Genuinely curious:

Is the author saying that ACO and VBC were decent ideas that got UHG’s fingers grafted into the legal structure, or are they just saying that ACO and VBC are bad in general?

And I knew that we had some awful structures within our healthcare system, but I LOATHE UHG and didn’t realize that they OWN our medical system. Disgusting.

Guess I’m no longer an Apple fan. Huh. I’m just locked in at this point. Switching would just spread my data around more and I’m already committed to not upgrading for a few years.

I use “Observational Maintenance” all the time:

When you ask someone to look at a problem and it’s fixed by the time they do.

A friend showed me an issue they’d been having for over a YEAR. I did almost NOTHING and it was working by the time I looked at it.

More often than not it’s me that looks dumb, though.p

It’s two halves of a bagel stuck together with jam and peanut butter to reform a solid torus. It’s math. They COULD have had an easy time eating your math, but the construction made it more difficult.

It seems like the issue is that the safety inspector ISN’T saving them any money by catching issues before they’re fined for them. If they were actually ever held accountable for safety issues, his job would pay for itself.

BNSF is absolutely a gilded age-level corporate villain. But no one is coming after them if Don doesn’t find these issues and that’s a problem too. If the rail safety bureau (or whoever manages rail safety) wants to hire him for the same job, I think BNSF would rethink that position VERY quickly.

That’s definitely my hope.

It’s less the repaired retail market (which they control on Amazon at least) and more the “I could repair this for cheaper than half of a new phone” lost sales. They’ve been quietly letting that group slip by for years of progressively more expensive to “repair” (read, “swap modules”) while people who could get a basic repair done for cheap are pushed to buy new phones instead.

What are the holes that can be poked into this as written? I firmly believe Apple is still against repair that would eat into their new sales. So where does this, as written, give them the room to keep that going?

Is it just that they can continue to make their “screen issue = replace whole top shell of laptop” and similar the default and draw the line there, standardizing high-cost repairs even if it’s just a wire or small component replacement? If they don’t allow ANY standard repairs more granular than swap module for module, they don’t have to provide more granular resources than that. I’m not fully up on what repairs Apple authorizes.

This is definitely a win to some degree, though. But when your opponent goes to your side and draws a line, that always gives me the chills.

So, ignoring the fees involved in making it happen at all (which I assume the person did, because wow.) Say they spend ⅓ the price of the car to get ⅔ again as much use out of it. That’s a profit. They’re probably looking at replacing the car and not the battery when thinking about it, so it’s really good then. And they probably assume the device is transferable, so they can get more than one use out of the investment.

So they’re selling themselves on almost 2x performance that they can apply to all future batteries or cars and thus they extend the life of each car in the fleet by a lot.

And if it’s doesn’t live up to the claims, they pay ‘nothing’ and reap any benefits they managed to get out of it. And SURELY it would give at least SOME benefit, right?!

It’s absolutely stupid and foolish, but it’s not one single thing that makes it stupid or foolish, it’s a cascade of assumptions and estimations that makes something stupid sound plausible. There’s a world where the person “logic-ed” their way into buying this scheme—and either way it was a scheme—that was sold to them as no-lose.

They just had to forget all the other associated costs. The real world is probably either that they were completely incompetent and bought “battery rejuvenation technology” or that they tried to payout to a buddy and were had.

There’s a reality here where someone saw this as a no-lose situation. Either:

A. We get some improvement, but it doesn’t reach their claims so we don’t go forward.

Or

B. We get the promised improvement and it’s actually worth it.

They missed a few obvious issues in that the cars may become safe or get worse longevity from the experiment. That and the contract process took time and money if they had a reasonable expectation of failure.

Still, it’s not entirely stupid and so long as Mullen got NOTHING besides a scam record, this could be a win.

I’ll be your third upvote. For less than 3.