Smartphone cradle used to cheat “10k steps/day” health insurance discounts
twitter.com
twitter.com
At night I would open the software, wrap my mouse cord around an oscillating desk fan, then go to bed. Earned myself $50/month
I may have made a quick buck on this back in the early 2000s.
There is a browser extension that does this for you:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611594
It was removed from Chrome's appstore, so it must be very effective... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327228 ...and shows very clearly whose side they're on.
Realistically that wasn't going to end any other way :)
If they get screwed, all the better.
Or in other words, the ad companies deserve it.
The theoretical economic value of advertising is new product discovery. If you needed a thing but didn't know there was a solution and you saw an ad, then some of the value you gain would be attributable to the ad.
Imagine a world entirely without ads. Would you really be lacking a lot? I doubt it. Especially with the internet, it's easy enough search, to receive word of mouth, to read reviews, or to ask friends for help with a problem. But let's assume it happens some. Ads might at least get you to a solution sooner, so count the value gain there as well.
Now subtract all the money spent on things where ads encouraged a purchase that was not valuable or even wasteful (e.g., didn't live up to expectations, was fine but the need wasn't urgent so it sits in a closet, was bad enough that it actively cost you extra money). Subtract further the amount of money spent on ads, hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Subtract also all the time spent watching, listening to, and reading ads. Further subtract the amount of value that would have been gained had that time been used as a person wanted. And further subtract all the value that could have been gained had those creative people creating ads been doing something beneficial.
I can't come up with any reasonable numbers that suggest advertising is a net societal positive. It exists not because its targets want it, but because businesses are in an arms race to manipulate consumers in ways favorable to the advertisers. It's like military spending: most of it happens not because anybody really wants it, but because nobody wants to lose to the other guy.
This isn't to say that you can't currently find useful things in ways other than ads; obviously that happens all the time. But without ads (or other similar forms of marketing) it might not be viable for many of these things to be launched in the first place, allowing you to then discover them.
And requiring money is often bad too. Many very good products just don't profit enough to afford mountains of marketing.
One obvious way is through buyers. A lot of clothing and housewares brands, for example, don't advertise significantly. Instead, they shop their wares to buyers for retailers. Another is through reviewers. Electronics companies, for example, have a long tradition of sending out gear to magazines and other sources of reviews. Car magazines are another good example. In the modern age, that also can mean lending or giving gear to people influential in an area.
If ads didn't exist, I think we'd see more of that. And we'd certainly see more of other approaches. Look at ProductHunt, for example, where startups can put things in front of a crowd of early adopters for nothing. It would be pretty easy to imagine specialist versions of that for particular interests. And look at Tesla, which famously didn't run ads; plenty of people have heard of them.
So I agree you're right that some new companies today could be at a disadvantage if they don't buy ads (although definitely not all of them). But I'm not convinced that's a necessary case if we end the ad arms race.
The whole thing seems quaintly naive from today's perspective.
What, what I believe consumers should do is install ad-blockers en mass.
Actually, no. What they should do is install ad blockers that specifically send in fake ad clicks and fake ad views and data to the advertisement companies so that they lose money.
There isn't much point to complaining when there are so many more disruptive and effective things that a bunch of consumers could do.
This setup provided enough income to cover the costs of my dedicated phone line and ISP access.
The only real exception would be the "let's make an example of out this person" case. When crime is rampant, prosecutions might happen with greater likelyhood in order to deter more crime for occuring. An example would be pirating music. It is not feasible to prosecute people for pirating music, but suing 1 party publicly will get 1000s of people to stop instantly.
But what about if tricking ad fraudsters avoided defrauding advertisers?
That means a 13 year old trundling down a 5 meter wide footpath to the local shops on Sunday morning is up for a $428 fine, roughly 23 hours of adult minimum wage work.
It seems to be seldom enforced, but it is doing a good job at what I think is the main objective - keeping people off bikes and in their car paying road tolls to the government and their private contractor businesses.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/rules-for-cycli...
