Isn't that exactly what a homo economicus should do? Remember that we are each in constant competition between each other, trying to satisfy our unlimited wants and trying to get others from satisfying theirs.
Homo economicus is motivated by maximizing their own benefit, not by spite. Trying to stop others from satisfying their own wants may be a useful strategy in many cases, but I don't see how it would be useful here.
Our economic system in no way rewards spite. It rewards value. It might not always be able to tell the difference between real value and underhanded tactics, but that's because the tactics masquerade as better value.
On the contrary, capitalism is based on providing value to others. It rewards those who do something that others actually WANT... as opposed to what some roomful of bureaucrats decide ought to be done.
I think it depends on just how much harm your target causing. Sometimes taking them down is the right thing. Doesn't feel justified in this case though.
There are more than two options for a 20 hour wait, and I don't think that lashing out maliciously and staring at water are in my top 100. How about conversation, making friends, reading a book, writing emails, letters, or journals?
Some people are simply not satisfied with maximizing their own gain, they also need to minimize everyone else's. Someone else's benefit is their loss. To the point where they'll make the game negative-sum in order to ensure The Other loses.
Some people are sadistic cretins who revel in the suffering of others, but I don't think that is the mainstream position.
I was pushing back on the idea that "homo economicus" or mainstream economics advocates for competitive sabotage. I have never heard academic economists advocate for this as a rational position.
If anything, the field is biased to over-emphasize positive collaboration.
The position of the parent post is some strange application of group competition for a scarce resource to happiness.
It assumes that someone's goal is not be be as happy as possible, but rather happier than others. This is the only situation where it makes sense to actively put in work to make other people more miserable.
Spending time to cost a company a few hundred bucks doesn’t seem rational. There are higher EV ways to spend your time to try to satisfy wants.
Unless your mindset is one of “it’s not enough that I succeed; others must fail by my hand”.
That said I could easily imagine doing some stuff like this as a teenager for giggles. There’s some small joy in being a minor troublemaker in a way nobody would actually care about. It’s not something I’d brag about though.
no you describe narcissistic personality disorder.
Homo economicus would try get as much as possible for himself, or have others bear the cost (e.g. have society pay for roads but don't want to pay taxes).
They would not lower the quality of service for someone else out of spite without any gain for themselves, let alone waste time on it. They would also understand this would rise the cost of the service they might potentially want to use in the future.
Only narcissists would feel the desire to fuck up a service out of spite and ruin it for anyone else, just because they feel bad for not agreeing to the deal of having to pay
Rational agents in the real world should realize that conspiring with others to make the world better gives them more benefits than being a greedy shit.
It is only in academic exercises where collaboration is made impossible that sociopathic behavior is optimal.
But I'm puzzled by the idea his actions make any sense as a _capitalist_ impulse (Of course neither of us know anything about OP except his story).
Resentment over what somebody else has is the quintessential mental sliver communism uses to drive people to destroy the system. Perhaps the OP was just engaging in an outburst of his own destructive revolutionary zeal against his fellow passengers because they had something he didn't.
I don't have anything to back my theories up, but when ChatGPT was new, heavily resource-constrained, but was catching on and I tried using it for sustainability research and I kept getting errors (service down / system overloaded), my mind always went to "yeah, people trying to do the two plus two is five or generating adult content. Perhaps trying to use it to generate bomb recipes. Let's try using ChatGPT for research again in a few hours"
Clearly the solution is to just make Wi-Fi free by default. Once this is done, it becomes uninteresting to download gigabytes of crap to "hurt" people. Win-win for everyone. Just saying.
> Once this is done, it becomes uninteresting to download gigabytes of crap to "hurt" people. Win-win for everyone.
I would disagree. Here in my corner of EU, public buses have a limited 30min - 1hour free wifi access. What most everyone does immediately getting in the bus is connect to the free wifi and start mindless scrolling on TikTok, Facebook or Instagram. Around 20-30% of the people are super obnoxious and play all the videos over loudspeaker or start calling their friends and speaking loudly as if they are in their home or something, until someone else yells at them. So far, I have only seen two person this month appearing to do something valuable(one was writing an email and another was checking local news).
