The way Flickr is handling the unhappiness with the switchover to Yahoo accounts - a Flickr employee will be personally discounting unhappy pro users who would rather quit than switch, because the legal implications of the corporate entity Flickr giving money to customers are too expensive to figure out* - reminds me of this story on a Sun hardware donation remarkable because of the sound bite: "No offense, but the legal cost of any more 'terms' than above exceeds our cost of the hardware." and, if only slightly, of the recent proceed and permit letter from Linden Labs to spoof site get a first life. Distrust (and the papertrail that follows in its wake) is just waaaay to expensive to work in the long run. Even further away but still related, the recent spate of completely ridiculous paranoia. Distrust is very expensive.

At the personal level, can I get a show of hands: How many of you at one time or another purchased stuff your company needed to procure so you could do the job and never asked for money back? Simply because the bitching with procurement just wasn't worth your time? I know I have many, many times.

* Note: I realize there's a distrust angle to this too, if you're a well trained cynic: It's just a sinister to ploy to limit the refund, because people will respond kindly and not ask for their money back when it comes out of the pocket of a nice personal person - but I'm going with trust on this one, personally.

Bonus link: Photo uploaded by the flickr outrage discount person while all the hating is going on.

Bonus link II: Witness the psychological mechanisms that spin into action because there's a person in the process.