Welcome to captive audience pricing! There are more a few companies who have this type of business, especially targeting those in institutions of all kinds.
They probably are fully gone now, but when I was in college some (IRL) classes, usually the big auditorium ones, added interactivity in the form of realtime polls and quizzes with a little “clicker” device. This was of course $30 or whatever and just used some custom RF protocol to register your vote across the room. Single-source, you have to buy it to be in the class.
Textbooks themselves, electronic or not, same racket. Professor is sold the book, but it’s the students who pay. (Don’t forget of course the scam of “writing your own math book” and requiring it!!)
Prisons: some private company always has a deal to “supply telephone service” and charges the inmates or their families rates that are higher than international long distance used to cost.
All of these things are sold to administrators who have no fiscal concerns with the service or product because the institution isn’t the one paying, so there’s zero pricing pressure. If there’s even multiple contractors in the niche, they are more incentivized to compete on sending cool freebies to the administrators, or add perks that benefit them, than they are to compete on pricing for the students/inmates/etc. like, say, Jostens might throw in “free school ID cards” which is technically “saving the school money” in order to get the yearbook contract, while making $100 a yearbook in gross profit on $150 yearbooks. Note: all numbers made up.
My issue with this type of thinking is it assumes "transport cost <<< manufacturing cost" -- a decent assumption for a lot of goods throughout a lot of history, but just... not really true for lots of things in a modern supply chain.
The cost of moving the gown between users -- in the form of the user needing to give back the gown to the service, who must then clean it, inspect it, etc. -- may in fact be far higher than the cost of manufacturing a new gown and only needing your supply lines to be "one way".
This is stupid and irrational. It's like seeing someone eat 100 cakes, and then assuming everyone can do it. And then getting diabetes afterwards.
It seems quite counterproductive to assume such a system would scale to everyone else, or that everyone else could possibly implement this. This is cowboy levels of human resource management, not careful engineering.
I mean a branching factor of 50 vs a branching factor of 7 is a massive difference. A team of 50 can either be run by one manager and a two-level tree or like 8 managers (!!) and a three-level tree. Think about the difference in execution (and expense) in these two companies.
If you can do it w/ the first model why on earth would you not?
This is "Steve Jobs looking at someone on a fruit diet" and thinking "I can do it too" levels of reckless.
Hell, Dunbar's Number is 150 people, and you expect to have 50 directs? That's literally 1/3 of your 150 being occupied by directs. It seems clearly infeasible the more you think about it.
> Yes, I agree. If you tell humans "do not think of pink elephants", they are more likely to think about pink elephants.
> Therefore, you must not use humans for any important work.
Counterpoint, all important work done in the history of humans were done by... humans, and yet I see no pink elephants created as a result of telling humans "do not think of pink elephants".
Yes, I see them all the time when I drink lots of alcohol [1]. This is a common issue with humans called "hallucination" which proves that humans are unreliable.
> We’re really not that vulnerable to such things as a species, because we as individuals all have our own minds and our own sets of biases that cancel out and get lost in the noise.
[Citation Needed]
Just because if you have a species-wide bias, people within the species would not easily recognize it. You can't claim with a straight face that "we're really not that vulnerable to such things".
For example, I think it's pretty clear that all humans are vulnerable to phone addiction, especially kids.
> people within the species would not easily recognize it
[Citation Needed]
Sorry, but I had to. There's easy counterexamples of true, species-wide biases that we're fully aware of. Optical illusions, cognitive biases, cultural universals (community-sanctioned relationships/marriage, inheritance, ceremonial treatment of the dead). What we don't have are universal biases towards believing specific facts or stories.
None of those things are easily recognized though. They're not universals. A term like "cognitive biases" generally require a college level education.
If you go to a tribe in the middle of the rainforest, would they be able to explain those concepts? Of course not.
Plus, I already gave an example of a species wide bias at the end of the comment- phone addiction for kids. I'm clearly not saying it's impossible for a human to spot a bias, but rather... how many 5 year old kids recognize that phone addiction is a bad thing?
You’ve gone from “people within the species not being able to easily recognize a bias” to “people universally recognizing that bias, even with no education or contact with the rest of civilization.”
That’s silly, and something I’d never argue for. To me, something is easy for humans to recognize if a 19th century scientist could discover it. We are a social and cultural species. Culture is how we learn anything over the long run.
That's an extremely high bar. To use something off the top of my head: a 19th century scientist discovered Algebraic topology, does that make Algebraic topology easy?
It's pretty clear for me to argue that those things are NOT intuitive at all, and not easy to recognize. That's not changing the goalposts at all. Would the median american voter understand Poincaré's contributions to algebraic topology? Obviously not. Things that are easy for people to recognize: "touching a hot stove burns you". Things that are not easy for people to recognize: Poincaré's contributions to algebraic topology.
Honestly, your argument falls apart the moment you think about it critically. If it was so easy to recognize bias, then wouldn't all the people in the species already recognized it and voted to shape our legal system to handle any such bias, so it wouldn't be an issue right now? Clearly, that's not the case (we're still dealing with such issues), and understanding such biases is obviously an issue for people in the general public.
If you have a legacy Time Capsule you'd rather not e-waste, you can try this out. Note that this is very much beta quality software, so don't expect it to work on all configurations.
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