I did something similar in college. A company paid cash for installing software that displayed ads on the bottom of your monitor. It qualified your ad viewing activity based on mouse movement.
At night I would open the software, wrap my mouse cord around an oscillating desk fan, then go to bed. Earned myself $50/month
That was my first ever exposure to programming. I installed as many of those crap ad bars as I could on a backup computer and wrote a macro that would open Internet Explorer, browse thru the same 10 sites in a loop, close IE, repeat.
This setup provided enough income to cover the costs of my dedicated phone line and ISP access.
Not that i have not done many questionable things like this when i was a kid, but at what point is it an admission of fraud that can get one in trouble?
When the incentive to prosecute (i.e opportunity for resources gained vs opportunity for resources lost) reaches a certain thresh-hold there's action. Generally, that thresh-hold is high because the value gained from prosecution is low, even in cases were one party is quite apparently guilty.
The only real exception would be the "let's make an example of out this person" case. When crime is rampant, prosecutions might happen with greater likelyhood in order to deter more crime for occuring. An example would be pirating music. It is not feasible to prosecute people for pirating music, but suing 1 party publicly will get 1000s of people to stop instantly.
I remember the AllAdvantage.com cheat as well. It became so popular to game that one that not only were novel tactics like yours employed, but automatic mouse hijacking apps for Windows made some headway for those that didn't want to sit and click ads ad nauseum.
I may have made a quick buck on this back in the early 2000s.
On site owners site? That extensions likely punishes owners of sites visited by you by suspending their ad network account for click fraud. I can see how that might be considered harmful.
AllAdvantage was great while it lasted. My method as a highschooler was a free mouse trembler app, coupled with 4 rotating Geocities sites I made to auto-forwarded to each other in a loop every 45 seconds.
There were programs that would run up the 40 hour weekly limit in seconds. I'm assuming AllAdvantage had no real sanity checking when receiving data, which to my eyes means they deserved to go out the way they did.
lol I remember AllAdvantage; I had a set of programmable Legos and I made a little jig that would sit there and spin a wheel under the mouse ball back and forth.
Remember, you aren't ripping off the shady ad companies. Actually, you are doing what they want you to do. You are ripping off the merchants (people buying ads) who just don't know better.
But this is a positive-sum world where it's actually better for us all the fewer people that get screwed. So although it may be better if they used alternative methods, it's actually a step backwards to turn this into a zero-sum game
I'm not sure about the latter part, but I think the first part is pretty clearly true.
The theoretical economic value of advertising is new product discovery. If you needed a thing but didn't know there was a solution and you saw an ad, then some of the value you gain would be attributable to the ad.
Imagine a world entirely without ads. Would you really be lacking a lot? I doubt it. Especially with the internet, it's easy enough search, to receive word of mouth, to read reviews, or to ask friends for help with a problem. But let's assume it happens some. Ads might at least get you to a solution sooner, so count the value gain there as well.
Now subtract all the money spent on things where ads encouraged a purchase that was not valuable or even wasteful (e.g., didn't live up to expectations, was fine but the need wasn't urgent so it sits in a closet, was bad enough that it actively cost you extra money). Subtract further the amount of money spent on ads, hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Subtract also all the time spent watching, listening to, and reading ads. Further subtract the amount of value that would have been gained had that time been used as a person wanted. And further subtract all the value that could have been gained had those creative people creating ads been doing something beneficial.
I can't come up with any reasonable numbers that suggest advertising is a net societal positive. It exists not because its targets want it, but because businesses are in an arms race to manipulate consumers in ways favorable to the advertisers. It's like military spending: most of it happens not because anybody really wants it, but because nobody wants to lose to the other guy.
Advertising can be very helpful to get a new product or service in front of people, which then allows you to start building word of mouth referrals etc. Without it, there are many things that would never see the light of day. And because it costs money, it provides somewhat of a filter; while we all feel inundated with a lot of garbage advertising, you'd have to wade through far more to find interesting new products otherwise.
This isn't to say that you can't currently find useful things in ways other than ads; obviously that happens all the time. But without ads (or other similar forms of marketing) it might not be viable for many of these things to be launched in the first place, allowing you to then discover them.
