telemarketer

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
by Dan Lyons
Published 4 Apr 2016

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.

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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.

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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.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
by David Graeber
Published 14 May 2018

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.

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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.

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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 and Patton Oswalt
Published 6 Mar 2012

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.

Talk Is Cheap: Switching to Internet Telephones
by James E. Gaskin
Published 15 Mar 2005

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.

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(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.

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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.

Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed
by Laurie Kilmartin
Published 13 Feb 2018

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.

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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?

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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?

Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House
by Cheryl Mendelson
Published 4 Nov 1999

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.

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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.

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(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.

Daemon
by Daniel Suarez
Published 1 Dec 2006

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.

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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.

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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.

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It
by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
Published 3 Oct 1989

■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.”

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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.”

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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.

VoIP Telephony with Asterisk
by Unknown
Published 8 Mar 2011

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.

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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?

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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?

My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture
by Guy Branum
Published 29 Jul 2018

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.

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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.

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How
by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Published 10 Mar 2020

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.

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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.”

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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.

This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare
by Gabourey Sidibe
Published 14 Apr 2017

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!

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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.”

Digital Accounting: The Effects of the Internet and Erp on Accounting
by Ashutosh Deshmukh
Published 13 Dec 2005

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.

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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.

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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.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King
Published 5 May 2016

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.

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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.

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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?”

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

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
Published 7 Feb 2004

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.”

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
by Steven Pressfield
Published 2 Jun 2002

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.

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age
by David S. Abraham
Published 27 Oct 2015

“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.

…

See also names of individual countries Assyrians (ancient), weaponry, 157–58 AT&T, iPhone sales, 1 Auer von Welsbach, Carl, 72 Australia, rare earth processing in, 183, 205 Automobiles, 141–48 Avalon Rare Metal, 54–56, 57, 63–64, 85 Ballmer, Steve, 1 Bangka, Indonesia, tin production in, 48, 105–6 Banks, investments in rare metals trading, 96 Baotou, China, 78, 176–77 Barium, 121 Base metals, 4, 29, 78, 101 Base Resources (Australia), 48 BASF, 3, 232n6 Battelle Memorial Institute, 274n6 Batteries, 116, 147–48, 188–89 Bayan Obo mine, 78, 175–76, 196 Becker, Ed, 142, 143 Belitung, Indonesia, tin production in, 48 Beryllium, 55, 121, 168, 260n14 Berzelius, Jöns J., 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.

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See also Sustainable use Gschneidner, Karl, 28, 130 Guliano, Vincent E., 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.

When Things Start to Think
by Neil A. Gershenfeld
Published 15 Feb 1999

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.

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V., 39-40 Reeves, Byron, 54 Reformation, 95-97, 103 religion, 131, 133 research and development, 169-84 applied research, 172, 177, 178, 185 basic research, 172, 174, 177, 178, 185 government role, 171-74 new way to organize inquiry, 180-84 organization in the U.S., 171-74, 180 presumed pathway of, 177 Resnick, Mitchel, 68-70, 146-47, 206 responsibilities in using new technologies, 104 reusable paper, 16-17 Reynolds, Matt, 196, 197 rights: Bill of Things' Rights, 104 Bill of Things Users' Rights, 102 Rittmueller, Phil, 170, 180 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 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.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

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.

Shampoo Planet
by Douglas Coupland
Published 28 Dec 2010

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.

Lost at Sea
by Jon Ronson
Published 1 Oct 2012

“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.

Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism
by Sharon Beder
Published 1 Jan 1997

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.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

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.

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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.

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age
by Simon Head
Published 14 Aug 2003

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.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away
by Doug Henwood
Published 9 May 2005

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.

Digging Up Mother: A Love Story
by Doug Stanhope
Published 9 May 2016

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.

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
Published 3 Dec 2016

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.

Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy
by Howard Karger
Published 9 Sep 2005

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.

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry
by John Warrillow
Published 5 Feb 2015

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.

Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition
by Robert N. Proctor
Published 28 Feb 2012

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.

This Is Not Fame: A "From What I Re-Memoir"
by Doug Stanhope
Published 5 Dec 2017

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.

Cultureshock Paris
by Cultureshock Staff
Published 6 Oct 2010

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?

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick
by J. David McSwane
Published 11 Apr 2022

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.

