Nice book. For another old but excellent math book I recommend Geometry and the Imagination by David Hilbert. No gutenberg remake I'm afraid, maybe because of the numerous (and incredibly high quality) illustrations.
I guess because mathematical formulas usually use single letters for symbols. It is so common that you end using several different alphabets, lower/upper case and even calligraphic variations. Of course it doesn't scale when you need thousands of symbols and your variables doesn't have well established meanings like "magnetic field" or "pressure". However they are used to it and it's hard to break some mental models after several years of using them everyday. For good or bad some scientific computer languages (like Julia) encourage you to use the Unicode alphabet to align your code with your paper/book.
While the focus has been on olives, the bacterium’s ability to infect such a broad spectrum of plants makes it an agricultural nightmare, particularly in regions where multiple crops are grown in close proximity.
They aren't talking about polyculture as proximity to other types of crops. They are talking about the limited genetic diversity in within a specific type of crop. This issue is very common. Another example is the Cavendish banana. I believe the article advocates for planting resistant varieties.
>They aren't talking about polyculture as proximity to other types of crops. They are talking about the limited genetic diversity in within a specific type of crop.
I know that not everyone is a horticulturalist. Allow me to explain why this is dumb. It is true that for a crop like tomatoes, you might just grow any old mongrel seed, and that the tomatoes will still produce... even if yields are off 30% or 40%. Monocropping in that case is about increasing yields, not making the impossible possible.
This is simply not true with most orchard tree crops (or grapes, or about half the sorts of food crops you've enjoyed all your life). An apple, for instance isn't just a monocrop of closely related sibling plants... each Fuji or Pink Lady apple you've eaten is a genetic clone of any other of that type. They are literally cloned through grafting (and sometimes rooted cuttings). If we want to get really technical, each tree is technically a chimera, with only the crown being Pink Lady, the low trunk and roots will be something like M.111 (another variety that you don't eat it's fruit). Hell, sometimes there's even a third type in the middle of the two called an "interstock". What would happen if you didn't clone apple varieties? You wouldn't eat apples anymore. Every apple tree would produce its own kind of fruit, some might be just as good as Fuji or Yellow Delicious or any of the others you're familiar with. But there'd only ever be one tree of that. Apples do not grow true to seed. Some would be little golf-ball-sized crab apples. Others would be completely tasteless. Or dry and pithy. Or nasty-looking things that always split while growing. Maybe farmers would still grow them as feed for hogs (but productivity is also a genetic trait, and you've just struck a death-blow against having a large number of highly productive trees). Maybe they'd be grown to make alcohol (more applejack or cider than apfelwein I'd think).
But apples as a desert fruit would be gone.
And it's like this for many, many crops. Hell, even something like wheat... you can complain about monocropping, but these new varieties that they use actually resist diseases better (not to mention prevented who knows how many famines through increased yield). This is the argument of someone who whines about GMO crops and shops at Whole foods, a certain political type whose preferred policies seem designed to just make food more expensive and scarce.
>Another example is the Cavendish banana.
There are plenty of banana cultivars... few of them of the sort that people in the developed world enjoy. It's the same problem as all of the other. But for Cavendish (and a tiny handful of other varieties), you'd have no bananas at all.
You bring up apples and other orchard fruits. Yes, in production you want things like uniformity and yield. But from a long term survival standpoint, you want some diversity, such as through preservation of heritage varieties or allowing some seeds to grow and selecting from them. Otherwise, you end up with a very short list of possible options when faced with new diseases. You need some genetic pool to select resistant rootstock from. It also prevents things like genetic and epigenetic adaptations to the environment (see progressive cold hardening). Of course the economics of it discourages farmers from selecting currently inferior varieties for crops. But perhaps a biosecurity program could fill that gap.
>But from a long term survival standpoint, you want some
You don't get to have that. It's just not an option. All these polyploidals do not work like that. You can have uniformity (which people want anyway), or you can have fruit that's so bad no one wants to bother growing it. There's no middle ground.
I have a Mathematica license and at the same time find this project quite cool (and I'm a SW engineer). I would be surprised if mathics developers are not Mathematica users.
I have always wondered how a world without marketing would look. I think marketing has a net negative effect. I also think that maybe you cannot eliminate all marketing but you can easily eliminate most of it just by controlling the spending of big companies, so it's possible. I have no ethical problems with eliminating it, as I consider it a form of manipulation and falsehood spreading, and anyway I don't consider companies have a right to free speech, or any real rights for that matter.
