I think he is implying (correctly) that in the absense of a robust secondary market for cars, the prices for new cars would drop -- there would be less demand for new cars people knew they couldn't resell. It's a bad analogy, though, especially for an economics professor. By suppressing the secondary market for his book, he secures his monopoly on a mandated good, ensuring the higher price.
Slice sells aggregated order data for categories of goods by brand, calculated by looking at email receipts. Things that are useful for calculating overall demand, seasonality, market share, etc. I don't know about selling the actual email content; would be surprised if they did. (Not affiliated with Slice, but am an occasional data buyer, which is how I know of them.)
"We collect such commercial transactional messages so that we can better understand the behavior of the senders of such messages, and better understand our customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising. We may disclose, distribute, transfer, and sell such messages...." [emphasis mine]
Of course they might not sell your messages, but it's pretty weird that they'd put up a "we totally can sell your vaguely anonymized messages" and then not take advantage of it. What they sell to Uber may not be what they make available to you.
Even if they don't currently, they could start doing so at any time. And even if you somehow trusted them not to, they could get bought out by someone not so trustworthy.
Now I'm curious: what is the commercial value in the aggregated email content that would make someone want to pay for it, besides the purchase and receipt data that Slice is already providing (plus subscription and open rates)?
Lyft receipts provide origin and destination addresses as well as the exact date and time. That would be tremendously valuable for Uber. That info could be aggregated and then sold to Uber, or their privacy policy would also allow them to just scrub these e-mails (and the manner of scrubbing is not specified, so who knows if they consider the exact origin and destination locations to be personal information or not) and sell them to Uber directly.
Maybe I can answer the question "where to find people to talk to." I'm in consumer research; here's what's worked for me.
If you need b2b: LinkedIn, conference and trade show lobbies (you don't need a ticket to hang out in the lobby), email lists you can buy online. There are also companies that maintain lists of experts with every imaginable background you can speak to for an hourly fee; not cheap but worth it.
If you need consumers: survey panel companies will let you field a simple survey to people who match your criteria, who you can then recruit into a phone/Skype call. You can also recruit people yourself through well-targeted Facebook and Twitter ads. Craigslist works well; set up a short survey to prequalify people.
Money is a great accelerant. You will always find people who would talk to you for free, but offering to pay them for their time and expertise makes things go a lot faster. Plus, if you are on the shy side, money changes the dynamic. You are now not asking for a favor, but are offering to engage in a business transaction.
Six people is often all you need to start seeing some common themes.
>> Six people is often all you need to start seeing some common themes.
That's interesting. I am curious how you came up with that number. Getting six people to give you their opinions is much easier than doing any kind of extensive research.
From personal experience of doing a bunch of interviews and surveys over the years, after about 6, you'll start hearing patterns. If you are new to the subject you are researching, doing some reading and talking to about six people will get you to a point where you'll be able to evolve the questions you are capable of asking, or formulate hypotheses for testing.
"How To Measure Anything" has a great chapter on how talking to only a few people can reduce uncertainty with a pretty amazing accuracy, but I don't have a copy handy.
Yes, she runs Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub eventually partnered with LibGen to help host files and reduce Sci-Hub's dependence on donated logins. (Previously all documents were accessed from their "real" journal/repository portals using credentials contributed by sympathetic academics.)
This is what gyms have become for many. I remember seeing a graph showing the decline in church attendance coinciding with the rise in gym memberships.
I think that gyms can scratch a certain itch in that arena, but aren't nearly as comprehensive as what a church provides. Also I hoped for that when I started at a small yoga studio, but nobody really talked to anybody else there, as far as I saw, and I didn't make any lasting connections.
Clearly you haven't read those emails: they show nothing of the sort, which is why you couldn't provide any evidence to back that claim.
You can find signs that people in the establishment personally favored the establishment candidate – the least surprising revelation in political history – but there's no evidence that lead to any concrete action. That's why the only claims of rigging have been intentional misrepresentation based on the knowledge that some people like you would repeat those claims without checking the sources.
When you have Donna Brazile feeding the Clinton campaign townhall questions so that she can prepare the answers. Threats for super delegates switching to Bernie and Debbie Wasserman Shultz stepping down. It's clear evidence of a rigged election. Who knows what was happening that is not in the emails.
Try citing specific ptimsry sources for events which actually happened. There's plenty of hyperventilating and outright propaganda on right-wing blogs but there's a reason why nobody with credibility is claiming the primary was rigged.
Hint: it's the same reason why the alleged victim is going around telling his supporters to vote for Hillary. If you trusted his judgement enough to think he should be president, why not trust his analysis now?
There's a reason why nobody with credibility is claiming the primary was rigged
And that reason is elementary game theory. The only people with incentives to claim that the Democratic primaries were rigged are those who will be left with no political influence if the Democrats fare poorly.
When the Republicans do well, it's because they value party unity over literally everything else. One of HRC's strengths is that she brings the same thinking to the Democrats. For anyone within the party, working against her carries no conceivable upside. And as we've seen in DWS's case, working for HRC means you'll be well taken care of, no matter what.
Basically, if Sanders or anyone else on the left has beef with the DNC, they will be much better off if they wait to bring it up until after the election. And maybe not even then.
Except Bernie's rallies were full of young people, who are always up for a rally but who can seldom be bothered to vote. Meanwhile, Trump's rallies are full of old people who have nothing else to do but vote.