Cops never bother to enforce it that I’ve seen tho’
I am guessing the insurance companies are looking far enough into the future where the long term benefits to my health outweigh the short term risks, but they are definitely losing money in the short term.
Of course it also depends on the physical condition of the person, especially their susceptibility to stress related injuries, and the running surface. Generally speaking running is much higher impact than biking, which is why you so often see runners with a stress injury training on a stationary bike.
Wonder what the tradeoff is there for my lifetime medical expenses if I wasn’t running?
Given the same commute you can expect riding a bike to be 23 times more dangerous than driving a car.
Put another way, it looks like people get into car accidents roughly once every 18 years. If instead of driving your car for your commute you rode your bike, you can expect to get into an accident every single year (and then some).
At 15 miles/hour, the means the first 5 miles of biking costs you about 0.25-0.5 micromorts of accident risk and gives you +2 microlifes of fitness.
Riding in a car, on the other hand, incurs accident risk AND has effects on fitness.
But the more interesting article to me was [0] which presents a study that says around 30% of "cycling" deaths are due to natural causes such as heart disease.
[0]: https://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2015/09/01/is-it-jus...
> It also signals that older males need to be mindful that vigorous cycling – as with any form of exercise – can be fatal if the rider has a serious medical condition like heart disease. It’s likely though that the exercise benefit of cycling prevents many more premature deaths from disease that it causes.
It would be interesting to break down the statistics on cycling to seperate those who cycle to commute, and those who cycle for leisure. I’d assume they have vastly different mortality causes.
For comparison, the car number quoted on Wikipedia appears to be from 2009.
Also, you have a lot of control over your own safety on a bike. I think there are many cyclists who are an order of magnitude safer than your average cyclist.
To be clear, I don't doubt that cycling is risker than driving. I just don't find the typically quoted numbers to be accurate.
Statiscally, that’s not likely - maybe even not possible. There will be some who are that much safer, but not many - otherwise the average would just be pulled up.
This is a common joke in aviation, but sharing a thermal with multiple gliders whizzing around is a little disconcerting.
Their resting heart rate algorithm is pretty bad, too. My RHR goes from 56 when I'm sedentary for a day to 61 during the week when I'm working out regularly. Looking at the actual chart there's a nice line at 55-56 where my RHR actually is, but I guess Fitbit just uses a moving average.
I'm excited at the prospect of insurance companies using these algorithms to determine that I'm unhealthy.
From here on out, your career consists of optimizing methods of manipulating that effect for your benefit, the benefit of your team, and the benefit of your company, in that order.
[1] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/04/jerry_muller_on.htm...
I couldn't figure out why it was that important, but with insurance discounts, I can definitely see the financial incentives.
The term cobra effect originated in an anecdote set at the time of British rule of colonial India. The British government was concerned about the number of venomous cobra snakes in Delhi.[3] The government therefore offered bounty for every dead cobra. Initially this was a successful strategy as large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped, causing the cobra breeders to set the now-worthless snakes free. As a result, the wild cobra population further increased. The apparent solution for the problem made the situation even worse
I'm curious because if everybody disliked wild cobras loose in the city I'd have expected the breeders to kill their stock when the bounty ended, not free it.
These breeders were trying to scam a government program so they didn't exactly have the highest scruples, expecting them to do anything to aid society is probably too much to expect.
That mostly comes down to insufficient education, greed and lack of immediate consequences.
Letting a live snake roam free is entirely different in that an uneducated man would understand the risk, there is no upside and there is a possibility for immediate consequence.
The AHA thought they saw a slight suggestion in the data that high levels of saturated fat led to heart disease. They wanted to stop heart disease. So they set a goal. Reduce the average Americans dietary intake of saturated fats by 15%. They worked for years with other agencies, legislators, regulators, and food companies. And they succeeded! They dropped the average Americans intake of saturated fats (well specifically the portion of the daily calorie intake made up of saturated fats) by 15%!
