I’ve honestly found online shopping to become increasingly anti-consumer. The absolute worst trend is what I would consider to be aggressive dynamic pricing, especially on Amazon.
I don't think you've been in stores much then. The entire experience is designed to be anti consumer and to trigger impulse purchases as much as possible.
Some would say this is the impact of late stage capitalism. There is no money left to be made on conventional purchases, but instead the profit is in trickery or deception.
I’m a little disheartened by how much e-commerce has changed for the worst since the Zappos heydays, and how the most successful cos now often employ anti-consumer dark patterns and tactics to squeeze more revenue and profits all while limiting investment in customer service.
Wayfair at a $30B market cap comes to mind...dropships almost everything eg zero control of inventory and shipping times, dynamic pricing and fake discounts makes it difficult to know if you’re getting a good deal, customer service very inconsistent, returns not free, etc.
I don’t really understand the rebate strategy here. They told Purdue to literally go to CVS and tell them “we are going to pay you a bonus for every overdose you cause?”
How does CVS interplay with the doctors who are doing the actual prescribing? I guess I don’t understand how a rebate change anything at CVS. Aren’t they just filling the prescription?
isn’t CVS just doing whatever the doctor is prescribing without any judgement? i don’t see how CVS would be liable here unless they failed to verify the authenticity of a prescription or something on purpose.
CVS can choose to set metrics and implement systems to discourage noticing that one person is pulling multiple scripts, for example.
Also remember that CVS is basically a monopoly wholesaler as well as a retailer — so they can play games at that level as well like stuffing the channel to favor the manufacturer that pays them more on the backend. Railroad trusts and standard oil did the same thing in the 1900s.
This is especially true in places where states have hobbled regulatory power. Little towns in West Virginia were dispensing more opioids than counties in other places. In places with more robust regulation, the pharmacists will lose their license.
The whole thing is disgusting and really illustrates how amoral and evil outfits like McKinsey are, and how their way of thinking is a more in your face vision of what many corporate leaders believe.
yeah I guess the wording of the story is confusing. I think it’s less “here’s a reward for literally killing people” and more “here’s a little something to soften the blow of an OD so that you continue to fill Oxycotin without judgement or heavy restrictions”
I’m trying to imagine this 45 year old CVS VP of Product stuffing the channel with opiates & hiding the analytics on one hand. And on the other hand feeling real bad somebody somewhere ODed.
These emotions - they belong to two very different people. Who don’t like each other at all.
“Your pharmacists get paid $150k to count pills and assess risk. They failed to assess risk, here’s a bonus for continuing to hire people who don’t do their job.”
Pharmacies have to handle the possibility that a patient is collecting multiple prescriptions from multiple doctors to get more quantities than they need or can safely have.
No, it’s not. Pharmacists are tasked with refusing to fill prescriptions they believe are harmful, and routinely reject combinations of medicines if they are harmful. And the DEA is putting pressure on pharmacies to refuse prescriptions for suspected opioid abusers, so many large pharmacy companies have many limits in place regardless of what the doctor writes.
If you walk into a pharmacy with just an opioid prescription, and you’re not a regular or something seems off such as it’s hand written, chances are you’re going to get denied or at least won’t get your medication until they call the doctor and discuss why you need it.
All the states even have a PDMP - prescription drug monitoring program - that pharmacies have to check before dispensing opioids to confirm the person’s prescription history.
ok, so a rebate is less “here’s a reward for OD’ing people” and more “we’ll soften the blow if you continue filling Oxy with no judgment if someone ends up dying” I guess
No, it’s more Purdue and McKinsey modeled the overdose rates based on market performance of OxyContin. Overdoses were a metric, provided for free by the county health departments, that was a proxy for sales performance.
It is a murder bonus; it proceduralized a public health crisis.
Whenever someone says “liable” I know they’ve stopped arguing about justice and begun arguing about proper application of laws lobbyists purchased from Congress.
Same question. They decided to INCENTIVIZE overdoses? (And "opioid use disorders" too, they were paying rebates for those too).
I don't understand either the ethical OR business sense of this. Very confused.
I haven't been paying too too much attention to this stuff, and I never before felt like saying anyone should face prison over any of this -- but incentivizing overdoses, are you serious? I feel like anyone involved in that decision is a horrible human being, at the least.
this seems like it’s also a struggle between different teams at the same company. Customer Service teams are very often looked down upon as “less than” other teams like engineering, and this article states that a disproportionate number of the black employees were on that team.
