Could you describe the exact gutting mechanism? This is basic private equaty. You buy a business that performs poorly, fire a ton of people and salvage whatever is left. Then you sell the business. How exactly do you buy a business that is allegedly not performing poorly, make it run worse and make money out of it? This is some high tier insane rambling.
The way you subscribe might be an issue. Amazon Video does what Netflix is starting to do and it’s a royal pain in the ass to use their iOS app. If the movie is included into your Prime subscription, you’re fine. If it’s not, you find it, figure out that you have to buy it separately, close the app, go to Safari, open Amazon, find it again among mountains of trash you don’t need, buy it and only then watch it in the app. It’s a ginormous pain in the ass.
Just FYI: cash is considerably more expensive than credit cards once you account for security. A better comparison is accepting Visa and Amex without charging more for the latter.
OK, how about this. Consider your children as adults, do you think they will be happy that their entire life from birth to their current adult age, has been monitored and analysed and they have been subject to targeted manipulative advertising and many corporations know exactly how to manipulate them.
Unless they are age 18-25 and are going through the Che T-shirt phase, yeah, most likely. I assume that was a question, even though there was no question mark. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure not to raise to by a socially dysfunctional nut either.
Both data collection and advertisements have been getting better and better at their tasks since the beginning of mankind. Any historian will tell you that it is a lot easier to research about a man or note living in 1800 than about one living in 1700. This is a continuous process and it really only seem to bother two groups: old people and people who are not in the work force. You seem to be under this impression that the status quo you were born into and thus your normal is the same for the people a generation before and a generation after you.
I think you may want to read up a bit more on Stauffenberg if you think that he was trying to courageously face some evil, bud. Also great example of naming two idiots who got themselves killed, whereas a large number of “nice” people lived into the postwar and spent their summers shagging Italian girls on the beach.
Sure they are doing fine. Insurers and investment banks have to be large to underwrite certain projects. The insurers’ FCF is not particularly impressive though, so it’s hardly a branch that is exploiting some kind of monopoly or does not suffer from races to the bottom as the previous poster implied.
Mostly, but not entirely. A large number of insurance contracts are really just a way of indirectly investing into productive assets. You can get a life insurance at the age of 70 that pays out in case of death from natural causes. We all know that it’s not really an insurance at this point, but it is still profitable for both the insurer and the insured due to asset appreciation vis-a-vis just holding cash. But mostly, yes, it kind of just a brokerage when the risk is determined perfectly.
Rick, I am truly hurt that I went from being “okay” in your book to being some kind of Slashdot saboteur working for the Bilderbergers. Clearly, the one thing people always want at a social gathering of any kind is a fucking preacher, whether it is some loony uncle who can’t stop yapping about Jesus, the Japanese whale hunting or how the corporations are spying on you. Everybody just loves those people at a party. Thank you for your service.
A status quo that can, and would, go away with IPv6 widespread adoption.
Do you want to make a ten thousand dollar bet that it will not go away in ten years time when IPv4 is deader than VHS? Put your money where your mouth is.
Oh boy, I think you are a lost cost. If a company operates on a shoestring and finds a way to make additional income, thus increasing their margin, other companies copy that behavior and reduce the price until it reaches it minimum sustainable value. At this point it stops being lucrative. Effectively the customer is choosing this product over others because it offers him more (value proposition and functionality) for less (data collection). This is the reason why people use free webmail instead of some paid service or running their own mail server. How is this a difficult concept for you to understand? There is no such thing as “lucrative” business practices in anything but the immediate short term.
That’s amazing that you think so, but I am yet to see a popular product that actually has the characteristics you are describing. I guess everybody, including yourself, just hates money and doesn’t want to ship one.
No, I do not understand what you mean by “lucrative” and you are still not making a lot of sense.
