Kevin Kelly -- The Technium
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/01/better_than_own.php

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kk.org%2Fthetechnium%2Farchives%2F2009%2F01%2Fbetter_than_own.php

Kevin Kelly's visie op de verschuiving van eigendom van content naar toegang tot content

"Better than owning" - a world of subscriptions giving instant universal access (to content, at least)

Better than Owning

Better Than Owning Ownership is not as important as it once was. I use roads that I don't own. I have immediate access to 99% of the roads and highways of the world (with a few exceptions) because they are a public commons. We are all granted this street access via our payment of local taxes. For almost any purpose I can think of, the roads of the world serve me as if I owned them. Even better than if I owned them since I am not in charge of maintaining them. The bulk of public infrastructure offers the same "better than owning" benefits.

Future. Very very cool.

Hall of shame...if they have any.

The worst economic turmoil since the Great Depression is not a natural phenomenon but a man-made disaster in which we all played a part. In the second part of a week-long series looking behind the slump, Guardian City editor Julia Finch picks out the individuals who have led us into the current crisis

... and six more who saw it coming

ChairmanBruce:

2009 Will Be a Year of Panic

Intellectual property made sense and used to work rather well when conditions of production favored it. Now they don't. If it's simple to copy just one single movie, some gray area of fair use can be tolerated. If it becomes easy to copy a million movies with one single button-push, this vast economic superstructure is reduced to rags. Our belief in this kind of "property" becomes absurd.

In a battered economy, free goods and services online are more attractive than ever. So how can the suppliers make a business model out of nothing?

Free is not enough. It also has to be matched with Paid.

More excellent insight from Fred Wilson about Internet startups, online business models, and revenue vs. cash. Important insight for anyone in business that needs to understand how next-generation economics are not what Wall Street was doing, but what the Web is doing today.

o a business is worth the sum of all of its future profits, discounted back to a net present value (buffet thinks this is the intrinsic value). its a lot easier to decrease costs than increase revenues. forget that ROE is so high for companies like craigslist. have a 1B company on 30 employees. any need to get big and grow.

Good article on Web based business profits, costs and revenues

Before the credit crisis, the world was awash with money. Now central banks are pumping in more than ever before and still everyone is short. Dan Roberts explains the illusion of wealth.

Recession spending by sector (US)

The spending data is cool, but it's largely meaningless to use for any decision-making about the state of the economy.

"Mint.com is in a unique position to answer this question – quantitatively. Since the crisis first hit in September, our user registration rate has more than quadrupled, giving us 900,000 sample points on the economy. That’s close to 1% of US households."

The average customer: "are spending $400 less each month than they were a year ago, have burned through half of their savings, and on average have taken on an additional $5k in debt."

Aaron Patzer

1. Outcomes, not income. Dumb growth is about incomes - are we richer today than we were yesterday? Smart growth is about people, and how much better or worse off they are - not merely how much junk an economy can churn out. Smart growth measures people's outcomes - not just their incomes. Are people healthier, fitter, smarter, happier?

Outcomes, not income. Connections, not transactions. People, not product. Creativity, not productivity.

Yahoo! Finance looks at some big companies who are on the razor's edge.

Loehmann's Capital Corp. (Privately owned; about 1,500 employees). This clothing chain has the right formula for lean times, offering women's clothing at discount prices. But the consumer pullback is hitting just about every retailer, and Loehmann's has a lot less cash to ride out a drought than competitors like Nordstrom Rack and TJ Maxx. If Loehmann's doesn't get additional financing in 2009 - a dicey proposition, given skyrocketing unemployment and plunging spending - the chain could run out of cash.

blistering

s like Hadoop. All of these are mature, high capable, and new ways of tackling the enormous challenges that large-scale co

business for the economic

While some might look at the social aspects of things like Web 2.0 as marginal subjects when things get tough, nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to the deeper implications of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Many of the more transformational aspects of the 2.0 era now have extensive groundwork laid for them, are available in genuinely enterprise-ready solutions/pilots, and many have just been waiting for the right situation; the driving need for businesses to change and transform in the face of radically different business conditions.

The internet really is a revolution for the media ecology, and the changes it is forcing on existing models are large. What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. ...ja uskottava rahoituspohja, mutta se on eri stoori.

"Unfortunately for the optimists, micropayments — small payments made by readers for individual articles or other pieces of a la carte content — won’t work for online journalism. "

Clay Shirky tells us why micropayments for news will not work.

thought you might be interested in this

The centerpiece of President Obama's domestic agenda is an $819 billion economic stimulus plan. The Senate will consider the measure this week, with an eye toward the amount of tax cuts and spending. Republicans and Democrats spar over what to consider a tax cut. An analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office tallies the tax-cut portion to be significantly less than the one-third Democrats claim it to be.

The Washington Post's breakdown of the stimulus package.

not the clearest visualization. could benefit from some compactness, perhaps via mouse interaction/exploration. but definitely a lot of good research and data in here.

share

http://clusterstock.alleyinsider.com/2009/2/aig-implodes-the-two-cows-version

The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?

"The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America's economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?"

Frightening look into the future of a social collapse in the US (and by extension other western countries) based on the experiences of the Russian collapse.

save

Hmmm. Trying not to panic.

save

Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture.

And so it goes, quite predictably too.... "As people scramble for the exits in Dubai, there is no ‘key mail’, like in America, where people can often mail back their house keys and walk away from a mortgage without the immediate threat of jail. People are literally fleeing this place, to date leaving 3000 cars stranded at the airport with keys still in the ignition. And the reason for this is that if you default on your Dubai mortgage, you can end up in a debtors prison. Perhaps Dubai will at least create a new Dickens?"

"people who have hundreds of millions or a billion in the bank are not going to change their lifestyles"

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world, visit my website here. or email me at: jonathan.jarvis@gmail.com

This short ten-minute video conveys the essentials of how the credit crisis occurred. It's a great example of information that is be explained using the smallest amount of words and images. It takes something both large and complex and personalizes/simplifies it for the lay audience. If you're looking for tips when putting together a presentation for non-scientists, this is a great resource to look toward for inspiration.

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated.

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world

obama's fc plan

obama plan website

A few weeks ago Obama's new secretary or treasury Tim Geitner unveiled the outlines of a plan to fix the financial crisis in our Country. One of the problems with these massive plans from the government is that citizens want to know exactly where their money is going. This is the treasury secretary's answer to that problem this site will document where all the money for the proposed plan will be documented and will be able to track.

Obama run site to track stimuls package spending

Great little animation that explains why the credit markets have frozen.

The Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis. Crisisofcredit.com The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world, visit jdjarvis.com.

Astute, approachable, and just plain pretty animated explanation of our current economic situation. Oh, and did I mention INCREDIBLY FRIGHTENING!? Once you realize how simple, and thus fundamental, the underlying problems are, it becomes very difficult to believe in a quick or easy fix. Now, back to stuffing my remaining cash into my mattress...

The Big Picture - News Stories in Photographs from the Boston Globe

What do you do if you don't have the money to pay a debt? If you are like most of us, you borrow. The US Government is no different. In order to pay for the $700 billion bailout, it will have to borrow more money, increasing the national debt. But who will pay for this massive bailout? If you are a US taxpayer, you will. Here is a visual guide to understanding how the bailout is funded and a couple of financial experts take on how it could be funded.

What do you do if you don’t have the money to pay a debt? If you are like most of us, you borrow. The US Government is no different. In order to pay for the $700 billion bailout, it will have to borrow more money, increasing the national debt. But who will pay for this massive bailout? If you are a US taxpayer, you will.

A nice graphic showing how the Bailout is being funded

"In the mid-'80s, Wall Street turned to the quants—brainy financial engineers—to invent new ways to boost profits. Their methods for minting money worked brilliantly... until one of them devastated the global economy."

The Nobel winning formula

Great explanation of the credit crisis...

The Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis. By Jonathan Jarvis.

Information and Aesthetic. Nice.

long form documentary on the financial crisis. Audio editing/narrative is strong

"How the economy went so bad, so fast and what Bernanke and Paulson did't see, couldn't stop and weren't able to fix."

Crazy collection of financial PDF's

Huge list of articles on finance-related topics

Innovation at Honda is fueled by a focus on engineering and problem solving and the proper levels of insight to enable spending and experimentation

I'm saving this for the next time I get that open-a-coffee-house/Mac-tech-shop urge.

"I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life."

There is a golden rule, long cherished by restaurateurs, for determining whether a business is viable. Rent should take up no more than 25 percent of your revenue, another 25 percent should go toward payroll, and 35 percent should go toward the product. The remaining 15 percent is what you take home.

Google首席经济学家：I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. ... The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. I think statisticians are part of it, but it’s just a part. You also want to be able to visualize the data, communicate the data, and utilize it effectively.

The McKinsey Quarterly - Hal Varian web challenge managers - Strategy - Innovation

Hal Varian, professor of information sciences, business, and economics at the University of California at Berkeley, says it’s imperative for managers to gain a keener understanding of the potential for technology to reconfigure their industries. Varian, currently serving as Google's chief economist, compares the current period to previous times of industrialization when new technologies combined to create ever more complex and valuable systems—and thus reshaped the economy.

I honestly can't believe this is real. Appalling, but true.

With all the recent talk about the decline of big media (eg. Seth Godin's article at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/01/when-newspapers.html), I thought it relevant to point to this piece about the shocking state of world slavery: "For four years, I saw dozens of people enslaved, several of whom traffickers actually offered to sell to me. I did not pay for a human life anywhere. And, with one exception, I always withheld action to save any one person, in the hope that my research would later help to save many more. At times, that still feels like an excuse for cowardice. But the hard work of real emancipation can’t be the burden of a select few." What place does four years worth of investigative journalism have in an internet driven meritocracy? Philanthropic endeavours? Streamlined news journals?Reportage is going to change and it is important we don't lose the power to expose issues like this.

Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. Before you go, let’s be clear on what you are buying. A slave is a human being forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. Agreed? Good. Most people imagine that slavery died in the 19th century. Since 1817, more than a dozen international conventions have been signed banning the slave trade. Yet, today there are more slaves than at any time in human history.

"Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. ... The total number of Haitian children in bondage in their own country stands at 300,000."

Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common.

There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history

waive

an interesting blog post on how banks set credit card limits

Today, we are bailing out the banks because of their greedy and deceptive lending practices in the mortgage industry. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. More is coming, I’m sorry to say. Layoffs are being announced nationwide in the tens of thousands. As people begin to lose their jobs, they will not be able to pay their credit card bills either. And the banks will be back for more handouts.

The Worst Is Yet To Come: Anonymous Banker Weighs In On The Coming Credit Card Debacle

By Felix Salmon at Wired Magazine, February 23, 2009.

One is that the financial press isn’t in the business of supplying useful information; it’s in the business of feeding people’s lust for predictions. “You keep buying the magazine regardless of how the forecasts turn out,” Wellington says, “and they’ll keep supplying the forecasts.”

Blaine Lourd got rich picking stocks. But then he realized that everything he thought he knew about the markets was wrong. And he's not alone.

As a group, professional money managers control more than 90 percent of the U.S. stock market. By definition, the money they invest yields returns equal to those of the market as a whole, minus whatever fees investors pay them for their services. This simple math, you might think, would lead investors to pay professional money managers less and less. Instead, they pay them more and more

Like a lot of people who end up on Wall Street, Blaine Lourd just sort of stumbled in. He'd grown up happy in New Iberia, Louisiana. His father had made a pile of money in the oil patch, and Blaine assumed that he too would one day eat four-hour lunches at the Petroleum Club, hunt ducks on the weekends, and get rich. His older brother, Bryan, had left Louisiana to make what seemed like a quixotic bid to become a Hollywood agent, but Bryan was gay, even if he pretended not to be. (He's now a partner at Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency.) Blaine was distinctly not gay and felt right at home in Louisiana—right up to the moment when, during his third year at Louisiana State University, the price of oil collapsed and took the family business with it. That was when he realized he had no idea what he would do with his life.

The markets are roiling, money managers & banks are posting disappointing returns, and people are beginning to wonder if they chose the wrong guy in Greenwich to take 2% of their assets and 20% of profits. But what if the problem isn’t the guy but the idea that makes him possible: the belief that the best way to invest capital is to hand it to an expert? As a group, professional money managers control more than 90% of the US stock market. By definition, the money they invest yields returns equal to those of the market as a whole less the fees investors pay them for their services. This simple math, you might think, would lead investors to pay professional money managers less and less. Instead, they pay them more and more. "If you put a thousand people in barrels and push them over Niagara Falls, some of them will survive. If you take those guys and push them over again, some of them will survive. And they’ll write books about how to survive being pushed over Niagara Falls in a barrel."

FTA: 'Blaine Lourd got rich picking stocks. But then he realized that everything he thought he knew about the markets was wrong. And he's not alone.' (note: Dec. 2007 issue!)

Next time you order a new pair of skinny jeans from Gap.com, you should know that you are helping welcome in the hive-mind robot overlords of retail. Warehouses run by

Boom. Now we begin. Watch the video.

Online Data

The data collection effort about investor attitudes that I have been conducting since 1989 has now resulted in a group of Stock Market Confidence Indexes produced by the Yale School of Management. These data are collected in collaboration with Fumiko Kon-Ya and Yoshiro Tsutsui of Japan. Some of our earlier results are also noteworthy.

Robert Shiller's database

Life at Wal-Mart

Wal*Mart isn't the devil? <gasp>

How about a different opinoin on those Wal-Mart jobs.

he seems surprised that the people who work at WalMart aren't ogres, and he completely ignores the fact that the writings about conditions at WM may have led to the improvements that he sees

"Of 13 million tracks available, 52,000 - just 0.4 per cent - accounted for 80 per cent of downloads."

awesome read on the sociology of shopping

The long tail

do I agree? does this matter?

nt us towards more mainstream

8 reasons why the music industry can't blame piracy alone for its decline in revenue.

During The Pirate Bay trial, the music industry placed the blame for the decline in their revenues squarely on the shoulders of file-sharers. Their logic is clearly flawed, but it could sway the verdict if no alternative explanation is presented. So, if piracy isn’t to blame, then what is *actually* killing the music industry?

Musikkbransjens motgang skyldes ikke bare pirater

http://www.fastcompany.com/node/54763/print fastcompany fastcompanyfastcompany NotoWal-Mart

""As I look at the three years Snapper has been with you," he told the vice president, "every year the price has come down. Every year the content of the product has gone up. We're at a position where, first, it's still priced where it doesn't meet the needs of your clientele. For Wal-Mart, it's still too high-priced. I think you'd agree with that. Now, at the price I'm selling to you today, I'm not making any money on it. And if we do what you want next year, I'll lose money. I could do that and not go out of business. But we have this independent-dealer channel. And 80% of our business is over here with them. And I can't put them at a competitive disadvantage. If I do that, I lose everything. So this just isn't a compatible fit."" A repost of an article doing the rounds a few months ago. Not saying nothing about Kindle.

There are a lot of parallels to Web design here.

"Wier traveled to Bentonville with a firm grasp of the values of Snapper, the dynamics of the lawn-mower business, the needs of the dealers, the needs of the Snapper customer, and the needs of the Wal-Mart customer. He was not dazzled by the tens of millions of dollars' worth of lawn mowers Wal-Mart was already selling for Snapper; he was not deluded about his ability to beat Wal-Mart at its own game, to somehow resist the price pressure. He was not imagining that he could take the sales now and figure out the profits later."

Jim Wier, the CEO of Snapper Mowers, flies to Wal-mart headquarters to tell them he no longer wants to offer Snapper mowers in their stores.

Monty Python’s DVDs climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list after posting free clips on YouTube

Interesting post about Monty Python putting up free, high quality content from their archives onto YouTube, and then seeing a 23,000 percent increase in sales of their DVDs and merchandise. When you have a huge body of work, this is a great way to "prime the pump." Unfortunately, it's a tough way for new artists/producers/musicians to make a living.

Despite the entertainment industry’s constant cries about how bad they’re doing, it works. As we wrote yesterday, Monty Python’s DVDs climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent.

Las ventas de dvds de Monty Python aumentan un 23.000% gracias al material gratuito posteado en YouTube. Chupate esa mandarina...

"And you know what? Despite the entertainment industry’s constant cries about how bad they’re doing, it works. As we wrote yesterday, Monty Python’s DVDs climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent."

Vistazo a donde las personas alrededor del mundo estan direccionando algo de su poder de compra

Who is buying what.

Shows average yearly expenditures per citizen by type of item (5 categories) around the world.

fun

to understand the financial world crisis

The indispensable Michael Lewis reports from Reykjavík on the de facto bankruptcy of Iceland. An amazing story: the country's currency is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance. This was the result of a collective madness stunning even by US standards of financial insanity. Lewis asks how a 300,000 person fishing nation with one of the highest living standards in the world managed to turn itself into a national hedge fund? Lewis reports on an inbred country where, among other things, the men are largely nuts and the women seem to have completely given up on them, The result is the first lesbian head of state, an all-female political party, and the nation's only profitable bank run entirely by women. Like most of what Lewis writes about the intersection of people and large sums of money, this is another "drop whatever else you are doing and read this" article.

on the financial meltdown ef Iceland

Iceland's collapse. "One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it."

"Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown. "

Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown.

terest rates have dropped by 1% from your current mortgage. As always, use t

handy

Get Rich Slowly — recently named most inspiring money blog by Money magazine — is devoted to sensible personal finance. You will not find any get-rich-quick schemes here. Nor will you find multi-level marketing fads or hot stock tips. I am not pitching any product or book. Instead, you’ll find daily information about personal finance and related topics. I share stories about debt elimination, saving money, and practical investing. I also post occasional reviews of books, magazines, and software. And, of course, I scour the web for the latest personal finance tools and articles. Please note that I am not a financial professional. I’m just an average guy who found himself deep in debt. When it finally became too overwhelming, I began reading personal finance books, hoping to find answers. I wanted swift solutions to my problems. My research revealed that few people get rich quickly, but almost anyone can get rich slowly by patiently following some simple rules.

CNBC Financial Advice

first video against Santelli

The Daily Show | Comedy Central

Sprekende foto's over de financiele crisis

Another great entry from The Big Picture. #30: Unused newspaper racks clutter a storage yard.

Iceland&#8217;s de facto bankruptcy&#8212;its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance&#8212;resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjav&#237;k, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown.

Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown.

A beautiful piece by Michael Lewis about the Iceland economy which went bankrupt in 2008.

Must read. 210309

If we wanted to rid the world of synthetic fertilizer use—and assuming dietary habits remain constant—the extra land we'd need for cover crops or forage (to feed the animals to make the manure) would more than double, possibly triple, the current area of farmland, according to Vaclav Smil, an environmental scientist at the University of Manitoba. Such an expansion, Smil notes, "would require complete elimination of all tropical rainforests, conversion of a large part of tropical and subtropical grasslands to cropland, and the return of a substantial share of the labor force to field farming—making this clearly only a theoretical notion."

by Paul Roberts (at Mother Jones) — the gist seems to be: re-evaluate your assumptions about what sustainable agriculture means (hint: it involves more than just carbon footprints and whether/not the farm is organic; see also: labor conditions, see also: man-hours of labor) and maybe be prepared to consider a few harsh realities about cost/benefit before you buy another heirloom tomato for $4

Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So 2008

Our industrial food system is rotten to the core. Heirloom arugula won't save us. Here's what will.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp.

TED Talks Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it&#39;s OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we&#39;re predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can&#39;t grasp.

http://www.boxuk.com/blog/monetizing-your-web-app-business-models boxuk.com

Business models for web applications

monetizing web apps

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform.

But these various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector’s profits—such as Brooksley Born’s now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998—were ignored or swept aside.

A withering op-ed by Simon Johnson on the policy disaster that is our financial sector. But he's still not willing to re-evaluate the underlying premise of perpetually debt fueled exponential economic growth. How, exactly, was this all supposed to work out?

The most lucid summary I've read to date on the current global financial crisis. Written in a clear manner by Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a former the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. His conclusion: Nationalize the banks immediately, break up the financial oligarchies which have brought us to this point, and recast the entire banking sector so the blackmail of "we're too big too fail" cannot be used again.

