telemarketer

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pages: 284 words: 92,688

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

Among his first hires were a head of marketing and a head of sales. Those guys assembled an old-fashioned phone sales operation, with an army of low-paid telemarketers who would badger companies into signing up for a one-year subscription. The salespeople targeted small business owners, whose needs were relatively simple and who were, typically, not very tech savvy. Eventually some customers would become disenchanted with the software and refuse to renew for a second year. By then HubSpot’s telemarketers would have found new customers to replace the ones who were leaving. By 2011, HubSpot had about five thousand customers. That year, the company raised a new round of funding and used the money to acquire a company with good engineers.

They seem to, but maybe they’re just playing along. As for me, I am completely transfixed. I’ve never seen or heard anything like this. Have you ever received a call from one of those annoying telemarketers and wondered what it must be like on his end of the phone? How many people are in the room where he is sitting? How does he talk people into buying whatever he’s selling? How did he learn how to do this? How does he rationalize what he does? The online version of that telemarketer’s world is the one that I’ve now entered. I’m in the Land of Spam, learning how to send email to lists of names in the hope that some teeny tiny percentage of the recipients will open my message and buy something.

He asks questions, gets hung up on, dials again. All. Day. Long. There are dozens more like him in this room. This is the telemarketing center, and it reminds me of the boiler-room operations you see in the movies, with people arranged in rows, some standing, some sitting, packed in close to each other, barking into headsets. Imagine Glengarry Glen Ross, but instead of four sales guys there are a hundred, and they are all in their early twenties, all talking at once, all saying the same things, over and over again. To be sure, the telemarketers at HubSpot are not selling penny stocks or fake real estate. They are selling a real product.


pages: 385 words: 123,168

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

The most obvious example of this are national armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies.12 If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society. I think almost anyone would concur that, were all telemarketers to disappear, the world would be a better place. But I think most would also agree that if all corporate lawyers, bank lobbyists, or marketing gurus were to similarly vanish in a puff of smoke, the world would be at least a little bit more bearable.

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or, for that matter, the whole host of ancillary industries (dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dockworkers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science-fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs, or legal consultants to similarly vanish.1 (Many suspect it might improve markedly.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well. Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism.


Care to Make Love in That Gross Little Space Between Cars?: A Believer Book of Advice by The Believer, Judd Apatow, Patton Oswalt

Albert Einstein, carbon tax, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Saturday Night Live, side project, telemarketer

Allison • • • Dear Allison: I am having trouble finding a job because I have a degree in English and everyone knows that is a fake degree. Should I do telemarketing or just let the earth have me? Michelle Portland, OR Dear Michelle: I would like to help you but, frankly, your letter is breathtakingly insensitive to those of us who majored in telemarketing. Are you under the impression that you can simply waltz into a telemarketing position without ever taking courses like “Introduction to Telemarketing: Conceptions of the Sensory,” “Telemarketing Perspectives: The Poetics of American Humanism,” or even “Gendered Identities: An Introduction to Black Queer Telemarketing”? And your equally cavalier approach to taking your own life—“let the earth have me”—betrays an utter ignorance of how much hard work and scholarship goes into suicide.


pages: 731 words: 134,263

Talk Is Cheap: Switching to Internet Telephones by James E. Gaskin

Debian, decentralized internet, end-to-end encryption, Ford Model T, packet switching, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, telemarketer

Adding Extension Phones Everyone loves extension phones because we hate to jump up and start running when we hear the phone. Call us spoiled by the cell phones in our pockets, but running from room to room to answer a wrong number isn't much fun. When we get a wrong number, or worse, a telemarketer, we don't appreciate our impromptu exercise program because then we're too out of breath to curse at the telemarketer. Unfortunately, your broadband phone must be plugged into your broadband router or telephone adapter, and you only have one of those units. Certain digital phones can be plugged directly into your Ethernet network, but you probably don't have Ethernet RJ-45 ports all over your house, either.

(See "911 Support," later in this chapter). Refer-A-Friend Convince a friend to sign up for your broadband phone service, and your service will reward you. Check out Table 5-1 for more details. VoicePulse offers Telemarketer Block, which may be worth changing your phone service for, all by itself. Lingo offers Automatic Call Rejection, which refuses calls with numbers blocked out or listed as anonymous, common tricks of telemarketers. Packet8 offers call blocking of anonymous calls as well. One way for companies to get more business is to encourage their happy customers to become salespeople. Car dealers call these "bird dog fees" (at least in Texas) when you send them a new customer.

Adding Extension Phones Everyone loves extension phones because we hate to jump up and start running when we hear the phone. Call us spoiled by the cell phones in our pockets, but running from room to room to answer a wrong number isn't much fun. When we get a wrong number, or worse, a telemarketer, we don't appreciate our impromptu exercise program because then we're too out of breath to curse at the telemarketer. Unfortunately, your broadband phone must be plugged into your broadband router or telephone adapter, and you only have one of those units. Certain digital phones can be plugged directly into your Ethernet network, but you probably don't have Ethernet RJ-45 ports all over your house, either.


pages: 119 words: 36,128

Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed by Laurie Kilmartin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, call centre, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, Uber for X

REMEMBER: The extended version of “Enter Sandman,” allows anyone to mourn their dead mother in satisfying 13-minute chunks. The First Time You Tell a Telemarketer, “She Can’t Come to the Phone Right Now Because She Is Dead.” My parents had the same telephone number for 46 years. Every reverse home mortgage salesman on earth had it. The Do Not Call registry reduced the number of sales calls, but didn’t eliminate them. Whenever my parents’ landline rang, their modus operandi was to let it go to voicemail while they hovered over the phone. If they knew the caller, they’d yank the receiver off the hook and shout, “HOLD ON!” Telemarketers never got through, but they also never stopped trying.

Don’t Call the Mortuary Just Yet: The Case for Hanging Out with the Body Overnight Your Parent Died before You Got to the Hospital, AKA One Final Attempt to Make You Feel Guilty Your Long Dark Night of Old Testament-Style Lamentations Bad News: Grief Is Not a Calorie Burner The First Time You Tell a Telemarketer, “She Can’t Come to the Phone right Now Because She Is Dead.” Morternity Leave: You Deserve at Least Six Weeks Off After You Give Death CELEBRATING THEIR LIFE Cremation: Hire a Professional or DIY? You Live in My Mom’s Childhood Home, Mind If I Spread Her Ashes on Your Lawn? For Lapsed Catholics Only: Yes, You Will Step Foot in That Church Again Our Dad Was a Vet: Can We Ever Unfold This Flag?

I was home when one called shortly after Dad’s death. “Hello. Is…Ron…K…Kil—” “Kilmartin. No, he’s not here, he’s dead.” Sometimes they would hang up. Sometimes they would express condolences. The go-getters would express condolences, then ask if Mrs. Ron Kilmartin was still alive. While they are odious, telemarketers are useful. You need practice informing someone that your loved one is dead. You’ll be saying it a lot in the weeks and months after they pass. Cell phone companies, health/auto/life insurance providers, and the Social Security Administration all need to be contacted. Why not practice in the comfort of your parents’ home, on people you will never talk to again?


pages: 1,631 words: 468,342

Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson

biofilm, Boeing 747, Broken windows theory, clean water, deskilling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Jacquard loom, Own Your Own Home, sensible shoes, spice trade, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer

These restrictions leave many permitted uses of automatic dialing machines, but none that poses a threat to the peace and privacy of the home. The FCC’s rules on telemarketing are otherwise rather soft. When you are solicited, if you tell the telemarketer that you want to get off its list, it is required to put you on a “do-not-call” list, which is good for ten years, and to stop calling you. But this doesn’t stop a dozen other telemarketers from calling you; each one has to be informed individually. You will not even be put on the do-not-call lists of a telemarketer’s affiliates unless you specifically request this. Moreover, the rule regarding the “do-not-call” list does not apply to nonprofit organizations or calls that are not made for a “commercial” purpose.

A second federal act, the Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act of 1994 (sometimes called the “Telemarketing Act”), aims primarily at preventing fraud, but its provisions bear upon privacy issues as well. The FTC has prescribed rules enforcing this act that, among other things, forbid telemarketers to call someone repeatedly or continuously with the intent to annoy, abuse, or harass him or her; to call someone who has previously stated that he or she does not wish to receive calls from the telemarketer; to call before 8:00 A.M. or after 9:00 P.M.; or to fail promptly to disclose the identity of the seller, that the purpose of the call is to sell something, and the nature of what is being sold.

(Check the FTC Web site or call the Federal Trade Commission at the number in the United States Government listings in the blue pages of your telephone directory.) State Regulations. Both the Consumer Telephone Protection Act and the Telemarketing Act specifically provide that they do not preempt state laws. This means that states can enact more stringent laws than the federal laws that regulate telemarketers, and states can add local remedies to any existing federal ones, which gives you two possible routes for your complaints. Although federal regulation would seem most effective, because telemarketing is a big interstate business that relies on national databases, several states have gone further and faster than the federal government in protecting the home against telephone intrusions.


pages: 562 words: 146,544

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Berlin Wall, Burning Man, call centre, digital map, disruptive innovation, double helix, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, high net worth, invisible hand, McMansion, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, RFID, satellite internet, SQL injection, Stewart Brand, tech worker, telemarketer, web application

Anderson just stood there, trying to decide. What was this, some sort of telemarketing scam? Was it another stalker? “I didn’t hear you say anything. Do you want the information? Just say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” She tried to imagine what Christiane Amanpour would do. “Okay. I’m listening.” “‘Okay’ is not ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ You must understand before we continue that this is not a person. This is an interactive voice system. It can only understand certain things you say.” Anderson hung up. Damned telemarketers. Her phone rang again almost immediately. She let it go to voice mail. Psycho telemarketers. She looked around for someone who might be staring at her.

The muted chatter of a hundred operators in orange jumpsuits came to his right ear—the ear not covered by a headset. An unarmed guard paced a catwalk above him behind a steel mesh barrier. The Warmonk, Inc., prison-based telemarketing facility in Highland, Texas, was privately owned and operated under contract to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. It was connected to the maximum-security prison of the same name by a covered pedestrian bridge. The prisoners’ labor was ostensibly used to defray the costs of their incarceration. At thirty cents an hour, they gave Indian telemarketers a run for their money. Like almost half the guests of the Texas Department of Corrections, Mosely was black. Prisoner #1131900 was his new name, and he was four years into a twenty-five-years-to-life stint for a third drug-trafficking conviction.

Just the matinees, though.” “And now you’re doing this?” “Oh, I know—kill me now, right?” “I’m sorry.” She laughed again. He could almost hear her twirling the phone cord around her finger. “You have such a great voice, Charles.” “Thank you, miss.” TeleMaster tracked the activities of individual telemarketers down to the second. Average number of seconds between phone calls, average number of seconds for each call, average number of calls per day, average sales close percentage—all calculated automatically through the VOIP-enabled software package marketed in North America under the brand name TeleMaster, but in Europe and Asia under the impenetrable name Ophaseum.


pages: 310 words: 82,592

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss, Tahl Raz

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Swan, clean water, cognitive bias, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, framing effect, friendly fire, iterative process, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, price anchoring, telemarketer, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment

■Remember you’re dealing with a person who wants to be appreciated and understood. So use labels to reinforce and encourage positive perceptions and dynamics. CHAPTER 4 BEWARE “YES”—MASTER “NO” Let me paint a scenario we’ve all experienced: You’re at home, just before dinner, and the phone rings. It is, no surprise, a telemarketer. He wants to sell you magazine subscriptions, water filters, frozen Argentine beef—to be honest, it doesn’t matter, as the script is always the same. After butchering your name, and engaging in some disingenuous pleasantries, he launches into his pitch. The hard sell that comes next is a scripted flowchart designed to cut off your escape routes as it funnels you down a path with no exit but “Yes.”

At that time, there were five other people aiming for the same slot, people who had psychology degrees, experience, and credentials. But I was on the road to the next hostage negotiation training course at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, ahead of everybody else. My career as a negotiator had officially begun. “NO” IS PROTECTION Think back to the telemarketer at the beginning of this chapter. The obvious reply to his question—“Do you enjoy a nice glass of water?”—is “Yes.” But all you want to do is scream, “No!” After a question like that you just know the rest of the phone call is going to be painful. That, in a nutshell, distills the inherent contradictions in the values we give “Yes” and “No.”

That’s why I tell my students that, if you’re trying to sell something, don’t start with “Do you have a few minutes to talk?” Instead ask, “Is now a bad time to talk?” Either you get “Yes, it is a bad time” followed by a good time or a request to go away, or you get “No, it’s not” and total focus. As an exercise, the next time you get a telemarketing call, write down the questions the seller asks. I promise you’ll find that your level of discomfort correlates directly to how quickly he pushes you for “Yes.” My colleague Marti Evelsizer was the one who first opened my eyes to why “No” was better than “Yes.” Marti was the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Coordinator in Pittsburgh at the time.


pages: 247 words: 62,845

VoIP Telephony with Asterisk by Unknown

call centre, Debian, framing effect, OSI model, packet switching, telemarketer

Asterisk can be used for many things and has features includin Private Branch Exchange (PBX) Voicemail Services with Directory Conferencing Server Packet Voice Server Encryption of Telephone or Fax Calls Heterogeneous Voice over IP gateway (H.323, SIP, MGCP, IAX) Custom Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system Soft switch Number Translation Calling Card Server Predictive Dialer Call Queueing with Remote Agents Gateway and Aggregation for Legacy PBX systems Remote Office or User Telephone Services PBX long distance Gateway Telemarketing Block Standalone Voicemail System Many of the world's largest telephone companies have committed to replacing their existing circuit switched systems with packet switched voice over IP systems. Many phone companies are alread transporting a significant portion of their traffic with IP. Many calls made over telephone compan equipment are already being transported with IP.

SoftHangup: Soft Hangup Applicatio StopMonitor: Stop monitoring a channe StopPlaytones: Stop playing a tone lis StripLSD: Strip Least Significant Digit StripMSD: Strip leading digit SubString: Save substring digits in a given variabl Suffix: Append trailing digit System: Execute a system comman Transfer: Transfer caller to remote extensio VoiceMail: Leave a voicemail messag VoiceMail2: (deprecated) Leave a voicemail messag VoiceMailMain: Enter voicemail syste VoiceMailMain2: (deprecated) Enter voicemail syste Wait: Waits for some tim WaitForRing: Wait for Ring Applicatio WaitMusicOnHold: Wait, playing Music On Hol Zapateller: Block telemarketers with SI ZapBarge: Barge in (monitor) Zap channe ZapRAS: Executes ZaptelISDN RAS application Here are the the same applications listed by group. General commands ADSIProg: Load Asterisk ADSI Scripts into phon Authenticate: Authenticate a use ChangeMonitor: Change monitoring filename of a channe GetCPEID: Get ADSI CPE I SendDTMF: Sends arbitrary DTMF digit SendImage: Send an image fil SendURL: Send a URL System: Execute a system comman Transfer: Transfercaller to remote extension Wait: Waits for some tim WaitForRing: Wait for Ring Applicatio WaitMusicOnHold: Wait, playing Music On Hol Billin NoCDR: Make sure asterisk doesn't save CDR for a certain cal ResetCDR: Reset CDR dat SetAccount: Sets account cod Asterisk cmd SetCDRUserField: Set CDR User fiel Asterisk cmd AppendCDRUserField: Append data to CDR User fiel Call management (hangup, answer, dial, etc) Answer: Answer a channel if ringin Busy: Indicate busy condition and sto Congestion: Indicate congestion and sto Dial: Place an call and connect to the current channel DISA: DISA (Direct Inward SystemAccess) Hangup: Unconditional hangu Caller presentation (ID, Name etc CallingPres: Change the presentation for the calleri LookupBlacklist: Look up Caller*ID name/number from blacklist databas LookupCIDName: Look up CallerID Name from local databas PrivacyManager: Require phone number to be entered, if no CallerID?

General commands ADSIProg: Load Asterisk ADSI Scripts into phon Authenticate: Authenticate a use ChangeMonitor: Change monitoring filename of a channe GetCPEID: Get ADSI CPE I SendDTMF: Sends arbitrary DTMF digit SendImage: Send an image fil SendURL: Send a URL System: Execute a system comman Transfer: Transfercaller to remote extension Wait: Waits for some tim WaitForRing: Wait for Ring Applicatio WaitMusicOnHold: Wait, playing Music On Hol Billin NoCDR: Make sure asterisk doesn't save CDR for a certain cal ResetCDR: Reset CDR dat SetAccount: Sets account cod Asterisk cmd SetCDRUserField: Set CDR User fiel Asterisk cmd AppendCDRUserField: Append data to CDR User fiel Call management (hangup, answer, dial, etc) Answer: Answer a channel if ringin Busy: Indicate busy condition and sto Congestion: Indicate congestion and sto Dial: Place an call and connect to the current channel DISA: DISA (Direct Inward SystemAccess) Hangup: Unconditional hangu Caller presentation (ID, Name etc CallingPres: Change the presentation for the calleri LookupBlacklist: Look up Caller*ID name/number from blacklist databas LookupCIDName: Look up CallerID Name from local databas PrivacyManager: Require phone number to be entered, if no CallerID? sen Ringing: Indicate ringing ton SetCallerID: Set CallerID SetCIDName: Set CallerID Name SoftHangup: Request hangup on another channe Zapateller: Block telemarketers with SI Database handling DBdel: Delete a key from the databas DBdeltree: Delete a family or keytree from the databas DBget: Retrieve a value from the databas DBput: Store a value in the databas Extension logic - strings, application integratio AbsoluteTimeout: Set absolute maximum time of cal AGI: Executes an AGI compliant applicatio Cut: String handling functio DigitTimeout: Set maximum timeout between digit EAGI: Executes an AGI compliant applicatio EnumLookup: Lookup number in ENU Goto: Goto a particular priority, extension, or contex GotoIf: Conditional got GotoIfTime: Conditional goto on current tim Macro: Macro Implementatio NoOp: No operatio Prefix: Prepend leading digits (Obsolete Random: Make a random jump in your dial pla Read: Read a variable with DTM ResponseTimeout: Set maximum timeout awaiting respons SetGlobalVar: Set variable to valu SetVar: Set variable to valu StripLSD: Strip trailing digit StripMSD: Strip leading digits (Obsolete SubString: Save substring digits in a given variable (Obsolete Suffix: Append trailing digits (Obsolete Sounds - background, musiconhold et BackGround: Play a file while awaiting extensio DateTime: Say the date and tim Echo: Echo audio read back to the use Festival: Say text to the use Milliwatt: Generate a Constant 1000Hz tone at 0dbm (mu-law Monitor: Monitor a channe MP3Player: Play an MP3?


pages: 301 words: 100,597

My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture by Guy Branum

bitcoin, different worldview, G4S, Google Glasses, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pets.com, plutocrats, Rosa Parks, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, tech billionaire, telemarketer

By this point in my career, I’d gotten fired from that one legal job, then I’d gotten hired by a company that telemarketed for high-end tech clients. I briefly quit that job to be campaign manager for a woman running for Oakland City Council, then realized that she expected the job to be something more akin to a body servant than a political consultant, so I quit her campaign and begged the telemarketing place to take me back. They did. She won her campaign and became one of Oakland’s least successful mayors.1 I stayed at the telemarketing job over a year after that, but eventually, I realized, I had to face my real life. I convinced the HR manager at the telemarketing place to include me in a bout of layoffs2 so I could receive unemployment, and I started aggressively applying for jobs as a lawyer.

The successful acquisition of two jobs and the ensuing ten months of job-having had sort of taught me I was capable of survival. But more than that, doing stand-up meant I was happy, and despite my cynical thoughts to the contrary, part of me was certain that following what made me happy would be the right path. I got a semi-bullshit job selling high-end tech solutions over the phone. It was basically tech-boom telemarketing. It didn’t matter. I had decided to stop worrying about what my career and path were and focus on making a life that seemed rewarding. Plus there were two sassy ladies who worked there who liked to get chips ’n’ margs after work. For the better part of a year, that was my life. I did stand-up nearly every night.


pages: 204 words: 73,747

This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare by Gabourey Sidibe

call centre, Mark Zuckerberg, Snapchat, telemarketer

She asked if I had computer skills and suggested I try telemarketing. I knew that jobs hosting and waiting was a market cornered by actors and models, but telemarketing felt like something I could probably do. I was great over the phone. I had a pleasant speaking voice that didn’t at all match what I look like in person. I thought a job over the phone would probably be ideal until I remembered my failure to sell anything to people without crying. Listen, I could lie to you and say that I happened upon phone sex by accident while looking for telemarketing jobs, but who would that fool? We’re friends now!

We’re friends now! You know me! As soon as my therapist suggested “telemarketing,” I heard “phone sex.” Must be my brain disease. I liked reading the Village Voice for its articles about art shows, concerts, and stories about people living “alternative” lifestyles. (When can we stop calling gay people “alternative”? Now, please?) But the best part was the back page. The classifieds! There were all kinds of weird help-wanted and sex-toy ads back there, and I loved reading them. I knew that was where I’d find a listing for the only job I thought I could get. I’m not sure how the ad was worded. It may have said, “Phone actress.”


pages: 257 words: 76,785

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game

Founded in 2011 by Gray, Byrne, and managing director Robert Copeland, Pursuit was built on a model of contracting with major technology companies to sell their products to other large businesses, not cable TV providers trying to upsell retirees on package internet-and-phone contracts. This requires training, and then retaining, highly skilled telemarketers. “You could be speaking with the CFO of a FTSE 250 business about their financial plans for the coming year, so you have to have a deep commercial and credible conversation with him,” Lorraine says, and that means “a lot of training at the beginning to get our team up to speed.” It also requires having employees who understand the economics of the business better than the average telemarketer. Employees at the average company think that “you put in long hours and you’ve done a good job,” Lorraine explains to me, “but actually, if you just speak to answering machines for twelve hours a day, that means nothing.

FOUR-DAY WEEKS DECREASE TURNOVER After they implemented a four-day week in 2015, Pursuit Marketing’s annual turnover rate dropped to 2 percent, a remarkably low figure in an industry where job-hopping is common. Not only has that helped keep productivity high and justified their higher-than-average investment in employee training, it’s also saved the company more than a quarter million pounds on recruitment. In Glasgow, corporate recruiters usually charge about £4,000 to hire a single telemarketer; thanks to the four-day week, the company was able to grow from 50 to 120 people without paying any recruitment fees at all. The four-day workweek also makes it easier to recruit people, and it makes it harder for other companies to steal them. “I’ve had competitors try to steal my people,” Goodall Group founder Steve Goodall says, “and the four-day week has kept them.”

On Helping People Adjust to Shorter Hours Lorraine Gray, Pursuit Marketing: We have to continually reinforce with the team that there is no expectation for them to come in on Fridays at all, and we want them to walk away at half five on Thursday and enjoy those three days off. Everyone knows what success looks like in their own role; whether they’re a telemarketer, they’re in the IT department, finance department, digital marketing, they all do what’s required of them to be profitable to the business and make bonuses and sales, and so they all leave on that Thursday knowing that they’ve achieved that. There should be no feeling of guilt or doubt that they’re going to come in on Monday and be in trouble for not being in on Friday.


Digital Accounting: The Effects of the Internet and Erp on Accounting by Ashutosh Deshmukh

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AltaVista, book value, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, currency risk, data acquisition, disinformation, dumpster diving, fixed income, hypertext link, information security, interest rate swap, inventory management, iterative process, late fees, machine readable, money market fund, new economy, New Journalism, optical character recognition, packet switching, performance metric, profit maximization, semantic web, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply chain finance, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, telemarketer, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, warehouse automation, web application, Y2K

The Revenue Cycle 137 • Field marketing: These capabilities are similar to enterprise marketing, though these are aimed at marketing initiatives at the regional or field level. • E-marketing: Marketing campaigns over the Internet are enabled here. Capabilities include catalog management, content management, personalization, one-toone marketing and customer segmentation. • Telemarketing: Telemarketing capabilities using call lists and interactive scripts are enabled in this function. • Channel marketing: Marketing efforts can be coordinated with channel partners by providing relevant information, consistent branding, appropriate incentives and measurement tools. Sales functionalities are geared toward sales teams.

Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. 4 Deshmukh Exhibit 1. Structure of the Internet Wide Area Networks Local Area Networks Telephone Lines Telephone Lines Dedicated high bandwidth lines ve wa cro ns Mi iatio d Ra Optical Fibers s Wireles Wireless Exhibit 2. Tele-marketing, t-tailing, or e-tailing? Think of the vast potential of the market — total population of 10 million, about 12 cities having population greater than 200,000 and an annual national income of $10 billion. Dreams are made up of this stuff? This is the U.S. of the 1880s. Richard was an agent of a railway station in North Redwood, Minn., having plenty of spare time on hand.

Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. 136 Deshmukh Exhibit 4. The functional view of SAP CRM •Enterprise sales •Field sales •E-selling •Telesales •Channel sales •Channel commerce •Analytics •Enterprise marketing •Field marketing •E-marketing •Telemarketing •Channel marketing •Analytics Marketing Service •Enterprise service •Field service •E-service •Customer service •Channel service •Analytics Sales Analytics •Analytical scenarios •Analytical methods Supply chain SAP R/3 ERP Siebel Corporation being the market leader in this segment. SAP and Oracle tools are primarily used in this book, though different software suites are used when appropriate.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

The outcome was clear. In the United States, more than 45 per cent of jobs could be automated within one to two decades. Table 2.3 shows a few jobs that are basically at 100 per cent risk of automation (I’ve highlighted a few of my favourites):8 Table 2.3: Some of the Jobs at Risk from Automation and AI Telemarketers Telemarketers Data Entry Professionals Procurement Clerks Title Examiners, Abstractors and Searchers Timing Device Assemblers and Adjusters Shipping, Receiving and Traffic Clerks Sewers, Hand Insurance Claims and Policy Processing Clerks Milling and Planing Machine Setters, Operators Mathematical Technicians Brokerage Clerks Credit Analysts Insurance Underwriters Order Clerks Parts Salespersons Watch Repairers Loan Officers Claims Adjusters, Examiners and Investigators Cargo and Freight Agents Insurance Appraisers, Auto Damage Driver/Sales Workers Tax Preparers Umpires, Referees and Other Sports Officials Radio Operators Photographic Process Workers and Processing Machine Operators Bank Tellers Legal Secretaries New Accounts Clerks Etchers and Engravers Bookkeeping, Accounting and Auditing Clerks Library Technicians Packaging and Filling Machine Operators Inspectors, Testers, Sorters, Samplers and Weighing Technicians One often voiced concern is that AI will create huge wealth for a limited few who own the technology, thus implying that the wealth gap will become even more acute.

Low friction interfaces also have optimal presentation of information so that readability and usability are high. 20 Ian Parker, “The Shape of Things to Come—How an Industrial Designer became Apple’s Greatest Product,” New Yorker, 23 February 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/shape-things-come. 21 Henry Blodget, “Uber CEO Reveals Mind-Boggling Statistic That Skeptics Will Hate,” Business Insider, 19 January 2015. 22 Todd Spangler, “Streaming overtakes live TV among consumer viewing preferences,” Variety, 22 April 2015, http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/streaming-overtakes-live-tv-among-consumer-viewing-preferences-study-1201477318/. 23 Tesla uses Tegra chips in its cars. 24 “Meet the Robot Telemarketer Who Denies She’s a Robot,” Time, 13 December 2013, http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/10/meet-the-robot-telemarketer-who-denies-shes-a-robot/. 25 Taken from Bill Gates’ speech at the Microsoft Developers Conference on 1st October 1997 26 A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” MIND: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy vol. LIX, no. 236.

Within 20 years, these devices will be AIs that have enough basic intelligence to cater for any need we might have that can be executed or solved digitally, along with interfacing with our own personal dashboards/UIs, clouds and sensor networks to advise us on our physical health, financial well-being and many other areas that we used to consider the domain of human advisers. Figure 3.11: Family robot Jibo is billed as a personal assistant and communications device for the home. (Credit: Jibo) Can You Tell You Are Talking to a Computer? In December 2013, Time magazine ran a story entitled “Meet the Robot Telemarketer Who Denies She’s a Robot”24 describing a sales call that Washington Bureau Chief Michael Scherer of Time received. Scherer, sensing something was off, asked the robot if she was a person or a computer. She replied enthusiastically that she was real, with a charming laugh. But when Scherer asked, “What vegetable is found in tomato soup?”


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

At long last, I could relax. At HubSpot, my job would be secure. Or so I thought. Within a few months, I came to understand that this fast-growing start-up offered even less job security than any of the failing magazines where I’d been working before. Turnover was tremendous, especially in sales and telemarketing. What’s more, the company did not see high turnover as a problem. They were proud of it. They considered it a badge of honor. It demonstrated that the company had a “high-performance culture” where only the best of the best could survive. Weirder still, when they fired someone they called it “graduation.”

The money-losing business model helps explain why VCs have invented the new compact and believe in treating employees so poorly. The VC and founders are not trying to build sustainable companies. So why should they care about providing employees with stable, long-term careers, or distributing wealth among the workers? Workers are merely the fuel that generates sales growth. You hire an army of young telemarketers, who hit the phones all day long. You give them impossible quotas and “burn them out and churn them out.” Employees can (and should) be underpaid, overworked, exhausted, and then discarded. When the IPO finally happens, a few people at the top get incredibly rich, and everyone else gets little or nothing.

Computers have become unfathomably more powerful, pervasive, and intelligent. Technology connects the supply chain to the sales department to the accountants in the finance office. Tech tracks the humans who work in customer service and support—and in some cases just handles customer support on its own, without any humans needed. Tech tells telemarketers if they’re hitting their quotas and warns them if they’re falling short. Tech decides which people should be hired and which should be fired. The company itself can come to feel like a kind of computer, a big thrumming electronic machine that we humans get plugged into. Hoping to save money, companies now automate every aspect of their organization, from sales and marketing to customer support.


Working the Street: What You Need to Know About Life on Wall Street by Erik Banks

accounting loophole / creative accounting, borderless world, business cycle, corporate governance, deal flow, estate planning, fixed income, greed is good, junk bonds, old-boy network, PalmPilot, risk/return, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, telemarketer

And the salesperson is always ready to sell the client his or her next bonds (Mercedes). 5 6 | W o r k i n g t h e St r e e t If you’ve got some leanings in this direction, and you like cars, it might be the place for you. RETAIL SALESPERSON OR TELEMARKETER? Retail salespeople, the ones who sell stocks and bonds to Mom and Dad, are like those dreaded telemarketers who call at dinner to try to sell you magazine subscriptions or long-distance calling plans. On Wall Street they are known, collectively and harshly, as the “great unwashed” (curiously enough the term seems to have stuck). These are the legions of cold-calling brokers who try to sell odd lots (small amounts of securities) by phoning unsuspecting people at home, reading off of manuscripts and making recommendations prepared by the research analysts.

These are the legions of cold-calling brokers who try to sell odd lots (small amounts of securities) by phoning unsuspecting people at home, reading off of manuscripts and making recommendations prepared by the research analysts. Their modus operandi is just like the telemarketer trying to sell you a subscription to Sports Illustrated or Vogue. You know the pitch: “You should buy this security [magazine] because it’s good value for your money. It’s priced to move and it’ll bring you lots of enjoyment, and if you act now, I can throw in a commission-free trade [extra one-month subscription]. But you must act today.”


pages: 121 words: 24,298

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield

delayed gratification, edge city, fear of failure, telemarketer

RESISTANCE ONLY OPPOSES IN ONE DIRECTION * * * Resistance obstructs movement only from a lower sphere to a higher. It kicks in when we seek to pursue a calling in the arts, launch an innovative enterprise, or evolve to a higher station morally, ethically, or spiritually. So if you’re in Calcutta working with the Mother Teresa Foundation and you’re thinking of bolting to launch a career in telemarketing. . . relax. Resistance will give you a free pass. RESISTANCE IS MOST POWERFUL AT THE FINISH LINE * * * Odysseus almost got home years before his actual homecoming. Ithaca was in sight, close enough that the sailors could see the smoke of their families’ fires on shore. Odysseus was so certain he was safe, he actually lay down for a snooze.

A PROFESSIONAL ACCEPTS NO EXCUSES * * * The amateur, underestimating Resistance’s cunning, permits the flu to keep him from his chapters; he believes the serpent’s voice in his head that says mailing off that manuscript is more important than doing the day’s work. The professional has learned better. He respects Resistance. He knows if he caves in today, no matter how plausible the pretext, he’ll be twice as likely to cave in tomorrow. The professional knows that Resistance is like a telemarketer; if you so much as say hello, you’re finished. The pro doesn’t even pick up the phone. He stays at work. A PROFESSIONAL PLAYS IT AS IT LAYS * * * My friend the Hawk and I were playing the first hole at Prestwick in Scotland; the wind was howling out of the left. I started an eight-iron thirty yards to windward, but the gale caught it; I watched in dismay as the ball sailed hard right, hit the green going sideways, and bounded off into the cabbage.


pages: 386 words: 91,913

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, circular economy, Citizen Lab, clean tech, clean water, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairphone, geopolitical risk, gigafactory, glass ceiling, global supply chain, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, planned obsolescence, reshoring, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Y2K

“Metal Bulletin, 60% of voters rejected MMTA-LME online pricing proposal,” November 30, 2009, accessed October 30, 2014, www.metalbulletin.com/Article/2350149/60-of-voters-rejected-MMTA-LME-online-pricing-proposal.html. 7. Nigel Tunna, interview by David Abraham, Ganzhou, China, August 11, 2013. 8. In 1992, several Canada-based telemarketing companies sold indium directly to investors at inflated prices before going out of business several years later, after law-enforcement investigations in the United States and Canada. Robert D. Brown Jr., “Indium,” in Minerals Yearbook, Vol. 1, Metals and Minerals (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Mines and U.S.

., 72 BHP Billiton, 58 Big Bertha gun, 160–61, 275n12 Big Data (Cukier and Mayer-Schönberger), 119 Bissel, Richard, 159 Bloomberg News: on CBMM, 42 on Colombian tungsten trade, 109 Boeing, 113, 128, 130–31 Boiridy, Mia, 85 Bombs, from airplanes, 279n33 Boogaart, Gerald van den, 33–35 Boron, 21, 26, 116, 121 Boston Consulting Group, 212 Boyle, Dominic, 163 Bre-X (exploration company), 59 Britain: export bans during WWI, 162–63 tungsten, actions on during WWII, 239n28 British Geological Survey, on Chinese production of critical materials, 236–37n18 Bronze, 157 Bronze Age, 12, 157, 274n7 Broxo company, 115 Bubar, Don, 55, 64 Bukit Merah, Malaysia, pollution in, 183 Burns, Stuart, 147 Business models, need for change in, 223–25 By-product production, 79–80 Cadmium, 3, 116, 148, 159, 167, 181, 258n3 Cadmium-tellurium thin films, 148–49 Calculators, 118–19 Canada: indium sales via telemarketing, 251n7 mining workforce, age of, 85 Carbon emissions, 152–53, 266n5, 281n2 Carnegie Mellon University, 211 Carneiro, Tadeu: on CBMM, 43, 46, 64–65 lack of investment worries, 54, 64 on niobium, 44 as spokesperson for CBMM, 41 on sustainability, 152, 153 Cars, 141–48 Cassiterites (tin ore), 105–6 Castilloux, Ryan, 116 Catalytic converters, 144–45 Caterpillar, 212, 223–24 CBMM (Companhia Brasileira de Metalurgia e Mineração), 39–46, 54, 62, 64–66, 152–53, 242n6 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 158 Centronics, 214 Ceramics, in wireless networks, 124 Cerium, 2, 35, 74, 75, 104, 140–41 CERN, Large Hadron Collider, 81 CFLs (compact fluorescent lightbulbs), 150 Characteristics of rare metals, 3–4 Chicago Board of Trade, 101 Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 101 Chile, ore grade of lithium mines, 285n33 China: antimony production in, 289n16 CBMM ownership in, 42 coal demand in, 208 critical material production, 236–37n18 defense expenditures, 278n31 environmental issues, 153–54, 173–77, 281n2 export ban on rare earth, x, 212 Hong Kong, relationship with, 102 Japan, conflict with, x, 15, 22–25, 165 Jiangxi, ore processing in, 77, 82–85 low-energy lighting production in, 152 material production costs, 240n33 rare earth elements supply chain, control of, 32–37 rare earth permanent magnets in, 137 rare metal exchanges, 96–98 rare metals industry in, 194–200 refining in, 75, 82–85 regulatory environment, 99–101, 103–5, 202, 240n34, 288n11 steel demand in, 11 technology use in, 218 tungsten production in, 289n16 WTO membership of, 200–203 China Securities Regulatory Commission, 99, 101 Chinese Society of Rare Earths, 176 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 158 Circular economies, 225 Cisco, 218 Clean energy technologies, 290n27 Cloud storage, 122 CO2 emissions, 152–53, 266n5, 281n2 Coal, 149–50, 178, 207, 208 Cobalt, 3, 18–21, 25, 28, 78, 101, 121, 128, 147, 219, 235nn5–6, 260n15 Cohen, Ronald R., 179–80, 184 Colombia: mineral trading as funding for conflicts in, 109 tungsten production in, 48 Colorado School of Mines, 79, 86–87, 296n23 Committee on Natural Resources (U.S.

., 292n1 Gussack, David, 185 Gutenberg rut, 292n1 Habord, James, 29 Haig, Alexander, 19 Halada, Kohmei, 177–78, 179 Halliburton, 86–87 Hamano, Masaaki, 21 Hastings, Richard Norman (“Doc”), 210 Hatch, Gareth, 138, 147 Heavy metal, 175 Heavy rare earths, 57, 75, 194, 205 Hess Corporation, 86–87 High-performance materials, need for, 169, 171–72 High-tech products, 179, 215 High-tech supply chain, 33 Hiranuma, Hikaru, 187 Hitachi Corporation, 186–87, 189–90, 197 Hittites, weaponry, 157 Hong Kong, relationship with China, 102 Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx), 101–2, 253n21 Hotel e Termas de Araxá, 38 “How Forward Integration along the Rare Earth Value Chain Threatens the Global Economy” (Boogaart), 34 Hudson Metals, 93 Hunter, Duncan, 28–29 Hydraulic mining, 158 IEA (International Energy Agency), 124–25, 136, 208, 228–29 IFixit, 216 Illegal mining and trading, 102–12 Incandescent bulbs, 150 Incentives, for rare element production, 226 India: energy demand in, 208 recycling in, 191 steel production in, 64 Indium: characteristics of, 3 pricing of, as by-product production, 80 processing of, 78 telemarketing sales of, 251n7 trading of, 97, 103, 205 uses of, 2, 13, 123, 187, 264n33 Indonesia: defense expenditures, 278n31 illegal minerals trade in, 105–8 social media use in, 126–27 Industrial accidents, 70, 81 Industrial products, resource demands for, 179 Industrial recycling, 185–86 Infrastructure, technological innovation in, 217–18 Inner Mongolia, export controls supporting, 202 Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology, 196 Innovation distortion, 140, 154 Integrated circuits, 117–18 Intel, 8, 168, 214 IntelliMet, 70 Intercontinental ballistic missiles, 279n33 Intermetallics, 205 International Energy Agency (IEA), 124–25, 136, 208, 228–29 International Materials Agency, need for, 229 Internet cafés, 126, 127 IntierraRMG, 51 Investments, in rare metals mining, 49–54 InvestorIntel Technology Metals Summit, 50–51 Investor types, 60–61 iPhone, 1–3, 10 Iridium, 144 Iron, 13, 20–21, 26, 29, 57, 71, 78, 157–58, 163, 176, 178, 189, 197, 200, 235n6, 294n14 Iron Age, 12, 13, 157 Iron Dome (Israeli weapon system), 13 Jaffe, Robert, 148, 208–9, 210, 212–13 Jaffe, Sam, 151 Jakarta, Indonesia, construction in, 10–11 Japan: CBMM ownership in, 42 China and, x, 15, 22–25, 36, 165 government policies, effects of, 227–28 minor metals trading in, 89–90 Osaka, pollution in, 181 rare metal security strategy, 203–5, 212 recycling possibilities in, 187 U.S. embargo against, 30 Japan Institute of Metals, 219 “Jesus Phone,” 1 Jet engines, 128 Jiangxi, China: ore processing in, 77, 82–85 pollution in, 173–75 Jiangxi Rare Earth Association, 198 Jobs, Steve, 1, 2, 3, 9 Johnson, Clarence “Kelly,” 155, 158 Johnson Matthey, 186 Junior mining companies, 49–54, 59.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

Imagine, for instance, that all of Washington’s 100,000 lobbyists were to go on strike tomorrow.2 Or that every tax accountant in Manhattan decided to stay home. It seems unlikely the mayor would announce a state of emergency. In fact, it’s unlikely that either of these scenarios would do much damage. A strike by, say, social media consultants, telemarketers, or high-frequency traders might never even make the news at all. When it comes to garbage collectors, though, it’s different. Any way you look at it, they do a job we can’t do without. And the harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without. Were they to suddenly stop working the world wouldn’t get any poorer, uglier, or in any way worse.

A few years ago he wrote a fascinating piece that pinned the blame not on the stuff we buy but on the work we do. It is titled, aptly, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” In Graeber’s analysis, innumerable people spend their entire working lives doing jobs they consider to be pointless, jobs like telemarketer, HR manager, social media strategist, PR advisor, and a whole host of administrative positions at hospitals, universities, and government offices. “Bullshit jobs,” Graeber calls them. They’re the jobs that even the people doing them admit are, in essence, superfluous. When I first wrote an article about this phenomenon, it unleashed a small flood of confessions.

This results in scenarios where, on the one hand, governments cut back on useful jobs in sectors like healthcare, education, and infrastructure – resulting in unemployment – while on the other investing millions in the unemployment industry of training and surveillance whose effectiveness has long been disproven. The modern marketplace is equally uninterested in usefulness, quality, and innovation. All that really matters is profit. Sometimes that leads to marvelous contributions, sometimes not. From telemarketers to tax consultants, there’s a rock-solid rationale for creating one bullshit job after another: You can net a fortune without ever producing a thing. In this situation, inequality only exacerbates the problem. The more wealth is concentrated at the top, the greater the demand for corporate attorneys, lobbyists, and high-frequency traders.


pages: 238 words: 46

When Things Start to Think by Neil A. Gershenfeld

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Bretton Woods, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, disinformation, Dynabook, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information security, invention of movable type, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, means of production, new economy, Nick Leeson, packet switching, RFID, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, the medium is the message, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, world market for maybe five computers

the rights of people are routinely infringed by things, and vice versa • dumb computers can't be fixed by smart descriptions alone • useful machine intelligence requires experience as well as reasoning • we need to be able to use all of our senses to make sense of the world Rights and Responsibilities Telemarketing. Thirteen unlucky letters that can inflame the most ill-tempered rage in otherwise well-behaved people. The modern bane of dinnertime: "click ... uhh . . . Hello ... Mr. Gersdenfull, how are you today?" Much worse than I was a few minutes ago. The most private times and places are invaded by calls flogging goods that have an unblemished record of being irrelevant, useless, or suspicious.

My wife and I spent a few years getting to know each other before we moved in together, making sure that we were compatible. I wasn't nearly so choosy about my telephone, although I certainly wouldn't tolerate from a spouse many of the things it does. The phone summons me when I'm in the shower and can't answer it, and when I'm asleep and don't want to answer it; it preserves universal access to me for friend and telemarketing foe alike. Letting the phone off the hook because it has no choice in whether to ring or not is akin to the military excuse that it's not responsible for its actions because it's only following orders. Bad people won't go away, but bad telephones can. A telephone that can't make these distinctions is not fit for polite company.

., 171, 172 Santa Fe Institute, 118 Satellites, communications, 99-100 Science-The Endless Frontier, 172 search engines, 134 security versus privacy, 57 224 + semiconductor industry, 72 Sensormatic, 153 Shannon,C~ud~5, 128,176,188-90 shoe, computer in a, 50, 52, 102-3, 179 shoplifting tags, 153 Shor, Peter, 158, 159 Silicon Graphics, 140 Simon, Dan, 158 skepticism about technological advances, 122 Small, David, 22-23 Smalltalk, 138 smart cards, 81, 152 smart money, 77-91 cryptography and, 80-81 as digital information, 80 distinction between atom-dollars and bit-dollars, 83-85 freeing money from legacy as tangible asset, 79, 91 global currency market, 83 linking algorithms with money, 86-88 paying-as-you-go, 82 precedent for, 80 standards for, 88-91 smart name badges, 206 Smith, Joshua, 144, 170-71 sociology of science, 119 software, 7, 53, 156 belief in magic bullets, 121 CAD, 73 for children, 138 remarkable descriptions of, 108-9 upgrades, 98, 108-9 Soviet Union, 121-22 speech recognition, 140 spirit chair, 169-70, 179, 193, 202 spread-spectrum coding techniques, 165, 166 standards: computer, 88-90, 126 smart money, 88-91 Stanford Research Institute, 139 INDEX Stanford University, 54 Starner, Thad, 47, 57-58 Steane, Andy, 159 Steelcase, 202, 203, 204 Stradivarius, designing digital instrument to compete with, 32-33,39-42 Strickon, Joshua, 55 Sumitomo, 77 supercomputers, 151, 177, 199 surveillance, 57 Swatch Access watches, 152 Szilard, Leo, 176 technology: Bill of Things' Rights, 104 Bill of Things Users' Rights, 102 daily use of, 58 freedom of technological expression, 103 imposing on our lives, 95, 100-2 invisible and unobtrusive, 44, 200, 211 jargon, 107-22 mature, 10 musical instruments incorporating available, 38 wisdom in old technologies, 19, 24 telemarketing, 95, 101 telephones, 175 access to phone numbers, 100 invasion in our lives, 95, 101 satellite, 99-100 smart cards, 81 widespread dissemination of, 99 television, 10, 99, 202 high-definition, 6 Termen, Lev, 144 Tetzel, Johann, 96 "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," 161 thermodynamics, 175, 176 Things That Think, 202-7 privacy and, 207-10 stratification of society and, 210-11 INDEX 3D graphics interface, 141-42 3D printer, 64-65, 70-71 3001: The Final Odyssey (Clarke), 51 Toffoli, Tomaso, 132 transistors: invention of the, 175 study of, 179 Turing, Alan, 127-28, 131, 135, 166 Turing test, 128, 131, 133-34, 135 281, 210-11 Underkoffler, John, 145-46 U.S.


Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland

gentrification, invisible hand, Maui Hawaii, McJob, Menlo Park, microapartment, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, telemarketer

But Mark was upset because he wanted a social worker, like everyone else in his class at school. * * * Everybody does work of some sort. Skye used to do retail at the Saint Yuppie boutique at the Ridgecrest Mall, back before the store filed Chapter Eleven, then suffered a mysterious fire like so many other Ridgecrest Mall businesses. Now Skye telepimps for a telemarketing company. She calls people at dinnertime and asks them if they've done things like purchase latex paint or groom their pets recently. She has to work because she owes roughly nine thousand dollars on all the credit cards she signed up for in high school. Harmony consults on computer-system installations and he already makes more money than everybody I know combined.

Skye will benefit from dating guys other than realtors and Harmony will benefit from dating, period. I worry about him reading bad pornography misspelled by fifteen-year olds over his computer bulletin boards. "I quit my job at the electronic plantation today," Skye then reveals, "down at the telemarketing hell." "She's going through coworker-deprivation syndrome. I'm helping her work her way through the crisis point." From Mink I order a twisty, tomatoey car crash of fries for myself plus a club soda for Stephanie. "How's life without Anna-Louise?" asks Skye. "Have you seen her?" I ask. "She won't answer her phone and I left about fifty messages for her so fair's fair.

The need to flee must run in the family. Better handcuff Daisy to the radiator. So I guess Anna-Louise is still concerned about you. She knows you better than you think. Enough said. Now there goes the phone! Hang on. one hour-ish later: That was a woman asking when the last time the chimney was cleaned. Bloody telemarketers (pardon my language [is Skye still doing that?]). Then I went out to bring in the garden furniture for the season. Then Norman did his duty in the litter box and needed a kibble reinforcement. All these distractions. My mood has changed now. And the sun has gone behind the clouds. I'm in this mood I feel occasionally ... this mood where there's a very good friend nearby who I should be phoning.


pages: 375 words: 106,536

Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Columbine, computer age, credit crunch, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Etonian, false memory syndrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, late fees, Louis Pasteur, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, telemarketer

“I’m sorry, honey,” Sylvia says. “Is he around me?” she asks. “Yes, he does come around you,” Sylvia says. “In fact, he rings the phone. He also drops coins around you. When the phone rings and no one’s there, that’s him. People have said to me, ‘That’s telemarketers.’ Have you ever heard of a telemarketer that didn’t talk? No.” (Actually, telemarketing companies use an auto-dialing machine called the Amcat. When your phone rings and there’s nobody there, it’s because the Amcat has inadvertently dialed your number on behalf of a cold caller who is still pitching to someone else. I feel bad mentioning it here, but it’s the truth.)

Sue Baker, the PR lady in charge of the event, had told me over the phone, “People are really worried.” More and more consumers are ticking the no box. They don’t want their details passed to third parties. “The list is severely compromised,” said Sue. An article in today’s Direct Marketing International magazine doomily predicts, “In a couple of years there will be no cold telemarketing industry in Norway. Could this happen here? Well, wake up! It is happening.” Six point eight million British people, the article continues, have so far signed up to the telephone preference service, which filters out cold calls. Everyone is here, from the brokers and profilers, like Mosaic and Baby Marketing, to the myriad businesses that provide the free gifts contained within junk.


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

Nov. 19, 2013. newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/11/her-film-spike-jonze-can-humans-fall-in-love-with-bots.html. 42 Suggest responses: BBC News. “Google Patents Robot Help for Social Media Burnout.” Nov. 22, 2013. bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25033172. 43 Robot sales pitch: Zeke Miller and Denver Nicks. “Meet the Robot Telemarketer Who Denies She’s a Robot.” Time. Dec. 10, 2013. newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/10/meet-the-robot-telemarketer-who-denies-shes-a-robot. 47 “The point of being”: Rob Horning. “Affective Privacy and Surveillance.” New Inquiry. April 30, 2013. thenewinquiry.com/blogs/marginal-utility/affective-privacy-and-surveillance. 47 “There’s no such thing”: Author’s notes.

Besides digital assistants, there are precedents for this kind of program—out-of-office replies, canned/suggested responses to text messages, companies that promise to maintain your social-media presence after you die, remote personal assistants with whom our relationships are so mediated (by software and distance) that they essentially serve as bots. On many customer service lines, we already use our voices to navigate menus, and some telemarketing operations have advanced this practice, using robots to give a sales pitch before transferring the customer to a human sales associate. In recent years, apps that mimic your Twitter or Facebook posts, often in vaguely accurate but also amusingly bizarre ways, have become an Internet phenomenon.

