cobble together per Collins Dictionary: If you say that someone has cobbled something together, you mean that they have made or produced it roughly or quickly.
Or Google AI overview – “Cobble together” is an American English phrasal verb that means to produce something quickly or roughly, often without great care or effort. For example, you might say “The group had cobbled together a few decent songs”. The phrase can also be used with disapproval, such as “The last half an hour was unconvincing and looked as if it had been hastily cobbled together just to get to the finishing line”.
I think this applies to my cooking fairly well – I really need to pay attention to more details during cooking, in terms of ingredients, prep, and actual cook, and do better on that aspect.
But sometimes I got to do what I got to do: I mean work sometimes. For example, last Tuesday evening I had to do that. This is something we should be able to improve when I reflect on it. The issue was: the database scripts for deployment were not version controlled all the way, and there were some manual steps involved. And the DBA ran an earlier version of the DB scripts. My problem on the spot is: I need to figure out the changes since the particular script DBA just ran. And came up the scripts so that the end results would be like we ran the latest scripts 🙁
Cobble together is suitable for that situation. And I was able to quickly realized what’s needed, and came up with the “Update” scripts in a few minutes. And have the DBA ran that. Followed by validation by the teammates.
In a more modern database world though, ideally DDLs and DMLs would be automated, or in other words, the versioning of Database will be managed by a framework, such as FlyAway, or LiquiBase. I recall in my previous job at Ascension, we used the latter. This (automated) way is usually better than the “cobbled together” (manual) way. It doesn’t mean the frameworks don’t have any issues.
(08-05-2024) Noticed judge ruled in a similar case, the Google search engine/Apple iPhone case, and Google lost this 1st round. Think they will likely appeal. But Tech Industry Braces for Fallout From Google Antitrust Verdict. This potentially has some impact on Apple.
Also, today I noticed the Google chat app on iPhone is called just “Chat” app. I guess that’s because Apple doesn’t have such an app: similar to slack or something like that.
(04-11-2024) Big tech in this new regulatory environment in general, Andy Jassy (CEO of Amazon) was talking to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin this morning on Squawk Box. I think Andy has a good point.
“What regulators were saying is that they trust two large Chinese companies to map inside U.S. consumer homes instead of Amazon,” says Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on the regulatory environment. “People don’t know what they can do right now.” pic.twitter.com/tnhU6LvTHp
Andy Jassy (CEO of Amazon) was talking to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin this morning on Squawk Box: on failed iRobot acquisition
(Update 04-06-2024) Yesterday it was somewhat educational to me in terms of the Apple ecosystem. I need to project screen along with audio/video to the projector or the system in the school gym. Our school district is all Apple in terms of computers etc. The way to do it is via “screen mirror” on my MacBook, but the WiFi I am on has some limitations: basically it blocks YouTube. But I want to play something on YouTube for the passport night. One workaround I came up with: I used my phone (iPhone 15) as hot spot, play the YouTube video once (now it’s the memory and I can play it even without Internet). Then I connect to the school public WiFi for the screen mirror purpose.
But there are some more issues: for example, another person texted me the YouTube links via text message, my iMessage App on MacBook could not receive it. On the other hand, a teacher texted me the movie clips via iMessage (using her iPhone), it worked pretty much out of the box.
Btw, for the “YouTube blocking issue”, I actually tried to use a VPN, but as soon as I connect to VPN, the screen mirror stops working. Also, it seems even on VPN, the YouTube is still blocked?
(Original) Some people may know I am an Apple fan, and to be honest, I think I am. And I am not a big fan of the DOJ’s anti-trust lawsuit against Apple. Full disclosure: I own a few shares of $AAPL too.
Walter’s Argument is interesting because he mentioned both the “dual mandate” of DOJ/FTC regarding the anti-trust laws: protect both competition and the customers. In terms of competition, he said, a company that uses its dominant position to get dominance in tangential areas, that company may have violated the law.
For me personally, I started to using Apple Pay since I got the Apple Watch – after seeing coworker using it at the MC Daily Grind Cafe. I used Apple Pay much less frequently via iPhone (before I had the Apple Watch). I bought my 1st Apple Watch in year 2017.