From Box UK, a survey of business models used by the top Web apps, most of them variations of ad-supported Free and Freemium. In the chart below, the largest segment (ITA) is ad-supported, the second largest (ISV) is Freemium. After that is referral (ITR) and then the sale of virtual goods (IPV), such as the gifts in Facebook.

A public diary on themes around my books

check out link to top 100 web apps

Terrific survey of free business models online

Shows cities on a innovation scale from McKinsey. The dynamic graphic is particulary good in making a comparion between Europe and the rest of the world.

What Matters, a blog about topics of global importance, curated by McKinsey & Company and featuring essays by respected experts in a variety of disciplines, including biotechnology, climate change, credit crisis, energy, geopolitics, globalization, health care, innovation, the Internet and organization.

Media Content for tutorial

The challenges facing Traditional and Online media

A great writeup on what's been going on with various media. Who will monetize the internet beyond advertising first?

There is no longer a need to warn of a gathering Chaos Scenario, in which the yin of media and yang of marketing fly apart, symbiotic no more. Doom has arrived.

Required reading

Economic Recovery Dashboard - Helping Advisors

To help you talk to your clients, we've identified a few key economic and market indicators to help assess the current economic health and trend.

Chart of leading and lagging economic indicators giving current numbers and historical information.

Ultimately, though, every business needs revenues—and advertising, it transpires, is not going to provide enough. Free content and services were a beguiling idea. But the lesson of two internet bubbles is that somebody somewhere is going to have to pick up the tab for lunch.

the lack of any business model describes the Web 2.0 era

"Ultimately, though, every business needs revenues—and advertising, it transpires, is not going to provide enough. Free content and services were a beguiling idea. But the lesson of two internet bubbles is that somebody somewhere is going to have to pick up the tab for lunch."

"Now reality is reasserting itself once more, with familiar results. The number of companies that can be sustained by revenues from internet advertising turns out to be much smaller than many people thought, and Silicon Valley seems to be entering another “nuclear winter”"

How to price an iPhone app, or whether to charge at all and use ads instead.

iphone app developer

Mrs. Tyler

unemployment map of the USA

"Oh, look. Here's the jerk who wrote the code that broke everything. A confession."

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work. Almost always, countries in crisis need to learn to live within their means after a period of excess—exports must be increased, and imports cut—and the goal is to do this without the most horrible of recessions. Naturally, the fund’s economists spend time figuring out the policies—budget, money supply, and the like—that make sense in this context. Yet the economic solution is seldom very hard to work out. No, the real concern of the fund’s senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis. Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises.

"In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay."

A former head of the IMF offers an insightful and alarming look at how the United States has been hijacked by a cabal of rotten financiers.

nice idea (accountability? no!)

Holding the experts to account

matt simmons "We are three, six, maybe nine months away from an [oil] price shock." - 2009-03-26 268 days open barton biggs the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index may rally between 30 percent and 50 percent from the 12-year low reached on March 9 - 2009-03-23 355 days open

Fantastic new site that lists and tracks predictions of the future made by public figures and purported experts.

By Christopher Hitchens

What the author of Das Kapital reveals about the current economic crisis by Christopher Hitchens

The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonmonthly.com%2Ffeatures%2F2009%2F0903.galbraith.html

"Why the economic crisis, and its solution, are bigger than you think."

"While each customer on average experiences more unique products in Internet World, the recommender system generates a correlation among the customers. To use a geographical analogy, in Internet World the customers see further, but they are all looking out from the same tall hilltop. In Offline World individual customers are standing on different, lower, hilltops. They may not see as far individually, but more of the ground is visible to someone. In Internet World, a lot of the ground cannot be seen by anyone because they are all standing on the same big hilltop. ... Individual diversity and cultural homogeneity coexisting in what we might call monopoly populism. A "niche", remember, is a protected and hidden recess or cranny, not just another row in a big database." + http://www.noahbrier.com/archives/2009/04/diverselessness.php

"A "niche", remember, is a protected and hidden recess or cranny, not just another row in a big database. Ecological niches need protection from the surrounding harsh environment if they are to thrive. Simply putting lots of music into a single online iTunes store is no recipe for a broad, niche-friendly culture."

<cite>Online merchants such as Amazon, iTunes and Netflix may stock more items than your local book, CD, or video store, but they are no friend to "niche culture". Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which distil the clicks of millions of people into recommendations, may also be promoting an online monoculture. Even word of mouth recommendations such as blogging links may exert a homogenizing pressure and lead to an online culture that is less democratic and less equitable, than offline culture.</cite>

is online culture lest diverse

hmm

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

The financial industry brought the economy to its knees, but how did they get away with it? With the nation wondering how to hold the bankers accountable, Bill Moyers sits down with William K. Black, the former senior regulator who cracked down on banks during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. Black offers his analysis of what went wrong and his critique of the bailout

Now Black is focused on an even greater scandal, and he spares no one — not even the President he worked hard to elect, Barack Obama. But his main targets are the Wall Street barons, heirs of an earlier generation whose scandalous rip-offs of wealth back in the 1930s earned them comparison to Al Capone and the mob, and the nickname "banksters."

The former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention now teaches Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. During the savings and loan crisis, it was Black who accused then-house speaker Jim Wright and five US Senators, including John Glenn and John McCain, of doing favors for the S&L's in exchange for contributions and other perks. The senators got off with a slap on the wrist, but so enraged was one of those bankers, Charles Keating — after whom the senate's so-called "Keating Five" were named — he sent a memo that read, in part, "get Black — kill him dead." Metaphorically, of course. Of course. Now Black is focused on an even greater scandal, and he spares no one — not even the President he worked hard to elect, Barack Obama. But his main targets are the Wall Street barons, heirs of an earlier generation whose scandalous rip-offs of wealth back in the 1930s earned them comparison to Al Capone and the mob, and the nickname "banksters."

video from jonas' recomendation

YES

What is fragile should break early while it is still small.

N.N. Taleb's ideas about how to avoid financial black swans in the future, based principally on greater regulation (regulating to help people from themselves)

"No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards."

economia

visual guide

see review in boing boing

free book: describes sustainable energy solutions

"According to a report by Credit Suisse, YouTube is on track to lose roughly $470 million in 2009....YouTube will manage to rake in about $240 million in ad revenue in 2009, against operating costs of roughly $711 million."

One thing is clear: YouTube cannot maintain its current course and remain a going concern. Google can continue to fund the experiment for a period of time, but at some juncture, shareholders will ask hard questions about why Google is sacrificing half a billion dollars to support a project whose chances of providing a return, at any point, is dubious at best. Advertising cannot solve the problem, at least not in its current form, and not in the near term. With a diminishing field of options, a massive, growing, cost center, and an economy in recession, Google will need to make some hard decisions about the future viability and business model of its prodigal child.

YouTube on track to lose $470 million in 2009.

The economics are hard to overcome. Assuming YouTube delivers the 75 billion streams that Credit Suisse projects for 2009, and assuming YouTube manages to slot an ad for every stream (which is practically speaking, impossible, given the nature of much of their content), YouTube would have to achieve a $9.48 CPM for every video impression shown. Presumably, the videos YouTube is already monetizing represent the best content available, with diminishing returns as they reach deeper and deeper into a repository rife with copyright violation, the indecent, the uninteresting, and the unwatchable. Hulu claims to be charging a $30 CPM, of which roughly 70% goes to the copyright holder. Averages for other proprietary content hover around the $10 CPM mark. CPMs for user-generated content, assuming you can attract the advertisers, tend to be measured in fractions of a dollar.

A classic in the making of how Nicholas Carr got it completely wrong.

"What Google doesn't mention is that the billions of clicks and the millions of ad dollars are so fragmented among so many thousands of sites that no one site earns enough to have a decent online business. Where the real money ends up is at the one point in the system where traffic is concentrated: the Google search engine." One side of the Google, media deabate.

"Once the news business reduces supply, it can begin to consolidate traffic, which in turn consolidates ad revenues and, not least, opens opportunities to charge subscription fees of one sort or another - opportunities that today, given the structure of the industry, seem impossible. With less supply, the supplier gains market power at the expense of the middleman. The fundamental problem facing the news business today does not lie in Google's search engine. It lies in the structure of the news business itself."

Google as Wal-Mart. (via @cshirky and @timoreilly)

Hiring is always hard. The hardest thing to do at a company is the recruiting and hiring. It was really hard when the economy was doing well. Paradoxically, for certain industries (especially those reliant on innovation such as those in the tech space), it's even harder when times are tough. That's right ... hiring in tough economic times can actually be much harder than when times are good. In a downturn, the amount of resumes from C-Players massively increases while the amount of resumes from A-Players probably remains the same.

"It's harder to hire great people in a tough economy"

Info, Comments, Opinions and Facts About Goldman Sachs

just because Goldman Sachs want to ban it.

threat blog post?

Just to clarify, the use of “steal” and “stole’ is in the sense of “stole the game.” The point of this post is to explain how Google won, and not at all to suggest that they didn’t deserve to win. Google’s success is a direct reflection of how much value they create, i.e. A LOT — they solved a problem in the market that nobody else figure out how to solve or even recognized as the huge opportunity in the market. This post is also intended to help media companies understand better how Google works so that they can better compete in the web content marketplace, not to justify any feelings of “sour grapes.”

"If media companies want to compete with Google, they need to look at the source of its power — judging good content, which enables Google to be the most efficient and effective distributor of content. They also need to look at Google’s fundamental limitation — its judgment is dependent on OTHER people expressing their judgment of content in the form of links. Above all, they need to look at sources of content judgment that Google currently can’t access, because they are not yet expressed as links on the web."

takes time to load.... but versatile views

click and roll over for pop stats of any region in the world

International comparisons of economies and societies tend to be undertaken at the country level; statistics refer to gross national product, for example, while health and education levels tend similarly to be measured and debated in national terms. However, economic performance and social indicators can vary within countries every bit as much as they do between countries. Understanding the differences and similarities in regional economic structures is essential for designing effective strategies which improve regional competitiveness and in turn increase sustainable national growth. Regions in OECD countries are classified on two territorial levels to facilitate greater comparability of regions at the same territorial level. The higher level (TL2) consists of 335 large regions. All the regions are defined within national borders and in most of the cases correspond to administrative regions.

Preciso ler assim que tiver tempo

Eric Hobsbawm: Whatever ideological logo we adopt, the shift from free market to public action needs to be bigger than politicians grasp

"Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left."

cool visual on where tax dollars are spent

A Visual Guide to Where Your Tax Dollars Go Interesting, detailed poster. Obama's budget requests.

I'm not sure if the argument is right; many people die from heart disease, but I don't think we can say that better diet and exercise would have prevented 100% of these deaths.

10 principles to rebuild on.

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. 2. No socialisation of losses & privatisation of gains. 3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (& crashed it) should never be given a new bus. 4. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards. 5. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. 6. Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. 7. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”. 8. Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. 9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement. 10. we will have to remake the system before it does so itself"

Taleb k současné krizi

2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

I just finished reading this book. It's one of the best analysis of energy use I was given to read. Hurray for raw number with cited sources!

Using a charming, educational style that teaches how to think about this kind of number, how to estimate with it, and what it means, MacKay explains these concepts beautifully, with accompanying charts that make them vivid and clear, and with exhaustive endnotes that are as interesting as the text they refer to (probably the best use of end-notes I've encountered in technical writing -- they act like hyperlinks, giving good background on the subjects that the reader wants to find out more about while allowing the main text to move forward without getting bogged down by details). sensible personal advice for things you can do to reduce your energy consumption -- especially identifying those few badly designed devices in your home whose idle power-draw really is punitive and replacing them (one Ikea lamp he cites draws nearly as much switched off as running, because of a transformer design that was one penny cheaper to manufacture than a more efficient one would have been).

PDF download on page

"This is to energy and climate what Freakonomics is to economics: an accessible, meaty, by-the-numbers look at the physics and practicalities of energy."

9 Apr 09 / cory Doctorow / David JC MacKay's "Sustainable Energy -- Without the Hot Air" may be the best technical book about the environment that I've ever read. In fact, if I have any complaint about this book, it's in how it's presented, with its austere cover and spartan title, I assumed it would be a somewhat dry look at energy, climate, conservation and so on. It's not. This is to energy and climate what Freakonomics is to economics: an accessible, meaty, by-the-numbers look at the physics and practicalities of energy

Clickable interactive map of Job gain and job loss across US across time.

By Chris Wilson (Slate Magazine): if you're morbidly interested, click-through; if you're the kind of person that cringes when you watch eye-ball surgery on the Health Channel... Well, maybe I can find a link to icanhazcheezburger around here somewhere...

Info-graphic: consumption of key resources, estimated number of years before exhaustion. Many between 5 and 40 years.

Great foresight from the guy who tried to beat the poker pros

While the nation's lenders ran amok during the boom, Andy Beal hoarded his money. Now he's cleaning up - with scant help from Uncle Sam.

Andy Beal, a 56-year-old, poker-playing college dropout, is a one-man toxic-asset eater--without a shred of government assistance. Beal plays his cards patiently. For three long years, from 2004 to 2007, he virtually stopped making or buying loans. While the credit markets were roaring and lenders were raking in billions, Beal shrank his bank's assets because he thought the loans were going to blow up. He cut his staff in half and killed time playing backgammon or racing cars. He took long lunches with friends, carping to them about "stupid loans." His odd behavior puzzled regulators, credit agencies and even his own board. They wondered why he was seemingly shutting the bank down, resisting the huge profits the nation's big banks were making. One director asked him: "Are we a dinosaur?"

According a recent report by analysts at the financial-services company Credit Suisse, Google will lose $470 million on the video-sharing site this year alone. To put it another way, the Boston Globe, which is on track to lose $85 million in 2009, is five times more profitable—or, rather, less unprofitable—than YouTube. All so you can watch this helium-voiced oddball whenever you want.

Interesting article telling that not only the newspapers struggle, YouTube is suffocating as well under the enourmous costs of storing its content.

User-generated content may have changed the Internet, but sites like YouTube are suffocating under the costs of storing it.

Whether you’re enrolled in a business school degree program or desperate for a review of b-school basics as you start your own company, it’s hard to pass up free study materials. These 100 ebooks on marketing, management, ecommerce, and finance are all free and worth checking out.

to read

How Rich Countries Die

This is a book report on The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, by Mancur Olson. There isn’t a whole lot about how nations pulled themselves out of their medieval stagnation (see A Farewell to Alms for that), so a better title for this still-in-print book from 1982 would be “How Rich Countries Die.”

want to read this, but only just started it

nice op-ed on the future of the university

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

If higher education is to thrive, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.

Author of mortgage backed security software.

http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=My+Manhattan+Project&expire=&urlID=35003522&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnymag.com%2Fnews%2Fbusiness%2F55687%2F&partnerID=73272--- manhanttan ManhattanProject

My Manhattan Project How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street.

I have been called the devil by strangers and “the Facilitator” by friends. It’s not uncommon for people, when I tell them what I used to do, to ask if I feel guilty. I do, somewhat, and it nags at me. When I put it out of mind, it inevitably resurfaces, like a shipwreck at low tide. It’s been eight years since I compiled a program, but the last one lived on, becoming the industry standard that seeded itself into every investment bank in the world.

A writer tries to answer a question I often ask myself. Is it actually always cheaper or tastier to make your own staples?

- By Jennifer Reese - Slate Magazine

(the previous three links were from this article)

financial crisis: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets. "They created fake capital by trading assets amongst themselves at inflated values,"

If you’re feeling the pinch in your paycheck, you may or may not feel comfortable going back to school right now, even if it can help your career prospects in the long run. You can, however, visit iTunes U for free access to helpful courses that will enlighten you to the state of the economy, inspire you to start your own business, and give you a little more perspective on what you should be doing with your money. Economic Principles Review the basics of economics here. 1. What’s the point of economics?: Learn why the study of economics is still relevant today. [University of Cambridge] 2. Microeconomic Analysis: Learn all about resource allocation and price determination in this course. [UC Berkeley] 3. Trade and Economics: This lecture will teach you all about the role of trade in economics. [CSIS] 4. Principles of Macroeconomics: This lecture will help you understand the principles of macroeconomics. [Rose State College] 5. Statistics: This course teaches the funda

Entrepreneur Lectures from Oxford

Q: What if markets never recover, the assets are not fundamentally undervalued, and even when held to maturity the government doesn’t make back its money? A: Then we have worse things to worry about than government losses on TARP-program money–for we are then in a world in which the only things that have value are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition.

bailout plan overview

הסבר ויזאולי על אינפלציה

Poze cu mizeria din India.

ゴミだらけ。

Actually, journalists deserve low pay. Wages are compensation for value creation. And journalists simply aren't creating much value these days. Until they come to grips with that issue, no amount of blogging, twittering, or micropayments is going to solve their failing business models.

The demise of the news business can be halted, but only if journalists commit to creating real value for consumers and become more involved in setting the course of their companies.

ervices that readers, listeners, and viewers cannot receive elsewhere. And these must provide sufficient value so audience

'A century and half ago, journalists were much closer to the market and more clearly understood they were sellers of labor in the market. Before professionalism of journalism, many journalists not only wrote the news, but went to the streets to distribute and sell it and few journalists had regular employment in the news and information business. Journalists and social observers debated whether practicing journalism for a news entity was desirable. Even Karl Marx argued that "The first freedom of the press consists in it not being a trade."'

Not sure I entirely agree with the sentiment expressed here, but it's interesting.

"…value is being severely challenged by technology that is "de-skilling" journalists. It is providing individuals – without the support of a journalistic enterprise – the capabilities to access sources, to search through information and determine its significance, and to convey it effectively."

Journalists like to think of their work in moral or even sacred terms. With each new layoff or paper closing, they tell themselves that no business model could adequately compensate the holy work of enriching democratic society, speaking truth to power, and comforting the afflicted.

Actually, journalists deserve low pay. Wages are compensation for value creation. And journalists simply aren't creating much value these days.

As one of Olivia Judson’s biggest fans, I feel honored and a bit giddy to be filling in for her. But maybe I should confess up front that, unlike Olivia and the previous guest writers, I’m not a biologist, evolutionary or otherwise. In fact, I’m (gasp!) a mathematician. One of the pleasures of looking at the world through mathematical eyes is that you can see certain patterns that would otherwise be hidden. This week’s column is about one such pattern. It’s a beautiful law of collective organization that links urban studies to zoology. It reveals Manhattan and a mouse to be variations on a single structural theme. The mathematics of cities was launched in 1949 when George Zipf, a linguist working at Harvard, reported a striking regularity in the size distribution of cities. He noticed that if you tabulate the biggest cities in a given country and rank them according to their populations, the largest city is always about twice as big as the second largest, and three times as big as th

One of the pleasures of looking at the world through mathematical eyes is that you can see certain patterns that would otherwise be hidden. This week’s column is about one such pattern. It’s a beautiful law of collective organization that links urban studies to zoology. It reveals Manhattan and a mouse to be variations on a single structural theme. [...] These numerical coincidences seem to be telling us something profound. It appears that Aristotle’s metaphor of a city as a living thing is more than merely poetic. There may be deep laws of collective organization at work here, the same laws for aggregates of people and cells.

Why elephants and cities have the same basic infrastructure

"For instance, if one city is 10 times as populous as another one, does it need 10 times as many gas stations?"

外国投资人购买美国国债情况一览表

Treasury Stats on holders of US debt

Thailand ranked high

Foreign-held U.S. treasury debt

MAJOR FOREIGN HOLDERS OF TREASURY SECURITIES

China our wingman with 750 billion in Treasury Bills.

simplified the data from the CIA World Factbook

As we discussed in yesterday’s post, whether the United States and China like it or not, the economic futures of both countries are intertwined. Everyone knows that China’s got more people and that its importance as an economic superpower has escalated in recent years. What you might not understand is how the differences between our countries, in economic philosophy, in population, in geography and in how the military is built and paid for ultimately play into the entire economic relationship. For many China remains something of a mystery. In order to help compare and contrast the economic differences, we have simplified the data from the CIA World Factbook. For the exact numbers in any category, check here.