There was an issue though. Food makers took fat out of their foods, producing "Lite" versions. These tasted like cardboard. People stopped buying. To get people to buy their products again, they brought back the flavor. With salt and lots of sugar. This led to a gigantic increase in the total number of calories people ate. Which led to a nationwide obesity episdemic. Which led to a national diabetes epidemic. Which led to record-breaking levels of... heart disease.
Oh, and research found that saturated fats aren't a danger to heart health. But once you've put things into law, established practices and regulations, it's tremendously difficult to change. If they had just told everyone they thought saturated fats might cause heart disease, none of this would have happened. And they would have been able to retract their statements on a dime.
nay, 1 in 4 [0] x 330 million times, this.........
We'd go through logs and see people sequentially logging for each day, one team member after another, on the last day of the competition.
You'd also find people scrutinizing the accuracy of any reporting we did as a company - some very odd bugs were found by companies with participants armed with Excel and too much time on their hands.
https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/little-chocola...
A lot of their speciality drinks are basically milkshakes though.
If it catches on, it will probably stop working once the statistics reveal gender-changed MtoF's to be just as high in accident rates as regular males.
Gender is a pretty crude (though effective) axis to make this sort of risk distinction on. An insurance company that can accurately figure out which men are lower-risk to insure than the average man will probably have a pretty good time in the market. (And get a head start on any policy changes about not discriminating on gender.)
Ronald Coase, of Coase theorem fame, believed that markets are rarely efficient: "Coase argued that real-world transaction costs are rarely low enough to allow for efficient bargaining and hence the theorem is almost always inapplicable to economic reality."[1] In this case, the inefficiency persists because the costs of implementing a more detailed model would far exceed the benefits.
Disclaimer I must say (for anyone who tries to report me) that I didn’t legally change my sex solely for cheaper auto-insurance, though, that was and is a big factor for me and other people who suffer from gender-dysphoria.
Yeah... never once heard anyone say that "car insurance" was why they got their gender changed on government paperwork. The whole things looks very suspect and found this thread on r/asktransgender talking about this which rather than trying to summarize I'll let you enjoy and read for yourself https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/8g0ai9/chea...
One commenter on the original thread pointed out the other difficulties the OP will eventually run into regarding booking flights, etc. so I presume that since the OP is not actually dysmorphic or having gender dysphoria that they will eventually discover that what they will encounter from doing this was not worth the $1000 a year saved.
Software engineers have higher pay and greater ability to walk if management gets too patronizing; a lot of other people are going to get this as the alternative to big insurance increases but not, say, getting a more flexible schedule or paid enough to spend an hour less commuting or be able to afford healthier food at inner city markets where vegetables cost more than at the Whole Foods further out.
The last contact I had with such a voluntary insurance program, it consisted entirely of the insured calling in to a call center, to have someone nag them to create health goals and then nag more to make progress. No thanks; I'm already married. I could have just blathed my way through to collect the cash reward at the end, but I decided I didn't want to feed that system with my attention, and opted out. Later iterations haven't seemed any better, and I too fear the "voluntary" -> "economically enforced" -> "mandatory" progression.
If you want me to walk 10k steps every day, the cash reward might be enough to reflect the lower claims paid out to frequent walkers, but it won't even begin to cover the excess cortisol, expressed because I can't stand the thought of my insurance company electronically monitoring my every move and judging me based on how much I can manage.
(Genealogical anecdotes suggest the stubbornness is Scottish in origin. The "go boil your head" temperament is strongly associated with a specific family name, traceable back to Edinburgh.)
I have a reverse psychology detector, though, so if you forbid something in an attempt to get me to do it, I'm then more likely to be stubbornly obedient in whatever way I have determined would punish you most for attempting to deceive me.
Nagging me about something I was already planning to do is the worst, though, because that means I have to delay doing it until it is apparent I'm not doing it just because you told me to.
