tomkarlo

Casinos (and lotteries) are subject to heavy regulation, including oversight on the odds of the games they offer.

The problem with back-end enforcement (and those laws do exist) is that it doesn't remove the incentive to try issuing a scam-ish security and hope you will evade prosecution, and the damage done can take years to unwind, if it's even possible at all. This is why there are regulations on public offerings of securities to non-accredited investors.

Some roles (ops, sales) are just naturally a lot more inclined to use these kinds of systems. I generalize like that after having watched similar systems at 3 companies; you hardly ever see an engineer give a "taco" for a code review, but someone in another team might give one simply for someone knowing which room a meeting is happening in. It's hard to normalize the culture. I think peer bonuses (which usually require manager approval on one or both sides) tend to be a bit more normalized across teams.

We use something like this in my org, and Google has "kudos", but I've found that the problem is their usage is highly variable even within a medium-sized or (we're roughly 1,000.) On some teams, the average employee will have hundreds of these kudos, whereas on others, the average might be 1 or 2.

This was highlighted to me recently when someone in Slack noted that one person had ~50X the kudos of everyone else and asked how that happens... and they said "just go hang around in team X's channel, they'll give you a 'taco' any time your answer a query."

Given Google's promo system (where a committee looks at candidates from very different teams) this then means they'd have to try to normalize the data for it to be useful.

The article's clear, but the headline is misleading, since it's not actually true that "California is losing residents" as an broad statement - it's more narrowly true that CA is seeing more people move to other US states than from other states, but I guess that's less compelling as a headline.

California's population has grown every year since at least 1960, but the headline and article would make you think otherwise.

If that customer exists - they sound like a great customer. $75 a month might be too expensive for your needs, but it's certainly not a ton of money if someone believes that product is the right fit for them.

Seems like they're pretty up front about that, right on their home page: "Online backups for the truly paranoid."

We can argue about whether that really differentiates them from GCP etc, but that's their spin.

That doesn't mean it's the wrong pricing, just that you're maybe not the customer they want. A business loses some customers at any pricing level, it's just a question of whether the incremental revenue from the remaining customers makes up for it.

When you charge a penny extra, that's all incremental margin from the customers you keep, but for the customers you lose, some of lost revenue is balanced by not having the costs associated with supporting them any more.

Pushing the most price sensitive customers out the door isn't that bad, because they're also likely to be the least loyal down the road, and maybe the highest maintenance relative to their spend.

The article seems to ignore a big group: California nets about 100K or more immigrants from outside the US each year, which would cover the gap in recent year.

http://www.ppic.org/publication/immigrants-in-california/

It's been almost 20 years since Pete Wilson was governor. In the meantime, the GOP has moved quite a bit to the right, and CA as a whole has moved left on most issues. If anything, it looks like the remaining red districts in places like Central Valley could be at risk as first generation Latinos hit voting age and start to outnumber the conservatives.

Much of the potential 2018 shift in Congress may come from CA, for example: http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/369254-perfect-storm...

Eg for the Central Valley districts: "Walters’s district has grown by 33,000 residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. Of those new residents, 30,000 are nonwhite. The white population actually declined in Royce’s district while the overall population grew by 10,000 residents. In Denham’s district, 17,000 of the 21,000 new residents are nonwhite."

(Not to mention the new tax plan was hugely unpopular in CA in general.)

Given the share of SP500 profits that the Google/FB/Apple/Amazon gang currently capture, it's hard to describe it as a "bubble". Maybe "corporate hegemony"... but the situation is SF/SJ at this point is clearly driven by actual cash profits, not speculation, at this point. E.g. Google alone apparently owns the equivalent of 14 Salesforce Towers (the largest building in SF) worth of commercial real estate.

Yes, but that's not a "risk factor"... generally in an issuance document, the big pressure is to disclose all the material negatives of your business that you're aware of, partially so that down the road the SEC or your investors can't complain they weren't warned of that risk during the issuance.

I'd love to see your stats you're using to set that outcome's likelihood at "very high", relative to the probability of being able to save enough for retirement based on simply being a saver.