China vs United States

Kuinka Googlen AdWords oikeasti toimii. Steven Levyn erinomainen juttu Wiredissa.

The economics behind the ads you see, and what they cost.

Article by Steven Levy (not: Steven Levitt ;-) ) on Hal Varian, Google chief economist and the application of auctions to all kinds of logistical, organisational or economic problems.

) is Wired's editor in chief.

Get in-depth tech news coverage from Wired and read about how it is shaping culture, education, entertainment, communications and technology.

Article de Wired sur l'économie du 21ème sicèle

Animated map: net change in job numbers of the 100 largest metro areas from Jan 2004-Mar 2009. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Demographics

RT @ritubpant: The Geography of Jobs (Interactive Map) http://tr.im/jZRA Pls RT (via @zaibatsu) [from http://twitter.com/peterto/statuses/1647222071]

The notion of micropayments — a pay-per-click/download web model — is hardly a new one. But as a business model it hasn’t exactly caught fire, or even generated more than an occasional spark. Lately, however, the journalism community has become obsessed with the idea. This is what happens when an existing business model begins to collapse: alternative models are desperately invented, debated, attempted, rejected, etc.

'This is what happens when an existing business model begins to collapse: alternative models are desperately invented, debated, attempted, rejected, etc.'

What a Texas town can teach us about health care.

"I'm going to talk about online auctions," says Hal Varian, the session's first speaker. Varian is a lanky 62-year-old professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and School of Information, but these days he's best known as Google's chief economist. This morning's crowd hasn't come for predictions about the credit market; they want to hear about Google's secret sauce

Google getta le basi per una nuova forma di organizzazione economica.

Why does Google even need a chief economist? The simplest reason is that the company is an economy unto itself. The ad auction, marinated in that special sauce, is a seething laboratory of fiduciary forensics, with customers ranging from giant multinationals to dorm-room entrepreneurs, all billed by the world's largest micropayment system. Google depends on economic principles to hone what has become the search engine of choice for more than 60 percent of all Internet surfers, and the company uses auction theory to grease the skids of its own operations. All these calculations require an army of math geeks, algorithms of Ramanujanian complexity, and a sales force more comfortable with whiteboard markers than fairway irons.

author of Growing Up Digital

On Line Journalism

Good overview of fundamental changes in the news business

Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky rejoice: Article on the crumbling economic basis of commercial news distribution in the 21st century. Two extremely interesting points added here: 11. The Rise of PR, 12. Reputation as a currency.

Reduced cost of newsgathering and production

Always useful to know how best to co-erce money out of loved ones.

f a sign imploring people not to steal pieces of petrified forest from the park. One mentioned large amounts of petrified forest taken away on an annual basis, the other one simply asked the visitors not to remove petrified wood. The first one actually tripled t

Hal Varian on how the Web challenges managers

I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it.

t

Always ask what can go wrong (Porterfield);

very cool summary of important things you should learn in b-school but that people don't seem to anymore...

ittle to do with their lascivious leanings (ahem, BedPost), and more with the scarcity of their skills. I believe that the folks to whom Hal Varian is referring are not statisticians in the narrow sense, but rather people who possess skills in three key, yet independent areas: statistics, data munging, and data visualization. (In parentheses next to each, I’ve put the salient character trait needed to acquire it).

sdfsgasdg

"Nice content - awesome presentation! What did you use to make it?!" That's what everyone who sees my BRITE presentation asks me. It's a new service called Prezi. And it's insanely great — the minute I saw it I had to have it, no questions asked. So, for the first time in half a decade, I found myself doing the unthinkable: paying for software.

"Yet, the best business model in the world is also the simplest: make stuff that's insanely great. Stuff that's insanely great does what Prezi does — amazes, enriches, and inspires. That kind of stuff doesn't need a hard sell, a new market, or a convoluted product range. It just needs to be."

The cable companies will become dumb pipes, and they'll get disintermediated. The phone companies will remain dumb pipes. The wireless companies will become dumber pipes. The competition between the multiple dumb pipes will eventually, we pray, result in lower prices for consumers for the only thing we will really need: Ubiquitous high-speed Internet access.

17 jun 09 / Economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf have just released a new Harvard Business School working paper called File Sharing and Copyright that raises some important points about file sharing, copyright, and the net benefits to society.

Via James Graham

Economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf have just released a new Harvard Business School working paper called File Sharing and Copyright that raises some important points about file sharing, copyright, and the net benefits to society. The paper, which includes a helpful survey of the prior economic studies on the impact of file sharing, includes the following:

Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle? Gladwell owns Anderson by using an example from Anderson's own book.

Publishing

When incremental change doesn't cut it. "It’s true that stupidity and malevolence do sometimes play a role in the disruption of industries. But in the first part of this essay I’ll argue that even smart and good organizations can fail in the face of disruptive change, and that there are common underlying structural reasons why that’s the case. That’s a much scarier story.""The problem is that your newspaper has an organizational architecture which is, to use the physicists’ phrase, a local optimum. Relatively small changes to that architecture - like firing your photographers - don’t make your situation better, they make it worse.""The only way to get from one organizational architecture to the other is to make drastic, painful changes."An early sign of impending disruption is when there’s a sudden flourishing of startup organizations serving an overlapping customer need...organizational architecture is radically different..."

about scientific publishing disruption, and disruption in general

Scientific publishers should be terrified that some of the world’s best scientists, people at or near their research peak, people whose time is at a premium, are spending hundreds of hours each year creating original research content for their blogs, content that in many cases would be difficult or impossible to publish in a conventional journal. What we’re seeing here is a spectacular expansion in the range of the blog medium. By comparison, the journals are standing still.

The answer is "Yes".

not so sure

Besides the fact that this comes from the NY Post, this article raises some legitimate causes for concern about our education system. Jack also provides some solutions worth thinking about and discussing...

Suppose all goes well. He'll be sitting in front of a teacher a good 18 months after first deciding to learn. What folly. The answer is to relieve schools of the job of validating knowledge and return them to a role of spreading it. Colleges should no more vouch for their own academic competence than butchers should decide for themselves whether their meat is USDA prime. As I write this, Google is putting every book ever written online. Apple is offering video college lectures for free download through its iTunes software. Skype allows free videoconferencing anywhere in the world. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and many other schools have made course materials available for free on their Web sites. Tutors cost as little as $15 an hour. Today's student who decides to learn at 1 a.m. should be doing it by 1:30. A process that makes him wait 18 months is not an education system. It's a barrier to education.

"A student who secures a degree is increasingly unlikely to make up its cost, despite higher pay, and the employer who requires a degree puts faith in a system whose standards are slipping. Too many professors who are bound to degree teaching can't truly profess; they don't proclaim loudly the things they know but instead whisper them to a chosen few, whom they must then accommodate with inflated grades. Worst of all, bright citizens spend their lives not knowing the things they ought to know, because they've been granted liberal-arts degrees for something far short of a liberal-arts education."

You can in fact calculate it, easily. The 100 customers each have a 3% chance of defaulting, so you expect three customers to default next year. That is, you will need to pay $3 million next year. Assuming the interest rate is about 3% each year, next year's $3 million would be worth 3/(3/100+1)=3/1.03=2.91 million now. Therefore HSBC will have to pay you at least $2.91 million for the insurance. Obviously Lehman Brothers wasn't a charity and so, to make money, they would double the price to $5.82 million and expect to make $2.91 million out of each of these deals on average. This kind of insurance is called a credit derivative swap (CDS).

People will not pay for by-the-book rewrites of news that belongs to all of us. People will not pay for yesterday's news, driven to our house, delivered a day late, static, without connection or comments or relevance. Why should we? A good book review on Amazon is more reliable and easier to find than a paid-for professional review that used to run in your local newspaper, isn't it? Like all dying industries, the old perfect businesses will whine, criticize, demonize and most of all, lobby for relief. It won't work. The big reason is simple: In a world of free, everyone can play. This is huge.

I've never written those three words before, but he's never disagreed with Chris Anderson before, so there you go. Free is the name of Chris's new book, and it's going to be wildly misunderstood and widely argued about.

"By refusing to build new digital assets that matter, traditional publishers are forfeiting their future."

In a world of free, everyone can play. This is huge. When there are thousands of people writing about something, many will be willing to do it for free (like poets) and some of them might even be really good (like some poets). There is no poetry shortage. The reason that we needed paid contributors before was that there was only economic room for a few magazines, a few TV channels, a few pottery stores, a few of everything. In world where there is room for anyone to present their work, anyone will present their work. Editors become ever more powerful and valued, while the need for attention grows so acute that free may even be considered expensive. Of course, it's ironic that sometimes people pay money for my books (I view them as souvenirs of content you could get less conveniently and less organized for free online if you chose to). And it's ironic that I read Malcolm's review for free. And ironic that you can read Chris's arguments the most cogently by paying for them.

People will pay for content if it is so unique they can't get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people. We'll always be willing to pay for souvenirs of news, as well, things to go on a shelf or badges of honor to share.

"by refusing to build new digital assets that matter, traditional publishers are forfeiting their future. ... People will pay for content if it is so unique they can't get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people."

Interesting site which allows manipulation and animation of set data. Bears further investigation.

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

How Goldman Sachs Has Engineered Every Major Market Manipulation Since the Great Depression" The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

They use the same playbook over and over again: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. When it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again.

If you’re 45 years or more you may consider retiring to Belize. The Retired Person’s Incentive Program may allow you to live a tax free lifestyle which should definitely help you saving up a few bucks.

(If it gets really bad...we might consider this!)

This week we saw the release of Chris Anderson's book Free and reviews from the New Yorker (Malcolm Gladwell) and the Financial Times. I'd like to talk a bit about the firestorm that freeconomics (fed by Chris' book) has unleashed...

"Earlier this week, we spoke to several sources who each have some insight into Facebook's financials (none of them know precisely). Taking the sources' input together, we'd estimate the company's expected 2009 revenue this way: * $125 million from brand ads * $150 million from Facebook's ad deal with Microsoft * $75 million from virtual goods * $200 million from self-service ads. "

link to audio book. "All this was possible because Alan Kay, an engineer at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, understood what Moore's law was doing to the cost of computing. He decided to do what writer George Gilder calls "wasting transistors." Rather than reserve computing power for core information processing, Kay used outrageous amounts of it for frivolous stuff like drawing cartoons on the screen." - "By 1970s IT standards, Kay had "wasted" computing power. ... This is the power of waste. When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently.

Chris Andersons neues Buch "Free" kostet 27 Dollar - wenn man es im Buchladen kauft. Wer sich jedoch die Audiobuch-Version herunterladen möchte, bekommt sie geschenkt, ganz im Sinne des Buchtitels - "Kostenlos: Die Zukunft eines radikalen Preises".

Print page

A professor, university president, personal finance columnist, and economist debate...

Gladwell perspective on 'free'.

Here's an excerpt from Malcom's New Yorker piece pointing out the flaws in Chris's argument. Malcolm was paid to write the piece, of course. Handsomely. As was Chris for writing his bestseller: There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money).

Statistics show hope: interesting as a visualization and as a prediction that the recovery is starting. I'll schedule a check up in six months

Fantastic illustration of business cycles

Brilliant interactive graphics on the economic cycle

"Dear Old People Who Run the World, My generation would like to break up with you. Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences. ... What do the "M"s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It's a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth "M"s. Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday's way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government."

This may be the most accurate description of my generation I've seen, ever

to read

Small is beautiful, at least in economy...

Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday's way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government.

Source: Consumer expenditures, U.S. department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 2009

Durchschnittsverbrauch eines US-Amerikaners

Almost a year after A.I.G.’s collapse, despite a tidal wave of outrage, there still has been no clear explanation of what toppled the insurance giant. The author decides to ask the people involved—the silent, shell-shocked traders of the A.I.G. Financial Products unit—and finds that the story may have a villain, whose reign of terror over 400 employees brought the company, the U.S. economy, and the global financial system to their knees.

The author decides to ask the people involved—the silent, shell-shocked traders of the A.I.G. Financial Products unit—and finds that the story may have a villain, whose reign of terror over 400 employees brought the company, the U.S. economy, and the global financial system to their knees.

The poorer you are, the more things cost.

You have to be rich to be poor. That's what some people who have never lived below the poverty line don't understand. Put it another way: The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace. This is a fact of life that reality television and magazines don't o...

http://www.visualeconomics.com/

Following are excerpts from a symposium on the economic crisis presented by The New York Review of Books and PEN World Voices at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 30. The participants were former senator Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, and Robin Wells, with Jeff Madrick as moderator.

By Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, Robin Wells et al.

Excerpts from a symposium on the economic crisis presented by The New York Review of Books and PEN World Voices at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 30. The participants were former senator Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, and Robin Wells, with Jeff Madrick as moderator.

Wendell Potter explains exactly hoe the health insurance companies are fucking you.

With almost 20 years inside the health insurance industry, Wendell Potter saw for-profit insurers hijack our health care system and put profits before patients. Now, he speaks with Bill Moyers about how those companies are standing in the way of health care reform.

Wendell Potter

Wendell Potter, former executive at Cigna, talks about the power of the health care lobby and the way the industry manipulates congress to increase the fortunes of their shareholders, at great public cost.

You Think ‘Free’ is Only About the Price? It’s Not.

Unresolvable

Time and time again I see the discussion about free content, free services, free products, and how they're going to liberate/destroy/change the current economy,

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The following post was written by a well known executive at one of the largest sites on the Internet. The author has requested to remain anonymous - not for dramatic effect, but because of the backlash he would receive from the SEO industry and possibly Google itself. He also doesn’t want his company associated with the post.

Crowdfunding, or getting many people to donate small amounts of cash to fund a project, startup, or service, is nothing new. Think public radio or television pledge drives. Think political campaigns.

amazing read this

Want to know why we have a zombieconomy? Because the beancounters killed the incentives to create real value. ... That's the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don't reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets. That 's not an economy: it's just a game of musical chairs. Hence, no new finance, healthcare, educational, auto, or, yes, music, industry — for decades.

No wonder everyone wants to be a banker, investor, or [insert beancounter here]. There's no money left in anything else. That's the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don't reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets.

If the world's biggest pop star only made $12 million a year from his recordings, why would anyone make serious music? Where did the rest of the money go? Why, straight into record labels' pockets. Did they make better music with it? Nope — they made Britney and Lady GaGa. And that's how they killed themselves: by underinvesting in quality, to rake in the take.

Want to know why we have a zombieconomy? Because the beancounters killed the incentives to create real value.

calculate how long you'll be in credit card debt, from board of governors of federal reserve system

from the Federal Reserve

"This problem is made worse by the fact that actually paying for your health care is a loss from an insurers’ point of view — they actually refer to it as “medical costs.” This means both that insurers try to deny as many claims as possible, and that they try to avoid covering people who are actually likely to need care. Both of these strategies use a lot of resources, which is why private insurance has much higher administrative costs than single-payer systems. And since there’s a widespread sense that our fellow citizens should get the care we need — not everyone agrees, but most do — this means that private insurance basically spends a lot of money on socially destructive activities."

There are a number of successful health-care systems, at least as measured by pretty good care much cheaper than here, and they are quite different from each other. There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence.

atode

Umair Haque gör det igen! Sätter nyhetstidningarnas problem i ett modernt affärsperspektiv och visar tydligt hur de ska göra för att utnyttja de krafter som är starka idag på ett positivt sätt. Betalmurar gör det inte...

Profitability can't be recaptured from a commodity. Newspapers used to be yesterday's most profitable industry. Warren Buffett made his fortune by investing in newspapers, yesterday. Yet, today, business model innovation, aka "monetization," is the surest, quickest path to self-destruction. Charging once more for the same old "content" — as argued for by David Simon, in an impassioned CJR article — will inevitably lead newspapers exactly where it led banks investment "banks" and automakers: into economic implosion. To reinvent the buying and selling of news, it's necessary first to reconceive the making of news. The AP's latest attempt at business model innovation, for example, is a heavyweight "rights management" system for the same old stuff. But protecting yesterday's "product" is exactly what prevented the music industry and Hollywood from rediscovering the art of value creation.

Journalists didn't make 20th century newspapers profitable — readers did

"A new generation of innovators is already building 21st century newspapers: nichepapers. The future of journalism arrived right under the industry's nose. Nichepapers, as the name implies, own the microniche. ... Nichepapers are different because they have built a profound mastery of a tightly defined domain — finance, politics, even entertainment — and offer audiences deep, unwavering knowledge of it." Good article. The term "niche paper" has been used previously, but I'm curious if Haque coined the compound word "nichepaper".

Compare and contrast with conventional 'news writing' opinion - McKane (on avoiding narrative), and Hicks (on delivering the latest, not last word)

Kevin: Umair Haque writes an open letter to 'newspaper magnates'. It's well worth a read. Just a taster: "20th century news isn't fit for 21st century society. Yesterday's approaches to news are failing to educate, enlighten, or inform. The Fourth Estate has fallen into disrepair. It is the news industry itself that commoditized news by racing repeatedly to the bottom. It's time for a better kind of news. A new generation of innovators is already building 21st century newspapers: nichepapers. The future of journalism arrived right under the industry's nose. Nichepapers, as the name implies, own the microniche."

Please do not take the term literally. Living on instant ramen would be very unhealthy. Rice and beans are a better source of food. Start by investing in a rice cooker, if you don't have one.

Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. This is a different form of profitability than startups have traditionally aimed for. Traditional profitability means a big bet is finally paying off, whereas the main importance of ramen profitability is that it buys you time.

the world in a window

どのようなことをして1日を過しているかの調査

Interactive Report which allows to filter by Age Group, Employment Status.

coyote

"Michael Pollan, in an 8,000-word essay in the New York Times Magazine, took the expected swipes at animal agriculture. But his truly radical prescriptions had to do with raising of crops. Pollan, who seemed to be aware of the nitrogen problem in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, left nuance behind, as well as the laws of chemistry, in his recommendations. ... n his book, Pollan quotes geographer Vaclav Smil to the effect that 40 percent of the people alive today would not be alive without the ability to artificially synthesize nitrogen. But in his directive on food policy, Pollan damns agriculture's dependence on fossil fuels, and urges the president to encourage agriculture to move away from expensive and declining supplies of natural gas toward the unlimited sunshine that supported life, and agriculture, as recently as the 1940s."

"On the desk in front of me are a dozen books, all hugely critical of present-day farming.... To the farmer on the ground, though, a farmer blessed with free choice and hard won experience, the moral choices aren’t quite so easy. Biotech crops actually cut the use of chemicals, and increase food safety. Are people who refuse to use them my moral superiors? Herbicides cut the need for tillage, which decreases soil erosion by millions of tons. The biggest environmental harm I have done as a farmer is the topsoil (and nutrients) I used to send down the Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico before we began to practice no-till farming, made possible only by the use of herbicides. The combination of herbicides and genetically modified seed has made my farm more sustainable, not less, and actually reduces the pollution I send down the river."

The Matrix, but with money

Supercomputers pitted against one another in a high-stakes battle of attack and counterattack over a global network where predatory algorithms trawl the information stream, competing every millisecond to gain an informational advantage over rivals. It sounds like Hollywood fiction, but it's just an average trading day on the stock market.

The world is heading for a catastrophic energy crunch that could cripple a global economic recovery because most of the major oil fields in the world have passed their peak production, a leading energy economist has warned.

oil warning

The world is heading for a catastrophic energy crunch that could cripple a global economic recovery because most of the major oil fields in the world have passed their peak production, a leading energy economist has warned. Higher oil prices brought on by a rapid increase in demand and a stagnation, or even decline, in supply could blow any recovery off course, said Dr Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the respected International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, which is charged with the task of assessing future energy supplies by OECD countries.

this is... not reassuring.

Catastrophic shortfalls threaten economic recovery, says world's top energy economist

The House hearings on rescission – the retroactive cancellation of individual health insurance policies – were over a month ago, but after its initial run through Daily Kos it seems to have waited a bit before popping up on Baseline and Slate. James Kwak at Baseline described the practice as rare, affecting only 0.5% of the population. The faint light bulb above my head began to flicker: could that be true…that’s not rare – that is amazingly common.

