I’ve always wondered why manufacturers don’t just bump the sticker up by whatever the estimated LTV of these subscriptions would be. If you want to buy a new F-150, there’s functionally no difference between paying e.g. $52,500 instead of $51,250 and as a bonus Ford gets to avoid headlines like this.
Maybe the long-term goal is to push more people toward direct leasing?
Because they dream of doing what all the streaming services do, what comcast does, get people to use their service, push everyone to enable autopay, and then quietly triple the price and hope no one notices. That's the goal of all of this.
Same reason Basic Starter Economy Lite airfares exist: to rank higher in lists. Once they have you in the sales funnel and don't have price competition anymore, they can start upselling you on things you're missing.
> Probably because the LTV is at least an order of magnitude more than you are estimating.
This subscription costs $140 per year; even accounting for price increases over time, if someone has calculated that its 10-year LTV exceeds $14,000 then I think they need to go back and review the spreadsheet.
Or what various advertising companies (and the advertisers) would pay to know where you shop.
Connect what gas you buy, what grocery or gym you go to, what restaurants you eat at with your name, address, and probably ip. And note this is significantly facilitated if they have a direct billing relationship with the driver: that's how they're getting clean phone, name, ip (gotta login to put that card in), etc.
> the amount you're paying for the subscription is only a fraction of what they can get for your data.
This doesn’t clarify it at all for me because this model already works without the bother of subscriptions. They’re generating the data either way, regardless of whether the customer is paying $140 per year or $1,400 up front.
I think the real reason is probably closer to “we want to be able to add recurring subscription revenue to our 10-K” than it is to “we want a better pretext under which to mine consumer data.”
This doesn’t clarify it at all for me because this model already works without the bother of subscriptions
Not if you're using CarPlay, it doesn't.
The automakers' best move is to incentivize drivers to use the company's nav system instead of their own phone, but instead they're penalizing them. That's the part I don't get.
I understand what you mean; what I’m saying is that they can still disable CarPlay and upcharge buyers for navigation and harvest the data to resell without bringing subscriptions into the picture.
It’s the foundational decision to make this an optional subscription instead of just pricing it into the sticker from the jump that I’m having trouble wrapping my head around.
I haven’t bought a car in a hot minute but those options usually also included different in-dash displays, etc. If Ford standardized the hardware, eliminated the option, and bumped the sticker, nobody would bat an eye and they would capture that revenue from every buyer, not only the ones who choose to subscribe.
It feels like such an obvious win that I know I must be missing something, I just don’t know what it could be.
In a perfectly efficient market, yes, but the market is notably not perfectly efficient. People make decisions about which career(s) to pursue or not pursue based on a huge variety of factors that stretch far beyond money.
There is absolutely no scenario in which you could convince me to train as e.g. an underwater welder, no matter how much cash you’re offering.
I don’t think you can really bake that in because the traffic rules can change day-to-day.
For example, there’s a street in my neighborhood that’s normally open for two-way traffic, but one of the buildings that fronts it is being renovated so the street was changed to one-way for about a month, and as of a couple of days ago it’s still one-way but in the other direction. Imagine trying to get a car to work that out on its own.
That's exactly a situation where signage is mandatory (and, I think, legally required) to say what the current rule is. The hard-coded traffic law that would apply here is "obey the traffic signs".
The point I was making is that these cars should absolutely not be "learning" what rules to follow by observing what other drivers actually do. When there is no clear signage, there are well-defined laws about what drivers need to do and self-driving cars need to follow those even if human drivers don't.
I’m no lawyer but I feel like clause seven leaves a clear opening to undermine the spirit of this license:
> “The User may not sell this Work directly, unless they/she/he/it/ey/fae/ze/bun/puppy/foxxo … use it only as a small part of a work of a much greater scale.”
That said, TIL that there are two things that can be considered “Belgium denialism” and surprisingly neither of them involves refusing to acknowledge that Belgium exists.
I‘m fairly sure that generation of MBP is USB-C only. If a UK plug prong is smashing its way in there, you‘ve got much bigger problems than a shorted port.
This story is incredible, I’m fascinated by every aspect of it:
- What decision-making process led to the idea of injecting human urine into a frog in the first place?
- How did the frogs escape? What kind of living and handling conditions are we talking about here?
- Did the bacteria that the government was concerned about make the frogs more susceptible to cold, thus the coincidental die-off at the same time as eradication was to begin?
- Will Welsh clawed frogs be the next species that we thought were gone but had just become better hidden?
> What decision-making process led to the idea of injecting human urine into a frog in the first place?
In the 1930s, two South African researchers, Hillel Shapiro and Harry Zwarenstein,[26] students of Lancelot Hogben at the University of Cape Town, discovered that the urine from pregnant women would induce oocyte production in X. laevis within 8–12 hours of injection.
The reaction is to Human chorionic gonadotropi - basically it's a marker which tells a human's body "You are pregnant, proceed accordingly". If you've got a womb and are in a reasonable age range this almost certainly means you're pregnant, if not it's a sign something went badly wrong. So, testing whether this marker is present means you know months earlier than you might otherwise.
Presumably the frog "Make eggs now" marker is different, but not different enough to ensure this effect doesn't happen, after all ordinarily frogs wouldn't be exposed to the urine of pregnant humans.
> Will Welsh clawed frogs be the next species that we thought were gone but had just become better hidden?
This isn't a rare species. It just wasn't in Wales and now it once again isn't in Wales. So that's like how Wales also does not have kangaroos. No danger the kangaroo goes extinct, there are lots and they're pretty competitive. But there aren't any in Wales (outside maybe a Zoo?) and so the ecosystem there does not have a kangaroo shaped niche.