So I'm curious. Suppose you're starting a new small business. You're selling a quality product but nobody knows about you. How do you propose they find out?
A product which needs help beyond its own merits to make a sale likely doesn't meet most people's definition of quality.
Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their own, without paid promotion.
I'd love to live in a world where there's no advertising and so therefore the only products available have to be genuinely fantastic.
I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the economy negatively.
What would happen is we would evolve faster and have more safety, reliability, productivity etc. The lack of useless junk polluting the planet would be yet another positive.
> A product which needs help beyond its own merits to make a sale likely doesn't meet most people's definition of quality.
How does the customer know anything about its merits if they've never heard of it?
> Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their own, without paid promotion.
What if it's not world changing product, it's just a new normal competitor in an existing market whose product is 2% better than average? Or is exactly average, but it costs slightly less? Don't we still want these things?
> I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the economy negatively.
An obvious downside is that it gives an even bigger advantage to incumbents with a known brand.
>How does the customer know anything about its merits if they've never heard of it?
They buy it and try it out. How do you think most things sell? It isn't advertising! When I go to the supermarket, I know they have food and home supplies. If you sell one of those things, get it on a shelf. My supermarket literally has tiny batch products from local cottage industry. If I need hardware, I know I can get it at lowes or Home Depot. I didn't need any advertising to know that a place that says "Hardware store" on the sign will sell hardware!
>What if it's not world changing product, it's just a new normal competitor in an existing market whose product is 2% better than average? Or is exactly average, but it costs slightly less? Don't we still want these things?
This will entirely occupy all conversation of most normal people. People LOVE to talk about their shit that is slightly better than the same shit you buy. People LOVE to tell friends and family and strangers about this product they bought that is just slightly different.
>An obvious downside is that it gives an even bigger advantage to incumbents with a known brand.
Which is why Coca-Cola still advertises right? Because advertising only helps those just getting started in selling a brand new product?
Not sure why you so desperately try to find some moral justification for advertising, having the skin in the game like many in HN?
Its literally manipulation of those who have money to spend them on product they otherwise wouldn't, has absolutely 0 relationship on quality on the product (in extreme cases it goes directly against it). Word of mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost something to keep the interference away but save you tons of money and time down the line). Its 2024, we are more connected than we probably should be. Manipulation always = lies, it doesn't matter how you wrap them around. We all have moral compass (barring sociopaths/psychopaths et al), and we all have opinion on such behavior.
Sure its like nuclear armament, once one does it many feel they also need to do it. But its purely emotional business on both ends (customers and companies feeling the need to pay for ads), where literally the only person truly winning is the advertiser (something about selling shovels during gold rush). Mankind as it is only loses, I don't see any way its morally justifiable. Even having less services say online available for free ain't a losing proposition if you look at long term damage of advertising.
> Its literally manipulation of those who have money to spend them on product they otherwise wouldn't, has absolutely 0 relationship on quality on the product (in extreme cases it goes directly against it).
This is an extremely strong claim. Certainly you'd concede that some ads contain truthful information. Like there exists at least one ad that is true. So then how is it "manipulation" for someone to post that information in a public space?
We jumped from "billboards are ugly" to "ads are categorically evil," and based on some pretty strong assumptions.
> Word of mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost something to keep the interference away but save you tons of money and time down the line).
Okay, so how do you get the first person to buy your product if advertising is illegal? The base case would seem to require it. Same goes for "independent reviews." How do you find the independent reviewer? And this is ignoring getting a critical mass of customers for word of mouth to even work.
> This is an extremely strong claim. Certainly you'd concede that some ads contain truthful information. Like there exists at least one ad that is true.
Conversely, I find this a weak claim. If most major uses of something are negative, one minor positive use does not trump the negative.
And even if a billboard is 100% factual, that does not necessarily means it’s a net positive to have constant visual pollution for something you may not even buy.
One caveat being, some high quality things really do get drowned out or conceptually polluted by loudly advertised crap. It's a tangly problem that's for sure
Word of mouth, to start. If there's no marketing, consumers in general will understand that they need to seek out products that they want and need, and will eventually find your new product.
A side bonus is that this will eliminate a lot of useless garbage. Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail.
At any rate, finding customers within the constraints of the law (including a hypothetical advertising ban) is not society's problem, it's the company's problem.
If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective.
> If there's no marketing, consumers in general will understand that they need to seek out products that they want and need, and will eventually find your new product.
