(wow, I've never experienced "that comment was too long" from Hacker News before... :/)

(part 1/2)

> I'm not "defending" Avis here; nor am I attacking this guy. I'm critiquing a behavior.

You actually are "attacking this guy", because you are "critiquing a behavior" he has performed and using it to justify calling him a "scam artist", a "pickpocket", and a "parasite". I am not certain how else to describe what you are doing. That isn't to say that attacking someone is bad... far from it... only that you should do it with care, and preferably not attempt to hide or sugar coat the action :(.

> That an exploiter is exploiting another exploiter does not seem morally better to me.

So, I agree with this. I primarily had to bring this up, as it completely decimates the "this is why we can't have nice things" argument that tends to come up in these situations. (Which makes it was all the more strange that you were trying to use that argument after we showed that this isn't a nice thing; it is like, by arguing against it, I reminded you of its existence, but you had totally ignored the part where I had made the argument not function by undermining "nice thing".)

Really, my argument has not been "this person deserves what they got", it is that we are attempting to define what this guy did that makes you feel he is worthy of the labels you have given him, and it turns out that we have two potential definitions so far from you, and one of them actually doesn't work without taking a step back and putting it in the greater context. I will again address that one first, as it is related to this paragraph.

> The basis of commerce is positive-sum exchanges of value. You create something for me that I value; I give you something you value in return. You create something for me that I value; I give you something you value in return. This guy is intentionally engaging in a negative-sum exchange to fill his pockets.

Yes: I understand how this works. In fact, I brought up the non-zero sum analysis of transactions in our back and forth. I also, in bringing it up, demonstrated how complex it is for you to attempt to model the scenario in this limited way by trying to "pull back the curtain" on how business arrangements with companies like AVIS and EuroBonus might operate. However, we can build a model of this situation that is even more simple than that: this entire thing is actually an interesting marketing stunt. Most of the things people do on websites like flyertalk is pretty obviously to everyone not negative-sum any more than people in retirement homes clipping coupons is bad for business.

When companies look like they have "retracted" promotions they have provided, they tend to look really bad to this actually-profitable-to-them community. (I point out "to them", as often these transactions end up hurting companies with travel expense accounts, which is yet another way in which this is all fascinatingly complex.) We therefore actually can make a reasonable argument that this specific transaction is actually positive sum to AVIS, because it shows "wow, AVIS is friendly, we should spend more time staring at AVIS". Which is again why trying to just claim "it is bad when the transaction is negative sum" is such a difficult argument to make: I've already pointed out how it requires a God's-eye view of the accounting, I've already pointed out how it essentially paints this entire industry

While I am concerned that my careful attention to concrete scenarios has been a waste of time so far in this conversation, I will give you another one: personally, I think everyone who covets "unlimited Internet" plans are doing something absolutely horrible for society: I think they are undermining innovation and free speech by encouraging scenarios where network neutrality is almost required to make the accounting work out correctly. I make that argument (on talks that I give at conferences and in panels at conventions), because I think we should have long-term views of the future, and we should decide which agents to blame in situations that are leading us down the wrong paths. In this case, I actually think consumers are more to blame than AT&T.

That said, I don't actually judge these people as bad people, because that is a really complex argument (one I'm not even laying out here, though if you really cared, I was on a panel as part of the EFF Track at DragonCon 2014 talking about this, an event that has an audio recording floating around the EFF website). There is a much simpler argument, of course, but I think the simpler argument actually falls to the same problem that it just requires people to care too much about someone else's business model: "you quite obviously can't get unlimited anything for a limited number of dollars". While maybe it would be fun to do so, we can't call people who complain that the unlimited plan they bought from AT&T was first rate limited and then terminated any of "scam artist", "pickpocket", or "parasite".

The argument, of course, is one that you have yourself made in the past, as in when you said "There's a clear information asymmetry here, and therefore a clear power differential. But so many people are instantly willing to blame the weaker party for being trusting, rather than blaming the stronger party for abusing their customers." when Joyent ended their lifetime hosting accounts, and people were here on Hacker News defending their decision. For this and the other reasons I have so far argued, we thereby really need to reject the simple "negative sum" argument for why we should denigrate this particular actor. Instead, we have to turn to the other argument you have made as the real reason why he could deserve our scorn.