davemel37

The point about watching the game...thats not really permissible according to many Rabbis, its just an excuse your friend made because its much worse to take an action that completes an electrical circuit (similar to biblical prohibition of lighting a fire) than to just look at something happening...but there is clear guidance about what you are allowed to even read or look at on Shabbos. This is just human nature...we all do the best we can with who we are at any given moment...the Eruv though is a very different mechanism.

There is debate in the religious community about this eruv and others in Manhattan.

If google and the internet went away tomorrow, small local businesses would likely be better off. Instead of having to pay money just to keep competitors from bidding on their brand or worrying about all the ways tech startups prey on small local businesses!

True ABM is platform and ad tech neutral, its almost entirely strategy and deep work in winning over every stakeholder at play with a completely customized content, advertising, and outreach experience. Unfortunately, many scam artists and platform developers or just uninformed marketers hijacked the term and created impressions on the strategy like the one you have and mention above...

Google selling ad space on brand searches to competitors unless you outbid them. Ad networks selling you in market audiences based on intent to buy from you anyways...if you dont buy that data, your competitors will... than you need to use first party data to compete and you spend to remarket to customers who would buy from you anyways if the ad networks were selling that other signal driven data to your competitors. Startups and publishers whose entire business model is ranking in google for your brand name and selling data... than they all have the chutzpah to claim their targeting and ad network should get credit for the sale...

Its one big protection racket driven by publishers and ad networks to skim from businesses...

If the targeting didnt exist for everbody, the cream would still rise to the top... 80% of online advertising today is only necessary because those same predators would sell your customers to your competitors if you dont pay to play!!!

The only solution is to take advertising out of the hands of publishers and put it into the hands of businesses and consumers...

The incentives are all wrong because publishers and middlemen control the monetization!

Catalog sales, mail order and direct mail businesses have been doing for the last century all of the same things we do today online.

The only thing that changed is the speed and access of information. The same way we didnt hear about conflicts two continents away, we didnt hear about the stores reselling our data.

Im not saying we dont have a privacy problem today, but its far from something new.

Would you ever voluntarily use an IVR? I wouldn't. If I am going to interact with automation for a business, I want to do it with a different interface than voice... all the hype around NLP and chatbots was uninspired and focused on the wrong side of the interaction... Building conversational interfaces for consumers to use to interact with businesses is a much better use case.

I think this perspective is very short sighted. You will lose customers to automation, but businesses wont turn away customers because of automation.

Customers and prospects don't want to interact with machines, but businesses should be willing to give customers what they want.

The idea that a tool can be rolled out to millions of consumers, even with limited use cases and not have to get adoption from businesses to be useful is IMHO a much bigger opportunity and much better use case than rolling out a tool to businesses that make the interaction less personal.

Customers need to trust businesses, business only need to collect money from customers.

I think everyone who focuses on chatbots from the business use case perspective is missing the bigger opportunity.

A technology that can give a consumer access to ALL businesses, not just the ones who adopt a new technology offers much more utility than serving businesses or the shortsighted use cases like saving time and money for the business.

The truth is, everything that touches a prospect or customer is marketing. Treating your employees well is marketing. Your product is marketing. You are marketing...everything that impacts a decision to buy, even indirectly, is marketing...

It never was a dirty word...but as a marketer, I consider growth hacking to be a dirty word nowadays :(

The question itself begs for an anecdotal answer that is completely irrelevant to your circumstances...

More importantly, the amount of people who have given up on strategies too soon or because it wasnt done in a way to provide empirical evidence, is staggering... and the amount of misinformation that flows out into the wild built on those flawed premises is really problematic for those without the context of your situation and the relative context of the situation where those opinions were formed.

The second problem is that opportunity cost is rarely measured by marketers. The third problem is that your resource allocation relative to your objectives is arguably more important than any other factor or opinion about a strategy.

Marketing decisions should be made in the context of your resources, goals, and your broader marketing mix.

The idea that you can evaluate a specific strategy and measure its return in a Silo without considering the opportunity costs and other available strategies relative to your specific resource limitations is very dangerous and needs to be killed off!

The ideal scenario is to optimize to cashflow relative to lifetime value and time value of money...or get as close as possible to this...and choose strategies within the context of this calculation.

You want an SEO strategy? First, figure out if your audience is there and the cost to reach them with paid search and how long it takes to turn into cashflow and the lifetime value of that customer...than evaluate the costs to optimize to rank for that keyword, and how long it will take, than look at your other resources and strategies relative to the likely costs and returns and time to get cash returned relative to those strategies and decide if its worth investing in ranking there...

Once you identify a proven keyword and have context for the cost and value and time and oppirtunity costs, than figure out how to rank for that keyword... maybe you buy a site that is already ranking. Maybe you advertise on sites already ranking. Maybe you think about the user and find a way to create a resource that Google will want to rank because of its utility... and than create empirical tests to measure progress and than you invest !!!

------ The shortcut SEO strategy i like is to ask yourself, what resource can I create for my industry that is not online but would offer so much utility that google has no choice but to optimize their algorithms to rank my resource... like wayne gretzky, go where the puck will be in the future...

When is SEO is done right, its Google trying to optimize its algorithms to rank your content, not vice versa!

Just my two cents.

I dont know enough to have an educated opinion on healthcare regulation or on social services...but its disengenuous to claim that medicine cant be managed as a business when its already so heavily regulated that it barely looks like a normal business.