How many products do you know where most of their ads were an initial announcement to the world, vs. how many are throwing up ads constantly just to fight back the flood of other ads?
And requiring money is often bad too. Many very good products just don't profit enough to afford mountains of marketing.
Ah, right. That's a good point. We have to consider the other arm of the counterfactual. Against his companies that can't launch because they can't get an audience, we have to compare the companies that can't launch today because they can't afford to buy an audience.
I think this is true in the already-ad-saturated environment. But if we imagine a world without ads, it's hard to think there wouldn't be other ways of getting a product out there.
One obvious way is through buyers. A lot of clothing and housewares brands, for example, don't advertise significantly. Instead, they shop their wares to buyers for retailers. Another is through reviewers. Electronics companies, for example, have a long tradition of sending out gear to magazines and other sources of reviews. Car magazines are another good example. In the modern age, that also can mean lending or giving gear to people influential in an area.
If ads didn't exist, I think we'd see more of that. And we'd certainly see more of other approaches. Look at ProductHunt, for example, where startups can put things in front of a crowd of early adopters for nothing. It would be pretty easy to imagine specialist versions of that for particular interests. And look at Tesla, which famously didn't run ads; plenty of people have heard of them.
So I agree you're right that some new companies today could be at a disadvantage if they don't buy ads (although definitely not all of them). But I'm not convinced that's a necessary case if we end the ad arms race.
What, what I believe consumers should do is install ad-blockers en mass.
Actually, no. What they should do is install ad blockers that specifically send in fake ad clicks and fake ad views and data to the advertisement companies so that they lose money.
There isn't much point to complaining when there are so many more disruptive and effective things that a bunch of consumers could do.
WiebeTech sells a bunch of interesting computer forensics hardware. I’m guessing these are typically used by law enforcement when seizing unlocked computers to keep them unlocked.
And that's the horrific part to me. Instead of making sane software or sane policies, it ends up making perfect sense, at least at an individual's level, to manufacture a piece of specialist hardware that does nothing but jiggle a mouse.
One of the use-cases of the jiggler is during police raids, where they're used to keep a computer from locking itself. Obviously that's not the use-case you're imagining!
I bike 15+ miles a day but my work's discount program doesn't "support" biking. If I was into vigilante justice, I'd consider a solution like this too. But as it is, I'm quite content biking for my own sake rather than some pittance of a benefit.
When my friend was in a corporate fitness challenge, he strapped the company-issued pedometer on his ankle to get credit for his biking. Not sure if he told the company that he did that, but his team won the competition.
They would prefer that healthy people don't get discounts since they are such low risks for claims. Better to incentivize the couch potatoes as a preventative health measure to reduce losses and have you subsidize the lifestyle of those who won't make an effort.
Tape it to a paint can at Home Depot and have them mix it up in the machine. You get the discount and people will think you're some sort of marathon runner.
Some sort incentivised exercise was offered at our local school. The winner was putting the fit bit on a kid each breakntime and getting excellent result. Strapping then on young children gets good numbers fast.
I routinely rack up thousands of steps playing my cello, even with my Fitbit on my left wrist. I suspect the numbers would be significantly higher if I wore it on the wrist of my bow arm.
The first week I had mine I was getting tons of steps while I was sitting in the office working. A little googling revealed that Fitbit uses the settings for handedness versus where you're wearing your fitbit to tune the sensitivity of their algorithm. Long story short, I set mine up to say that I'm right-handed and that I wear mine on my right hand, even though I'm left-handed.
Their resting heart rate algorithm is pretty bad, too. My RHR goes from 56 when I'm sedentary for a day to 61 during the week when I'm working out regularly. Looking at the actual chart there's a nice line at 55-56 where my RHR actually is, but I guess Fitbit just uses a moving average.
I'm excited at the prospect of insurance companies using these algorithms to determine that I'm unhealthy.
