2,505 karma · joined August 12, 2016
That depends, amongst other things, on how much interest you charge in the interim. Payday lenders makes lots of money off of people who a) cannot afford their loans by any reasonable metric and b) default on those loans.
During the early 90s, RJ Reynolds had a promotion called "Camel Cash", where each pack of cigarettes came with a coupon that could be redeemed for Camel merch (tshirts, beach towels, etc.) Our car was covered in cigarette ash, a vaguely sticky layer of tar, and stacks and stacks of Camel Cash. Most of the instrument cluster was obscured by Camel Cash stacked in front of it. We were Camel Cash millionaires.
My grandmother (born in 1928, started smoking at 13) said that, growing up, people casually referred to cigarettes as "cancer sticks".
1.8 A word about Unix standards
``The wonderful thing about Unix standards is that there are so many to choose from.'' You may be totally bewildered about the multitude of various standards that exist. Rest assured that nowhere in this manual will you encounter an attempt to spell it all out for you; you could not read and internalise such a twisted account without bleeding from the nose and ears.
However, you might keep in mind the following simple fact: of all the standards, POSIX is the least common denominator. So when this manual repeatedly refers to POSIX, the point is ``the thing we are describing should be portable just about anywhere.'' Scsh sticks to POSIX when at all possible; its major departure is symbolic links, which aren't in POSIX (see -- it really is a least common denominator).
Definitely. Another big driver is recurring relationships, either with customers or a larger peer selling community[0]. Most people won't buy more than once from someone unreliable, and ethical people generally don't want to work alongside or be associated with unethical people. Sales people that have options will gravitate towards products/companies they think they can sell more of and most won't consider working for companies that make useless crap or companies that can't or won't support what they make.
0 - think multi-tier tech sales, where you might have an OEM that makes a product, a distributor that either holds stock on the product or handles receivables for the OEM, and a VAR who might directly sell the product to an end-user, all with sales reps that work together on most (or all) deals.
We'd hire a new manager from outside the company. This new manager would go around and meet some sales teams, meet some customers, then a month or two in, end up at a meeting where they gave a speech. At this speech, they would opine that customers loved our product, that it "practically sold itself" and our job was at least 90% execution.
Translation: a trained circus monkey could do your job. Just show up, answer your emails, and the product will do all the heavy lifting. Don't come complaining to me about how your quota is too high, product isn't taking your feature requests seriously, etc. Those are just excuses for poor performance.
I saw this happen a half dozen times, at least. In every case -- every case -- those people were singing a very different tune after they had been around for six months and saw what the job was really like.
Now, having good traction in the market, and analysts saying good things about you, and customers excited to be references? All that is really important. But in large enterprise sales, nothing "sells itself." And, for the record, we had plenty of people who weren't idiots, who nonetheless couldn't sell a product that was in very high demand. At least, not enough to keep their job.
I also wasn’t thinking about this from the perspective of the tooling discouraging someone from wanting to learn - that just wasn’t a problem my friends and I had, but I can see how the modern tools could be more likely to inspire someone on the fence to continue.
Anyway, thanks for the comment.
I’d also like to add image obfuscation on the static generator side - as it stands now, anything other than text or html gets passed through unchanged.
There’s an awful lot of small-government posturing that goes on, but it is not accurate to say our system is the result of a small government approach.
To provide just one concrete example: in the 80s, we had problems with hospitals “dumping” indigent patients. In some cases, they would literally take homeless people who showed up needing medical attention to some random part of town and drop them off on the side of the road.
Naturally, there was public outrage about this. Demands that it stop.
There are, of course, many ways a society could address this problem: a single payer system, a nationwide indigent care fund, etc.
Here’s what we did: as part of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986, the federal government stipulated that any hospital which accepts Medicare/Medicaid[0] and which operates an emergency department must provide “stabilizing care” to anyone who shows up at that emergency department with an "Emergency Medical Condition" before inquiring about the patient’s ability to pay[1].
This law did not stipulate that those hospitals, or the doctors who practice at those hospitals, be reimbursed in any way for providing that stabilizing care, just that they provide it.
Naturally, doctors and hospitals consider this an example of a heavy handed government engaging in cost-shifting. CMS countered with a paper written by one of their economists that what they do here is not technically “cost-shifting” for reasons.
Hospitals now employ staff to get uninsured patients who qualify for Medicaid signed up so they’ll get paid.
(I haven’t seen stats on this in several years, but the last numbers I saw were that around half of US hospitals lose money on an operating basis. They make up the balance in the gift shop, cafeteria, endowment if they are lucky enough to have one, local taxes, or bankruptcy court.)
0 - that’s basically “all hospitals”
1 - the actual rules are more complex, but that’s the gist of it
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I'm not ignoring anything. I posted an analogy about how the US hospital business has some similar incentive structures as Google's search business, in that both are dependent on third-parties to deliver revenue. You, for reasons that are not clear to me, felt the need to post an unhelpful, off-topic, and incorrect rant about the insurance system in the US backed up, apparently, by nothing more than your favorite AI hallucination engine.
I don't think you've even tried to understand what I posted or why, nor do I think you are capable of understanding why your claim is completely irrelevant to what I wrote. Guess what? Even if insurance companies purchased every single hospital in the country, those hospitals would still be dependent on the doctors to operate.
I posted an analogy about the dynamic that exists between hospitals and doctors. You responded by saying that's a distinction without a difference, when the dynamic I described is a primary difference between the two groups: doctors can practice medicine without hospitals. Hospitals cannot provide patient care without doctors.