Consumer addiction
A side note of Apple’s domination in the smart phone market, along with the general popularity and Android and iOS smartphones in the world, and in our daily lives, may have pushed the pendulum too far in terms of addiction to the phone or tablets for many people. I am not just talking about the teens doing TikTok, or adults doing FB or Instagram. I am talking about both legit use such as the Panera Bread app (refer to this one) and also binge watching Netflix (or in the case of my wife, Korean soap opera on her iPad, at the expense of sleep sometimes). Jon Hadit, the NYU professor has written quite extensively on the topic too – First He Came for Cancel Culture. Now He Wants to Cancel Smartphones.
(Update 03-27-2024) Both the app and the website are back, fully functional as of now (this morning). Btw, I cleaned up a few CC in my account (from 6 to 3); also enabled 2 factor authentication for MyPanera account (via SMS, not perfect, but better than nothing). Honestly I still don’t know what happened to Panera’s system. One thing impressed me a bit is their mobile app works out of the box – it’s logged in this morning when I opened the app. I used to work on an app when I was working for the Mastercard, and that feature alone (make sure the user logged in if he/she was logged in before the app update) is a difficult task to do.
(Update 03-26-24) It looks like the website is coming back, but I cannot log in using my old credential either. Forgot password via email or #MyPanera number don’t work either 🙁 Thanks to the Twitter user who reported the website coming back. || A small benefit of this thing is it made me to look up the good old MyPanera number. Another side benefit is for me to rethink the practice of saving credit cards under my Panera account (going forward will probably only do Apple Pay). Also refer to our friend’s new article at SVDaily.
Yesterday morning (3/24), I went to the the new U City Panera Bread as usual, and noticed system is down nationwide: the mobile app and the kiosk didn’t work. But the register still works. Note the new U City is an all digital store and it’s almost full outage – the manager said they have a computer for employee order and I assume he can ring a bit regular customer sales as needed (maybe it’s the 3rd party app such as Uber Eats order instead?). WiFi is down too so I am using iPhone as hotspot. At this time it seems 3rd party apps (e.g., Uber Eats) still work.
I posted it on Twitter and also posted a survey yesterday evening.
PSA: Panera system is down nationwide now: the mobile app and the kiosk don’t work. But the register still works, I think. I am at the new u city all digital store and it’s full outage. || WiFi is down too so I am using iPhone as hotspot 😀 https://t.co/cIEwKLRNFT
This sadly could have more impact to Panera compared to say, companies such as Garmin. Some of my readers may know I am a loyal Panera bread customer, and I regularly went to the Old Olive store (sometimes walk) since year 2005; sometimes I work there using laptop (remote work). So it’s almost 20 years since I regularly go there. I also talked about them quite extensively on my blog.
(In Chinese) 原来Panera网站炸了. Note Panera is popular in Chinese American customers too.
In the News
This incident was not widely reported in the news, due to various reasons: it happened on a Saturday; and Panera is not McDonald’s or Starbucks.
Btw, it’s the 1st time Panera Bread website/app/kiosk underwent an incident like this. A few years ago, I do recall Panera Bread had a security related issue, and was remediated quickly. Below are some articles around the issue.
Panera Bread, here in the St. Louis area they are called St. Louis Bread co., or breadCo as some people call it, is early in its digital transformation effort. The in store kiosks and the online ordering (web and mobile app). Personally I liked the convenience of it, although I do miss the “first name basis” at the counter when I started going to Bread Co almost 20 years ago.
Sipper Club (loyalty program) (and in year 2011, I interviewed there once for a dev position related to that, no offer)
I like that too. I recall it was initially called “Coffee+” or something like that, and it was limited free coffee refill. Later it was expanded to soda and other drinks. Note there were controversy around that too. I mean the chargedlemonade. Initially I didn’t pay close attention to the caffeine content, until the news break. My wife was not happy that I gave our daughters that drink once or twice.
Pandemic (during pandemic in year 2020?, I interviewed there again for a software architect position, no offer)
I recall in the early days of pandemic, probably in May 2020, we cannot go in the store. The first time I ordered and picked up the food there, when I saw the young girl (masked) brought out the food, I was almost in tears.
