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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: October 19th, 2023

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  • It’s essentially a payment plan here in the US. Switch to a new carrier, get an iPhone for free as long as you stay subscribed to their most expensive tier for a year. How it usually works is that the phone is sold to you on an installment plan, say $80 per month, and the “free” part of that is where they also give you an $80 bill credit each month. If you cancel early then you have to pay off the remaining balance of the phone in a lump sum.




  • The reason is because it supposedly creates a moral hazard. This is the logic behind pricing for all sorts of medical resources (such as co-pays and deductibles). If there is a nominal cost involved to obtain the resource, then you will be incentivised not to use more than you need. But if it is free or costs too little, then you (and others) may choose to use a lot of the resource, far more than you actually need.

    For example, suppose there is a $50 co-pay (a co-pay is essentially a fee) to see the doctor, and you figure you should go once a year for a check-up. In this case, you will not schedule an excessive number of appointments because you know it is not necessary and it will cost you money each time you do. If scheduling doctor’s appointments were free or costs very little, like $1, you may instead choose to schedule two or three appointments per year, because why not? Or maybe you will go see the doctor for every minor cold or stuffy nose. It’s not like it will cost you a significant amount of money. Or so their thinking goes, anyway.

    Remember, the $50 you pay isn’t all that it costs. For every $50 you pay, the insurance company is probably paying the doctor $150.

    Similarly, suppose a drug costs $100, but the insurance company pays $90, and you have to pay a $10 co-pay. You buy one vial, which is good for one month. The fear is that if the insurance company pays for all $100, since the drug is now free for you, you might decide to get two vials instead, just in case. After all, they’re free for you, right? This means the insurance company has to pay $200 for two vials of the drug but the benefit to you is actually pretty small. Again, this is how insurance companies think.

    Now, whether this logic is sound or not, I leave that part up to you.











  • If you’re developing software for one client who only uses a specific browser, I can see this being okay, but several times I have chosen not to buy things from websites that were broken in Firefox. I don’t bother to check whether they’d work in Chromium, I just buy it elsewhere.

    The number of people who act like me probably isn’t large in absolute terms, but how many customers have been lost because of a broken website that you didn’t even know about because they just left without a trace?

    This might not apply to you, but it’s some food for thought whenever Web developers decide to be sloppy and not check compatibility for a browser that still has significant market share.


  • If you are fired during your notice period, in most US states, you’re still entitled to unemployment insurance for the time between when you were fired and when your notice period would end

    The default standard at law is whether a reasonable person would interpret your statement as intent to resign. Generally, that means giving a specific date and not just a nebulous idea of some time in the far future. This would probably be down to a case-by-case basis. If you said “I won’t be here in two weeks”, that’s different than “I don’t see myself continuing to do this job five years from now.”