My advice is to immediately rebrand as gracefully and effectively as possible and use all that activist energy to effect the transition.
They kind of have a point which doesn’t make them right, but they hold all the cards and you will lose this one and regret the wasted bandwidth.
This name is pretty rings rather badly in my ears, though I’m not offended by such things. I’d feel similarly if they had named it “fuck sleep”. I’m not offended by the word “fuck” but I don’t really want to buy products that are named that. Do apps need energy drink names to be successful? I’ve noticed a trend in talking about men’s balls in ads, manscaping, underwater fart jokes. It’s seems so much like idiocracy more then something offensive.
On the other hand a rose is still a rose. So I agree they should probably just rename it. I doubt there would be any major loss from doing so.
Then don't. How is this relevant? They say the app has been downloaded 500,000 times, so many people are fine with the name.
These stories keep coming; they should remind us that nothing is more precious than the open web, and all those stores or walled gardens, their "rules" and vague TOS are the ennemy.
Is it the housing market as homeowners who favours HOAs, or is it the builders who favour them? Are HOAs opted in by homeowners in existing communities because of their benefits, or do builders create them force them upon new communities because it benefits them somehow?
I am asking because while I do not have any knowledge of HOAs, I have been following the saga of rental water heaters/furnaces/ACs in Ontario for a while. Long story short, construction companies sign a long-term contract with an appliance company instead of buying and installing necessary appliances like furnaces for new houses. They get a nice kickback for this. If you want to buy a new house, odds are you will be bound by a long-term contact. If you want to terminate it early, you end up paying 30k for an appliance that is worth 10k new and installed. If you keep your contact, you will pay the same over many years.
It is a deal that is very much to the benefits of the builder and very much against the interest of the homeowners. But they have been exploding in popularity. There are relatively more and more homes with rented water heaters and fewer and fewer homes with owned water heaters every year. It would still be wrong to conclude that "water heater rental is beneficial. See, the market has spoken."
If so, I could see people liking it as it serves the same function as an HOA: a hedge against bad things happening.
Water heater died? Plumber comes out, no charge. Neighbor starting a junkyard on his front lawn? HOA sends a letter, no confrontation.
Some people will decline an HOA for the same reasons they decline extended warranties: they’d rather deal with situations themselves, as they arise. Others don’t want to be bothered and let someone else handle it. I think there is space for both.
I believe so. But the price is so unreasonably high that you could replace the furnace literally 3 to 5 times and you would still be ahead compared to renting the furnace. How many people would purchase an extended warranty that is priced at multiples of the price of the object they are buying? More than none, but a very small number. New rentals are signed overwhelmingly by builders and not homeowners.
If you buy a home warranty, or an extended warranty for your car, you are (on average) going to be out of pocket more than you would be without it. You are buying it for the peace of mind that comes from not having to deal with an unlikely but major repair expense.
Not at this price. Usually the warranty is a percentage of the price of the goods. So for example, I expect a $1000 gadget to have extended warranty priced at $100 or so. I have never seen the warranty of a $1000 gadget to be priced at $3000 to $5000 dollars. And that is for stuff that break down more frequently, e.g. phones and laptops and cars. The odds of a furnace breaking down are even lower.
Or worse, because they are over leveraged and unable to fund a replacement without an installment plan – so they have no better option?
I’m not sure. I can see a consumer protection argument to be made.
I just went through buying a furnace and had a few prospective installers. The first tried to sell the extended coverage: twice annual “checks and maintenance” and a 30% discount on all parts.
The second said he’d let me source the parts myself if I so desired and if I would be responsible for changing the air filter on schedule and hosing down the outside fan every summer I’d be better off putting the annual fee into a sinking fund. Or, I could pay him $200 a year to hold a hose, money he’d happily take. He got the job. ;-)