See also cyber-libertarianism life-extension beliefs and research, 5 lifelogging, 136–40 Like, +1, or heart buttons and BuzzFeed listicles, 118–19 as commercial endorsement, 31–33, 34–35 data from, 8, 10, 294, 300 as de facto legal agreement, 26–27 and human nature, 24–26 as limp pat on the back, 52 as people rating system, 190–92 scoreboard function, 48 See also retweets and reblogs like economy, 35 liking studies, 24 linkbait, 104, 125, 125n LinkedIn, 35, 165, 181, 199, 323 Lippmann, Walter, 249 listicles, 114–15, 116–17, 118–19, 123, 261 ListiClock, 118 Lithium Technologies, 196 log-ins, 160, 165–66, 182 London, England, 306 Losse, Katherine, 6, 8, 12, 48, 129, 323, 327 Luddism and Luddites, x, 48 lurkers, 49 Lyft, 235 Lyon, David, 129, 316 MAC (media access control) address, 99 MAC address identifications, 306 Madrigal, Alexis, 25 Maimonides, 179–80 manipulation to obtain free labor, 260–63, 264–65 pricing based on purchaser’s ability to pay, 318 Manjoo, Farhad, 65, 262 Marconi, Guglielmo, 2, 3 market inefficiencies, 234, 235, 240, 243, 245 marketing boosting likes with prizes, 32 celebrity-driven campaigns, 89, 93–94 consumers joining companies in marketing process, 32–33, 34–35, 58–60 Facebook slogan, 12 follower services, 85–87, 88–89 liking studies, 24 marketing as journalism, 27–28 telemarketing, 43 tradition of deception, 92–94 and viral media, 68–69 See also advertising market intelligence, 35–36, 216–17 MarketPsy Capital, 37 Mastering the Internet project, Britain, 314 Master Switch, The (Wu), 67 Matlin, Chadwick, 119 McCoy, Terrence, 68 McDonaldization of Society, The (Ritzer), 270 McGillvary, Caleb “Kai,” 70 Mechanical Turk, 90, 226, 228, 229–30 Medbase2000, 318–19 MediaBrix, 304 media recommendations, 202 Mediated (Zengotita), 120 memes advertisers appropriation of, 60 amplifiers for, 88–89 false stories, 107–8, 109, 111, 113 of Hilton and Kardashian, 67 inflationary rhetoric for, 102–3 and informational appetite, 322 from local newscasts, 69–72 Old Spice guy as, 93 as one greedy industry meeting another, 84–85 poverty and urban crime, 72–73 reworking and corrections, 105, 106–7 unemployed college graduate’s story, 220–26 Memoto Mini Camera, 137–38 messaging apps, 156, 259 Messenger smartphone app, 177 metadata, 131 Metal Rabbit Media, 213 metrics advertising, 97–99 audience, 95–96, 101–2, 103 biometric tools, 305–6 Facebook, 152, 358–59 followers, 53 hits at a Web site, 102 influence scores, 194, 197–98 page views, 98, 102 as reminder of how well others are doing, 152–53 Twitter, 87, 96–97, 348–49 unique visitors, 96, 102 for Upworthy, 102 See also page views micro-fame, 149–50, 152, 196–97, 206 Microsoft, 195, 296, 311–12 micro-targeting listicles, 118–19 micro-work.


pages: 651 words: 161,270

Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism by Sharon Beder

American Legislative Exchange Council, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, business climate, centre right, clean water, corporate governance, Exxon Valdez, Gary Taubes, global village, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, laissez-faire capitalism, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two and twenty, urban planning

He advises: “Database management companies can provide you with incredibly detailed mailing lists segmented by almost any factor you can imagine.”27 Once identified, potential supporters have to be persuaded to agree to endorse the corporate view being promoted. Specialists in this form of organising use opinion research data to “identify the kinds of themes most likely to arouse key constituent groups, then gear their telemarketing pitches around those themes.”28 Telephone polls, in particular, enable rapid feedback so that the pitch can be refined: “With phones you’re on the phones today, you analyze your results, you can change your script and try a new thing tomorrow. In a three-day program you can make four or five different changes, find out what’s really working, what messages really motivate people, and improve your response rates.”29 Focus groups also help with targeting messages.

To win in the hearing room, you must reach out to create grassroots support. To outnumber your opponents, call the leading grassroots public affairs communications specialists.34 In his promotion, Davies explains that he will use mailing lists and computer databases to identify potential supporters and telemarketers to persuade them to agree to have letters written on their behalf. In this way he is able to create the impression of a “spontaneous explosion of community support for needy corporations”.35 The practical objective of letter-writing campaigns is not actually to get a majority of the people behind a position and to express themselves on it—for it would be virtually impossible to whip up that much enthusiasm—but to get such a heavy, sudden outpouring of sentiment that lawmakers feel they are being besieged by a majority.

In 1992 Burson-Marsteller created an independent grassroots lobbying unit, Advocacy Communications Team, to counter activists that threaten corporations by organising “rallies, boycotts and demonstrations outside your plant”.37 Burson-Marsteller used their grassroots lobbying unit to create the National Smokers Alliance in 1993 on behalf of Philip Morris. The millions supplied by Philip Morris and the advice supplied by Burson-Marsteller’s Advocacy Communications Team allowed this ‘grassroots’ alliance to use full-page advertisements, direct telemarketing and other high-tech campaign techniques to build its membership to a claimed three million by 1995, and to disseminate its prosmoking message. The Alliance’s president is the Vice-President of Burson-Marsteller, and other Burson-Marsteller executives are actively involved in the Alliance.38 Burson-Marsteller is heavily involved in similar activities on behalf of clients who have been threatened by the rise of environmentalism.


pages: 306 words: 78,893

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Computers have made some of our jobs more interesting; I couldn't have produced this book, from concept to camera-ready copy, as completely or as quickly twenty years ago, nor could I have pubHshed a credible looking newsletter w^ith up-to-date economic stats w^ithout a staff 68 After the New Economy of editors, number-crunchers, and artists. But for lots of people—like the U.S.'s 5 million telemarketers—the computer means sitting in a cubicle and having your output monitored by the boss. Computers have allowed financiers to develop complex new financial instruments and trade them at Ughtning speed—which is good news for the principals, but is it good for most of society? The net has allowed people around the world to make contact with each other in completely unprecedented ways—but computers have also allowed governments to spy on us and marketers to profile us in unprecedented ways.

A standard definition of IT jobs includes the categories that the BLS calls electrical and electronics engineers, computer speciaHsts, and operations research analysts. These accounted for 2% of employment in 2000, and will account for 3% in 2010. Since they are slated to increase their share, they're also responsible for a lager share of total growth—10%. A selection of more mundane old economy jobs—retail salespersons, cashiers, telemarketers, truck drivers, and office clerks, who on balance earn a third of what IT workers do—accounts for the same share of growth, and will make up 10% of the workforce in 2010. So the American economy hasn't been producing only burger-flipper jobs. It produces a fair number of high-end jobs, a lot of low-end jobs, but not much in the middle.

Clothaire, 146 Reagan, Ronald, 8 recessions, political purpose, 182 regionahzation, 159 Reich, Robert, 71,74 retail trade, 64-66 Riflcin, Jeremy, 68 Robinson, Joan, 235 Robinson, William, 175-176 Rockefeller, David, 232 Rubin, Robert, 218 ruling class, global, 174—178 Russell, Marta, 100 sad militants, 185 Sakakibara, Eisuke, 228 Index Sale, Kirkpatrick, 168 Salomon Smith Barney, 197 scale, economic, 167-168 Scandinavia, very wired, 6 Schama, Simon, 23 Schrager, Ian, 233 Schwab, Klaus, 175-178 Seattle, anti-WTO protests, 32,160 sex, Gilder on, 11—13 sexual preference and pay, 100 sex discrimination, 94—101 international comparisons, 101—102 Shakespeare, 188 shareholder activism, 214 Shiller, Robert, 6-8,25-27,194 Shiva, Vandana, 162,168-169 Shorrock.Tim, 171 Sichel, Daniel, 57 Silicon Valley, income distribution, 105 Silicon Valley Toxics CoaUtion, 232 Sinai, Allen, 4 Singhne, Peter, 18 Skilhng, Jeffirey, 33 skills, job, 73-77 returns to, 86—87 skin shade and pay, 99 Smith, Adam, 109-110, 163,173 Smith, Patti, 183 Smith, Paul, 6 social democracy, 139-143,182 social movements, new, 179 Social Security, 227 Solow, Robert, 3 sovereignty, 170 space, shrinkage of, 146 speedup, 215, 229 Spencer, Herbert, 37 state, retreat of, 150-152 Stigbtz, Joseph, 193 Stiroh,Kevin,51,57 stock market 1990s bubble, history, 188-189 analysts' role, 194—200 anomalies, 194 book value, defined, 233 brokers' fees and salaries, 201-202 and corporate profitability, 203—204 and corporate restructuring, 214-215 economics of, 187-188,192-195 and evolution of the corporation, 212-217 excess volatiHty, 194 happiness of investors, 212 and managers' pay, 216—217 and pop culture, 187 psychology of, 25—26 trading frequency and returns, 190—191, 234,239 wisdom of, 35 see also finance stock options, 216—217 and wealth distribution, 126—127 stock ownership, distribution of, 24, 122-124 stress, management by, 25 stylish shoes, 165 Summers, Lawrence, 5,231 surveillance, 68,77—78 Survey of Consumer Finances, 118—119 Survey of Income and Program Participation, 118 symbolic analysts, 71,72 synergy vs. conflict, 197-200 Taylorism, 78 technology not evil, 2 and social movements, 179 telecommunications industry, 196—198 telegraph, 7 telemarketers, 68 TheGlobe.com, 189 269 TheStreet.com, 31 dme, acceleration of, 146 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 82,139 Tompkins, Doug, 161-162 total factor productivity. See Productivity transnational capitalist class, 175—176 transnational corporations. See multinational corporations transparency, 223 Triplett, Jack, 51,55 tulip-bulb mania, 23 unemployment, political uses of, 206—207 U.S.


pages: 242 words: 245

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

But the operative word here is "can," because most of the software companies represented in the pages of CCS have created an elaborate superstructure of technology designed to "manage" these sales encounters from beginning to end, with the "verbal interaction" between agent and client playing out according to prearranged formulas. The agent loses the power to manage the call and has instead to defer to instructions provided by CRM software, which embodies the detailed preferences of management. A primitive version of this managed call will be familiar to anyone who has been disturbed by the intrusions of a telemarketer trying to sell real estate or Caribbean vacations. But the software systems on offer in the pages of CCS vastly strengthen the managed call as a weapon of knowledge management and control. From now on, we will, wherever possible, let the software executives, engineers, and consultants speak for themselves.

This was puzzling since call center employees never come into physical contact with their customers and the dress habits of the Southwest are notably relaxed. But by drawing up and enforcing strict dress codes, call center managers could open up a whole new field of employee activity that they could bring under their control, thus adding to an already draconian regime of regulation and surveillance. Managers at one leading telemarketing company, Teletech, were notable sticklers for sartorial ON THE DIGITAL ASSEMBLY LINE conformity. Carolyn Grogg, a Tucson resident who worked for Teletech for a year, failed to comply with the company's footwear regulations. Suffering from a swollen toe, Grogg came to work with a closed-toe shoe on her healthy foot, and a matching sock and sandal on her injured foot.

See 47, 58,172,173,175 also Scientific management United Parcel Service (UPS), 105 Teams: cross-functional teams, 69; in University of California at Irvine's medical reengineering, 133 Medical Center, 127 Techno-economic regime's effect, University of Iowa College of 13-15 Medicine, 128 Teixeira, Ruy, 179-80,181-82,183 Telemarketing. See Call centers Vance, Dina, 108 Teletech (Tucson, Arizona), 104-05 Vinkhuyzen, Erik, 89-92,109, 111, Teloquent Communications, 95 114,115 Teufel, Thomas, 156,158 The Visible Hand (Chandler), 18 Textbook of Office Management Volpe, Lou, 85-86 (Leffingwell), 60 Thurow, Lester, 183-84 Wages and salaries, stagnation of, Tilney, Cornelia, 130 2-3,13,179,188 Time-and-motion studies, 7-8; Wagner, Edward, 131 metal-working industries, 32, Wall Street Journal, 78 41,48; service industries, Whalen, Jack, 89-92,109, 111, 62-63, 66, 67 114,115 Time To Heal (Ludmerer), 127, 149 White-collar industrialization, 6, 8, Town, Nigel, 160 9,13, 17, 66.


pages: 323 words: 111,561

Digging Up Mother: A Love Story by Doug Stanhope

call centre, false flag, index card, pre–internet, rent control, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, telemarketer

I couldn’t wait to call Mother to tell her about my first brush with fame. (If I hadn’t been so slipshod in deleting Mother’s hoard postmortem, I’ll bet there was a VHS or three of Tough Love in there, queued up to the second I walked by.) BACKSTAGE WEST WAS THE ACTORS’ RAG THAT WOULD LIST AUDITIONS and casting information and it was always littered with ads for telemarketing positions promising boatloads of money. So one day I put on the only suit I’d brought and went down to for an interview. The place was a gutted apartment on the second floor over the shops on La Cienega Blvd. across from a car wash. Everyone was bedraggled, sitting at highway salvage desks, yelling into phones.

I’d loiter in front of the motel office and wait for someone to buy a newspaper out of the machine, then casually jam my hand in the door before it shut. Every coin could be the one that made you rich in Vegas, no point in wasting one on the paper looking for a job. Finding a job was a breeze. At that time, boiler-room telemarketing was the second largest industry in Nevada next to gaming, for what reason I do not know, most likely due to lax regulation. The classifieds of the Las Vegas Review-Journal were loaded with ads for phone room work just like the ones in LA. I found one that was within walking distance and went down to apply, knowing this time I wouldn’t need a suit and tie.

We had plenty of money and could buy real gifts and decorate. Mother came with Deputy Mike who was now her third husband. Aside from me and Mike, almost everyone smoked pot heavily and we were all entertained by getting to hand a joint to a cop to pass along to the next guy in the circle, inside the offices of a fraud telemarketing outfit. He took it all pretty well. “Hey, I don’t give a shit. I’m off the clock.” Mother would make Mike come into the office and watch me pitch people. They’d pull up chairs in front of my desk like Mother was seeing me in a school play. I tried to make it a show. I drew up a bullshit checklist—a legal pad with the word “bullshit” written on each line that I’d check off every time I lied.


pages: 206 words: 51,534

Wrap It In A Bit Of Cheese Like You're Tricking The Dog: The fifth collection of essays and emails by New York Times Best Selling author David Thorne by David Thorne

Day of the Dead, Minecraft, pink-collar, telemarketer

From: David Thorne Date: Thursday 19 May 2016 5.24pm To: Steven Semmens Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Plagiarism *You’re the twat. ................................................................................................ From: Steven Semmens Date: Thursday 19 May 2016 5.29pm To: David Thorne Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Plagiarism Real original. Robert the Telemarketing Raccoon Something had been in the wheelie bins. They were tipped over and torn bags were strewn across the yard. A garbage bag was all the way at the end of our driveway, the contents spilled onto the road for all the neighbours to see. It was lucky we hadn’t thrown out a huge dildo or something, as our neighbours are huge gossips.

“Nothing if you’re a mattress salesman. It’s an odd name for a raccoon though.” “I know a Robert and he’s not a mattress salesman. He’s a sales rep for the local radio station.” “How is that any better?” “Fine, you name him then.” “No, you’ve already named him. We’re stuck with Robert now. Robert the telemarketing raccoon. He’ll take twenty-percent off if you book ten radio spots and throw in a pillow-top mattress.” On the fourth night, after giving Robert his cauliflower crepes with sautéed asparugus and grilled cheese topping, I accidentally left the back door slightly ajar when I headed back to the kitchen to get his crème brûlée.


pages: 299 words: 83,854

Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy by Howard Karger

Alan Greenspan, big-box store, blue-collar work, book value, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, delayed gratification, financial deregulation, fixed income, illegal immigration, independent contractor, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, microcredit, mortgage debt, negative equity, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, predatory finance, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, underbanked, working poor

Agencies began to focus exclusively on revenue-generating DMPs rather than on non-revenue-generating financial services. Through aggressive marketing, newer CCAs occasionally crossed the line into deceptive practices, such as falsely claiming that involuntary fees were voluntary; providing customer bonuses for referrals; and paying for incentive-based telemarketing and spam e-mail. The newer agencies also charged high fees—typically a full month’s DMP payment—to set up an account. In contrast, traditional NFCC member agencies may offer one-on-one budget counseling for $13 a session, and charge a $15-per-month DMP fee plus $25 for setting up a new account.6176 Because many newer CCAs deal solely with CCIs that pay a Fair Share reimbursement, they place only a portion of customers’ unsecured debt into a DMP, leaving them to manage other creditors on their own.

Meanwhile, most state and federal regulators appear to be asleep at the switch.”48 Abuses by unethical consumer credit counseling agencies are in many ways the most reprehensible in the fringe economy. Drawn to the nonprofit status of CCAs, financially desperate consumers are led to believe they will find a safe harbor and an advocate who is sympathetic to their plight. Instead, they often encounter “credit counselors”—many of which are simply telemarketers who read from a prepared script—hungry for a commission and ready to sign them up for a DMP.49 Cynically, the “credit counselor” knows full well that most consumers will not be able to handle the high monthly DMP payments. For consumers with few resources and limited incomes, paying 9% instead of 17% on a $15,000 credit card debt will not make much difference.

Since many of these clients are desperate to get their lives back on track, they are willing to undertake a sizeable DMP obligation, even though they’re unsure how they will meet their other expenses. This explains why so many “non-profits” grab the money at the front end by requiring a “voluntary contribution” equal to a one-month DMP payment.191 Credit counseling is a national rather than statewide industry, since CCAs routinely use telemarketing and the Internet to reach millions of consumers across the United States. Although some states license CCAs, it’s essentially a futile task to regulate the thousand or more agencies that operate nationally. In many ways, the Internet has created a national economy for CCAs that supersedes state regulations.


pages: 186 words: 49,251

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry by John Warrillow

Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, David Heinemeier Hansson, discounted cash flows, Hacker Conference 1984, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Network effects, passive income, rolodex, Salesforce, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, time value of money, zero-sum game, Zipcar

MarketingSherpa used to offer its case studies for $7 each. “Everyone assumed we made tons of money from selling $7 articles,” Holland told me, “but the reality is, the one-shot article business was a small part of our company.” MarketingSherpa’s real moneymaker was the conferences. Holland employed a full-time telemarketer who called people who had ordered a $7 case study. First, the telemarketer would ensure that the customer had received the case study and then would follow up with an invitation to a live event on the same topic. “We ended up selling 900 tickets to a $1,500 conference just because we called someone who bought a $7 article.” Holland has even done testing to isolate the ideal time to upgrade a customer who has recently become a subscriber.


pages: 1,199 words: 332,563

Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition by Robert N. Proctor

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", bioinformatics, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, facts on the ground, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, index card, Indoor air pollution, information retrieval, invention of gunpowder, John Snow's cholera map, language of flowers, life extension, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, speech recognition, stem cell, telemarketer, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

An even bigger response followed the company’s 1993–94 Marlboro Adventure Team promotion, during which smokers were invited to call 1–800 MARLBORO to obtain free brand-linked merchandise after accumulating “Marlboro Miles” (for smoking that brand). The response was one of the largest in the history of telemarketing, generating 900,000 calls in the first forty-five minutes and 2.5 million during the first four hours. Nearly 10 million smokers participated in the frenzy, which Philip Morris marketers characterized as “the largest promotion in consumer products history.” Some 4 million orders were placed and 11 million items shipped.76 Telemarketing on such a scale requires complex and coordinated management. In 1993, for example, just to receive calls and process orders for its Marlboro Adventure Team promotion, Philip Morris established a new 450,000-square-foot “fulfillment facility” in Lafayette, Indiana, staffed by 350 employees, and a new Customer Service Telemarketing Facility in Kankakee, Illinois, with a staff of 25 to handle phone orders.

The companies sometimes kept logs of such calls, and these, too, reveal the persistence of ignorance even in the face of long-established medical wisdom. The background here is that like many other large corporations, tobacco manufacturers often receive thousands of calls per day from consumers. In 1997, for example, R. J. Reynolds received 260,000 calls to its consumer relations department, plus an additional 400,000 calls via its outside telemarketing contractors.74 Philip Morris fields an even larger volume, which can increase dramatically during periods of special promotions. At the turn of the millennium the company was receiving three to four million consumer-initiated calls per year, most of which were responses to promotions.75 Calls are handled in a number of different ways, according to what the company hopes to gain from such communications.

In 1993, for example, just to receive calls and process orders for its Marlboro Adventure Team promotion, Philip Morris established a new 450,000-square-foot “fulfillment facility” in Lafayette, Indiana, staffed by 350 employees, and a new Customer Service Telemarketing Facility in Kankakee, Illinois, with a staff of 25 to handle phone orders. Philip Morris in the year 2000 expanded its call-receiving capabilities, implementing natural-language speech recognition, standby promotional and apology mail packages, and a “new attitude” tailoring personal service to the individual smoker. Callers were given a personalized consumer ID and PIN to allow personal logins, and email and fax programs were installed to reach consumers more quickly.


pages: 323 words: 100,923

This Is Not Fame: A "From What I Re-Memoir" by Doug Stanhope

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, bitcoin, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, obamacare, pre–internet, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Stephen Hawking, telemarketer, traveling salesman

She’d just throw me off of her and onto the floor. I’m the worst fuck alive. She blew me off a few times on plans we’d made and started to become more distant. I became stalkery but in inventive and entertaining ways. She had a day job as a secretary for some classified ad circular. I got a job there telemarketing for a day, just to see the look on her face when I punched in for work. I put on a big fawning display of bullshit in the interview and the boss couldn’t have been more impressed. Krystal hadn’t seen me come in but was at her desk when I walked out with her boss—perfectly timed—telling me: “Well, we look forward to seeing you first thing Monday morning.”

Krystal hadn’t seen me come in but was at her desk when I walked out with her boss—perfectly timed—telling me: “Well, we look forward to seeing you first thing Monday morning.” I put on an over-the-top, cheese-dick smile, looked right at her and said, “Oh, believe me, I’m looking forward to working here, too!” She tilted her head back, rocked it sideways and yawn-laughed in defeat. It was funny until I had to do telemarketing for a few hours that Monday. As soon as Krystal went to lunch and the joke had run its course, I went permanently AWOL. It was clever but eventually that type of nonsense wore thin. Krystal told me she had another boyfriend and that I should, in so many words, fuck off. I was devastated. I had gigs coming up out of town and got myself together to get back to life on the road.

My neighbors were a couple and were hardcore tweekers, staying awake for five and six days in a row on that poison and telling me about their shared hallucinations. They would see the same elves on fence posts. They were also where I scored meth. Right next door. On an afternoon after work—I was still a telemarketer back then—I had plans to drive to Pahrump, Nevada, to visit my first-ever legal brothel. I was very excited and told my neighbors about it over some bumps of crystal. You’d think I was talking about going to see my favorite band, I was so anxious. They asked what it was gonna cost and I told them I figured I could get outta there for under a hundred and fifty bucks.


pages: 401 words: 108,855

Cultureshock Paris by Cultureshock Staff

Anton Chekhov, clean water, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Louis Pasteur, money market fund, PalmPilot, QWERTY keyboard, Skype, telemarketer, urban renewal, young professional

Ordering Groceries Online You can order groceries online for home delivery from supermarkets, as well as from Picard, the frozen food specialist described on page 216, and Telemarket, a longestablished grocery ordering service. See also the section on ‘Eating Out at Home’ below. Auchan; website:http://www.auchandirect.fr Carrefour; website:http://www.ooshop.com Picard; website:http://www.picard.fr Telemarket; website:http://telemarket.fr Monoprix; website: http://www.monoprix.fr Groceries for Homesick Anglophones Don’t Americans need an Oreo once in a while and don’t the English pine for Hobnobs?


pages: 368 words: 102,379

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, global pandemic, global supply chain, Internet Archive, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, ransomware, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, uber lyft, Y2K

His life had an uncanny resemblance to that of Jason Cardiff, the guy in California with the dick pills. Wexler was also a telemarketer with a history of fraud allegations. He too had been sued by the Federal Trade Commission. He was also, as Gabrielson would later confirm, the shadow owner of Fillakit. From 2005 to 2012, Wexler operated a pseudo debt relief firm that told consumers they could consolidate unsecured debt, such as a big credit card balance, and pay off a new loan with as little as zero percent interest, according to court records. This sounds-to-good-to-be-true offer was marketed online and through telemarketing and robocalling, including to those on the FTC’s “do not call list.”

Fuentes delivered a tranche of the Chinese version of the N95, called KN95s, destined for the Navajo Nation, but the agency would determine that most of what he delivered couldn’t be worn by medical staff because it didn’t meet FDA standards. The agency would later request a refund, which Fuentes would refuse. In the data we’d find former telemarketers whose records included allegations of fraud, but who were now entrusted with delivering millions of masks and coronavirus test tubes. Dozens of the companies we plucked out had been created just days before landing multimillion-dollar contracts. It appeared that anyone who paid a nominal fee to create a limited liability company could land a multimillion-dollar contract in the very same week.


pages: 187 words: 62,861

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, business process, California gold rush, citizen journalism, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, do well by doing good, East Village, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, informal economy, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Different activities or different populations are better served by different combinations of these levers. A campaign to get people to donate funds for disaster relief, for example, is better off appealing to a shared set of moral commitments and sheer human empathy than is a telemarketing sales department trying to get its employees to deliver better service. But even the telemarketing department that understands the importance of fair wages and employee autonomy will do better than one that uses technology to strictly monitor the work environment, or one that implements a reward system based exclusively on material incentives.