Just because you think entertainment (or rather, their specific form of entertainment, since you seem to consider reading the news OK but facebook not ok) isn't "valuable" doesn't make it so.
Being able to enjoy entertainment (or, as you'd probably see it, "mindlessly waste the time" that you have to spend on the bus anyways) is what makes public transit bearable.
I really agree with this point; who’s to say making the email is not less valuable or making the world just a little worse? I would probably agree more if the example was Netflix or even YouTubr but part of me is still biased toward feeling TikTok is just probably neurologically worse than anything outside of drugs.
>Around 20-30% of the people are super obnoxious and play all the videos over loudspeaker or start calling their friends and speaking loudly as if they are in their home or something, until someone else yells at them.
This is a culture problem, and has nothing to do with free Wi-Fi. This kind of thing never happens here in Japan, except maybe foreign tourists.
Except there's 2,500 people on that ship and the satellite bandwidth is 15mbps. Now making it free doesnt work because the resources aren't there.
If you want free wifi, that's great but the private sector isn't going to do it for you. How many of these public nuisance hackers are advocating for large socialized programs to make wifi a human right on all manner of transport? Usually the hacker demographic is right-wing libertarian and would never advocate for socialism.
So you dont want socialism but you want socialized services? Curious.
If this person's story ended with "Then I started a website to advocate for regulations and pricing for better transport wifi," then that would be great! Instead he just drowned out the internet connection of paying customers who are now making angry calls at some poor tech support person making minimum wage in a poor country. He did nothing but hurt people out of his own immaturity and cheapness.
These are paying customers, discouraging them from coming back is a net loss. Suppose your cabin includes a shower but you need to pay every day to actually use it. Nobody would think that’s reasonable, but because internet used to be difficult companies are still tacking on insane fees even though the actual costs are minimal.
With Starlink you’re looking at a lot more than 15mbps. We’re at the point where some cruise lines offer free Wi-Fi and people still see multi megabit connections anyway.
Commerce includes many unspoken agreements. Order a meal at a restaurant and expect to pay list prices +taxes etc, you don’t expect to be charged for using the salt on the table, or the price of a doggy bag etc. Airlines don’t charge people to go to the bathroom, though they may reserve better bathrooms for first class etc.
Companies breaking with these trends face a backlash assuming a competitive marketplace.
Reasonable is not wanting to be nickle and dimed for every amenity that could possibly be split into a separate cost.
Prices for such add-ons, especially ones that your average customer won't think of before, are also often unreasonably high because the operator knows they have a captive audience they can exploit - you either buy from them or go without.
Once my company instituted a per diem limit for meals while travelling, I stopped eating cheap food and would deliberately spend exactly the limit to spite the penny pinchers
> You're just hurting honest working class people trying to do work, email/call their kids, manage things like doctors appointments
Right, so they can do all that important stuff on technology that was invented by nerds and hackers over the decades, while they were being demonized by society, bullied, put down, and shoved aside by the so-called sociable class.
Yeah, I’ll continue not shedding tears over Joe Sixpack’s inability to check his football scores for a few minutes.
This is such an incredibly bizarre victimhood mindset that I feel like I must be misunderstanding it. Degrading a utility for everyone else is fine because of some perceived wrong by society done to your in group?
If you piss in the punch bowl at a party attended by your in group and perceived out group, you’re going to be justifiably hated by both.
It is a strange form of entitlement, not unlike incels.
Somehow people get in their mind that they are owed X, then spiral into bitterness and jealousy when they dont get it, and then lash out arbitrarily.
The part that I dont get is where the sense of entitlement comes from? Imagine such a deep sense of entitlement to free wifi on a boat that you feel the need to take revenge on innocents.
A more charitable view is that there are some people that grew up with BBS and then the Internet and it was just a very different place with a culture for which nerds could sort of call home and now it is decidedly not that thing and it can be kind of sad for some people.
I’m sympathetic to this point because I used to strongly have this feeling of “the Internet is for us nerds”, so I get it. I think that ship has sailed though, these people don’t even know about us or that we existed. I mean, the Internet is the most popular thing in the world but no one could tell you who Vint Cerf is, even so-called programmers today.