Menu Revamp
They are in the process of big revamp of the menu items in the coming April. Then this happened. I still think it’s unlikely menu revamp will cause this. Menu revamp is nothing new at Panera and at other restaurants, Panera has done many times during my 20 years observations with them. I recall once they tried pizza: it didn’t work out very well (this was before the most recent pizza effort). Once they removed the famous Frontega Chicken sandwich, and some fans revolted, and they brought it back. I am a fan of Frontega, btw.
Key People
Ronald M. Shaich: he is the founder of Panera, and I believe he engineered Panera’s buying St. Louis Bread Co., rebranding, and digital transformation and so on. I saw him in person once at the SunsetHills Panera. It seems he is friendly with the rank and file Panera IT people (I saw a guy who interviewed me in year 2011, quite a few years after that).
I also liked Niren Chaudhary, although his tenure is not as long as Ron, once he replied me to my comment in LinkedIn. It was before Pandemic, I commented on the closing of the store in ForestPark way at Central West End, near BJC/Wash U medical school campus.
I can think of two scenarios: one is acquisition is done via cash; another one is done by stocks (and the stock itself is overvalued).
The yardstick of overpayment
======
EBITA or EBITDA (or use Charlie Munger’s word, replace it with bullshit)
I know from my own software industry experience, 10x sales (or revenue) is usually a fair price.
Example:
Francisco Partners Completes Acquisition of Sumo Logic: Pursuant to the terms of the definitive agreement announced on February 9, 2023, Francisco Partners has acquired all outstanding shares of Sumo Logic common stock for $12.05 per share in cash, valuing the company at an aggregate equity valuation of approximately $1.7 billion.
Sumo Logic’s peak revenue was $300.7M in 2022. The peak quarterly revenue was $79.8M in 2022(q4). Sumo Logic’s revenue increased from $155.1m in 2019 to $300.7M currently. That’s a 93.91% change in annual revenue.
If my memory is correct, they were losing a lot of money too.
Note each industry has its own metrics (or yardsticks).
In the below example, I assume Square and AfterPay is in the fintech space, and Disney is in the content creation (movie and animations to be specific), and park/entertainment business.
Both scenarios didn’t play out well. Both acquirers’ stocks ($DIS; $SQ) were down since the acquisitions. Btw, I googled those two deals’ closing date.
For Block (Square Inc., I used 02/01/2022 per this source, noted another source too)
I think, maybe we should track the performance between the day before deal was announced until now.
======
Consolidation in the Production Monitoring software space
In addition to Sumo Logic, we have
New Relic (by Francisco Partners and TPG for $6.5 billion) –
Revenue in 2023 (TTM): $0.96 B According to New Relic ‘s latest financial reports the company’s current revenue (TTM) is $0.96 B. In 2022 the company made a revenue of $0.88 B an increase over the years 2021 revenue that were of $0.75 B.The revenue is the total amount of income that a company generates by the sale of goods or services. Unlike with the earnings no expenses are subtracted.
As mentioned here in the CBS News YT video – “Breaking down the Apple antitrust lawsuit”.
iMessage vs text message. I noticed some issues in the group text messages in the past: for example, I can not add someone on Android to a group text. If one of the member in the group text is on Android, we need to resend via text message (default is iMessage), and so on.
Recently I asked my daughter (14 year old) about the group text chat as well, and she said: we prefer iPhone, but we don’t exclude Android people too 🙂 I guess they are the inclusive generation.
This reminded me of the CAD interoperability product: I worked on long time ago, it translates from competitor’s file format to ours. Also around the time, I recall it was very hard for us to compete in the 3D CAD market place (we were No. 2 in terms of market share). And our executive’s marketing strategy: we are more open (than the big bad No. 1 guy). See some similarity with Apple here? 🙂 Btw, I recall it was not easy to develop the translator, both from technical and business perspectives.
I had to admit I am not a legal expert. But one thing to note this is not isolated to Apple. This Yahoo Finance article Justice Department files antitrust suit against Apple has a graph says Regulators vs Big Tech that summarized all the US regulators actions against the big tech currently.