Rescission is not rare, if you happen to be sick.

rescission – the retroactive cancellation

The House hearings on rescission – the retroactive cancellation of individual health insurance policies – were over a month ago, but after its initial run through Daily Kos it seems to have waited a bit before popping up on Baseline and Slate.  James Kwak at Baseline described the practice as rare, affecting only 0.5% of the population.  The faint light bulb above my head began to flicker: could that be true…that’s not rare – that is amazingly common.

"The House hearings on rescission – the retroactive cancellation of individual health insurance policies – were over a month ago... James Kwak at Baseline described the practice as rare, affecting only 0.5% of the population. The faint light bulb above my head began to flicker: could that be true…that’s not rare – that is amazingly common."

But I will make this simple point in the hope some speechwriter pressed for a deadline picks it up: if a bank manager went to half of his highest net worth clients and said “sorry, you misspelled your address when you opened your account, I’m confiscating your balance,” he would be lucky to get himself assigned to minimum security

If, as I suspect, rescission is targeted toward the truly bankrupting cases – the top 1%, the folks with over $35,000 of annual claims who could never be profitable for the carrier – then the probability of having your policy torn up given a massively expensive condition is pushing 50%. One in two. You have three times better odds playing Russian Roulette.

"Suelo's been here for three years, and it smells like it. " http://tr.im/vasK [from http://twitter.com/techpr/statuses/3088661236]

"When I lived with money, I was always lacking. Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present."

HE WASN'T ALWAYS THIS WAY. SUELO graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in anthropology, he thought about becoming a doctor, he held jobs, he had cash and a bank account. In 1987, after several years as an assistant lab technician in Colorado hospitals, he joined the Peace Corps and was posted to an Ecuadoran village high in the Andes.

A symbiotic relationship with industrialised society. He's almost as heavily dependent on everybody else as everybody else is. I'm not impressed at all. Nor is he all that bright: "Gold is pretty but virtually useless" - wrong. Gold is dense, soft, and therefore malleable, like lead, and both are very useful. Chimps would find such a metal (if they were bright enough to mine it, smelt it, etc.) rather handy. Then other chimps would get jealous... eventually they'd start trading it. A few thousand years later, some chimp would decide that gold is silly and go back to living in a tree (or a cage in a research facility).

"In leaner times, Suelo's gatherings include ants, grubs, termites, lizards, and roadkill. He recently found a deer, freshly run over, and carved it up and boiled it. "The best venison of my life," he says." ... ""I'll do what creatures have been doing for millions of years for retirement," he says. "Why is it sad that I die in the canyon and not in the geriatric ward well-insured?"

illiquid asset

Sadly, @jasoncalacanis has it right. The whole ecosystem would be better if Apple opened their hardware/software. Not sure if it will keep the public at large from their move to MacBooks and iPhones.

With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people's money. These deficits are simply not sustainable.

Testify brother, I think only business owners truly understand the ideas of free markets.

Here's what the CEO of Whole Foods actually said.

Great slide show on drinking and economics.

This is short, funny and nice story about taxes and tax cuts. We are sure you'll find it interesting and would appreciate your vote for the presentation. FYI.... THIS PRESENTATION WAS CONCEIVED, DESIGNED AND DEVELOPED IN ABOUT 27 HOURS. That story of how we managed it is coming up shortly as a separate presentation

I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.

It's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full.

What is the deeper relationship between Goldman and AIG? Didn't they almost merge a few years ago but did not because Goldman couldn't get its arms around the black box that is AIG? If that is true, why should Goldman get bailed out? After all, they should have known as well as anybody that a big part of AIG's business model was not to pay on insurance it had issued.

The Real AIG Scandal It's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full. By Eliot Spitzer

Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?

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Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward.

"So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view – to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation – has swollen. Now it is all they can see."

"How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?"

These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence – here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper – can pierce this conviction.

What's wrong with America? Here's one thing...

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what&#39;s in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Entire markets have been transformed by products that trade power or fidelity for low price, flexibility, and convenience.

But the experience taught Kaplan and Braunstein a lesson: Customers would sacrifice lots of quality for a cheap, convenient device. To keep the price down, Pure Digital had made significant trade-offs. It used inexpensive lenses and other components and limited the number of image-processing chips. The pictures were OK but not great. Yet Pure Digital sold 3 million cameras anyway.

The low end has never been riding higher.

Humans don’t always make the most rational decisions. As studies have shown, even when logic and reasoning point in one direction, sometimes we chose the opposite route, motivated by personal bias or simply "wishful thinking." This paradoxical human behavior has resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade. But now, scientists have shown that a quantum probability model can provide a simple explanation for human decision-making - and may eventually help explain the success of human cognition overall.

Need to read more carefully; till then, count me as skeptical

LOL. The first few sentences made me think of Busemeyer, even before he was mentioned.

Suggests that high production values, high quality products are not where the mainstream market is. Looks at digital video cameras, legal services, health care, and Web content. Made me think about legal publishing, where increased costs are justified by "value added" content, which gets very little use. At some point the "good enough" plateau will be reached so that lawyers and librarians will not continue to pay for improvements that go beyond what is valued.

Interesting article on how goods are increasingly becoming just good enough as opposed to high quality

Interesting article but sorely mistaken about the novelty of 'good enough'. This is an old phychological framework.

After some trial and error, Pure Digital released what it called the Flip Ultra in 2007. The stripped-down camcorder had lots of downsides. It captured relatively low-quality 640 x 480 footage at a time when Sony, Panasonic, and Canon were launching camcorders capable of recording in 1080 hi-def. It had a minuscule viewing screen, no color-adjustment features, and only the most rudimentary controls. It didn't even have an optical zoom. But it was small (slightly bigger than a pack of smokes), inexpensive ($150, compared with $800 for a midpriced Sony), and so simple to operate—from recording to uploading—that pretty much anyone could figure it out in roughly 6.7 seconds.

In The Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler writes that AT&T is dying and dragging down the rest of us by overcharging us for voice calls and stifling innovation in a mobile data market critical to the U.S. economy.

It wouldn't be so bad if we were just overpaying for our mobile plans. Americans are used to that—see mail, milk and medicine. But it's inexcusable that new, feature-rich and productive applications like Google Voice are being held back, just to prop up AT&T while we wait for it to transition away from its legacy of voice communications. How many productive apps beyond Google Voice are waiting in the wings? The FCC better not treat AT&T and Verizon like Citigroup, GM and the Post Office. Cellphone operators aren't too big to fail. Rather, the telecom sector is too important to be allowed to hold back the rest of us.

With Google Voice, you have one Google phone number that callers use to reach you, and you pick up whichever phone—office, home or cellular—rings. You can screen calls, listen in before answering, record calls, read transcripts of your voicemails, and do free conference calls. Domestic calls and texting are free, and international calls to Europe are two cents a minute. In other words, a unified voice system, something a real phone company should have offered years ago.

As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less ...

operating

"...the idea that software should be priced low enough to pass the average user's "why not" threshold is a powerful one."

codinghorror application software pricing price discount appstore apple iphone coding horror

What I think isn't well understood here is that low prices can be a force multiplier all out of proportion to the absolute reduction in price. Valve software has been aggressively experimenting in this area; consider the example of the game Left 4 Dead: Valve co-founder Gabe Newell announced during a DICE keynote today that last weekend's half-price sale of Left 4 Dead resulted in a 3000% increase in sales of the game, posting overall sales (in dollar amount) that beat the title's original launch performance. It's sobering to think that cutting the price in half, months later, made more money for Valve in total than launching the game at its original $49.95 price point. (And, incidentally, that's the price I paid for it. No worries, I got my fifty bucks worth of gameplay out of this excellent game months ago.) The experiments didn't end there. Observe the utterly non-linear scale at work as the price of software is experimentally reduced even further on their Steam network: The mass

One of the side effects of using the iPhone App store so much is that it's started to fundamentally alter my perception of software pricing. So many excellent iPhone applications are either free, or no more than a few bucks at most. That's below the threshold of impulse purchase and squarely in no-brainer territory for anything decent that I happen to be interested in.

Chris Anderson

Since Craigslist collapsed a multibillion dollar classified advertising business into a fabulously profitable $100,000,000 business, perhaps we should be talking about the potential deflationary impact of more "zero billion dollar" businesses.

. As the radical efficiencies of the web seep into more sectors of the economy, and participants in social networks exchange attention instead of dollars, will governments at all levels need to make do with less tax revenue? That's a scary thought in an era of high deficits unless traditional governments can learn from the efficent governance systems of social networks and provide more for less.

In a world where facts are readily available, from multiple sources, basic information will be commoditized. But the explosion of sources will create a real burden for the consumers of information. Raw information will become not just a commodity, it will be a nuisance. In that world, consumers will value scarce, relevant insight over abundant facts.

In a world where facts are readily available, from multiple sources, basic information will be commoditized. But the explosion of sources will create a real burden for the consumers of information. Raw information will become not just a commodity, it will be a nuisance. In that world, consumers will value scarce, relevant insight over abundant facts. Computer scientists have been working for years on algorithmic ways of mining text for insight with only modest success. It turns out that people still out perform computers at this task. Web services like Google, LastFM, and Facebook, succeed because they do a good job of harnessing the explicit or implicit input of users to sift through an overwhelming supply of information to deliver relevant insight. Google uses in-bound links to filter search results. LastFM uses other people with similar tastes to recommend music. Facebook filters information by the strength of relationships.

Freemium, Geschäftsmodelle

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Quants come in three basic varieties. 1. Structurers: people who price complex financial instruments. 2. Risk managers people who manage portfolio risk 3. Quant traders people who use statistics to make money by buying and selling most quants are structurers. Of course, there is often bleed over between these varieties -but it’s a useful taxonomy for looking for work. I’ve done a little of all three at this point (very little, honestly), and have always liked quant trading problems more than the other two varieties. It’s the most ambitious, and the most likely to net you a career outside of a large organization (go me: Army of one!). It’s also the most mysterious, since successful quant traders don’t like to talk about what they do. Structurers and risk managers have to talk about what they do, almost by definition. Quant traders gain little from talking about their special sauce.

***** very good and deep articles on finance topics by "Locklin on science"

vocab of "job specs" in trading

StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge

Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought—she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

This seems very interesting.. but its only basic math, writing, and econ.. bah...

The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.

Google Domestic Trends track Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy. Changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide unique economic insight. You can access individual trend indexes by clicking on the left-hand navigation.

Google Domestic Trends track Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy.

Google's new ecommerce / micropayments platform. Must read. keep for ref.

Zach Seward at Nieman Journalism Lab looks at Google's proposal to use its Checkout system to manage micropayments for news content. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.niemanlab.org%2F2009%2F09%2Fgoogle-developing-a-micropayment-platform-and-pitching-newspapers-open-need-not-mean-free

putting some absurdly expensive item on the menu. Rapp doesn’t expect many consumers to buy it, but having it there makes expensive items appear cheap by comparison

Have you ever gone to a restaurant and found some ridiculously priced item on the menu? Of course you didn’t buy it — you’re no sucker. Or are you? This Today Show piece on Gregg Rapp may surprise you. Rapp is a menu engineer. He helps restaurants maximize revenue by hacking common flaws in human decision-making. For example, by simply removing “$” signs from prices, people are less intimidated by them. And he advises against listing items from least to most expensive, because that focuses the consumer on price. Instead he mixes up items, making it hard to find their price — thereby encouraging the customer to emotionally commit to something before finding out what it costs. But my favorite strategy of his is that of putting some absurdly expensive item on the menu. Rapp doesn’t expect many consumers to buy it, but having it there makes expensive items appear cheap by comparison. Think about it: How many times have you ordered a bottle of wine in the middle of the price range?

Interesting Article on the human mind and price from a "Menu Engineer"

"Here, on a sleepy stretch of shoreline at the far end of Asia, is surely the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history. Their numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined; their tonnage is far greater. Container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers - all should be steaming fully laden between China, Britain, Europe and the US, stocking camera shops, PC Worlds and Argos depots ahead of the retail pandemonium of 2009. But their water has been stolen. They are a powerful and tangible representation of the hurricanes that have been wrought by the global economic crisis; an iron curtain drawn along the coastline of the southern edge of Malaysia's rural Johor state, 50 miles east of Singapore harbour."

Content Type: text/html

recession effects

Good article from the Daily Fail shock!

save

Using data on movie-rating patterns, new Wharton research challenges current thinking on the Long Tail effect

Using data on movie-rating patterns, new Wharton research challenges current thinking on the Long Tail effect ...

unread

Controversy about the long tail theory

Knowledge@Wharton

One side effect of $1mil Netflix prize was the treasure of data that was made public. Researches at Wharton use it to find out how valid is the Long Tail theory.

Hilarious!

37 signals smartly mocks the new Twitter valuation and the hoopla surrounding it by valuing itself at $100 billion: http://j.mp/2yfvs [from http://twitter.com/JMaultasch/statuses/4367035641]

"you should see the spreadsheet models we’re making up. Really breakthrough stuff"

In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. “When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation,” said Mr. Fried. “Once you have profits, it’s impossible to just make stuff up. That’s why we’re switching to a ‘freeconomics’ model. We’ll give away everything for free and let the market speculate about how much money we could make if we wanted to make money. That way, the sky’s the limit!”

nice one

CHICAGO—September 24, 2009—37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.

ou are the least bit hesitant or apologetic for offering the money, you are doomed. No one likes to take money if he feels as though the person is stretching himself to give it away. Remember, the more public the favor, the more private the pass. Whip out the bill, move swiftly. Fold it in quarters for discretion. Use the right palm. Smile knowingly. Wave it flat, like

Gutsy: "I skipped the ticket counter altogether, walked straight into first class, and announced that I'd give anyone twenty dollars for his seat. There was some laughter, some nervous ass shifting, and just when I figured no one would bite, a big guy with a beltful of pagers and cell phones took the deal... The FAA would shit their pants if everyone could do that... One of the guys flagging cabs pointed me to the back of the line. That's when I grabbed him by the elbow, pulled him close, and shook his hand, passing the next twenty... As we pulled away, someone in the line threw a half-empty cup of coffee against my window... At 3:00 that very morning, I had called an Eighth Avenue bodega and told them I'd give them twenty dollars for a pint of milk and a Hustler magazine.... I got my shoes resoled in twenty minutes instead of two weeks..."

...Then I realized something else: Most people aren't willing to lose their job for twenty bucks, but if they have something they already take for granted--a place in line, a seat, a ticket to a show they've already seen--they'll jump on a twenty like a possum on a wet bag of groceries. How to Grease a Palm IT'S ALL ABOUT ATTITUDE AND NEED. You have to have the attitude. You must discern the need. If you are the least bit hesitant or apologetic for offering the money, you are doomed. No one likes to take money if he feels as though the person is stretching himself to give it away. Remember, the more public the favor, the more private the pass. Whip out the bill, move swiftly. Fold it in quarters for discretion. Use the right palm. Smile knowingly. Wave it flat, like a flag, when you're after more favors, more fealty. In this case, use the fingertips. Either way, it's really just a sort of greeting. Treat it like a how-do-you-do and nothing more.

»But what’s almost certain is that economists will have to learn to live with messiness.«

It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession.

By Paul Krugman

"'Globalisation and shipping go hand in hand. Worldwide, we ship about 8.2 billion tons of cargo a year. That's more than one ton per person and probably two to three tons for richer people like us in the West. If the total goes down by five per cent or so, that's a lot of cargo that isn't moving.'" (Source: Daily Mail)

Snow crash is coming.

Sign of the recession anchored off Singapore

Incredible.

couple of years ago these ships would be steaming back and forth. Now 12 per cent are doing nothing

ghost fleet of the recession anchored just east of Singapore, Close to 500. An armada of freighters with no cargo, no crew. last year, an Aframax tanker capable of carrying 80,000 tons of cargo would cost £31,000 a day ($50,000). Now it is about £3,400 ($5,500)

California has the highest unemployment rate in the last 70 years

"Los Angeles, 2009: California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state staff are being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike."

Los Angeles, 2009: California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state staff are being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so catastrophically wrong?

California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state staff are being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so&hellip;

California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state staff are being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so catastrophically wrong?

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

The demise of the dollar - Business News, Business - The Independent

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading.

Content Type: text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1, size: 300,585 bytes

Silicon Valley thinks the internet can transform anything from car sales to anonymous sex, but the way Americans grow and buy food is rooted in ancient,

'FarmsReach wants to make ordering from local, small farms as easy and reliable as ordering from Sysco. Farmers with smartphones would snap quick photos of their produce, then upload their products into their “virtual stalls.” Restaurants could cruise through the vegetables online and pick what they wanted. It’s a classic farmer’s market with a high-tech twist. And by bringing producers and customers closer together, the internet could cause purchasers to change who they buy their food from. Already, increasing numbers of restaurants and produce buyers demand to know more about the food they are purchasing.'

"With a suite of mobile apps for use in restaurants and on farms, FarmsReach wants to create an online food marketplace that would directly connect farms with restaurants. “The food supply industry is ripe for ‘disintermediation’ because of the internet,” said Alistair Croll, a startup consultant working with FarmsReach. In other words, middlemen beware: Food could undergo a transition like the one that swept through classified ads, air travel and dozens of other industries. If that happens, it could begin to transform the food system, and that would be welcome news for food activists. The problems of the food system have been well-chronicled over the last few years: environmental degradation, occasional food-borne disease outbreaks and millions of overweight Americans."

Moiz Syed: Highly recommend this read to understand contemporary organizational structures: http://bit.ly/WcmwS

wow! MacLeod hierarchy. Sociopaths, clueless, and losers. Fascinating.

YouTube may pay less to be online than you do, a new report on internet connectivity suggests, calling into question a recent analysis arguing Google’s popular video service is bleeding money and demonstrating how the internet has continued to morph to fit user’s behavior.

Youtube's bandwidth bill may be almost zero because it connects directly with the ISPs through it's Dark Fiber.

"YouTube’s low or nonexistent bandwidth bill points to a very important shift in the structure of the internet...top 30 websites serving up 30 percent of net traffic, either from their own sets of pipes or from data centers around the world that connect much closer to your computer — and for much cheaper — than ever before."

YouTube may pay less to be online than you do, a new report on internet connectivity suggests, calling into question a recent analysis arguing Google’s popular video service is bleeding money and demonstrating how the internet has continued to morph to fit user’s behavior. In fact, with YouTube’s help, Google is now responsible for at least 6 percent of the internet’s traffic, and likely more — and may not be paying an ISP at all to serve up all that content and attached ads. Credit Suisse made headlines this summer when it estimated that YouTube was binging on bandwidth, losing Google a half a billion dollars in 2009 as it streams 75 billion videos. But a new report from Arbor Networks suggests that Google’s traffic is approaching 10 percent of the net’s traffic, and that it’s got so much fiber optic cable, it is simply trading traffic, with no payment involved, with the net’s largest ISPs.

"But a new report from Arbor Networks suggests that Google’s traffic is approaching 10 percent of the net’s traffic, and that it’s got so much fiber optic cable, it is simply trading traffic, with no payment involved, with the net’s largest ISPs"

The music industry is really focused on the ‘industry’ part and not so much on the ‘music’ part. This is the greatest moment in the history of music if your dream is to distribute as much music as possible to as many people as possible, or if your goal is to make it as easy as possible to become heard as a musician. There’s never been a time like this before. So if your focus is on music, it’s great. If your focus is on the industry part and the limos, the advances, the lawyers, polycarbonate and vinyl, it’s horrible.

"Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class".

