121–130 of 215 posts
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
Do these companies still exist?
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I rarely bike because I don't trust drivers, and you can't bike on the sidewalk.
People who use bikes don't trust drivers either. In fact I work on the base assumption that bus drivers in particular, are actively trying to kill me.
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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.
Low-risk individuals subsidizing high-risk individuals? We just call that "insurance."
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."
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.
People are willing to go quite far sometimes: https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/8fu7wi/albertan_cha...
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.)
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People are willing to go quite far sometimes: https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/8fu7wi/albertan_cha...
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.
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They don't even work: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-26/workplace...
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.
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.
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. [1] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/04/jerry_muller_on.htm...
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Between walking, driving, and biking, biking is the _most_ dangerous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort#Travel 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 ever…
And according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microlife , the first 20 minutes of moderate exercise is worth 2 microlifes (or -2 micromorts). At 15 miles/hour, the means the first 5 miles of biking costs you about 0.25-0.5 micromorts of accident risk and gives you +2 microlifes of fitness. Riding in a car, on the other hand, incurs accident risk AND has effects on fitness.
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.
[0]: https://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2015/09/01/is-it-jus...