Walter Isaacson: The law says you can’t use market dominance to then dominate an adjacent field (YT Video): I was in the Mossberg camp until Walter mentioned the “dual mandate” of DOJ/FTC regarding the anti-trust laws: protect both competition and the customers. In terms of competition, he said, a company that uses its dominant position to get dominance in tangential areas, that company may have violated the law.
Some of my thoughts on the topic in Chinese (linkedIn)
很多年前在一个CAD/PLM 软件公司打工。我的东家在三维CAD行业里是老二，有一段时间公司很紧张，因为汽车行业里面除了美国通用汽车有不少公司要换老大的软件：福特说要换，丰田后来还是选了老大的软件（世界上最大的两家飞机制造公司也用她家的），尼桑（日产）是我东家非常想保住的客户。后来我们那里的人想到一招：就说我们比她们更open, 她们是封闭的（就像今天美国司法部的AT部门的人说的那样）。题外话：大概也是二十年前，苹果用我们的软件设计她们的产品，她家当时的当家花旦是iPod. 前提是我们的三维设计软件在她家的Mac 上运行。#DOJvsApp || Back to software or more broadly the technology business, building better #mouseTraps or #moat if I could use #warrenBuffett words, is one important measurement of success #yardstick
(04-09-2024) Change Healthcare faces second ransomware dilemma weeks after ALPHV attack || So in summary, ransomware attack poses two threats: 1) Loss of data, if they bad guys encrypts the data; 2) Leak of data, in the case a company or an organization (the victim) restores the data from backup (without paying the attacker), the attacker can threat to leak the data online (or sell the data to other bad guys in a black market etc.), so basically this is what happened here.
(Update 03-24-2024) It seems Panera Bread, which probblay has 2,000 stores in the US, had just experienced a similar issue.
As far as I know, it's been down now for at least 2 days. I was trying to use a BOGO 50% that was loaded on my app but couldn't get it yesterday morning & they told me to come back later – I did & still down. Then tried to call their CS ph# & hear message that they're unavailable
Panera Bread app and kiosk down since 03-23-2024 afternoon
PSA: Panera system is down nationwide now: the mobile app and the kiosk don’t work. But the register still works, I think. I am at the new u city all digital store and it’s full outage. || WiFi is down too so I am using iPhone as hotspot 😀 https://t.co/cIEwKLRNFT
Note it was not in the mainstream news at least not covered heavily in the network TV and so on, initially. Until its impact are felt by both providers and the patients. Below are some more recent coverages.
Change Healthcare has acknowledged the hack, which reportedly affected billing and care authorization portals. It’s led to prescription backlogs and missed revenue for providers, posing potential threats to worker paychecks and even patient care.
“Our experts are working to address the matter, and we are working closely with law enforcement and leading third-party consultants such as Mandiant and Palo Alto Networks on this attack against Change Healthcare’s systems,” Change Healthcare said. “We are actively working to understand the impact to members, patients and customers.”
(My take, lesson learned: cyber security best practice; collect the data that’s only necessary)
UnitedHealth Pays $22 Million To Ransomware Group Behind Change Healthcare Cyber-Attack: Reports https://t.co/bHb8mAUceK "The Russian-speaking cybercriminal gang known as AlphV and Blackcat claimed responsibility and said on its darkweb site that it exfiltrated 6 TB of data in…
“The Russian-speaking cybercriminal gang known as AlphV and Blackcat claimed responsibility and said on its darkweb site that it exfiltrated 6 TB of data in the attack against Change Healthcare.”
This Change Health incident somehow reminds me of the SolarWind hack a few years ago. It seems Microsoft has some more work to do, as they are still a popular target for hackers.
“The tradecraft was phenomenal,” said Adam Meyers, who led the cyber forensics team that pawed through that tainted update on behalf of SolarWinds, providing details for the first time about what they found. The code was elegant and innovative, he said, and then added, “This was the craziest f***ing thing I’d ever seen.”
The hackers didn’t do anything fancy to give them the domestic footprint, officials confirmed. In fact, they just rented servers from Amazon and GoDaddy.
SWI stock has not done too much in last 5 years mostly due to this attack.
