> If you're unable to set a consistent cookie across your user's many sessions (especially for a high retention business like e-commerce), or your javascript conversion events (Google Tag Manager for example) are being blocked, your user's historical behavior will be extremely difficult to stitch together over time.
Yes, that is in fact the point.
Look, I know there are strong financial incentives to build individual user profiles and doing it this way may not violate the letter of the law, but it sure as hell violates the spirit. If we ask a user if they're willing to be tracked and they do everything in their power to tell us no then I'm not sure how comfortable we should be doing it anyway.
Yeah, this advice looks targeted to companies that benefit hugely from targeting their users.
If I'm reading correctly it's basically saying 'once a user has identified themselves to you, then you can go back and figure out the steps they took before that'
As a person, if a company knows what I did right before I bought their product (say in that session) I think I'm ok with that. If they follow me onto other websites or other devices then that feels a lot more invasive.
Of course people have different risk appetites, including poor people.
The point isn't so much about "risk" per se, it's about whether or not there's a viable Plan B.
If I'm working two jobs to barely keep a roof over my head and play the lotto and lose, I'm still keeping a roof over my head (by working two jobs). The odds are long, but the cost of failure is low.
If, on the other hand, I have the Best Startup Idea Ever (and all the necessary skills to make it a reality) then I will still be unable to pursue it. Sure, I'm like 80% certain it's going to be a huge success, but in the 20% case I'm fuuuuuuuuucked so taking a swing at it is a nonstarter.
Just playing devil's advocate a bit, but what would be the downside of just drawing a bright line that owning stock in your employer is inherently a conflict of interest?
It would be refreshing if business didn't have any incentive to maximize shareholder value. Lots of great things are killed or diluted for a handful of people to get a return. Exponential growth isn't sustainable, yet it's expected to keep shareholders rich and satiated at the cost of the quality of product that the end customer receives. What's wrong with just making a good product and running a business well enough to cover your overhead and pay your employees well? Why do we never hear of these stories in Bloomberg or Forbes?
There's nothing barring this. Just don't sell any control of your company to anyone who won't agree with this strategy indefinitely, and run a consistently cash flow positive business so you will never be in a position to need to bend that rule to make payroll. It's definitely harder, especially if you don't have your own capital to start with, or hit a temporary bump in the road that bleeds the war chest, but people do it.
If you take outside capital to accelerate your business on the assumption that the investors will make money as it grows, you're choosing to join that system, no one forces you to participate.
Although I suppose you could end up in a zero sum competition with another business for market share, and there might be an unstable nash equilibrium where you both might want to not raise money, but if the other raises significant capital they could crush you, so you are kind of systematically pushed to play the game to keep your vision alive.
It's somewhat more stronger than that even. For US investors and parties servicing (like Dow Jones) those Not owning stocks in your own firm is a red flag. So even though post crisis bonusses, stocks and options are to different measures frowned upon in, say, some EU countries, you would underperform in some US benchmark and reach less investors.
I don't really believe that mechanism is sound. I mean, it likely has some sort of affect in that direction, but I don't really think that it's a strong one.
It is absolutely a strong one and one that startup's function as a result of.
If an employee couldn't get stock options in a startup, then there would be significantly fewer cases where they would choose to join a startup over a more stable, mature company. Sharing in the upside potential is critical. Sure, that isn't a public company but it still demonstrates the mechanism is sound.
> If an employee couldn't get stock options in a startup, then there would be significantly fewer cases where they would choose to join a startup over a more stable, mature company
That's possible, of course. I haven't seen any data to support it.
In my own experience (which is not statistically meaningful), this is a weak effect. I strongly prefer working for startups and very small companies, and most of the engineers I've worked with have stated that things like stock options aren't important to them (that's part of why options are so widely referred to as "wallpaper").
The attraction to working for startups, for both myself and most of the people I've worked with, is that startups offer better working conditions and more interesting projects.
However, I do feel the need to underline that this is just my subjective experience and it may not representative overall.
Every company in YC Winter 2019 issues half its ownership to a pool. Every company receives, in return, shares of the YCW19 fund. Employee stock options are 100% issued from the YCW19 fund.
Is this better or worse for non-founding employees? More or less attractive than receiving stock options that only apply to the member company that they actually work for?
It is definitely better for the employee. But it also doesn't necessarily align incentives.