The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design by Michael Kearns, Aaron Roth

23andMe, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, Alvin Roth, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, cloud computing, computer vision, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, general-purpose programming language, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Chrome, ImageNet competition, Lyft, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, p-value, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, personalized medicine, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, short selling, sorting algorithm, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, telemarketer, Turing machine, two-sided market, Vilfredo Pareto

It guarantees that no matter what your data is, and no matter what thing you are concerned about occurring because of the use of your data, that thing becomes (almost) no more likely if you allow your data to be included in the study, compared to if you do not. It literally promises this about anything you can think of. It promises that the probability that you get annoying telemarketing calls during dinner does not increase by very much if you allow your data to be included in a study. It promises that the probability that your health insurance rates go up does not increase by very much if you allow your data to be included in a study. And it certainly promises that the probability that your data record is reidentified (as in the Massachusetts hospital record and Netflix Prize examples) does not increase by very much.

See also gender data and bias sexual orientation data, 25–26, 51–52, 86–89 Shapley, Lloyd, 129–30 The Shining (King), 118, 120 Shmatikov, Vitaly, 25 Simmons, Joe, 157–58 simple algorithms, 174 simulated game play, 134–35 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), 30–31 singularity, 180 Smith, Adam, 36 smoking, 27–28, 34–36, 39, 51–54 Snowden, Edward, 47–48 social awareness, 16–17, 131 social welfare, 97, 113, 115 societal norms and values, 12, 15–18, 20–21, 86, 134, 169–70 socioeconomic groups, 57 software engineers, 48–49 sorting algorithms, 4–5 spurious correlations, 150, 159 stable equilibriums, 99–100, 128 stable matchings, 128–30 standoffs, 98 statistics and adaptive data analysis, 159 and aggregate data, 22–23, 30–31 and algorithmic violations of fairness and privacy, 96 Bayesian, 38–39, 173 and the Bonferroni correction, 149 criminal sentencing, 14–15 and differential privacy, 40, 44–45, 47–52, 167 and fairness issues, 193–94 flawed statistical reasoning, 140–41 and interpretability of model outputs, 171–72 and investing scams, 138–41 and medical research, 34 and online shopping algorithms, 117 and p-hacking, 144–45, 153–55, 157–59, 161, 164, 169–70 statistical modeling, 90 statistical parity, 69–74, 84 and US Census data, 195 and “word embedding” models, 57–58, 63–64 stock investing, 81, 137–41 strategy, 97–102 Strava, 50–51 subgroup protections, 88–89 subjectivity, 86, 172 subpoenas, 41, 45–46, 48 “superfood” research, 143–44 superintelligent AI, 179–81, 185, 187 supervised machine learning, 63–64, 69–70, 183 supply and demand, 94–97 Supreme Court nomination hearings, 24 survey responses, 40–45 Sweeney, Latanya, 23 synthetic images, 132–35 target populations, 172–73 TD-Gammon program, 132 technological advances, 100–101, 103 TED Talks, 141–42 telemarketing calls, 38 temporal difference, 132 Tesauro, Gerry, 132 test preparation courses, 74–75 theoretical computer science, 11–13, 36 threshold rule, 75 Title VII, 15 tobacco research, 34–36 torturing data, 156–59 traffic and navigation problems, 19–20, 101–11, 113–15, 179 training data, 61–62 transparency, 125–26, 170–71 trust, 45–47, 170–71, 194–95 “truthfulness” in game theory, 114 “tunable” parameters, 37–39, 125–26, 171 Turing, Alan, 11–12, 180 Turing Award, 133 Turing machine, 11 23andMe, 54–55 2020 Census, 49, 195 Twitter Predictor Game, 52–53 two-route navigation problem, 107 two-sided markets, 127 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 184 typing, 118 underspecified problems, 183 unintended consequences, 6–8, 16–17, 184–85, 188 unique data points, 26–27 unsupervised learning, 63–64 upstream effects, 194 US Census Bureau, 49 US Constitution, 49 US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 86–87 user identifiers, 24 user modeling, 121 user ratings, 118–21 US military deployments, 50–51 US State Department, 15 validation sets, 162–63 value alignment problems, 184 values.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Forty-one percent of Etsy sellers who focus on their business full-time get their health care through a spouse or partner, and 39 percent are on Medicare or Medicaid or another state-sponsored program. It’s possible that some workers in towns with dying retail stores could find menial jobs on their computers as telemarketers, phone sex operators, English tutors to Chinese kids, or image classifiers to help train AI. That’s not exactly an appealing future though—and long-distance low-skilled jobs are the ones most subject to automation and a race to the lowest-cost provider. Most retail workers at least had the gratification of leaving home, conversation with colleagues and customers, getting a store discount, and generally being a member of society.

During the 1990s, Youngstown’s murder rate was eight times the national average, six times higher than New York’s, four and a half times that of Los Angeles, and twice as high as Chicago’s. Through the 1990s, local political and business leaders kept seeking new opportunities for economic development. First it was warehouses. Then telemarketing. Then minor league sports. Then prisons—four were built in the region, which added 1,600 jobs but brought other issues. Many residents were concerned about the perception of Youngstown as a “penal colony.” One prison run by a private corporation was so lax that six prisoners, including five convicted murderers, escaped at midday in July 1998 and the officials didn’t notice until notified by other inmates.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

The unemployed stay unemployed as much by choice as necessity, turning down job offers as they patiently scout out more promising opportunities: maybe something with a shorter commute, higher pay, or greater prospects for career advancement. In Akerlof’s view, this was hard to reconcile with extended stretches that many Americans spend without a job, despite a willingness to do just about anything for pay.7 Lots of people do scan the want ads looking for something better than the burger-flipping or telemarketing opportunities that immediately present themselves. But this view of unemployment ignored many of the brutal job market realities experienced by the long-term unemployed that he felt a model should be able to explain. That’s what led him back to the market for lemons, which was a more satisfying framework for understanding why the labor market doesn’t work for so many people.

Eli Berman, “Sect, Subsidy, and Sacrifice: An Economist’s View of Ultra-Orthodox Jews,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, no. 3 (2000). 6. Diego Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 7. “Maine Attorney General Stops Telemarketing of Dubious Baldness, Psoriasis, and Weight-Loss Products,” Quackwatch, November 2003, http://www.quackwatch.org/02ConsumerProtection/AG/ME/folliguard.html. 8. “Return to Spender,” Snopes.com, last updated April 25, 2011, http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/nordstrom.asp. 9. Paul Milgrom and John Roberts, “Price and Advertising Signals Product Quality,” Journal of Political Economy 94, no. 4 (1986): 796–821. 10.


pages: 200 words: 72,182

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Alan Greenspan, business process, full employment, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, McMansion, PalmPilot, place-making, post-work, sexual politics, telemarketer, union organizing, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero day

I rule out various occupations for one reason or another: hotel front-desk clerk, for example, which to my surprise is regarded as unskilled and pays only $6 or $7 an hour, gets eliminated because it involves standing in one spot for eight hours a day. Waitressing is also something I'd like to avoid, because I remember it leaving me bone-tired when I was eighteen, and I'm decades of varicosities and back pain beyond that now. Telemarketing, one of the first refuges of the suddenly indigent, can be dismissed on grounds of personality. This leaves certain supermarket jobs, such as deli clerk, or housekeeping in the hotels and guest houses, which pays about $7 and, I imagine, is not too different from what I've been doing part-time, in my own home, all my life.

This might not make Maine an ideal setting in which to hunker down for the long haul, but it made it the perfect place for a blue-eyed, English-speaking Caucasian to infiltrate the low-wage workforce, no questions asked. As an additional attraction, I noted on my spring visit that the Portland-area business community was begging piteously for fresh employable bodies. Local TV news encouraged viewers to try out for a telemarketing firm offering a special “mothers' shift”; the classic rock station was promoting “job fairs” where you could stroll among the employers' tables, like a shopper at the mall, playing hard to get. Before deciding to return to Maine as an entry-level worker, I downloaded the help-wanted ads from the Portland Press Herald's Web site, and my desktop wheezed from the strain.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

What would happen if advertisers expected measured results from the $3 million spent for each thirty-second ad for NBC’s 2009 Super Bowl, or for the approximately $60 billion spent on television advertising in the United States each year? Or the estimated $172 billion spent in the United States on advertising, and the additional $227 billion spent on marketing, including public relations, direct mail, telemarketing, and sales promotions? “That’s the worst kind of business model in the world,” he said—the worst, that is, if you’re an old-school ad man. “You don’t want to have people know what works. When you know what works or not, you tend to charge less money than when you have this aura and you’re selling this mystique.”

Yet ad spending was less than half of what was spent on what is euphemistically now called “marketing.” A media campaign no longer consisted of buying ads on the three networks and a few other places; now a campaign might combine ads on TV and in magazines, a viral effort online, search ads, in-store sales promotions, telemarketing, polling, public relations—all of which was more expensive. The increased expense, and spending, spurred media buying agencies to merge into su peragencies, such as Irwin Gotlieb’s Group M. These media buyers now had enormous clout, which they exercised over traditional media companies that relied on advertising.

Why do we need multiple answering machines? Why do we need to switch phone numbers when we move? Why do we need to wait to listen to phone messages? Why can’t we convert them to text messages instead? Why can’t we record phone conversations if the other party consents? Why can’t our phones block telemarketing calls or make sure certain people are screened out? Because it’s over the Internet, why can’t most calls be free? For its beta test, in 2007, Google introduced for a relatively small group a service that would work as Google Voice does. It was called GrandCentral, the name of a start-up Google acquired a few years earlier.


Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland

air freight, Live Aid, plutocrats, RAND corporation, telemarketer

In December, when Susanhad realized she was pregnant, Eugene forbid her to go near themicrowave oven or to drink alcohol. Spring and summer came and went. She liked her job. She opened the daily mail, which Eugene picked up at a post-officeboxa few streets over. Inside the envelopes came crumpledmoney, sent in by superstitious radio enthusiasts whose namesEugene purchased from an old college pal who'd become a tele-marketing whiz—suckers! Most often it consisted of two twentiesand a ten, but sometimes Susan collected wads of ones and fivesin dirty little clumps, likely scrounged from under the front seat of a teenager's car. What did these people want? What kind ofcosmic roulette wheel did they hope to spin by responding toEugene's fraudulent thrusts?

"Jerr-Bear, it's John Johnson." "The happy wanderer!" "Yeah, that's me." John heard chewing sounds. "Are you atdinner now? Do you want me to call back?" The thought ofJerr-Bear at a nonrestaurant dinner table seemed almost impos-sible for John to visualize. "Yeah, it's dinner, but big deal. What are you, a telemarketer?How can I help you, John?" "Call me back." "Right." Jerr-Bear maintained a complex system of cloned cell phonesso as to avoid tapping by authorities. A minute later John's linerang. Even then, the two spoke in veils. "Jerr, what do you give someone who's in a lot of pain?" "Pain's a biggie, John.


pages: 92 words: 23,741

Lessons From Private Equity Any Company Can Use by Orit Gadiesh, Hugh MacArthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, call centre, corporate governance, financial engineering, inventory management, job-hopping, long term incentive plan, performance metric, shareholder value, stock buybacks, telemarketer

For the second initiative, the new owners assigned a high-level executive team—supported by outside technical experts—to spearhead a change management program to consolidate loan processing, credit collection, and trade finance into two new customer service centers. This initiative included a parallel step that dedicated project teams to upgrade Korea First’s IT organization, adding telemarketing and customer call-center capacities. By choreographing these steps in parallel, Newbridge was able to make Korea First’s new facilities operational within five months. Finally, the blueprint took into account the need to build the right organization with the right salespeople to support the full-potential plan.


pages: 313 words: 94,490

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, Barry Marshall: ulcers, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, desegregation, Helicobacter pylori, Jeff Hawkins, low cost airline, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Pepto Bismol, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, telemarketer

The profile goes into much greater depth: Sam and Samantha’s tastes in pop culture, their preferences about social events, and so on. What does “Saddleback Sam” accomplish for church leaders? Sam forces them to view their decisions through a different lens. Say someone proposes a telemarketing campaign to local community members. It sounds as if it has great potential to reach new people. But the leaders know from their research that Sam hates telemarketers, so the idea is scratched. And thinking about Saddleback Sam and Samantha isn’t limited to church leaders. There are hundreds of small ministries at the Saddleback Church: grade school classes, Mother’s Day Out programs, a men’s basketball league.


pages: 303 words: 93,545

I'm a stranger here myself: notes on returning to America after twenty years away by Bill Bryson

flying shuttle, illegal immigration, millennium bug, National Debt Clock, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, telemarketer

My point is that there is almost nothing you cannot buy in this remarkable country. Of course, shopping has been the national sport in America for decades, but three significant retailing developments have emerged in recent years to elevate the shopping experience to a higher, giddier plane. They are: •Telemarketing. This is an all-new business in which platoons of salespeople phone up complete strangers, more or less at random, generally at suppertime, and doggedly read to them a prepared script promising a free set of steak knives or AM-FM radio if they buy a certain product or service. These people have become positively relentless.

The possibility that I would buy a time-share in Florida over the telephone from a stranger is about as likely as the possibility that I would change religious affiliation on the basis of a doorstep visit from a brace of Mormons, but evidently this feeling is not universal. According to the New York Times, tele-marketing in America is now worth $35 billion a year. That figure is so amazing that I cannot think about it without getting a headache, so let us move on to retail development number two. •Outlet malls. These are malls in which companies like Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein sell their own lines at discounts.


pages: 534 words: 15,752

The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg

air freight, Akira Okazaki, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, flag carrier, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, haute cuisine, means of production, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, telemarketer, trade route, urban renewal

“You’re used to catching 400 tonnes, and when the allocation comes and it’s 150 tonnes, well, you couldn’t survive.” The quota holders were quickly forced to decide whether they wanted to stay in the tuna business; those who saw a future looked to expand their share. Puglisi sat down with the government’s published list of quota holders and started, with a telemarketer’s diligence, calling up boat owners and asking them if they were interested in selling. In small amounts, sometimes as little as five tonnes at a time, he accumulated 1,200 tonnes over several months for a total of $1.7 million. Prices started at under $700 per tonne. The quota, however, offered only the right to catch fish, not a guarantee of finding them, and in the years after the quota system was implemented, catches fell precipitously.


pages: 340 words: 91,745

Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married by Abby Ellin

Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Burning Man, business intelligence, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, content marketing, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, double helix, dumpster diving, East Village, fake news, feminist movement, forensic accounting, fudge factor, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, John Darwin disappearance case, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk, telemarketer, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Society starts sending us these conflicting messages when we’re children, and parents fully participate. Though they say that honesty is the trait they most want in their children, parents are ten times more likely to rebuke a child for snitching than for lying.17 They lull kids to sleep with parables of George Washington and chopped cherry trees, all the while lying to telemarketers or salespeople or friends. (Don’t even get me started on Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.) This continues into adulthood. After leaving the White House in 2017, former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer went on to teach a class at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. A few months later, he made a surprise appearance at the Emmy Awards, making light of the flagrant falsehoods he’d told while working for the president.

We still have this idea that the man goes to work and earns the money and the woman stays home. Because of the pressure and stress of their job, we excuse the men’s problems. We’re conditioned to do that.”36 Besides society, who else can we blame for this? Parents. In a February 2016 study, researchers found that parents usually lie less when kids are around (the dreaded telemarketer aside). But check this out: they act more dishonestly around their sons than their daughters.37 “It’s possible that parents lie less in front of girls because they don’t want to teach the girls that lying is okay, but they don’t feel so bad teaching boys that lying is okay,” said Anya Samek, an associate professor of economics at the University of Southern California.38 Why would that be?


Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes

book value, commoditize, Donald Trump, index card, Indoor air pollution, Maui Hawaii, telemarketer

Typically if you are running a department, your department is the impact area. But if you're a CEO or general manager of a medium or large company. you may have many impact areas. To make identifying them easier, here is a list of 15 impact areas from another CEO I worked with: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. Outside sales Inside telemarketing team Marketing activities Customer service CRM (customer relationship management) Purchasing and suppliers Shipping and receiving Inventory control Accounts receivable Personnel Technology Partner relations/vendors Partner relations/ affiliates Export sales California initiative This last initiative was to attack a new market.

If the prospect was not "buying now," this was a very short conversation: "No thanks. I'm not interested." It's the same in the circulation department of every newspaper in America: they are all tactical. "Hi. I'm with the City Chronicle. We have a special right now for subscribers." If you're not someone who reads newspapers, you're hanging up on these poor tactical telemarketers. A strategist might devise an approach that would make you want to read a newspaper. But that's another project, so let's stick with the ad sales example for a moment. Becoming a Brilliant strategist 67 Picture yourself as the owner of a small-town ad agency, a body shop, a haircutting salon, or a restaurant-all mainstay advertisers every community newspaper should have.


pages: 289 words: 99,936

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

In addition, one member of WYMSM was a systems administrator. If we relax the definition of IT-based work enough to correct for its innate class and gender bias by including data entry, insurance claims and processing, and telemarketing, more than a dozen more YWCA residents were engaged in high-tech labor. More than half of the residents I interviewed held jobs in data entry, call center customer service, telemarketing, telephone operating, and claims processing, and many of them had held several of these jobs over the years. Others identified significant computer and technological skills that were required for their work in the social service, secondary education, administrative, consumer service, and health care occupations.


pages: 362 words: 99,063

The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late by Michael Ellsberg

affirmative action, Black Swan, Burning Man, corporate governance, creative destruction, do what you love, financial engineering, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, hiring and firing, independent contractor, job automation, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, mega-rich, meta-analysis, new economy, Norman Mailer, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social intelligence, solopreneur, Steve Ballmer, survivorship bias, telemarketer, Tony Hsieh

He got started when he attended a workshop by a real estate sales and marketing trainer named Joe Stumpf, in Eugene, Oregon. “I immediately recognized I had to somehow work for this guy and soak up his knowledge. But I didn’t know how I was going to do that—here he was, leading big group workshops all over the country, and I was barely scraping by. “So I started calling up his outbound telemarketers. These guys are trying to sell you on something, so they’ll talk to anyone! I told them about my experience at the workshop and became friendly with them. Once, I found this set of Tony Robbins tapes at Goodwill for ten bucks, and I knew one of the guys I was talking to there would like it, so I packed the tapes up and sent them to him.

Rather, such jobs provided valuable exposure to the values of work and industry, opportunities for meeting mentors and others who could advance their career prospects, and a stream of income and savings that helped them live independently, which often became initial capital for ventures that eventually made them affluent. Nearly every person I feature in this book started out their working lives in low-status “dead-end” jobs, from fast food to waiting tables to door-to-door sales and telemarketing to manual labor. But they sure didn’t stay there. Why not? In a wonderful book called 50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School: Real-World Antidotes to Feel-Good Education by Charles Sykes, Rule 15 is: “Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping.


pages: 97 words: 31,550

Money: Vintage Minis by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, DeepMind, European colonialism, Flash crash, Ford Model T, greed is good, job automation, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, lifelogging, low interest rates, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Ponzi scheme, self-driving car, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Osborne, published ‘The Future of Employment’, in which they surveyed the likelihood of different professions being taken over by computer algorithms within the next twenty years. The algorithm developed by Frey and Osborne to do the calculations estimated that 47 per cent of US jobs are at high risk. For example, there is a 99 per cent probability that by 2033 human telemarketers and insurance underwriters will lose their jobs to algorithms. There is a 98 per cent probability that the same will happen to sports referees, 97 per cent that it will happen to cashiers and 96 per cent to chefs. Waiters – 94 per cent. Paralegal assistants – 94 per cent. Tour guides – 91 per cent.


Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern

Rubik’s Cube, telemarketer

So really the only thing you should worry about is the part you’re at right now. Where you got a body and a head and all that bullshit. Just worry about living, dying is the easy part.” Then he put down his spoon, looked at me, and stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to do one of the best things about being alive: take a shit.” On Telemarketer Phone Calls “Hello?…Fuck you.” On My Interest in Smoking Cigars “You’re not a cigar guy…. Well, the first reason that jumps out at me is that you hold it like you’re jerking off a mouse.” On Entertaining the Notion of Getting a Tattoo “You can do what you want. But I can also do what I want.


pages: 268 words: 112,708

Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

Advertisers get more fine-grained information about how users respond to ads on the Web as well, including click-through rates to the advertisers’ site by keyword purchased from a search engine, domain type, time, region, and so on. The abundance of infor216 The Web mation generated by the clickstream means that companies can generate leads and target repeated appeals (in ads or E-mails) more cheaply and effectively than through direct mail or telemarketing.52 But wait, as the late-night TV commercials tell us, there’s more. The Web lends itself to other forms of market research as well. Polls, surveys, and online forums devoted to particular products offer free focus groups, where entertainment companies figure out which soap-opera characters and potential plot lines appeal most to audiences, or software firms learn how consumers react to their latest release.53 Products and ads are constantly being tested.

Once a client invests in a campaign, software can evaluate the performance of banner ads in real time, allowing advertisers to redesign campaigns on the fly, or redeploy ads to pages that deliver the highest response rates. Programs also assess editorial content on pages in real time, permitting advertisers to match their ads with “complimentary and appropriate editorial.”55 This flexibility is available far more cheaply and quickly than in broadcasting or even direct mail and telemarketing.56 All of this underscores how commercial forces can take advantage of the Web’s interactivity to turn users’ pursuit of knowledge, community, and play to economically productive ends. How should we understand the nature of users’ contribution to value creation? This question raises one of the foundational debates in the political economy of communication, which can only be sketched out briefly here.


pages: 370 words: 107,983

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Despite the realities behind these algorithmic ratings, there have been many quantitative conclusions drawn from the ‘probabilities’, job categories and employment statistics represented in this graph, and people seldom look beyond the resulting infographics to the specific conclusions for specific jobs. However, those results are provided in the study, in an appendix table where the jobs are ranked from 0 to 702, with the highest number being the most computerizable category of job. That job is Telemarketer, with a near certain probability of computerizability of over 0.99. Right behind Telemarketers, with the same probability to two decimal places, are Hand Sewers. One would assume that given that their jobs were largely eliminated by Lee’s and Jacquard’s weaving frames in the 17th and 18th century, Hand Sewers occupy some tiny fraction on the far right of the layer labelled in the legend as “Production.”


pages: 889 words: 433,897

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey by Emmanuel Goldstein

affirmative action, Apple II, benefit corporation, call centre, disinformation, don't be evil, Firefox, game design, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, late fees, license plate recognition, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Oklahoma City bombing, optical character recognition, OSI model, packet switching, pirate software, place-making, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RFID, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, undersea cable, UUNET, Y2K

You will then hear the caller’s name as they have recorded it and you will have the options of accepting the call, denying the call, playing a “sales call refusal” to the caller, or sending the call to your Home Voice Mail, if you subscribe to 669 94192c16.qxd 6/3/08 3:35 PM Page 670 670 Chapter 16 it. The “sales call refusal” is pretty useful. If the caller is stupid enough to identify that they are a telemarketer, you can have this announcement played to them. It will inform the caller that you do not accept telephone solicitations and wish to be placed on their Do Not Call list. I have never had a telemarketer attempt to ring my line through Call Intercept, although with the new National Do Not Call List, some of these phone solicitors may become desperate. I should note that Call Intercept may not interact well with certain Verizon services as well as some types of phone calls.

“Are you Brent?” he queried. “Yesss,” I said. The phone cop turned around to face the door. He knocked two or three times. Immediately the door flew open and the barrels of small hand guns were pointed at me, wielded by men dressed in what you might call “land warrior nerd” attire. They were wearing telemarketer headsets and I heard the cracking of walkie-talkies. I don’t remember the specifics. All I know is that I was facing the other way, my hands against the wall up above my head. “What is this?” I asked. They frisked me and my friend. “Do you have any weapons? Any knives? Guns?” “No,” I said, flabbergasted.

Doom, Doom II, Quake, and Heretic were all played on a 386 with no sound card. And beat. I either got lucky a lot, saved a lot, or used the cheat codes a lot. Regardless, I won. Then came phone phreaking. I never really took part, but I played enough to build my own advanced Rock Box without the aid of others. Loved to blast the random telemarketer who called. Seems they call much more now. I remember that 1-800-4249096 and 9098 were the White House Press Line and the Department of Defense hotline. One still works. You play to figure out which. I memorized the touch tones so that I could tell you what number or numbers you dialed. That always seemed to freak people out.


Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin

Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, Saturday Night Live, telemarketer

In the 1990s, my father’s attitude toward me began to soften. I had written Picasso at the Lapin Agile, a play set in 1905 about a hypothetical meeting between Picasso and Einstein. My father flipped over it, bragging to his friends and telling me I should win a Pulitzer Prize. He was laughing more, too, enjoying pranks on telemarketers and mail solicitors, and he exhibited his charitable streak by delivering Meals on Wheels, a service that provides food to the elderly. I began to appreciate him more as his humor started to shine through. Though he was experiencing disturbing health issues, he took my twenty-five-year-old nephew, Rusty, to a car dealer to help him negotiate a price.


pages: 288 words: 16,556

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Philanthropy in today’s world is made doubly unrewarding by the typical giving process. A paid caller for some philanthropic organization telephones at dinner time, beginning to read from a script that has been carefully worded by professional marketers. The paid consultants who write these scripts have years of experience with telemarketing. The scripts are such a powerful force that local governments in the United States require that charities register their scripts with the attorney general or the charitable trust division. The script is designed to elicit a cash contribution, by one tactic or another. Readers are likely very familiar with the typical response when one hesitates to promise a particular dollar amount: “I need to enter a minimum amount that you are prepared to give,” perhaps with the additional explanation that the organization needs to set its budget.

