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Comment by diminoten | Hacker News Reader

You honestly can't be so arrogant so as to assume that if you can't see the benefit of an activity, that it must not have any benefit, right?

Lobbyists are critical to the functioning of the American system of government. They're even mentioned in the Constitution.

Private equity firms make retirement possible.

PR researchers enable companies to not have to deal exclusively with the populist swaying of public opinion. Public opinion, generally speaking, is an awful way to do business and to make decisions. Mobs are cruel.

I could go on but this method of dealing with your issues is unsustainable. Suffice it to say that you're just going to have to live with the fact that you don't understand everything and that's okay.

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Go on. I'd like to see how telemarketing is useful. For me, it's a more demeaning job than being a prostitute - at least in the latter case, two parties engage in a mutually beneficial exchange of value. The job of a telemarketer is to trick a person into wasting his/her hard-earned money on a subpar product the person doesn't even need.

Telemarketing may not be useful, but now the goalpost seems to have moved from "prove most jobs are actually useful" to "prove no jobs of questionable utility exist"

Useful is such a relative word.

Telemarketing is useful in some way to the person who employs the telemarketer. Otherwise he/she wouldn't pay someone to do it.

It's also useful to the person earning the salary, who then spends their salary consuming in the economy. Not everyone is lucky/brave enough to pursue what they are truly passionate about.

Finally, even if the job doesn't generate any sales, it's still redistributing wealth away from one set of people (shareholders of the company) to others in the economy. Is this useful?

Useful for humanity. Because "useful for employee" or "useful for employer" are bad measures that allow really stupid things to exist.

This job is based on lying and/or deceiving to people to trick them into buying somethng. Whoever is paying for it is actively hurting other humans. In a way it's worse than bullshit - it's a malicious job.

Are you implying that there is no place for malicious jobs in society?

I am. Before someone brings up the military - you can say that armed forces are built on malice, but the harm is at least directed towards other societies. Telemarketing is basically hurting members of your own.

Before we start, what do you define as a telemarketer?

And how do you define usefulness for humanity?

Agreed, and the same goes for the people that do "customer support" on call centers set up in basements, run by "managers" fit for a reenactment of the Stanford experiment, dealing with disrespectful customers that are angry about the crap sold to them by the same company that outsources "support" to yet another outsourcer. All while these people do nerve wrecking "work" for minimum wage, because they have to eat, until they burn out. And this is in Europe.

>>I could go on

Yes, please do. I want to hear what kind of bizarre reality you live in where telemarketing is useful.

It's been useful for me.

I recently received a call to remember to sign up for a charity race before the early signup deadline passed.

It was good for me because I had done it for the past 5 years, but hadn't remembered to sign up yet. The reminder saved me money for early signup.

It was good for the caller because they then had another person committed to doing the event.

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The college I went to was funded in part by donations from alumni. Without donations received by telemarketers calling, there would be less resources available for my education.

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