For example, once you are fully vested at a startup, the reason to stay is primarily if you think you have a material impact on the share price. If you don't, then you should leave to go somewhere where you do have a material impact and treat your shares in the original startup simply as an investment. In contrast, if you have a material impact, you should stay to maximize the value of your shares. Pooling everyone's shares, while better for the individual employee from a diversification perspective, reduces the ability of the employee to have a material impact on their investment.
Consider that the overwhelming majority of startups don't make a positive exit/acquisition/IPO... but in a group as large as YCW19, some of them will. (That being the entire purpose of YC.)
Assume your prospective employees are economically rational. They have a couple of offers on the table, identical as to salary, benefits, and track record of existing founders. The only difference is that one is offering a tiny percentage of a lottery ticket that will pay out if they exit successfully, and the other is offering a tinier percentage of a lottery ticket that will pay out if any of their sister companies exits successfully. And there's little chance that you picked a unicorn, but a pretty good chance that somewhere in the cohort is a unicorn.
Being in that cohort becomes a hiring advantage if you get to share in their success.
>Every company in YC Winter 2019 issues half its ownership to a pool. Every company receives, in return, shares of the YCW19 fund. Employee stock options are 100% issued from the YCW19 fund.
It is an inherent conflict of interest but the question is whether that conflict can be mitigated and, after mitigation, whether the potential risk/"cost" of that conflict to the shareholders outweighs the benefit to the shareholders. There would be at least a few downsides to prohibiting employee stock ownership: significantly higher salary expenses and (in theory) less employee motivation/incentive to stay at a company.
Historically we've said the pros outweigh the cons but I'm really not sure we can accurately assess the risk of insider trading anymore because the definition of it is constantly changing.
Startups would be next to impossible if employees (which includes the founders) couldn't own stock.
Maybe you could limit the rule to publicly traded companies, but then people would have to decide whether to sell all of their stock or leave a company when it went public, which doesn't seem fair to the employees or good for the company.
Presumably they are doing something during that week; namely code reviewing all the patches in front of yours in the queue.
Don't get me wrong. I, too, wish that other developers would drop whatever they're doing on demand to prioritize my immediate needs. I would also prefer that they waive their normal security concerns because, after all, I already know that I am trustworthy. I've got enough self awareness not to publish a blog post about it, though.
I discuss an issue with someone on Slack or over email or whatever. I can invoke some magic command in band to capture the surrounding conversation and create a reference number. I can then cite that reference in code comments or commit messages. When my CI server deploys the fix, it automatically informs the other participants in the same channel the issue was created from.
The last thing I want is yet another browser tab with another separate inbox to maintain. Interact with me entirely over the channels that I already budget attention to.
> I can invoke some magic command in band to capture the surrounding conversation
I just read about a tool that does this for documentation. I really wonder how this would work in reality because the information you want in the issue will probably be spread across dozens of messages.
So capture dozens of messages. Better yet, capture dozens of symlinks to make it trivial for me to review the messages in the original context.
The point is, I've already had a long, sprawling, disjointed conversation with the interested party. Don't expect someone to do manual data entry that will never actually be kept current enough to be useful, and don't force me to have the same conversation twice.
My wife owns and operates a private medical practice (she's an audiologist), and it's insane the way she has to do billing and accounts receivable.
When a patient asks about prices she quotes them her standard price for the necessary services and calls their insurance company to confirm that the patient is covered and check what kind of copay the patient needs to pay. Assuming the patient is satisfied with the results of that call she provides the services, bills the patient for their copay, and files a claim with their insurance company.
Several months later (and no real way to predict when), the insurance company will provide an "offer" for probably somewhere around 60% of the quoted price (though this varies dramatically as well). She can accept the offer, in which case she's inevitably required by the terms to eat the difference instead of attempting to collect the balance from the patient. Or she can reject it and attempt to collect from the patient, in which case they will likely be very confused and angry as to why their insurance isn't being accepted, despite her explicitly confirming that it would be covered before they purchased her services.
To be clear, none of this is negotiated or agreed upon in any meaningful sense. She doesn't have any special relationship with any insurance provider. Instead, the providers use their massive power differential to dictate terms. She wouldn't be able to stay in business if she didn't accept at least some insurance, but they'd be quite happy to never write her another check.
She knows what her price schedule for everything is, but it doesn't end up mattering that much since she doesn't know when or how much she'll ultimately be reimbursed except in an extremely broad aggregate sense. The worst part is that she has to dramatically overprice her services so that she can ultimately get adequately reimbursed to keep the lights on, which just ends up hurting the patients who don't have insurance.