Also the Kronos attack which received less media attention (somewhat similar to the UnitedHealth hack). I recall this incident because around at time I was working on a Kronos based project (app, the official name of the app is Ascension Nurse Center of Excellence). It didn’t work out due to various reasons, after the company sunk millions of dollars on the project.
Legality aside, paying the ransom encourages the hackers? See also Incident Of The Week: Garmin Pays $10 Million To Ransomware Hackers Who Rendered Systems Useless. But from a business’s perspective, they are usually between a rock and a hard place: meaning if they don’t pay, they usually don’t know how long it will take them to recover the data, if at all; or if they pay up, they essentially are working with the bad guy (or encouraging the bad guy).
Can we ever negotiate or trust the hackers (the bad guys)? || This somehow reminded me of my personal experience when I was working for one of the major credit card company (their loyalty and rewards platform), and at one time I was assigned to investigate the root cause of an incident in which the bad guys (or girls) logged into some cardholers’s loyalty redemption website quickly after the website launch, and redeemed their points for air tickets or hotel bookings. At the time, amid the tedious work, I asked myself: how come in this world there are evil people like that?
Another question I had for the UnitedHealth Group (Change Healthcare) hacking: if this is the notorious Russian hacking group BlackCat, can the US government do something about it (hint: retaliation)?
I am teaching a database course this semester at a local university. It seems install MySQL on Windows is not very straightforward. Something I didn’t realize as personally I am on the Mac for a while.
I looked around and summarized the following choices.
Rule of thumb: when you give the credit card information to a public cloud provider, always set a budget, and a cost alert. Because we don’t want any surprises in the bills.
Personally if I am the person who is in charge of a company’s cloud bill, for both dev (experiment) and production. I will be like Cory Quinn.
(Original) Some people may know I worked at CAD industry for a while: I actually explained a bit here (search for “my 1st employer”).
I heard about Bentley Systems many years ago, but until fairly recently, to be precise in year 2020, it came to public market. Here is their IPO prospectus filed in Sept 22, 2020. In last year or so, I traded and still own some of their stocks $BSY (note this class of stocks has less voting power compared to the Bentley families, and this is quote common in tech stocks, btw. More explanation in the next paragraph). And in last few days, the stock dropped quite a bit and I added a bit more in the last few days too.
Their main competitor includes another former employer of mine: AutoDesk $ADSK. I didn’t stay at AutoDesk as long as the 1st employer of mine. Unlike AutoDesk and many medium sized software companies, Bentley has a small quarterly dividend: 5 cent per share. Note the Bentley families still has the voting power. It’s probably one of the few family controlled software companies in the world. Many software companies are public and has no controlling shareholder: with the exception of Alphabet (Google), Meta Platform, and Hashicorp $HCP etc. Founders usually have control of the company via Dual Class Stock. In a way Berkshire Hathaway has a similar structure too: A share has way more voting power than B share, and Warren Buffett and his family has the control.
It seems they just exceeded $1 b annual revenue in year 2022 (here are the link to their annual reports in recent years).
Future and risk factors
Family control. No check and balance from outside shareholders. Note this is true for many companies. The exception is usually when a stock underperforms the market for a long time, an activist shareholder may emerge, e.g. Nelson Peltz vs. Disney at this time.
Likely lower growth or even negative growth in China, both in terms of R&D and end market. This is similar to many west/US tech companies. APAC (Asia Pacific made up about 18% of the revenue, so this is still manageable).
US recession, or no growth. Possible, but software companies usually sell products in multiple years, eventually the growth will come back, even with the economy cycle.
I started software development journey from Oct 2000 in the US (my LinkedIn profile here), for about 8 years my main focus was the C++ CAD software development, and I didn’t use much Database or SQL in my day job. I did take a graduate level database course when I was in Rolla in year 1999 or 2000.
I started to use database, SQL and Oracle PL/SQL for my day job from 2010, when I started working for a small consulting company that does work for the Union Pacific Railroad. The application I worked on uses quite a bit of Oracle PL/SQL partially because during the time of development (around 2000 to 2003), PL/SQL was the “new and hot”, and also Oracle itself was the mainstay in the enterprise application/database development platform too. Later on at Mastercard I learned the Master Reward System (or platform) used PL/SQL extensively too, as one of my colleagues put it, it’s really the heart of the system. This is also confirmed by one of the former developers’ LinkedIn profile (John McGuinness).