The SEC's halfhearted oversight didn't go unnoticed by the market. Six months after Bear was eaten by predators, virtually the same scenario repeated itself in the case of Lehman Brothers — another top-five investment bank that in September 2008 was vaporized in an obvious case of market manipulation. From there, the financial crisis was on, and the global economy went into full-blown crater mode.

ant. Under what became known as the "options market maker exception," the SEC permitted a market maker to sell shares whether or not he had them or could find them right away. In theory, this made sense, since delaying the market maker from selling to offset a big buy order could dry up liquidity and slow down trading. But it also created a loophole for naked short-sellers to kill stocks easily — and legally. Take Bear Stearns, for example. Say the stock is trading at $62, as it was on March 11th, and someone buys put options from the market maker to sell $1.7 million in Bear stock nine days later at $30. To offset that big trade, the market maker might try to keep his own portfolio balanced by selling off shares in the company, whether or not he can locate them. But here's the catch: The market maker often sells those phantom shares to the same person who bought the put options. That buyer, after all, would love to snap up a bunch of counterfeit Bear stock, since he can driv

Naked short-selling, and how it brought down Bear Stearns (well, that and their ludicrous debt-to-asset ratio).

Windows 7 release -- Google vs. Apple vs. Microsoft in the future of OSes.

The launch of Windows 7 marks the end of an era in computing&#226;&#128;&#148;and the beginning of an epic battle between Microsoft, Google, Apple and others

Briefing from The Economist (17 October 2009)

9. The universal rule of taxi haggling, for both driver and passenger, is that once both sides agree on a fare before setting off, neither side can reopen negotiations once you’re en route. You should not try to get a better deal nor should you accept any increase in the fare from the driver after the journey has started

Since the Great Depression, presidents have frequently experimented with Keynesian economics to combat recessions. Three economists chronicle the history of government policy during past recessions and explain what worked and what didn’t.

Keynesian economics

A possible web page for International Finance of Princ of finance

Charts showing the world today and 30 years ago.

New Scientist infographic

Chart with statistics and trends

good summary

the state of the world across a number of parameters

is the world getting better or worse?

Evidence of steady human progress but unsolved environmental issues

Here, you’ll find the 100 best blogs for economics students to read.

ib

Fun to play if you're bored. You get to be a pirate!!

Wired Magazine's game about the business of Somali pirating; see related article published in Wired, "An Economic Analysis of the Somali Pirate Business Model." Commentary at http://jag.lcc.gatech.edu/blog/2009/07/cutthroat-capitalism.html

"You are a pirate commander staked with $50,000 from local tribal leaders and other investors. Your job is to guide your pirate crew through raids in and around the Gulf of Aden, attack and capture a ship, and successfully negotiate a ransom."

See the latest multimedia and applications including videos, animations, podcasts, photos, and slideshows on Wired.com

You are a pirate commander staked with $50,000 from local tribal leaders and other investors. Your job is to guide your pirate crew through raids in and around the Gulf of Aden, attack and capture a ship, and successfully negotiate a ransom.

Scientific studies have shown that you can destroy a child by calling them "smart." Even when they're very young, little kids know that being "smart" is what makes them special - and so, the first time they encounter something they don't understand immediately, it's a threat. Their specialness is in danger of being stripped away. And if they lose that smartness, then what are they?

You're going to live in fear, smarty. The question is, which fear?---------As long as they were in the drawer, they could be good. And I could be a good writer. If I worked at it. Which I wasn't, but that potential gave me all the glory of feeling like I might be a great writer some day without all of that icky negative feedback. Sure, I had this constant underlying fear that maybe I wasn't good enough - but I had a moderately popular journal, some folks who liked me, and wasn't that enough?

the

Not to make too much of it, but this struck a chord with me. I can identify with this.

Louis Menand outlines the changes afoot with regard to graduate education (and education in general?) and notes the danger of losing academia's contributions to social criticism and reflection.

The following excerpts, from the third and fourth chapters and his conclusion, probe the professionalization of a research-oriented professoriate and the practice and consequences of contemporary doctoral education, and the resulting implications for liberal-arts colleges, universities, and the wider society.

Quote: "A college student who has some interest in further education, but who is unsure whether she wants a career as a professor, is not going to risk investing eight or more years finding out"

People who illegally download music from the internet also spend more money on music than anyone else, according to a new study. The survey, published today, found that those who admit illegally downloading music spent an average of £77 a year on music – £33 more than those who claim that they never download music dishonestly. The findings suggest that plans by the Secretary of State for Business, Peter Mandelson, to crack down on illegal downloaders by threatening to cut their internet connections with a "three strikes and you're out" rule could harm the music industry by punishing its core customers.

Notes on methods to eliminate corruption in a system by making honesty the most advantageous course of action

"Here’s a self-enforcing protocol for determining property tax: the homeowner decides the value of the property and calculates the resultant tax, and the government can either accept the tax or buy the home for that price. Sounds unrealistic, but the Greek government implemented exactly that system for the taxation of antiquities. It was the easiest way to motivate people to accurately report the value of antiquities."

Jonathan Chait, 09/14/09, The New Republic takes AR seriously in a long art (c. 5,000 words?), ostensibly a review of Burns and Heller's books. Lousy article, but Chait gets some imp things right: says AR is different in regarding redistribution wrong, not in practical terms, but moral terms. But stresses that the moral issue is the virtuous and productive being sacrificed to the lazy and immoral. Says she has been very influential among the right.

On Ayn Rand's legacy and the American right: "Ayn Rand's novels tend to strike their readers with the power of revelation, and they are read less like fiction and more like self-help literature, like spiritual guidance. Again and again, readers would write Rand to tell her that their encounter with her work felt like having their eyes open for the first time in their lives... The likes of Gale Norton, George Gilder, Charles Murray, and many others have cited Rand as an influence. Rand acolytes such as Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson have held important positions in Republican politics. "What she did--through long discussions and lots of arguments into the night--was to make me think why capitalism is not only efficient and practical, but also moral," attested Greenspan. In 1987, The New York Times called Rand the "novelist laureate" of the Reagan administration. Reagan's nominee for commerce secretary, C. William Verity Jr., kept a passage from Atlas Shrugged on his desk."

Amazing chart to play around with.

Interesting dataset, but the population of all possible combinations of settings as a backdrop is a weird choice. It does make it easier to explore, but I'm not sure about it. Might be nicer to just show settings you've tried and build it up over time so it feels more like you're discovering the trends yourself? Also wish there was more granularity, but I guess you take what you can get from the labor statistics people.

Interesting graphic from the NYT. Graphs usually bore me, but this is engaging and relevant. Nice, subtle use of animation and background to add context.

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

"The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying. The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves."

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying. The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves. The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation's latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.

Timeline of unemployment rate, county by countr

Animated time-lapse map of county-by-county unemployment rates in the U.S. since January 2007. Jarring.

Creepy.

This depicts a graphic of the unemployment rate from 2007 to current date. Fascinating.

Wow.

ISPs may not act for years on local complaints about slow Internet—but when a town rolls out its own solution, it's amazing how fast the incumbents can deploy fiber, cut prices, and run to the legislature.

"ISPs may not act for years on local complaints about slow Internet—but when a town rolls out its own solution, it's amazing how fast the incumbents can deploy fiber, cut prices, and run to the legislature."

Leet, leet, leet. Would have been awesome if they could prevail against TDS.

Minnesota town wants fast fiber broadband to the curb. Cable internet monopoly refuses. Town passes a referendum funding construction of a municipally owned network. Cable company sues town frivolously in order to delay construction of said network, and installs its own first. What a crock of monopolistic bull. This kind of crap is why we don't have fiber to the door.

Regional telco TDS Telecommunications last week issued a press release announcing a major milestone for the company: 50Mbps service over fiber optic cable to residents of Monticello, Minnesota. The Minneapolis suburb became one of the few non-FiOS communities in the country to experience full fiber-to-the-home deployment, and subscribers will all receive a free upgrade from 25Mbps service to the new 50Mbps tier

Edict on Maximum Prices issued by Diocletian in 301 A.D.

prices of common goods in ancient rome

Edict of Prices

When studying Ancient Rome, it is only natural to wonder what the price of everyday items might have been. In order to fully understand the price of an item, you must also consider the wages workers received at the time the item was purchased.

What things cost in Ancient Rome

Comparison between low cost and regular airline infographic

"I’m simply explaining why I’m not embarrassed that I 'owe' Warner Bros. almost $400,000. They didn’t make a lot of money off of Too Much Joy. But they didn’t lose any, either. So whenever you hear some label flak claiming 98% of the bands they sign lose money for the company, substitute the phrase 'just don’t earn enough' for the word 'lose.'"

A great post from a musician's perspective on digital royalties for recording artists. Lots of insight here. The bottom line is that, moving forward, there has to be absolute and real-time transparency in royalties for artists and authors.

So I was naively excited when I opened the envelope. And my answer was right there on the first page. In five years, our three albums earned us a grand total of… $62.47

So I was naively excited when I opened the envelope. And my answer was right there on the first page. In five years, our three albums earned us a grand total of… $62.47 What the fuck? I mean, we all know that major labels are supposed to be venal masters of hiding money from artists, but they’re also supposed to be good at it, right? This figure wasn’t insulting because it was so small, it was insulting because it was so stupid.

I got something in the mail last week I’d been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included our digital earnings. Though our catalog has been out of print physically since the late-1990s, the three albums we released on Giant/WB have been available digitally for about five years. Yet the royalty statements I received every six months kept insisting we had zero income, and our unrecouped balance ($395,277.18!)* stubbornly remained the same.

A rant on recouping an artist's repayment. Talks about revenue earned from digital sales.

While the middle class has been caught in an economic vise, the financial industry that was supposed to serve them has prospered at their expense. Consumer banking -- selling debt to middle class families -- has been a gold mine. Boring banking has given way to creative banking, and the industry has generated tens of billions of dollars annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts. And when various forms of this creative banking triggered economic crisis, the banks went to Washington for a handout. All the while, top executives kept their jobs and retained their bonuses. Even though the tax dollars that supported the bailout came largely from middle class families -- from people already working hard to make ends meet -- the beneficiaries of those tax dollars are now lobbying Congress to preserve the rules that had let those huge banks feast off the middle class.

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month.

Can you imagine an America without a strong middle class? If you can, would it still be America as we know it?

it's time to steal from the rich

Financial Literacy for Everyone

WHY I AM NOT AFRAID TO TAKE YOUR MONEY, BY AMANDA FUCKING PALMER

"listen. artists need to make money to eat and to continue to make art. artists used to rely on middlemen to collect their money on their behalf, thereby rendering themselves innocent of cash-handling in the public eye. artists will now be coming straight to you (yes YOU, you who want their music, their films, their books) for their paychecks. please welcome them. please help them. please do not make them feel badly about asking you directly for money. dead serious: this is the way shit is going to work from now on and it will work best if we all embrace it and don’t fight it. unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve surely noticed that artists ALL over the place are reaching out directly to their fans for money. how you do it is a different matter. maybe i should be more tasteful. maybe i should not stop my concerts and auction off art. i do not claim to have figured out the perfect system, not by a long shot."

if you think i’m going to pass up a chance to put my hat back down in front of the collected audience on my virtual sidewalk and ask them to give their hard-earned money directly to me instead of to roadrunner records, warner music group, ticketmaster, and everyone else out there who’s been shamelessly raping both fan and artist for years, you’re crazy.

"artists will now be coming straight to you (yes YOU, you who want their music, their films, their books) for their paychecks. please welcome them. please help them. please do not make them feel badly about asking you directly for money. dead serious: this is the way shit is going to work from now on and it will work best if we all embrace it and don’t fight it."

via kedrosky .... greenspun is right of course but that doesn't mean i've stopped thinking he's kind of an asshole

I don't agree with all of his points, but I do like some of his proposals as to how to restructure pedagogy to make classes far more practical.

"This article is about why educational performance is critical to a society's wealth, how the modern university is not appreciably improved over the template established in 1088, and proposes some simple changes that should greatly improve the effectiveness of undergraduate education."

What universities need to change to improve society

This article is about why educational performance is critical to a society's wealth, how the modern university is not appreciably improved over the template established in 1088, and proposes some simple changes that should greatly improve the effectiveness of undergraduate education.

Alan was co-founder of Fast Company magazine and former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review. More specifically related to this post, Alan developed a very interesting habit more than 20 years ago, when he began to carry a supply of 3 x 5 index cards wherever life took him. He wrote down and collected the lessons and insights he gleaned from his experiences travelling the world and in his interactions with people ranging from CEOs and spiritual leaders to basketball coaches, novelists, and stars from dozens of other worlds… His new book, Rules of Thumb, is a collection of 52 truths he’s culled from these notes specifically related to winning in business. I asked him if I could have an exclusive excerpt, and he graciously agreed.

Think outside the box. Do it different than its being done.

Start-up Strategy

RULE #24 – If you want to change the game, change the economics of how the game is played.

The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway. By Matt Taibbi

"What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside."

The controversial Matt Taibbi December 2009 Rolling Stone article.

European Parliament speech of 26/03/09.Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP for the South East of England and author of The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Brita...

The YouTube hit.

this still gives me a warm fuzzy feeling...

"you can not spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt"

hannan pillors gordon brown

"You, Randall Stephenson, and your lazy stupid company — you are the problem. You are what’s wrong with this country."

Brilliant take on AT

Fake Steve Jobs has a fake conversation with AT&T's CEO, hitting close to home in a real way.

A glorious FSJ rant: "And now here we are. Right here in your own backyard, an American company creates a brilliant phone, and that company hands it to you, and gives you an exclusive deal to carry it — and all you guys can do is complain about how much people want to use it. You, Randall Stephenson, and your lazy stupid company — you are the problem. You are what’s wrong with this country." (via @gruber)

Excellent visualisation of UK government spending volume

ver imagenes

hat meets the needs of the present without compro

When a word becomes so popular you begin hearing it everywhere, in all sorts of marginally related or even unrelated contexts, it means one of two things. Either the word has devolved into a meaningless cliché, or it has real conceptual heft. “Green” (or, even worse, “going green”) falls squarely into the first category. But “sustainable,” which at first conjures up a similarly vague sense of environmental virtue, actually belongs in the second. True, you hear it applied to everything from cars to agriculture to economics. But that’s because the concept of sustainability is at its heart so simple that it legitimately applies to all these areas and more. Despite its simplicity, however, sustainability is a concept people have a hard time wrapping their minds around. To help, Scientific American Earth 3.0 has consulted with several experts on the topic to find out what kinds of misconceptions they most often encounter. The result is this take on the top 10 myths about sustainability.

Despite its simplicity, however, sustainability is a concept people have a hard time wrapping their minds around. To help, Scientific American Earth 3.0 has consulted with several experts on the topic to find out what kinds of misconceptions they most often encounter. The result is this take on the top 10 myths about sustainability.

ABD'de gelir adaletsizliği tüm zamanların rekorunu kırdı

US statistics: -top .01% own 6% of wealth - top 10% own 50% of wealth

from the page: "Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. .. Saez calculates that in 2007 the top .01 percent of American earners took home 6 percent of total U.S. wages, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2000. As of 2007, the top decile of American earners, Saez writes, pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages, a level that's "higher than any other year since 1917 and even surpasses 1928, the peak of stock market bubble in the 'roaring" 1920s.'""

surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. ....As of 2007, the top decile of American earners, Saez writes, pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages

La revolución también impacta a los mayores organismos de banca multilateral en el planeta. El Banco Mundial ha lanzado un mecanismo para compartir la información económica que ha recolectado durante 50 años, con quien quiera utilizarla para crear aplicaciones en los nuevos entornos web

It is difficult to sympathize with these people, their comments laced with snobbery and petulance. But you can understand their shock: Their world has been turned on its head. After years of enjoying favorable tax rates, they are facing an administration that wants to redistribute their wealth. Their industry is being reordered—no one knows what Wall Street will look like in a few years. They are anxious, and their anxiety is making them mad.

Wall Street people are not moral idiots (most of them, anyway)—it’s not as if they’ve never pondered the fairness of their enormous salaries. “One of my relatives is a doctor, we’re both well-educated, hardworking people. And he certainly didn’t make the amount of money I made,” a former Bear Stearns senior managing director tells me. “I would be the first person to tell you his value to society, to humanity, is far greater than anything that went on in the Bear Stearns building.”

In a witch hunt, the witches have feelings, too. As populist rage has erupted around the country, stoked by canny politicians, an opposite rage has built on Wall Street and other arenas where the wealthy hold sway. Its expression is more furtive and it’s often mixed with a kind of sublimated shame, but it can be every bit as vitriolic.

IBG-YBG: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone

As the privileged class loses its privileges, a collective moan rises from the canyons of Wall Street.

It was the culture of what some called IBG-YBG: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone,”

cost of Marshall Plan

costo del rescate de bancos en la crisis económica del 2008

How much does the bailout cost, compared to other grand government programs? More.

oh. my. god. and where the hell is this money coming from, anyway???

Bailout costs more than Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA's lifetime budget -- *combined*!

$4.6165 trillion? That'sa spicy meataballa!

"As we've seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market's self-correcting forces."

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Price, wage-fixing, and collusion blamed for length of 1930's Depression.

In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key

e lead

"There has never really been a bad time in the last fifty years to be Warren Buffett, but just now would seem to be less favorable than most. If Buffett still measures his life by the book value per share of Berkshire Hathaway, then for the first time in forty years he must feel like a wasting asset. His share price is still off more than 40 percent from its highs, underperforming even the S&P 500. He railed against derivatives as weapons of mass destruction, and now turns out to have been sitting on a $68 billion pile of credit default swaps and exotic put options on various stock market indexes. And having vowed never again to become entangled in a big Wall Street investment bank, he has gone and sunk $10 billion into Goldman Sachs, a virtual re-enactment of his investment in Salomon Brothers--cash for reputation. The difference this time is that he has gotten himself a sweeter deal than not merely ordinary shareholders, but also the U.S. Treasury."

review by michael lewis of Snowball. a biography of Warren Buffet

Article on Warren Buffet.

got mugged on Christmas Eve. I was in front of my Brooklyn apartment house taking out the trash when a man pulled a gun and told me to empty my pockets. I gave him my money, wallet, and cell phone. But then—remembering something I’d seen in a movie about a hostage negotiator—I begged him to let me keep my medical- insurance card. If I could humanize myself in his perception, I figured, he’d be less likely to kill me. He accepted my argument about how hard it would be for me to get “care” without it, and handed me back the card. Now it was us two against the establishment, and we made something of a deal: in exchange for his mercy, I wasn’t to report him—even though I had plainly seen his face. I agreed, and he ran off down the street. I foolishly but steadfastly stood by my side of the bargain, however coerced it may have been, for a few hours. As if I could have actually entered into a binding contract at gunpoint.

How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

By: Douglas Rushkoff

this article is my initial article; laying out

A better description might be “cost carriers very, very, very little to transmit.” A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. The decision could not have come from a dearth of business: the 2.5 trillion sent messages this year, the estimate of the Gartner Group, is up 32 percent from 2007. Gartner expects 3.3 trillion messages to be sent in 2009.

"text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network. That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted."

The public assumes that wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain.

TEXT messaging is a wonderful business to be in: about 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year. The public assumes that the wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain.

Conservative protesters should remember that the recession, which led to so many of the policies they oppose, is almost entirely the result of Bush’s policies. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession began in December 2007—long before Obama was even nominated. And the previous recession ended in November 2001, so the current recession cannot be blamed on cyclical forces that Bush inherited.

HOORAY!

In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical Italian catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse — a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.

Bruce Sterling text on design, futurism and stuff.

funny, brilliant man

We create and distribute original Science is Culture content that communicates science's fast-changing place in our culture to an international audience. Our mission is to help nurture a science-savvy global citizenry by increasing public interest in science and public understanding of science.

"Eight years late, the 20th century has finally departed us this year. It will never return." bruce sterling's optimistic piece on what we're collectively in for next.

RT @applicants: The Obama Economy http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123604419092515347.html [from http://twitter.com/Captoe/statuses/1276487461]

WSJ edit page fires a shot across Obama's bow.

As the Dow keeps dropping, the President is running out of people to blame.

financial crisis

Great article -- recommended by Jeremy Shapiro. One part of the argument: the fallacy of the belief in diversification and complexity.

Very interesting article about the causes of the current crisis.

By Jerry Z. Muller Thursday, January 29, 2009 Major recessions are characterized by something novel. Opacity and pseudo-objectivity created the crisis today.

Read Entire Package Here

Provides a high level breakdown of how much money is allocated to each agency

Stimulus Spending Breakouts

see very bottom for foreclosure information

Why you should stick to the sciences.

