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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

It's more like you ordered a book on Amazon, but it was shipped from Wal-Mart instead.

You still got your book. These people got their psychic readings. Just from a different source.

Can you prove that the different source was of lower quality, for something that you can't prove quality for in the first place?

It reminds me of famous artists where a lot of their work was done by assistants.

Should I be able to sue a celebrity when their autobiography was ghostwritten but that wasn't publicly disclosed? Or when their tweet is written by a publicist? We seem to have decided the answer to that is no.

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Ah but psychic readings are personal comissions, not mass marketable!

I ordered a cat scratcher. Cat scratchers are perfectly commodity things.. but mine wasn't. I ordered a handmade one. What I got shipped was a repurchase from Wayfair.

I sent a single picture of the box and got a full refund.

Yes, I got a cat scratcher but the handmade part was a material term of the deal.

Paying someone to do a psychic reading is not buying a paragraph of text. You are buying an action.

If you hire someone to tweet original tweets on your behalf and they just use a bot to retweet random clever sayings... they have in fact engaged in fraud!

Not sure if using cat scratcher as fictional example or actually ordered a handmade cat scratcher...

Oh, so my cats are all insanely big cats. I don't mean fat, I mean big. They knock over cat scratchers all the time (and then go on to scratch other things like furniture).

I also wanted a cat scratcher with a perch on top so my oldest can sit at the same height as the dining room table - he likes sitting near me at meals but I also don't want him on the table.

So yeah I needed a cat scratcher with a certain base size and a specific height and have no interest in a woodworking project. Instead I just wanted to pay $50 to have someone else make it.

(The other cat scratchers I buy are $70 a pop so really not a cost issue. At that point you get a cat scratcher that lasts 5+ years, looks nice and is big enough my cats will actually use it)

Thank you for satisfying my curiosity. I totally understand. A lot of the pet products you buy in the big box stores are really cheap crap.

Nobody has the ability to give you a psychic reading because psychic readings don't exist.

I'm glad you brought up the paragraph of text because are literally buying a fictional paragraph. It can say anything and will still be a psychic reading.

I'm struggling to understand how you can equate something that isn't real and something that's tangible.

I pay you to produce for me a drawing of a Blorgen.

You think on this for a while and decide that instead of drawing a Blorgen, you are going to grab a random Google image and send it to me. That's fraud.

But let's say you draw the Blorgen instead. What's a Blorgen? No idea. Maybe you draw a lizard person. Maybe it's an abstract piece.

Even if you and I disagree on what a Blorgen is, the situation is no longer fraud.

If I hire you to do a psychic reading for me and you decide to get naked, walk around a bonfire 3 times and then stream of consciousness pronounce whatever is in your head.. great. You did the commission.

Even if your psychic fortune is "electric badgers like rock n roll radio", man, I have some issues but fraud ain't one.

Blorgen is clearly an interpretation of something and a tangible piece of art.

Psychic predictions are never psychic predictions because psychic predictions don't exist.

Nobody in the universe can give you a psychic prediction.

Hired into a place that had a crazy active astrology slack channel. Those people would believe anything as long as it wasn’t traditional mainstream.

Of course they also told me how upset they were to hire a white man, something I wish they had mentioned Before hiring. so that kind of set the tone.

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