The entire problem is that most folks grossly overestimate their probability of future success, even over a lifetime.

(Not to mention likely done a lot of damage to your health and relationships, if you spend a career trying to finally achieve a big outcome... there are non-financial costs to taking bigger risks that we often fail to assess.)

It's one thing to do it for 6 months with a newborn that can't leave their crib (although even that's challenging). It's another to do it with one or two kids that have learned to walk.

Even over a lifetime of trying, the probability remains pretty low. This is why articles like this emphasize that the more realistic was is via savings; lots of folks fail to save because they believe they're going to "hit it big" on the next deal / job / inheritance / lottery ticket, but it's usually just going to result in failing to save enough because you've over-estimated your future income.

It's also a convenient way to justify not saving enough.

I've watched fairly successful business owners make this mistake many times - they were making 400K or 500K (in some cases, millions) a year off a business, but not saving anything because they still expected it to grow a lot larger. If it fails to grow, then end up either broke or in debt.

It's inherent to entrepreneurs that they believe in the big future payoff more than average, but that's also a big blind spot for financial planning.

That's easy, if you're single. But "renting just a room" isn't really an option for couples, or families.

That said, if you're moving to the Bay Area for a job, you need to take into account that six figures here is not the same as six figures anywhere else.

You have to account for the expected value of those two approaches.

The payout on your strategy (generate a lot of value for a lot of people) is high, but the probability of success is very low. (And the payout is usually tied to the stock market, if you're talking about generating corporate equity value, private or public.)

Conversely, a dollar saved is just a dollar plus it's return over time, but the probability of saving that dollar is essentially 100%.

The price the insurance company pays is almost never going to be higher than what you would pay if you're uninsured. You're confusing your co-pay with the uninsured cost of a flu shot. If Sam's Club and Costco can offer flu shots for $15 [0], it's a safe bet that the cost to an insurance company is less than that.

[0] https://www.bradsdeals.com/blog/where-to-get-a-cheap-flu-sho...

It's not deceptive - there's no commitment or understanding that the only thing he's doing when out of sight is work on your car. (And they don't bill based on how long they're gone - they bill based on how long they actually work on the car, in theory.)

On a computer, however, users generally assume that results are being delivered as fast as possible, even though in reality there's usually other things eating cycles.

Let's consider the flu. Before you choose your provider you don't even know you have the flu in many cases. You might have a cold, or something much more serious. How is a consumer supposed to make an educated choice about what provider they should take when they don't even know their diagnosis? Simply saying "I'll take the cheaper one" is not an educated buying decision - it just incentivizes providers to provide the lowest quote up front, and maybe the worst service.

Funny, it happens that I actually tried to go to the local urgent care that day, and I was turned away because they couldn't handle an injury that serious.

Even if they did, I made my decision based on which provider I thought was doing to do the best job... I didn't know at the point I made that choice whether I would need those vicodin, so they wouldn't have been part of my decision. And once I was checked in to the SF General Hospital (after two hours of waiting) I was definitely not going to hobble down the street, trying to compare prices on vicodin.

Also my damn leg was broken. It wasn't really the right moment to break out Google Sheets and create an expected value analysis of my various healthcare provider options.

It's nice to say "if only we had more agency, prices would be lower"... but it ignores the fact you still need risk pooling (insurance) unless you expect everyone to keep savings for the worst case scenario. And pretty quickly a risk pool means someone has to decide how much that pool should pay to help treat a particular injury... and you're back to where you started.

You're confusing emergency care with non-elective care. Just because something isn't an ER visit doesn't mean you don't need to get treated for it immediately. E.g. the flu.

> I'd be interested in any citations you could provide that shows that system-wide preventative care is dwarfed by the system-wide costs of major incidents for the elderly.

95% of healthcare spend is reactive, 5% is preventative[0] Medical spending in the last three years before death accounts for 13.4 percent of aggregate US medical spending.[1] And this ignores major treatments for people over 65 that occur more than 3 years before they die (and on average, people live 20+ years after they turn 65.)

[0] http://www.newsweek.com/health-prevention-worth-money-86075

[1] https://meps.ahrq.gov/data_files/publications/st429/stat429....