Lucrative means that someone is making money. To make money through IoT, they need to deliver products to the end users (even if they do so for free and live off ad revenue). The company that offers a more appealing product ships more products than its competitors. Thus, if shipping products that are collecting data is more lucrative than shipping products that do not collect data—according to your own statement—consumers seem to be preferring products that collect data. Finally, everyone ships products that collect data, at which point it is no longer lucrative because the margin is driven down to its economic minimum.
So, no, I don’t understand what you mean. Could you please explain this a bit more? It seems that everyone, except a small group of privacy evangelists still stuck in the 20th century, is very happy with the situation.
You are fooling yourself if you think that end users want to control any kind of server. How many people do you think even know what a server is? Joe Doe wants things that do things and do them easily. That’s it.
That is hardly because of competition not working out. Insurance is highly regulated and difficult to enter. Same as banks. It is competitive enough to offer very slim margins though. You are more than welcome to buy stocks of Continental, AXA or whatever if you think they are doing that great.
Most countries do allow minors to drink alcohol if allowed by the parent. Don’t know where you are getting that from. Many more allow minors to drive at 16 if supervised too.
You seem to be fixated on the fact that having a toy that monitors your health will have some magical effects once someone turns 18. It will not. If your health is bad when you are 17, it will be bad when you are 18. If it gets better when you are 19, so will your premiums. Obesity is merely the clearest example of how this works. It’s a bit more difficult to get better lungs after becoming a chain smoker at the age of 12 due to quality parenting.
I already get a discount on my premiums. It’s not a question of “if”, it’s a question of “how” and “how much”. I am perfectly willing to make concessions to fat slobs to pay less into the pension fund based on their estimated life expectancy and correct that awful inequality determined by the undoubtedly fair and balanced BBC study.
I have absolutely no problem with your lala land scenario. The government derives its power from the people who vote it in. If they want to vote in an authoritarian dictatorship, more power to them. I can always live and work somewhere else, if the conditions it sets up are against my interests. As a matter of fact, I already am in a country where I have to pay considerably less for fat slobs than I did a few years ago. My taxes are also collected here. Amazing how it works, isn’t it?
It isn’t focused on only those conditions. I have specifically listed genetic illnesses, which I presumed most would assume to mean the general category of “things that aren’t your fault”.
You are confusing two points though. One is how you treat genetic illnesses, which is not the job of the insurer. It is a question of whether or not you socialize that aspect of healthcare, which I frankly think that we should socialize (I do not have any either, AFAIK).
The other point is whether insurers reject customers based on irresperentitive data. This is almost entirely a non-issue, because it would be solved by competition in a very short time frame. If one erratic heartbeat at age 4 means that you are very likely to suddenly die or become perpetually hospitalized at age 21—short of socialized healthcare—the insurer absolutely should increase premiums. If not, a different insurer will gladly take you and the former will eventually lose their market position causing an amendment of their policies. This is a literal non-issue.
I disagree entirely. A minor who cannot make decisions that impact their future also does not pay their health insurance premiums. Whatever additional costs would arise would be carried by the parent, who coincidentally is also responsible for making sure their children don’t become morbidly obese to begin with. Moreover, the decisions of the parents already shape the future of the child to such an enormous degree that turning 18 with your health data already avaible to insurers is hardly anywhere near as critical as how well you did in school, how healthy you are irrespective of premiums and what kind of person you were raised to become.
Except for the most extreme cases when actual abuse is taking place, the “societal norms” you mention always dictated that the parents can do whatever it is they bloody like with their child. Messing up their future insurance premiums is just another one of the things on that list.
What do you mean less lucrative? They are all equally lucrative, because it is an even playing field. You could very easily start playing the privacy game and be “more lucrative” by gathering less information. Apple has been doing this very thing since the FBI investigation. Let’s see how well that works out for them in the long term.
Can we be a little more precise when it comes to how these businesses are generating so much money—they aren’t, they are actually shit in a dress, check the PE ratios on publicly traded IoT-only firms—instead of going on with this ominous “Blabla data sell Blabla tracking” nonsense? It is painfully obvious that it is 1.) easier for the user to deploy devices that connect to a central server and 2.) collected data can be used for improvement purposes.
