What is missing in the typical narrative about Groupon – the one promoted by the company – is the “counterfactual”. The counterfactual is a powerful concept embedded in statistical theory. In order to evaluate the data in front of us, we must imagine an alternative world (the counterfactual) in which we allow the data to present themselves differently. To understand how medicine X might affect you, you can't just measure what happened after you took medicine X; you must also consider what might have happened if you took medicine Y and/or nothing at all.

So, instead of just thinking about the new customers brought in by Groupon, we must also consider the world without Groupon. In the world without Groupon, the regulars pay $100 for their meals, and the new customers pay $0 or some other amount (if Giorgio’s has other ways to attract them). This allows us to realize that the insertion of Groupon into that world would lower the intake from regulars while simultaneously raising the intake from new customers. For the merchant, whether Groupon is a net benefit depends on the balance between those two numbers.

This is related to the concept of opportunity cost in economics. When evaluating the value of an investment, we can’t just tally up the returns of said investment; we have to compare those returns to the returns of doing something else such as keeping the money in the bank.

$ rdesktop -g (Size of the screen) -u (your AD userid) -d (AD Domain) -r disk:desktop=/home/(your linux account)/ -a (colour depth) (PC Name according to Active Directory)

• Connect to the VPN
• In the terminal

rdesktop ip address of the remote computer