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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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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