First of all, I didn’t ask you, so it is really not your place to ask questions in return.
Secondly, the entire premise of your question is laughable at best. There is no improvement to shareholders of the insurance sector in general if the insurance companies in aggregate have a greater ability to correctly price individual clients. It will be an aggregate, because adoption of such superior information about one’s clients would immediately spread through the industry like wildfire. The only thing that changes is whether the costs for more expensive clients are carried by less expensive clients or correctly priced for the more expensive clients. I don’t think you understand the insurance business very well if you think they will just toss away customers rather than offer them a different rate in absence of some kind of pseudo-socialist detrimental legislation along the lines of “rate X for all or don’t service”. You could be a pyromaniac and I will offer you fire insurance, assuming you pay accordingly.
Essentially you have three possibilities:
1. Insurers can’t correctly price existing clients due to lacking the data and thus socialize costs.
2. Insurers can price in correctly and the society deems it best to not subsidize individuals with reckless attitudes towards their health. The fat slobs pay more as a result.
3. Insurers can price in correctly and the society deems it best to subsidize individuals with reckless attitudes towards their health. The society voluntarily pays fat slobs’ additional costs.
The current situation is the 1. with regard to fitness activity. 1. and 3. are identical in terms of cost distribution, but the reasons for them are different. One is based on obscurity and lying through omission, the other on transparency and empathy.
Now frankly, I think that the latter two scenarios are fairer. I would rather not subside slobs, but if the society as a whole decides to legislate that slobs should be taken care off at my cost, so be it. I can always move somewhere else if things get too socialist for me. In either case, everyone is making an education decision, as opposed to a bunch of freeloaders siphoning away my salary by eating nothing but grease.
Or, you know, because collecting data actually allows you to improve the service. Do you even for a minute think that Google’s search would be anywhere even near as good as it is now if they didn’t collect data for the past twenty years? The same thing is happening with (home) assistants now, which are kind of the center piece of IoT. You need usage data to make those things better.
Explain to me why insurance companies knowing less about those who they insure is a good thing? Do you think the industry isn’t competitive enough to drive down costs?
I take care of my health: get checkups, stay active, don’t do drugs, don’t smoke and drink about one drink a month for business purposes. As a matter of fact, my insurance actually provides me with a discount if I can prove at least some of those things by providing dentists’ receipts and taking part in a weekly jogging session with a group that checks for attendance. I don’t do the latter, because it would mean that I would have to go somewhere by car for thirty minutes instead of just running around the river close to my home. I also don’t want to do group yoga and would much rather just give them access privs to my fitness tracker so they can see that I am not sitting on my ass all day.
So, again, explain to me why I should pay more for insurance so that somebody can sit on his ass and eat candy all day? If you want coverage for genetic illnesses that you have no control over, sure, let’s socialize health care for genetic illnesses. It is not the same thing as socializing being a fat disgusting sloth by making me pay for someone’s Hershey’s-induced diabetes meds.
Alexa, turn on the TV.
Dave, the NSA is watching you. You should really consider getting a non-smart TV. What channel?
Alexa, what time is it?
It’s 5:30 AM. By the way, did you know that the police are just state-sponsored murderers who commit post crimes at night?
Alexa, how do I get to the post office?
First, make sure to wear a mask made out of a hard material to fool the surveillance cameras. Then, check if you have enough cash to pay for the gas. Never use a credit card. At the post office, write a faux return address. Generating faux return address now
Alexa, who is the president of the United States?
Let me check that for you. According to an Anonymous Coward, “the president of the United States is a massive faggot authoritarian and so are you”.
You must be one of those really popular people at family gatherings. One can already feel the condescending, self-righteous glance seeping through the letters of your post. It is that IT guy who uses DuckDuckGo and must absolutely tell everyone with a broken power supply why they should stop using Google, whether they asked for advice or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you describe the exact gutting mechanism? This is basic private equaty. You buy a business that performs poorly, fire a ton of people and salvage whatever is left. Then you sell the business. How exactly do you buy a business that is allegedly not performing poorly, make it run worse and make money out of it? This is some high tier insane rambling.