What you're really implying is that somebody is going to set up a website or search engine for people to find products, and then marketing would be replaced entirely by SEO and payola.
> Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail.
The assumption here is that the companies selling junk aren't the incumbents. What mechanism is going to exist to help people identify what is and isn't junk that can't or doesn't exist already?
>If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective.
Spend your marketing budget on your fixed costs.
Also, is your product direct-to-consumer? Because if it isn't, there are established channels to sell it to distributes, and if it is, you're likely a big part of the problem (since marketing of direct-to-consumer products is not usually a tool to let people know about new quality products).
We already have those things. To the extent that people can use them to get the good product instead of the junk one, don't they already do it?
And, of course, we know that these things are often corrupted. One of the major problems is that people want this most for products that are expensive, but manufacturers only send free/pre-release test samples to reviewers they think will publish a favorable review.
To do it right you need the reviewer to not have this dependency on the manufacturer for access, so they need money to buy the product themselves. Which is what you get with Consumer Reports, but they (haha) aren't funded by advertising, and then people on a tight budget forego subscription and don't know what to buy.
That's really two different classes of products. You want to read a review before you buy a car, but by and large people actually do that already.
Low cost items don't need that because this isn't going to be the only sandwich or bottle of laundry detergent you buy this decade, so it's as easy to take a chance on it once and try it yourself as to read a review which may or may not be biased, and then if it sucks you don't buy it again.
Somehow you have to get your product in front of (and probably give it away) to the people doing the independent reviews and product testing. That's marketing.
There are probably some exceptions in well-defined markets with a limited number of products like automobiles but those are actually companies that, in general, spend a lot on marketing and advertising.
> If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective.
The obvious answer is that you chose a risky business to go into.
There as a time when if you sold tiny hinges to mount stamps in a stamp collecting book there would be a Philatelist Monthly magazine or such that would be your target market where you can advertise.
The only thing that would achieve is that a "word of mouth" businesses would pop up. People would sign up, product place stuff in regular talks about weather near the office coffee machine. You would visit your parents and they would told ask you to buy some stuff you don't need because they would get a cut. Would you prefer that? I surely wouldn't.
People have no idea how the world works, yet want to design laws and would like to force other people to act according to their preferences. It's so egocentric it's unbelievable.
A world without marketing would still allow for products to be registered, reviewed, rated, and for people to talk about it. It would still allow you to have a website and a newsletter that people can opt into. The only restriction would be that you cannot pay for better visibility, reviews or references from influencers.
So the way I imagine it would work is that you would register your product into an official registry (free of charge). Then if I need something specific I can search the registry for what I need, and your product might pop up, with links to your website, your videos, as well as all reviews and ratings. There could be a subsidy system that makes unreviewed products cheaper. If your product is really awesome, the awesome reviews should, in principle, suffice to make your business thrive.
Of course, whatever the system in place is, there needs to be work done to make sure it cannot be cheated: if people can pay to prop up their product, they will. But it shouldn't be necessary to pay to make people aware of a product that could improve their lives. Surely it should be possible to set up some kind of discovery system.
> A world without marketing would still allow for products to be registered, reviewed, rated, and for people to talk about it. It would still allow you to have a website and a newsletter that people can opt into. The only restriction would be that you cannot pay for better visibility, reviews or references from influencers.
These are all forms of marketing, but not specifically advertising. I think what OP meant to say is "a world without advertising."
I don't know about you but I'm still not finding out about them, they have to compete with more established businesses for ad space.
I have gotten precisely one piece of marketing communication that had a positive value in my entire life and it was from an online restaurant supplier. One. Solitary. Closer to forty than I am thirty.
I just don't think the value proposition that you're talking about actually exists.
If you're a new business and you're any good and you do effective marketing, in a couple years you're an established business. Then you see their ad and you say "well yeah but they're an established business." Now they are, but at one point they weren't. And at that point they weren't buying as much advertising because they didn't have as much money, but if they hadn't bought any they'd be gone instead of established.
I also kind of suspect that big companies buy a lot of advertising specifically to outbid their smaller competitors on the ad slots, because the ROI is much higher for the company that wouldn't have been the customer's default, so the bigger company isn't buying the slot to build awareness, they're buying it to keep their challenger from doing that. And then most of the ads you see are for big companies.
And I'm saying that their marketing has had a negative impact on my life, I don't want it, and if your case represented a true and effective strategy then at some point I would have been exposed to it. Sorry, that it would have happened more than once.
