"and there are people who will see a bonus/commission/etc as a great objective to shoot for"
Sure, but you can tie a variable salary or bonus to performance for sales without paying out massive commissions scaled to the deal. In reality marketing is doing more to bring you those sales than the actual sales people.
"But then again, if your competitor is offering a percentage of the action..."
They'll stop the moment their major competitor isn't doing so because not paying that commission means you you can take the difference as profit and beat them on the stock market or undercut their prices aggressively thus increasing sales while maintaining the same profit margin which increases profits and beats them on the stock market (stock price is what companies care about, not profits).
This is how every major industry works and why you get burned in more or less the same ways by all the major "competitors" as a consumer. You get the same result as active collusion and monopoly behavior without need for any of it because the competitors in a given industry have common interests.
Absolutely and you seem really well informed on your choice of phone. But hey, did you know they developed a new type of case that will never break and are on sale for $10 vs $20? And we match those other guys price PLUS you can get a $300 smart watch on a promo right now for $5 if you get a $30 microsd card with your phone and you need one anyway right? Oh hey, did you know the manufacturer warranty doesn't cover the screen? You did need a screen protector ($10), right? Oh and a protection plan because water damage isn't covered either. Oh and if you do it as a package we'll give you that phone for just $200 instead of $399 with a 2 yr commitment.
$250 today. $2765 total = $10+$5+$30+$200+$480($20/mo because the smart watch requires an additional line)+$1920($80*24 contract)+$120($5mo protection plan)
If you'd done it on your own you'd have paid $720 $399 + $30/mo + $10 screen protector and case and probably never wanted or needed the microsd card or watch.
$409 today $720 total = $399 + $30/mo + $10
Of course that assume they didn't get you for VR headgear, service add-ons, chargers, etc.
Having sales people hasn't lost all point in all industries. The industries where those people should be paid commissions on the size of the deal are getting fewer and farther between.
"A product that almost sells itself is simply priced too cheap;)"
It can be, by an entire sales commission worth. Just offer the sales people a variable salary that ranges from minimum wage to what your marketing people make depending on performance. People who have a knack for sales aren't everyone but they aren't uncommon like those with the raw capacity to learn to be talented in STEM. Pretty much anyone who was popular in high school has what it takes. There is no reason the performance based incentive has to scale to a major chunk of the deal.
Most sales people do. They don't hit the pavement and generate sales they expect people to come to them when they are interested in what they are selling. The getting people interested part is driven by marketing/advertising/engineers these days and not sales.
Compare a salesman to a pick-up artist who is selling wing man services on one night stands with a celeb. What you are sold on is the idea he is a smooth artist walking into a bar and finding the hottest girls convincing them to ditch the husband they came with and go to the hotel with them instead. What really happens is he goes about his day drinking and cavorting while he carries a phone with the professionally designed tinder profile of the guy he works for loaded he does the swiping on the app, although in some organizations they have people to carry around the phone and swipe for them as well. When a girl swipes right he arranges the location and time for the boss and he goes and gets a couple drinks in her to be sure and takes a blowjob from the girl as a commission and then the boss bangs the girl. Oh, and of course the boss pays for all the drinking and cavorting as well.
Now, as the boss, is the whole process getting you laid more? Of course it is. Is there value in what he's doing? Sure, even though the girl already indicated shes down for a hookup many of them would back out. If he's "good" then his warm-up probably means the deal gets closed more. Does the blowjob give him incentive? Obviously, and the hotter the girl the more motivated he'll be.
So here is the question, How many deals are lost because the girl doesn't like him? Also, that blowjob commission, either you are giving up a blowjob or you are trying to get the girl to give an extra blowjob. A blowjob is a substantial sexual favor. The first question is, does he actually bring enough value with his lubrication efforts to make up for the girls who would follow through if not for the mandatory blowjob especially considering the parts your professionally created celeb profile and assistant are playing in bringing warm leads already? Especially when you consider that these "wingmen" are going to compete to work for the celebs whose profiles bring in the highest quantity of warmest leads so they can get the most blowjobs from the hottest girls. Could you get someone to play his part and provide an incentive far less valuable than blowjobs from hot girls? Couldn't you just pay him a variable salary based on performance? It could range from what that assistant makes to double what that assistant makes.
"That's a totally different issue than having hidden fees in the signing paperwork, isn't it?"