Customer Service is often regarded in companies like insurance is regarded by most people—you gotta have it, in a perfect world you’d never need it, and very few people brag about how much they pay for it.
That’s why Customer Service isn’t treated like the Rock Stars that Sales or Engineering is treated like in a company.
It also tends to have the most natural turnover, and tends to be the lesser skilled positions in a software company (not often requiring specializations, like developers).
yeah it’s unfortunate even at a finance startup that CX is so disregarded. Coinbase doesn’t exactly have a great CX reputation eg lots of horror stories plus it seems to go down every time there’s a big move up or down.
CX folks at CB are doing God's work. Nothing but respect for them on my eng team at CB. At past companies I had to do a lot more legwork to dive into an issue; our CX folks are incredibly technical and have great instincts on identifying, grouping, and triaging issues as well as providing just the right amount of context.
I’m speaking from the perspective of the customer. They might be top knotch but if it’s understaffed and underesourced then no one can be set up for success when they have to face the wrath of a million customers when the site goes down on the slightest uptick in volume due to a large move.
Man, when I was at an early stage online brokerage back in the day, customer service was pure gold. These people were mostly ex-traders who knew the ins-and-outs of complex options trades, and were legit viewed as rock stars.
I just downloaded the app again to refresh my memory on what it looked like since I had never actually bought anything off it.
Used an anonymous email to register eg clean profile and the front page was filled with scammy hair loss products, male enhancement pills, and foot stickers that claimed it could help you grow 1-6 inches (!), among other cheap suspect goods that looked straight out of some tourist market in Asia.
Honestly a little depressing selling Chinese counterfeit crap at scale is a good business. Not exactly something I find particularly exciting or noble.
i joined an early stage co that will go public within the next year and got very lucky in a junior role with a life changing amount of money. the compensation at private cos is so whacky depending on when you join. it’s just the nature of working in early stage cos.
On the one hand I think this will do really well in public markets and will probably buy some on the first day.
On the other as someone who doesn’t play and doesn’t have kids it’s a bit unsettling seeing some of these engagement numbers eg average daily play time is 2.5 hours per active user. That sounds like a massive time suck. Perhaps one could justify this as inciting creativity and there’s a social aspect to it but spending hours a day on this can’t be healthy long term.
For a lot of kids this is their social time during Covid. My son hops on after HW, has a Discord for talking, and they all meet up in Roblox or Fortnight. Mostly Roblox.
I haven't noticed anything unhealthy yet. He has a learned a lot about scams, understanding valuations and trading (it's like a mini stock market around virtual goods), and just hanging out with his friends.
One of the most interesting things I've noticed is that in this virtual world -- boys and girls hang out together. He has about 12 core friends -- and it's almost an even split girl/boy. Which I think would not have happened in the "real world".
My daughter has played a bunch and the platform admittedly does a pretty good job catering to all genders. I've seen her play fashion games, and on the same platform she's invited me to also play zombie shooters and gun-games. It's a good lesson in inclusive design.
Games like Roblox and Minecraft have an inherently social aspect to them in addition to being mostly creativity-based. Not only they allow to emulate some of the social contacts that are currently impossible due to the pandemic, they also make some things possible at all due to the flexibility of the game engines that does not exist in reality. (Compare e.g. asking the question of "Do you know how to make TNT? I need some for an experiment" on a Minecraft server and on a busy airport.)
there’s a balance. 2.5 hours spent on average means there’s kids spending much longer on this each day. i get there’s a creativity aspect to it but it still seems like a lot of time, to the point where it’s likely bordering on addiction level.
I feel you haven’t played MMOs or online games in general. Yes, they can become a time sink, but there are worse time sinks out there ;)
Edit: Note that I and others from my generation grew up spending hours playing MMOs, and we turned out fine. As responsibilities come up to the forefront, the majority of people adapt.
I think the more concerning trend is social media addiction. With games, there is at least an interactive element. Social media use is as passive as you can get.
>but spending hours a day on this can’t be healthy long term.
If you think this is some new phenomenon that kids spend a whole 2.5 hours/day on a game... well, I'm not sure how to break this to you.
Kids used to watch an insane amount of TV each day forever. Then they moved to console games in the early 90s.. and also computer games. It's been what 50/60 years of TV and 30+ years of consoles/computer games.