This is interesting... I am in my 20s and bike ~20 miles per day. Over the last 5 years I have had 3 broken bones due to bike accidents including one which required an ambulance ride. With few exceptions, I only go to the doctor for bike-related injuries and my annual physical. To my health insurance provider, do the benefits to my cardiovascular system and general fitness offset the cost to treat my injuries?
I am guessing the insurance companies are looking far enough into the future where the long term benefits to my health outweigh the short term risks, but they are definitely losing money in the short term.
You are correct - this is interesting. I run, and in the last 2 years my only medical visits are for bacterial pneumonia (non-flu related, just appeared to be really bad luck) and a stress fracture in my knee from ‘overtraining’. The stress fracture involved 3 visits with an orthopedic surgeon, an x-ray, and an MRI.
Wonder what the tradeoff is there for my lifetime medical expenses if I wasn’t running?
3 incidents per year at 20miles/day is higher than the statistical average. Are you biking in a way to increase the likelihood of an incident, biking in an area that is less safe than the average bike ride, or did you just have an unlucky year?
That is 3 incidents over 5 years. I don’t think that is too much of a statistical anomaly. One of the injuries was from a pedestrian stepping into the bike lane without looking, one was from a car merging into me, and one was from a collision with another cyclist while racing.
Could just be biking in an area that has no biking infrastructure (i.e. bike lanes well separated from roads). I commute to work by bike daily and the most dangerous part of that is by far when I leave the cycleways between towns and have to be on the road. Motorists everywhere (except maybe Denmark or the Netherlands) seem to have a very fuck you attitude towards cyclists taking away their road; this shows mainly in disregarding right of way or attempting unsafe overtaking manoeuvres.
Someone who ran the equivalent of ~20 miles per day (a 5K per day, maybe?) for 5 years would probably have their share of expensive medical issues too. Runners get fractures, they get in traffic accidents, they get pneumonia, etc. So in a straight comparison between running vs. biking as far as the insurance company is concerned, it's probably a wash.
20 miles per day and 5K per day are not comparable. Probability of injury is a function of the quantity/intensity you are performing the action, and of course running 7x farther will be result in more injury.
I think OP was comparing 5k running to 20 miles biking. That is still probably inaccurate, since a 20 mile bike is at least 60 minutes, and a 5k run is at most 30 minutes. It would be more accurate to compare a 10k or even 10 mile run to a 20mi bike.
Of course it also depends on the physical condition of the person, especially their susceptibility to stress related injuries, and the running surface. Generally speaking running is much higher impact than biking, which is why you so often see runners with a stress injury training on a stationary bike.
Given the same commute you can expect riding a bike to be 23 times more dangerous than driving a car.
Put another way, it looks like people get into car accidents roughly once every 18 years. If instead of driving your car for your commute you rode your bike, you can expect to get into an accident every single year (and then some).
23x sounded pretty high, and indeed the GP's Wikipedia article cites 23x as one option from the original 1979 work, or 11.5x as a more recent one. The latter seems much more reasonable, and a quick look at stats for Australia suggests current stats put it at something like 6-10x.
But the more interesting article to me was [0] which presents a study that says around 30% of "cycling" deaths are due to natural causes such as heart disease.
> It also signals that older males need to be mindful that vigorous cycling – as with any form of exercise – can be fatal if the rider has a serious medical condition like heart disease. It’s likely though that the exercise benefit of cycling prevents many more premature deaths from disease that it causes.
It would be interesting to break down the statistics on cycling to seperate those who cycle to commute, and those who cycle for leisure. I’d assume they have vastly different mortality causes.
Only the first estimate given there is reasonably sourced. And it's almost 40 years old. Bike safety has improved dramatically since then, so I doubt it's as bad as you suggest. [1] suggests that the number of trips made by bike increased from 1.7 billion in 2001 to 4 billion in 2009, but [2] suggests that the number of cyclist deaths was roughly constant over that range. So per-capita, cycling safety has likely improved dramatically. I couldn't find any data on the number of cyclists or number of trips by bike going back to 1979 in the 5 minutes I spent on it, but I suspect the trend is similar going back that far.
For comparison, the car number quoted on Wikipedia appears to be from 2009.