., 59 nonconsequentialist reasoning, 181 nonprofit organizations: asset accumulation (trapped capital), 122–23, 205; boards, 120; child sponsorship, 200; donor recognition, 234; executive compensation, 121, 122; future of, 123; in housing market, 52; number of, 122; participation, 205–6; purposes, 122, 203; roles, 119, 120–21, 123; telemarketing, 198. See also philanthropy North Korea, 190 Novemsky, Nathan, 161 Nunn, Sam, 192 NYSE. See New York Stock Exchange O’Brien, John, 56 Occupy Wall Street, xiv, xv, 92, 187 O’Donnell, Lawrence, Jr., 91 olive oil options and futures, 76–77, 79, 246n6 (Chapter 9) Oneal, John, 228–29 Open Yale online courses, xiii, 241n1 (preface) options: demand for, 78–80; in everyday life, 76; future of, 80; history, 76–77, 79; markets, 75, 77–79; prices, 78–79; regulation of, 80; use of, 35.


Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer

affirmative action, business cycle, call centre, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, game design, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, immigration reform, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, market bubble, McMansion, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, place-making, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional

Given the demographic reality of an increasing ethnic population and relative shrinking of the number of Anglo-European consumers, many mainstream supermarkets and stores are stocking ethnic goods. There are Halal meat shelves, racks of spices, and frozen foods of different nationalities in the supermarket chains of the three cities. Ethnic products are being integrated into mainstream commerce. Recently, corporate telemarketers have started using ethnic languages and salutations to target ethnic consumers. For example, telephone and Internet service providers in Toronto use ethnic speakers to promote their offerings. The same is true in New York and Los Angeles. All in all, consumer markets of the three cities are segmented along ethnic lines to some extent, though open to outside influences.

., 172, 289n9 Switzerland, 78–9 symbolic interactionalism, 150 synagogues, 59, 78 Syrians, 93–4 Taiwanese: and Chinese economies, 118, 119, 258; in Chinese enclaves, 62, 70, 116; economic niches, 122; immigration, 113; media, 159; Index 353 political representation, 180; selfemployment rates, 102, 105, 111; transnational economies, 93, 116, 189 Tajbakhsh, K., 274 Tamils, 46, 259 Tammany Hall, 176 Target stores, 162 Taric mosque (Toronto), 79 taxi services, 74, 91, 94, 97, 103, 106, 122, 145, 249 Taylor, C., 24, 209, 237 technology industries, 89, 97, 98 telemarketing, 110 Temecula City (California), 225 temporary workers, 42, 54 terrorism, 20, 52, 78–9, 97, 265 Thompson, R., 114 Thrift, N., 29 Tim Hortons, 162 tokenism, 185 tolerance, 28, 52, 151, 154, 169, 293n23 Toronto: about, 9, 62–3, 87, 97, 98t, 143, 252; Chinese economies, 113–15, 117, 118–19, 287n54; consumer markets, 110; and diversity, 81, 191; earnings by ethnicity, 108; ethnic economic niches, 91, 97, 101–2, 105–6, 123; ethnic economies, 74; ethnic enclaves, 60–1, 62–7, 65, 72, 115, 132, 134, 142; ethnic groups, 10, 44, 45t, 46, 63; ethnic malls, 75; governance structure, 182, 183; housing, 66; iconic symbols, 260–1; immigrant demographics, 10, 44–6, 45t; integrated neighbourhoods, 73, 139, 140; as majority-minority city, 44–6, 45t, 113; as multicultural city, 5, 11, 252–4; opportunity structures, 97, 98t, 99, 100, 115, 118–19; places of worship, 79; polarization in, 106; political representation in, 181–5, 192, 193, 206, 296n22, 296nn24–5, 296–7n29; social organization, 129, 147, 148–9; and social sustainability, 86; statistics, 9, 10, 44, 45t, 46, 97, 98t, 183–4, 200; and transnationalism, 93.


pages: 172 words: 46,104

Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age by Michael Wolff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Carl Icahn, commoditize, creative destruction, digital divide, disintermediation, Golden age of television, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Joseph Schumpeter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, telemarketer, the medium is the message, vertical integration, zero-sum game

On the other hand, there’s the cheap, crass, and low, a constant and immediate arbitrage between what you spend to create the medium against the short-term sales it produces. One side of the business produces content meant to stand on its own (the content is the asset), another side makes the circulars, direct mail, advertorial, freestanding inserts (the junk in Sunday papers), telemarketing calls, crap magazines, and cable ads that in the end only justify the creation of the ad rather than any independent-value content. It’s all media, but with fundamentally different models and to a different effect. Facebook’s value as a technology company may seem high, but its actual value comes from the enormity of its meaningless, undifferentiated traffic.


pages: 199 words: 43,653

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator

Imagine a time when your mobile phone rang but you didn’t answer it. Why not? Perhaps the phone was buried in a bag and therefore difficult to reach. In this case your inability to easily answer the call inhibited the action. Your ability was limited. Maybe you thought the caller was a telemarketer or someone else you did not want to speak to. Your lack of motivation influenced you to ignore the call. It is possible that the call was important and within arm’s reach, but the ringer on your phone was silenced. Despite having both a strong motivation and easy access to answer the call, it was completely missed because you never heard it ring—in other words, no trigger was present.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

The specificity of detail is scary, as is the ability of the corporation’s computer program to reduce human activity and aspiration to predetermined, quantifiable measurements. The data from companies like Acxiom are responsible for the offers that arrive in our mailboxes, as well as the language that’s used in them. This is the data a telemarketer’s computer uses to direct him to which of a hundred different possible scripts to use when speaking to each of us. The company doesn’t really know anything about any one of us in particular. They don’t really care to know. All they need to do is look at our behaviors and then compare them with everyone else’s.


Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

Among the professions with significant gaps were CEOs (11 percent of the images in the Google image search result were women, compared with 27 percent of U.S. CEOs who are women), authors (25 percent of images for this search result were women, compared with 56 percent of U.S. authors who are women), and telemarketers (64 percent of the images were women compared with 50 percent in the workforce).43 Another study examined advertisements for the web page of a highprofile, historically black fraternity, Omega Psi Phi, which celebrated its Economic and Social Perspectives 127 one hundredth birthday. Among the algorithm-generated ads on the website were ads for low-quality, highly criticized credit cards and ads that suggest the audience member had an arrest record.44 What remains unclear is why a black fraternity website attracts ads about one’s criminal history, and why men get career coaching ads for boosting their salary, but not women.

Allen Grunes, our colleague at the Data Competition Institute, explained this “capture” dynamic with respect to an industry-proposed do-not-track standard.62 The Federal Trade Commission asked industry participants to craft a new “Do Not Track” policy for online data, similar to the “Do Not Call” registry that helped reduce the nuisance of telemarketers telephoning our homes. “But what started as a group effort by technology companies and privacy experts to craft a new type of consumer protection has quietly changed,” Grunes said, “and today has morphed into a committee where a few of the most powerful Internet firms are deciding on the rules of the game.”63 The World-Wide-Web Consortium, under the influence of dominant players such as Google, Yahoo!


pages: 515 words: 143,055

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The walled garden, by its nature, was already giving companies direct access to users and some of their information; now AOL also began allowing them, for instance, to insert ads into emails (making the service, in effect, a spammer of its own users). But there were more audacious plans still. AOL sold its users’ mailing addresses to direct mail companies. It was going to sell the phone numbers to telemarketers as well, shamelessly describing these maneuvers in its terms of service as a membership benefit. Alas, an inadvertent leak of the plan prompted a user revolt and the telemarketing part was abandoned. Finally, when these methods failed to produce enough revenue to meet the aggressive targets set by Pittman, the business group would resort to “special deals.” For example, money owed AOL for other reasons might somehow be accounted as “advertising revenue.”


pages: 520 words: 134,627

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn, Jennifer Levitz

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, blockchain, call centre, Donald Trump, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, high net worth, impact investing, independent contractor, Jeffrey Epstein, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, performance metric, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Thorstein Veblen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, yield management, young professional, zero-sum game

Headlined “Program to Outline ‘25 Steps to College,’” the article expanded into a preview of tips from Singer. One quote from him read, “Families and students need to understand that the college process is a game.” It had been a busy few years for Singer. After the Money Store folded in Sacramento, he continued on in the telemarketing industry, his initial success in the field landing him a job as an executive vice president at West Corporation, an Omaha-based company that then ran thirty-four call centers in North America. Singer was living in the Huntington Park neighborhood with Allison and their five-year-old son, Bradley, a little boy who, Singer liked to say, already had his sights set on Vanderbilt University.

In Singer’s telling, the teen had too many interests, from athletics to student government. He needed a personal brand. Singer said in the piece that he and Brad had settled on a “backpack business,” orchestrating an intricate plan to have backpacks with the school logo mass-produced by manufacturers in India—with the help of Singer’s old telemarketing coworker. A video advertisement for the Key, uploaded to YouTube in January 2012, strikes a tone somewhere between an after-school special and paid programming for a gadget you didn’t know you needed. There’s a worried mom in a kitchen extolling the virtues of the Key’s advisory services, saying that without the company, “My son would’ve missed his chance to go to USC.”


AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

The traditional service and manufacturing industries suffered heavy losses. Both were spheres where machines had an advantage.” As Michael gestured, an array of people from different professions appeared and vanished in the midair scroll: cashiers, truck drivers, seamstresses, factory workers, fruit pickers, telemarketers, well-dressed office workers, even doctors. The images kept coming, faster and faster, crowds like ghosts, vague and indistinct. “Humanity’s competitor was AI,” Saviour continued, “which could learn and improve continuously, twenty-four/seven, without rest. Jobs that had been performed by humans just a month earlier were suddenly and ruthlessly overtaken by AI.

DEXTERITY: AI and robotics cannot accomplish complex physical work that requires dexterity or precise hand-eye coordination. AI can’t deal with unknown and unstructured spaces, especially ones that it hasn’t observed. What does all this mean for the future of jobs? Jobs that are asocial and routine, such as telemarketers or insurance adjusters, are likely to be taken over in their entirety. For jobs that are highly social but routine, humans and AI would work together, each contributing expertise. For example, in the future classroom, AI could take care of grading routine homework and exams, and even offering standardized lessons and individualized drills, while the human teacher would focus on being an empathetic mentor who teaches learning by doing, supervises group projects that develop emotional intelligence, and provides personalized coaching.


pages: 168 words: 50,647

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

Because of these improving global education standards and communication technologies, many of the jobs being outsourced were not blue-collar, manual labor jobs, but so-called white-collar jobs. They were jobs in information technology, such as computer systems analysts and software engineers, or were what could be called “IT-enabled” jobs (e.g. telemarketers and bookkeepers). Any job that could be done purely over the Internet, even ones that required advanced degrees, began moving overseas in 2001. Since then, the trend isn’t just continuing—it’s speeding up. Globalization vs. Innovation: Hyatt Hijacking Shan Zhai is a Chinese term used to describe the culture and practice of producing fake and imitation products, services, and brands.


pages: 135 words: 49,109

Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America by Linda Tirado

emotional labour, it's over 9,000, payday loans, plutocrats, quantitative easing, retail therapy, telemarketer, unpaid internship

It’s just that they didn’t start getting demerits until they stopped wiggling.) At work, I’m often told what words to say, and I will be written up if I deviate from the script or combine two steps to save time. In retail, we must acknowledge a customer who comes within a set radius of us with a certain tone and tenor in our voices. In telemarketing, our every word might be scripted. In fast food, we’re typically given three greetings to choose from. At one large fast-food chain (let’s call it LFC for short), the choices were these: 1) Welcome to LFC, how can I help you? 2) Welcome to LFC, would you like to try a delicious chicken meal today for only $4.99?


pages: 179 words: 49,805

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are by Rachel Bloom

4chan, call centre, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, COVID-19, gentrification, imposter syndrome, Snapchat, telemarketer

Also, I was very chill that one time when I was instructed to get in the car of the owner, was driven by the owner to an unknown location, and waited with the car idling in the red zone when he went to a party. Bonus skill: distracting the health inspector while someone closed the doors that led to a secret and unpermitted second kitchen. Telemarketer for Nonprofit Theaters Some call center, the name of which I’ve blocked out of my memory because it was a very sad place January 2009–May 2009 I called people who saw The Nutcracker at the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre once in 1996 to ask if they were interested in purchasing a full subscription that year.


pages: 170 words: 47,569

Introverts in Love: The Quiet Way to Happily Ever After by Sophia Dembling

Albert Einstein, big-box store, Burning Man, fake it until you make it, longitudinal study, telemarketer, young professional

So while it might feel awkward at first, being able to turn on approachability at will is a useful skill to develop. I believe that the first step to looking approachable is thinking approachable. It’s no big news that our minds and bodies work in collaboration, one feeding off the other. Radio announcers and telemarketers know, for example, that keeping a smile on their face puts a smile in their voice. Similarly, going into a situation with “approachable” on your mind can help your body exude approachability. Amy Cuddy, a social scientist who studies the role nonverbal communication plays in personal power, has learned that you can “fake it till you make it” with nonverbal communication.


pages: 152 words: 53,304

I'm Just a Person by Tig Notaro

Saturday Night Live, telemarketer

The living room was silent in the early evening when she should have been making loud calls to our cousins the Raffertys, back in Mississippi. The water and food bowls in the yard were all dry. I wondered if her little squirrel, armadillo, and bird friends knew she was gone. Every time people called the house for her, mostly telemarketers and a few stragglers who didn’t know about her death, I had to tell someone else she was dead. Childhood friends came over to see me, and without my mother’s doting affections—“Oh, Sweetie, I love how you did your hair!”; “Oh, look at you . . . that shirt’s so cute!”—there was a palpable emptiness.


The Complete Android Guide: 3Ones by Kevin Purdy

car-free, card file, crowdsourcing, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, John Gruber, lock screen, QR code, Skype, speech recognition, telemarketer, turn-by-turn navigation

You can even switch between phones on the fly, so you can change from the cellphone you had walking in the door to your more comfortable home phone when you're sitting down. Call screening for conversations you want to send straight to voicemail or avoid entirely. You can have Google Voice ring you and announce the caller's name for those you've never called before, and even listen in on the voicemail as it's being recorded. For the really annoying telemarketers, you can mark them as "spam," just like email, and they'll always get ignored. Call recording by simply pressing "4" during the call (on incoming calls only, for the time being). When you stop recording (press "4" again) or end the call, the recording shows up in your Voice inbox, just like a voicemail, with an easy option to download it as an MP3 file.


pages: 162 words: 51,978

Sleepwalk With Me: And Other Painfully True Stories by Mike Birbiglia

index card, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, telemarketer, traveling salesman

My sister Gina worked at HBO so all the dupes had HBO stickers on them. It was a bit misleading. “This Birbiglia guy has an HBO special? Wait a minute—this was shot on a hi-8 in the back of a comedy club next to a tray of clinking glasses! What the hell kind of HBO special is that?” Calling club bookers is kind of like telemarketing, except you never have to say, “Is your mom there?” But you follow similar principles. Never leave a message. Always try and get a live person on the phone, and try to keep the conversation going. “Oh, you don’t want to book me this week? Okay, how about next week? Oh, you don’t like me in general?


pages: 194 words: 54,355

100 Things We've Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Big Tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, financial independence, Google Earth, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, TikTok, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Wall-E

Naturally, that family phone always rang in the middle of dinner. “Let it ring” was the prevailing ethos. Not only was it rude to pick up at dinnertime, unless Grandma was on her deathbed or someone needed picking up from the train station, it was rude to call in the first place. That had better be a telemarketer. Now our phones are wired into mealtime, bringing the Internet to the table. We can “talk” to everyone, and we can talk to one another not at all. In restaurants, people don’t converse with each other while waiting for their food. Once illuminated by candlelight, the faces of romantic couples now glow from lit-up screens.


pages: 519 words: 155,332

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

The consequence…is that our communities will find themselves in an unenviable bind: They will have to either repeal the exemptions that allow for helpful signs on streets and sidewalks, or else lift their sign restrictions altogether and resign themselves to the resulting clutter. Lower courts have since relied on the Supreme Court’s decision in this case to overturn laws restricting panhandling and “robo” telemarketing calls. A broad cross section of lawyers believes it could put all kinds of other regulations—SEC laws governing what stockbrokers can say to clients, for example, or rules about how cigarettes can be advertised—in jeopardy, too. Martin Redish told me he regards decisions like the signage case, or challenges to tobacco advertising, as “breakthroughs for freedom and a blow against hypocrisy….If you don’t like cigarettes, ban them; don’t restrict what people can know about a legal product.”

country-of-origin information: American Meat Institute v. USDA, https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/​internet/​opinions.nsf/​A064A3175BC6DEEE85257D24004FA93B/​$file/​13-5281-1504951.pdf. overturned a local ordinance: Reed et al. v. Town of Gilbert, Arizona et al., Oyez, https://www.oyez.org/​cases/​2014/​13-502. “robo” telemarketing calls: Adam Liptak, “Court’s Free-Speech Expansion Has Far-Reaching Consequences,” New York Times, August 17, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/​2015/​08/​18/​us/​politics/​courts-free-speech-expansion-has-far-reaching-consequences.html. “breakthroughs for freedom”: Interviews with Redish. the thirteenth most cited: This was determined using the database HeinOnline at http://www.heinonline.org/.


pages: 498 words: 145,708

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

As many as three-quarters of Americans favor organ donation, but opt-in requirements mean that less than one-quarter actually exercise this preference in their wills.46 On the other hand, while most consumers dislike solicitation calls on their home phones, government opt-out requirements give telemarketing firms the edge. Consumers retain a formal “right” not to be called (by opting to put their names on no-call lists), but “choice” (no surprise!) favors the marketers, who have recently won the additional right to intrude on wireless cell-phone lines unless users opt out. Finally, it would seem that maximizing the number of choices we make in private and segmented domains that are not really crucial to human happiness while limiting the choices we are able to make in public domains that are significant allows a private market system dominated by consumption and the faux liberty it supposedly entails to distort and corrupt what we care about and how we live.

Or “subvertising” corporations by getting those who patronize McDonald’s to feel “a little guilty, a little sick, a little stupid.”67 Other preferred strategies, as tame as they were cute, included sending spam mail faxers black pages that would use up the offending machines’ ink supplies and asking telemarketers for their home numbers to call them back later that evening. On paper, then, Lasn’s proposals hardly amount to resistance, let alone a ruthless critique of all that exists. Yet the jammers turn out to be exactly what Debord and his Situationists were not. In the case of the metaphysical Guy Debord, the theory was opaquely exquisite, but the practice altogether unsatisfactory.


pages: 532 words: 141,574

Bleeding Edge: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon

addicted to oil, AltaVista, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Burning Man, carried interest, deal flow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, eternal september, false flag, fixed-gear, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, index card, invisible hand, jitney, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, margin call, messenger bag, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, Y2K

“Morning,” Maxine chirps in a descending third, sharping the second note maybe a little. “Last call for his ass.” Some days it seems like every lowlife in town has Tail ’Em and Nail ’Em on their grease-stained Rolodex. A number of phone messages have piled up on the answering machine, breathers, telemarketers, even a few calls to do with tickets currently active. After some triage on the playback, Maxine returns an anxious call from a whistle-blower at a snack-food company over in Jersey which has been secretly negotiating with ex-employees of Krispy Kreme for the illegal purchase of top-secret temperature and humidity settings on the donut purveyor’s “proof box,” along with equally classified photos of the donut extruder, which however now seem to be Polaroids of auto parts taken years ago in Queens, Photoshopped and whimsically at that.

On first glance, Chazz Larday is an average lowlife from down in the U.S. someplace, come to NYC to make his fortune, having emerged out of a silent seething Gulf Coast petri dish of who knows how many local-level priors, a directoryful of petty malfeasance soon enough escalating into Title 18 beefs including telemarketing rackets via the fax machine, conspiracy to commit remanufactured toner cartridge misrepresentation, plus a history of bringing slot machines across state lines to where they are not necessarily legal, and cruising up and down the back roads of heartland suburbia peddling bootleg infrared strobes that will change red lights to green for rounders and assorted teenage offenders who don’t like stopping for nothing, all at the behest allegedly of the Dixie Mafia, a loose confederacy of ex-cons and full-auto badasses very few of whom know or even like one another.


pages: 187 words: 55,801

The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market by Frank Levy, Richard J. Murnane

Atul Gawande, business cycle, call centre, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, digital divide, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gunnar Myrdal, hypertext link, index card, information asymmetry, job automation, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, talking drums, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, working poor

In today’s economy, reading and math are similarly enabling—necessary for economic success but not sufficient. Begin with reading. If all a person can do is to follow written directions, he or she is limited to the kinds of tasks that can be expressed in rules-based logic. An example is making heavily scripted telemarketing calls. While these jobs require the ability to read, they typically pay only $6 to $8 an hour and they are increasingly vulnerable to both outsourcing abroad and computer-generated marketing messages. At the same time, a person who cannot read is lost in the computerized workplace. Reading well is essential for people to be able to acquire the knowledge needed to excel at expert thinking.


pages: 207 words: 52,716

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons by Peter Barnes

Albert Einstein, car-free, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, dark matter, digital divide, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, hypertext link, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, jitney, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, new economy, patent troll, precautionary principle, profit maximization, Ronald Coase, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

If anything is a “tragedy of the commons,” this is it (though here, again, the commons is victim, not cause). Here are a few statistics that confirm what everyone knows. Children in America see, on average, one hundred thousand television ads by age five; before they die they’ll see another two million. In 2002, marketers unleashed eighty-seven billion pieces of junk mail, fifty-one billion telemarketing calls, and eighty-four billion pieces of email spam. In 2004, a Yankelovich poll found that 65 percent of Americans “feel constantly bombarded with too much advertising and marketing.” Advertising isn’t just an occasional trespass of one person against another; it’s a continuous trespass of relatively few corporations (the one hundred or so that do the most advertising) against all the rest of us.


pages: 177 words: 56,657

Be Obsessed or Be Average by Grant Cardone

Albert Einstein, benefit corporation, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, fear of failure, job-hopping, Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, white picket fence

I’ve created best-selling audio and video programs and have written books, all related to sales and growing a business. Being a sales genius also meant I could talk about different topics within sales, including closing the sale, customer service, customer control, follow-up, cold-calling, running a telemarketing team, long sales cycles, retail sales, Internet sales, webinars, selling from the stage, real estate sales, insurance sales, and on and on. Once I had this list, I came up with a short statement of who I am and why I dominate this particular area of expertise. My statement was “I am the Godfather of Sales.


pages: 224 words: 64,156

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, digital Maoism, Douglas Hofstadter, Extropian, follow your passion, General Magic , hive mind, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Conway, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Long Term Capital Management, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Project Xanadu, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, social graph, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Despite some attempts, it doesn’t look as if the industry is able to agree on how to make this happen, so this annoyance seems to define a natural role for government. It is strange to have to point this out, but given the hyper-libertarian atmosphere of Silicon Valley, it’s important to note that government isn’t always bad. I like the “Do not call” list, for instance, since it has contained the scourge of telemarketing. I’m also glad we only have one currency, one court system, and one military. Even the most extreme libertarian must admit that fluid commerce has to flow through channels that amount to government. Of course, one of the main reasons that digital entrepreneurs have tended to prefer free content is that it costs money to manage micro-payments.


