Last year, I wrote about the astrology that brought down AshleyMadison.com, a website dedicated to the proposition that if people (men, mostly) were going to cheat on their spouses, someone might as well make a buck off of it. On the one hand, this sounds like one of the basic principles of capitalism that we all know and love — if there is a demand, someone will find a way to bill you for the supply. On the other hand, AshleyMadison.com also reflected another tenet of capitalism — buyer beware.
You can read that blog entry here, but as it turns out that wasn’t at all the end of the story. Like herpes, Ashley Madison is the gift that keeps on giving. Avid Life Media, the parent company, bought the site on August 1st, 2007. That chart (as I described in the previous blog entry on this subject) took some hard hits last July when the site was hacked, revealing that the vast majority of women on there were in fact totally fake.
But Ashley Madison bounced back. They’re still in business. They’re even running TV ads that make them look just enough like a respectable, legitimate dating site… but still don’t ignore the whole cheating angle. Times are tough though, and that’s why a New York court cut them some slack on a settlement today to some of its users, cutting the settlement from $16 million to $1.65 million. Why the lawsuit? Because if married people wanted to delete their accounts to hide the evidence, the site would charge them nineteen dollars to do so — yet the site would retain that information for up to twelve months afterwards, anyway.
Lucky you, Ashley Madison.
The site is now having some great transits. It will be having its Saturn Trine throughout most of next year (making for solid and steady progress) and Pluto continues to sextile the site’s natal North Node and (probably) Moon… meaning it will find new customers. Unless of course the parent sells it — but in corporate terms, that would still make it a “good” year ahead for Ashley Madison.
So: despite the rip-offs, despite the notoriety, despite the immorality of it all, the cheaters are still willing to part with their cash to help them cheat. Welcome to the post-truth era, folks. Welcome to The Age Of Neptune.