Also, you have a lot of control over your own safety on a bike. I think there are many cyclists who are an order of magnitude safer than your average cyclist.
To be clear, I don't doubt that cycling is risker than driving. I just don't find the typically quoted numbers to be accurate.
> I think there are many cyclists who are an order of magnitude safer than your average cyclist.
Statiscally, that’s not likely - maybe even not possible. There will be some who are that much safer, but not many - otherwise the average would just be pulled up.
A healthy dose of paranoia is absolutely the way to survive on your bike. About the only thing you can trust not to screw you over is a tree. Of course, trees can easily conceal other objects...
I am invisible in my mind when I'm riding. In fact, the one thing that catches me off guard is people yielding when they shouldn't be yielding - drives me crazy, and throws off my game.
Can't stand that. If they'd just gone when they should have, I wouldn't have had to fully stop and unclip. Working on my trackstands, but can only do them for a few seconds still...
In Sydney, Australia there is a $109 fine for cycling on a footpath (for those 13 and older), and a $319 fine for not wearing a helmet.
That means a 13 year old trundling down a 5 meter wide footpath to the local shops on Sunday morning is up for a $428 fine, roughly 23 hours of adult minimum wage work.
It seems to be seldom enforced, but it is doing a good job at what I think is the main objective - keeping people off bikes and in their car paying road tolls to the government and their private contractor businesses.
Yes, but the reduced risk of heart disease/stroke/obesity more than makes up for it. Also better lung function and less car fumes breathed in since your car cabin isn't trapping them.
I've always found that anytime time a financial outcome is tied to some sort of behavior incentive, weird behaviors come out. This especially comes out in sales, where whether you like it or not, individuals will typically optimize for the best financial outcome, which is not always explicitly connected to what's best for the company.
Congrats, you've learned the Secret of Management.
From here on out, your career consists of optimizing methods of manipulating that effect for your benefit, the benefit of your team, and the benefit of your company, in that order.
EconTalk from three weeks ago was The Tyranny of Metrics[1] about how when metrics are tied to compensation, they often have disastrous consequences, even to the point of achieving the opposite of the desired effect.
I wonder how many people use stuff like this to cheat the system? I remember seeing someone on reddit bragging about attaching their Fitbit to a reciprocating saw to get more steps than his wife.
I couldn't figure out why it was that important, but with insurance discounts, I can definitely see the financial incentives.
I worked in this space, and yes, if the employer offers an incentive, people will cheat. Even for something like a $10 Dunkin Donuts gift card (heck of a incentive for a health/wellness program).
We'd go through logs and see people sequentially logging for each day, one team member after another, on the last day of the competition.
You'd also find people scrutinizing the accuracy of any reporting we did as a company - some very odd bugs were found by companies with participants armed with Excel and too much time on their hands.
FWIW, if you are unfamiliar with Dunkin Donuts, the most common item people buy from there is coffee, by far. In fact, I have seen Dunkin Donuts that only sell coffee.
A lot of their speciality drinks are basically milkshakes though.
Sorry. It's an old John Belushi Saturday Night Live sketch where he wins some Olympic-type events and then the voiceover claims that "little chocolate donuts" were part of his training regimen. Last shot is a picture of some fat, stubby fingers holding a half-smoked cigarette and reaching for another donut.
This feels like an abstracted form of arbitrage: the markets have figured out that there's a quantifiable risk difference between men and women, but they have not distinguished cis and trans folks in their model, and not figured out whether this is a hormones-at-birth difference, or a current-hormones difference, or a socialization difference, or what. They have also certainly not figured out how to distinguish actual trans folks from arbitrageurs (this is something that I think the law ought not to try too hard to figure out, on limited-government grounds, but the markets would love to take as much data as they can and feed it into a model). Once they figure it out, they'll price this person as a person, and he won't be able to swing it as dramatically.
Gender is a pretty crude (though effective) axis to make this sort of risk distinction on. An insurance company that can accurately figure out which men are lower-risk to insure than the average man will probably have a pretty good time in the market. (And get a head start on any policy changes about not discriminating on gender.)