Learning Node.js: A Hands-On Guide to Building Web Applications in JavaScript by Marc Wandschneider

business logic, database schema, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, functional programming, Google Chrome, node package manager, telemarketer, web application

rl.question(item, function (answer) { output.push(answer); cb(null); }); }, function (err) { // 3. if (err) { console.log("Hunh, couldn't get answers"); console.log(err); return; } fs.appendFileSync("answers.txt", JSON.stringify(output) + "\n"); console.log("\nThanks for your answers!"); console.log("We'll sell them to some telemarketer immediately!"); rl.close(); } ); * * * The program performs the following tasks: 1. It initializes the readline module and sets up the stdin and stdout streams. 2. Then, for each question in the array, you call the question function on readline (using async.forEachSeries because question is an asynchronous function) and add the result to the output array. 3.


pages: 232 words: 66,229

Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland

Berlin Wall, index card, Maui Hawaii, PalmPilot, Silicon Valley, telemarketer

And then she hung up, no phone number or anything. Well what was I supposed to make of that? I listened to the message again. She didn’t sound evil, and believe me, I’ve seen and heard so much evil in the courtroom that by now you could use my blood as an anti-evil vaccine. Who was this woman, and what exactly was she on about-telemarketing? If it had been something to do with Jason, I figured she would have used a different voice with a different tone. Meaning what, Heather? Meaning, this woman didn’t sound like the type to deliver ransom instructions or notify the cops to go looking in the Fraser River for a corpse rolled up in a discount Persian carpet.


pages: 237 words: 66,545

The Money Tree: A Story About Finding the Fortune in Your Own Backyard by Chris Guillebeau

Bernie Madoff, drop ship, Ethereum, fail fast, financial independence, global village, hiring and firing, housing crisis, independent contractor, messenger bag, passive income, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, Steve Jobs, telemarketer

Maybe he’d give Romeo George a call to see if he knew a furniture guy. As he was unpacking, trying to decide where to place his desk, thinking that he really should put up those groceries, he received some news that made everything else completely irrelevant. It arrived in a phone call from an unknown number, which he ignored at first. Must be telemarketers. When he didn’t pick up, he heard another ping with a message. “Jake, it’s Celia from the group. I got your number from Preena. Can you call me back ASAP?” He called her right away. “Celia? Hey, how are you and how are things with your web—” She cut him off. “Jake, listen. Where are you now?”


pages: 227 words: 71,675

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond, Zack Exley

battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, declining real wages, digital rights, Donald Trump, family office, fixed income, full employment, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, income inequality, Kickstarter, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, randomized controlled trial, Skype, telemarketer, union organizing

I’m serious when I say that if there are no nurses, I don’t want to be part of your revolution. In poll after poll, nursing is named by Americans as the most-trusted profession. No other profession is even close. Meanwhile, there’s a four-way tie for the least-trusted professions: lobbyists, members of Congress, telemarketers, and car salespeople. When National Nurses United endorsed Bernie Sanders for president (they were the first national union to do so), NNU president RoseAnn DeMoro said “Bernie’s issues align with nurses from top to bottom.” The same could be said about a true political revolution by the people.


pages: 258 words: 69,706

Undoing Border Imperialism by Harsha Walia

Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, degrowth, emotional labour, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Internet Archive, mass incarceration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, telemarketer, women in the workforce

We’re anarchists, which is reflected both in the books we provide and the way we organize our business. Decisions at AK Press are made collectively, from what we publish, to what we distribute and how we structure our labor. All the work, from sweeping floors to answering phones, is shared. When the telemarketers call and ask, “who’s in charge?” the answer is: everyone. Our goal isn’t profit (although we do have to pay the rent). Our goal is supplying radical words and images to as many people as possible. The books and other media we distribute are published by independent presses, not the corporate giants.


pages: 233 words: 69,745

The Reluctant Carer: Dispatches From the Edge of Life by The Reluctant Carer

call centre, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, disinformation, gig economy, Jeff Bezos, load shedding, place-making, stem cell, telemarketer, trolley problem

Doctors, children, chemists, restaurants (when sufficiently mobile), we all respond to him this way. Unlike the door which thumps like ordnance, the phone rings at a pitch which can elude Mum completely. Dad then is the default receptionist at this office of dysfunction and so if I am out or otherwise engaged it falls to him to keep the rogues at bay. The volume of hoax calls, telemarketing, and pernicious aural spam directed at an elderly household is phenomenal. I have worked in frantic offices where things were quieter. It matters not which directories you exit or what preferences you set, somewhere in the world in some extrajudicial circle of hell, there are rooms full of underpaid young people calling the houses of older people in a bid to redistribute whatever wealth is perceived to be there.


pages: 168 words: 9,044

You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing by John Scalzi

non-fiction novel, Occam's razor, place-making, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, zero-sum game

But now, 15 years into the whole "writing career" thing, I'm here to tell you that I was cruelly deceived by my own attempts at sloth: Turns out writing—if you actually want to make a living from it, and I do—really is actual work. Naturally when I discovered this I was appalled and dismayed, but since at the time I was too far into the writing hole to be qualified to do any other sort of work that didn't involve a price check or reading a telemarketing script (which is even more like real work than what I was doing), I had no choice but to continue . Fortunately, overall things have turned out pretty well for me so far with this writing thing I've got going. By the end of 2006 I'll have published eleven books, fiction and non-fiction both, and aside from that I'll have written just about every sort of commercial writing there is to write save for a movie script (that's a special sort of hellish endeavor I suspect I would need to start drinking in order to contemplate).


pages: 254 words: 79,052

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation by Chris Nodder

4chan, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, drop ship, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, game design, gamification, haute couture, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, late fees, lolcat, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, Netflix Prize, Nick Leeson, Occupy movement, Paradox of Choice, pets.com, price anchoring, recommendation engine, Rory Sutherland, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile

Class Action Lawsuit: Complaint document, Martha Cornett v. Direct Brands Inc. and Bookspan, United States District Court, Southern District of California. Filed Aug 4, 2011. Scholastic’s $710,000 fine: “Children’s Book Publisher to Pay $710,000 to Settle Charges It Violated Commission’s Negative Option and Telemarketing Sales Rule.” Federal Trade Commission (ftc.gov). June 21, 2005. Retrieved December 2012. Discount clubs: “Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee report on Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and Their Impact on American Consumers” (commerce.senate.gov). Nov 17, 2009. Retrieved December 2012; and “Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee Supplemental Report on Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet” (commerce.senate.gov).


pages: 287 words: 80,180

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim, Renée A. Mauborgne

Asian financial crisis, Blue Ocean Strategy, borderless world, call centre, classic study, cloud computing, commoditize, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, endogenous growth, Ford Model T, haute couture, index fund, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, machine translation, market fundamentalism, NetJets, Network effects, RAND corporation, Salesforce, Skype, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

It has done so by complementing its compelling value proposition with an unbeatable profit proposition that simultaneously achieves a low-cost structure while generating funds in a differentiated way. Traditional charities use a variety of methods to raise funds from several sources such as writing grant proposals to governments, trusts, and foundations; holding fund-raising galas for wealthy influential people and corporations; directly soliciting via mail and telemarketing; and operating charity shops. Almost all these activities entail significant overhead costs in staff, management, and administration as well as the possible renting or purchase of facilities. Comic Relief, by contrast, eliminated all of these. It doesn’t plow time and money into expensive fund-raising galas, it doesn’t write grants to solicit funds from governments and foundations, and it doesn’t have charity shops.


CultureShock! Egypt: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette (4th Edition) by Susan L. Wilson

air freight, anti-communist, call centre, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land reform, RAND corporation, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route

MANAGING YOUR MONEY: BANKS For a listing of Egyptian banks, addresses and phone numbers go to: http://www.egyptdailynews.com/egypt%20banks.htm Some Egyptian banks have Internet sites, for example: „ Banque Misr Website: http://www.banquemisr.com.eg/index.asp „ Alwatany Bank of Egypt Website: http://www.alwatany.net/ „ Banque du Caire Website: http://www.bdc.com.eg/English/ Emergency Numbers (Cairo) „ „ „ American Express (24 hour customer service) Tel: (02) 2480-1530 Visa Card (Lost Cards) Tel: (toll free in Cairo) 510-0200-866-654-0128 (outside Cairo) 02-510-0200-866-654-0128 Western Union Money Transfer Tel: (02) 2755-5165 (Heliopolis); (02) 2796-2151 (Garden City) Website: http://www.westernunion.com/ (Click “Find A Location”) Resource Guide 311 TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS Train information/reservations Tel: (02) 2575-3555 Country and City Codes The country code for Egypt is 20 Selected City Codes Cairo Alexandria Aswan Luxor Hurghada 2 3 97 95 65 Telephone Service „ „ „ Mobinil (Their mobile numbers always start with ‘012’) Nile City Bldg. 2005C, Cornishe El-Nil, Ramlet-Boulaq Customer Service: 16110 (from any line); 110 (from a Mobinil line) Website: http://www.mobinil.com/home.aspx Vodafone Egypt (formerly Click GSM. Their mobile numbers always start with ‘010’) Vodafone C2 Bldg., Cairo Telemarketing: (02) 2529-4444 (Sun to Thurs 9am to 5pm) Customer Service: 16888 (from any line) Telecom Egypt (Landline service) Call centre: 111 (24 hours daily) Important Telephone Numbers „ International Operator 120 For Telephone Complaints „ HQ (Troubleshooting) 188 312 CultureShock! Egypt INTERNET CAFÉS AND SERVICE PROVIDERS „ „ „ „ Internet Egypt 2 Midan Simon Bolivar, Ground Floor, Garden City, Cairo Tel: 19665; fax: (02) 2794-9611 Email: inquiries@internetegypt.com Website: http://www.internetegypt.com/Contact_us.htm At Internet Egypt, you can get free through DSL service (at a reasonable rate) and it has four cybercafés throughout Cairo.


pages: 271 words: 83,944

The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty

affirmative action, Apollo 13, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, cotton gin, desegregation, El Camino Real, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Lao Tzu, late fees, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, p-value, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skinner box, telemarketer, theory of mind, War on Poverty, white flight, yellow journalism

Even the ones who are biologically white aren’t white white. Laguna Beach volleyball white. Bel Air white. Omakaze white. Spicolli white. Brett Easton Ellis white. Three first names white. Valet parking white. Brag about your Native American, Argentinian, Portuguese ancestry white. Pho white. Paparazzi white. I once got fired from a telemarketing job, now look at me, I’m famous white. Calabazas white. I love L.A. It’s the only place where you can go skiing, to the beach and to the desert all in one day white. She held on to her vision rather than sit next to me, not that I blamed her, because by the time the bus hit Figueroa Boulevard, there were a number of people on board whom I wouldn’t have chosen to sit next to, either.


pages: 244 words: 85,379

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

Bonfire of the Vanities, Day of the Dead, fear of failure, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, old-boy network, pink-collar, telemarketer, traveling salesman, War on Poverty

If you want to be a successful writer, you must be able to describe it, and in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition. If you can do this, you will be paid for your labors, and deservedly so. If you can’t, you’re going to collect a lot of rejection slips and perhaps explore a career in the fascinating world of telemarketing. Thin description leaves the reader feeling bewildered and nearsighted. Overdescription buries him or her in details and images. The trick is to find a happy medium. It’s also important to know what to describe and what can be left alone while you get on with your main job, which is telling a story.


pages: 304 words: 85,291

Cities: The First 6,000 Years by Monica L. Smith

Anthropocene, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, diversified portfolio, failed state, financial innovation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, New Urbanism, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, SimCity, South China Sea, telemarketer, the built environment, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Our entertainment follows the oscillation of the sun, too. Although there are now many more ways to watch television programs, for example, we nevertheless have a sense that the “prime time” for relaxation and entertainment is equivalent to the early evening hours. We are ready prey for those who expect us to be home, as known by telemarketers who target their customers between dinner and bedtime. Our diurnal patterns set conditions on infrastructure, too. Commuting to the kinds of white-collar work that cities make possible will continue to be between 6:00–9:00 a.m. and 4:00–7:00 p.m., which means that there will always be a need to tailor transportation networks to concepts of a “rush hour” instead of spreading out infrastructure timings as if there were a 24/7 world of steady demand.


pages: 324 words: 86,056

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

When I tell people I’m a socialist today, they just nod and go about their day—not a hint of physical revulsion. I discovered socialism largely by chance. My parents immigrated to the United States from Trinidad and Tobago with four children shortly before I was born. My mother worked nights as a telemarketer, my father, a declassed professional, eventually as a civil servant in New York City. After hopping around for a bit, they rented in a suburban town with a good school district. Even though we didn’t have much, I had enough—a decent home, a great education, basketball courts, and a public library where I spent way too much of my youth.


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

Qtd. in Christopher Matthews, Hardball: How Politics is Played—Told by One Who Knows the Game (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 155. 11. John Aldrich, “The Invisible Primary and Its Effects on Democratic Choice.” PS: Political Science and Politics 42, no. 1 (2009): 33–38. 12. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/july-dec99/drew_7-23.html 13. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/03/30/149648666/senator-by-day-telemarketer-by-night 14. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/our-corrupt-politics-its-not-all-money/ 15. http://www.mendeley.com/research/theory-political-parties-2/; see also http://a.nicco.org/L3wbUY 16. In John Tedesco and Andrew Paul Williams, The Internet Election: Perspectives on the Web in Campaign 2004 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). 17.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

Citing a paper by Oxford University’s Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne that predicts that 47% of all American jobs might be lost in the next couple of decades,40 the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson speculates on “which half” of the workforce could be made redundant by robots. Of the ten jobs that have a 99% likelihood of being replaced by networked software and automation over the next quarter century, Thompson includes tax preparers, library technicians, telemarketers, sewers in clothing factories, accounts clerks, and photographic process workers.41 While it’s all very well to speculate about who will lose their jobs because of automation, Thompson says, “the truth is scarier. We don’t have a clue.”42 But Thompson is wrong. The writing is on the wall about both the winners and the losers in this dehumanizing race between computers and people.


pages: 420 words: 98,309

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Ayatollah Khomeini, classic study, climate anxiety, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, false memory syndrome, fear of failure, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, psychological pricing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sugar pill, telemarketer, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

About a fourth of the entire American adult population has been taken in by one scam or another, some silly, some serious: sweepstakes offers of having won a million dollars, if only you send us the tax on that amount first; gold coins you can buy at a tenth of their market value; a miracle bed that will cure all your ailments, from headaches to arthritis. Every year, Americans lose more than $40 billion to telemarketing frauds alone, and older people are especially susceptible to them. Con artists know all about dissonance and self-justification. They know that when people are caught between "I am a smart and capable person" and "I have spent thousands of dollars on magazine subscriptions I don't need and on bogus sweepstakes entries," few will reduce dissonance by deciding they aren't smart and capable.


pages: 318 words: 93,502

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren, Amelia Warren Tyagi

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, business climate, Columbine, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, McMansion, mortgage debt, new economy, New Journalism, payday loans, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, school vouchers, telemarketer, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

In addition, under the current SSDI guidelines, the disability must be so severe that the individual is unable to perform any job anywhere in the entire country, not just the job for which the worker is trained and has spent a lifetime building skills and qualifications. This means that someone who had worked for decades as an electrician or as a surgeon, but who developed a disability that prevented him from performing those duties, would not receive a single dime if he were deemed well enough to work as a telemarketer or a toll collector. The SSDI program could be modified to provide a sliding benefit depending on the level of disability (akin to many private disability policies), and temporary benefits could be offered while the worker undergoes retraining. Universal, state-sponsored disability benefits would be ideal to fill the gap in the safety net.


pages: 327 words: 88,121

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

And because our more basic needs are met by a more limited pool of labor, a greater proportion of the American workforce—most of whom, in previous eras, would likely have toiled on farms and assembly lines—have been empowered to earn their livings by satisfying more fleeting demands. The guy who once might have worked in a steel mill now earns a living making custom window treatments. The woman who once would have done backbreaking labor on the family farm now works in the relative comfort of a telemarketing call center. Say what you will about which job you’d prefer in a perfect world, two things are true: food and steel satisfy a more basic need than window treatments and customer service, and the latter two jobs are significantly less taxing and dangerous. It wasn’t always obvious that things would turn out this way.


Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life by David Allen

Abraham Maslow, cognitive dissonance, index card, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, shareholder value, Skype, telemarketer

In addition to all the stuff you interact with that you need to address, there are many other things that show up in your world that, while needing no further action or commitment on your part, do require you to make a determination about which of the following three subcategories each one of them falls into: It’s Meaningless An obvious set of items that have a discrete meaning would be those that actually have no meaning at all: things you no longer need, or didn’t need in the first place—junk mail to toss, e-mails that have no interest or relevance to you, absurd telemarketing messages on your answering machine. This category includes anything in your environment that has no reason to be there, or to exist at all. Think of it as fodder for the Delete key on your computer, your wastebasket, recycle bin, Dumpster, shredder, or local charity. Trash, once it is determined to be so, is usually not a problem, unless your garbage collection service in on strike, your kitchen disposal is broken, or you’re just too lazy to pull out the dead rose from the garden.


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

.”* While jobs that produce essentials like food, shelter, and goods have been largely automated away, we have seen an enormous expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration (as opposed to actual teaching, research, and the practice of medicine), “human resources,” and public relations, not to mention new industries like financial services and telemarketing and ancillary industries in the so-called gig economy that serve those who are too busy doing all that additional work. How will societies cope with technology’s increasingly rapid destruction of entire professions and throwing large numbers of people out of work? Some argue that this concern is based on a false premise, because new jobs spring up that didn’t exist before, but as Graeber points out, these new jobs won’t necessarily be rewarding or fulfilling.


pages: 287 words: 92,194

Sex Power Money by Sara Pascoe

Albert Einstein, call centre, Donald Trump, fake news, Firefox, gender pay gap, invention of movable type, Louis Daguerre, meta-analysis, Neil Kinnock, Ocado, phenotype, Russell Brand, TED Talk, telemarketer, twin studies, zero-sum game

There’s great difficulty in proving someone ‘meant’ what they claim was a joke. Jokes are usually monstrous. We laugh when intentions are clear, we laugh because we know it’s pretence and grotesquerie. Yet even when joking, people lose their jobs for saying the sort of thing Trump did. But Trump wasn’t in a telemarketing or admin role which he could be fired from. No one told him, ‘We can’t allow that attitude in customer service – you’re dealing directly with the public,’ because he had no one to answer to. Grabbing women reflected how powerful he was. ‘You can do anything,’ he locker-roomed about his own authoritative position.


Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Apple Newton, Big Tech, Biosphere 2, car-free, computer age, El Camino Real, Future Shock, game design, General Magic , guns versus butter model, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence

Bug Barbecue and I were wondering last week what's going to happen when this new crop of workers reaches its inevitable Seven-Year Programmer's Burnout. At the end of it they won't have two million dollars to move to Hilo and start up a bait shop with, the way the Microsoft old-timers did. Not everyone can move into management. Discarded. Face it: You're always just a breath away from a job in telemarketing. Everybody I know at the company has an estimated time of departure and they're all within five years. It must have been so weird - living the way my Dad did - thinking your company was going to take care of you forever. * * * A few minutes later I bumped into Karla walking across the west lawn.


pages: 347 words: 91,318

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs by Gina Keating

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, company town, corporate raider, digital rights, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Netflix Prize, new economy, out of africa, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Superbowl ad, tech worker, telemarketer, warehouse automation, X Prize

In 1984, he helped found the U.S. version of MacUser magazine, which was brought to the United States by British publisher Felix Dennis and pornography impresario Peter Godfrey to capitalize on the growing consumer interest in PCs. About a year later, Godfrey tapped Randolph to a start a new venture—the computer mail-order businesses MacWarehouse and MicroWarehouse. Randolph chose the product mix, published the mail-order catalogs, and set up the telemarketing sales force. Here Randolph learned that overnight delivery coupled with superior customer service translated into increased sales and better retention. He partnered with up-and-coming overnight shipper Federal Express and targeted zero tolerance for shipping errors. At the end of each day his customer service workers called to apologize to people whose orders had not shipped.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

Winning, moreover, yields no relief from the need to raise money. A “model daily schedule” for congresspeople calls for more than four hours directly soliciting donors every day in office. This roughly triples the time spent discussing policy with nondonor constituents, a disparity so great that politicians are sometimes said to resemble telemarketers rather than government officials. When Mick Mulvaney, the Trump administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and (as of this writing) acting White House chief of staff, recently told the American Bankers Association that when he was in Congress, “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you.

every day in office: See Ezra Klein, “The Most Depressing Graphic for Members of Congress,” Washington Post, January 14, 2013, accessed July 20, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/01/14/the-most-depressing-graphic-for-members-of-congress/?utm_term=.072d62e69b40. Hereafter cited as Klein, “The Most Depressing Graphic.” This roughly triples: See Klein, “The Most Depressing Graphic.” said to resemble telemarketers: See, e.g., David Jolly, interview with Norah O’Donnell, “Dialing for Dollars,” 60 Minutes, CBS, April 24, 2016. “If you’re a lobbyist”: See James Hohmann, “The Daily 202: Mick Mulvaney’s Confession Highlights the Corrosive Influence of Money in Politics,” PowerPost (blog), Washington Post, April 25, 2018, accessed July 20, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2018/04/25/daily-202-mick-mulvaney-s-confession-highlights-the-corrosive-influence-of-money-in-politics/5adfea2230fb043711926869/?


pages: 374 words: 97,288

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

Without the ability to tailor licenses, they argue, it will be more difficult for rights holders and retailers to tailor their prices. We interrogate those claims below. Licensing and Price Discrimination Licenses facilitate price discrimination. ProCD v. Zeidenberg illustrates this point well. ProCD wanted to sell its database to two different groups of customers at very different prices. Businesses like telemarketing companies were willing to pay high prices for ProCD’s database. But the average person has less money to spend and less interest in a phone database. So the price had to be lower. If ProCD charged a high price, businesses would buy, but normal people wouldn’t. If it charged a low price, both would buy, but ProCD would be leaving money on the table since businesses would have paid the higher price.


pages: 317 words: 101,074

The Road Ahead by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson

Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Donald Knuth, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, glass ceiling, global village, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, medical malpractice, Mitch Kapor, new economy, packet switching, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

Others discover they don't have the self-discipline to make it effective. In the years ahead, millions of additional people will telecommute at least part-time, using the information highway. Employees who do most of their work on the telephone are strong candidates for telecommuting because calls can be routed to them. Telemarketers, customer-service representatives, reservation agents, and product-support specialists will have access to as much information on a screen at home as they would on a screen at an office. A decade from now, advertisements for many jobs will list how many hours a week of work are expected and how many of those hours, if any, are "inside" hours at a designated location such as an office.


pages: 309 words: 95,644

On Writing Well (30th Anniversary Edition) by William Zinsser

affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, feminist movement, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Lewis Mumford, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, popular capitalism, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman

It’s also what stockholders want from their corporation, what customers want from their bank, what the widow wants from the agency that’s handling her social security. There is a deep yearning for human contact and a resentment of bombast. Recently I got a “Dear Customer” letter from the company that supplies my computer needs. It began: “Effective March 30 we will be migrating our end user order entry and supplies referral processing to a new telemarketing center.” I finally figured out that they had a new 800 number and that the end user was me. Any organization that won’t take the trouble to be both clear and personal in its writing will lose friends, customers and money. Let me put it another way for business executives: a shortfall will be experienced in anticipated profitability.


pages: 319 words: 103,707

Against Everything: Essays by Mark Greif

1960s counterculture, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, fixed-gear, income inequality, informal economy, Joan Didion, managed futures, Norman Mailer, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, Ronald Reagan, technoutopianism, telemarketer, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, white flight

Of course, teen pregnancy didn’t lead to car keys; quite the opposite, as when we saw new mother Farrah unable, despite begging and tears, to get her mom to help her lease a Ford Focus so she could get out of the house sometimes on her own. Early pregnancy was declassing. Even this unusually wealthy-ish cheerleader had to surrender plans for college, eliminate her social life, and spend her time caring for the kid. Her after-school telemarketing job, shown in the first minutes of the program, at the end seemed like a lifetime fate. Or the teen could hand the baby over to a nice wealthy couple in their mid-to-late thirties, as Catelynn did on the season finale. I don’t know if either tale was cautionary. It all seems grim; yet the pregnancy series, as much as the party series, is unavoidably, unbelievably watchable, not in the manner of PBS-style vitamin-rich sociological documentary, but Technicolored.


pages: 358 words: 95,115

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman

affirmative action, classic study, cognitive load, Columbine, delayed gratification, desegregation, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, index card, job satisfaction, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, theory of mind

The other reason children lie, according to Talwar, is that they learn it from us. Talwar challenged that parents need to really consider the importance of honesty in their own lives. Too often, she finds, parents’ own actions show kids an ad hoc appreciation of honesty. “We don’t explicitly tell them to lie, but they see us do it. They see us tell the telemarketer, ‘I’m just a guest here.’ They see us boast and lie to smooth social relationships.” Consider how we expect a child to act when he opens a gift he doesn’t like. We expect him to swallow all his honest reactions—anger, disappointment, frustration—and put on a polite smile. Talwar runs an experiment where children play various games to win a present, but when they finally receive the present, it’s a lousy bar of soap.


pages: 292 words: 99,273

Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living by Nick Offerman

Berlin Wall, Downton Abbey, lateral thinking, Mason jar, telemarketer, wage slave, Wall-E

I wanted for nothing, and I was making theater sixteen hours a day. I was lucky that my day job was also working in theaters as a carpenter, especially compared to many of the company members who had temp jobs in offices or other equally depressing grinds. There was one slow winter, however, that saw a few of us reduced to this quasi-telemarketing job set up by another charismatic Kabuki alumnus named Goldberg (our actual Achilles). The job was to sit in a cubicle and call cardiologists on the phone to ask them to review a new perfusion catheter that they had been utilizing. Adding to the bizarre flavor of the experience was the fact that the company had located its offices directly over the Fulton Street fish market, so this “cool” brick warehouse office absolutely reeked of fish.


pages: 268 words: 109,447

The Cultural Logic of Computation by David Golumbia

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, American ideology, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, borderless world, business process, cellular automata, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, creative destruction, digital capitalism, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, folksonomy, future of work, Google Earth, Howard Zinn, IBM and the Holocaust, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, machine translation, means of production, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application, Yochai Benkler

Profitable customer management begins with knowing your customers. Yet few companies have the cross-channel knowledge required for consistent, personalized customer management and marketing decisions. With MarketSmart, information is collected at all your push and pull touchpoints—including email, direct mail, stores, inbound and outbound telemarketing, Web sites and kiosks. As a result, you now can have a complete picture of each customer’s behavior and preferences—a picture that will help drive profitability across all of your channels and product lines. MarketSmart integrates powerful decisioning tools that help you create, test and execute strategies across your business.


pages: 308 words: 98,022

Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson

cotton gin, impulse control, Mason jar, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, telemarketer, Y2K

And possibly my stepbrother. Then one of us would get stabbed with a broken whiskey bottle and/or raped. Turns out the only part I was right about was that one of us was going to get stabbed. IT WAS 1996, and Victor and I were still in college. At night he worked as a deejay, and I worked as a phone prostitute in telemarketing. We’d been living together for about a year when Victor decided it was time to get married, and (just to make it all rock-star romantic) he decided to propose on air. The only problem was that if he was on air he wouldn’t be there to physically make me say yes, and so instead he took the night off and set up a recording that would make it sound like he was calling in to the radio show to talk to the guy filling in for him.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

If you never speak in public but must say something at a wedding, and your highest ambition is not to embarrass yourself, then the risk-reward calculation is likely to point to writing a script. But if you are delivering a talk that should be informal and interactive, yet you are reading out a backdrop of bullet-point slides, you’ve cast a vote of no confidence in yourself—just as a telemarketing script is the micromanagers’ vote of no confidence in their junior staff. So what does it take to successfully improvise? The first element, paradoxically, is practice. Comedians and musicians must also practice their craft until much of what they do is entirely unconscious. “Reflection and attention are of scarcely any service in the matter,” wrote the pianist and teacher Carl Czerny, back in 1839.


pages: 193 words: 98,671

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Bill Atkinson, business cycle, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Gary Kildall, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, informal economy, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, natural language processing, new economy, PalmPilot, pets.com, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, urban planning

Dexter has a pager, two cell phones, a pocket computer, and a wireless modem stashed in the pockets of his double-breasted suit as he walks between sound stages. He is a master of technology, and he can solve any problem. His colleagues are always calling him over to help find lost files for them, but he is really too busy for those time-wasting exercises. Clint is holding on line three! Roberto is a telemarketing representative for J. P. Stone, the mail-order merchant of rugged outdoor clothing. He sits in a carrel in a suburb of Madison, Wisconsin, wearing a telephone headset and using a PC to process phoned-in orders. Roberto doesn't know a thing about high technology or computers, but he is a steady, conscientious worker and has a wonderful ability to follow complex procedures without difficulty.


pages: 335 words: 96,002

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World by Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, Marc Kielburger, Sir Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, blood diamond, Boeing 747, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, Colonization of Mars, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, energy transition, family office, food desert, future of work, global village, impact investing, inventory management, James Dyson, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, market design, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, pre–internet, retail therapy, Salesforce, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Virgin Galactic, working poor, Y Combinator

Jeff challenged our longstanding assumptions that the business world makes the profits and then shares a little extra with a beholden charitable sector. He cautioned us that the charitable sector was often caught in a cycle of wasteful fundraising techniques, like for-profit firms that take up to 90 cents on the dollar for mass mailings, telemarketers, street canvassers, and those Sunday morning commercial pleas to send money.1 As social entrepreneurs, we could create financial sustainability for our projects. We were missing untapped opportunities by limiting ourselves to only traditional charitable models. Jeff planted the seed for a socially conscious revenue driver.


pages: 349 words: 98,309

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

Grocery store clerks and retail workers can’t just show up whenever they want—they have set hours. Law-firm attorneys, teachers, accountants, postal workers, emergency room doctors, and call center employees have their hours set by an employer and the market: no one wants their mail to arrive at midnight or to get a telemarketing call at 4 a.m. Some of these jobs also have staffing considerations: we want teachers to be present when students are at school and a certain number of doctors to fulfill the needs of a busy emergency room. There’s nothing wrong with requiring people to show up to work at certain times, but if you can’t do the job whenever you want, you should not be considered an independent contractor.


Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder

Berlin Wall, centre right, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, index card, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Prenzlauer Berg, telemarketer, the built environment

The easterners are wary because of their fancy clothes, their Mercedes Benzes, and so on.’ Terrific. Here he is once more getting the trust of his people and selling them cheap. Stasi men are by and large less affected by the unemployment that has consumed East Germany since the Wall came down. Many of them have found work in insurance, telemarketing and real estate. None of these businesses existed in the GDR. But the Stasi were, in effect, trained for them, schooled in the art of convincing people to do things against their own self-interest. ‘We never thought, no-one ever thought, that it would all come to an end,’ he says. ‘It would not have occurred to anyone that our country could somehow cease to be.


pages: 331 words: 96,989

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam L. Alter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, death from overwork, drug harm reduction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Richard Thaler, Robert Durst, side project, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, three-martini lunch

They forget that exercise is primarily designed to make them healthier, developing stress-related injuries instead in the quest for arbitrary fitness goals. Beyond personal fitness devices, some companies gamify the workplace to motivate their employees. In 2000, four tech entrepreneurs formed a remote call center called LiveOps. LiveOps enlists more than twenty thousand everyday Americans to make telemarketing phone calls, and, more recently, to run the social media platforms of large organizations from Pizza Hut to Electronic Arts. The company vets agents before admitting them to its staff, and once accepted they can work as much or as little as they like in blocks of thirty minutes. All agents need are a landline phone, a computer, a high-speed Internet connection, and a corded headset.


pages: 325 words: 97,162

The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life. by Robin Sharma

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, dematerialisation, epigenetics, fake news, Grace Hopper, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, index card, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Rosa Parks, telemarketer, white picket fence

The homeless man burped, then got down to the floor and held a plank, the kind fitness pros at the gym love to do to build a strong core. You could hear The Spellbinder begin to cough even more fiercely. A brutal—and sustained—pause followed. Next, he uttered these words, haltingly. He was wheezing audibly. His voice began to quiver like a novice telemarketer on her very first sales call. Rising at 5 AM truly is The Mother of All Routines. Joining The 5 AM Club is the one behavior that raises every other human behavior. This regimen is the ultimate needle mover to turn you into an undefeatable model of possibility. The way you begin your day really does determine the extent of focus, energy, excitement and excellence you bring to it.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

That AI is nebulous to the point of emptiness is invisible, along with the premises of whiteness generally, to those who are invested in it. Raymond Lawrence (“Boots”) Riley’s film Sorry to Bother You (2018) brings out some of these premises of whiteness and their intimate ties to capitalism. The film’s protagonist, Cassius (“Cash”) Green, who is black, finds work at a telemarketing center. An older black colleague offers Cash some friendly advice: if you want to sell things over the phone, use your “white voice.” The colleague explains: “It’s not about sounding all nasal. It’s about sounding like you don’t have a care. Like your bills are paid and you’re happy about your future.… Breezy, like you don’t need this money, like you never been fired, only laid off.”35 The white voice, as the film brilliantly demonstrates, is a politically useful fiction, not an imitation of any white person’s voice.


pages: 346 words: 97,890

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

The debate in this area was galvanized by a 2013 report entitled ‘The Future of Employment’, written by two colleagues of mine at the University of Oxford, Carl Frey and Michael Osborne.1 The rather startling headline prediction of the report was that up to 47 per cent of jobs in the United States were susceptible to automation by AI and related technologies in the relatively near future. Frey and Osborne classified 702 occupations according to what they saw as the probability that the job could be automated. The report suggested that those occupations at the highest risk included telemarketers, hand sewers, insurance underwriters, data entry clerks (and indeed many other types of clerk), telephone operators, salespeople, engravers and cashiers. Those at least risk included therapists, dentists, counsellors, physicians and surgeons, and teachers. They concluded that: Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are at risk.


pages: 285 words: 98,832

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, gentleman farmer, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, out of africa, precautionary principle, QAnon, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, tech bro, telemarketer, the new new thing, working poor, young professional

After all, if you were calling the Red Phone it was usually because some system had failed you. One evening in March, Joe looked down, saw an unfamiliar number, and very nearly didn’t answer it. The area code was Sacramento, his hometown, and so he gave the caller the benefit of the doubt. “I thought it was a telemarketer, but I picked it up and it was Gavin Newsom.” The California governor explained that he had a problem but was still unsure of its dimensions. He asked Joe to make two lists: one, of the three best things the governor of California might do to respond to the new coronavirus; the other, of the three worst.


pages: 394 words: 110,352

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation by Jono Bacon

barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), collaborative editing, crowdsourcing, Debian, DevOps, digital divide, digital rights, do what you love, do-ocracy, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, Guido van Rossum, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, openstreetmap, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, software as a service, Stephen Fry, telemarketer, the long tail, union organizing, VA Linux, web application

Or maybe it only accepts calls from telemarketing companies? Maybe the buttons are too small? How about really short battery life? When you ask these kinds of questions in a brainstorming session, it almost always breaks the ice and gets people talking. Such ridiculous questions generate a lot of fun discussion, laughter, and ludicrous ideas. Make sure you write down every one of these nuggets of madness. After your group has exhausted their initial pool of ideas, you should invert each idea again. How do we make sure that our phone accepts all calls? How can it avoid calls from telemarketing companies? How can we make sure the buttons are the right size and not too small?


pages: 416 words: 108,370

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

“Politics as entertainment” is a common phrase in the press, but the truth might be one letter off; for better or worse, politics is entertainment. Every political campaign is a media organization. Political campaigns spend half their money on advertising. Elected representatives spent 70 percent of their time engaged in what any sane person would recognize as telemarketing—directly asking for money, asking other people to ask for money, or building relationships with wealthy people, which is a politely indirect way to achieve the same goal. Even governance is showbiz: One third of the White House staff works in some aspect of public relations to promote the president and his policies, according to political scientists Matthew Baum and Samuel Kernell.


pages: 427 words: 112,549

Freedom by Daniel Suarez

augmented reality, big-box store, British Empire, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, corporate personhood, digital map, game design, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Naomi Klein, new economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, private military company, RFID, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, telemarketer, the scientific method, young professional

The center of the room looked to be a staging area, bustling with young people, all wearing eyewear and gloves. To the side was a raised platform lined with office chairs and desks where a dozen people were grabbing, pulling, and pushing at invisible objects in the air. They were all speaking to unseen people, as though it were a call center. Fossen nodded. "Telemarketers." He turned to her. "This is one of those network marketing schemes, isn't it? I'm really disappointed in--" "Dad! It's nothing like that." She walked up to a canvas tarp draped over a large object. She pulled it away, revealing an old, wooden piece of equipment. Fossen stopped cold. "A Clipper . . . what's it doing here?"


pages: 398 words: 108,889

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth by Eric M. Jackson

bank run, business process, call centre, creative destruction, disintermediation, Elon Musk, index fund, Internet Archive, iterative process, Joseph Schumpeter, market design, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, moral hazard, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the new new thing, Turing test

Besides aiding sellers in finally closing their Billpoint accounts, I reasoned that flooding the eBay corporate headquarters switchboard would also provide the auction giant’s staff with a vocal display of customer discontent. In addition to the e-mail, Sacks and I enlisted the help of April Kelly to manage an outbound call project to our high volume sellers. April was an entrepreneurial manager from our Omaha office who had supervised the telemarketing campaign in support of our debit card launch earlier in the year. Even though PayPal didn’t have a formal outbound call group—we still didn’t have enough customer service personnel to answer inbound calls at some peak times—April was a leading proponent of finding ways to turn our Omaha office into a profit center by helping customers learn more about new features.


pages: 377 words: 110,427

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

A stack of such sheets is always kept in a binder and whenever a candidate gets a free moment, they are dragged to a closet with a phone and forced to do their call time. This is the real substance of the fund-raising consultant’s job: forcing the candidate to do the most humiliating and degrading and torturous work of the campaign—to become a telemarketer. The closet is typically kept far away from campaign headquarters and contains nothing besides the binder and the phone (step one: no distractions). Then the fund-raising consultant uses every psychological tactic in the book to sit there and force the candidate to make calls. And, eventually, they do—with all the results you’d expect.


pages: 317 words: 107,653

A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams by Michael Pollan

A Pattern Language, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, dematerialisation, Frank Gehry, interchangeable parts, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, off-the-grid, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Stewart Brand, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, urban renewal, zero-sum game

I told Charlie that the first millworker I’d taken them to, a giant, dour Swede named Tude Tanguay, had taken one look at the drawing of the awning window and pronounced it worthless. Tude guessed it might be possible to design an in-swinging window that didn’t let in the rain, but he was sure of one thing: This wasn’t that. “Architects,” Tude had growled, adopting the tone of voice other people reserve for the words “termites” or “telemarketers.” “Fellow who drew this doesn’t even show a drip edge,” he pointed out, pushing the blueprint aside. “Get me a better detail, then we’ll talk.” Charlie acknowledged he needed to come up with a system to prevent water from seeping under the sash and promised to get me a sketch right away. Very gingerly, I asked him if maybe we shouldn’t reconsider the whole approach.


The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Boeing 747, call centre, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, emotional labour, Frederick Winslow Taylor, job satisfaction, late capitalism, longitudinal study, new economy, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, telemarketer

Trivial and serious, it all went into my researcher's notebook. On the scholarly front, I was also gratified to see my ideas applied, refined, and richly developed by other researchers. Scholars studied emotional labor among such employees as social workers, retail sales clerks, Disneyland ride operators, waitresses, receptionists, youth shelter workers, telemarketers, personal trainers, nursing home caregivers, professors, policemen, midwives, door-to-door insurance salesmen, police detectives, hair stylists, and sheriff's interrogators. Pam Smith, a former nurse, wrote a book about emotional labor of nurses, and Jennifer Pierce, a former student of mine, wrote one about the emotional labor of lawyers, paralegals, and secretaries.!


pages: 413 words: 106,479

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

4chan, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, citation needed, context collapse, Day of the Dead, DeepMind, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Google Hangouts, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, lolcat, machine translation, moral panic, multicultural london english, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social bookmarking, social web, SoftBank, Steven Pinker, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine

The Harvard Dialect Survey results, downloadable in full, even found new life a decade later as the YouTube accent challenge, a viral video meme where thousands of people from around the world filmed themselves answering questions from the survey, and as the dataset at the base of “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk,” the massively popular New York Times dialect quiz that introduced many people to the idea of mapping out how you speak in 2013. But if you’ve ever hung up on a telemarketer or fudged your answers to a “Which Disney Princess Are You” quiz, you know some of the potential problems with phone and internet surveys. On the phone, researchers could record audio, but they still had to have an individual conversation with each person they surveyed. While operating a Word Wagon or a linguistic phone bank is a fascinating job for the right type of language nerd (um, hi), such nerds still need to be paid for the massive amounts of time and labor they’re putting into the interviews.


pages: 366 words: 107,145

Fuller Memorandum by Stross, Charles

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Beeching cuts, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon credits, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, dumpster diving, escalation ladder, false flag, finite state, Firefox, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, invisible hand, land reform, linear programming, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, operational security, peak oil, Plato's cave, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantum entanglement, reality distortion field, security theater, sensible shoes, side project, Sloane Ranger, telemarketer, Turing machine

He's done a thorough job of porting it--this is almost as tightly integrated as the old version I used to have on my Treo, before they pulled it because it violated our RoHS waste disposal statement. HALF AN HOUR LATER, MY OLD AND UNWANTED MOTOROLA rings. I pick it up and see WITHHELD on the display. Which means one of two things: a telemarketer, or work, because I've put my unclassified desk phone on call divert. "Yes?" "Bob?" It's Andy, my onetime manager. Nice guy, when he's not stabbing you in the back. "What's up? You know I'm on--" "Yes, Bob. Er, it's about Mo." I sit down hard. "She's flying into London City from Amsterdam on KL 1557"--my heart starts up again--"and I think it would be a really good idea if you were to meet her in.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

For instance, it is very common to hear discussions about the chances of various jobs being automated, with statements like “nurses are safe but accountants are in trouble” or “X percent of jobs in the United States are at risk from automation but only Y percent in the UK.” One influential study, by Oxford’s Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, is often reported as claiming that 47 percent of US jobs are at risk of automation in the coming decades, with telemarketers the most at risk (a “99 percent” risk of automation) and recreational therapists the least (a “0.2 percent” risk).29 But as Frey and Osborne themselves have noted, conclusions like this are very misleading. Technological progress does not destroy entire jobs—and the ALM “job” versus “task” distinction explains why.


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

* * * — IN the spring of 2012, Geoff Hinton phoned Jitendra Malik, the University of California–Berkeley professor who had publicly attacked Andrew Ng over his claims that deep learning was the future of computer vision. Despite the success of deep learning with speech recognition, Malik and his colleagues questioned whether the technology would ever master the art of identifying images. And because he was someone who generally assumed that incoming calls were arriving from telemarketers trying to sell him something, it was surprising that he even picked up the phone. When he did, Hinton said: “I hear you don’t like deep learning.” Malik said this was true, and when Hinton asked why, Malik said there was no scientific evidence to back any claim that deep learning could outperform any other technology on computer vision.


pages: 363 words: 109,834

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

The initial attack was to bypass corporate purchasing and have individual users directly purchase access for a low charge. That did not go well. So Benioff changed the policy to allow up to five users at a company to sign up for free. There would be a $50 per month fee for each user over five. Over time, the company began to use telemarketing and direct sales to reach larger customers. With a better product and a lot of positive word of mouth, sales began to grow. The initial hypothesis was that the free sign-ups would generate inside influencers who would lead large companies to sign up. But sales analysis showed that smaller firms were actually the fastest-growing source of new customers.


pages: 455 words: 116,578

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Checklist Manifesto, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, game design, haute couture, impulse control, index card, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, patient HM, pattern recognition, power law, randomized controlled trial, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, Tenerife airport disaster, the strength of weak ties, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Walter Mischel

At the core of that system were computer programs much like those Andrew Pole created at Target, predictive algorithms that studied gamblers’ habits and tried to figure out how to persuade them to spend more. The company assigned players a “predicted lifetime value,” and software built calendars that anticipated how often they would visit and how much they would spend. The company tracked customers through loyalty cards and mailed out coupons for free meals and cash vouchers; telemarketers called people at home to ask where they had been. Casino employees were trained to encourage visitors to discuss their lives, in the hopes they might reveal information that could be used to predict how much they had to gamble with. One Harrah’s executive called this approach “Pavlovian marketing.”


pages: 390 words: 115,769

Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World's Healthiest and Longest-Lived Peoples by John Robbins

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, Donald Trump, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, land reform, life extension, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, telemarketer

Twenty-five percent of American households today consist of one person living alone; half of American marriages end in divorce (affecting tens of millions of children); more than a third of all U.S. births are to unmarried women, many of whom are not in committed relationships.3 Even within many families and marriages that are intact, there is profound disconnection and loneliness. There sadly seems to be something about the direction of modern Western civilization itself that undermines a sense of community and makes it harder to sustain positive relationships. A few years ago, when the Unitel Corporation moved a hundred telemarketing jobs out of Frostburg, Maryland, the company’s vice president, Ken Carmichael, explained that the move was made because the area’s residents weren’t pushy enough on the phone. The problem, he said, was “the culture and the climate in western Maryland, one of helping your neighbor and being empathetic and those sorts of things.”4 The trend toward isolation is taking place all over the industrialized world.


A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories) by Barbara D. Metcalf, Thomas R. Metcalf

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, demand response, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentleman farmer, income inequality, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

New communications also offered India unusual opportunities in a new kind of ‘service’ sector, namely the export of services that included computer software programming; clerical services, for example for medical transcription; and engineering services. Other service areas that began to emerge as potential exports included higher education in English; research, including clinical trials in such areas as pharmaceuticals; entertainment, both film and music; even transport repair and maintenance; and telemarketing. In these arenas, the Internet played a critical role (plate 9.7), and the Indian diaspora population – no longer thought of as a ‘brain drain’ – proved an invaluable resource. Perhaps the most problematic of the BJP’s achievements during the 1990s was its decision to develop a nuclear weapons capacity.


pages: 377 words: 115,122

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, emotional labour, game design, hive mind, index card, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, twin studies, Walter Mischel, web application, white flight

Introverts sometimes outperform extroverts even on social tasks that require persistence. Wharton management professor Adam Grant (who conducted the leadership studies described in chapter 2) once studied the personality traits of effective call-center employees. Grant predicted that the extroverts would be better telemarketers, but it turned out that there was zero correlation between extroversion levels and cold-calling prowess. “The extroverts would make these wonderful calls,” Grant told me, “but then a shiny object of some kind would cross their paths and they’d lose focus.” The introverts, in contrast, “would talk very quietly, but boom, boom, boom, they were making those calls.


The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick by Jonathan Littman

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, centre right, computer age, disinformation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, power law, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, telemarketer

Then there's the VIP room, where the celebrities lounge in sixties beanbags and get high without being hassled for autographs. Eric wants a favor. How can she refuse? She's forgiven him for the manacles, the handcuffs, the gag, and the alligator clips. And she remembers the night Eric warned her about the phone tap on Spiegel's telemarketing boiler room operation. Erica and Henry's excon bank robber buddies worked his phone lines selling suckers on fictitious gold mines and phony office products. If not for Eric, she and Spiegel would surely have been busted for the three dozen phone lines running into Spiegel's house and the $150,000 in unpaid long distance bills.


pages: 298 words: 43,745

Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising by Jim Jansen

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, bounce rate, business intelligence, butterfly effect, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, data science, en.wikipedia.org, first-price auction, folksonomy, Future Shock, information asymmetry, information retrieval, intangible asset, inventory management, life extension, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine translation, megacity, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, PageRank, place-making, power law, price mechanism, psychological pricing, random walk, Schrödinger's Cat, sealed-bid auction, search costs, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sentiment analysis, social bookmarking, social web, software as a service, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the market place, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

It is the location where the customer can purchase the product. A business can sell a product in many different places, and sometimes a small change can have a dramatically positive effect on sales. There are a variety of such places in the marketplace, including both physical and virtual. Some businesses sell directly via a salesperson. Others sell via telemarketing efforts. Some companies are primarily brick-and-mortar stores or sell in the retailer establishments of other businesses. Others are primarily catalogs or mail-order operations, whereas others sell at trade shows. Some sell in joint ventures with other similar products or services. Some companies use manufacturers’ representatives or distributors.


pages: 352 words: 120,202

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, card file, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Hacker Ethic, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, human-factors engineering, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, popular electronics, post-industrial society, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Home Computer Revolution, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

Satellites and state-of-the-art computers and new software were added to accommodate up to a quarter-million subscribers. To those who can afford an initiation fee of $100, and a connect-time fee of $7 to $22 per hour, The Source and its newer competitor, Compuserve, offer computer owners admission to an electronic community-in-the-making. Besides remote computing, electronic mail, communications, telemarketing, software exchange, game playing, news gathering, bulletin board, and other services, The Source provides something called "user publishing." Since subscribers are billed according to how much time they spend with their computer connected to the Source host computer, it is possible to pay royalties to "information providers," based on a portion of that connect time.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

Hal Varian, the current chief economist at Google, assessed the potential employment losses from AI as follows: “If ‘displace more jobs’ means ‘eliminate dull, repetitive, and unpleasant work’ the answer would be yes.” There is not one clear answer to the question of how automation will impact the material welfare of workers. Some occupations will be more affected than others. The experts say that dentists and clergy remain relatively safe from AI at this point, while customer service agents, telemarketers, accountants, and real estate agents should be concerned. It’s also far more likely that automation will change how most people work, rather than eliminating occupational categories outright. Smart machines can take over the repetitive and dull tasks while leaving human beings to focus on things that require greater cognitive capability or creativity.


pages: 416 words: 112,159

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, business cycle, clean water, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, full employment, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, global village, haute couture, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market clearing, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Pareto efficiency, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, working poor

The same study found that in 1995, only half felt their jobs were secure if they performed well, down from 73 percent in 1988; and that 44 percent found their workload excessive in 1995, up from 37 percent in 1988.50 Still another survey found that balancing the demands of work and family was a leading source of pressure for 74 percent of men and 78 percent of women.51 Another new source of stress is that workplaces are growing significantly smaller. Whereas just a decade ago, newly constructed office buildings allowed an average of 250 square feet of space per worker (including a proportionate share of a building’s lobby, corridors, and restrooms) the current figure is close to 200 square feet, and the rapidly growing ranks of telemarketing employees and customer-service phone operators typically receive 100 square feet or less.52 In some locations, conditions are more crowded still. “You’re literally getting guys into 60 or 70 square feet,” complains Patrick Moultrup, president of a nationwide group of real-estate firms. These cuts are usually accomplished by relegating employees to space-saving cubicles and eliminating private offices.53 Along with smaller workspaces, American workers are having to make do with fewer and smaller parking spaces.


pages: 405 words: 130,840

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt

Abraham Maslow, classic study, coherent worldview, crack epidemic, delayed gratification, do well by doing good, feminist movement, hedonic treadmill, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Paradox of Choice, Peter Singer: altruism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Waldo Emerson, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, stem cell, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the scientific method, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Reciprocity is like a magic wand that can clear your way through the jungle of social life. But as anyone w h o has read a Harry Potter hook knows, magic wands can be used against you. Robert Cialdini spent years studying the dark arts of social influence: He routinely answered ads recruiting people to work as door-to-door s a l e s m e n and telemarketers, and went through their training programs to learn their techniques. He then wrote a manual23 for those of us who want to resist the tricks of "compliance professionals." Cialdini describes six principles that salespeople use against us, but the most basic of all is reciprocity. People who want something from us try to give us something first, and we all have piles of address stickers and free postcards from charities that gave them to us out of the goodness of their marketing consultants' hearts.


pages: 405 words: 121,531

Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini

Albert Einstein, attribution theory, bank run, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, desegregation, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, Norman Macrae, Ralph Waldo Emerson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds

The American investigators defined collaboration as “any kind of behavior which helped the enemy,” and it thus included such diverse activities as signing peace petitions, running errands, making radio appeals, accepting special favors, making false confessions, informing on fellow prisoners, divulging military information, etc. READER’S REPORT 3.1 From a Sales Trainer in Texas * * * The most powerful lesson I ever learned from your book was about commitment. Years ago, I trained people at a telemarketing center to sell insurance over the phone. Our main difficulty, however, was that we couldn’t actually SELL insurance over the phone; we could only create a quote and then direct the caller to the company office nearest their home. The problem was callers who committed to office appointments but didn’t show up.