"If you cannot find a tenure-track position, your university will no longer court you; it will pretend you do not exist and will act as if your unemployability is entirely your fault."

"As things stand, I can only identify a few circumstances under which one might reasonably consider going to graduate school in the humanities: [1] You are independently wealthy, and you have no need to earn a living for yourself or provide for anyone else.... It's hard to tell young people that universities recognize that their idealism and energy — and lack of information — are an exploitable resource. For universities, the impact of graduate programs on the lives of those students is an acceptable externality, like dumping toxins into a river. If you cannot find a tenure-track position, your university will no longer court you; it will pretend you do not exist and will act as if your unemployability is entirely your fault. It will make you feel ashamed, and you will probably just disappear, convinced it's right rather than that the game was rigged from the beginning."

Incisive

"15 year old Calvin and Hobbes strip with almost clairvoyance on how we got into our current financial crisis.‏"

Calvin needs a bailout

http://tr.im/glf8 - via gregmankiw.blogspot.com Explains it so well! [from http://twitter.com/hardmanjustin/statuses/1217823016]

Really great analysis.

America has been strong because, despite its flawed system, people built toward the future in the 1840s, and the 1930s, and the 1950s. During just the time when Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park, when Theodore Roosevelt set aside land for the National Parks, when Dwight Eisenhower created the Pentagon research agency that ultimately gave rise to the Internet, the American system seemed broken too. They worked within its flaws and limits, which made all the difference. That is the bravest and best choice for us now.

Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great: our university system, our receptiveness to immigration, our culture of innovation. In most significant ways, the U.S. remains the envy of the world. But here’s the alarming problem: our governing system is old and broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future.

Very good but doesn't *really* propose that strong of sol'ns. I think we need to try to infuse competition into the government. I also think that we need to cut military spending, my god how did he not mention this!

thoughtful - build on this to make the argument that our best way to change the system is by changing the people within it. If people in government were operating more altruistically, it wouldn't matter what system they operated within, good things would happen.

Why Rechargeable Batteries Are Rarely Cost Effective September 15th, 2009 I was standing in line at a local electronics store the other day when I struck up a conversation with the guy ahead of me who had a basket full of battery chargers and AA rechargeable batteries. It turns out he had decided to replace all of the batteries in his house with the rechargeable kind. Between the batteries and the chargers this guy plunked down over a hundred bucks!

Rechargeables are best for frequently-used, high-current-draw devices (cellphone, for example). Anything with infrequent battery changes (clocks etc), will take practically forever to reach break-even on costs using rechargeables.

It makes more sense to use alkaline batteries for low-draw devices like wall clocks because they lose power at a much slower rate than rechargeable batteries.

I realize many people want to convert to rechargeable batteries for environmental reasons, which is fair enough. But the truth of the matter is this: when cost is the primary discriminator, low current-draw devices simply don’t warrant the extra expense of rechargeable batteries. That’s because the batteries of low current-draw devices are typically changed so infrequently that the payback period for equivalent rechargeable batteries would be too far long to justify the investment!

Bruce Sterling's Manifesto for a new Millennium

Let me start by saying that I like newspapers. And let me say further that, no matter how much I like them, they just might not have a future.The Internet chews up media and spits them out again. Sometimes they get more robust. Sometimes they get more profitable. Sometimes they die.

Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform, or Destroy Your Favorite Medium

the future of media, opera, poetry, cory doctorow of boing-boing

A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism.

an insane article, on this day there were videos of tent camps in Sacramento, CA filled with people who had lost jobs. The editorial is by Michael Boskin

So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?

The web site redesign and relaunch cost the Dolans $4 million, according to Mr. Jimenez. With those 35 people, they've grossed about $9,000.

In late October, Newsday, the Long Island daily that the Dolans bought for $650 million, put its web site, newsday.com, behind a pay wall. The paper was one of the first non-business newspapers to take the plunge by putting up a pay wall, so in media circles it has been followed with interest. After Three Months there are only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday's Web Site. The web site redesign and relaunch cost the Dolans $4 million, according to Mr. Jimenez. With those 35 people, they've grossed about $9,000.

Article on less than successful launch of New York title's paywall (26.01.10)

"The web site redesign and relaunch cost the Dolans $4 million, according to Mr. Jimenez. With those 35 people, they've grossed about $9,000."

The web site redesign and relaunch cost the Dolans $4 million, according to Mr. Jimenez. With those 35 people, they've grossed about $9,000. In that time, without question, web traffic has begun to plummet, and, certainly, advertising will follow as well. Of course, there are a few caveats. Anyone who has a newspaper subscription is allowed free access; anyone who has Optimum Cable, which is owned by the Dolans and Cablevision, also gets it free. Newsday representatives claim that 75 percent of Long Island either has a subscription or Optimum Cable.

08年度駒澤大学「経済学＜現代経済理解へのガイド＞」（講師：矢野浩一）講義資料。前期「ミクロ経済学入門」、後期「マクロ経済学入門」。

ナイスな資料。

peterturtle, turtle try at home

A virtual town where you play games and make friends, while learning about earning, saving, spending and giving. You start out with $50,000 in MinyanMoney and a Condo worth $50,000. You can spend your money, invest your money, and earn more MinyanMoney by playing games or doing real-life chores your parents assign you.

MinyanLand is a virtual community designed to engage kids and families in games and interaction that are entertaining and educational. Appropriate for 3-8. Accessible to deaf students.

Virtual world for learning about economics and finances.

In Wal-Mart's Image The "values" of the largest private-sector employer in the U.S. are shaping our national economy -- and that's a very bad thing.

"The "values" of the largest private-sector employer in the U.S. are shaping our national economy -- and that's a very bad thing."

"Wal-Mart's more serious failure of market penetration remains its inability to break into America's major coastal cities or Chicago. There, the specter of its superstores -- stores that include supermarkets, whose success has already given Wal-Mart 30 percent of the U.S. retail food market -- poses a direct threat to unionized supermarket workers. In 2003, Southern California supermarkets, after decades of mutually profitable labor relations, told the United Food and Commercial Workers that they would have to reduce wages and benefits to compete with Wal-Mart, and, after breaking the union's strike, imposed a contract in which new hires were offered not the traditional health insurance package but one modeled on Wal-Mart's. At the time, the proportion of Southern California grocery workers with health insurance stood at 94 percent; by 2007, it had declined to 54 percent."

Rectangles in the chart are sized according to the amount of spending for that category. Color shows the change in spending from 2010.

President Obama's proposal for the 2011 budget.

Nice graphical representation of Obama's 2011 budget proposal, and how the budget changes from 2010.

Beautiful infographic.

A Strong Middle Class

US Government

Official blog of V.P. Joe Biden's Middle Class Task Force

This is the official web page of the White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families.

WhiteHouse.gov is the official web site for the White House and President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. This site is a source for information about the President, White House news and policies, White House history, and the federal government.

if you take the time to learn the ropes and experiment. Below is a graph of my return on investment from Adwords for my table planning software over 5 yea

The zero-rupee note. I like this. How long til the Tea Party in United States latches on and starts using something similiar in political protest against...well....all things not Tea Party.

"One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success. Had the zero rupee note reached the old lady sooner, her granddaughter could have started college on schedule and avoided the consequence of delaying her education for two years. In another experience, a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen."

In addition, officials want to keep their jobs and are fearful about setting off disciplinary proceedings, not to mention risking going to jail. More importantly, Anand believes that the success of the notes lies in the willingness of the people to use them. People are willing to stand up against the practice that has become so commonplace because they are no

This is one way to end bribery.

He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance....In another experience, a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen.

Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success.

utch blogger Marc Drees of Recruitment Matters has posted recap and commentary of this post, including a very nice graph summarizing my results:

Payer pour ses infos ? Selon Martin Langeveld, ça ne colle pas.

The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come.

"Con artists have a word for the inability of their victims to accept that they've been scammed. They call it the 'True Believer Syndrome'. That's sort of where we are, in a state of nagging disbelief about the real problem on Wall Street. It isn't so much that we have inadequate rules or incompetent regulators, although both of these things are certainly true. [..] Instead of liquidating and prosecuting the insolvent institutions that took us all down with them in a giant Ponzi scheme, we have showered them with money and guarantees and all sorts of other enabling gestures."

dissecting wall street as a series of cons

Still, the trick for Goldman was: how to collect the insurance money. As AIG headed into a tailspin that fateful summer of 2008, it looked like the beleaguered firm wasn't going to have the money to pay off the bogus insurance. So Goldman and other banks began demanding that AIG provide them with cash collateral. In the 15 months leading up to the collapse of AIG, Goldman received $5.9 billion in collateral. Société Générale, a bank holding lots of mortgage-backed crap originally underwritten by Goldman, received $5.5 billion. These collateral demands squeezing AIG from two sides were the "Swoop and Squat" that ultimately crashed the firm. "It put the company into a liquidity crisis," says Eric Dinallo, who was intimately involved in the AIG bailout as head of the New York State Insurance Department.

Matt Taibbi gets very angry at Wall Street again; I'm not sure how fair some of it is, but it's entertaining stuff.

Something happened to management culture decades ago and now being a Master of Business Administration, especially from Harvard, is rather on the nose. MBA, it's being said, can also stand for 'Mediocre but Arrogant', or 'Management by Accident'. Reporter, Stephen Crittenden.

"Fedex.com makes shipping so fast and easy, even an MBA can do it " (sweet ad) - education shaping culture, heritages squandered - Transcript of Henry Mintzberg, Phillip Delves Broughton, Russell Ackoff, Rakesh Khurana, Will Hooper et al on MBA's, admittance, arrogance, attitudes, best-and-brightest, compensation, elites, quantity over quality, risk averse people taking risks, syndromes, Taylorism and scientism, professions (over practices) - "educating for hubris" - Warren Buffet turned down by HBS, unlike Dubya who "was certainly decisive, let alone divisive, and he was decisive in utter ignorance. The case study method does that" - Leadership? "That's a disease in the United States. Everything is going to be cured by leadership. Look, every time you talk leadership, you're talking followership" - failed models, over-confidence that we have the right-answer - fast tracks (when there is no short cut), credentials over merit

The failure of business schools.

The unfolding debt drama in Russia, Ukraine, and the EU states of Eastern Europe has reached acute danger point.

EMU - european monetary union

"There are accidents waiting to happen across the region, but the EU institutions don't have any framework for dealing with this. The day they decide not to save one of these one countries will be the trigger for a massive crisis with contagion spreading into the EU."

Brazil lost 650K jobs in 1 mo - Jan apparently??? how

JM Keynes

The Wallstreet mindset that allowed the Madoff scandal to happen, and how to fix it.

Required reading, Part I.

OUR financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense... The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest.

financial crisis

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"Effectively, Kingston is just a channel trader and is probably seen by SanDisk/Toshiba as a demand buffer for their production output. I also wouldn’t be surprised if SanDisk/Toshiba was selling Kingston “A-” grade parts, i.e., parts with slightly more defective sectors, but otherwise perfectly serviceable. As a result, Kingston plays a significant and important role in stabilizing microSD card prices and improving fab margins, but at some risk to their own brand image."

Apparently Kensington releases SD cards produced on "Ghost Shifts", with sub-standard materials.

links to broadcast and unedited videos of Cramer-Stewart interview

Jon Stewart skewers Jim Cramer

Thursday Mar 12 2009 | Comedy Central. John Stewart interviewed CNBC pundit Jim Cramer, berating him for misreporting news on the financial crisis on his show ‘Mad Money.’ Stewart used video clips where Cramer contradicted himself.

John Stewart and the daily show

important research document

Rated Colleges Top Rated Online Colleges and Universities 100 Useful Research Tools for Amateur Economists Posted By Site Administrator You don’t have to be a professional economist to do some really great research on the web. Whether you’re looking into historical trends, modern buying patterns or the latest stats on the global financial market you won’t find any shortage of information to keep you interested. Here are 100 great resources to utilize that can help you find, organize and understand your economic research. General Tools These tools offer some great general research material, help getting it all organized and some essential search capabilities. Internet Resources for Economists: This extensive list will direct you towards journals, economic research institutions, software and more that can be helpful in your search for information. American Economic Association: Here you’ll find a wealth of resources including journals, papers and links to members who may be able to he

imperfect people create imperfect financial situations, regardless of prior experiences. fascinating!

Postrel on a laboratory experiment where people buy and sell a guaranteed and specified security. "Here, finally, is a security with security—no doubt about its true value, no hidden risks, no crazy ups and downs, no bubbles and panics. The trading price should stick close to the expected value. At least that’s what economists would have thought before Vernon Smith, who won a 2002 Nobel Prize for developing experimental economics, first ran the test in the mid-1980s. But that’s not what happens. Again and again, in experiment after experiment, the trading price runs up way above fundamental value. Then, as the 15th round nears, it crashes...you don’t just get random noise. You get bubbles and crashes. Ninety percent of the time. So much for security. "

These lab results should give pause not only to people who believe in efficient markets, but also to those who think we can banish bubbles simply by curbing corruption and imposing more regulation. Asset markets, it seems, suffer from irrepressible effervescence. Bubbles happen, even in the most controlled conditions.

financial bubbles

At least that’s what economists would have thought before Vernon Smith, who won a 2002 Nobel Prize for developing experimental economics, first ran the test in the mid-1980s. But that’s not what happens. Again and again, in experiment after experiment, the trading price runs up way above fundamental value. Then, as the 15th round nears, it crashes. The problem doesn’t seem to be that participants are bored and fooling around. The difference between a good trading performance and a bad one is about $80 for a three-hour session, enough to motivate cash-strapped students to do their best. Besides, Noussair emphasizes, “you don’t just get random noise. You get bubbles and crashes.” Ninety percent of the time.

this is the "shotgun over the mantle" of the financial debacle we are living through -- those few with a sense of history or drama KNEW it would be fired before the play ends... and here we are

Phil Gramm

news of the repeal of the steal-glass act

The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation's financial system. -- boy did it ever!

Ground zero for the financial crisis. 1999.

The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank.

The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank. As Tim Duy put it, there are no bad assets, only misunderstood assets. And if we get investors to understand that toxic waste is really, truly worth much more than anyone is willing to pay for it, all our problems will be solved.

We should just let the banks and institutions that have been poorly managed fail.

To this end the plan proposes to create funds in which private investors put in a small amount of their own money, and in return get large, non-recourse loans from the taxpayer, with which to buy bad — I mean misunderstood — assets. This is supposed to lead to fair prices because the funds will engage in competitive bidding. But it’s immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem.

Krugman talks about structural problems that make Geithner's plan highly unlikely to work, and msot definitely transfers all risk upon the tax payer http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/opinion/23krugman.html

Krugman analyzes The Geithner plan

In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose.

This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn’t actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won’t be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work.

For years Dr Doom toiled in relative obscurity as a NYU economics professor under his alias, Nouriel Roubini. But after making a series of uncannily accurate predictions about the global meltdown, Roubini has become the prophet of his age, jetting around the world dispensing his advice & latest prognostications to politicians & businessmen desperate to know what happens next – and for any answer to the crisis. Most other economists scoffed at Roubini & his predictions of imminent disaster. They dismissed his warnings that the sub-prime mortgage disaster would trigger a financial meltdown & that the investment banks would be crushed as the world headed for a long recession. Yet all these predictions & more came true. Few are laughing now.

Nouriel Roubini

a Cassandra

As stock markets headed off a cliff again last week, closely followed by currencies, and as meltdown threatened entire countries such as Hungary and Iceland, one voice was in demand above all others to steer us through the gloom: that of

What if Steve Jobs ran a car company?

steve jobs in the auto industry

The idea of Steve Jobs running a car company

What if Steve Jobs ran one of the three auto makers? Will the Stevian way continue to shine and would he make the Apple-like revolution in a decade from now again?

Interesting portrait of Ben Bernanke in the New Yorker

Article from The New Yorker on Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke; brief history of current economic crisis (13 pp)

Interesting article about Chairman Bernanke and the current financial crisis

via shinuna (thx!)

were born, that they will hurt and humiliate you as much as they can. Letting a criminal inside you house almost guaranties you that he will rape/beat/ torture and abuse

some notes/thoughts on urban survival

200 yar

This is a pretty good blog about practical survival in a tought country.

googles monopoly

Even Google itself is starting to worry about the possibility that the Department of Justice may seek regulation, possibly even the break-up of Google.

What An Antitrust Case Against Google Might Look Like

irlines initially chose to participate early, when participation in the CRSs was free. Only later, when agencies had come to depend upon CRSs, and thus when airlines had become dependent upon CRSs as well, did Sabre and Apollo institute high fees for reservations, ticketing, and other services they provided to the airlines.

I get a lot of questions from young, aspiring Indie developers, and the most common query is: How many copies of a game does Spiderweb Software sell? It's a really reasonable question. After all, making a game is a long and punishing process. It's entirely fair to want to know what the parameters of success are. Alas, this information is generally kept secret. I've never given this question a straight answer, with real numbers.

Geneforge guy talks openly about his sales. Very cool.

Old professions

WSJ article that has one part of the housing collapse that I hadn't heard before. Apparently inflation data that gets reported and looked at by the Fed and other regulators doesn't include home prices, it includes rental prices. Since the housing bubble was driven by mortgages, rents didn't spike nearly as much home prices. Had a truer picture of inflation been reflected in the numbers regulators been looking at the rate would have been double what was reported and likely regulators would have had to act in some way.

A great piece on the differences between the housing crash and the dot com bubble.

WSJ.com | Bubbles have been frequent in economic history - Steven Gjerstad and Vernon Smith explain why the housing crash ruined the financial system but the Dot-com collapse did not

fantastic wsj essay on formation of bubbles, experimental economics

What is neoliberalism, and what's it done to our universities?

Short-term transactions-for-profit replace long-term planning designed to produce a more just and equitable society. Everyone is always running around doing and acquiring things, but the things done and acquired provide only momentary and empty pleasures (shopping, trophy houses, designer clothing and jewelry), which in the end amount to nothing. Neoliberalism, David Harvey explains, delivers a “world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.” (”A Brief History of Neoliberalism.”)

a good description of commodity-based thinking

As Ronald Coase put it in his classic article, “The Problem of Social Cost” (Journal of Law and Economics, 1960): “The question to be decided is: is the value of the fish lost greater or less than the value of the product which the contamination of the stream makes possible?” If the answer is more value would be lost if my factory were closed, then the principle of the maximization of wealth and efficiency directs us to a negotiated solution: you allow my factory to continue to pollute your stream and I will compensate you or underwrite the costs of your moving the stream elsewhere on your property, provided of course that the price I pay for the right to pollute is not greater than the value produced by my being permitted to continue.

Well defined article analyzing the disjointed humanism taught at institutes of higher education. NeoLiberalism.

081209

Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

"When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t."

Charlie Bit My Finger

Use this free site to access interactives in Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, Geology, Living Environment, Meteorology, Nature of Science, or Physics. Click on a subject to view a list of games. Click on the teachers section to receive great tips, create your own games, and download study sheets for use in class. 1

Flash drill games

Interactive educational games, all subjects

How the New Deal actually corrected the economy and the myths used to argue that it did not.

Addresses the pervasive myth that FDR failed. That is, it's a "myth" for some definitions of "myth." As always, YMMV.

At such a moment, it is imperative to expose a dangerous popular myth regarding the efficacy of President Roosevelt’s actions: that it was not the programs of the New Deal, but only the placing of the nation on a wartime footing years later, that restored the health of the nation’s economy. This belief, though widely held, cannot stand up to even the most basic economic analysis. Yet the mainstream corporate media, which abound with anti-government ideology, seek to reinforce this myth. Just this past Sunday, The Washington Post featured on Page One of its Outlook section an article by Amity Shlaes headlined “FDR Was a Great Leader, But His Economic Plan Isn’t One to Follow.” Underscoring Shlaes’s made-up claims, the Post ran the continuation of her piece under the title: “FDR’s Plan Failed to Spark Real Growth.”

One year ago nostalgia :-)

PDF at http://buffalobeast.com/133/BIG3.ad.from.BEAST133.pdf . Just brilliant.