> Once they figure it out, they'll price this person as a person, and he won't be able to swing it as dramatically.
Ronald Coase, of Coase theorem fame, believed that markets are rarely efficient: "Coase argued that real-world transaction costs are rarely low enough to allow for efficient bargaining and hence the theorem is almost always inapplicable to economic reality."[1] In this case, the inefficiency persists because the costs of implementing a more detailed model would far exceed the benefits.
I liked this hilarious little bit at the end of that post:
Disclaimer I must say (for anyone who tries to report me) that I didn’t legally change my sex solely for cheaper auto-insurance, though, that was and is a big factor for me and other people who suffer from gender-dysphoria.
> that was and is a big factor for me and other people who suffer from gender-dysphoria.
Yeah... never once heard anyone say that "car insurance" was why they got their gender changed on government paperwork. The whole things looks very suspect and found this thread on r/asktransgender talking about this which rather than trying to summarize I'll let you enjoy and read for yourself https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/8g0ai9/chea...
I interpreted it as being a joke, which while may be construed as poor taste, was probably made in jest.
One commenter on the original thread pointed out the other difficulties the OP will eventually run into regarding booking flights, etc. so I presume that since the OP is not actually dysmorphic or having gender dysphoria that they will eventually discover that what they will encounter from doing this was not worth the $1000 a year saved.
Gender is a state of mind in Canada and therefore Alberta.
If it catches on, it will probably stop working once the statistics reveal gender-changed MtoF's to be just as high in accident rates as regular males.
Assuming that's what they reveal, yes. If accident rates are linked to testosterone levels, trans women taking hormone-replacement therapy should have statistically lower accident rates - and trans men taking hormone-replacement therapy should have statistically higher accident rates.
A lot. I'd be surprised if any Business Management 101 class didn't teach that if there is a reward involved, people will maximize for whatever critera you measure.
The term cobra effect originated in an anecdote set at the time of British rule of colonial India. The British government was concerned about the number of venomous cobra snakes in Delhi.[3] The government therefore offered bounty for every dead cobra. Initially this was a successful strategy as large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped, causing the cobra breeders to set the now-worthless snakes free. As a result, the wild cobra population further increased. The apparent solution for the problem made the situation even worse
Things like that should be, but never are, a real teaching moment for people. Manipulating social behavior through any means other than education (which isn't manipulation) leads to destructive unintended consequences. Look at what happened in the USA thanks to the American Heart Association.
The AHA thought they saw a slight suggestion in the data that high levels of saturated fat led to heart disease. They wanted to stop heart disease. So they set a goal. Reduce the average Americans dietary intake of saturated fats by 15%. They worked for years with other agencies, legislators, regulators, and food companies. And they succeeded! They dropped the average Americans intake of saturated fats (well specifically the portion of the daily calorie intake made up of saturated fats) by 15%!
There was an issue though. Food makers took fat out of their foods, producing "Lite" versions. These tasted like cardboard. People stopped buying. To get people to buy their products again, they brought back the flavor. With salt and lots of sugar. This led to a gigantic increase in the total number of calories people ate. Which led to a nationwide obesity episdemic. Which led to a national diabetes epidemic. Which led to record-breaking levels of... heart disease.
Oh, and research found that saturated fats aren't a danger to heart health. But once you've put things into law, established practices and regulations, it's tremendously difficult to change. If they had just told everyone they thought saturated fats might cause heart disease, none of this would have happened. And they would have been able to retract their statements on a dime.
What did the Delhi residents themselves think about cobras? Were the natives OK with cobras running around and it was just the British that wanted to reduce the population?
I'm curious because if everybody disliked wild cobras loose in the city I'd have expected the breeders to kill their stock when the bounty ended, not free it.
Why? Killing them requires, well, doing something. You have to actually kill them, which takes effort, and then you have to dispose of the carcasses, which takes effort. On the other hand, simply turning them loose is no effort at all.
If you own a machete (or rampiri, or kukri), the marginal cost (and frankly effort) of killing a cobra is basically zero. And disposing of the dead ones has to be as easy or easier than disposing of live ones if you factor in any factors related to other people...