Why would you think it would have happened more than once to you? By definition small businesses are small. They might run ads and only find 100 more people who want their product. There could be a million small businesses doing this in the US and the average person might not experience it happening to them even once.
> If you're a new business and you're any good and you do effective marketing, in a couple years you're an established business.
This is massively burying the lede here. Doing 'effective marketing' costs a large amount of money. Where is this marketing budget going to come from with a fresh business that hasn't begun to sell products at scale yet?
>Doing 'effective marketing' costs a large amount of money.
Yes. It requires an investment. Setting up a website. Maybe going to and speaking at relevant events. Sending out press releases. Etc. If you're going to setup a business and just not tell anyone, you probably shouldn't bother. And, in general, telling people and promoting your business is marketing even if you don't classically advertise.
You won't have the money to buy such billboards anyways. Also it would be more efficient to do semi-targeted advertising by buying space in related places: magazines related to your product, sponsor spots in youtube videos, ads in specialty stores, etc. Start small by targeting an audience likely to be interested, not by mass-advertising in a spray-and-pray fashion.
Example: I found out about JLCPCB from sponsor segments on electronics youtube channels, when they started their offering. Granted this is not a small business (the company behind JLC is a behemoth), but it is a Chinese company unknown in the west, that only did B2B before. They advertised directly to audiences that might be interested.
> Also it would be more efficient to do semi-targeted advertising by buying space in related places: magazines related to your product, sponsor spots in youtube videos, ads in specialty stores, etc.
Those are all still marketing. Whether they're better than billboards depends on what the product is.
> You won't have the money to buy such billboards anyways.
Billboard space is available starting at on the order of $1000/month. This is well within the reach of a small business for a one month campaign and the dynamic billboards will even sell space on an interval of 15 minutes.
The fixed billboards in the most expensive cities are all Coca Cola and McDonalds because those cost the most and that's who can afford them, but the proposal is "ban all marketing" not "ban all marketing by multinational corporations".
Well, when was the last time someone saw something like that advertised on billboards? Can’t remember ever seeing anything like it on a billboard outside SF which is a very weird special case
Partial answer: A lot of products people buy are not directly from the maker, but some store. So instead of marketing directly to consumers, the maker can just go and pitch to the store owner, who then carries the product. If there are enough stores out there (not a world full of Walmarts), then most makers will find many stores to carry their product. People go to the store, browse and buy.
> A lot of products people buy are not directly from the maker, but some store.
How does this account for high streets becoming ghost towns in the UK? It seems like running bricks & mortar stores in the UK isn't financially viable.
Wasn't especially my observation last time I was in London. But it's fair that a combination of online purchases and (maybe?) changing tastes/priorities have taken a hit on at least some categories of B&M retail overall.
Your product can be listed somewhere, discovered, word of mouth... The thing is you cannot pay to promote it. I agree it would be a challenge to solve, maybe some kind of compromise could be achieved.
In a free market your product, if it is truly better than competitors, will sell more. Because consumers will research products based on merit, and consumers can tell somehow which product is higher quality, and they can do it instantly.
As you can see, we have never lived in a free market.
The same way humanity has done for thousands of years? Word of mouth and reputation. This isn't a new problem, what's new is the ubiquitousness of advertising and the amount of money that gets pissed away on marketing.
So what ends up happening is that local businesses don't get any of the marketing opportunities which get bought out by big businesses with a large ad spend budget.
If it's not 1905, you put up a website and let people search for your product. Modern marketing doesn't seek to inform, after all. It doesn't work to make a product discoverable. Does Ford Motor Company really need to spend that $400 million annually? Would anyone soon forget the existence of the F150?
i like the trap laid here. "But NoMoreNicksLeft, you have to pay for search rankings!" ban that, too. Ban SEO. If i make a page that has my product offerings on it, it should compete on my copy, not SEO or how much i spent at google, bing, FB, etc. This is a solvable problem with specifically search technology, but also as a society we also have access to more people to ask for recommendations, to see other people talking about some new toy (or whatever) they bought.
As far as search engines go, the search provider can wholesale ban everyone who even accidentally games the system. Put your widget catalog on a web page, be honest about your products and/or services, and you should be fine. I will repeat that, because i think this is the part that gets marketing graduates in a tizzy - be honest about your products and/or services. If you gotta lie about what you offer or can do, then i really could not care less if your business survives; there's already enough dishonesty in our society.
edit to add: i actually logged in on my computer to reply to another comment you made (they should just buy a house closer to the job) which was very good.