I would agree that the current model is super messed up...but maybe managing it like a business without all the government intervention and IP laws is the better solution here... maybe not...i dont know...but you definitely cant support your conclusion from the current environment.

You wrote a previous comment about jews distinctive physical features and now you speak of their means and share an article about rotschild and than view a Jew who calls you out on your false narrative a narcissist?!

Ascribing a few peoples wealth on a group of millions is the very definition of anti-semitism... I refrained from calling you out sooner to try to give you the benefit of the doubt...but the fact is the wealth on one person or a few people lending money hardly reflects on the entire Jewish people...it is a dangerous stereotype not based on actual facts...just a stereotype based on a fraction of a fraction of the population...

Your belief that jews arent poor or oppressed minorities without means throughtout history is patently false! Even if you can point to a few exceptions to the rules.

I really think there is an undertone to this perspective that is colored by a narrative that is false at best and possibly something much worse.

I dont think there is any factual basis to claim Jews had great economic success or were of means outside of false narratives perpetuated by their enemies. Even if you can point to specific eras or individuals that had success, you certainly couldnt demonstrate it existed propritionately more so than others, or that it existed in all the periods where they were persecuted and oppressed...

>As you I don't see why someone should be proud about anything inherited. It can be a gift (or a curse), but it is certainly not an achievement.

One way to look at this is if you believe achievements are worthy of pride, or that pride is an 'incentive' to achieve, than recognizing how significant everything you do can be is a great way to inspire maximizing achievement... One way to do this may be to recognize that your achievements can have a positive impact on future generations, even in simply creating positive and breaking negative parenting cycles in your family, or how smiling at someone can have a ripple impact elevating numerous peoples days and possibly lives... its possible that training us to be proud of something that is as insignificant as being a product of our parents will nurture a sensitivity to take our ability to impact others with the seriousness and responsibility it demands. Just a thought.

Im not a rabbi or in kiruv or anything, so take this with a grain of salt...but I would point to Jordan Petersons position about the longevity and survival of the bible stories and his response to atheists around it all sounding made up. There is a reason these stories survived through the ages. There is wisdom and much to learn from the ideas in the Torah even if you dont buy into their accuracy. It's just too shallow to dismiss it as superstitious ancestors who werent as smart as us.

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the very fact that we are finite beings in a world that will survive our existence means that our life will face tragedy...and the best way to cope with a tragic existence is to find meaning in life and in our actions.

Most fundamentally is buying into the idea that we can bargain with the future and that decisions we make today matter and have an impact on the future and future generations.

From that context, ritually connecting with the past and exploring how things that happened to your ancestors have an impact on your existence today is about the best way I can think of to get you to internalize the idea that what you do today matters to tomorrow.

The idea of mesorah(transmission from generation to generation) is framed as a way to verify the validity of the stories...but I really think its more along the lines of showing the unbroken chain between the past and the present...so you can internalize the responsibility of the chain between the present and the future...

It sounds like you've decided to start a new chain for your children and sever that connection to your past. For me, I think the responsibility and ramifications of that decision are massive and at the very least deserve a reckoning with the significance of how the decision impacts future generations regardless of what you finally decide...it feels to me that because you werent able to internalize the ideas (regardless of the factual nature of them) of "Hashem took ME out of mitzrayim" or "had the exodus not taken place, we would still be slaves" ...and never connected with the powerful idea that we eat matzah to commemorate what our ancestors ate rushing out Egypt...you either feel the decision for keeping your future generations connected to the past is inconsequential, or the past is blatanly wrong.

Considering you grew up religious, I am assuming you had a modern Yeshiva education...like many others, it sounds like they failed to show you the pragmatic wisdom in yiddishkeit and instead left you feeling unconnected with your brilliant history.

I would encourage you to try to pass on the parts that you did connect with and the pragmatic wisdom in much of the torah and halacha to atleast give your children the chance to make their own decisions.

You can reject the bible and reject religion and put science on a pedestal...but the idea that what you do matters and that you can bargain with the future...and that who and where you are today is a product of decisions your parents and their parents made...that lesson is too important not to pass on. It would be a shame to be passedover!

This was a smart biz decision and CA was just a convenient opportunity to roll out without too much backlash IMHO.

It will make some marketers feel less in control...but i actually doubt that data actually warranted the additional costs facebook charged for using it.

I am all for being brutally aware of reality...but, there is also a time horizon to these things. Most great startups had to break through resistance. Maybe the resistance you guys saw was simply resistance to change...

Maybe tweaks to UI isn't what wins this game...maybe its tools like Pilot or services like bench, or maybe its something like the car solving the horse manure problems of the turn of the century...

And to be fair, there are some studies that show cognitive strain being linked to better focus or something like that (Disclaimer: I have no idea what im talking about, but am pretty sure Thinking Fast and Slow discusses it.) so, maybe a harder UI is better...

What I do know is that I want software to make my life easier and more efficient. And I don't mind if that takes away part of a means of my livelihood, I'll figure out the next step the same way I got to where I am today.

If I understood you correctly, the folks in charge of this are very good at their jobs and I am sure they are optimizing for their quarterly earnings, or bonuses, or whatever else they are incentivized to do...and I get the idea that they see bookkeepers as their customers, not business owners, and are serving them as best they know how... but this feels like the lazy way out of innovating.

We get that from a short term perspective, it may make sense to keep it too complicated for the end users, but efficient markets will prevail short of forced intervention.

If that is how Intuit thinks, I cannot wait for the day when they get displaced.