In a world of pre-1990s, high-deductible, 80/20 insurance, this would happen less as the insurance company might not do the 800lb gorilla thing until the patient maxes their deductibles, and high deductibles give the consumer a strong incentive to negotiate directly with the provider.
It's insane more people haven't realized this. All you need to do to fix our healthcare system is bring transparency to prices and have insurance actually be insurance again instead of health plans. I have multiple anecdotes from my own life where I didn't care about the cost of something due to my insurance paying for it (and in some instances not being able to be informed of the price beforehand). When you have a whole country like that it's easy to see how things have gotten to this point.
The only downside is I don't see how it would fly politically...which is a big downside.
The counterexample is Medicare and Medicaid, which (CMS particularly) are exhaustively transparent (to provider and patient alike) regarding what they cover, pricing schedules, etc. Having architected revenue cycle platforms, I can say that Medicare was almost ridiculously easy to work compared to private carriers.
Yes, but that would require lower costs (prices). That we could get if pricing were more transparent. I believe that will require moving back to high-deductible 80/20 style insurance.
That's exactly backwards. Cheaper oil will lower the operating costs of power plants that use oil as a fuel, which raises the bar that newer technologies will have to clear to be comparatively more efficient, which will in turn slows the rate of adoption for renewables.
CO2 emissions are cumulative, and there's far more CO2 still sequestered in as-yet-unburned fossil fuels than even the rosiest estimates say our atmosphere could safely absorb. That implies that we're going to have to leave some sizable fraction of our planet's remaining oil in the ground, permanently.
From a long term betterment of the species standpoint, what we really want to be seeing is the global supply of oil starting to taper off and costs per barrel drifting slowly but steadily upward.
From what I understand, running a power plant off oil is done by roughly no one because it is super cost-ineffective compared to existing alternatives. Coal and natural gas are the main fossil fuels for electric plants.
The space where oil is competitive is transportation. We are seeing massive gains in efficiency in that space.
Power plant doesn't just mean fixed electrical generation plant. There's probably a gas-fired power plant in your car, for example. And you're correct that the main place fuel oil is price-competitive is in transportation, but that's less a story about cars and more one about the massive amounts of extremely dirty bunker fuel consumed by marine shipping vessels.
Even with electrical generation it's a mixed bag. The recent US fracking boom has also dramatically lowered the prices for natural gas. Natural gas burns cleaner than coal, so to the extent it's pushing us away from coal consumption it's serving to buy us some time. But it's still desequestering carbon, which means we're still going to need to stop well before we run out of available natural gas to burn.
I think we're just talking past each other without actually disagreeing on anything.
My whole point is that I believe clean energy can stand on its own feet, and that when it does, fossil fuel use will plummet dramatically to almost nothing.
In the meantime, having a plentiful supply of fossil fuels is good for the economy and for national security. The whole point is to have a ton available but never need to use it.
This works reasonably well for things like vision care because they're entirely opt-in. Patients who aren't satisfied with the prices they're being quoted can realistically choose to keep wearing glasses instead.
No one in their right mind is going to decide that the going rate for chemotherapy is a little steep right now so they're going to sit with the cancer for a year or two and see if the prices come down.
A) We do have socialized food insurance. That's literally what EBT is.
B) I'm not going to wake up in the morning to discover that my expected annual food costs have suddenly increased by four or five orders of magnitude. There is no budget-conscious version of a lot of non-emergency, but still lifesaving, medical care.
A) Right. We have universal single payer food insurance, also known as taxpayer funded welfare for the poor. We're in essence covered by, and paying premiums to, a mandatory State-run insurance policy such that if we ever can't afford the minimum necessary food to survive the State will (at least in theory) step in and buy it for us from the open market.
B) Let me rephrase. I'm not going to wake up one day to find that my required daily calorie intake has increased by multiple orders of magnitude. There are very few household budgets that could reasonably be expected to absorb such a shock, no matter how efficiently the market for those calories functions.
A) and it works like insurance in that most of us don't ever need it, but it's there just in case. Also, it does not regulate prices, providers, etc.
B) Again, yes, we need health insurance for rare surprises just like we get fire insurance, auto collision insurance, etc. in case of those rare occurrences. We do not need insurance for medical treatments that everyone gets. We just need to plan ahead financially for those, just like we do for food, clothing, housing, etc. Preparing ahead of time for known expenses is not insurance. If everyone's house burned down a few times each year fire insurance would not work, you would instead just factor that in to the cost of living.