How might one practically ban SEO? The moment a search engine uses information on a web page to determine relevance, the operator of the website can modify its presentation to bump up its rankings. There's plenty of room even within the strictest possible bounds of "being honest", and being the first result on the biggest search engine is valuable enough that you'll still get an underground SEO industry, legal or not.
Also, search providers know that users will get mad if they can't access popular websites, so there's no way they'll cut those websites off at a whim just for "accidental gaming", not unless they're compelled from above. And then you have the usual issues with corruptible officials deciding which companies are good and which are verboten.
From a legal standpoint, this seems far easier than banning advertising of any form. Which, if you'll remember, has (some) constitutional protections within the US. In contrast, it's a bit more difficult to claim such a thing about SEO. We regulate the activities of business all the time, and SEOing just doesn't seem expressive in the ways that "free speech" are.
From a practical standpoint, I do not have a clue. It seems as if this would just drive the worst of it overseas, where it is not possible to investigate or to prohibit effectively. I'll await the other guy's answer, maybe he has something more clever than I can come up with on a Friday at 5pm.
How often have you discovered a quality product through advertising, rather than through reviews, personal recommendations, or just being present in a store? I have a hard time remembering even a single case.
You know what, how about this: A corporation gets to spend let's say up to 5% of its total budget on advertising in the first two months of its existence, as long as it has a new product that is exclusive to the company and as long as the company is advertising exclusively for itself and for the new product, and as long as the corporation is financially and structurally independent from established corporations. Any loopholes that let Coca-Cola take advantage of this are systematically closed, the intent of the law is clearly communicated, and the FTC fines any established corporation trying to work around it.
This advertising is only legal to put in free versions of media that have paid ad-free versions, and to opt-in newsletters organized by product (so that people can pay to keep it out of their lives but if they're curious about innovations in a space or just want to know what's coming out they can get a slight discount for it).
This also gives an advantage to new companies, which is probably a good thing, though could of course be abused by a billionaire with fly-by-night companies, at which point we'd have to patch that loophole. Maybe with my favorite idea of "ownership disclosures", where the majority owner(s) of any given corporation has to be disclosed on product labels, so that you know if you're buying from Nestle or Unilever even if they want to obfuscate that fact.
A lot of marketing is not falsehood spreading. It’s literally just trying to get the word to potential customers that a thing exists that might be useful to them. Most b2b marketing is like that.
I agree that marketing where they have an attractive person just show something is manipulative though.
This is just so wide of the mark in my experience, especially B2B where the sales and marketing tactics are just, well, awful.
What I have observed is that almost without fail, I find out about really good, high quality products and services from friends and colleagues, through more general word of mouth, by reading reviews, and by research, not through ads.
In fact, it is so noticably true that what is being advertised to me is rarely what I want that I use advertising as a negative signal. If I recall seeing ads for something, I will consciously avoid buying it and that usually works out for the best.
So I conclude advertising is mostly important for duping people into buying things they don't really want or need, that are more than likely nothing special, and that society would benefit greatly from a ban on advertising.
One of the sponsored results is for an electric skid steer that I didn’t know existed. This is genuinely useful to know for small jobs.
Another sponsored result is for a delivery rental service that can bring them anywhere. Also good to know for jobs where I don’t want to go to an equipment rental place in the city to haul it myself to a site 150 miles away.
A separate example is that lots of airports have 3rd party off airport parking that is cheaper. A billboard on the highway to the airport that says “off-site aport parking $20/day, $80/week with 24/7 shuttle service every 15 mins” is literally all just useful information about a way to save money using a third party at a convenience cost that you wouldn’t think to look into.
Well, if you try to run your own business of any type, you suddenly realize why there's need for marketing. Things don't sell themselves. Nobody beats a path to your door even with the best of mousetraps.
... because your competitiors are using ads to manipulate your potential customers into buying from them instead of you. Do you think people would just stop eating because restaurants/grocery stores were not allowed to advertise?
I would stop eating because I wouldn’t be able to sell my products and won’t have money to go to restaurants! Like most of the people who don’t work for employers (so they could outsource their marketing efforts to corporations), and have to market their efforts.
You are right that advertising employs other manipulative tactics besides just deception. The other tactics are just as bad and most ads are straight up deceptive.
I don't think so. For me the real test is whether or not someone is giving me a monetary incentive. The very act of having to pay someone to say something increases the probability of it being a lie
For me the real test is whether or not someone is trying to persuade other human beings towards a certain action. An action that is favourable for you.