Lead developer and technical owner of back end of MasterCard Rewards Loyalty System.
Used C++, Korn Shell, PL/SQL, and Java in a Sun Solaris Environment.
Btw, once in 2005, I recall my “formerly IT/software engineer” mortgage broker and I had a quick talk after the closing of the house (condo to precise), and I recall he was doing VB (Visual Basic) before his mortgage career, and we tend to agree “software development using database as backend” is funner. Green is always greener at neighbor’s yard. I think it applies in the software development field as well 🙂
My own DB experiences – Working in progress as of 01-14-2024
Below are some of my observations on the relational DB in various production environments across multiple applications.
Unidev (contractor for Union Pacific Railroad): year 2010, when I 1st touched the DB, Oracle SQL and PL/SQL, C++.
Arch Coal (now Arch Resources): I used SQL server, it’s a small app in which I created both backend (C# .NET web services), and front end (iOS on iPad).
Btw, for own mobile apps, iOS apps, I used parse and google firebase (no longer active maintained).
Mercy: I used both Oracle and MySQL (we have different apps using different databases for backend).
Mastercard: Oracle (the main backbone for the MRS, see below), and Postgres (a small database for the Pay with Rewards app), this is the most substantial app I ever worked on – Mastercard reward system (MRS), Exadata: which is the high performance Oracle/Sun Sparc dedicate DB hardware. At MC I had opportunity to work on some performances issues on our SQL, both in the web application and the batch application, including promotion.
I also touched upon the Oracle Advanced Queues for the Pay with Rewards app I mentioned above. Overall I gained most of my DB exposure when I was working at MC. Before working at MC, I think I consider myself still a newbie on the DB (I was more confident on the java, and web apps dev side of things), after the MC gigs I was much more confident on both the DB as well as web admins (Site Reliability Engineering, using Google’s term).
A very subtle yet interesting observation: at MC they have teams such as software engineering (dev team), business operation (Technical/Production Support + Site Reliability Engineering), Database Engineering (DBA team) etc. At my current place we have dev team, Dev Tools team (somewhat like Dev Ops), dedicated Production Support team, and Data Management team (DBA team). Overall from my experience, only the MRS at MC has a dedicated application DBA. Most places don’t have a DBA with in-depth DB knowledge.
Enterprise Fleet Management (current employer): Oracle and Postgres (no production yet), some issues around DB (frequent locking, and concurrent DB connection exceeding alert limit, this happened at MRS too).
When the system hangs due to the exhaustion of database connections (basically DB server got overloaded), DBA’s usual workaround is killing the blocking session. In the extreme cases, they have to restart the DB server – but this could cause outage if there is no secondary DB server.
Application DBA is a DBA that has knowledge on the application database, in other words, he/she may be familiar with the data model in the database, and sometimes could provide valuable input to the performance and optimization of the database design, and database queries.
Outage
To avoid outage, we could have a primary and secondary database and database servers. Basically during normal operation, we use the primary DB server. Keep in mind the data is sync’ed (one way) from the primary to the secondary all the time (sometimes this is called data replication on Oracle). In the event, we need to take the primary DB server down, we can start up the secondary server 1st, switch the application DB connection to the secondary server, and this way we avoid an outage. When the primary DB server is available again, we can cut the application traffic back, keep in mind, when we switch back and forth, we need to make sure the data is kept up to date: for example, the case of switching back to the primary server, we need to replicate the data from secondary server to the primary server 1st. There are existing software solutions for that, e.g., Oracle GoldenGate is a popular choice for Oracle DB replication.
Web app <=> [ Primary server ] => secondary server
Some tips:
Always backup before deleting.
In addition to relational DBs, we need to be aware of object datastores (sometimes people called NoSQLs) such as MongoDB.
We can do Entity Relational (ER) model using MySQL Workbench for the WordPress MySQL DB – I think the Data Modeler role at MC (and other large organizations) may used similar tools to check the data modeling. It seems many small organizations don’t have this capability. The ER model is a very good way to introduce new developers to the system.
