
Out to Get You - apsec112
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/out-to-get-you/
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mooreds
Oooh, I really enjoyed this. The style, while some other commenters had issues
with it, was enjoyable to me.

"Some things are fundamentally Out to Get You."

"They seek resources at your expense."

You aren't being paranoid. There are systems out there that are designed to
maximize your loss and minimize your gain. This is the way of pirate
capitalism, where you aren't concerned about LTV, just about short term value.

Great list of techniques for dealing with this situation, which seems to come
up more and more often. Would have loved more examples, but the ones the
author mentioned were excellent.

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ryandrake
I liked this read. I heavily subscribe to the "only suckers pay full price"
philosophy. Everyone is out to get you, and they profit by relying on most
people's trusting, docile, harmony-seeking nature. Your cable bill is $0.01
more than last month? Call up and fight it--threaten to drop your
subscription. Medical bill you don't understand or credit card charge you
don't remember? Call them up and dispute it. Speeding ticket? Fight it in
court. Find a small scratch on a piece of furniture you just bought? Threaten
to dump it back in the store's lobby unless you get a discount. And never,
ever buy a new car! Negotiate everything, even your groceries. You work too
hard for your money in order to just give "them" what they want without a
fight.

\- Proud cheapskate

~~~
TrainedMonkey
Think about how much you value your time and how doing that will affect your
happiness.

~~~
Waterluvian
Exactly. Some people enjoy this and that's great. Others are so blinded by the
need to not Get Got that they end up working for pennies an hour on some
tasks.

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jechamt
Authored by Zvi Mowshowitz, Magic PT Hall of famer. I was surprised to see
intersection here of two of my interests.

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devnonymous
tl;dr for those who read the definitions but don't want to Get Got.

* Understand the difference between the value of something and the cost of the thing.

* Understand opportunity cost (and sunk cost).

Get Got when when value is high and opportunity cost is low.

Get compact when value is high but opportunity cost is non trivial.

Get Gone when value is low and opportunity cost is high.

Get ready when cost as well as sunk cost is high.

~~~
iridium
This comment made me realize why I never remember summaries of self help
books.

Using examples makes it easier to relate and remember, whereas summaries
require an additional step of mapping an ongoing situation to a stored summary
in your head, and this is very hard to do in realtime.

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ryandvm
Upvoting for the excellent philosophical points; in spite of being mentally
exhausting to read...

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MandieD
Actionable, seemingly trivial advice that might be the foundation of better
habits:

"A buffet creates overeating. Filling up one plate (or one early to explore,
then one to exploit) ends better."

"one early to explore, then one to exploit"

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mcfist
> When you deal with Out to Get You, you know it in your gut. Your brain
> cannot relax. You lookout for tricks and traps. Everything is a scheme.

That's exactly how I feel when I'm in US. That'd be X dollars. Plus state tax.
Cover not included. And 15% tips. Sorry, no change.

How you people can tolerate this, I don't know.

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warent
What's the experience called when a word is said so many times it feels like
it starts to lose meaning?

Get Got Got Get Got Got Got Get Got Get Got

Got

Worth It

~~~
Deimorz
"Semantic satiation":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation)

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amelius
Perhaps one day we'll have AI and collaborative filtering to warn us in such
circumstances.

~~~
sounds
(At the risk of stating the obvious.)

It is likely we will soon have multiple AI's Out To Get You. We're pretty
close to it, but I would assume current algorithms are not "AI".

~~~
khedoros1
> We're pretty close to it, but I would assume current algorithms are not
> "AI".

Seems like it depends on your definition of "AI". We've got computer programs
reading our communication, watching our browsing, and piecing together which
patterns are likely to be the same person in different locations.

Then they use that information, both alone and in aggregation with other
peoples' info, and finding ads for things that the individual might be
interested in.

I understand at least some of the algorithms behind this, and have at least a
fuzzy concept of most of the rest. It certainly crosses over into the category
of what I'd call "AI". But that's the problem with the definition of
Artificial Intelligence: It seems like the most-used definition is roughly
"The collection of intelligent-seeming behaviors that we haven't figured out
algorithms for yet".

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singularity2001
Sometimes you can retroactively undo being Gotten by just not paying.

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hydrox24
While there is good thought behind this article, I found it unnecessarily
difficult to read. For instance:

> "Get Compact when you find a rule you can follow that makes it Worth It to
> Get Got."

Now, he defined "Get Compact" earlier, and "Get Got", but why is "Worth It"
capitalised? I am not sure if it is a typo or if it is also referring to some
abstraction made elsewhere in the piece or in another piece by TheZvi. The
language is, in general, difficult and abstracted where it doesn't need to be.

There are many more examples of the kind of grammar that makes you read a
sentence twice, or second guess yourself, etc. Ultimately, I think this sloppy
writing elevates the author's system of writing over helping the reader
understand quickly.

Is there a reason to be particularly forgiving? Is English not a first
language or is there something else Hacker News knows that I don't?

~~~
warent
It sounds like the article wasn't Worth It and you Got Got

~~~
rdiddly
But since it was free, it was Worth It...

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bradknowles
It wasn’t free in terms of the time cost.

If you value your time, then maybe it was Worth It, and maybe not.

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sneak
This reminds me: don’t ever do business with SurePayroll.

