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Mafia Wars CEO Brags About Scamming Users
jamie writes with a follow-up to our recent discussion of social gaming scams:
"Mark Pincus, CEO of the company that brought us Mafia Wars, says: 'I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues right away. I mean, we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar, which was like, I don't know... I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it.'"
TechCrunch also ran a interesting tell-all from the CEO of a company specializing in Facebook advertisements, who provided some details on similarly shady operations at the popular social networking site.
Saying this won't be popular around here, but we already have a perfectly good treatment for wealth addition.
It's called a highly progressive income tax, which includes capital gains.
greed, as a part of human nature,
People should be always suspicious toward prophets (and propaganda workers) who are trying to explain humans what humans are supposed to feel to follow our own "human nature". Humans have all kinds of emotions and motivations, and tendency for what we recognize as selfishness and competitiveness being balanced by approximately the same amount of tendency toward what we recognize as altruism and cooperation. If humans were overwhelmingly inclined toward some specific kind of behavior, that behavior would not ever be given a name because it would never be necessary to explain it to a human. Is there a specific name for a typical way of walking? Typical way of breathing? Typical attitude toward others? If something has a name, especially a recognizable and emotionally charged one, it has to be a deviation.
is here to stay
Greed, being a deviant behavior, is very easy to suppress to the level when it does not take over large groups of people and turns them into a danger to everyone around them.
That is, when the society is not full of stupid fuckheads like yourself who bought this idea of greed being the only driving force that is worth following.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
You NEVER lie when you want to pick up men/women?
Do you wear make-up? Your face don't look like that!
Have you fixed your hair? That's not what it looks like in the mornings!
Have you brushed your teeth? That's not what your breath smells like later that night!
Have you used deodorant/perfume? That's not what you smell like!
Are you wearing the same clothes you would wear at any other time? That's not what you look like!
Are you ordering expensive drinks, because you rarely go out? You're not that rich!
Do you keep quiet about her bad habits? You're engaging in subterfuge!
Go see The Invention of Lying to get an idea of just how bad things would be, if we didn't lie.