yeah no thx. With how long devices last me now and days the only thing that will accelerate my trade in would be the extra battery wear from wireless charging.
Honest question, do you think a 2x factor of error is all that significant? Maybe it's just my EE background (where everything is measured in logs) but anything within an order of magnitude seems accurate enough for me.
Are you being serious? Saying you have 100k users when you actually have 50k is not fine, no matter your background. Hell, is it fine if I take an appliance that works on 110V and plug it into a 220V outlet? I'm also an electrical engineer and measuring everything in log scales doesn't excuse lying.
It's not about how significant the error, but that they don't care about their quality. When they interview someone without verifying that person actually works for a company, it shows they don't care about their quality.
They could fix it afterwards, but they don't even do that.
Hmm. Not off the top of my head. The intuition is pretty straightforward though. Imagine the difference between doubling total amount of money in the economy by either:
a. doubling the amount of money each individual person has.
b. distributing that new money evenly across every person.
In the former case, the demand curve would get steeper, no? And in the latter case, it would get flatter.
In case a, you'd decrease the price elasticity of demand and people would have an incentive to raise prices. You'd have inflation.
In case b, you'd increase the price elasticity of demand providing an incentive for producers to keep their prices lower and compete with each other on price.
Of course it all depends on where on the demand curve we're talking about. But for many of the goods we produce, their market-clearing prices are at a quantity such that they would benefit from an additional even distribution of income to every person.
> No, pitbulls are not sweet. Pitbulls are unpredictable monsters.
Do you have any direct experience with a well-loved, housebroken pitbull? In all my experiences with the breed, the only thing they're aggressive about is snuggling. /anecdata
Yes I have. She was sweet as sweet can be. But I never got to trust her.
They are bred for fighting. Not all that bright, and with fuses that are known to blow without apparent reason. Too many cases of owners suddenly attacked and maimed.
It's an American thing which has spread to the rest of us. Thirty years ago, we never saw these muscle- and fighterbreeds. I don't believe we were the poorer for it.
> It's an American thing which has spread to the rest of us. Thirty years ago, we never saw these muscle- and fighterbreeds. I don't believe we were the poorer for it.
Pitbulls as a general category have been around for hundreds of years and originated in Europe.
Is the system setup to value them with money? Can a parent walk into a school and agree to higher property taxes if their kid is placed in a specific teacher's classroom?
Perhaps it's possible that digital marketing is not all that effective for commodity items?
I admit to having brand preferences for laundry detergent and garbage bags, though I like to believe (perhaps wishfully) they are a result of first-hand and family experiences.
Often it's a false economy. Dish detergent for example... the more expensive stuff is often far thicker concentrate and lasts many times longer than the cheap stuff.
Oh they care about the packaging, they care very much. They're doing price discrimination in stages:
The fancy toothpaste with the beautiful box comes from the same conglomerate as the cheaper one does. If you consider yourself hot stuff, you pick the fancy brand with the shiniest box. The middle class, humble folk pick the same product sans color whirl and foil insets on the box, but it's still Colgate brand shaving cream. None of that Value-By-Walmart crap for our house, no sir.
The in-store, value-add generic products look even cheaper and less attractive. My rational mind knows that Safeway doesn't own any shampoo factories, and Safeway Compliments brand shampoo comes from the same vats as the more expensive stuff on the higher shelves.
It's not like fancier graphics take more money to print. Rather, P&G, Tesco et al pay the designer to make the boxes look "cheap" or "expensive", so us suckers would opt for the more expensive option - and bring more revenue.
We are all suckers. I learned this like 10 years ago prepping for my economics admittance exam. Our house is still filled with brand-name items, because monkey be dumb.
As a control system engineer, I can confirm you're correct that store brand items are often made in the same factory, using the same equipment as brand items.
However in every factory I've worked in, there have always been differences in quality.
Active or expensive ingredients are reduced or replaced. Soaps concentration is lowered, butter and cocoa is reduced/replaced, less pulses(beans) or fruit in the tin, drained weights are lowered, quality control is not as strict, etc.
Regarding quality control - often factories would clean the line prior to running the high end product. Switching over to the cheaper product usually consists of switching the packaging out and topping up the supply with the cheaper product - no clean or flushing of the line. The first couple of items produced would be different quality to the rest of the batch.
You have to cut some corners to compete with big companies like p&g and Unilever. They're buying and producing much larger quantities of products than any generic brand.
