New Zealand’s largest private health insurance provider (Southern Cross) is “run on not-for-profit principles”.
It’s not terrible, and seems to work. I guess the caveat is that their competition is a (mostly) functioning public healthcare system.
A fish knows it is a fish, because that is basic self awareness to facilitate reproduction.
A fish does not know it is wet, because it does know there are alternatives.
What? That would be like saying Chris Hemsworth got “Thor’d” because that’s all he played in the MCU.
Belzer played way more than just Munch.
One of my devices uses three keys because out of the two local servers I have, they seem to go down every other month, so I need a failover.
Just a few more billion dollars .
We’re so close!
You appear to have eaten an Onion OP.
The Civilian is a satire site.
Social/Mobile games. So an already predatory industry. Let’s get people addicted to a game, and then suck as much money from them as possible.
In the industry, we definitely weren’t the only ones doing it. And really we were only doing basic stuff (it was all in house developed middleware, so effort vs reward didn’t make much sense to go hard) I wouldn’t be surprised if others were going deep.
Everything was broken down into campaigns (we’d have multiple running at any one time) targeting different segments. Then we’d track the conversion, sale, and retention numbers of those campaigns against each other. Sometimes one campaign might flop for one segment but not another, so we’d retarget with a new one.
I don’t think it’s used much in other markets. I know Twilio has Segment, that could be used to do segmented pricing but I’ve never really seen it done in other industries.
I wouldn’t say it’s jaded me. It has made me conscious of my data footprint. I don’t play mobile or f2p games. But I am weary. The COVID greed-flation showed the mindset of businesses. It might not be long until targeted pricing becomes worthwhile to make number go up (still), and hidden under the guise of “lowering prices”.
You don’t need a monopoly for this to be a problem.
Databrokers can offer data sets of “customer price elasticity”. Tables of “how much we think X would spend on these generic item categories”. Eg “booly would pay $15 for a burger, vs $10 average”
Point of Sale systems could start offering integrations to these data sets.
All shops have to do now is set a list price, a minimum price, a category, and leave it up to the PoS to (not) give discounts.
You want a burger, you’re fed a single-use short lived discount “$5 off a $20 burger. Today only” While someone else gets “buy one get one free”.
It’s then a ‘fair’ market. Shops have and ‘compete’ with their (high) list prices, data brokers compete with “excess profit” statistics (ie, how much more money above the minimum price they made). Nobody is colluding, they’re just basing discounts off external arbitrary signals.
It slowly becomes the norm to get just-in-time discounts, and the consumer gets shafted. If you’re not in the system, you’re paying more than everyone else.
(And all of this has been happening in some markets for over a decade)
In a past life I wrote the software that did this.
It’s not just about charging more when you’re desperate. It’s also things like charging you less to keep you addicted, or getting you hooked. Exploiting your emotions and behaviour to make it effective. A small loss on you now could be a long time gain for them.
Some more scenarios:
The data available back then was pretty minimal, effectively only the data we generated. But it was still enough to prey on your lizard brain. With data brokerage I’ve got no idea what level of evils we could have done.
Same volume, just increased length but reduced girth.
Why would it result in zero women playing? I’m not suggesting you merge the women’s teams with the open team.
But have it so your women’s teams performance counts just as much as the men’s.
Two teams (men’s and women’s), each playing against their own gender, scoring points in one league.
No point paying your dudes millions per season to get the best players if your women’s team sucks and loses every game.
Get teams and fans an incentive to invest and in both genders by playing for the same trophy.
Why does nobody watch the women’s leagues? Is it because nobody else does? can’t have all the social aspects of sports if nobody else is doing it.
Imo, they need to stop the segregation. Ditch the women’s leagues, but keep the games and teams. Have both teams play in one league, and contribute to the overall score of the team.
It’ll add new strategy to the seasons. Spend all of your budget on the dudes and hope they keep winning despite the ladies; build a strong women’s team to carry your b-tier men’s team; or something in between.
Man outraged map of Western Seaboard doesn’t contain directions to the moon.
Take what HR says with a grain of salt.
If they’re gaming H1B, They’re not gonna say “yeah we’re faking it to get cheap indentured immigrants to work for us”.
The number 3 doesn’t exist at Valve
What kind of bizarre trinket cabinet did your teacher have.
“And today kids I brought in Howard. His job is to measure tolerances on every B22 lightbulb to come out of the local GE lightbulb factory”
Not entirely true.
In some countries (UK, NZ) Uber has to give you the price of the journey up front. Whereas taxis are metered and do not.
Uber UK has competition in thin regard with Minicabs, but the minicab apps are still shit.
Capped costs for consumers is a competitive advantage over taxis, and Uber has managed to find the sweet spot between hailing a taxi, and booking a minicab.
Because you’re only ‘exposing’ the port on the peer to peer network.
You “publish” a port to holesail, then clients have to create a local proxy via holesail before they can access it.
I agree, It’s a dumb pointless claim. But I don’t think it’s misleading.
It looks like holesail is just tailscale, but on a much smaller scale. It’s not networks, it’s just ports.
Yep, This is taken straight from Facebooks advertisements circa 2018, maybe still today.
Because their jobs financing is mostly perception based.
Crime can be at an all time low, but all it takes is a politician to rile up the population about murderers and law enforcement and incarceration will end up getting more money.
Be seen as being ineffective, soft or incompetent, especially by those holding the purse strings, and people lose jobs to those who will toe the line.
This is a message to the wealthy “look how seriously we take serving you”