No, it's exactly the same issue. If a plumber quotes you $500 to fix something with your plumbing you are figuring that against what you can afford and the potential costs and hassles of not having the thing repaired. Your disclosure is like the Plumber being required to give a listing of charges including parts and labor. But in this particular case if the line item for "labor" were broken down it would have line items for "smoke breaks", "Phone calls for personal business", etc. Just because the total falls within what you'd agree to pay doesn't mean you don't want to pay as little as possible. If you had that breakdown you could dispute and refuse those line items. A requirement to disclose the total labor being charged doesn't prevent hidden fees within that charge.
"But a lawyer won't help you catch that because its already included in the loan amount. It's your responsibility to compare two numbers and notice the difference."
On the contrary, part of the Attorney's job is to make sure what I'm agreeing to is what I think I'm agreeing to. If I've communicated what I'm agreeing to that attorney and the paperwork differs from that it is the Attorney's job to catch that and make sure I'm informed. Further, it is his responsibility to make sure I actually understand any repercussions or consequences of the terms I'm agreeing to even if they are what I've communicated and advising of other common alternative terms. The only thing about the agreement that the Attorney is not responsible for is making the call on whether or not the deal is actually a good one.
"If they had large numbers of people demanding even $100 they'd probably go bankrupt."
And so they should.
"Anyways, the whole point of class action suits isn't to get people their money back, it's to punish companies that do a little bit of harm to a large number of people."
The purpose of class actions is to deter companies from engaging in behavior that harms people in the future. If the judgement is for even a penny less than the actual damages then the company made a net profit on the whole affair and all you've done is establish the profit margin the best you can hope for companies adjusting to increase the profit margin of harming people in response.
Uh huh. I assume you've never actually gotten a mortgage. Don't read a word and it will still take you 20-30 minutes to sign and initial everything you are agreeing to. Oh you'll get that five pages in there but the stack is truly impressive. Refi is fun as well. You'd be amazed how loosely mortgage brokers use terms like "you don't have to pay" when what they really mean is you are totally being charged but we are rolling it into the principal.
Yup, they find listings of websites. You can use a search engine too, I promise. People are foolish and believe they help you negotiate and advise on bad purchases but I never understood why people would think they should trust someone who only makes money if you buy and who gets more the more you pay to do those things.
Hell, in many ways if you've found a place you like and it's in a decent neighborhood you are shooting yourself in the foot trying to "get a deal." People don't understand how real estate value works. The seller sells for what they want to which generally can be within a reasonable ballpark (usually 10-15%) over the what something vaguely comparable in that neighborhood has sold for before in the past couple years. Comparable is fuzzy, the people involved are looking for an excuse but either square footage or bedroom count are best. Any kind of upgrade can be used to rationalize it as well like wood flooring or appliances (you don't even actually have to be including them just have them at appraisal) these things have more to do with getting someone to want to buy your house than any dollar per dollar relationship to sale price.
The mortgage company will send their appraiser, there are all sorts of rules keeping the different people from talking but even if they don't, the appraisers job is to value the house at a figure that allows the lender to show whatever LTV they require on their books. This is substantially different than what people think which is that the appraiser's job is to make sure the house is somehow innately worth enough to back the loan. Even if no prohibited communication happens the formula above is the unspoken rule of thumb for where to price the house and everyone involves knows it so the appraiser can just follow that. Now, reread that forumla for what the seller should price at and you'll realize that as long as anyone buys a house nearby within a margin of years that appraisal becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you pay 200k for a house, the next time one sells it will generally be for 10% more than that increasing YOUR home value by $20k. The next brings you another $22k, etc. This needs to compound a bit to make up for say not saving 10k on the price. But the more difficult and probably bigger factor is the rate it compounds. The more you pay, the more you've increased the value of comparable houses in that neighborhood... which creates rapidly growing property value in that neighborhood and increases both the temptation to cash in for those with lots of equity and design to buy in and get that easy equity. Again, the increasing property value becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this scenario your higher price only needs to stimulate one additional home turnover in the next few years to give you more additional equity than any sort of purchase price savings you are likely to have gotten.
I doubt merely being part of the disclosure would do the trick. You need to have damages in a civil suit. You haven't been harmed merely because they leaked your data, you aren't harmed unless someone uses it.
As others have indicated the limit is for small claims court. Small claims court generally has simpler procedures. Sometimes the law is actually on your side because of what actually occurred but not on the side of the argument and rationale you presented in court and/or the basis for that argument wasn't legally correct. A judge MIGHT be more inclined to advocate for the law and disregard your faulty case in small claims court.