Speaking of the frog test, there is apparently an old expression "the rabbit died" in English to refer to someone being pregnant. The original test involved injecting urine into a rabbit, killing it after a few days, and examining it's ovaries
I was watching M* A* S* H* with residents in a nursing home last week and Hot Lips thought she might be pregnant. The Colonel was concerned because they only had one rabbit and it was Radar's pet.
In case anyone is worried about the rabbit :-), they ended up using Radar's pet rabbit for the pregnancy test, but removed the ovaries surgically for examination rather than killing the rabbit.
Those weren't his words, and his actual words (which he quoted above, acknowledging their ambiguity) could be (mis)read as meaning that injecting the urine killed the rabbit a few days later, especially since he also wrote "apparently [frogs] could survive the urine injection".
I assumed that the line "can't catch me 'cause the rabbit done died" was referring to a failure to perform the rabbit test -- the rabbit they were using for the test died before the ovaries would have a chance to enlarge, therefore it was inconclusive, therefore it couldn't be proved the singer of the song got the woman in question pregnant.
> What decision-making process led to the idea of injecting human urine into a frog in the first place?
Hormones are basically messages sent through an animal's body to signal some change should take place. It was discovered that there was a hormone called hCG produced by the human placenta that triggers "you're pregnant" changes in the body. hCG is also present in the urine.
So if you want to detect a hormone, the idea is you inject it into an animal and see if it triggers the relevant changes (since the changes are usually internal, you generally need to kill the animal to check). So you would look for an animal that responds somehow to the hCG hormone, inject urine into it, and check for the response. Mice and rabbits were first used, but it was eventually discovered that certain species of frog that are highly sensitive to hormonal changes made for much simpler and faster testing.
IANAMD/B/? I interpret this as: hCG looks like "stop ovulation" for humans(mammals?) and "star ovulation" for frogs. Is this interpretation correct? Why the opposite direction?
Urine has long been used in medical testing and treatment. The term diabetes mellitus comes from the sweet taste of patients’ urine, for instance.
Estrogen extracted from pregnant women’s urine used to be used as a supplement for menopausal women. I read recently that some doctors would overprescribe urine tests during pregnancy, bill the patient and sell the excess urine.
Later as an estrogen supplement came Premarin, which is made from pregnant mares’ urine.
I can do you perhaps as well as a one-hour documentary. The science podcast Let's Learn Everything [https://www.letslearneverything.com] had an episode on the history of the use of animals in pregnancy tests. It's fascinating. See Episode 5.
Statistics tells us that probably means it's the only frog of this species in the area. In fact we use a related approach to estimate true populations.
But as they admit, that's only one possible reason.
Incredibly, I actually did learn this today because it was in the NYT crossword and I went down a very similar rabbit hole. I never made it to Freud, though, after I discovered and got sucked into the European Union Eel Regulation Framework[1].
If you, like me, are masochistically fascinated by this kind of “I can’t believe this is a real thing that the government actually does” documentation I recommend giving it a once-over.
I mean, in this case who else should do it? If a fish in your local waters goes from relative abundance to critically endangered, who else but the government is supposed to step in?
I don’t mean to suggest that governments shouldn’t do things like this, I’m just abnormally delighted when I find them.
A multinational framework explicitly for the protection and restoration of eels would never have occurred to me (or most of the rest of humanity, I’d imagine) but nevertheless it occurred to someone and now there are civil servants who are paid real money to design and implement it.
To put it another way, I’m less interested in the policy than I am in the mechanics of governance that enable it to exist. One of my favorites is the National Cemetary Administration Operational Standards and Measures[1] program, which basically defines OKRs for U.S. veterans cemeteries.
> Do not go to college if you have to spend any money on it.
“If your family isn’t well-off or you didn’t work hard enough in high school to get any scholarships, college isn’t for you” is certainly an interesting take, and it seems like a much too simplistic heuristic.
All of the places around here that had first-gen units with a scale on the packing side (to make sure you actually scanned eg a banana and not a two pound block of cheese, yet were constantly wrong) have replaced them with newer versions that don't have scales or any other way that I can see to validate that what you scanned is what you put into your bag.
I'm not sure where I would find the data to back this up, but since it seems like an across-the-board change I imagine the labor savings have proven to outweigh (heh) the inventory shrinkage.
To me, the Uniqlo system where everything has an RFID tag and the machine just automatically scans the contents of your basket is the platonic ideal but I know that comes with issues of its own in different retail contexts.
The horrible scale system of self-checkouts brought my anxiety to a fever pitch. Any slight adjustment to the bag or moving anything around would literally set off an alarm for "assistance." Still gives me low-key ptsd even though I know they don't use them anymore.
Still here at Kroger which consistently calls for assistance.
And then there’s fucking Costco where after the system calling over a rep after I scanned something. apparently I am only to use the scanning gun for things that are staying in the cart, when I bagged it it called them over.
We still have them in the UK. As you say, any attempt to adjust your packing sets the alarm off so I find it's quickest to place everything directly onto the scales and only pack once I've paid.
At my local grocery store, if the item doesn't end up on the scale in about three seconds, the machine locks up and requires an attendant to unlock it. Makes bagging as you go nigh impossible. Infuriating.
It seems like they only make the localhost requests on your first visit. If you open devtools in incognito mode (or just clear the cookies) before accessing https://ceac.state.gov/genniv/ you should see those 127.0.0.1 attempts as ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED in the network tab.
Somewhat more worryingly, Little Snitch doesn't report them at all, though that might just be because they were already blocked at the browser.
Maybe the long-term goal is to push more people toward direct leasing?