Regarding cheap packaging - you pay per colour when printing. Printing materials can also be swapped out. Thinner plastic or card. Matt instead of high gloss.
A lot of people love brands and pick the one they last remember - which is why advertising is so powerful. It maybe sound cheesy/irrational/unbelievable but it's true and there are 100s of billions in market value built on it.
There is even a hidden logic to picking a brand product: when I recognize a brand, chances are high that if I had read something scandalous about that brand in the past I would not fail to make the connection. Whereas when I am looking at a noname with a "brand" as recognizable as an IPv6 address, there is no way I could make the link between product and something bad I might have read about it in the past.
"It's famous, I would have heard about it if they were all duds"
I actually do this, more or less, and consider it rational. For a large number of household goods, I really don't care about them past some baseline quality threshold. So if something worked last time and the price doesn't seem out of line, I'll use that. I generally don't remember brand names for most of these things, but generally can pick out what packaging looks like. And I'm sure advertising influences my first-choice and whatnot on the margin.
I'm sure paying attention would save some money, or, who knows, I might even be "delighted" by a "new" "product experience", but I'd rather just not think about it.
Better yet: seller that delivers to your local supermarket so you don't have to stay home and wait for them. In NL it's pretty much the preferred option for carryable items
at this scale their digital marketing is not your traditional performance marketing. traditional performance marketing would absolutely be worthless to a brand this big, but large ad buys ensure they stay top of mind for consumers in a (commodities) space where competition is more numerous than it is deep.
My apartment, on a weekly basis, gets mail to roughly 3-5 previous inhabitants. As in, exact same address, etc.
Sometimes even bills from insurance companies or other important mail.
I think when you move you're supposed to notify USPS to forward mail to your new address (probably also inform important mailers of the move as well) but from what I've seen they don't propagate the address changes very well.
I mean, sure, those previous inhabitants may not have notified USPS at all, but I find that hard to believe.
USPS only forwards the mail for one year after notification. After that any mail that is still marked for that address will be delivered there. Ideally you would have notified all relevant parties at that point.
Also a lot of junk mail will be addressed to the name "or current resident"
> I think when you move you're supposed to notify USPS to forward mail to your new address
> sure, those previous inhabitants may not have notified USPS at all, but I find that hard to believe
I certainly wouldn't. Why would I notify the USPS that I moved? I would notify my contacts (or much more likely, they'd ask me for my address in the event they wanted to send me something). A delivery service is for delivering things to addresses, not to people.
Try getting them to deliver to a person using some other location than an address, such as "wherever he happens to be". It can't be their purpose to do something they're not able to do.
If I have something mailed to me at my office, are you claiming the post office hasn't made a mistake when they deliver it to my home?
> Try getting them to deliver to a person using some other location than an address
So, like, General Delivery?
> If I have something mailed to me at my office, are you claiming the post office hasn't made a mistake when they deliver it to my home?
There's a question of principal/agent there, so maybe, maybe not.
OTOH, I'll maintain that the post office is not making a mistake when it keeps delivering my mail from my employer to me at my actual address, even though they keep sending it to an address which resembles mine only in that the street name and zip code are the same, and two of the four numbers in the street address they use also appear (in different positions) in my actual address.
Which I suppose I should go talk to HR about again.
General Delivery is meant for the use of people who don't have an address (or as a substitute for a PO Box), and has to be arranged by the recipient, and the recipient may only receive General Delivery at a single location. So no, not like General Delivery -- General Delivery is an address, the address of the post office offering it, which is where the person receives their mail.
What happens when you miss giving notice to one of your contacts? What if your contact doesn't update their records right away? How do you get the timing just right? Not having your mail sent to a new address before you move in nor having any mail arrive after you've left your old address?
There is value in updating your address. Ideally, you won't need a year to get things sorted, but a couple of months is certainly valuable.
>> much more likely, they'd ask me for my address in the event they wanted to send me something
You're trying to invoke the fear that the only method of contacting your friend is to write to the last address you knew for them. That was true once; it has no particular relationship to the modern day.
Even when it was true, though, postal services were a system for delivering mail to places, not to people. If your friend moved and you didn't know that, it was difficult to contact them.
By not having a physical mailbox. Nothing says that you have to have a mailbox, and without one the USPS won't deliver mail to your house. Also, I believe that they have some sort of permanent forward that the local postmaster can put in so that if you don't have a mailbox at home they'll send it to a PO box.
