Why the Needless Lies?

 On Facebook I often get ads for Humble Bundles.  The ads usually say something like, "Pay What You Want, Get $229 in Games!" The amount and what you get (games, books, comics, whatever) changes.  What doesn't change is this is a bald-faced lie.  You literally cannot "Pay what you want" to get that amount of stuff.  

Instead, there are tiers ranging from $1 on up to whatever, usually like $35-$65.  The tiers are spread out like $1, $10, $20, etc.  So what if I want to pay $0.01?  I get nothing.  What if I can only pay $2.53?  I only get the $1 tier.  I've replied to a few of their ads and never get any response from Humble Bundle.  And the brilliant responses from other people are like, "Learn to read!" or "You can pay what you want. You just dont get everything.  They never told anything else"  Or those really smart people who just laughing icon react without saying anything.

And to respond to them, obviously I did read it and it does literally say, "Pay What You Want, Get $229 in Games."  See the image above.  How can you interpret that to say, "Pay What You Want, You Won't Get Everything?"  In reality it should say, "Pay What You Want, Get UP TO $229 in games."  That would actually be accurate.

It's not that I'm saying Humble Bundle is bad, but it's a stupid, needless lie.  It's like when I talked about the Movie House app on Roku.  They advertise that you can get "free premium movies."  But in reality if you watch enough "standard" movies (ie, mostly indie pictures no one has heard of) you get a $5 gift card for Amazon or Vudu, which usually is not enough to watch the movies they advertise as "premium" for free.

In both cases, the lies seem really pointless because the truth is still pretty good.  Humble Bundle you pay some money and you get games or comics for a lot less than they retailed for.  Plus you support charity.  The Movie House, I get $5 gift cards with little effort that I use on the shit I routinely buy on Amazon.  So they're still good deals; it just bugs me that they lie.

There are so many other lies like these.  I probably mentioned somewhere before how yogurt companies use these whimsical names like "cherry cobbler," "Boston cream pie," "red velvet cake," or "Key Lime pie" when in reality they don't have anything to make them taste like cobbler, pie, or cake.  They're just cherry, custardy, red(?), and lime flavor.  Similarly I buy these keto-friendly jams by "SkinnyGirl" which also makes cocktails, so they give the flavors drink names like "apricot mimosa," "strawberry rose" (rose-eh, not rose), and "grape merlot."  In reality there's no alcohol in them so they're just apricot, strawberry, and grape.  But they're usually the same size and cheaper than other keto-friendly jams so what the hell.

Another one is Sling billing itself as "a la carte TV."  In reality like Humble Bundle or, you know, cable, you have to buy set packages.  Real "a la carte TV" would mean I can just buy the channels I want, which would not be many, hence why cable and Sling offer packages.  I mean, most of us would never actively subscribe to those stupid religious or shopping channels if they weren't included.  Fox "News," MSNBC, ESPN, etc would have a lot fewer subscribers if people weren't forced to get them in packages.  And in return those networks pay a kickback to Big Telecom.

Anyway, the point is we're surrounded by lies and so many of them are completely unnecessary.  What happened to "truth in advertising?"  Did it ever really exist? 

I suppose a lot of people shrug this off as, "What's the big deal?"  Well if we can't stop ourselves from lying about the little things, how are we going to stop lies about the big things?  You know, like saying the 2020 election was "rigged" or all the bullshit about vaccines and whatnot with the pandemic.  In my mind, we can't excuse lying about little things and complain about big lies.  We have to say all lying is wrong and try to be more honest about things.

And that ain't no lie.