Okay... and I suppose you just signed all that paperwork without reading it? Trusting the mortgage company that produced your paperwork for you? Even if you did read it, do you honestly think you understood the full implications of all the terms? There is nobody involved in that process who represents your interests rather than "Completing the sale" and "closing" other than you. That goes double for the Realtor.
There is a lot of crap that gets slipped into mortgage terms if you aren't paying attention and most of it isn't as glaring and obvious as a balloon payment. Spread across a transaction the size and term of a mortgage those little details can be thousands of dollars.
$2500 is certainly better than anything you'd see a class action. A class action will hurt Equifax and make the lawyers filthy rich but the $5 check the actual victims may or may not ever see one day isn't even going to compensate for the time it takes them to complain about it on Slashdot.
Nope soccer is pretty lame too along with basketball. Football is better then either, it's reasonably fun to play sometimes but boring to watch. Hockey is the only real sport. MMA was good early on when it was an actual martial arts competition but now it's devolved into nothing but a pack of roid raging hulks wrestling in tights. Might as well just call it wrestling.
You need to let go of this classical thinking as you move into the quantum world. You want to think this either works or it doesn't work but currently this quantum bit flip flop is in an excited quantum state where it both works and doesn't work at the same time. If they were to build it and then observe the result only then would the entangled devices produced all fix into a single state of either working or not working.
More and more incidents like this and still they won't let us sue the stores that sell these products or manufacturers who arm managers and players with them.
True. Baseball has so little action and is so damn boring that you need this sort of thing to add an element of suspense. It isn't enough to actually make the sport entertaining to watch but people who have no taste and enjoy shitty watery American commercial beers need something to do.
I can't sleep in absolute silence. It magnifies and makes jarring every little sound the house makes or worse, cues my brain that it's think time. Some people use a fan, for me it is the bedroom TV. Just kick on House or some other show with lots of episodes I've seen a million times so I won't get "interested" and I'm out in no time.
With two groups of 17 as the subjects the sample size of this study amounts to "click bait." I have personal anecdotes with more statistical significance.
Slashdot Mirror
"and there are people who will see a bonus/commission/etc as a great objective to shoot for"
Sure, but you can tie a variable salary or bonus to performance for sales without paying out massive commissions scaled to the deal. In reality marketing is doing more to bring you those sales than the actual sales people.
"But then again, if your competitor is offering a percentage of the action..."
They'll stop the moment their major competitor isn't doing so because not paying that commission means you you can take the difference as profit and beat them on the stock market or undercut their prices aggressively thus increasing sales while maintaining the same profit margin which increases profits and beats them on the stock market (stock price is what companies care about, not profits).
This is how every major industry works and why you get burned in more or less the same ways by all the major "competitors" as a consumer. You get the same result as active collusion and monopoly behavior without need for any of it because the competitors in a given industry have common interests.
"Shipping is covered by no sales tax."
You mean back in the day where the best prices weren't found at like 3 mega sites who all charge sales tax in pretty much every state?
Absolutely and you seem really well informed on your choice of phone. But hey, did you know they developed a new type of case that will never break and are on sale for $10 vs $20? And we match those other guys price PLUS you can get a $300 smart watch on a promo right now for $5 if you get a $30 microsd card with your phone and you need one anyway right? Oh hey, did you know the manufacturer warranty doesn't cover the screen? You did need a screen protector ($10), right? Oh and a protection plan because water damage isn't covered either. Oh and if you do it as a package we'll give you that phone for just $200 instead of $399 with a 2 yr commitment.
$250 today.
$2765 total = $10+$5+$30+$200+$480($20/mo because the smart watch requires an additional line)+$1920($80*24 contract)+$120($5mo protection plan)
If you'd done it on your own you'd have paid $720 $399 + $30/mo + $10 screen protector and case and probably never wanted or needed the microsd card or watch.
$409 today
$720 total = $399 + $30/mo + $10
Of course that assume they didn't get you for VR headgear, service add-ons, chargers, etc.
Having sales people hasn't lost all point in all industries. The industries where those people should be paid commissions on the size of the deal are getting fewer and farther between.
"A product that almost sells itself is simply priced too cheap ;)"
It can be, by an entire sales commission worth. Just offer the sales people a variable salary that ranges from minimum wage to what your marketing people make depending on performance. People who have a knack for sales aren't everyone but they aren't uncommon like those with the raw capacity to learn to be talented in STEM. Pretty much anyone who was popular in high school has what it takes. There is no reason the performance based incentive has to scale to a major chunk of the deal.