The way you subscribe might be an issue. Amazon Video does what Netflix is starting to do and it’s a royal pain in the ass to use their iOS app. If the movie is included into your Prime subscription, you’re fine. If it’s not, you find it, figure out that you have to buy it separately, close the app, go to Safari, open Amazon, find it again among mountains of trash you don’t need, buy it and only then watch it in the app. It’s a ginormous pain in the ass.
Just FYI: cash is considerably more expensive than credit cards once you account for security. A better comparison is accepting Visa and Amex without charging more for the latter.
OK, how about this. Consider your children as adults, do you think they will be happy that their entire life from birth to their current adult age, has been monitored and analysed and they have been subject to targeted manipulative advertising and many corporations know exactly how to manipulate them.
Unless they are age 18-25 and are going through the Che T-shirt phase, yeah, most likely. I assume that was a question, even though there was no question mark. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure not to raise to by a socially dysfunctional nut either.
Both data collection and advertisements have been getting better and better at their tasks since the beginning of mankind. Any historian will tell you that it is a lot easier to research about a man or note living in 1800 than about one living in 1700. This is a continuous process and it really only seem to bother two groups: old people and people who are not in the work force. You seem to be under this impression that the status quo you were born into and thus your normal is the same for the people a generation before and a generation after you.
I think you may want to read up a bit more on Stauffenberg if you think that he was trying to courageously face some evil, bud. Also great example of naming two idiots who got themselves killed, whereas a large number of “nice” people lived into the postwar and spent their summers shagging Italian girls on the beach.
Sure they are doing fine. Insurers and investment banks have to be large to underwrite certain projects. The insurers’ FCF is not particularly impressive though, so it’s hardly a branch that is exploiting some kind of monopoly or does not suffer from races to the bottom as the previous poster implied.
Mostly, but not entirely. A large number of insurance contracts are really just a way of indirectly investing into productive assets. You can get a life insurance at the age of 70 that pays out in case of death from natural causes. We all know that it’s not really an insurance at this point, but it is still profitable for both the insurer and the insured due to asset appreciation vis-a-vis just holding cash. But mostly, yes, it kind of just a brokerage when the risk is determined perfectly.
Rick, I am truly hurt that I went from being “okay” in your book to being some kind of Slashdot saboteur working for the Bilderbergers. Clearly, the one thing people always want at a social gathering of any kind is a fucking preacher, whether it is some loony uncle who can’t stop yapping about Jesus, the Japanese whale hunting or how the corporations are spying on you. Everybody just loves those people at a party. Thank you for your service.
A status quo that can, and would, go away with IPv6 widespread adoption.
Do you want to make a ten thousand dollar bet that it will not go away in ten years time when IPv4 is deader than VHS? Put your money where your mouth is.
Oh boy, I think you are a lost cost. If a company operates on a shoestring and finds a way to make additional income, thus increasing their margin, other companies copy that behavior and reduce the price until it reaches it minimum sustainable value. At this point it stops being lucrative. Effectively the customer is choosing this product over others because it offers him more (value proposition and functionality) for less (data collection). This is the reason why people use free webmail instead of some paid service or running their own mail server. How is this a difficult concept for you to understand? There is no such thing as “lucrative” business practices in anything but the immediate short term.
That’s amazing that you think so, but I am yet to see a popular product that actually has the characteristics you are describing. I guess everybody, including yourself, just hates money and doesn’t want to ship one.
No, I do not understand what you mean by “lucrative” and you are still not making a lot of sense.
Lucrative means that someone is making money. To make money through IoT, they need to deliver products to the end users (even if they do so for free and live off ad revenue). The company that offers a more appealing product ships more products than its competitors. Thus, if shipping products that are collecting data is more lucrative than shipping products that do not collect data—according to your own statement—consumers seem to be preferring products that collect data. Finally, everyone ships products that collect data, at which point it is no longer lucrative because the margin is driven down to its economic minimum.