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest
by Yochai Benkler
Published 8 Aug 2011

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 and Aaron Roth
Published 3 Oct 2019

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.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us
by Tim Sullivan
Published 6 Jun 2016

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.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Published 2 Jan 2003

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.

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future
by Andrew Yang
Published 2 Apr 2018

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.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta
Published 1 Jan 2009

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
Published 14 Mar 2000

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.

Lessons From Private Equity Any Company Can Use
by Orit Gadiesh and Hugh MacArthur
Published 14 Aug 2008

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.

The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy
by Sasha Issenberg
Published 1 Jan 2007

“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.

I'm a stranger here myself: notes on returning to America after twenty years away
by Bill Bryson
Published 6 Jun 2000

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.

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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.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 18 Dec 2006

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.

Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married
by Abby Ellin
Published 15 Jan 2019

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.

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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?

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age
by Virginia Eubanks
Published 1 Feb 2011

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.

Ultimate Sales Machine
by Chet Holmes
Published 20 Jun 2007

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.

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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.

The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late
by Michael Ellsberg
Published 15 Jan 2011

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.

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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.

Money: Vintage Minis
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 5 Apr 2018

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
Published 4 May 2010

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.

Culture works: the political economy of culture
by Richard Maxwell
Published 15 Jan 2001

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.

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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.

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All
by Robert Elliott Smith
Published 26 Jun 2019

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.”

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey
by Emmanuel Goldstein
Published 28 Jul 2008

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.

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“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
Published 20 Nov 2007

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.

Finance and the Good Society
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 1 Jan 2012

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.

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C., 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
Published 10 Mar 2016

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.

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See also Filipinos; Laotians; Vietnamese Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 189 Southern Europeans, 41, 42, 43, 50, 61, 87, 158, 252 spatial assimilation model, 131–2 spatial segregation and assimilation, 82–4 sports: and class, 161; and common ground, 218, 261; and cultural responsiveness, 201, 250; and media, 159; and social encounters, 162, 167, 169 Staten Island, 67, 302–3n35 Statistics Canada, 98t Stein, J., 52 stereotypes, 153, 154, 155, 156, 163, 164 Stewart, E., 293–4n37 Stren, R., 86 subcultures, 12–13, 14, 47 subway systems, 144, 161 Sukkahs (Jewish prayer shelters), 166 Sunset Park (New York), 67, 116, 138, 247 Swaminarayan mandir, 79 Swanstrom, T., 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.

Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age
by Michael Wolff
Published 22 Jun 2015

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.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
by Nir Eyal
Published 26 Dec 2013

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.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Jun 2009

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 and Maurice E. Stucke
Published 30 Nov 2016

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.

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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!

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
by Tim Wu
Published 14 May 2016

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.”

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen
Published 13 Sep 2021

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.

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal
by Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz
Published 20 Jul 2020

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.”

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5
by Taylor Pearson
Published 27 Jun 2015

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.

Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America
by Linda Tirado
Published 1 Oct 2014

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?

Introverts in Love: The Quiet Way to Happily Ever After
by Sophia Dembling
Published 6 Jan 2015

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.

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are
by Rachel Bloom
Published 17 Nov 2020

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.

The Complete Android Guide: 3Ones
by Kevin Purdy
Published 15 Apr 2011

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.

I'm Just a Person
by Tig Notaro
Published 13 Jun 2016

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.

100 Things We've Lost to the Internet
by Pamela Paul
Published 14 Oct 2021

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.

Sleepwalk With Me: And Other Painfully True Stories
by Mike Birbiglia
Published 11 Oct 2010

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?

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It
by Steven Brill
Published 28 May 2018

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/.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 1 Jan 2007

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.

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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.

Bleeding Edge: A Novel
by Thomas Pynchon
Published 16 Sep 2013

“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.

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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.

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons
by Peter Barnes
Published 29 Sep 2006

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.

The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market
by Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane
Published 11 Apr 2004

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.

Be Obsessed or Be Average
by Grant Cardone
Published 20 Sep 2016

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.

Learning Node.js: A Hands-On Guide to Building Web Applications in JavaScript
by Marc Wandschneider
Published 18 Jun 2013

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.

You Are Not a Gadget
by Jaron Lanier
Published 12 Jan 2010

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.

The Money Tree: A Story About Finding the Fortune in Your Own Backyard
by Chris Guillebeau
Published 6 Apr 2020

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?”

Hey Nostradamus!
by Douglas Coupland
Published 1 Jan 2003

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.