If anything, things in the last ~10 years are better because kids have a good option to not just sit in front of the TV and watch whatever is on and all these ads.. they can be into games that are mentally challenging. And they have all these options to have voice chats with friends, so it's way more social than ever.
So just in general the argument is "this can't be healthy in the long term" seems to imply that it's some new phenomenon..
yeah dunno. honestly i’m a little terrified of what growing up in the age of social media and hyper addictive gaming does to someone. pretty glad I grew up at a time when the biggest thing was just Myspace.
The S-1 mentions many times (i) DAU, (ii) total hours. But a quick skim didn't find either (iii) MAU, or (iv) # registered users.
The statement to which I replied ("average daily play time is 2.5 hours per active user") would only be true if DAU/MAU (aka 'stickiness') is over 95%.
For comparison, leading messaging apps that you imagine every user using every single day (like WhatsApp and WeChat) have DAU/MAU ratios of ~70%.
If we assume stickiness of 40% (still high!), then average daily usage per (monthly) active user is more like 1 hour.
YT Premium still supports creators while Ublock Origin denies creators one of the easiest ways to be compensated for their work. That's a pretty big difference.
True, though most of the videos I watch these days either have explicit sponsor mentions, or I support though patreon. My general feel on adblock is that it is a reasonable step against an abusive advertising industry. That it harms creators is the side effect of the advertising industry's overreach, and is not a moral fault of the end user for acting in self-defense.
Nevermind the fact that for the vast majority of creators, their advertising revenue is 100% up to the whims of some bullshit black box "AI" algorithm on whether they are worthy of money they earned or not.
Most of the valuable youtube creators don't care much about their ad revenue and prefer to curate out of band sponsorships and patreon. And if I wanted to actually support them, I'd invest in them through patreon, not watch an atrocious ad that will likely give them 30% of 5 cents
You wrote something that is completely obvious to anyone but some how its surprising what little thought I had put into it... I'm calling it: "Employed by robots" because it goes well with the "Trial by robots". Just those 2 make for "Governed by robots".
We still have some humans in the board room who could theoretically switch things off just like the switched them on but its somewhat naive to think their job description allows for it.
This leaves only governments. I could see myself write government automation even while fully aware of the above. If the pay is right, nice coworkers, interesting stack. ~rolls eyes~
The point is there usually isn't a premium service for sites blocked by UBO. So doing just YT Premium with UBO for other sites would only entrench YT and deny creators on other services a significant source of income.
Maybe if advertisements don't work for them, and the subscriptions work for YouTube, they'll roll out subscriptions too. But to be honest, I just hate advertisements, and so I'll block them, and I'll also subscribe where I can because I want to give back something too.
yeah its probably this, market caps on some of these money losers is stratospheric. I think alot of people forgot the lessons of 2000. Take Palantir, a company that is 11 years old and for the past 3 years has lost 600M a year. What monopoly will this company carve out for itself to achieve this lofty valuation?
Or lets look at doordash [1] despite the pandemic and most of its workers not being employees(low paid gig workers) it is still losing money at an astounding rate: $533M last year and with a pandemic bump of only a 149M loss this year so far(it expects orders to slow alot after the pandemic).
I feel like I am Michael Burry in the big short playing my drums pointing out the obviousness of the huge crash that is coming with alot of these companies. What is scary is alot of americans and foreigners for that matter have their retirement savings(401k) tied up into these mini-titanics. When the fed's tap gets turned off, expect a reckoning.
What makes you think the fed's tap will ever get turned off?
What preconditions do you think we have to see before it happens?
In the past, every time I thought "the Fed will have to tighten soon" something happens which somehow, magically, always requires more easy money to solve.
Example: Easy money caused a housing bubble that burst? Now we need easy money to fix unemployment and keep the markets from seizing up.
It seems that politicians have now decided that the easy-money solution is always the easiest one, with the least traceable future negative ramifications.
It could happen with this Biden presidency, although most likely with whoever comes after him. If you think about easy money and interest rates, with Obama the lowering of interest rates made sense, the country was coming out of a long protracted recession and the money was needed to grease the gears of the economy so to speak.
With the Trump presidency he made his north star be the stock market(and keeping it high) and its why he heavily pressured the Fed to keep interest rates extremely low to supercharge the economy(and make him look good).
If a vaccine comes quickly and is highly effective long term and covid is eradicated by late spring/summer I expect a big jump in the stock market and a red hot housing market, this would be a time to slowly increase the interest rates, wall street won't like it but at some point it will have to happen.
