Google Fiber has been aggressively upselling us to a higher plan the last 6-12 months, prior to that in my 6 years with them I don't remember a single upsell. Guess I know why now, trying to grease the numbers for the highest possible sale price.
I'll be sure to take this as a warning sign in the future with other services if aggressive upselling starts happening unexpectedly.
Fruit does not have added sugar and the fiber in fruit helps slow the digestion of the fructose greatly dampening the negative effects of the sugar. Plus fruit is loaded with naturally occurring vitamins essential to the human body.
I've been looking for something like this for a while now but honestly if you run a non-technical service requiring your users to sign up for a github account (just to vote on features) is a pretty big ask. Integration with other AUTH services like Facebook/Google would be very beneficial.
We figured out our early adopters would be on GitHub, that's why we started with GitHub login. Fell free to add a feature request on http://feathub.com/feathub/feathub :-)
This raises the question of the gameability of the voting, but this could be mitigated using a mixture of cookies, captchas and browser fingerprinting.
1. People perceive they don't have a choice. For example when you visit the doctor and you have to sign 12 different form/contracts. Most people believe they either sign them or don't get treated.
2. Fear of not understanding. They think they wouldn't understand they legalese even if they tried, so why even bother? Personally I don't blame them. I've read contracts that were so wordy and had so much legalese in them you'd be convinced the lawyers wrote them that way just so everyone involved would need to hire as many lawyers as possible simply to understand the darn thing.
I think a grossly underutilized tactic is learning the art of quickly reading and red-lining a contract. Meaning you go through line by line and cross out particularly nasty lines or clauses, or make quick edits, and then initial next to the changes. Then sign at the bottom and hand it back.
It's a habit I picked up from being in the music business for years, specifically being a concert promoter in my early 20's, where it's absolutely standard and normal practice to get a contract, red-line or change the stuff that doesn't apply or doesn't work for you, and return it. A good example would be striking language like "or for any other reason" at the end of a cancellation clause, or changing terms from perpetuity to 12 months, stuff like that.
I've since done it at doctor's offices, when renting or buying things, when signing a simple freelancing contract, and many other contexts. It's much less confrontational, after all you do sign it and hand it back to them, putting the onus on them to deal with it if it's a problem. I recommend this approach highly if you're the type to care.
Don't they usually contain things like. "Any changes to this standard contract have to be approved by the CEO of LargeCorp in writing, otherwise it is invalid". And every change has to be initialed by has to be initialed by both parties.
It's compounded with scummy tactics too. I've had one office email me a few forms to read and sign before the first office visit. Then, when I arrive two minutes before the appointment, they give me "just one more form", which is the arbitration agreement.
Why couldn't that have been sent with the others? To pressure people into signing.
Heck, I've even had medical doctors insist that I don't need to read something before signing it, just "get the gist" so they can go ahead with the appointment.
Edit2: I almost think the world is designed around prodding you not to read the contract, by any means necessary, and then holding you personally responsible for it. Like, imagine parking garages. Try asking for a contract there and see what happens. Let's say you don't like the terms. Then what? They make everyone back out of the single lane entry while glaring at you? What about negotiating the terms? And good luck expecting them not to assert rights they can't legally get via contract.
I still find both explanations a bit strange, though. I mean, wouldn't you at least like to know whether there are any restrictions on operating a company from your rented accommodation, even if you perceive that you don't have any choice in it? Or even just where you stand in general?
I've also read some crazy legalese, but the thing is that I've read a heck of a lot more contracts that aren't legalese, and are very easy to understand.
That leaves me wondering whether it's the common introductory bits (e.g. that state "THE TENANT is John Smith") that make people give up early?
Do you find that has a negative affect on your interactions with society? I can't imagine I could find a dentist or doctor that didn't have patient contractual obligations that I'd rather not agree to.
This is the problem, really. Don't like some terms in e.g. a mobile phone agreement? Take it or leave it. If you can't mobilize a mass of people to join you in rejecting it (you almost certainly can't, even if everyone hates the terms) your choice is to sign or go to another carrier (who will have the same problematic clauses in their contract). It'll hurt you more to be without a phone than it'll hurt the company not to take some special snowflake contract with you and get your tiny monthly payment in return. This is broadly true for loans, employment contracts, even doctors'/hospitals' contracts.
For the overwhelming majority of business interactions most individuals participate in, they're the weaker party by a large margin. The notion that any substantial portion of contracts and business agreements are being freely made between equals is a fiction. Degrees of coercion are everywhere. Consider: it's common to require candidates for low-wage jobs to take a piss test. If they say no, someone else will agree because they need the money. The business can afford to be at 98% capacity (or just overwork their employees) for another couple of days—an individual may not be able to afford an income of $0.00 for another couple of days. The job is worth more to the candidate than the (particular) candidate is to the employer. Agree, but insist your potential manager show you the results of a piss test, too? Laughed out of the room. Equals? Not even close.
Yadda yadda yadda this is the reason we have laws and don't just rely on contacts for everything. Also why unions exist (and why they must require membership, or else be largely ineffective) for employment issues specifically.
In the phone market, increasingly, you can go non-contract with pay-as-you-go / prepaid SIMs.
What's starting to emerge is the concept of a WiFi-only device which is usable for voice / messaging when within network range, but not otherwise.
I agree with you generally vis-a-vis power relations -- that's really a highly underappreciated element of economics, though Smith's own second discussion of wealth begins: "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power".
More generally, organizing politically to prohibit such measures is necessary.
Not merely "making them unlawful to use for discrimination", as there are plenty of other unrestricted grounds for discrimination. But prohibiting outright.
Agreed. They are both solid frameworks and I've used both fairly heavily. I personally find Laravel more 'natural'. I have to refer back to the documentation in Yii far more often.
I was completely shocked when I read this yesterday morning while drinking my morning coffee. The best outcome that could arise from the author disclosing his password is him receiving hundreds of texts that day. I understand the point he is making, but still a very risky move.
As long as his Twitter account was isolated[1], the only risk was losing control of his twitter account for a few days. And given the fact that he published an article previously saying that he was going to give away his password, I don't think that he would run into much trouble even if they used his twitter account for malicious purposes.
[1]This is, the twitter account wasn't being used to log into other services.
You assume that losing control of his twitter account couldn't have unforeseen consequences. I'm sure the author didn't expect that he would end up having to change his phone number. It's not at all implausible that there could have been further repercussions.
^ This. Ever since Namecheap went through their 'rebranding' the site has been slow and at times completely unusable. I consistently get timeouts when performing basic tasks. The old site was ugly but it worked. The new site is slightly less ugly and it barely works. They had a lot of goodwill built up which they are slowly chipping away at.
This. People sing to the heavens of how stable OSX is and how it just works. I've had as many if not more issues than with my Windows 7 Samsung laptop.
Wifi constantly needs manually disabling/enabling, Bluetooth Audio crashes are common, I average one full system crash per month, display settings reset themselves magically and Finder is infuriating. I should be keeping a log of all the issues I have.
Latest Macbook Pro here and have that same WIFI issue. I still have 5 year old Lenovo with windows 7 on it that is just as, if not more, stable than the Mac.
On Mac things like Alfred (probably will drop this for the new spotlight), better touch tool, some capabilities like ability to swap USB MIDI controllers without restarting OS are cool. Honestly though, performance wise there isn't that much difference between my Mac and Win Machines and being in programs full screen most of the day I notice much difference at all. The really flexible information moving things I've grown accustomed to on Win seem a bit crippled on Mac because of lack of a filesystem.
I'll be sure to take this as a warning sign in the future with other services if aggressive upselling starts happening unexpectedly.
reply