> a world where people dump hazardous waste into rivers to save money
That mostly comes down to insufficient education, greed and lack of immediate consequences.
Letting a live snake roam free is entirely different in that an uneducated man would understand the risk, there is no upside and there is a possibility for immediate consequence.
But letting the snakes go is even easier. Use the example of people littering instead of using a trash can, or not flushing public toilets, if you need a demonstration of how people can't be bothered with even simple tasks.
Most people aren't worried their litter will literally come back to bite them. Were the snake breeders really unconcerned that dumping a bunch of snakes out the back window wouldn't have consequences?
They were breeding poisonous snakes in a land where those snakes already live in the wild, I doubt they were worried about having a few more of those snakes out there.
These breeders were trying to scam a government program so they didn't exactly have the highest scruples, expecting them to do anything to aid society is probably too much to expect.
That's only true to the extent that the chosen measure was only coincidentally something that looked like a good measure to start with; if you were actually measuring the true feature of merit, making it a target wouldn't make it a bad measure. Making a measure a target incentivizes discovery of its deficiencies, if any, as a measure.
I agree with you in the narrow sense, but I bet you can't think of a metric that should be hyper-focused on for any purpose. Even something like "Lives Saved" fails pretty hard if you do it hard enough.
This is probably true for all jobs and compensation schemes, but for some reason super true in Sales. Take a sales guy who failed middle school math, give him as complicated a salary/bonus structure as you can and overnight he will turn into Albert Einstein and optimize his behavior to produce the most money.
A fitbit wellness program similar to this is attributed to one of the ignition points of the West Virginia teachers strike. The gamification program was added in conjunction with a health insurance cost increase and in the context of already very low pay.
Our healthcare costs are insanely high, with the fundamental performance of the system the worst in the modern nations of the world, our life expectancy being the only one in the group actually dropping. Instead of addressing fundamental issues, our employer benefit systems are experimenting with behaviour modification via gamification programs like some sort of bizzare black mirror dystopia.
Turn it around- perhaps the low risk individuals find subsidizing the high risk individuals equally repellent. Wellness programs allow those individuals to recover some of their premiums.
And after all the accounting of minuitae is done, after we pay for layers of actuaries, account administrators, and executives that rebalance all the groups and variable, we end up paying a risk and profit optimized system price that is, on average, double other modern nations bills. And for the privilege of paying more than any other modern nation, we die earlier, exclude the poorest, and subject even those with that optimized insurance to bankruptcy should they need to exercise their benefit in a major medical episode.
That’s not a trait inherent to insurance. Premiums can be adjusted based on risk so that everyone “subsidizes” everyone else by the same amount on average.
It tends to start out that way, yes. But eventually as you can better model risk, you can better customize premiums to each individual, until you eventually approach charging each individual their expected risk (loss * probability) plus overhead.
Which, I believe, is how insurance is ideally supposed to behave according to economists.
You have to wonder if there is some ulterior motive at work or else just some sort of mass psychosis where some eggheads think employees want their bosses to tell them what to eat and how to exercise.
I think more simply ask how many people make a substantial, durable change in health status in the general population. My sense is quite few, it’s really hard to change your lifestyle or get more exercise. I doubt a small workplace incentive is going to tip the balance for all but a few people, and those were likely already close to making a change.
It’s also labor intensive to measure workplace wellness in a verifiable fashion. You basically need to collect vital signs on your employees, otherwise you’re open to being gamed in the way described in the OP.
Because I dislike the idea of insurance companies nosing in on my private life and telling me how to spend my time. I'm sure someone will object that participation is voluntary, but I expect it to go along the familiar voluntary with perks -> penalties if not participating -> outright mandatory progression.
I also have a stubbornness gene in me that encourages me to spitefully resist all attempts to meddle in my lifestyle by sanctimonious blowhards that couldn't care less about my actual well being.
The last contact I had with such a voluntary insurance program, it consisted entirely of the insured calling in to a call center, to have someone nag them to create health goals and then nag more to make progress. No thanks; I'm already married. I could have just blathed my way through to collect the cash reward at the end, but I decided I didn't want to feed that system with my attention, and opted out. Later iterations haven't seemed any better, and I too fear the "voluntary" -> "economically enforced" -> "mandatory" progression.
