'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

I don't disagree with any of this. And if we're talking early stage, founder-led startups, I'll grant that this may not apply. It's most relevant to large, board-led corporations, and it's also not necessarily zero-sum: it's up to regulators to set the rules such that sociopathic businesses benefit their shareholders and their customers.

My proviso that businesses tend to act like sociopaths _even if no one who works there is a sociopath_ is important.

Suppose I go to pick up coffee, but on the way to the stand I see a homeless man and decide he could use the money more than me, so I give him the money instead of getting coffee. Everyone wins: homeless man gets money, I get a feeling of satisfaction that is presumably better than the coffee.

Now suppose instead of getting myself coffee, I was actually getting coffee for my boss, who'd given me $5 for it. Suppose that if either I or my boss had been getting _our own_ coffee, we'd choose to give the homeless man our money instead.

The only scenario where he doesn't get our money is when I'm acting on behalf of my boss: my boss gave me a task, and I can't choose to give my boss's money away -- not even if that's what I would do in my boss's shoes, and not even if that's what my boss would do.

When I act on behalf of my boss, I'm less charitable than either of us individually.

I'm just trying to illustrate what happens when you have an agent-principal relationship, which is the situation that public corporations are in.

Now, perhaps my boss and I have an agreement such that if I see a suitably sympathetic looking homeless person, I can alter the coffee mission and give them the money instead. But the the number of potential situations that could arise exceeds the number of prior agreements we could conceivably have, and ultimately in the face of uncertainty my default position has to be 'do what the boss said'.

The scenario was between me and my boss, but the analogy is for the relationship between the board of directors and the shareholders. It's not practical for the (millions of) shareholders to communicate their specific desires in every potential circumstance to the board. The board's default mission is 'enhance shareholder wealth'. Thus _on average_ the board's decisions will probably be less charitable than those of any individual board member or individual shareholder if they weren't acting on someone else's behalf. See the Milgram experiment, for example.

The reality is that for most shareholders, the company is just an anonymous component of their retirement fund, and all they want is for it to go up. Super funds generally don't even tell you what companies you're invested in.

So the average shareholder does not want the board of directors they've never met of a company they don't even know they own to decide without consultation to give THEIR retirement money to a (figurative) homeless person who the board decided was more worthy of the shareholder's money than the shareholder. They just want their retirement fund to grow, and this is what the boards of these companies have been tasked with: if the shareholders want to be charitable, they can do that on their own.

Enhancing shareholder wealth doesn't have to be zero-sum: in a free market, transactions should be beneficial to both parties. You give customers something they want, and customers pay you for it. Everybody wins. It's up to regulators to set rules such that legal methods of enhancing shareholder wealth don't include exploitation.

I’m scrubs, I’m an addict. Spent my youth programming, going from language to language.

I was learning and it led me to jobs and I’m grateful for that, but my memories of youth is me in a dark room in front of a big monitor and a buzzing light that never really worked right.

I have almost no other memories of it.

was it worth spending my youth so that I could be 15% more productive at some firm?

Even now I come home, kiss my gf and then sit in front of the computer to chase the next big thing, mostly because when I come home I am to tired to do anything else than just programming.

There was some research on HN where they found that programming (successful run/compilation) led to similar dopamine boosts as gambling.

My neck, back and hands all hurt, but I do what I always do.

I am interested in making games, and looking at market data, either you can build a good game and pray you get lucky, or you can make a much easier game and build in pay to win and hope you get lucky.

It's much easier to make a pay to win game, so I could try a few times more than by trying to make a good game off the bat.

People just don't like to pay money up front, so getting them to start for free and then adding in the paid features to skip past your intentional delays is a pretty strong tactic to get people to pay when they otherwise wouldn't. I just refuse to do it because I find it unethical.

> Did McDonalds create a "Diabetes increases sales" video? Because AAA and mobile games did.

The video linked is just one person in the industry. I'm sure you could find 100 videos on seductive advertising to get people to spend money on other stuff. I'm not sure your point here.

Any other company could still be using those tactics without publishing a video about it.

If I go to McDonald's website right now, I can find a position open for "Us Marketing, Consumer Insights Associate". One of the responsibilities:

* Develop, manage and execute consumer insights plan to understand trends, consumer attitudes and behaviors, key functional and emotional requirements, consumption occasions, and translate those learnings into insights to be used as foundations to drive future growth

And some requirements:

* Strong understanding of behavioral science standard methodologies

* MBA (preferred), Marketing Research or related field (e.g. Psychology, Anthropology, Behavioral/Cognitive Science, Statistics) or Strategy.

So they are to study consumers and their behaviors, then to use that to drive business growth. They also clearly want someone who understands human behavior, presumably so they can leverage that to get people to spend more money.