Hey, just here to recommend that you use or otherwise build a CRM interface around the SMS conversations. This will allow you to scale the number of messages without being overwhelmed by operator costs.
Technology could be used to solve the problems that it's causing. E.g. better utilization of existing resources (self-driving cars), alternative sources of energy, and perhaps even space colonization.
The author left out one major reason textbooks are so expensive-- course adoption lists (i.e. which books go with which courses) are kept private or disorganized so that students or businesses can't offer rival "Search by Course" type sites without scraping the local bookstore. As a result students go to the bookstore which knows their requirements unlike Amazon.com.
There was a law that was supposed to make this easier, to make it so that students have more time to look for books rather than the week before the semester starts.
Starting in 2010 schools that receive federal financial aid are required to list the ISBN and title of books (or author, title, publisher, and date if an ISBN is not available) at the time of course registration.
In practice, though, one wonders how many courses have their texts listed as "TBD" up until the week prior to the semester.
The law was called the Higher Education Opportunity Act, and the bookstores responded to it mainly by offering seperate, inconvenient search forms. If you found your way there, you you'd then have to copy and paste the ISBN.
The law was good in spirit but in letter it didn't require making the data available. A good law would just be that every school has to offer all the data they send to the bookstore to everyone for bulk download.
If anything, shouldn't apps that involve ratings and profiles reduce racism, because they allow you to judge the person by their behavior as opposed to just their appearance? Compare Lyft to taxis, for example.
In the case of taxis the driver only sees appearance-based characteristics when they choose whether to pick someone up. In the case of Lyft the user has a long history of ratings which indicate whether they're a good person to drive around.
Almost every term in marketing/sales is imprecisely defined
and most writing in the field seems to be around making things more complex and vague than they need to be. Kind of like the postmodernists, it's as if they want to convince you that there's some extra layer complexity which only they can understand.
And if you've watched nerds sell you'd agree that there's some extra layer of complexity which only marketers understand.
If you haven't read them you may enjoy Deschooling Society by Illich or The Spectacle of Society by Debord, though Debord gets a little postmodernist/heglian at points.
Nerds' general inability to sell isn't because they don't understand marketing lingo, but because they lack an intuitive sense of people/markets. Inconsistent and vague buzzwords do nothing to bridge that chasm.
