I think you meant to say "That it is parasitic is factual if I make a bunch of assumptions about AVIS' profit margin and intent, as well as OP's past and future business dealings with AVIS. That hypothetical parasitism is immoral is my opinion."
As you get more practice making distinctions between what's true and what's opinion, I think you'll find it easier to interact with different viewpoints from your own :)
Continuing to be an anonymous, smug, superior dick is not improved by putting smiley-faces at the end of it. If you're actually trying to be helpful, then start with enough respect that you consider that I might have already considered carefully the boundaries of opinion and fact.
In your 12 comments on this thread, you called OP or likened him to a parasite, immoral, exploitative, wasteful, crazy, a pickpocket, a medical quack, net negative to our society, a con artist, a scam artist, a Nigerian scammer, "why we can't have nice things", morally bereft, manipulative, a time waster, a waster of resources, and selfish.
I responded to this by asserting that you were making those claims by making large assumptions about AVIS, OP's mental state / situation, and OP's past and future dealings with AVIS.
I simply don't see how you can know the things your claiming to know without access to that information. For example, you'd need to have an answer to: did AVIS make a profit on all this?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10215662 would seem to imply AVIS did make a profit, and OP is overvaluing airline miles in an economic sense. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10221662 calls it into question from a different perspective.
If I was wrong in assuming you don't have that information, please correct me and post it! I will happily read through it and perhaps join you in judging OP. If you don't have the information, but feel there that the information is not necessary, please describe how and I'll read it and respond. If neither of these is true, please consider adding caveats to your statements in future. It will help others understand you, and make debates more fruitful (#include the replies to your other comments on this thread)
I don't normally engage with people making schoolyard-type statements, but did so in this case because it felt like my civic duty -- it matters to me that HackerNews remain a place for intelligent discussions. As you are probably aware, my intent with the ":)"s were not to be mean but rather to let you know I didn't have a problem with you as a person, only with your specific behavior. It's hard to call out behavior civilly, but I tried (and think I succeeded) in this case. That you then proceeded to call me snotty, smug, and a superior dick is only serving to prove my point: you're assuming, and mistaking those assumptions for reality.
I agree you don't see it, but I don't think that merits your insulting assumptions and language about me and what I know.
To see this guy as acting parasitically, all you need do is take him at his word. He has a calculated economic value for the miles that is far larger than what he paid for them. He himself believes that Avis values them and would see him as a scammer, which is why he carefully limited the size of his grift and energetically persuaded employees to do things that they realized made no sense. I don't see anything wrong with assuming that he's right.
To double-check, though, there are plenty of reasonable estimates on what air miles actually cost out on the web, and the guy's estimate of the economic value is in line with those. And Avis's promotion looks like a pretty typical customer acquisition thing where you pay some sort of initial acquisition cost and hope to make your money back over time. They did not acquire 37 customers here, or even 1, so the guy is entirely reasonable in thinking that Avis would stop him if he did this at scale.
So the balance of the evidence is that 37rentals is, as he himself thinks, scamming Avis out of a lot of miles. Is this CERN-level proof? No, but I don't think it's necessary here. We're on a forum, discussing another forum post. My assumptions are reasonable and are based on my many years in business. If you have evidence for other assumptions you'd like to make, godspeed. But for a guy wrongly in a lather about supposed no-evidence assertions, you are making a lot of no-evidence assertions yourself. Anonymously, of course.
When I saw you'd replied here, I excitedly checked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10218108 to see if you'd also given saurik a reply. Alas, no. You choose to reply here stating you believe OP agrees with your assumptions, while ignoring more detailed replies to your position.
For my part, I think that if OP agreed with you he wouldn't have done it. This whole thing reminds me of a discussion I once had about doctors who perform abortions... Some people find it very hard to understand the other side doesn't agree that life begins at conception, and wrongly conclude abortion doctors must believe they're committing murder.
It's always easier to brush other positions off as too verbose, or too anonymous, or too whatever. It's much harder (but much more valuable) to consider the problem and data at length, and come to a new truth. This is what differentiates science from the tinkering which proceeded it.
> Is this CERN-level proof? No, but I don't think it's necessary here. We're on a forum, discussing another forum post.
This is what I was talking about when I said "it matters to me that HackerNews remain a place for intelligent discussion" above -- to me HN isn't just some online forum; the standards we should hold ourselves to are much higher. We're here to learn and relate. If you'd acted this way on reddit I wouldn't have taken issue... but on HN it pains me to see this kind of behavior. The other side of your holy war is not inherently immoral.
I think you meant to say "That it is parasitic is factual if I make a bunch of assumptions about AVIS' profit margin and intent, as well as OP's past and future business dealings with AVIS. That hypothetical parasitism is immoral is my opinion."
As you get more practice making distinctions between what's true and what's opinion, I think you'll find it easier to interact with different viewpoints from your own :)