Most sales people do. They don't hit the pavement and generate sales they expect people to come to them when they are interested in what they are selling. The getting people interested part is driven by marketing/advertising/engineers these days and not sales.
Compare a salesman to a pick-up artist who is selling wing man services on one night stands with a celeb. What you are sold on is the idea he is a smooth artist walking into a bar and finding the hottest girls convincing them to ditch the husband they came with and go to the hotel with them instead. What really happens is he goes about his day drinking and cavorting while he carries a phone with the professionally designed tinder profile of the guy he works for loaded he does the swiping on the app, although in some organizations they have people to carry around the phone and swipe for them as well. When a girl swipes right he arranges the location and time for the boss and he goes and gets a couple drinks in her to be sure and takes a blowjob from the girl as a commission and then the boss bangs the girl. Oh, and of course the boss pays for all the drinking and cavorting as well.
Now, as the boss, is the whole process getting you laid more? Of course it is. Is there value in what he's doing? Sure, even though the girl already indicated shes down for a hookup many of them would back out. If he's "good" then his warm-up probably means the deal gets closed more. Does the blowjob give him incentive? Obviously, and the hotter the girl the more motivated he'll be.
So here is the question, How many deals are lost because the girl doesn't like him? Also, that blowjob commission, either you are giving up a blowjob or you are trying to get the girl to give an extra blowjob. A blowjob is a substantial sexual favor. The first question is, does he actually bring enough value with his lubrication efforts to make up for the girls who would follow through if not for the mandatory blowjob especially considering the parts your professionally created celeb profile and assistant are playing in bringing warm leads already? Especially when you consider that these "wingmen" are going to compete to work for the celebs whose profiles bring in the highest quantity of warmest leads so they can get the most blowjobs from the hottest girls. Could you get someone to play his part and provide an incentive far less valuable than blowjobs from hot girls? Couldn't you just pay him a variable salary based on performance? It could range from what that assistant makes to double what that assistant makes.
"That's a totally different issue than having hidden fees in the signing paperwork, isn't it?"
No, it's exactly the same issue. If a plumber quotes you $500 to fix something with your plumbing you are figuring that against what you can afford and the potential costs and hassles of not having the thing repaired. Your disclosure is like the Plumber being required to give a listing of charges including parts and labor. But in this particular case if the line item for "labor" were broken down it would have line items for "smoke breaks", "Phone calls for personal business", etc. Just because the total falls within what you'd agree to pay doesn't mean you don't want to pay as little as possible. If you had that breakdown you could dispute and refuse those line items. A requirement to disclose the total labor being charged doesn't prevent hidden fees within that charge.
"But a lawyer won't help you catch that because its already included in the loan amount. It's your responsibility to compare two numbers and notice the difference."
On the contrary, part of the Attorney's job is to make sure what I'm agreeing to is what I think I'm agreeing to. If I've communicated what I'm agreeing to that attorney and the paperwork differs from that it is the Attorney's job to catch that and make sure I'm informed. Further, it is his responsibility to make sure I actually understand any repercussions or consequences of the terms I'm agreeing to even if they are what I've communicated and advising of other common alternative terms. The only thing about the agreement that the Attorney is not responsible for is making the call on whether or not the deal is actually a good one.
"If they had large numbers of people demanding even $100 they'd probably go bankrupt."
And so they should.
"Anyways, the whole point of class action suits isn't to get people their money back, it's to punish companies that do a little bit of harm to a large number of people."
The purpose of class actions is to deter companies from engaging in behavior that harms people in the future. If the judgement is for even a penny less than the actual damages then the company made a net profit on the whole affair and all you've done is establish the profit margin the best you can hope for companies adjusting to increase the profit margin of harming people in response.
Uh huh. I assume you've never actually gotten a mortgage. Don't read a word and it will still take you 20-30 minutes to sign and initial everything you are agreeing to. Oh you'll get that five pages in there but the stack is truly impressive. Refi is fun as well. You'd be amazed how loosely mortgage brokers use terms like "you don't have to pay" when what they really mean is you are totally being charged but we are rolling it into the principal.
Yup, they find listings of websites. You can use a search engine too, I promise. People are foolish and believe they help you negotiate and advise on bad purchases but I never understood why people would think they should trust someone who only makes money if you buy and who gets more the more you pay to do those things.