I think this is a very common thing: at the car rental counter, the clerk asks “do you want to buy the comprehensive insurance”, and/or buy the full tank of gas, so that you don’t need to fill up the car when you return it.
My answer is always, no. Except once I probably bought the gas when I was on a business trip, and the reason, was the trip before that one, my colleague and I tried to fill up the gas at the last minute, and rush to the airport terminal. We didn’t buy the gas for that one.
In America, we always need to buy the liability insurance for car/driving. Comprehensive insurance is required if we have car loans (the loan company or bank need that). I think the requirement is similar for the home insurance.
For rental car, I believe liability insurance from our own car transfers while comprehensive/collision don’t. For the latter, I do have a credit card that offers “primary insurance coverage” – basically means if applicable, the credit card issuer can pay for the damage of rental car. The card has an annual fee.
Self Insure
This March, we rented a violin for our younger daughter, as we plan her to take the violin lesson from April. The violin shop asked us maybe helpful to add the violin to the home insurance, or buy the insurance from somewhere. The violin is worth about $950, btw. My wife bugged me a few times about insurance. And I said we are self insured. Meaning, if our daughter accidentally damaged the violin, I will pay for it.
Years ago, I worked for a coal mining company, and the company self insures all employees health insurance too. They still have a health insurance company to administrator it, but the mining company takes all the risk. It was year 2012, and coal mining company’s deals with quite big amount of money, in terms of the equipment and mining side of the things. Note this has been changed in last 10+ years, as the natural gas replaced coal as the main load for power generation, and the renewable energy (wind, solar) grew significantly too.
Warren Buffett, who is both the greatest investor of our time, as well as an expert on insurance, explained the need about insurance at about 44 mins mark of the video (he talked about 5 minutes on the topic). Below are most quotes.
There are two reasons a company (or a person) needs to insurance. The main reason to buy insurance, is to protect yourself from the loss, the loss you are unable or unwilling to take or bear yourself, this could both be objective or subjective. Sometimes a manager could ; the second reason is the price of insurance is favorable to us.
YouTube: BRK 1995 annual shareholder meeting
What insurance do I have
I have a term life insurance. Bought in year 2011. It’s 15 years. I think it will be more expensive if I buy now – due to aging. At the time I bought the policy, my older daughter is one year old and my wife didn’t work outside home. Another reason is I was changing jobs, and the life insurance policy at work place cannot be carried over between jobs. A side note, after I left my 1st employer in the US, I learned from my former boss once at the Macy’s that one of my coworker died suddenly, and he was younger than me. To make things worse, in his benefits selection, he seems didn’t select the company paid life insurance policy (or in other words, he didn’t opt-in, there was no cost). It’s just overall a very tragic situation. That’s the main reason we need to have a life insurance on the bread-winner.
I have car insurance (comprehensive) and home owner insurance (mortgage requirement). The cars are paid off, but comprehensive insurance helps in the case if we got in car accident: this actually happened last year when our 2012 Camry was totaled, and the insurance company seems worked for us well. They raised the premium afterwards, and I just switched to new insurance co. One thing I personally recommend, is the roadside assistance and the rental car reimbursement option, if applicable. I use AAA for roadside assistance, and I also work from home (we have 2 cars, both WFH) and that’s why I don’t add “rental car reimbursement”.
Health insurance through employer. This is common in the US. Another option is Healthcare market place (Obama care).
Bonus question:Extended Warranty (EW)
Our current 2 cars (one Camry and one Sienna) are both preowned certified. One common question is do we buy the “extended warranty” from the 3rd party provider (dealer always pushes for this). I bought it for Sienna in year 2013 as I just wanted to leave. I thought it was probably $1,200 for 7 years (100,000 miles, whichever comes first). The only time I used it is for roadside assistance (I do have AAA too, but wanted to use the service from Extended Warranty once. If I had saved the money myself, I would probably paid off the cost associated with the squirrel (rodent). Last year, with the preowned Camry, the dealer offered EW again. I recall it has tiers, and the cheapest is over 7k, and I declined.