This can be monetary of course. But this could also be ballot vote on election day. This could be a change in behaviour of people to drive less cars, but take the train instead. Or convince people that advertising should be banned for large corporates.
Marketing is the art and science of achieving behavioural changes to your benefit.
> For me the real test is whether or not someone is trying to persuade other human beings towards a certain action. An action that is favourable for you.
I think the test for me, at least for the kind of marketing/advertising that should be banned, is the passiveness of it.
If, while going through my day, I am interrupted by your billboard, banner ad, spam email, promotional app notification, street marketing person, etc. in an attempt to manipulate me into action, that is the thing that should be illegal.
If I walk into a shop and say "I'm looking for a camera", invite a business in to pitch for work, call somoene up for a quote, directly enter a query like "buy camera uk" into a search engine, etc. then I think that is ok. I have asked to be sold to, and I am mentally prepared for the fact of that happening (notwithstanding that certain techniques should maybe also not be allowed).
Yes, we are always trying to have some effects on other people's behavior, but I don't think most people would say it's marketing. And maybe most important, quantity is a quality on itself. So, me as an individual trying to persuade another individual is a total different game than a big corporation trying to persuade millions of people. To give a more clear cut example, me having a look on the street is very different to mass surveillance.
The difference is that people come to the comment section here to read opinions on the subject of the article. People don't go on a highway drive just to learn about what lawyers and and casinos are available. I'm sure you can also understand the difference between a catalogue listing on-topic producs and unprompted signage.
Karma will you get more status and increase the likelihood of posts being upvoted. There are many guides online how to rank on HN in order to market your startup.
HN comments have influenced my thinking and my subsequent actions quite heavily in the past years.
The line you’re drawing is super thin and only theoretical.
I kind of wonder how far you want to go with these sorts of things.
Would controlling things like this bleed into adjacent social controls, like how HOAs will prevent any house from looking too different? Or possibly take on other dimensions, like sponsored in-real-life product placement and word-of-mouth?
Regular people living their lives like to make arbitrary changes to their houses, which is why HOA rules are contentious.
Regular people aren’t paid to advertise as they go about their day. It’s not very comparable.
And I’ve never heard anyone suggest that word of mouth recommendations should be banned... That’s kind of an insane idea that isn’t even remotely possible.
> I have always wondered how a world without marketing would look.
We would all be standing there at the entrance of the supermarket exchanging awkward looks not knowing what to do until an old lady shows up and we grab a cart because she did. Then we follow her around the store pretending not to be looking, buying the same products. When everyone has paid and the old lady is long gone we have conversations about what to do with the things we've just purchased.
Oh man, I thought it was completely obvious what marketing is.
It takes effort to bridge the gap between users and manufacturers. We are used to the company doing the work and picking up the bill but the customer has as much need to figure out what solutions are available.
Having the company search the customer only barely works. It works but very poorly and only to some extend. The potential client feels bothered by the noise of endless offers and spends very little time on them. In stead of dangling your garden set in their face until one of them bites you can put it in a store next to the other garden sets.
Because pushing barely work products are limited to that what is instantly obvious.
Customers may also gather and inform themselves. They might willingly go to a conference and sit though lengthy presentations. In stead of screaming at you that I offer an email service a presentation is more about what sets it apart [say] its scripting interface.
If stores and conferences are still considered marketing the customer will have to put in more work to stay informed. They would tend more towards objective side by side comparison making the company more about the product than about marketing.
The pun of my joke was that customers are not stupid. They can find the breakfast cereal aisle and pick something entirely by themselves.
I thought it was obvious since the screaming contest is enormously frustrating. An overpriced mediocre product will allow for the largest budget which is most likely to win - so that is what you have to make? lame
Exactly, it's all about revenue. Not only for the airlines, but also for the airports. It's intentionally inconvenient so they can make a lot more money.
i end up paying the higher price instead of attention which I do not have. just recently I got given a deliveroo voucher, which I added to my account. there's no way to figure out how much is left at any time, unless you're about to commit to an order. I ordered some food, thinking I'll pay with the free credit - nope, I missed the bit where you have to change the payment option from card to voucher credit.
It's not a bug, it's a feature. All students know that any line goes through two big enough points.
I was expecting something related to "exact predicates", like for example:
Efficient Exact Geometric Predicates for Delaunay Triangulations
Which is not "classical geometry", I guess, although it is constructible with ruler and compass (you need to draw circumcircles of triangles and maybe change triangles after that)
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