Hi Jon -- we work primarily with businesses, but if you're shipping freight and have questions, you can always email us at sales@shipwell.com -- thanks!
At your level, it sounds like you're past getting an MBA. You may find value in an Executive MBA, which are usually done part time and have an average age of ~40, later, but it would depend on a lot of factors.
I ran some tests a few months back on how much bandwidth I use up while watching Twitch. What I found is that if I streamed Twitch 24/7 that I'd hit something like 1.2 TB down in a month.
By that logic, even just 3 hours a day would be 150 GB down a month.
Ah, sorry. Too much time on the internet, I'm starting to read everything too cynically. I'll delete my comment responding to yours, since it doesn't add anything to the discussion and misrepresents what you were trying to say.
The idea of comparing insurance isn't new, but I felt that no one had done it well. Generally, either the results are biased because someone is trying to encourage you to pick one company over the other. Or when an agency is able to show you accurate, official prices - they are not able to show it for all of the largest companies, which results in an incomplete comparison.
With Leaky, we've set out to change that by being as impartial and transparent as possible - because we think that people deserve to be able to compare and manage their insurance the way they want to.
Can you explain how other comparison websites try to encourage you to pick one company over another without providing a benefit (i.e. cheaper price or better cover) to the customer?
Also, I understand that most comparison websites will not quote from every insurer and that there are now almost as many comparison websites as there are insurers. How will you be able to attract partnerships from more insurers than anyone else has done so far?
In a previous life, I worked with an online travel agent (you'll note I don't say for).
One of their major income streams was promoting certain providers in order to get more commission, so that if two providers had approximately similar inventory, then the one paying better commission typically gets placed at the top.
I understand how that happens when you're talking to a sales person - it's their job so they want to get the best commission they can.
A comparison website is just an algorithm. The deal at the top is the one with the cheapest quoted price. The price comes directly from the insurer so the comparison website has little control in which results are shown to the user. The only control they might have would be to remove low return insurers from their result set (in which case why partner with them at all?) or more likely present a high return result as a special or premium offer in which case they have to sell that to the customer on the basis of value for money.
Nope, in this case the algorithm was tuned to deliver the highest commission for them. It's a really, really stupid technique, and leads to poor conversion, but that aim of grasping for every bit you can get out of your local maximum is a difficult habit to break (and a worse one to codify in an algorithm).
We have a variety of these websites in the UK, such as gocompare, comparethemarket and moneysupermarket.
All of them list quotes ordered by price, from lowest to highest - and while some companies aren't listed, I have yet to find an unlisted company that offers a better price.
I don't think it's currently possible to do entirely online at the moment. Your best chance would be with an independent agent at the moment (though we're trying to change that).
This is very true, and actually had a strong influence on Leaky - especially in the early days. I spent a lot of time in the UK (and actually spoke at a price aggregation conference in London), and there are a few structural reasons for why the markets evolved so differently and have made the US much more resilient to adopting comparison services. Suffice to say, we think that's changing.
Glad to read you are launching country wide, and with over 100 companies on board. Hopefully that will be a wake up call for the remaining to get with the times and open up some services to consume.
My wife dragged me to an appliance shop in the Mission (SF) and they had a toilet like this in their bathroom. At first I was shocked and appalled at how forceful the stream of water was - especially as I had it on the 'low' setting. Then I became aware of how long it was spraying because after 30 seconds I had to turn it off. With the combination of these two (and the heated dryer), I didn't have any problems.
This is fantastic news! For too long have larger companies used the looming threat of legal action to discourage legitimate competition from smaller companies. I'd never heard of Chilling Effects before this, but now I'm tempted to put all of the C&D's we've collected (and will continue to collect) into it.
Google seems to relay the majority of their legal notices there for many years now [1]. That said, the site didn't change at all in those years, either. Just an information trove rotting away.
[1] You can try searching for "Amy Weber" on Google (random query I pulled from one of the complaints, semi-nsfw). For me, it shows multiple links to CE with respective DMCA-esque requests made to german governmental bodies. You aren't affected by those in the USA, but theres a DMCA one, too.
The site hasn't changed much (and dear god is it still slow), but it has been pretty fundamental in a number of papers on copyright. The database will hopefully be able to bring actual data to bear on future copyright reforms...if that ever happens.
I'm surprised at the number of people who haven't heard of the site before. If a link has been removed from Google, it will replace it with a notice that a link was removed and and link to the actual takedown request in the Chilling Effects database (which includes the link that was taken down). I believe they started doing this when they were forced to take down the Scientology links years ago.
Since we now know Microsoft is one of the top DMCA notice issuers to google, if you pick a query like
you'll see a bunch of the notices down at the bottom. If you click through to a notice, I don't think you can figure out which link was actually removed for your particular query since the notices can apparently contain hundreds of links, but it is at least a decent measure of transparency for the process.
The inferences he makes about political and religious beliefs as a consequence of evolutionary psychology is pretty cool.
Gets a bit weird around here though:
"Intelligent people are more likely to be nocturnal because humans are designed to wake up when the sun comes up and go to sleep when the sun goes down. They are more likely to be homosexual, because humans are evolutionarily designed to reproduce heterosexually. They are more likely to enjoy instrumental music because music in its evolutionary origin was vocal, and they are more likely to consume alcohol, cigarettes and drugs because all of these substances are evolutionarily novel."