"You wouldn't buy our shitty cars, so we're taking your money anyway."

Great article

Must read: excellent post on "the media hologram" and existence

A bit naive in his discussion of free markets, but otherwise a great article.

First you will experience boredom, then comes an internal psychic violence and anger, much like the experience of zazen, or sitting meditation, as the layers of your mind conditioning peel away. Don't quit, keep at it, endure it, to the end. And when you return you will find that deeply experiencing a non-conditioned reality changes things forever. What you have experienced will animate whatever intellectual life you have developed. Or negate much of it. But in serious, intelligent people, experiencing non-manufactured reality usually gives lifelong meaning and insight to the work. You will have experienced the eternal verities of the world and mankind at ground zero. And you will find that the healthy social structures our well intentioned Western minds seek are already inherent in the psyche of mankind, but imprisoned. And the startling realization that you and I are the unknowing captors.

And what I write about is Americans, and why we think and behave the way we so. To do that here today I am forced to talk about three things -- corporations, television and human spirituality.

Psychology and what it might be good for considering the state of the world

Under the Bush team a prominent and profitable bank, under threat of a damaging public audit, was forced to accept less than $1b of TARP money. The gov insisted on buying a new class of preferred stock which gave it a tiny, minority position. The money flowed to the bank. Arguably, back then, the Bush administration was acting for purely economic reasons. It wanted to recapitalize the banks to halt a financial panic. Fast forward to today, and that same bank is begging to give the money back. The chairman offers to write a check, now, with interest. He's been sitting on the cash for months and has felt the dead hand of government threatening to run his business and dictate pay scales. He sees the writing on the wall and he wants out. But the Obama team says no, since unlike the smaller banks that gave their TARP money back, this bank is far more prominent. The bank has also been threatened with "adverse" consequences if its chairman persists. That's politics talking, not economics.

I must be naive. I really thought the administration would welcome the return of bank bailout money. Some $340 million in TARP cash flowed back this week from four small banks in Louisiana, New York, Indiana and California. This isn't much when we routinely talk in trillions, but clearly that money has not been wasted or otherwise sunk down Wall Street's black hole. So why no cheering as the cash comes back?

#armamentos

'Information is beautiful'

This guide is intended to help users prepare citations for electronic resources from the Library of Congress Web site. The purpose of a works cited document is to acknowledge the source of information and give as much detail as possible to find the source of that information at a later date. Consistency and the intended audience are the guiding principles to the following suggestions.

Video - CNBC.com

Intense reaction by some financial analysts in Wallstreet to the current plans

Rick Santelli expresses outrage at the prospect of government rewarding bad behavior.

"CNBC's Rick Santelli and the traders on the floor of the CME Group express outrage. . ." It's good to see and hear people who are appropriately angry. Also, note the paternalistic, faux-aristocratic comments of the other anchors, though; particularly how they try to paint a dissenting, informed, concerned, and eloquent citizen as a demagogue stirring up, "mob rule."

There is a clear pattern at play: Once a name catches on among high-income, highly educated parents, it starts working its way down the socioeconomic ladder. Amber, Heather, and Stephanie started out as high-end names. For every high-end baby given those names, however, another five lower-income girls received those names within 10 years.

unit 1

unite 1

UNITONE

RT @PierreBRT: Combien gagne un artiste qui vend sa musique en ligne ? Une infographie explicite. http://u.nu/863c8

via alphatrends

How much does music artists earn online http://bit.ly/bMgKjd #infographic #piratpartiet

Graphic comparisons of the US to other countries in the areas of life expectancy, education, etc.

while the top income-tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, the numbers are a bit misleading. “People coming from the U.S. to the Netherlands focus on that difference, and on that 52 percent,” said Constanze Woelfle, an American accountant based in the Netherlands whose clients are mostly American expats. “But consider that the Dutch rate includes social security, which in the U.S. is an additional 6.2 percent. Then in the U.S. you have state and local taxes, and much higher real estate taxes. If you were to add all those up, you would get close to the 52 percent.”

29 Apr 09 /

Free Loading Free Lance writer extols the collective virtues of the Dutch.

For 18 months now I’ve been playing the part of the American in Holland, alternately settling into or bristling against the European way of life. Many of the features of that life are enriching. History echoes from every edifice as you move through your day. The bicycle is not a means of recreation but a genuine form of transportation. A nearby movie house sells not popcorn but demitasses of espresso and glasses of Dutch gin from behind a wood-paneled bar, which somehow makes you feel sane and adult and enfolded in civilization. Then there are the features of European life that grate on an American sensibility, like the three-inch leeway that drivers deign to grant you on the highway, or the cling film you get from the supermarket, which clings only to itself. But such annoyances pale in comparison to one other. For the first few months I was haunted by a number: 52. It reverberated in my head; I felt myself a prisoner trying to escape its bars. For it represents the rate at which

A story done on behavior economics and it's acceptance in the Obama administration.

RT @GuyKawasaki: Great piece on behavorial economics and social psychology. Must read! http://adjix.com/6ufc [from http://twitter.com/r1tz/statuses/2088997262]

Human beings don't always behave rationally. Now, policymakers are using research about human decision-making to design policies to protect humans from their own poor judgment &mdash; including everything from unwanted pregnancies to failing to save for retirement.

Economic models and how unpredictable human beings mess with them.

Business bloggers at Harvard Business Review discuss a variety of business topics including managing people, innovation, leadership, and more.

April 8, 2009.

Collaboration (conversation) as a mechanism for accelerating growth along the 'experience curve'

Network effects = the value of a node in a network rises exponentially as more nodes are added to it. These are called network effects

rapid leaps in performance improvement arise as participants get better faster by working with others. These leaps in performance describe the shape and power of the collaboration curve, a new force in our professional and personal lives that turns the experience curve on its side, and explains why the whole of us, working, playing, and, learning together, can often be greater than the sum of our parts.

Collaboration curves. And WoW.

Collaboration curves hold the potential to mobilize larger and more diverse groups of participants to innovate and create new value. In so doing they may also reverse the diminishing returns dynamics of the experience curve and deliver increasing returns to performance instead. The evidence for the collaboration curve is, as yet, mostly anecdotal.

via http://www.informl.com/2009/04/08/climbing-the-collaboration-curve/

The Economist

everyone seems to be viewing this as horrific, i don't see it. adjusting your economic approach to a given economy is inevitable, and prudent. am i missing something?

"Among the projects whose future is uncertain are Google Notebook, a site for storing and taking notes on Web pages, and Google Audio Indexing, which allows users to search for phrases within online video footage of politicians, say people familiar with the matter."

acquire

In Seed Magazine, Jonathan Gottschall, a leading Literary Darwinist, reviews Geoffrey Miller's latest book, Spent, which argues that most of what we do, especially what we buy, is a kind of marketing designed to signal our power and secure our (genetic) place in the social hierarchy. That's all well and good, but it seems awful reductive.

In Spent, University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller contends that marketing—the jet fuel of unrestrained consumerism—“is the most dominant force in human culture,” and thus the most powerful shaper of life on Earth. Using vivid, evocative language, Miller suggests that consumerism is the sea of modern life and we are the plankton—helplessly tumbled and swirled by forces we can feel but not understand. Miller aims to penetrate to the evolutionary wellsprings of consumerist mania, and to show how it is possible to live lives that are more sustainable, more sane, and more satisfying.

Great way to lose an hour - a must-read dialog between sports columnist Bill Simmons and author Malcolm Gladwell. http://bit.ly/3w857i [from http://twitter.com/JMaultasch/statuses/1796294654]

This will suck about 30 minutes from your life. As Truman Capote once said about Jack Kerouac, "That's not writing, it's typing."

Simmons Meets Gladwell Part II

Malcolm Gladwell talking about Nick Faldo. "Faldo in his prime was terrifying. He was surly and tough and charismatic and emotionally and psychologically bulletproof, and I feel like he'd do a better job of getting under Tiger's skin than anyone out there right now. What's the defining fact about Faldo? His ex-girlfriend once destroyed his Porsche with a 9-iron. The corresponding fact for Woods is that his favorite band is Hootie and the Blowfish. Hootie and the Blowfish? What's Faldo's favorite band? Joy Division? Or some kind of obscure Welsh thrash band too hard core for American radio?"

The truth about Obama....

content type: text/html;charset=UTF-8

The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Congresspersons, after what happened in Iraq, why did you give a green light here, then get surprised that Paulson is acting like a douche?

``We need oversight,'' Paulson told lawmakers. ``We need protection. We need transparency. I want it. We all want it.''

The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral

"The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral."

Site regroupant un gros paquet de données de la banque mondiale.

Spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5m e-mails they send, finds a study. ... "After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted," wrote the researchers. -- And still they found it would have been worth it.

Spammers see a 1 in 12,500,000 response rate and still profit. How the hell do you fight that? http://is.gd/6VoG [from http://twitter.com/inxilpro/statuses/1000550716]

Spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5m e-mails they send, finds a study.

negocio spam

"Spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5m e-mails they send [...] the researchers estimate that the controllers of the vast system are netting about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or more than $2m (£1.28m) per year. While this was a good return, said the researchers, it did suggest that spammers were not making the vast sums of money that some people have predicted in the past."

Spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5m e-mails they send

Comprehensive list!

Business & Tech

Nb Might follow up

Yes.

1-cnn marijuana

Over the past two years, drug violence in Mexico has become a fixture of the daily news. Some of this violence pits drug cartels against one another; some involves confrontations between law enforcement and traffickers. Recent estimates suggest thousands have lost their lives in this "war on drugs." The U.S. and Mexican responses to this violence have been predictable: more troops and police, greater border controls and expanded enforcement of every kind. Escalation is the wrong response, however; drug prohibition is the cause of the violence. Prohibition creates violence because it drives the drug market underground. This means buyers and sellers cannot resolve their disputes with lawsuits, arbitration or advertising, so they resort to violence instead.

Prohibition of drugs corrupts politicians and law enforcement by putting police, prosecutors, judges and politicians in the position to threaten the profits of an illicit trade. This is why bribery, threats and kidnapping are common for prohibited industries but rare otherwise. Mexico's recent history illustrates this dramatically. Prohibition erodes protections against unreasonable search and seizure because neither party to a drug transaction has an incentive to report the activity to the police. Thus, enforcement requires intrusive tactics such as warrantless searches or undercover buys. The victimless nature of this so-called crime also encourages police to engage in racial profiling.

Eric

2009

Patent and copyright law are stifling innovation and threatening the global economy according to two economists at Washington University in St. Louis in a new book, Against Intellectual Monopoly. Professors Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine call for abolishing the current patent and copyright system in order to unleash innovations necessary to reverse the current recession and rescue the economy. The professors discuss their stand against intellectual property protections in a video and news release linked here.

According to two economists at Washington University in St. Louis in a new book, Against Intellectual Monopoly. But that's the opposite of what they were designed for...

via NPR's Planet Money @planetmoney on Twitter. Great commentary from a great kid.

Em inglês

Here's the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.

Why states need to cut taxes: http://tr.im/lEOG #tcot [from http://twitter.com/Underdown/statuses/1836031711]

It's already happened in Maryland.

Where in the world do people feel most content with their lives? According to a new report released by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, a Paris-based group of 30 countries with democratic governments that provides economic and social statistics and data, happiness levels are highest in northern European countries. In Depth: See All 10 of the World's Happiest Places Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands rated at the top of the list, ranking first, second and third, respectively. Outside Europe, New Zealand and Canada landed at Nos. 8 and 6, respectively. The United States did not crack the top 10. Switzerland placed seventh and Belgium placed tenth.

World&#39;s Happiest Places http://tinyurl.com/omxf5u [from http://twitter.com/fullfilth/statuses/1751512594]

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

Friedman, Thomas L.. The Inflection Is Near?." New York Times 07 March 2009.

We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows. “You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate ...’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

m the things I’ve made for them,” Chen said. “And I also hear that, when they no longer want an item, they simply

The Inflection Is Near? By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Sometimes the satirical newspaper The Onion is so right on, I can’t resist quoting from it.

Freidman,

Jack Shafer/Slate, Feb. 18, 2009.

Inventing and refining the rich content that wants to be sold

News organizations should think outside the browser similarly to how iTunes, the Times Reader, and the Kindle do in order to create a stand-alone boutique environment for information consumption that users would more naturally pay for.

photo business model web site website payments payment charging for slate

banktron [waupwaupwaupwaup] <-transformer noise

This comic pretty much sums up the bank bail-out of 2008.

:| (Also, wait, poverty-influenced stress can affect... your genes? Erm, what?)

"To test their hypothesis, Evans and Schamberg analyzed the results of their earlier, long-term study of stress in 195 poor and middle-class Caucasian students, half male and half female. In that study, which found a direct link between poverty and stress, students' blood pressure and stress hormones were measured at 9 and 13 years old. At 17, their memory was tested. Given a sequence of items to remember‚ teenagers who grew up in poverty remembered an average of 8.5 items. Those who were well-off during childhood remembered an average of 9.44 items. So-called working memory is considered a reliable indicator of reading, language and problem-solving ability — capacities critical for adult success. When Evans and Schamberg controlled for birth weight, maternal education, parental marital status and parenting styles, the effect remained. When they mathematically adjusted for youthful stress levels, the difference disappeared."

Does being poor make you physically less intelligent?

Growing up poor isn't merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.

Until last month, the clock had enough digits to measure US debt levels The US government's debts have ballooned so badly the National Debt Clock in New York has run out of digits to record the spiralling figure.

The US government's debts have ballooned so badly the National Debt Clock in New York has run out of digits to record the spiralling figure. The digital counter marks the national debt level, but when that passed the $10 trillion point last month, the sign could not display the full amount.

US debt clock runs out of digits

BBC News

"Capitalism (in addition to being a lot of other things) is the way people get rich simply for being rich."

The economy is as great an example as any of a program that not only got out of control, but became so prevalent - so accepted - that we came to take it for granted. We think of the economy and its rules as given circumstances, when they are actually constructions. In brief, the money we use is just one kind of money. Invented in the Renaissance, and protected with laws banning other kinds of money, it has very particular biases that lead to almost inevitable outcomes.

Economy's as great an example as any of a program that not only got out of control, but became so prevalent - so accepted - that we came to take it for granted. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.boingboing.net%2F2008%2F09%2F23%2Fwhat-went-wrong.html

Meanwhile, local currencies had the opposite bias of centralized currency. Local currencies lost value over time. They were really just receipts on the amount of grain that farmer had brought to the grain store. Since some of that grain was lost to rats or water, and since the grain store had to be paid, money devalued each year. This meant the money was biased towards being spent. That's why reinvestment in infrastructure as a percent of total revenue was so high in the late Middle Ages. It's why they built those cathedrals. They were local efforts, by people looking to invest their abundant wealth into real assets for their communities' future. (Cathedrals were built to attract pilgrims and tourism.) Since the purpose of the Renaissance innovations was to keep the currently wealthy wealthy, the currency was biased to favor those who had it - and could mete it out at high interest rates to those who needed it for their transactions.

Money can be just as open source as any other operating system. It used to be.

explaning the american economic crisis

In a post published earlier today, John Robb claims that as “there is reason to believe that costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree…this situation has all the earmarks of a bubble. A bubble that will soon burst as median incomes are adjusted downwards to global norms over the next decade.

James Levy: Learning Is Not A Spectator Sport

"In a post published earlier today, John Robb claims that as “there is reason to believe that costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree…this situation has all the earmarks of a bubble. A bubble that will soon burst as median incomes are adjusted downwards to global norms over the next decade."

John Robb claims that as “there is reason to believe that costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree…this situation has all the earmarks of a bubble. A bubble that will soon burst as median incomes are adjusted downwards to global norms over the next decade.

Great post from Seth Godin on the myth of $50m salaries http://bit.ly/1o5EYK [from http://twitter.com/r1tz/statuses/1418127934]

The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing) /Seth's Blog/ - The failed bankers on Wall Street have been ... http://tinyurl.com/chkazp [from http://twitter.com/jorgefsb/statuses/1374768795]

Excellent post that lifts the lid on the nonsense of self-justified bib money salaries

Seth Godin has posted a great post 'The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)' on his BLOG.

The failed bankers on Wall Street have been whining that if they have to cut bonuses and salaries dramatically, they'll be unable to recruit great talent, and they need great talent to fix the situation. And for years, boards have...

"American journalism is in trouble, and the problem is not just financial. My profession is in distress because for more than a decade it has been chasing the false idols of fame and fortune. While engaged in those pursuits, it forgot its readers and the need to produce a commercial product that appealed to its mass audience, which in turn drew advertisers and thus paid for it all. While most corporate owners were seeking increased earnings, higher stock prices, and bigger salaries, editors and reporters focused more on winning prizes or making television appearances."

Walter Pincus/The Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 2009. Internet isn't the threat, stenography and narcissism is. Repetition rather than length.

Cert of dep

"In the first year of the current bear market, the market has fallen more steeply than it did during the first years of Great Depression's bear markets. After adjusting for inflation, stocks are more than 40 percent lower than they were at their 2007 high (and more than 50 percent lower than their 2000 high)."

As a white-collar criminologist and former financial regulator much of my research studies what causes financial markets to become profoundly dysfunctional. The FBI has been warning of an "epidemic" of mortgage fraud since September 2004. It also reports that lenders initiated 80% of these frauds.1 When the person that controls a seemingly legitimate business or government agency uses it as a "weapon" to defraud we categorize it as a "control fraud" ("The Organization as 'Weapon' in White Collar Crime." Wheeler & Rothman 1982; The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. Black 2005). Financial control frauds' "weapon of choice" is accounting. Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime -- combined. Control fraud epidemics can arise when financial deregulation and desupervision and perverse compensation systems create a "criminogenic environment" (Big Money Crime. Calavita, Pontell & Tillman 1997.)

"Craftsmanship is a preservation method That's why "being famous" is a great way to preserve your work—because value is the #1 preservative for old objects. But want to know another? Craftsmanship. One of the great hazards of survival through time is the lack of a market and a lack of trade value, but another is simply shoddiness. (I have to chuckle whenever I read yet another description of American frontier log cabins as having been well crafted or sturdily or beautifully built. The much more likely truth is that 99% of frontier log cabins were horribly built—it's just that all of those fell down. The few that have survived intact were the ones that were well made. That doesn't mean all of them were.) It's not just that things that are poorly made deteriorate more readily, it's also that they signal their own worthlessness."

"One of the problems of historical preservation is that people only tend to preserve things that are valuable. And the problem with that is that value fluctuates over time."

really interesting article on the "trough of no value": you buy something it decreases in value until it has no value, but then after a while it has valuer as an antique

always one step ahead ; http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/49b1654a-ed60-11dd-bd60-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

"By contrast, Soros sees the current crisis as a real-life illustration of reflexivity. Markets did not reflect an objective “truth”. Rather, the beliefs of market participants – that house prices would always rise, that an arcane financial instrument based on a subprime mortgage really could merit a triple-A rating – created a new reality. Ultimately, that “super-bubble” was unsustainable, hence the credit crunch of 2007 and the recession and financial crisis of 2008 and beyond."

A diagram comparing the cost of the current economic crisis with large and costly events in US history

It is exceedingly difficult to convey exactly how much we are spending on all these bailouts. Whenever I start talking trillions (versus mere billions), I get puzzled looks from people. Humans have a hard time conceptualizing any number that large. I wanted a graphic way to clearly show how astonishingly ginormous the amounts involved were. So I once again went to Jess Bachman at Wallstats. I gave him my list of expenditures (inflation adjusted of course!) and he went to work. This early Bailout Nation graphic shows the the total costs to the taxpayer of all the monies spent, lent, consumed, borrowed, printed, guaranteed, assumed or otherwise committed. It is nothing short of astonishing.