Introduce some thing that not everyone wants, then incentivize it’s use, then punish it’s non-use.
Which, I believe, is how insurance is ideally supposed to behave according to economists.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-26/workplace...
It’s also labor intensive to measure workplace wellness in a verifiable fashion. You basically need to collect vital signs on your employees, otherwise you’re open to being gamed in the way described in the OP.
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-west-virginia-teachers...
Our healthcare costs are insanely high, with the fundamental performance of the system the worst in the modern nations of the world, our life expectancy being the only one in the group actually dropping. Instead of addressing fundamental issues, our employer benefit systems are experimenting with behaviour modification via gamification programs like some sort of bizzare black mirror dystopia.
I will also share another famous quotation of mine which I intend to eventually get tattooed somewhere (when I can figure out how to make it look good.. I have no tattoos): "Make game of that which makes as much as thee." - from The Rubiyat by Omar Khayaam.
Great quote. But you probably know, that the English translation is more inspired by Omar, and much of what you enjoyed was the work of FitzGerald.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/516526...
Full Quote:
“But leave the Wise to wrangle, and with me
The Quarrel of the Universe let be:
And, in some corner of the Hubbub couch'd,
Make Game of that which makes as much of Thee.”
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zHQqznuFPd6EO1ryjV2Zlc6MSxY=...
The benefit would come from smoothing extremes. Lie about speeds over 80, reduce big accelerations and hard breaking. Lieing about total miles could also work, but I think that could be done by just unplugging the box, or only sending it power and not data.
Has anyone come across anything on these insurance plans? I'm sure it's something many companies would love to do but I remain skeptical.
Which is fine. That’s human nature.
But. No shame.
I’m reminded of that guy[1] who earned tons of airline miles by taking advantage of an ill-thought-out pudding promotion.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Phillips_(entrepreneur...
My current insurance hasn't tried this yet, but I'm sure they will. They're going to hate me by the time I get done redlining the agreement and sending it back, and that's just for starters.
We are going to see a ton of tertiary effects of all this data sloshing around, and I really don't think people are going to like them. Especially wrt insurance and invasive surveillance like this. To drive, the state requires it, and so any time-and-place data and so on will be effectively legally required to be shared under whatever terms insurance companies choose.
https://www.provanthealth.com/industry-trends/2018/3/26/what...
"In the fall of 2016, the AARP brought suit on behalf of its members, arguing that the ADA and GINA regulations are inconsistent with Congress’s statutory requirement that employers’ wellness programs be “voluntary.” The AARP argued its members were injured by being forced to pay higher health insurance costs to avoid disclosing personal health information. In the fall of 2017, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted summary judgment to the AARP, holding that, although the term “voluntary” was ambiguous in the ADA’s and GINA’s statutes, the EEOC’s interpretation of the term was not supported by a reasoned explanation and therefore was not entitled to the Court’s deference."
http://www.psfinc.com/articles/aarp-vs-eeoc-lawsuit-update-s...
"If the current court order stands, wellness programs may not be allowed to tie incentives to wellness programs subject to the ADA or GINA."
That is just a guess though. I don't have the ability to verify it.
Be honest here: we are both speculating about that which we don't know, and it is hard to study.
All I'm saying is there may be some benefit for the many fat smart people in taking up some kind of insulin-resistance-reversing diet; lo, for all the fat people (, as well as the thin-yet-still-insulin resistant people, too). But ketosis is not exactly the default path-of-least-resistance for most people, given the standard american diet, conventional nutritional 'wisdom', etc.
I wouldn’t do it otherwise. Even the flimsiest of pretenses will do it.
Doing it this way also takes care of the cheating concern, it’s a reward I can only get by physically doing the work.
Plus, it gives me a quiet time to watch everything including the Star Trek back catalogue.
And I don’t live in Melbourne so honestly brown water with a gram of sweet is a synonym for coffee.
Besides, who says the users of this are smart? They're just at a bar that offers that service.