You start the curriculum with the following:
> Despite our superior technology, there are many things that Western countries could do in the past that we can’t today—e.g. rapidly build large-scale infrastructure, maintain low-crime cities, and run competent bureaucracies.
Which seems to be objectively false. There is a huge range in terms of infrastructure capacity, crime rate and bureaucratic competence in Western countries. Cities in the Netherlands, Norway, Estonia, Croatia, are among the safest in the world. Spain has doubled its amount of high-speed rail since 2010 to nearly 4,000km while the UK’s HS2 is a disaster. Nordic countries have very efficient, streamlined bureaucracy while Portugal or Italy are a Kafkaesque nightmare.
vfourier
Karma: 12
I never, ever had a single good experience with any product that was bought as a result of persuasion by human sales person, as opposed to careful research by the buyer who was then the one to initiate the purchase. This has held true both in my personal life and my work life as a software engineer.
Now I don’t know the coffee industry, but the same principles should hold where if you’re about to drop $30k on an espresso machine, it should be after you’ve read reviews from trusted industry professionals, talked to people who’ve used that particular model, and made a cost/benefit analysis. You’d want to obtain as much information as possible without having to talk to a sales rep whose only interest is getting you to buy the product.
In the software industry, there’s a huge number of companies selling inferior products at gigantic mark-ups when there are alternatives costing orders of magnitudes less. Developers often have to deal with the consequences of sales rep making non-technical people buy solutions they don’t need, or the wrong solutions. Putting a product behind a sales rep is also a common strategy to hide pricing information and thus be able to charge whatever you think the customer will pay, and also pressure them into a sale since they have to call you to get information in the first place.