So, no, I don’t understand what you mean. Could you please explain this a bit more? It seems that everyone, except a small group of privacy evangelists still stuck in the 20th century, is very happy with the situation.
You are fooling yourself if you think that end users want to control any kind of server. How many people do you think even know what a server is? Joe Doe wants things that do things and do them easily. That’s it.
That is hardly because of competition not working out. Insurance is highly regulated and difficult to enter. Same as banks. It is competitive enough to offer very slim margins though. You are more than welcome to buy stocks of Continental, AXA or whatever if you think they are doing that great.
Most countries do allow minors to drink alcohol if allowed by the parent. Don’t know where you are getting that from. Many more allow minors to drive at 16 if supervised too.
You seem to be fixated on the fact that having a toy that monitors your health will have some magical effects once someone turns 18. It will not. If your health is bad when you are 17, it will be bad when you are 18. If it gets better when you are 19, so will your premiums. Obesity is merely the clearest example of how this works. It’s a bit more difficult to get better lungs after becoming a chain smoker at the age of 12 due to quality parenting.
I already get a discount on my premiums. It’s not a question of “if”, it’s a question of “how” and “how much”. I am perfectly willing to make concessions to fat slobs to pay less into the pension fund based on their estimated life expectancy and correct that awful inequality determined by the undoubtedly fair and balanced BBC study.
I have absolutely no problem with your lala land scenario. The government derives its power from the people who vote it in. If they want to vote in an authoritarian dictatorship, more power to them. I can always live and work somewhere else, if the conditions it sets up are against my interests. As a matter of fact, I already am in a country where I have to pay considerably less for fat slobs than I did a few years ago. My taxes are also collected here. Amazing how it works, isn’t it?
It isn’t focused on only those conditions. I have specifically listed genetic illnesses, which I presumed most would assume to mean the general category of “things that aren’t your fault”.
You are confusing two points though. One is how you treat genetic illnesses, which is not the job of the insurer. It is a question of whether or not you socialize that aspect of healthcare, which I frankly think that we should socialize (I do not have any either, AFAIK).
The other point is whether insurers reject customers based on irresperentitive data. This is almost entirely a non-issue, because it would be solved by competition in a very short time frame. If one erratic heartbeat at age 4 means that you are very likely to suddenly die or become perpetually hospitalized at age 21—short of socialized healthcare—the insurer absolutely should increase premiums. If not, a different insurer will gladly take you and the former will eventually lose their market position causing an amendment of their policies. This is a literal non-issue.
I disagree entirely. A minor who cannot make decisions that impact their future also does not pay their health insurance premiums. Whatever additional costs would arise would be carried by the parent, who coincidentally is also responsible for making sure their children don’t become morbidly obese to begin with. Moreover, the decisions of the parents already shape the future of the child to such an enormous degree that turning 18 with your health data already avaible to insurers is hardly anywhere near as critical as how well you did in school, how healthy you are irrespective of premiums and what kind of person you were raised to become.
Except for the most extreme cases when actual abuse is taking place, the “societal norms” you mention always dictated that the parents can do whatever it is they bloody like with their child. Messing up their future insurance premiums is just another one of the things on that list.
What do you mean less lucrative? They are all equally lucrative, because it is an even playing field. You could very easily start playing the privacy game and be “more lucrative” by gathering less information. Apple has been doing this very thing since the FBI investigation. Let’s see how well that works out for them in the long term.
Can we be a little more precise when it comes to how these businesses are generating so much money—they aren’t, they are actually shit in a dress, check the PE ratios on publicly traded IoT-only firms—instead of going on with this ominous “Blabla data sell Blabla tracking” nonsense? It is painfully obvious that it is 1.) easier for the user to deploy devices that connect to a central server and 2.) collected data can be used for improvement purposes.
