 70, misconstrued the situation and though it was just our modem being slow. He drove to a brick & mortar Cox shop, where a rep promptly sold him on leasing a gateway for $10/mo that would be (and I quote) "25 times faster" than the speeds we were currently getting (roughly peaking at 250 Mbps down).

Of course, my Dad, not knowing too much about this stuff, rents the new router. And of course, it doesn't solve the fact that there was an outage in the first place. I tested the new connection and while I could see _rare_ instances of faster peak speeds, for the most part it was not much faster than the old setup when sampled over time.

I really hope there comes a day when companies can be held accountable for straight up lying and taking advantage of customers who simply don't have the technical means to know any better. It really, really bothers me when my parents get taken advantage of like this and I know I'm mostly helpless to prevent it without micro-managing my dad's tech purchasing decisions.

I sometimes think that the _core_ reason companies like this take advantage of people is because people don't usually care enough to do anything about it; in other words, to care enough to help _other_ people out. I envision that in the future there will some kind of easy to use "web of trust" that people will look up before deciding to do business w/ someone. Review sites like Yelp/Facebook are just the start of this concept but I think it could eventually turn into something more robust.

care_enough_to_explain_the_weird_underscores?

Older way of showing bold or italics.

It's also how _Markdown_ shows italics.

HN already has italics. It shows up "like this" if you use asterisks

Markdown italics maybe.

Consider the word that has it around to be underlined.

Employees get incentivized to upsell customers, and some just run with it gleefully. If they were paid by the hour regardless, and actually chewed out pushing things on people they don't need, things would be very different, but the fish stinks from the head. I once worked in a call center for a shitty ISP for a little while, based on that one sample, I say the core reason for these shennanigans is solely to be found in corporate sociopathy, that is, the kind of people that attracts and who climb those ladders. They grin from ear to ear so much, they know exactly what they're doing. And wherever you find people who exploit customers you will also find people hating customers, since they project their own evil. It's gotta go somewhere and looking into the mirror is not an option for them.

It's hard to be critical of your dad for this. If you told me that for only $10 extra per month, I could increase my download speed from a mere 250 Mbps to 6.25 GIGABITS per second, well of course I would sit up and take notice.

Who wouldn't?

(While they are at it, do you think they could boost my 90 Mbps connection to 2.25 Gbps? I have $10/month burning a hole in my pocket!)

...well, a counterargument would be, if you never do anything that requires such fast speeds, the extra $10 per month isn’t worthwhile regardless of the percent increase.

By extension, if the customer increased their speed and didn’t notice a difference, than either the speed is the same OR the extra speed was never needed to begin with.

Mind you, none of this excuses Comcast! Also, the placebo effect is powerful. I recall a time my father upgraded his internet plan, and then marveled at how much “faster” Google Chrome’s new tab page opened...

>I really hope there comes a day when companies can be held accountable for straight up lying and taking advantage of customers who simply don't have the technical means to know any better.

The situation is genuinely pretty grim but there is the occasional bright spot. If you google "australia nbn false speed claims" you can read about how half a dozen Australian ISPs had to pay penalties, change their advertising and refund NBN (national broadband network) customers who paid for speeds that were not possible on their home Internet connections.

There is the occasional win for individuals but its mostly when large numbers of people are affected all at once.

Caveat Emptor

Your dad has been around for 70 years. How has he not figured out not to trust a salesperson and do independent research or consult an expert (literally YOU, his son, one phone call away).

Is it perhaps a skill that is lost with age? Everyday I see online posts made by old people that show a complete lack of critical thinking ability. These are all relatively successful people, I imagine they couldn't have made it so far in life without critical thinking.

And that raises the question, should people above a certain age stop being considered as adults and have their adult privileges taken away? Just like children who tend to lack critical thinking can't vote then why should people older than a certain age get to do it?

Note, this is not something that I necessarily agree with, especially because I know quite a few of old people (my ex-professors) who seem quite good with critical thinking.

If you want to ban people who can't think, add tests on thinking abilities. Age is a terrible proxy.

I totally agree, which is part of why I believe that age limitations on people who can vote is a bad idea.

Not everyone enjoys the task of performing extensive research, and perhaps a 70 year old might value their time doing something else? I've also met more than one 70+ year old person who was convinced that they understood how things worked, and to admit otherwise was to display weakness/lose credibility (despite that not being the case at all). The point is, what is obvious to you may not be obvious to others, and you have no idea why they chose the route they did.

> and perhaps a 70 year old might value their time doing something else?

They should be content with their inferior choices then.

> I've also met more than one 70+ year old person who was convinced that they understood how things worked, and to admit otherwise was to display weakness/lose credibility

These people deserve it.

Note, I certainly do think that there should be more regulation on lying salesmen, but these are kind of bad examples imo.

I hope in your old age you never have to interact with people as devoid of empathy as yourself.

Neither of these are a property exclusive to old people though - why should I have empathy for people who mess up while they pretend to know everything?

Why should I have empathy for people who have chosen to invest their time in some other way? I do not have empathy for them just like I do not have empathy for people who have chosen to not do their homework and end up getting a low grade.

If I do end up being like that however, then I will fully deserve it. I can only hope that the people around me will try to put me in a straight path then.

I have empathy. I also have a brain, which I used to come to the conclusion that you either have self-agency and therefore you are liable to the consequences of your actions or you do not have self-agency. If a person chose to not do research, then he is liable to the consequences of his ignorance.

So he decided not to do the research because it's not worth his time and therefore he made a suboptimal purchase.

He made his bed and lay in it. Im saving my tears.

A mix of stubborn dad syndrome and not wanting to "bother" me (even though of course it doesn't), shrug. I doubt my dad's stubbornness is the core problem here though, there are countless Americans being taken advantage of by our ISPs, stores like Best Buy, etc. on daily basis.

Reminds me of Ma Bell's descendants still renting out rotary telephones to their customers into the 2000's.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14838642/ns/technology_and_science...

Possibly because that person was supposed to be tech support, not sales. He came in with a problem, not looking for a purchase.

People actually get more trusting as they age, putting them at even higher risk of behind taken advantage of.

https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2013/01/trust-rises-age

Culturally speaking, I've noticed that older people tend to be much more trusting. I expect part of this is an expectation of mutual respect between parties -- effectively "why would they lie?". A lack of knowledge of the technology and an unwillingness to "be a burden" by asking someone more knowledgeable probably factor in too.

See also "why older people tend to get scammed more often than younger people"... certainly for the family members I've helped, all three of the above were factors to some degree.

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