The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

The fancy stuff In September, icici OneSource, an Indian bpo company which has so far concentrated on call-centre work, took a 51% stake in Pipal Research, a firm set up by former McKinsey employees to provide research services for consultants, investment bankers and company strategy departments. Mr Roy of Wipro Spectramind says that his firm is moving from basic call-centre work – helping people with forgotten passwords, for instance – to better-quality work in telesales, telemarketing and technical support. Wipro Spectramind is also spreading into accounting, insurance, procurement and product liability. “We take the raw material and convert it,” says Mr Roy, his eyes gleaming. “That is our skill – to cut and polish the raw diamonds.” The top end of the market is more interesting still.


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

videogame spam speakers, audio special purpose simulators speech Speiginer, Gherix Spengler, Marie sphere, dividing spherical videos or spatial video capture Spiegel, Laurie Spielberg, Steven Spinal Tap spying algorithms spy submarine Stallman, Richard Stanford Research Institute (SRI) VALS (Values and Lifestyle Program) Stanford University computer music lab Starship Enterprise Star Trek TNG (TV series) Star Trek (TV series) startups Star Wars (film) State Department Station Q Steam gaming platform Stephenson, Neal stereo 3-D glasses stereo film viewing devices stereo pairing stereo vision Sterling, Bruce Stock Exchange Stone, Linda strategic forgetting string theory subjective experience Sufi Islam suicide, mass Suicide Club suits Sun Microsystems VPL acquired by support calls surgical simulator surveillance Survival Research Lab Sutherland, Ivan Switzerland Swivel 3-D Sword of Damocles symbolic communication symmetrical forms synesthetic sensations synthesizers systems writing tablet Tachi, Susumu tai chi taiko dojos tails Tanguay, Eva Tarahumaras music tarantula taste taxes Taxi Driver (film) teapot avatar tech companies culture of business model of tech culture. See also libertarianism tech journalism technology abundance and life cycle of teeth Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre Teitel, Mike tele-existence telemarketing telephone telepresence telescopes Tenniel, John Terak computer Tesler, Larry Texas text editing theater theme park prototypes theocracy therapy Theremin, Leon third arm 3-D, honest signals and 3-D design 3-D display monitors 3-D display walls 3-D effects 3-D glasses 3-D graphic cards 3-D graphics 3-D interactions 3-D modeler 3-D perception 3-D shapes, depth camera to derive 3-D sound 3-D TVs 3G wireless standard Tibetan ritual time, fight vs.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

In order to be convincing, conversational software on a bank website might need to answer about 150,000 different questions—a capability that is now easily within the range of computing and storage systems. Despite their unwillingness to confront the human job-displacement question, the consequences of Capper and Zakos’s work are likely to be dramatic. Much of the growth of the U.S. white-collar workforce after World War II was driven by the rapid spread of communications networks: telemarketers, telephone operators, and technical and sales support jobs all involved giving companies the infrastructure to connect customers with employees. Computerization transformed these occupations: call centers moved overseas and the first generation of automated switchboards replaced a good number of switchboard and telephone operators.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Almost 50 percent of total US employment could potentially disappear within two decades, conclude Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne in a study of 702 occupations that could be affected by new technologies. The danger of becoming computer roadkill depends on the nature of your work; if you are a rental clerk or telemarketer, you are in for a rough ride, unless you are a computer of course. There is a race, the authors claim, between workers and technology, and “for workers to win the race ... they will have to acquire creative and social skills.”77 Such skills, however, have been important for employability for a long time and the labor market has changed profoundly over a long period of time.


pages: 570 words: 115,722

The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications by Michal Zalewski

barriers to entry, business process, defense in depth, easy for humans, difficult for computers, fault tolerance, finite state, Firefox, Google Chrome, information retrieval, information security, machine readable, Multics, RFC: Request For Comment, semantic web, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application, WebRTC, WebSocket

P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences)[220] is a method to construct machine-readable, legally binding summaries of a site’s privacy policy, be it as an XML file or as a compact policy in an HTTP header. For example, the keyword TEL in an HTTP header means that the site uses the collected information for telemarketing purposes. (No technical measure will prevent a site from lying in a P3P header, but the potential legal consequences are meant to discourage that.) Note The incredibly ambitious, 111-page P3P specification caused the solution to crumble under its own weight. Large businesses are usually very hesitant to embrace P3P as a solution to technical problems because of the legal footprint of the spec, while small businesses and individual site owners copy over P3P header recipes with little or no understanding of what they are supposed to convey.


pages: 624 words: 127,987

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume by Josh Kaufman

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business process, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, hindsight bias, index card, inventory management, iterative process, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loose coupling, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Network effects, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, place-making, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, scientific management, side project, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, systems thinking, telemarketer, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra

Salespeople are often taught to do what they can to encourage their customers to start saying yes as soon as possible. By getting a “foot in the door,” they increase the probability that their prospect will take further action. That’s why so many activists use opening questions like “Do you care about child safety?” or “Do you care about the environment?” when telemarketing or collecting signatures on a petition. Most people do care about these things, so the reply is automatic and swift. Once you’ve said you care about something, however, it would be rude of you to refuse their request—it’s inconsistent with your previous statement. Obtain a small Commitment, and you’ll make it far more likely that others will comply with your request.


pages: 446 words: 138,827

What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, California energy crisis, clean water, cotton gin, deal flow, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, high net worth, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, microcredit, new economy, proprietary trading, rolling blackouts, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, telemarketer, traffic fines, work culture , young professional

She’s long thought it would make sense for her to take her business skills back to the arts, but she fears that arts administration will be boring. So she stays on the bus, and soon she’s not the young prodigy anymore. I have this term I use now and then: “Phi Beta Slacker.” If a traditional slacker hops between temping, waitressing, working at record stores, telemarketing, and more temping, Phi Beta Slackers hop between esteemed grad schools, fat corporate gigs, and prestigious fellowships, looking like they have their act together but really having no more clue where they’re headed than anyone else. And while slackers are not lazy by nature—they actually want to work, just not at the wrong thing or for the wrong reason—Phi Beta Slackers have a great gift for the world, if they can figure out what it is, or defuse whatever is holding them back.


pages: 458 words: 137,960

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Albert Einstein, call centre, dematerialisation, disinformation, escalation ladder, fault tolerance, financial independence, game design, late fees, Neal Stephenson, Pepsi Challenge, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, side project, telemarketer, walking around money, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

My mom once told me that my dad had given me an alliterative name, Wade Watts, because he thought it sounded like the secret identity of a superhero. Like Peter Parker or Clark Kent. Knowing that made me think he must have been a cool guy, despite how he’d died. My mother, Loretta, had raised me on her own. We’d lived in a small RV in another part of the stacks. She had two full-time OASIS jobs, one as a telemarketer, the other as an escort in an online brothel. She used to make me wear earplugs at night so I wouldn’t hear her in the next room, talking dirty to tricks in other time zones. But the earplugs didn’t work very well, so I would watch old movies instead, with the volume turned way up. I was introduced to the OASIS at an early age, because my mother used it as a virtual babysitter.


pages: 455 words: 138,716

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, butterfly effect, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, company town, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Edward Snowden, ending welfare as we know it, fake it until you make it, fixed income, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, information retrieval, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Michael Milken, naked short selling, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, social contagion, telemarketer, too big to fail, two and twenty, War on Poverty

“And if the intent of that New Jersey statute was to apply to the conduct in this case then the New Jersey Court should apply it without doing a balancing test to determine whether or not some other state has a bigger interest or not.” Hansbury shrugged, seeming unimpressed. When speaking to Bowe, he acted like a man taking a sales call from a telemarketer. I’d seen the same phenomenon at more than one white-collar fraud case. If judges in regular criminal courts treat everything that comes out of the mouth of a defense lawyer like a ploy to get some definitely guilty scoundrel out of trouble, in civil trials involving financial companies, they treat plaintiff’s counsel like parasites trying to use the courts to wrangle money out of hardworking, successful people.


pages: 567 words: 122,311

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, constrained optimization, data science, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, frictionless market, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, Network effects, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, platform as a service, power law, price elasticity of demand, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social software, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, web application, Y Combinator

In the Scale stage, you want to compare higher-order metrics like Backupify’s OMTM—customer acquisition payback—across channels, regions, and marketing campaigns. For example: is a customer you acquire through channels less valuable than one you acquire yourself? Does it take longer to pay back direct sales or telemarketing? Are international revenues hampered by taxes? These are signs that you won’t be able to scale independent of your own organizational growth. Is My Business Model Right? In the Scale stage, many of the metrics you’ve used to optimize a particular part of the business now become inputs into your accounting system.


Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert

index card, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Socratic dialogue, telemarketer

But then I wonder—with all my restless yearning, with all my hyped-up fervor and with this stupidly hungry nature of mine—what should I do with my energy, instead? That answer arrives, too: Look for God, suggests my Guru. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water. 50 The next morning in meditation, all my caustic old hateful thoughts come up again. I’m starting to think of them as irritating telemarketers, always calling at the most inopportune moments. What I’m alarmed to find in meditation is that my mind is actually not that interesting a place, after all. In actuality I really only think about a few things, and I think about them constantly. I believe the official term is “brooding.” I brood about my divorce, and all the pain of my marriage, and all the mistakes I made, and all the mistakes my husband made, and then (and there’s no return from this dark topic) I start brooding about David . . .


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

The yellow pages activities were spun off when AT&T was broken up. Yellow Pages became a business in its own right, and it attracted competitors, who would encourage people to use· their directories by providing more convenient listings. Other firms developed annotated lists of telephone customers to sell to those irritating telemarketeers. New technologies offered opportunities for CD-ROM and Internet-based directories and alternative number information services. Today a whole range of competitive businesses are engaged in the differentiated supply of the most boring information of all-lists of telephone numbers. The first maps were products of art and scholarship.


pages: 407 words: 136,138

The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler

always be closing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, classic study, David Brooks, full employment, illegal immigration, late fees, low skilled workers, payday loans, profit motive, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, working poor

From time to time, she earned under the table by caring for children in her apartment in public housing. She applied for a bank teller’s position but then learned that the only openings were an hour’s commute, a trip she couldn’t make with two children of her own at home—kids who were not doing well in school. She applied for a telemarketing job, but smelled a rat when they asked her to spend $120 for “supplies,” including the smoke alarms she was to sell. She seemed to be spinning her wheels, sliding from one idea to the next with no forward motion. She could improve her typing and get an office job, she figured, or work in the insurance industry, perhaps in a billing department.


pages: 311 words: 130,761

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

Airing from 1988 through 1997 on network television and still available on DVD and via global syndication, Roseanne has no doubt influenced 9781442202238.print.indb 142 2/10/11 10:46 AM Tarnished Metal Frames 143 viewers’ ideas about what it means to be white trash, portraying the working-class lifestyle as a mixture of tasteless behavior and the genuine love and respect that members of the Conner family show toward each other. Over the show’s nine-year run, Roseanne held several working-class jobs, including factory worker, hair washer at a beauty salon, magazine telemarketer, and waitress at the local mall. The family’s acceptance of its “white-trash” status was made clear to television audiences through comments the Conners made to each other as well as on a website (Roseanneworld.com), which once pictured a small metal house trailer with the door wide open, chairs and flowers out front, giving the general impression that visitors were welcome.


pages: 479 words: 144,453

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Osborne, published ‘The Future of Employment’, in which they surveyed the likelihood of different professions being taken over by computer algorithms within the next twenty years. The algorithm developed by Frey and Osborne to do the calculations estimated that 47 per cent of US jobs are at high risk. For example, there is a 99 per cent probability that by 2033 human telemarketers and insurance underwriters will lose their jobs to algorithms. There is a 98 per cent probability that the same will happen to sports referees, 97 per cent that it will happen to cashiers and 96 per cent to chefs. Waiters – 94 per cent. Paralegal assistants – 94 per cent. Tour guides – 91 per cent.


pages: 468 words: 150,206

The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World by John Robbins

Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, clean water, complexity theory, do well by doing good, double helix, Exxon Valdez, food miles, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, profit motive, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, telemarketer

I was especially impressed with the chapters on genetic engineering. Robbins explains the situation better than anyone I've ever heard. For the hundreds of thousands of people like me, whose lives have been forever changed by Robbins' work, The Food Revolution is a MUST READ. The word revolution is normally reserved in our society for guerrillas and telemarketers. THIS revolution is ours. It's a simple choice in the foods we eat that will have a radical effect on the world around us." Adam Werbach, Former President, Sierra Club "Beautifully written, The Food Revolution is a remarkable book by a remarkable man. It opened both my eyes and my heart. This is indeed a book that can save our lives."


pages: 559 words: 155,372

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

But either way, Facebook didn’t make the match of user and message, and at most decides secondary things like how often the ad is seen in general, or which of two ads addressed to you is seen that particular instant. In this sense, ads on Facebook are no different from phone calls or emails. We receive commercial versions of both in the form of spam and telemarketing calls. And yet, when we get a penis-enlargement email, nobody blames Google for providing Gmail, does he? Nor do you blame AT&T for the marketing call that distracted you from Game of Thrones. The only difference is that while people commonly make phone calls and write emails, few if any people address and post an ad.


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Despite this, society continues to function, because the honest, positive, and beneficial uses of our infrastructure far outweigh the dishonest, negative, and harmful ones. The percentage of the drivers on our highways who are bank robbers is negligible, as is the percentage of e-mail users who are criminals. It makes far more sense to design all of these systems for the majority of us who need security from criminals, telemarketers, and sometimes our own governments. By prioritizing security, we would be protecting the world’s information flows— including our own—from eavesdropping as well as more damaging attacks like theft and destruction. We would protect our information flows from governments, non-state actors, and criminals.


Analysis of Financial Time Series by Ruey S. Tsay

Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, data acquisition, discrete time, financial engineering, frictionless, frictionless market, implied volatility, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Long Term Capital Management, market microstructure, martingale, p-value, pattern recognition, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, telemarketer, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve

FindBestStuff.com Google Search Web FindBestStuff com Coffee Cooking Tips Recipes & Food and Drink Wine & Spirits Elder Care Babies & Toddler Pregnancy Acne Aerobics & Cardio Alternative Medicine Beauty Tips Depression Diabetes Exercise & Fitness Hair Loss Medicine Meditation Muscle Building & Bodybuilding Nutrition Nutritional Supplements Weight Loss Yoga Martial Arts Finding Happiness Inspirational Breast Cancer Mesothelioma & Cancer Fitness Equipment Nutritional Supplements Weight Loss Credit Currency Trading Debt Consolidation Debt Relief Loan Insurance Investing Mortgage Refinance Personal Finance Real Estate Taxes Stocks & Mutual Fund Structured Settlements Leases & Leasing Wealth Building Home Security Affiliate Revenue Blogging, RSS & Feeds Domain Name E-Book E-commerce Email Marketing Ezine Marketing Ezine Publishing Forums & Boards Internet Marketing Online Auction Search Engine Optimization Spam Blocking Streaming Audio & Online Music Traffic Building Video Streaming Web Design Web Development Web Hosting Web Site Promotion Broadband Internet VOIP Computer Hardware Data Recovery & Backup Internet Security Software Mobile & Cell Phone Video Conferencing Satellite TV Dating Relationships Game Casino & Gambling Humor & Entertainment Music & MP3 Photography Golf Attraction Motorcycle Fashion & Style Crafts & Hobbies Home Improvement Interior Design & Decorating Landscaping & Gardening Pets Marriage & Wedding Holiday Fishing Aviation & Flying Cruising & Sailing Outdoors Vacation Rental Copyright © 2007 FindBestStuff Advertising Branding Business Management Business Ethics Careers, Jobs & Employment Customer Service Marketing Networking Network Marketing Pay-Per-Click Advertising Presentation Public Relations Sales Sales Management Sales Telemarketing Sales Training Small Business Strategic Planning Entrepreneur Negotiation Tips Team Building Top Quick Tips Book Marketing Leadership Positive Attitude Tips Goal Setting Innovation Success Time Management Public Speaking Get Organized - Organization Book Reviews College & University Psychology Science Articles Religion Personal Technology Humanities Language Philosophy Poetry Book Reviews Medicine Coaching Creativity Dealing with Grief & Loss Motivation Spirituality Stress Management Article Writing Writing Political Copywriting Parenting Divorce Analysis of Financial Time Series Analysis of Financial Time Series Financial Econometrics RUEY S.


pages: 543 words: 157,991

All the Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, break the buck, buy and hold, call centre, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stock buybacks, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, the long tail, too big to fail, value at risk, zero-sum game

The arbitrator did not opine on Parker’s allegations of fraud. But he wrote that “there is no evidence that anything that happened to Parker in terms of his employment was connected” to his reporting of problems. 4 The case was scheduled to go to trial in October 2010, shortly before the publication of this book. 5 In response, Fannie hired a telemarketing company, which blanketed the Hill with tens of thousands of letters protesting the bill. Some of them turned out to be from dead people. When asked how much the campaign cost, Fannie said that information was “proprietary.” 6 It should be noted that although both Spitzer and the SEC would soon bring charges against Greenberg, he has never gone to trial for any alleged wrongdoing.


pages: 568 words: 162,366

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea by Steve Levine

Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, computerized trading, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fixed income, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, John Deuss, Khyber Pass, megastructure, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil rush, Potemkin village, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, trade route, vertical integration

Paul Proehl received no commission, even though it was his encounter with the Mack executive that had led to Satra’s sudden rise. Oztemel made amends by telling him to buy a Mercedes-Benz and charge it to the company. So he did—an aqua gray sedan with black leather seats. Meticulously dressed, with a telemarketing personality, Giffen trolled for new clients wherever high-powered businessmen from America gathered. One of his favorite hunting grounds was the U.S.-USSR Trade and Economic Council (USTEC), a pioneering association formed by Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to faciliate business activity.


Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition by Kindleberger, Charles P., Robert Z., Aliber

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, death of newspapers, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, edge city, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Hyman Minsky, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, junk bonds, large denomination, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, railway mania, Richard Thaler, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, very high income, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Robert Brennan of First Jersey Securities owned and operated or was associated with a series of boiler shops; the names kept changing but the scam was always the same. Their buddies hustled increases in the prices of stocks of very small, little-known firms; once the stock prices were increasing, they used tele-marketing to sell the stocks to dentists and undertakers in small towns all over America. They managed to increase the prices of the stock day by day until most of the shares in the firms had been sold to the gullible investors who were congratulating themselves on how much money they had made. When one of these investors tried to convert the paper profits into cash, there suddenly were no buyers.


pages: 666 words: 181,495

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Some of these were as simple as paying expense money (known as “red pockets,” typically fees that exceeded cab fare) to reporters attending press conferences. Google angered the local press by not paying. More complicated were fees paid to managers of Internet cafés. A substantial percentage of Chinese users accessed the net in these basement operations, smoky parlors that looked like a cross between a telemarketing boiler room and a video poker casino, with hundreds of terminals active at any hour. The large companies that franchised these establishments preloaded the computers with their chosen software, and Google and Baidu paid for the privilege of being the default search engine. But often the managers of individual cafés would take money under the table to replace one search engine with another.


pages: 721 words: 197,134

Data Mining: Concepts, Models, Methods, and Algorithms by Mehmed Kantardzić

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, backpropagation, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, data acquisition, discrete time, El Camino Real, fault tolerance, finite state, Gini coefficient, information retrieval, Internet Archive, inventory management, iterative process, knowledge worker, linked data, loose coupling, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NP-complete, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, phenotype, random walk, RFID, semantic web, speech recognition, statistical model, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, text mining, traveling salesman, web application

This has led the company to make some changes in its messages to customers, which, in turn, has led to a 30% increase in targeted customers signing up for new services Worldcom Worldcom is another company that has found great value in data mining. By mining databases of its customer-service and telemarketing data, Worldcom has discovered new ways to sell voice and data services. For example, it has found that people who buy two or more services were likely to be relatively loyal customers. It also found that people were willing to buy packages of products such as long-distance, cellular-phone, Internet, and other services.


The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs

air freight, Albert Einstein, car-free, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, compound rate of return, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Golden Gate Park, intentional community, job satisfaction, late fees, low interest rates, money market fund, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, telemarketer, the rule of 72, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

It would be one thing if the company earmarked a percentage of its profits to be used to donate materials to schools; it is quite another to encourage consumption of its product as a way to give books to schools. A motivational book and tape company sent around a flyer to schools about self-esteem. Parents could send away for a free booklet on building self-esteem. I thought, “Why not,” and sent for it. After receiving the booklet—what do you know—I got an evening call from a company telemarketer wanting to set up a home visit with me to go over the “wonderful” line of products this company could offer me that would help build my child’s self-esteem. I said no thanks and was angry that my children were being used as conduits for aggressive sales tactics. Pay attention to what is going on at your children’s school.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Apply automated scripts, and malicious actors could release a deluge of fake content at a scale far beyond what people could create on their own. Many issues are manageable in small numbers but become problematic at scale. Spam, whether it is via physical mail, email, Twitter, robocalls, or some other form, is generally not high quality, but the sheer volume of garbage threatens to drown out other content. Human telemarketers have been around for decades, but it is only in recent years due to machines that robocalls have become a plague, with one’s phone ringing ten times a day. Machine-driven spam floods our email inboxes and telephones, and machine-generated fake text could lead to a similar flood of spam text on the internet.


pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

The campaign targeted Floridians whose profiles identified them, for example, as “math teacher” or affiliated with a PTA, and on top of that, users whose interests included, for instance, “I love my daughter.” All the while Facebook was strengthening its persuasion machine by feeding it information about users’ offline lives. Around 2012 the company set out to buy up reams of data from outside firms, the type that collected and sold phone numbers to telemarketers. Its database swelled with records of users’ income levels, credit ratings and purchase histories, places of residence, educational attainment, and more. All could easily be matched to each user’s already data-rich Facebook profile and activity history. That bundle gave advertisers an unprecedented, 360-degree comprehension of whom to target and how to win them over.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Growing (like others) through acquisition in the ’90s, Acxiom partnered with Oracle and continued to amass information and improve its ability to process and refine that data. On 9/11, a pretty good national identity database existed, but it was private, not public, and Acxiom’s clients used it to target suckers for catalogs and telemarketing calls, not to predict terrorist activity. That idea doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone involved until after the Twin Towers were down. Once they were, Acxiom searched its files and found it had a bunch of information on the hijackers, including so many inconsistencies that in theory the authorities could have been able to tell in advance that the men were up to something, had anyone been looking.


Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C by Bruce Schneier

active measures, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, dark matter, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Dutch auction, end-to-end encryption, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, finite state, heat death of the universe, information security, invisible hand, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, NP-complete, OSI model, P = NP, packet switching, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, seminal paper, software patent, telemarketer, traveling salesman, Turing machine, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

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pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

He gave speeches; he wrote articles; he wrote editorials; he gathered people at parties and gave little lessons; he testified in lawsuits; he appeared in television documentaries and did television interviews and took journalists along with him on trips; he went around to colleges and taught classes; he got college students to come and visit him; he gave lessons at the openings of furniture stores, the inauguration of insurance telemarketing centers, and dinners for would-be customers of NetJets; he gave locker-room talks to football players; he spoke at lunches with Congressmen; he educated newspaper folk in editorial board meetings; he gave lessons to his own board of directors; and, above all, he put on the teacher’s robes in his letters to and meetings with his shareholders.


Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

There’s no guarantee of timely delivery for text messages. The text might get sent to the wrong number. Mobile phones can be cloned. In some countries users have to pay for each SMS sent or received. Users have to pay forward roaming charges if they’re overseas. Your bank could on-sell your cell phone number to telemarketers. Mobile phones aren’t tamper-resistant. Visually impaired users can’t do SMS. Businesses will have to buy cell phones for employees who currently don’t own one and are in charge of business bank accounts. Some cellular networks send SMS’ unencrypted. This authorisation mechanism doesn’t work with shared bank accounts.


pages: 2,045 words: 566,714

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax by J K Lasser Institute

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, collective bargaining, distributed generation, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, telemarketer, transaction costs, urban renewal, zero-coupon bond

What apparently won the decision for the couple was evidence that (1) the husband did not have access to a computer at the university, and (2) the state office in which the wife worked did not have funds to buy a computer. The court held that the use of the computer was necessary for them to properly do their jobs, and as the purchase of a computer spared their employers from having to provide them with computers, the purchase was for the employers’ convenience. In a later case, a telemarketing sales manager was allowed a first-year expensing deduction for a home computer and printer used to prepare reports. The key to winning the deduction was her supervisor’s testimony that as a mid-level manager, she could not enter the office after regular hours to use a company computer, and that she was able to keep up with the volume of sales reports she was required to submit by using her home computer and accessing information via modem


pages: 1,845 words: 567,850

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2014 by J. K. Lasser

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, collective bargaining, distributed generation, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, telemarketer, transaction costs, urban renewal, zero-coupon bond

What apparently won the decision for the couple was evidence that (1) the husband did not have access to a computer at the university, and (2) the state office in which the wife worked did not have funds to buy a computer. The court held that the use of the computer was necessary for them to properly do their jobs, and as the purchase of a computer spared their employers from having to provide them with computers, the purchase was for the employers’ convenience. In a later case, a telemarketing sales manager was allowed a first-year expensing deduction for a home computer and printer used to prepare reports. The key to winning the deduction was her supervisor’s testimony that as a mid-level manager, she could not enter the office after regular hours to use a company computer, and that she was able to keep up with the volume of sales reports she was required to submit by using her home computer and accessing information via modem