If you want me to walk 10k steps every day, the cash reward might be enough to reflect the lower claims paid out to frequent walkers, but it won't even begin to cover the excess cortisol, expressed because I can't stand the thought of my insurance company electronically monitoring my every move and judging me based on how much I can manage.
(Genealogical anecdotes suggest the stubbornness is Scottish in origin. The "go boil your head" temperament is strongly associated with a specific family name, traceable back to Edinburgh.)
I don’t have much to add but I’d like to point out that you can see that "voluntary" -> "economically enforced" -> "mandatory" progression pattern in other areas too, not just in insurance. Look at those electronic toll tags that used to be voluntary. Then you got a “discount“ for using them. Now there are lanes you can’t use without them. Credit cards are going down this path, with the big push towards a “cashless” society.
Introduce some thing that not everyone wants, then incentivize it’s use, then punish it’s non-use.
Could be both. I have some Irish ancestors, too, and in the same subtree as the Scots.
I have a reverse psychology detector, though, so if you forbid something in an attempt to get me to do it, I'm then more likely to be stubbornly obedient in whatever way I have determined would punish you most for attempting to deceive me.
Nagging me about something I was already planning to do is the worst, though, because that means I have to delay doing it until it is apparent I'm not doing it just because you told me to.
I also expect that ratchet effect where the goals will increase over time without considering other factors such as whether people are paid enough to afford to have reasonable commute times, access to healthy food, etc.
Software engineers have higher pay and greater ability to walk if management gets too patronizing; a lot of other people are going to get this as the alternative to big insurance increases but not, say, getting a more flexible schedule or paid enough to spend an hour less commuting or be able to afford healthier food at inner city markets where vegetables cost more than at the Whole Foods further out.
I've seen folks wrap their step tracker in a couple pairs of socks, then either throw it in the dryer, or tie the socks to a ceiling fan on low. Those particular folks called it "going jogging."
What you measure - you optimize. They measured cellphone shaking. They got optimized cellphone shaking.
I will also share another famous quotation of mine which I intend to eventually get tattooed somewhere (when I can figure out how to make it look good.. I have no tattoos): "Make game of that which makes as much as thee." - from The Rubiyat by Omar Khayaam.
I originally found the quote in a computer science book, and it interested me enough to seek out The Rubiyat to read. The version I found (online I believe) was actually a translation of several different versions of the work I believe? I'm not sure who the translator was. The quote in particular was only present in one of the 'versions' of the work. I imagine translating poetry, of all things, would be tremendously difficult, but as I don't know many other languages I had to take what I could get. Regardless of source, I think the quote is very insightful and stupendously relevant in todays world that seeks to reduce all people to an easily manipulable optimized factor in a rigid system. Viewing those systems as a game to optimize in turn seems the only rational course.
Yeah, but spoofing GPS is possible. The black box insurance gadgets typically wire directly into a car, so it'll be harder send fake data from that pipeline, but totally possible.
The benefit would come from smoothing extremes. Lie about speeds over 80, reduce big accelerations and hard breaking. Lieing about total miles could also work, but I think that could be done by just unplugging the box, or only sending it power and not data.
This would presumably work as long as your insurance provider doesn't have access to your location or any other means of figuring out that your exercise routine is odd.
"You see, so many people are in to exercise that the restaurant started offering treadmill tables". Though probably more believable to just hang out in the gym lobby with your laptop or a book while your watch does its exercise routine,.
Not exactly what you describe, but SXSW paid a platoon of homeless Austin residents to carry around WiFi access points. IIRC it didn’t go over so well for them in the media, which I personally found odd since they were paying $20/hr and the homeless people probably thought it was a cool way to earn easy money...
Funny enough, my wife works at an insurance company that has "walking stations" where you can work while on a treadmill and the fitbit doesn't detect steps that way unless you remove it from your wrist and jam it in your belt or bra, which doesn't always work when the walk stations are not private.
