I bought a visa prepaid debit card that's expiring in a month. I have a bank account. How do I get the money from the debit card (anonymous, not attached to my name and has no online account associated with it) into my bank account? There's no payment gate in my online bank account.

Has anybody donated a car to charity before (in the US? CA in particular, but I imagine it'll generalize outside of location-specific charities).

The general advice online is useful but not very narrowly-tailored. Couple points I'm looking for information on:

1) Good charities (from an EA perspective)

2) Clarification on the tax details (when car's fair market value is between $500 and $5000)

Would appreciate any advice.

Missing actor/incentive structure:

Our current justice system is largely based on the idea of retribution, not rehabilitation. This is a trade-off where the State delivers vengeance for victims/families of victims to prevent vigilante justice. It may not make much sense in terms of impact today, but as a cultural norm it still exists and this idea does nothing to address that.

Other thoughts:

Does not really address "recidivism" of victimless crimes, including most drug crimes, except in the most general sense. Convincing people that smoking weed is morally wrong is much harder than convincing them that murder is morally wrong.

No one is saying "I will fly these routes"; they're saying "I will buy these tickets".

...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. Terms that you generally have to check a box saying you're agreeing to.

In any case, the part that makes it deception is that the seller wouldn't consent to the sale if you told them what you were up to. If your general approach to interacting with people is that you'll happily deceive them in order to get better terms in your deals, then by all means proceed.

If you want to say, "well, I don't think an airline is an entity deserving of weight in my moral calculation", fine. But let's not pretend that the act itself is not a matter of obtaining consent through false pretenses, one that we would roundly condemn in another context, where our moral intuition is more inclined to see the object of the deception as a powerless victim instead of a powerful entity that can afford to be deceived.

At the very best, you could maybe say that what you're doing is Not Technically Lying.

In any event, my other point still stands: telling other people how to exploit anti-inductive loopholes is a dumb idea, even if your moral calculus doesn't cover the entities upon whom the loophole is being practiced.

PUAs, for example, became victims of their own success when they promoted canned pickup routines to the point that every bar-going female in an area began hearing the same routines regularly from different men, and every stock market strategy destroys itself if it becomes popular enough. Presumably both PUAs and traders -- even if they don't place any moral weight on the welfares of their respective "prey" -- do not benefit from having their techniques become irrelevant, and having to develop new ones.

(OTOH, I suppose people who train PUAs or traders actually do benefit from the churning of methods that results... so I guess the rule should be, "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". But that's getting a bit longwinded and off-point.)

Anyway, I think that some people have drawn the inference that I have a moral objection to people cheating the airlines. I think it's more accurate to say that I think people who cheat the airlines and then talk about it in public are behaving irrationally.

IOW, I'm not so much saying OP is evil, as I'm saying OP is not evil enough. HPMOR!Quirrel's rule number two is "Don't brag", after all. ;-)

If I knew about an awesome loophole of this nature, I would absolutely not post it on lesswrong. I would not even post it on a super-secret private forum for people who figure out awesome loopholes for exploiting airlines. You cannot unshare a secret.

Not every revealed loophole is as anti-inductive as stock market strategies. Ad blockers, for example, probably won't destroy the internet unless a major browser vendor includes one and turns it on by default. But if you gain substantial value from a loophole, and you already consider your welfare more important than that of others, it's an unnecessary risk to publicize the loophole -- especially if it involves revealing to the public that you are exploiting that loophole.

It occurs to me, though, that by arguing about this, I may be making a similar meta-level error as Eliezer did when he deleted the basilisk. By arguing the point, I may have actually brought more attention to the topic, rather than less, while failing to actually educate anyone about the stupidity of the underlying ideas (either the loophole itself, or talking about loopholes).

Perhaps the more important rule is, "Do not try to silence people talking about fight club, because that just makes people more interested in fight club."

So on that note, I'm going to abandon this thread altogether.

Just to check: there's no issue with leaving the flight at the "layover" instead of continuing to your final destination? I mean, I have no objection whatsoever to confusing somebody's database of "where cbhacking is supposed to be" but if it would lead to legal hassles or similar inconveniences I'd like to know.

How should I contact Vassar regarding my willingness to follow his lead regarding whatever projects he deems sensible?