381–390 of 471 posts
Amusingly, the website this article is hosted in pops up a modal asking you to sign up to a mailing list with a low contrast dismiss button and saying "you can always unsubscribe". People in glass houses.
Ultimate hypocrisy is that their profit model is probably built around reselling their email list.
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Who insures the reinsurance company?
Berkshire Hathaway. Per https://www.reuters.com/article/us-berkshire-buffett-insuran... , they are planning for handling a potential $400 billion catastrophe.
Hurricane Katrina (2005) was up at 160 Billion and Harvey (2017) hit 125 billion. So 400 Billion is just at the upper end of the expected range.
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There's a furniture salesman here in Houston who makes heavy use of that sort of promotion. His latest if you spend $3,000 on a mattress and the Astros win the "2018 baseball final championship series" you'll be refunded the purchase price. Not sure why it's worded so formally; must be a legal thing.
Seems that it would violate the "no purchase necessary" rule most (all?) states require to avoid it being an illegal lottery.
https://gleam.io/guides/no-purchase-necessary
>A contest is a type of promotion you can run in which an element of skill is involved. For a promotion to be considered a contest, entries must be skill-based and winners must be chosen based on merit. Meaning they cannot be drawn randomly.
>Examples of contests include:
>"Best Photo" Competition
>Voting Contest
>Sports-Based Contest
>Essay Competition
>"Tell us in less than 20 words..." Competition
>When you run a skill-based contest, winners are not randomly drawn, hence removing one of the three defining features of a lottery. As a result, contests are not impeded by No Purchase Necessary laws.
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I have the same philosophy about office chairs.
Mattresses (Casper), office chairs (Steelcase LEAP), keyboards (something with Cherry MX Brown switches). I spend the majority of my life using these bits so I buy quality.
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I'm trying to recall the Mancini Mattress (Bay Area) ad -- something like "If we can't beat the price, the mattress is free!" I'm thinking ... ohhh... I bet they always somehow manage to beat the price!
Many stores will have custom SKU or model IDs, so a mattress that is physically identical and cheaper somewhere else is actually a different product per the paperwork...
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Way back in the day, I had a reinsurance company as a client. For those unfamiliar, reinsurance companies insure insurance companies. For example, they might insure a standard insurance company for automobile accidents, with a $1,000,000 deductible. So the retail insurance company handles payouts up to a million dollars, but when there's a really wild claim, the reinsurance company pays the insurance company for anyt…
Who insures the reinsurance company?
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Thanks. I'll check it out. I'm quite immune to the tactics myself due to watching my father fall for way too many of them growing up. As a result of seeing that at an early age I've become quite immune to the tactics. But I could easily see how the less immune could readily be drawn in to something they likely could not afford.
Paul Wilson gave a talk at DEF CON 20[1] - he said something that stuck with me (which I'm paraphrasing now): "The way you spot a mark is to look for the person who thinks they can't be taken. They're the greenest grass to a con man." I'm sure it's in the video somewhere :-) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkz1ItKLAvk
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Seems that it would violate the "no purchase necessary" rule most (all?) states require to avoid it being an illegal lottery.
Since winners aren't drawn at random and it takes skill to win the World Series, it's not a "lottery", it's a "contest." https://gleam.io/guides/no-purchase-necessary >A contest is a type of promotion you can run in which an element of skill is involved. For a promotion to be considered a contest, entries must be skill-based and winners must be chosen based on merit. Meaning they cannot be drawn randomly. >Examples o…
>...entries must be skill-based and winners must be chosen based on merit.
In the scenario above, it takes skill but not the participants' skill, so it is essentially as out of the control of the participants as which number is drawn by a ball machine.
Now, if the skill in question is that of picking a winning sports team, then were talking about gambling which, of course, has its own set of rules and would be a stretch to apply here in any case.
Overall, it seems this contest would be on shaky legal ground one way or another.
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Wow I'd love to hear some of those stories. What a largely unknown, esoteric and hugely interesting industry.
They used to talk about anti-selection (a/k/a "adverse selection"). For example, if a retail insurer has no reinsurance, it has to incorporate both the probability of claims and the distribution of payout sizes. But if they have reinsurance, the payouts are 'clipped' at their deductible. This means that they have an incentive to take on clients that are less likely to have any sort of accident, even if when they do h…