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.

I see someone has found the back alley of the Geoff’s Trash Anime restaurant.

The update has been queued for about a month on my work computer. No. I won’t do it.

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

At the funeral home for my FiL talking about urns. We ask about the little ones they have. While doing their little pitch, the funeral director says that “they hold a spoonful of the- the-“ and one of my FiL’s children finishes “spoon full of dad”.

And now I can’t think about cremation without thinking about “spoon full of dad”.

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.