>Cars: “The thing about automakers is that making cars safe is expensive. So they have an incentive to make unsafe cars.”

It took a lot of wrangling to get them to be safe. They were coffins on wheels for decades.

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loloquwowndueo 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I imagine someone could have leveraged that: 1. Build a safe car when no others are 2. Advertise like crazy “other cars will kill you - ours won’t!” 3. Profit?

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QuercusMax 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Wasn't that Volvo's whole thing? They invented the 3-point seatbelt and were always positioned as the safest car option when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.

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catigula 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The perfect information consumer knows Tik Tok doom scrolling, while pleasurable in the short term, actually hurts them in the long term, so that is, of course, a very unpopular application.

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loloquwowndueo 19 hours ago | parent [-]

I have no idea what you’re talking about here.

	▲	joshstrange 18 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think they are making a point about how very few, if any, consumers have "perfect information". I'm _guessing_ they are trying to say that even if you have a better product it doesn't matter but I'm not 100% sure and I'm not completely sure on how that fits in with your original comment. Maybe saying that even if you optimize for safety that people won't take that into account? Their comment itself is making a sarcastic statement about how few consumers there are with "perfect information" given TikTok's user-base (the same could be said for Temu or even Amazon). To be fair, I agree with their statement by itself, I'm having more trouble fitting its message into this thread.
	▲	catigula 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I constructed a direct falsification of the implicit premise, that capital allocation inherently produces good outcomes for individuals by competing well in the market. Whether or not you agree with my “perfect information” assertion is beside the point, it’s more so the trivial observation that really bad things sell really well.

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s1mplicissimus 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also, in their argument "unsafe" could be replaced with "environment polluting", and it would be just as true

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hamdingers 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And yet, car companies are still incentivized to make unsafe cars, at least in the US.

Bigger vehicles are more profitable, easier to advertise (for features and/or as a status symbol), suffer less emissions regulation. They also are more likely to kill pedestrians or occupants of other cars, and do significantly more damage to anything else they hit.

	▲	tonyedgecombe 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They aren't even that safe for the occupants, they are much more likely to turn over in an accident.