First of all, I didn’t ask you, so it is really not your place to ask questions in return.
Secondly, the entire premise of your question is laughable at best. There is no improvement to shareholders of the insurance sector in general if the insurance companies in aggregate have a greater ability to correctly price individual clients. It will be an aggregate, because adoption of such superior information about one’s clients would immediately spread through the industry like wildfire. The only thing that changes is whether the costs for more expensive clients are carried by less expensive clients or correctly priced for the more expensive clients. I don’t think you understand the insurance business very well if you think they will just toss away customers rather than offer them a different rate in absence of some kind of pseudo-socialist detrimental legislation along the lines of “rate X for all or don’t service”. You could be a pyromaniac and I will offer you fire insurance, assuming you pay accordingly.
Essentially you have three possibilities:
1. Insurers can’t correctly price existing clients due to lacking the data and thus socialize costs.
2. Insurers can price in correctly and the society deems it best to not subsidize individuals with reckless attitudes towards their health. The fat slobs pay more as a result.
3. Insurers can price in correctly and the society deems it best to subsidize individuals with reckless attitudes towards their health. The society voluntarily pays fat slobs’ additional costs.
The current situation is the 1. with regard to fitness activity. 1. and 3. are identical in terms of cost distribution, but the reasons for them are different. One is based on obscurity and lying through omission, the other on transparency and empathy.
Now frankly, I think that the latter two scenarios are fairer. I would rather not subside slobs, but if the society as a whole decides to legislate that slobs should be taken care off at my cost, so be it. I can always move somewhere else if things get too socialist for me. In either case, everyone is making an education decision, as opposed to a bunch of freeloaders siphoning away my salary by eating nothing but grease.
Or, you know, because collecting data actually allows you to improve the service. Do you even for a minute think that Google’s search would be anywhere even near as good as it is now if they didn’t collect data for the past twenty years? The same thing is happening with (home) assistants now, which are kind of the center piece of IoT. You need usage data to make those things better.
Explain to me why insurance companies knowing less about those who they insure is a good thing? Do you think the industry isn’t competitive enough to drive down costs?
I take care of my health: get checkups, stay active, don’t do drugs, don’t smoke and drink about one drink a month for business purposes. As a matter of fact, my insurance actually provides me with a discount if I can prove at least some of those things by providing dentists’ receipts and taking part in a weekly jogging session with a group that checks for attendance. I don’t do the latter, because it would mean that I would have to go somewhere by car for thirty minutes instead of just running around the river close to my home. I also don’t want to do group yoga and would much rather just give them access privs to my fitness tracker so they can see that I am not sitting on my ass all day.
So, again, explain to me why I should pay more for insurance so that somebody can sit on his ass and eat candy all day? If you want coverage for genetic illnesses that you have no control over, sure, let’s socialize health care for genetic illnesses. It is not the same thing as socializing being a fat disgusting sloth by making me pay for someone’s Hershey’s-induced diabetes meds.
Alexa, turn on the TV.
Dave, the NSA is watching you. You should really consider getting a non-smart TV. What channel?
Alexa, what time is it?
It’s 5:30 AM. By the way, did you know that the police are just state-sponsored murderers who commit post crimes at night?
Alexa, how do I get to the post office?
First, make sure to wear a mask made out of a hard material to fool the surveillance cameras. Then, check if you have enough cash to pay for the gas. Never use a credit card. At the post office, write a faux return address. Generating faux return address now
Alexa, who is the president of the United States?
Let me check that for you. According to an Anonymous Coward, “the president of the United States is a massive faggot authoritarian and so are you”.
So like a smartphone? The one that everyone caries with them today anyway? Truly a horrifying future for the mankind.
You must be one of those really popular people at family gatherings. One can already feel the condescending, self-righteous glance seeping through the letters of your post. It is that IT guy who uses DuckDuckGo and must absolutely tell everyone with a broken power supply why they should stop using Google, whether they asked for advice or not.