As I understand it, we have a relatively small number of people with serious or chronic illnesses whose normal, predictable healthcare expenses will drastically and permanently outstrip their realistic ability to pay. The only way they will ever be able to receive treatment is on someone else's dime, one way or another. And because everyone involved knows they're going to cost more to treat than they can pay then no sane insurer will willingly cover them if they have a choice in the matter.
As far as I can tell the main difference between the socialized food insurance we already have and the socialized medical insurance I'd like us to have is that subsistence level food costs are uniformly low for everyone whereas subsistence level medical costs vary wildly from person to person.
Because it's not everyone paying for everyone's health care, it's one entity paying for everyone's health care (using funds they get from everyone).
That one entity can unilaterally refuse to do business with abusive vendors. They can negotiate for lower prices. They can notice and investigate discrepancies in pricing between similar cases. They are in a position to judge which types of care are and are not cost effective and can refuse to cover the latter.
So that explains why having an insurance company helps, but it doesn't explain why a private insurance company can't perform the same role. For that, we have to introspect a little into how insurance firms work.
An insurance company is, in essence, a mechanism for transferring funds from lucky people to unlucky ones. If your car gets totaled then, in essence, a bunch of other people with working vehicles have all volunteered to chip in a couple of bucks toward buying you a new one. The insurer is mostly facilitating the transfer and skimming just enough off in the process to cover their administrative costs.
The private insurance market works well enough for most types of property because the volunteers can't predict in advance whether they're going to be lucky or not and because there's a realistic upper bound on how much money the unlucky ones will need to be made whole. Neither of these assumptions are true for healthcare. Many people were born into pre-crashed cars, to stretch the metaphor, and at least for the foreseeable future it's not possible to decide to replace a body instead of attempting to repair it.
So we need* some non-market mechanism to incentivize or compel insurance companies to cover the already unlucky: people with pre-existing conditions. But that introduces a new problem. The lucky people are being asked to volunteer to chip in more, and at least some of them will stop volunteering. That causes the prices to go up even more, which causes a few more volunteers to leave, which causes the prices to go up again, and so on. Pretty soon there's no volunteers left to transfer funds from.
So we also need* some non-market mechanism to incentivize or compel healthy people to contribute to our insurance system. And with those two requirements (needs to cover everyone and everyone needs to contribute) we are left with a problem space that the State is really the only entity with the ability to implement a solution. It doesn't have to be socialized medicine, per se, but it does basically have to be big government of one stripe or another.
\* Yes, we do technically have the option of compelling innocent people to suffer and die from otherwise treatable diseases that they're not wealthy enough to afford to cover out of their own pocket. If you're aware of that fact and comfortable with it then okay, but please do understand that it is the societal tradeoff that we would have to make to avoid some sort of serious state involvement in provisioning medical care.
They are in a position to judge which types of care are and are not cost effective and can refuse to cover the latter.
That doesn't always work out as well as you might think. A number of years back Medicare told hospitals they'd no longer pay for UTI treatment, unless the provider could prove that the patient had the UTI when they were admitted. This made sense, because hospital-acquired UTI is a big thing.
The thing is, what hospitals had to do to defend against this was to test everybody being admitted to prove that they already had the UTI. So from Medicare's point of view they were saving, but from a broader perspective they were pushing unnecessary costs (unnecessary tests) onto providers which increased the total amount being spent on healthcare.
It doesn't always have to work out, it just has to work out in the aggregate. The bar that the existing private insurance regime has set for discouraging wasteful medical tests isn't exactly high, though.
It's also worth pointing that what you're describing is an illusion of efficiency arising from Medicare implicitly pushing costs off onto non-Medicare patients. That wouldn't be able to happen if there weren't any non-Medicare patients.
"That one entity can unilaterally refuse to do business with abusive vendors. They can negotiate for lower prices. They can notice and investigate discrepancies in pricing between similar cases. They are in a position to judge which types of care are and are not cost effective and can refuse to cover the latter."
Having worked for companies that do government contract work (DoD, in particular), this line of reasoning always makes me laugh.
Yes, that is in fact the point.
Look, I know there are strong financial incentives to build individual user profiles and doing it this way may not violate the letter of the law, but it sure as hell violates the spirit. If we ask a user if they're willing to be tracked and they do everything in their power to tell us no then I'm not sure how comfortable we should be doing it anyway.