For me the red flag is them willing to send this letter to Chase, via snail mail at no charge to you. Nobody gives something for nothing. So I thought, why would they do this? after reading through the form, at the bottom, it looks like one of the companies, who sponsors this site, "Radvocate" seems like they are in the "class action" lawsuit business. https://myradvocate.com/
This site is about having enough potential clients are able to sue Chase at some point in the future, whenever a class action lawsuit comes up - and heck, they even will have a customer list and a relationship with you from sending this "free" letter for you in the past.
Usually in those kinds of cases, the end recipient gets very little - perhaps some subscription to a ID protection service or a few bucks but the firm who runs the class action makes a lot.
On the one hand, maybe it helps keep them honest (they cite Wells Fargo) so its good to be able to. But clearly there is some vested interest here on the part of Radvocate.
Radvocate here:
We do have a vested interest. Over time, we want to be the place you come when you have a dispute against a big company because we'll fight hard for you.
We're excited to partner on this project partly because it is very "on brand" for us from that perspective — we can help people, get our name out there, and shine light on an issue that matters to us. We're a business, but we're also all in this business (instead of some other business) because we want to make the system fairer for consumers.
ETA: Also, to correct one misapprehension: we are not in the class action business. We actually help consumers pursue individual arbitrations. We think more people should know that even if their contract doesn't let them sue, they actually do have a way to assert their power through arbitration. If anything, we'll have more customers for our current business if no one opts out of their Chase clause.
Bravo. In my view, this connection and upside was made appropriately-clear in the "Who are you and why did you build this?" section, and the context from the logo attached to the site.
Very clever marketing, good on you for managing this, and I hope you see a great return for your efforts.
And an interesting business concept - to help consumers pursue individual arbitrations. That could be really cool especially against large corporations when they are abusive. What do you charge as people go through their individual arbitration process/ how does the profit model work?
I really have mixed feelings about the legal system - on
Also, Radvocate, wondering if you can address the PII concerns other's have raised, as that is a very big deal.
On the business model – we charge a commission currently set at 15% of whatever compensation you recover. Hopefully that's from a negotiated settlement with the company before a full arbitration process is necessary. (More details at bottom). We currently process against 20+ cable / ISP / wireless companies.
Re: PII, first I want to make clear that I can't speak with legal standing about the terms & conditions as written. That said, if someone checks the (optional) box giving us permission to do so, all we plan to store is an e-mail address (plus an anonymized token?). We at Radvocate don't have current plans to use that e-mail address, but it is true that it likely would be most useful for the purpose of putting together a future class action against Chase. We'd only partner on that with firms we trust and who will make respectful use of the information.
We think this could be of interest and beneficial to someone opting out of arbitration. To repeat a point on this thread, it's another way to take action against Chase. Additionally, while we all have experience with a class action of being mailed a gift card three years later, if someone does make direct contact with a lawyer on the lawsuit, that may put them in a different position (though I'm not a lawyer).
More on our process: The way arbitration works is you usually have to send the company a notice letter (which we automate) 30-60 days before filing. When you do that a lot of companies suddenly want to negotiate, instead of ignoring your dispute, and we provide data and process guidance to help you negotiate most effectively. If negotiation fails then we automate escalating your claim to arbitration by filing with the American Arbitration Association, and we continue to provide guidance as the case moves through their system, including preparation for the hearing (which will typically happen by phone).
I don't think you've come close to adequately addressing the PII issue here.
The information you're collecting, if it ends up in the wrong hands, could lead to some nightmarish identity theft.
Surely you're aware of massive and prevalent data breaches[1]. You're collecting sensitive information to help people, but not providing any convincing bonafides on information security, let alone an actual plan for how sensitive information goes in your web form, then (many technical/logistical steps later) ends up in Chase's P.O. box, without leaking out to some unintended party.
I don't think anyone should feel comfortable with "all we plan to store is an e-mail address"
That seems awesome that you're going after big cable/ISP/wireless companies. Do you think consumers that are harmed by Comcast/Xfinity's abusive practices of bundling and zero-rating their own video services, but charging you for data overages if you use Netflix or other 3rd party video services have a strong position?
