One key difference is that submariners are rigorously trained to operate effectively in less-than-ideal environmental conditions, whereas Bob from accounting probably is not.
I understand where you’re coming from, but it’s perfectly sane if your legal system recognizes and accepts that speed detection methodologies have a defined margin of error; every ticket issued for speeding within that MoE would likely be (correctly) rejected by a court if challenged.
The buffer means, among other things, that you don’t have to bog down your traffic courts with thousands of cases that will be immediately thrown out.
> It literally is shipping AI generated content in the product.
When someone goes three miles per hour over the speed limit they are literally breaking the law, but that doesn’t mean they should get a serious fine for it. Sometimes shit happens.
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.
> 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.”
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> In a verbal, synchronous conversation (a phone call), you can communicate extremely efficiently. Misunderstandings or doubts are detected and clarified instantly.
My anxious brain might just work differently here, but I’ve found that I communicate way more efficiently if I have a minute or two to turn something over in my head before I need to respond.
Even if I don’t grok it immediately, my clarifying questions will usually be much better because my mind has had time to work through the possible second-order effects of whatever we’re discussing without - and this is key - the social pressure of making someone sit and wait while you think.