18 jun 09 / early Bailout Nation graphic shows the the total costs to the taxpayer of all the monies spent, lent, consumed, borrowed, printed, guaranteed, assumed or otherwise committed. It is nothing short of astonishing. It includes the total outlay for all the bailouts to date. In just about one short year (March 2008 - March 2009), the bailouts managed to spend far in excess of nearly every major one time expenditure of the USA, including WW1&2 (omitted from graphic), the moon shot, the New Deal, total NASA budgets (omitted from graphic), Iraq, Viet Nam and Korean wars — COMBINED.

brilliant review (and comments) on Shirky's "Here comes Everybody

"Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market's transaction costs: buyers and sellers need to find one another, then reach agreement, and so on. The Coase theorem implies that if these transaction costs are low enough, direct markets of individuals make a whole lot of sense. But if they are too high, it makes more sense to get the job done by an organization that hires people. What's new is something consultant and social technologist Clay Shirky calls "Coase's Floor," below which we find projects and activities that aren't worth their organizational costs -- things so esoteric, so frivolous, so nonsensical, or just so thoroughly unimportant that no organization, large or small, would ever bother with them. Things that you shake your head at when you see them and think, "That's ridiculous." Sounds a lot like the Internet, doesn't it?"

Review of Clay Shirky's book, with useful new insights in the first couple of paragraphs.

In 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of the most perplexing questions in economics: if markets are so great, why do organizations exist? Why don't people just buy and sell their own services in a market instead? Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market's transaction costs: buyers and sellers need to find one another, then reach agreement, and so on. The Coase theorem implies that if these transaction costs are low enough, direct markets of individuals make a whole lot of sense. But if they are too high, it makes more sense to get the job done by an organization that hires people.

"[Clay Shirky's] new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, explores a world where organizational costs are close to zero and where ad hoc, loosely connected groups of unpaid amateurs can create an encyclopedia larger than the Britannica and a computer operating system to challenge Microsoft's."

Buy American. I Am.

"They work, what, 27 hours in a good week" , "19 holidays a month" Huuuuu, 41 hours a week and 11 holidays a year: http://www.touteleurope.fr/fr/actions/social/emploi-protection-sociale/presentation/comparatif-le-temps-de-travail-dans-l-ue.html

Viewpoint: As Washington rushes to nationalize troubled parts of the economy, the inescapable reality is that we're all French now

Viewpoint: As Washington rushes to nationalize troubled parts of the economy, the inescapable reality is that we\'re all French now

Article discusses how socialist the US has become, despite conservative's contempt for the concept.

I don't love her, but she sure says it like it is. Nice Q & A on investing, student loans, debts, etc..

When someone tells you to invest in a stock because it was up 40 percent in two months, ask yourself: “is that normal?” When someone tells you to put all your money in technology stocks because they have doubled in value in one year, ask yourself: “is that return normal?” When you buy a home on the expectation that values will rise 20 percent per year, ask yourself: “is that normal?”

Great financial advice to refer back to from time to time

Earlier this week, we solicited your questions for Suze Orman. You asked about paying college debt, choosing a good retirement plan, and — especially with a week like this — how safe your money is. In her answers below, Orman also offers a question to ask whenever deciding what to do with your money:

Article in The Guardian about the Lego company. Includes a great slideshow (see esp their Lego business 'cards').

For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of...

Seth Godin is a marketer, not an educator, but as a marketer he predicts the downfall of higher ed. "I'm afraid," he writes, "that's about to crash and burn. Here's how I'm looking at it... Just as we're watching the disintegration of old-school marketers with mass market products, I think we're about to see significant cracks in old-school schools with mass market degrees... Accreditation isn't the solution, it's the problem."

College might be overrated.

Mon Feb 09, 2009 at 08:58:22 PM PDT According to Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D) (PA-11), in mid-September of 2008, the United States of America came just three hours away from the collapse of the entire economy. In a span of 2 hours, $550 billion was drawn out of money market accounts in an electronic run on the banks.

Nevermind, this is apparently false. http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2009/02/11/kanjorski-and-the-money-market-funds-the-facts

Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D PA-11)

According to Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D) (PA-11), in mid-September of 2008, the United States of America came just three hours away from the collapse of the entire economy. In a span of 2 hours, $550 billion was drawn out of money market accounts in an electronic run on the banks. Rep. Kanjorski: "It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it."

The unprecedented expansion of the money supply could make the '70s look benign. - ARTHUR B. LAFFER

Getting a business loan in this economy can be more difficult than landing a reservation at French Laundry in Napa, California. Now try selling the loan officer on an open source hardware project where the blueprints will be given away. That's why the hardware hacking community is turning inwards to fund its ideas. Two open source hardware enthusiasts, Justin Huynh and Matt Stack, have started the Open Source Hardware Bank to fund hardware projects such as the microcontroller board pictured above.

an open source peer to peer bank, good coverage of their start

Getting a business loan in this economy can be more difficult than landing a reservation at French Laundry in Napa, California. Now try selling the loan officer on an open source hardware project where the blueprints will be given away. That's why the hardware hacking community is turning inwards to fund its ideas. Two open source hardware enthusiasts, Justin Huynh and Matt Stack, have started the Open Source Hardware Bank to fund hardware projects such as the microcontroller board pictured above.

わかりやすかった

The statistics and causes of Russia's startling post-Soviet population decline...

"The upsurge of illness and mortality, furthermore, has been disproportionately concentrated among men and women of working age—meaning that Russia’s labor force has been shrinking more rapidly than the population overall."

how restaurants fiddle with their menus to get you to buy more. mostly nonsurprising but good to tuck away

Menu Design Psychology

Menu design techniques for boosting sales.

How to alter menu design to increase profits

While I was reading The Food Network Magazine, I found a tid-bit I wanted to share with you all. Restaurant Menus are designed to make you eat more and spend big.

Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis report on how Argentina's worker-run factories have nurtured a powerful social movement, while seamstress Matilda Adorno explains how a dispute over pay became a political struggle ... There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighbourhood assemblies and barter clubs to resurgent left-wing parties and mass movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina with workers in "recovered companies". Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over businesses that have gone bankrupt and reopening them under democratic worker management. ... "We formed the co-operative with the criteria of equal wages and making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders."

Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis report on how Argentina's worker-run factories have nurtured a powerful social movement, while seamstress Matilda Adorno explains how a dispute over pay became a political struggle

In South Africa, we saw a protester's T-shirt with an even more succinct summary of this new impatience: "Stop Asking, Start Taking".

Occupy, resist, produce

"Capitalism produces and distributes not just goods and services, but identities. When the capital and its carpetbaggers had flown from Argentina, what was left was not only companies that had been emptied, but a whole hollowed-out country filled with people whose identities - as workers - had been stripped away as well. As one of the organisers in the movement wrote to us: "It is a huge amount of work to recover a company. But the real work is to recover a worker and that is the task that we have just begun.""

Reasons to bail out GM. Basically useful as a device to pull out whenever anyone claims that the problem is easy, and that we should "just liquidate the bastards."

by Jonathan Cohn. This is not your father's Oldsmobile we're rescuing.

Nice chart comparing tax plans.

Obama v McCain tax plans

Wash. Post. / NYTimes review of tax plans useful diagrams

卡奴是如何炼成 http://www.mint.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/creditcardhell3.jpg

pds

When used wisely, credit cards can be the cornerstone of a sound financial strategy. A solid credit history makes you a good credit risk and that in turn allows you to purchase the necessities of life. But credit cards can also be a slippery slope. One misstep and you’ll tumble into the abyss of credit card debt hell, a mounting spiral of missed payments, fees, high APRs, and rate increases that will take years to recover from. Only by remaining vigilant can you hope to avoid this fate. Here’s our guide to what you may experience on the way down.

mmm, reminds me to top mine up. oooh for real-time banking!

I love that the Wall Street Journal writes this but never complained about Bush using fear mongering. Also I don't think he has fear mongered, I think Obama has presented evidence that backs up what he is saying.

the Great Depression are not only historically inaccurate, they're also dangerous. Repeated warnings from the White House about a coming economic apocalypse aren't likely to raise consumer and investor expectations for the future. In fact, they have contributed to the continuing decline in consumer confidence

Mr. Obama's analogies to the Great Depression are not only historically inaccurate, they're also dangerous. Repeated warnings from the White House about a coming economic apocalypse aren't likely to raise consumer and investor expectations for the future. In fact, they have contributed to the continuing decline in consumer confidence that is restraining a spending pickup.

Inventing and refining the rich content that wants to be sold.

RT @draenews: Del Not all information wants to be free. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine: http://bit.ly/d3d1bF

Review of the kind of online content users want to pay for.

Examples of paid content on the web

The idea that people won't pay for content online has become such a part of the Web orthodoxy that New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller risked getting lynched earlier this month for merely musing about paid models for the online editions of his paper. Not helping Keller's cogitation was a contemporaneous "secret memo" from Steve Brill and a Time article by Walter Isaacson, both which advocated variations on the micropayment model. Neither advances the topic much beyond what most Web entrepreneurs understood long ago.

What content will people pay for? Beautifully designed, irreplaceable and authoritative.

A Tally of Federal Rescues http://nyti.ms/cwSSVf Mind blowing ! The New York Times > Week in Review > Image >

visualization of the recent bailout

Need some time to wrap my head around these figures

Note, you don’t want to hire most of those laid off. Most permanent Googlers were “managing” projects (e.g, taking 4 day weekends and showing up to work only to eat the free food and showed up barely to 1 or 2 meetings per week). The temps that were there for more than a year learned the same laziness and worthless work ethic. If you’re looking for people with no real experience and who think it’s okay to steal a tray of bottle water provided by the company for everyone to drink… then go ahead and hire a Googler. Otherwise, be really careful and interview really in-depth about what they can and cannot do (and verify it).

Google has been quietly laying off staff and up to 10,000 jobs could be on the chopping block according to sources. Since August, hundreds of employees have been laid off and there are reports that about 500 of them were recruiters for Google. By law, Google is required to report layoffs publicly and with the SEC however, Google has managed to get around the legal requirement. In fact, one of the ways Google was able to meet Wall Street’s Q3 earnings expectations was by trimming “operational” expenses. Google reports to the SEC that it has 20,123 employees but in reality it has 30,000. Why the discrepancy? Google classifies 10,000 of the employees as temporary operational expenses or “workers”. Google co-founder Sergey Brin said, “There is no question that the number (of workers) is too high”. There is no question the economic downturn is hitting Google hard and with the slowdown in online advertising, their troubles are just beginning.

Google has been quietly laying off staff and up to 10,000 jobs could be on the chopping block according to sources.

Comment 42: William: "That, and our economy runs on paper money that the world doesn't accept as currency due to no gold standard. See the financial reasons for war in Iraq and Iran being next due to both economies no longer accepting US Dollars as main trade currency, instead switching to the Euro for its more stable fluctuation in value. When the US buys, the US prints, thus inflating their own economy, essentially taking it out on US citizens, and devaluing the money the foreign sellers recieve. They get tired of taking $9.50 worth of bills at which time of agreement was worth $10; in which time we declare them an international threat and takeover their government to re-establish the dollar as currency to maintain the image in the world. One large economic nation such as China or India stopping trade in US Dollars and our economy is finished." -- Basically

heh

Seriously? I picked out 1/2 cup of defects from a 12oz bag of eight o clock coffee once. I just can't believe news stories like this.

http://travel.yahoo.com/p-interests-27384279;_ylc=X3oDMTFxcWIyczFpBF9TAzI3MTYxNDkEX3MDMjcxOTQ4MQRzZWMDZnAtdG9kYXltb2QEc2xrA21hbGRpdmVzLTQtMjgtMDk-

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

RT @kantandesu: NYタイムズにすごい記事が出た。アフガニスタンには1兆ドル規模の鉄、銅、コバルト、金、リチウムなどの鉱物資源が眠る。アフガニスタンはリチウムのサウジアラビアになれる、と書いている。理由はタリバンではなかったのだ…。恐ろし。http://ny ...

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan..Afghanistan has never had much heavy industry before, it has little or no history of environmental protection..The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal w/ mineral development. Internatl accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult w/ the Afghan Ministry of Mines, & technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies & other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange bids on mineral rights by next fall..In 2004, American geologists, stumbled across old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. The data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

Not long ago I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good, because I had none.

Confessions of a fake businessman from Beijing

"And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”" this is beautiful

And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”

In this post, Drew Conway (a PhD Candidate at New York University, studying networks) and I will walk you through a guide that we hope may be of use to others trying to find their way through network theor

great piece looking at the brutal economic realities of the iphone app market media cost of building an iphone app ($35K) and the median app sales ($700/year).

Tragic, scary stuff here.

Period ending.....Period downloads.....Cumulative downloads....Period revenues Jun 2008............no apps...................no apps........................no revenues Dec 2008.............600 M......................600 M..........................$ 172 M Jun 2009..............800 M....................1.4 B.............................$  228 M Dec 2009..........1.6 B.........................3.0 B............................$  458 M Jun 2010...........2.0 B.........................5.0 B............................$  542 M Total.................5.0 B.........................5.0 B............................$1.4 B

Stats on iphone dev. Money etc.

평균적인 앱스토어 개발자의 1년 수입은 $680

A truly excellent analysis on how much an iPhone app developer can expect to earn on average. Phrases like "But the picture starts out bleak" and "Now the picture starts to get worse." sum it up. Well worth reading the whole thing.

Whether Cahn and Carbone are right will take time and subsequent scholarship to learn; but their story is both plausible and sobering. Plausible, because it brings so many aspects of the culture wars into sharper focus. Sobering, because the economic and cultural forces battering traditional family norms show no signs of abating -- but the new, education-centered pathway to adulthood is often least accessible to those who need it most.

In red America, families form adults

"New norms arise for this environment, norms geared to prevent premature family formation. The new paradigm prizes responsible childbearing and child-rearing far above the traditional linkage of sex, marriage, and procreation. Instead of emphasizing abstinence until marriage, it enjoins: Don't form a family until after you have finished your education and are equipped for responsibility. In other words, *adults form families*. Family life marks the end of the transition to adulthood, not the beginning. Red America still prefers the traditional model."

RT @brainpicker: Do "family values" weaken families? Very compelling read from National Journal http://is.gd/c3p5t [from http://twitter.com/bfwriter/statuses/13765341391]

Can it be? One of the oddest paradoxes of modern cultural politics may at last be resolved. The paradox is this: Cultural conservatives revel in condemning the loose moral values and louche lifestyles of "San Francisco liberals." But if you want to find two-parent families with stable marriages and coddled kids, your best bet is to bypass Sarah Palin country and go to Nancy Pelosi territory: the liberal, bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate.

Web Services as Governments http://bit.ly/dcQn3M via @VenessaMiemis | Related: War http://www.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/3424896427/ [from http://twitter.com/CircleReader/statuses/16160255165]

As I thought about it, it became clear that web platforms really don't make much. Instead, they create the conditions that encourage others to invest their time and energy to create useful services. The value of Twitter is not in the software that runs on their servers; it is in the content that 180 million people contribute to their network - same with Facebook. Many would argue that Apple makes things, but even there, the full experience of the iPhone has a lot to do with the 200,000 applications that others created to run on the device. A lot of people have begun using the term ecosystem to describe these big platforms. That captures their decentralized, emergent character, but ecosystems do not have a central point of control. Apple decided to eliminate third party analytics between one release and the next. That doesn't happen in an ecosystem. The right analogy is a government.

Apple, Facebook, Craigslist, et all as governments (totalitarian, state economies, libertarians?)

Social networks act as governments with their APIs.

The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.

Andy Grove writes interesting/controversial piece arguing for protectionism and other techniques to generate American jobs.

Fantastic piece from the former CEO of Intel on the problems with focusing on profit-margins over jobs. The possible decline of Silicon Valley looks rather similar to the collapse of manufacturing that the UK went through in the late-70s and 80s. The challenge for us is to work out how to recover from that problem.

How it works nowadays: successful companies rarely make what they create.

Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter. The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.

Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000 -- lower than it was before the first personal computer, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975. Meanwhile, a very effective computer-manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workers -- factory employees, engineers and managers. The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenue last year was $62 billion, larger than Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Dell Inc. or Intel. Foxconn employs more than 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel and Sony Corp.

Die langweiligen Industrie-Jobs sind doch gar nicht so doof.

All Joy and No Fun | Why parents hate parenting (parents are more depressed than nonparents no matter what their... http://ff.im/-nq6wU

read this when I have time...

particularly those of us who find moment-to-moment happiness a bit elusive to begin with.

Via Ben. Fascinating analysis of parenting, expectations, happiness, the history of parenting, etc.

"From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think. Most people assume that having children will make them happier. Yet a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so. This finding is surprisingly consistent, showing up across a range of disciplines."

Why parents hate parenting.

oh dear,

All Joy and No Fun

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1431761

Where Americans Are Moving To: Interactive Map http://bit.ly/aYVs9v via @cubitplanning #flowmaps #cartography #migration #maps

Brutal artículo acerca de la crisis en España. BUENÍSIMO!!!!!!!!!!

La situación en España en 2010, vista por un americano (ex del Washington Post)

Tras recorrer España en las últimas semanas, el ex director adjunto del 'The Washington Post' ofrece su retrato de la crisis.

Retrato de un país en crisis Tras recorrer España en las últimas semanas, el periodista estadounidense Phil Bennett ofrece su retrato de la crisis. El relato incluye entrevistas a Salgado, Rajoy y Rato, pero también a empresarios, trabajadores y parados. Esta es la visión de España del ex director adjunto del 'The Washington Post'

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.elpais.com%2Farticulo%2Freportajes%2FRetrato%2Fpais%2Fcrisis%2Felpepusocdmg%2F20100613elpdmgrep_1%2FTes

"The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe."

amazing how a team of Pentagon officials and American geologists found all these resources

RT @mikewhills @jonnyrichards Cud discovery of $1trn worth of minerals turn Afghanistan into 'Saudi Arabia of lithium' http://nyti.ms/bbGY05

From one of my favorite books this year, there's a great tie in as to why people hate the jobs that they are in and want to do something more intrinsically rewarding like freelancing.

This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace....

This is an interesting video on what motivates knowledge workers to perform. And how the phrase "I do this if they didn't pay me" become more relevant the higher the cognitive requirements become.

Very very very interesting take on what motivates people to work. -KO

Inverse relationship between incentives and motivation

While strong AI still lies safely beyond the Maes-Garreau horizon1 (a vanishing point, perpetually fifty years ahead) a host of important new developments in weak AI are poised to be commercialized in the next few years. But because these developments are a paradoxical mix of intelligence and stupidity, they defy simple forecasts, they resist hype. They are not unambiguously better, cheaper, or faster. They are something new. What are the implications of a car that adjusts its speed to avoid collisions … but occasionally mistakes the guardrail along a sharp curve as an oncoming obstacle and slams on the brakes? What will it mean when our computers know everything — every single fact, the entirety of human knowledge — but can only reason at the level of a cockroach?

New Developments in Artificial Intelligence: Man vs. Google #AI http://bit.ly/9LbS0q $$

What are the implications of a car that adjusts its speed to avoid collisions … but occasionally mistakes the guardrail along a sharp curve as an oncoming obstacle and slams on the brakes? What will it mean when our computers know everything — every single fact, the entirety of human knowledge — but can only reason at the level of a cockroach?

Impressive essay on artificial intelligence.

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

While strong AI still lies safely beyond the Maes-Garreau horizon1 (a vanishing point, perpetually fifty years ahead) a host of important new developments in weak AI are poised to be commercialized in the next few years. But because these developments are a paradoxical mix of intelligence and stupidity, they defy simple forecasts, they resist hype. They are not unambiguously better, cheaper, or faster. They are something new. What are the implications of a car that adjusts its speed to avoid collisions … but occasionally mistakes the guardrail along a sharp curve as an oncoming obstacle and slams on the brakes? What will it mean when our computers know everything — every single fact, the entirety of human knowledge — but can only reason at the level of a cockroach?

New Developments in Artificial Intelligence: Man vs. Google #AI http://bit.ly/9LbS0q $$

What are the implications of a car that adjusts its speed to avoid collisions … but occasionally mistakes the guardrail along a sharp curve as an oncoming obstacle and slams on the brakes? What will it mean when our computers know everything — every single fact, the entirety of human knowledge — but can only reason at the level of a cockroach?