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.
I have a theory that the key hit boxes slowly have error introduced to them over time.
Sort of like “my phone is slow” except not, because there’s no perceivable performance loss on iPhones other than battery degradation.
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.
Hello stranger what ‘ar ya buyin’ what ‘ar ya sellin’
kee-voh rogan woololooooo
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.
It’s obviously enough of a thing to warrant Google to crack down on it in both chrome and YouTube.
If it’s such a small problem, why spend the effort?
Just a few more billion dollars .
We’re so close!
Sony Bravia, not connected to any network, running in Pro Mode so it’s “just a TV”
Then a PC running plex and the arrs to substitute the streaming services.
If they know we have savings. They’ll just increase prices again to take them.
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.
Imo, the term “buy” for all goods should pass some sort of litmus test. Eg:
does the product being sold have the same properties as a brick?
- can the product be resold privately?
- can the product be lent to another user temporarily?
- would the product still perform its function when the manufacturer stops supporting it?
- would the product still perform its function if the manufacturer ceased to exist.
if the product does not pass all these tests, the customer is not buying. Consider using terms such as ‘rent’ or ‘lease’ or ‘subscription’
Explain what you want. It’s that easy.
I did many years of “I want something simple that I can maintain easily, and will still look ok when I drag my ass out of bed at 10am, an hour late for work. Anything but a buzz cut”
Eventually I found something that I can touch up at home myself, and can explain to even the shittiest of barbers.
It’s hair. Nobody really gives a shit. You’ll get some shit ones, some good ones, a buzz cut you explicitly didn’t want. Nobody got hurt, and it grows back.
If 2000 out of 5,000,000,000 images can be found, why couldn’t they be found before the dataset was published.
It’s America, so the answer is probably “No”.
Do you not have consumer protection laws?
We’ve had digital price tags for decades. But you couldn’t do this in NZ. Stores are obligated to sell you a product at the price they advertise it for AND have a reasonable quantity of units at that price… you couldn’t sell 1 TV for $1.
So these systems would need to track what price you saw it at.
(Caveat: Our stores are still cunts and have been found to overcharge people)
They are also IR controlled. A lot of them have a little window on the front of the unit, and an array of transmitters in the ceiling.
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”