Paying for doughnuts is not why veterans don’t like the Red Cross.
The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
191–200 of 317 posts
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also scroll.com, which is more netflix-y: you pay a fixed amount per month and it gets paid out to particpating sites you visit.
Too few partners. Doesn't include the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, for instance. I favour the nickel-and-dime approach. I'm sure I'd only need to pay pennies per day to outpay advertisers. (I'm assuming that would be enough to keep these outlets afloat, which might not be the case.)
I would like to see more partners too, but for me it was enough to get started. I'm not particularly worried about the NYT or the WSJ having enough money. It's the smaller sites that I'm aiming to support by using Scroll.
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He still talks about it like it was a personal attack Not surprising, otherwise he wouldn't hold the grudge for so long. Many climate change deniers feel like even implying they're a (tiny) part of the (systemic) problem is a personal attack, hence their shitty attitude about science.
I know a guy who died recently who didn't eat rice and exclusively bought Chinese and Korean electronics as a result of his involuntary relocation to a certain pacific island from 1942-45. He wasn't personally the target by any of the orders that the people he was wronged by were following yet I think most people would consider the grudge reasonable since he was personally affected even though it wasn't personally ta…
> He wasn't personally the target by any of the orders that the people he was wronged by
I study WW2, especially the Pacific.
Trust me, that war was taken very personally, especially by infantry.
(The next time you watch a documentary on Saipan or Tarawa, note the American rifles are pointed at the ground, since the enemy was coming up through cave networks behind lines. Talk about close quarters fighting!)
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#194Once you lower the price of a product, you can never raise it again. I heard that on/around HN at some point and I haven't seen it proven wrong yet. There's a reason why chip bags get smaller, why new versions that seem identical to the old come out, why Tommy Hilfiger will never be a prestige brand again. And it's because customers don't tolerate raising prices.
Well i dont know about Tommy H but in general a lot of designer brands raised their prices in recent years.
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#195I can call out one example of a poorly executed price raise: Apollo Engine ( https://www.apollographql.com/pricing ) There was a time when they charged for data points/performance traces ingested into the system. At our scale, we were paying around $100/month. We were prepared to scale that to their, I think it was, $550/month plan when our usage got that high. They relatively recently changed their structure to char…
I have a similar story. Year is 2014 and client was using a very specific payment processor because the client was part of UK government and credit card processing was to be done using only that processor - you know, politics and stuff when dealing with government.
So the payment processor, after absorbing a good chunk of this organization became a behemoth, with a lot of political power and overnight they decided to charge additional license fees if you are throwing more then 5 connections/second from same IP to be processed.
Of course the client was upset and asked me if there is a solution before shelling what was possible more then a few million pounds (GBP, not the weight) per year in those fees. My solution? Made them just increase their pool of IP addresses from internet provider and additionally made an intermediate proxy which had the job to gather user requests and spread them to up of 4 requests/second to said processor. When waiting for your card to be processed usually the end user doesn't mind waiting extra 10 seconds, seconds that gave my proxy plenty of time to balance the requests. AFAIK it works without hiccups to this day. And of course, client only thanked me like government thanks to medics in COVID nowadays, all talk and no extra dime (apart from what we agreed upon). Oh well, I take pride in a job well done.
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am quite curious why business plans themselves are not generally subject to a/b testing....
Well, it would be like splitting a company into two parts competing with each other. And wouldn't necessarily determine which plan is better - maybe plan A is better on its own but was undercut by competition from plan B?
> Well, it would be like splitting a company into two parts competing with each other.
Presumably you'd have to design the A/B test around this to get much use out of it. However, when you're just starting a service and not sure how consumers will view the value of it, the benefit is obvious.
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who has turned nearly all cookies off, I appreciate (and use) the plaintext site as well, but there's really no actual reason why they couldn't serve the regular site without cookies all the same.
I don't think it's GDPR compliant, but I'll take it over some other obnoxious "solutions" out there.
Oh, and why is that?
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#198Paying for doughnuts is not why veterans don’t like the Red Cross.
Oh? Then what is the reason?
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#199Pricing things can be strange. Back in the old Zortech days, we included full library source for free with the compiler. Library source wasn't even available for other compilers. Nobody particularly cared that we did that, and it was never mentioned in compiler reviews in the press. One day, Borland decided to package partial (not including floating point) library source for their compiler as a separate product. The…
A looong time ago I worked at a comic book store and the owner had a table of freebies at the front of the store. The distributors were always sending marketing material with cool artwork, so instead of throwing it in the trash when it piled up, he figured why not give it away?
No one touched it. Then he started packaging it into $5 “grab bags”. That crap was gone in a week. The lesson? “You can’t give shit away, but put a price on it and it’ll sell”.
Maybe that says more about comic book store patrons than pricing, I’m not sure.
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and adjust prices weekly to get people in the doors. They don't adjust prices very often at all. They way they regulate attendance in real time is by allowing lower tier passholders to come in on days they predict low traffic. The page isn't interesting now, but they have a website that shows when employee passes are good and for which park[0]. That's a great way to figure out when Disneyland will be crowded. If em…
First park tickets are just part of the story they are also adjusting hotel room costs and occasionally offering ‘free’ meal plans. Those prices go up and down not just for the specific day, but also how far out your doing the booking. On top of that they do various partnerships and large group discounts to try and keep the parks filled. Most of these are either seasonal events or have prices that shift in response t…
That's DisneyWorld, not DisneyLand. They have an entirely different pricing structure because they have so much more space there, they can just build more park to meet demand. So they are built to the peak and then need to incentivize people to come off peak.
DisneyLand can't build any more park, so they could charge even more than they do now and keep the park full.