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sujal
11/24/2008
Newsweek’s Daniel Gross explains the Consumer Price Index (here’s the official BLS site) in a very simple video. I could do without the goofy sound effects, but it’s a good, 2 minute explanation of how the government tracks inflation.
Per David Simon’s Berkeley talk, though, the video doesn’t go into why this matters. Perhaps they’ll cover that in the next installment of the Economics 101 series.
2:42 pm | leave a comment
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August 6th, 2004 at 11:23 pm
The sad part is, of course, that it adds cost and uncertainty for the legitimate companies out there who want to do the right thing. ESPN.com and Disney, for example… we just had a meeting a few weeks ago to go over what types of communications we can have with customers, new software systems that have been developed to help our apps comply with the legislation, and the utter uselessness of the legislation. The problem is that the fines are so severe that it makes it very hard for legitimate businesses that followed user preferences (like us) to ignore any provision of the new legislation.
For example, if a user asks to never get another mail from ESPN.com (as a result of a marketing message they agreed to receive when they signed up for an account, say), what do we do about emails they request? How about lost password requests? In all those cases, we still have to check with the master black list of emails to never contact and then ignore them. That’s the “safest” way of avoiding a complaint.
stupid, but true. The user would then have to complain using some other means and ahve a customer service rep unblock their email from our services.
August 7th, 2004 at 11:59 am
I went to high school with the 3 guys who own the company that wrote the CAN-SPAM act. One of them was actually a pretty good friend of mine. Random though.