Hell, in many ways if you've found a place you like and it's in a decent neighborhood you are shooting yourself in the foot trying to "get a deal." People don't understand how real estate value works. The seller sells for what they want to which generally can be within a reasonable ballpark (usually 10-15%) over the what something vaguely comparable in that neighborhood has sold for before in the past couple years. Comparable is fuzzy, the people involved are looking for an excuse but either square footage or bedroom count are best. Any kind of upgrade can be used to rationalize it as well like wood flooring or appliances (you don't even actually have to be including them just have them at appraisal) these things have more to do with getting someone to want to buy your house than any dollar per dollar relationship to sale price.
The mortgage company will send their appraiser, there are all sorts of rules keeping the different people from talking but even if they don't, the appraisers job is to value the house at a figure that allows the lender to show whatever LTV they require on their books. This is substantially different than what people think which is that the appraiser's job is to make sure the house is somehow innately worth enough to back the loan. Even if no prohibited communication happens the formula above is the unspoken rule of thumb for where to price the house and everyone involves knows it so the appraiser can just follow that. Now, reread that forumla for what the seller should price at and you'll realize that as long as anyone buys a house nearby within a margin of years that appraisal becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you pay 200k for a house, the next time one sells it will generally be for 10% more than that increasing YOUR home value by $20k. The next brings you another $22k, etc. This needs to compound a bit to make up for say not saving 10k on the price. But the more difficult and probably bigger factor is the rate it compounds. The more you pay, the more you've increased the value of comparable houses in that neighborhood... which creates rapidly growing property value in that neighborhood and increases both the temptation to cash in for those with lots of equity and design to buy in and get that easy equity. Again, the increasing property value becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this scenario your higher price only needs to stimulate one additional home turnover in the next few years to give you more additional equity than any sort of purchase price savings you are likely to have gotten.
I doubt merely being part of the disclosure would do the trick. You need to have damages in a civil suit. You haven't been harmed merely because they leaked your data, you aren't harmed unless someone uses it.
As others have indicated the limit is for small claims court. Small claims court generally has simpler procedures. Sometimes the law is actually on your side because of what actually occurred but not on the side of the argument and rationale you presented in court and/or the basis for that argument wasn't legally correct. A judge MIGHT be more inclined to advocate for the law and disregard your faulty case in small claims court.
Okay... and I suppose you just signed all that paperwork without reading it? Trusting the mortgage company that produced your paperwork for you? Even if you did read it, do you honestly think you understood the full implications of all the terms? There is nobody involved in that process who represents your interests rather than "Completing the sale" and "closing" other than you. That goes double for the Realtor.
There is a lot of crap that gets slipped into mortgage terms if you aren't paying attention and most of it isn't as glaring and obvious as a balloon payment. Spread across a transaction the size and term of a mortgage those little details can be thousands of dollars.
$2500 is certainly better than anything you'd see a class action. A class action will hurt Equifax and make the lawyers filthy rich but the $5 check the actual victims may or may not ever see one day isn't even going to compensate for the time it takes them to complain about it on Slashdot.
Nope soccer is pretty lame too along with basketball. Football is better then either, it's reasonably fun to play sometimes but boring to watch. Hockey is the only real sport. MMA was good early on when it was an actual martial arts competition but now it's devolved into nothing but a pack of roid raging hulks wrestling in tights. Might as well just call it wrestling.
There is a dark corner in my attic where the rats are both dead and not dead at the same time.
You need to let go of this classical thinking as you move into the quantum world. You want to think this either works or it doesn't work but currently this quantum bit flip flop is in an excited quantum state where it both works and doesn't work at the same time. If they were to build it and then observe the result only then would the entangled devices produced all fix into a single state of either working or not working.
More and more incidents like this and still they won't let us sue the stores that sell these products or manufacturers who arm managers and players with them.
Arm... heh... see what I did there?
I promise you, not many Americans parse Japanese league team names, correctly or incorrectly.
It's not cheating unless you get cau... oh nvm.
True. Baseball has so little action and is so damn boring that you need this sort of thing to add an element of suspense. It isn't enough to actually make the sport entertaining to watch but people who have no taste and enjoy shitty watery American commercial beers need something to do.
They could very nearly have telepathy if they used an electronic signaling system.
"Evidence? Well, it's played far more widely, it has far more supporters, far more people playing"
Exactly. It is the game of commoners and riff-raff.
I can't sleep in absolute silence. It magnifies and makes jarring every little sound the house makes or worse, cues my brain that it's think time. Some people use a fan, for me it is the bedroom TV. Just kick on House or some other show with lots of episodes I've seen a million times so I won't get "interested" and I'm out in no time.
With two groups of 17 as the subjects the sample size of this study amounts to "click bait." I have personal anecdotes with more statistical significance.