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything
by Becky Bond and Zack Exley
Published 9 Nov 2016

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.

Undoing Border Imperialism
by Harsha Walia
Published 12 Nov 2013

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.

The Reluctant Carer: Dispatches From the Edge of Life
by The Reluctant Carer
Published 22 Jun 2022

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.

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation
by Chris Nodder
Published 4 Jun 2013

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).

You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing
by John Scalzi
Published 28 Jan 2007

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).

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne
Published 20 Jan 2014

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.

The Sellout: A Novel
by Paul Beatty
Published 2 Mar 2016

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.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
by Nicco Mele
Published 14 Apr 2013

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.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

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.

CultureShock! Egypt: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette (4th Edition)
by Susan L. Wilson
Published 20 Dec 2011

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.

Cities: The First 6,000 Years
by Monica L. Smith
Published 31 Mar 2019

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.

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
by Bhaskar Sunkara
Published 1 Feb 2019

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.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
by Stephen King
Published 1 Jan 2000

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.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
Published 6 May 2007

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.

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke
by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi
Published 17 Aug 2004

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.

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community
by Marc J. Dunkelman
Published 3 Aug 2014

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.

Microserfs
by Douglas Coupland
Published 14 Feb 1995

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.

Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life
by David Allen
Published 30 Dec 2008

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.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

.”* 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.

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs
by Gina Keating
Published 10 Oct 2012

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.

Sex Power Money
by Sara Pascoe
Published 26 Aug 2019

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.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits
Published 14 Sep 2019

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/?

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Published 2 Sep 2008

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.

On Writing Well (30th Anniversary Edition)
by William Zinsser
Published 1 Jan 1976

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.

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy
by Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz
Published 4 Nov 2016

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.

The Road Ahead
by Bill Gates , Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson
Published 15 Nov 1995

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.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
by Alan Cooper
Published 24 Feb 2004

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.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir)
by Jenny Lawson
Published 5 Mar 2013

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.

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives
by Tim Harford
Published 3 Oct 2016

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.

Against Everything: Essays
by Mark Greif
Published 5 Sep 2016

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.

Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall
by Anna Funder
Published 19 Sep 2011

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.

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
by Adam L. Alter
Published 15 Feb 2017

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.

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy
by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle
Published 12 Mar 2019

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.

The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.
by Robin Sharma
Published 4 Dec 2018

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.

Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living
by Nick Offerman
Published 30 Sep 2013

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.

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World
by Craig Kielburger , Holly Branson , Marc Kielburger , Sir Richard Branson and Sheryl Sandberg
Published 7 Mar 2018

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.

The Cultural Logic of Computation
by David Golumbia
Published 31 Mar 2009

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.

Artificial Whiteness
by Yarden Katz

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.

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
by Michael Lewis
Published 3 May 2021

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.

The Road to Conscious Machines
by Michael Wooldridge
Published 2 Nov 2018

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.

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation
by Jono Bacon
Published 1 Aug 2009

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?

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
by Derek Thompson
Published 7 Feb 2017

“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.

A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams
by Michael Pollan
Published 15 Jan 1997

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 Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz
by Aaron Swartz and Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Jan 2016

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.

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
by Eric M. Jackson
Published 15 Jan 2004

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.

Fuller Memorandum
by Stross, Charles
Published 14 Jan 2010

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.

The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
by Arlie Russell Hochschild
Published 1 Nov 1983

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.!

Freedom
by Daniel Suarez
Published 17 Dec 2009

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?"

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
by Gretchen McCulloch
Published 22 Jul 2019

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.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

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.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World
by Cade Metz
Published 15 Mar 2021

* * * — 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.

The Crux
by Richard Rumelt
Published 27 Apr 2022

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.

If You See Them
by Vicki Sokolik
Published 23 Nov 2023

It was gratifying to impress the mayor, but I assumed her attentiveness had more to do with her smart political skills than actual interest. As I walked down the neighbor’s driveway, I couldn’t help but make a close study of the street. Honest to God, it looked perfectly paved. The next day, my phone rang and a pleasant voice asked to speak to Vicki Sokolik. “This is Vicki,” I said curtly, bracing for a telemarketer. “We met at the Coffee Talk yesterday. This is Mayor Iorio. Would you have time to meet with me?” That’s when it began to sink in. This was not a call from the mayor’s assistant. This was a call to my home phone from the mayor herself. “How about Friday at 9:00 a.m. in my office?” she proposed.

Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising
by Jim Jansen
Published 25 Jul 2011

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.

Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World's Healthiest and Longest-Lived Peoples
by John Robbins
Published 1 Sep 2006

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.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
by Susan Cain
Published 24 Jan 2012

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 Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
by Charles Duhigg
Published 1 Jan 2011

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.”

The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick
by Jonathan Littman
Published 1 Jan 1996

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.

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
by Howard Rheingold
Published 14 May 2000

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: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

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.

A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories)
by Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf
Published 27 Sep 2006

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.

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess
by Robert H. Frank
Published 15 Jan 1999

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.

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
by Jonathan Haidt
Published 26 Dec 2005

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.

Influence: Science and Practice
by Robert B. Cialdini
Published 1 Jan 1984

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.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Published 21 Nov 2017

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.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

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.

The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications
by Michal Zalewski
Published 26 Nov 2011

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.

The Future of Technology
by Tom Standage
Published 31 Aug 2005

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.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

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.

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor
by John Kay
Published 24 May 2004

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.

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume
by Josh Kaufman
Published 2 Feb 2011

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.

The Working Poor: Invisible in America
by David K. Shipler
Published 12 Nov 2008

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.

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America
by Diana Elizabeth Kendall
Published 27 Jul 2005

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.

What Should I Do With My Life?
by Po Bronson
Published 2 Jan 2001

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.

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster
by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
Published 1 Mar 2013

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.

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
by Matt Taibbi
Published 8 Apr 2014

“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.

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
by Elizabeth Gilbert
Published 1 Jan 2000

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 . . .

Ready Player One
by Ernest Cline
Published 15 Feb 2011

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.

The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World
by John Robbins
Published 14 Sep 2010

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."

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 2 Mar 2015

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.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Mar 2015

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.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
by Antonio Garcia Martinez
Published 27 Jun 2016

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.

Politics on the Edge: The Instant #1 Sunday Times Bestseller From the Host of Hit Podcast the Rest Is Politics
by Rory Stewart
Published 13 Sep 2023

Most voters seemed unsure what was on offer, or what the point of the whole thing was. ‘At a practical level,’ I suggested, ‘probably fixing the things that bug my Cumbrian neighbour in his daily life. Stop hospital car parking charges; stop incentivising traffic wardens to give unnecessary tickets; stop mobile phone companies from ripping people off. Stop nuisance telemarketing. People are fed up with officials tearing up the roads and not fixing them. We have to be much better at governing. And stopping people from being mugged. And we need to fix the horrifying way we deal with the elderly, although that’s a £100 billion-a-year project … And not give knighthoods to people who don’t pay taxes, like Philip Green.

All the Devils Are Here
by Bethany McLean
Published 19 Oct 2010

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.

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea
by Steve Levine
Published 23 Oct 2007

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.

Analysis of Financial Time Series
by Ruey S. Tsay
Published 14 Oct 2001

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Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition
by Kindleberger, Charles P. and Robert Z., Aliber
Published 9 Aug 2011

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.

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 25 Jun 2024

Yet driving is just one of a very long list of occupations that are threatened in the fairly near term by AI that exploits the advantage of training on massive datasets. A landmark 2013 study by Oxford University scholars Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne ranked about seven hundred occupations on their likelihood of being disrupted by the early 2030s.[14] At a 99 percent likelihood of being able to be automated were such job categories as telemarketers, insurance underwriters, and tax preparers.[15] More than half of all occupations had a greater than 50 percent likelihood of being automatable.[16] High on that list were factory jobs, customer service, banking jobs, and of course driving cars, trucks, and buses.[17] Low on that list were jobs that require close, flexible personal interaction, such as occupational therapists, social workers, and sex workers.[18] Over the decade since that report was released, evidence has continued to accumulate in support of its startling core conclusions.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy
Published 12 Apr 2011

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.

Data Mining: Concepts, Models, Methods, and Algorithms
by Mehmed Kantardzić
Published 2 Jan 2003

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
Published 1 Apr 2014

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
Published 18 Jan 2023

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.

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
by Jill Abramson
Published 5 Feb 2019

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.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

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
Published 10 Nov 1993

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The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder
Published 1 Sep 2008

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

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.

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax
by J K Lasser Institute
Published 30 Oct 2012

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

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2014
by J. K. Lasser
Published 5 Oct 2013

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