Let's say I was paying out of pocket. (Given my HDHP, I effectively was.) Would that somehow magically change my ability to negotiate the price of those pills?

No.

It's not a "distortion". It's the inherent problem of trying to turn healthcare into a market. The dynamics of service delivery make it impossible for consumes to negotiate or compare prices in the manner necessary to have a functioning market.

I'd also note, that since I've never gone to any other healthcare institution with a broken leg, I have *no way to compare my experience to other providers. This is yet another way in that healthcare does not lend itself to market solutions.

It's not very hard to define "worse outcomes"... the US trails other developed nations in just about every wide-reaching healthcare metric at this point. If you have counter-examples, feel free to raise them.

> In other words, the system complains that people don't do something that the system prevents them from doing.

Uh, this has nothing to do with the system, and mostly everything to do with behavioral economics and risk pooling. People are poor at investing in preventative care, because the benefit is extremely hard to perceive at the individual level. And they over-invest in end of life care, because, well, they don't want to die. That's not the result of "the system", that's human nature. Attempting to build a healthcare system on how we "should" act instead of how we actually do isn't a plan.

What are you going to do, pre-negotiate rates for every possible medical procedure you might ever need?

Because if you wait until you need it, it's going to be a pretty bad time to negotiate.

The market for auto repair is also regularly cited as one of the more scammy, consumer-unfriendly experiences around - because consumers have a very difficult time assessing quality of service, and incremental charges often pop up mid-purchase.

This is why consumers love warranties and extended-warranties on their vehicles so much - it means they leave this problem to their insurer. It's easier to insure cars than people, though - your risk is essentially bounded by the market value of the car.

Can you point to an example where any of these three things have happened in the real world?

"Still providing disaster coverage"... is pretty much all of what health insurance does for people over 65. The annual spend on preventative care is dwarfed by a single common incident (fall, flu, cancer) at that age.

>Define "how much something costs?" I can pull up the spec sheet from my insurance company and tell you the in network price and out of network price for just about anything.

Except if you go in for a major procedure, you don't know what you'll end up needing off that price list, and often, neither does your doctor. So even if providers were perfectly transparent about what a procedure would cost (and it's well-established they're not - just try calling and asking for prices) the nature of the service being purchased is that you sometimes don't know exactly what you're buying until it's too late to change providers.

A few years back I broke my leg and went to the hospital. Halfway through the process I was offered a couple of Vicodin, which I would later be billed $1,000 for. Was I supposed to haggle about them with that, or take my xray and hobble out down the street to someone who would sell me vicodin cheaper?

Supplements are explicitly not considered "health care" in the US

Countries with single payer also offer eye drops, family doctor visits, and LASIK... they just tend to pay less for them

You don't need "government force" to change how health insurance works. See Germany, many other countries. All you do is create a government healthcare pool that's large enough to cover risk, fund it, and give folks the option of using it or using a private insurer that will cost a lot more.

And yet the data shows that when you leave the decision to regulators and bureaucrats, you seem to get better value for the healthcare dollar than if you let individuals make their own decisions. The US, in particular, spends more and sees worse outcomes than other counties.

This shouldn't be a surprise. An individual is going to not make very good decisions about how healthcare dollars are allocated over the course of their life. They're going to usually tend to underspend on preventative care (which has the highest ROI) and tend to overspend on end-of-life care (which has a lower ROI). You can see this played out in things like the US's infant mortality rate (3X other developed nations) and life expectancy (31st worldwide, declining).

Cars have the nice property of being mass-produced goods, where there's an established mechanism for testing, rating, and regulating them. There's no such thing for healthcare (and it's a service, not a hard good.)

If I was qualified to discern if my doc's preferred solution was the best one, I'd be a doctor. I ask my doctor because he's been specifically trained to make that determination.

> Or how would it be beneficial if the "worst" provider was forced to charge you the same as the best provider?

You've got that backwards. Right now, we basically allow the worst provider to charge as much as the best one, because we don't really have any way to differentiate the best from the worst. There's no need to force any business to charge more.