Old poker adage: "The more wild cards and crazy rules, the greater the expert's advantage."

Poker has nothing on Commercial Lawfare.

This reflects a common complaint in social engineering.

People keep trying to enact rules to stick it to the elites and make the downtrodden better off.

And as the rules get more and more complex, the position of the elites gets more and more solid.

Adding complexity is just one aspect. Everywhere there is someone whose job is to ensure the bottom line never changes and status quo for the powerful is preserved. Insurance, taxes, rents.. in the absence of effective regulation, the average number of successful appeals will simply get factored in and average costs go up so that profit stays the same and grows at the same rate as before. Similar to how chains factor in losses due to spoilage or theft.. of course they don't actually take a profit loss, they just price it in.

I really don't get people who see this kind of thing as empowering because in the end your (now strictly necessary) appeal with lawyers or AI to get a more fair deal just becomes a new tax on your time/money; you are worse off than before. A good capitalist will notice these dynamics, and invest in AI once it's as required for life as healthcare is, and then work on driving up the costs of AI. Big win for someone but not the downtrodden.

Exactly. The elites hire experts to do it for them, while everybody else has to deal with the complex rules themselves.

It's like auditting tax returns of the rich - of course they didn't cheat, they already lobbied for the loopholes making their shenanigans legal.

>It's like auditting tax returns of the rich - of course they didn't cheat, they already lobbied for the loopholes making their shenanigans legal.

The IRS disagrees every single year.

They say they can easily recover significant revenue from tax cheats if they were staffed and funded enough, to the point that every dollar you fund the IRS recovers 1.6 dollars.

The rich people who say they are just getting their fair deductions then refuse to fund the IRS.

If they weren't cheating, they wouldn't have to kneecap the IRS.

Oh wow, I had independently formulated that as the duality/parallel between corruption and cheat codes: "The more out-of-band information you need in order to be treated normally/fairly, the more corrupt the system is."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9933801

I suppose a saving grace there is that Medicare is incentivized to help people or at least not incentivized to provide the minimum amount of value for maximum profit.

Lol. Who do you think makes the Medicare rules?

CMS?

So what you're saying is we've injected a whole smorgasbord of electrical dumbasses into a system already rife with corruption, greed and exploitation that provides services no person can do without and is frustrating to use at every juncture.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.