Would you help us go after them? I'd sign up in a heartbeat for that. When I moved from Connecticut where we have a relatively benign ISP (Cablevision) who doesn't have data caps, to California where we only have Comcast/Xfinity, my monthly price for Internet doubled and I have less than half the bandwidth available to me.
I am not sure why I want to sue Chase. I bank with them and they have provided the agreed services. What exactly has Chase done to harm someone like me? If I don’t like something they do, I simply bank elsewhere.
From a "consumer who wouldn't individually sue chase" perspective I see nothing wrong here.
I know many here consider this to be ideological heresy but it's possible to have a transaction where both parties come out ahead and this seems like one of those win-wins to me. They do a little work for you in exchange for putting your name on a list of people they can use in a class action, you might even get $5 or something out of it if they win.
Putting your PII into a random website should be what raises red flags here. I hope they're not storing the account numbers, or at least not storing them with the associated personal details.
It's a standard HN (and wider society) complaint that makes very little sense: the best case for corporate behavior is having incentives that are aligned with the consumer or whatever your definition of societal good is.
> Usually in those kinds of cases, the end recipient gets very little - perhaps some subscription to a ID protection service or a few bucks but the firm who runs the class action makes a lot.
This suggests to me you feel that class action judgments do not adequately compensate claimants. This shouldn't dissuade us from fighting back against businesses who treat their customers unfairly.
The problem isn't the class action lawsuit or Radvocate. It goes much deeper. It's goes to the core of businesses (e.g, banks) who provide critical access to the financial system forcing you, the consumer, to resolve disputes through their shadow justice system in which they pay the arbiters, which have a history of siding more frequently with the corporation.
So the "downside" is that they might ask for your help causing more problems for Chase in the future? I didn't click the link but now I'm going to go sign up!
I don't have direct access to the fulfillment of this particular initiative, but in general we can take advantage of the efficiency of sending multiple legal notices in the same packet. So the cost per individual letter can be much less than one would assume.
> This site is about having enough potential clients are able to sue Chase at some point in the future
...that sounds good to me! I certainly don't have the resources to take Chase to court myself, and who knows, maybe the existence of this class-action-in-waiting will keep Chase from being as shady.
I really like the idea about the "switch" to put oneself in "learning mode".
I wonder if we can hack this by isolating what the OLMa2 cells do (which appears to be tied to anxiety) and using some kind of mindfulness technique to self impair that part of the brain, the same way we can attempt to turn off parts of our brain in meditation.
If the function of the OLMa2 cells are anxiety, my experience has been that when I am in an anxious state, I don't learn very well - could it be as simple as relax and then learn?
You can definitely improve your learning ability with meditation and a better environment. This "hack" is what most upper-class families use to get ahead.
I'd think it could be helpful to flip this question on its head: find things that excite you, that you intrinsically find motivating. Put some energy into getting re-acquainted with that energy within you rather than trying to get excited about something you have lost interest in and learn to cultivate that energy and see where it takes you.
Wondering if you can say more about managing "energy and motivation"? I'm curious abut the details, how one does this. It sounds like a great approach!
Thanks! I'll give the most simple and effective technique for me.
On a day-to-day basis, I usually have a pretty good idea of what I should be working on.
My issue is actually doing it. I can work hard for a full day, but not seemingly get anything done.
So one technique is to chunk the tasks up. Pretty well established technique. But I'll chunk smaller and smaller until I get momentum on what I need to do. That could mean picking a goal that only takes a minute.
Sounds laborious, but it's more about building momentum than building a plan. Maybe I want to start a newsletter. So I set a goal of setting up a Mailchimp account. And by the time I get to that... I pick something else.. eventually momentum kicks in and I start getting it done.
Works for me anyway!
Looking at the long term is important too! But I do that infrequently, and usually big, big picture instead.
hboon - that ability to run a script and see time spent from a text file sounds like a fantastic combo of simplicity to use and the ability to mine data. I'd love to see an example of your file format and script to see exactly how it all works together, if you are up for sharing.