I'm sure I've something similar come up a few times recently, but never with any source discussing the health insurance plans that supposedly collect this data.
Has anyone come across anything on these insurance plans? I'm sure it's something many companies would love to do but I remain skeptical.
It always makes me smile when I see the hoard of people proudly step forward, and boast, “oh yes, here are examples of how I’ve cheated various systems!!”
I was using the Samsung Health app not for insurance just for personal reasons. I was doing well most days I waked a minimum of 10,000 steps or so I thought. So I opened up the app to find it was not working because it had updated and I had to agree to new terms first. :(
I certainly hope so. Fuck that, the insurer chosen by my company doesn't get to be this intrusive with me. I simply do not trust them.
My current insurance hasn't tried this yet, but I'm sure they will. They're going to hate me by the time I get done redlining the agreement and sending it back, and that's just for starters.
We are going to see a ton of tertiary effects of all this data sloshing around, and I really don't think people are going to like them. Especially wrt insurance and invasive surveillance like this. To drive, the state requires it, and so any time-and-place data and so on will be effectively legally required to be shared under whatever terms insurance companies choose.
"In the fall of 2016, the AARP brought suit on behalf of its members, arguing that the ADA and GINA regulations are inconsistent with Congress’s statutory requirement that employers’ wellness programs be “voluntary.” The AARP argued its members were injured by being forced to pay higher health insurance costs to avoid disclosing personal health information. In the fall of 2017, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted summary judgment to the AARP, holding that, although the term “voluntary” was ambiguous in the ADA’s and GINA’s statutes, the EEOC’s interpretation of the term was not supported by a reasoned explanation and therefore was not entitled to the Court’s deference."
Maybe if you're smart enough to do that, you're smart enough to care about your health in other ways and thus you should still fit into the price model that the insurance company uses ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m on Medicare in Australia (so universal healthcare mostly funded by 2% of all taxable income that came in real handy for me last year) and I have an incentive to walk 10,000 steps every morning. A coffee with artificial sweetener from 7 Eleven will do it. And I aim to listen to good podcasts or the like while I do.
I wouldn’t do it otherwise. Even the flimsiest of pretenses will do it.
Twin studies have tended to indicate that IQ is quite dependent on socio-economic status (thereby raising the question of what IQ is actually _measuring_, but anyway...). Socio-economic status is also highly relevant to life expectancy.
My guess is it is childhood. I see poor people eating junk food all the time and feed that to their kids - the kids are fat on empty calories and so the brain doesn't get what it needs to grow smart.
That is just a guess though. I don't have the ability to verify it.
There are plenty of fat smart people. The brain does not develop, and especially does not develop knowledge, as a result of the passage of time and metabolic processes. It develops, both structurally and in terms of 'contents', solely as a response to repeated stimulus. We don't really have a word for a situation where a persons life is impoverished due to lack of intellectual stimulus, but we certainly have the condition. Some kids grow up in homes where if they ask a question, they'll get an answer. Others grow up in homes where an asked question is replied to by the parent dismissively saying 'I don't know' (sending a clear message that the child shouldn't want to know) as they turn back to reading about celebrity gossip. No amount of clean eating can overcome that sort of poverty. Internet access can, though.
That being said, insulin resistance / T2DM is associated with the thinning of cortical tissue [0] - insulin resistance being the typical cause of burgeoning fat storage. Additionally, the brain runs well on ketones [1], which are an abundant supply of fuel on the insulin-resistance-reversing ketogenic diet.
All I'm saying is there may be some benefit for the many fat smart people in taking up some kind of insulin-resistance-reversing diet; lo, for all the fat people (, as well as the thin-yet-still-insulin resistant people, too). But ketosis is not exactly the default path-of-least-resistance for most people, given the standard american diet, conventional nutritional 'wisdom', etc.
IQ historically has had a strong correlation with social status and affluence, which also implies access to healthcare, ability to eat a balanced diet or go to the gym, etc.
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At night I would open the software, wrap my mouse cord around an oscillating desk fan, then go to bed. Earned myself $50/month