"...tickets which the airlines have offered to sell to people traveling from point A to point B, and under terms which expressly prohibit jumping off at point C. "
That wasn't true in Australia for Unknown, and I doubt it is true anywhere.
Think of how impractical it would be. People have plans, but plans change. People miss flights. They get sick. They're hit by a bus. They just change their minds. So they'd all be opening themselves to litigation? That's not why people get on a plane.
" Terms that you generally have to check a box saying you're agreeing to."
See Lumifer's discussion of contracts, presumably in Common Law jurisdictions: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lne/how_to_save_a_lot_of_money_on_flying/bxo2
Non negotiated contracts are just not treated the same as negotiated contracts.
"In any event, my other point still stands: telling other people how to exploit anti-inductive loopholes is a dumb idea"
In most cases, no. I'm often struck by the cheek of people telling other people how stupid they are in the pursuit of their own values.
You're just making false assumptions about the values that people have. People often share information on tactical advantages that become marginally less advantageous the more other people know about them. They're not all stupid - they're generally just obtaining some value other than the value that comes from exercising the advantage when they communicate the advantage.
"you do not talk about anti-inductive loophole club, unless you stand to profit more from its promotion and eventual replacement than you do from the loophole itself"
No. Still wrong. You best decision is not determined by the worst case macro state on the loophole. People share deals primarily because they want to help other deal seekers win too. For many, that's a value.
I was going to wait to post this for reasons, but realized that was pretty dumb when the difference of a few weeks could literally save people hundreds, if not thousands of collective dollars.
If you fly regularly (or at all), you may already know about this method of saving money. The method is quite simple: instead of buying a round-trip ticket from the airline or reseller, you hunt down much cheaper one-way flights with layovers at your destination and/or your point of origin. Skiplagged is a service that will do this automatically for you, and has been in the news recently because the creator was sued by United Airlines and Orbitz. While Skiplagged will allow you to click-through to purchase the one-way ticket to your destination, they have broken or disabled the functionality of the redirect to the one-way ticket back (possibly in order to raise more funds for their legal defense). However, finding the return flight manually is fairly easy as the provide all the information to filter for it on other websites (time, airline, etc). I personally have benefited from this - I am flying to Texas from Southern California soon, and instead of a round-trip ticket which would cost me about $450, I spent ~$180 on two one-way tickets (with the return flight being the "layover" at my point-of-origin). These are, perhaps, larger than usual savings; I think 20-25% is more common, but even then it's a fairly significant amount of money.
Relevant warnings by gwillen:
Additionally, you should do all of your airline/hotel/etc shopping using whatever private browsing mode your web browser has. This will often let you purchase the exact same product for a cheaper price.
That is all.