One benefit with marking tasks with a @@. I move the current project I'm working in wip.md to the top, so if I do a search from the top for @@, the first hit will be the task I am currently working on. I wrote a plugin in https://getbitbar.com to put that first (and thus current task) in my menubar. I get distracted easily.. so every bit helps :)
I have another BitBar plugin that scans my wip.md file and run the same script (which I run end of the day) to compute totals and then put it in my menu bar. Since I have something like this:
11:10 PM - 11:21 PM Mimic
12:10 PM
It can detect the start time of my current task or how long since I haven't worked and display them in green or red in the menu bar.
* "projects" marked with headers, with a prefix :: so I can search for it
* I mark "tasks" as done with an *
* I mark uncompleted tasks with @@
* When I start to work on a project, I add a line near the top with the start time and when I finish, I mark the end time too, using a vim macro.
I use MacVim all the time, so my wip.md is always open as the first tab. And I bind cmd+1 to it.
I then go through it manually and delete the tasks that are still marked as @@ just keeping those with an asterisk. So this effectively becomes my journal for that day. I keep a short note under the Notes: line. For eg. I might say that I didn't work because I went out with my family, or if I'm sick. I delete those mark with an asterisk in wip.md, add more or tweak the remaining ones and I have the file ready for the next day. I do my daily review at this time, so the macro which I mentioned actually opens a few other files including one called on-deck which is basically where I can grab things over from to add to wip.md. Over the years, I sometimes end up with wip.md growing too much, making it quite inhibiting. I try to keep the wip.md to ~1 page so it's more manageable.
I'm ashamed to share the script which I wrote a few years ago :P But it's simple, it just goes through each line looking for a regex match for:
So it can figure out the project name from the regex and only include the relevant ones. Then compute a total for each project, for AM/PM, as well as a grand total for the day.
A co-work of mine sent me this article after his iPhone 6S slowed down considerably after installing iOS 11. He thought that his battery was defunct and causing the issue.
I suggested he turn off the animations that are designed to run on the latest phones and are more processor intensive. (One other thing that will help, however, is to cut back on the transition animations in iOS 11. Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion and toggle it to off.) And like magic, his phone ran as fast as it ever did!
I did the same thing with my sluggish iPhone 5, and did a reinstall clearing all my data, and it runs really great now, as if it were brand new!
Makes me wonder how many people will think they have the battery issue when in reality they have features turned on that will inherently bog down the older phones. You'd think Apple would auto detect the model and by default have features like animation turned off. But perhaps their motivation is not to give their customers the best experience?!?
Apple did disable some graphic effects for older phones during one of the big changes. I recall the iPhone 4 didn't blur the backgrounds like newer phones.
Pharma stock prices should go down. That is a good thing. Drugs should be first a service and second a source of profit and that should always be the order of it, or we will continue to have drugs that bankrupt people till they cannot afford it.
Not long ago all the software one wanted to run[1] was only available on Windows. Then the Internet happened, then[2] the open source movement, then Apple's return from the brink of death. One doesn't need to be very old to know what it feels like.
Brilliant! When I am dealing with refactoring or modifying existing code, finding my way around is the hardest, most time consuming part. This seems a huge timesaver.
Please. Another vote for this. This would seriously become my tool of choice, but I would become so dependent on it, as an extension of my working style, that I wouldn't want to invest unless I knew I could know that it wouldn't go away and that I could also hack changes into the code. Would definitely be willing to pay for the Open Source Version. I've also had ideas very similar to this, but am much more interested in having it than developing it.
I'm working on something that's very similar. It's early in development, and lacks many features. But if you private host it, it's already very usable.
This site is about having enough potential clients are able to sue Chase at some point in the future, whenever a class action lawsuit comes up - and heck, they even will have a customer list and a relationship with you from sending this "free" letter for you in the past.
Usually in those kinds of cases, the end recipient gets very little - perhaps some subscription to a ID protection service or a few bucks but the firm who runs the class action makes a lot.
On the one hand, maybe it helps keep them honest (they cite Wells Fargo) so its good to be able to. But clearly there is some vested interest here on the part of Radvocate.