economy
Fred Wilson on how Amazon has helped create the economy that undervalues blogs
The point is that my blog post drove a lot of value to Amazon that is not totally captured by the 40 purchases of Gretchen's book or even the 118 transactions that were done by those visitors in the past two days. The value of that link, in my opinion, is significantly greater than $25.20 and as a result bloggers and other users of affiliate services are getting under compensated for the value they are providing.
John Battelle: The world is clearly moving away from a US-dominated model
2010 will mark the beginning of the end of US dominance of the web. I am not predicting the decline of the US Internet market, but rather its eclipse in size and overall influence by other centers of web economies. In essence, this is not an Internet prediction, but an economic one, as the web is simply a reflection of the world, and the world is clearly moving away from a US-dominated model.
So 2010 is all about jobs, fiscal responsibility and the deficit but not immigration reform?
And people think am a cynic when I say Democrats are not going to do anything that will shake the "all enforcement, all the time" nativist framing of Comprehensive Immigration Reform. From Coming Up In 2010: All About The Deficit | TPMDC:
Top aides on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue say 2010 will be the year of fiscal responsibility, even if President Obama has to battle with progressive Democrats to make cuts they won't like."Next year the focus will be jobs and fiscal responsibility," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told TPMDC in a briefing with two reporters Thursday.
Hoyer (D-MD) said one reason Democrats are having a tough time one year before the Congressional midterm elections is that voters are concerned about the nation's fiscal health, and they also want to see the unemployment rate shrink.
You see what happened here? A Democrat swallowed whole an extreme-right talking point and ran with it.
Let's see how so-called Liberals and Progresives try to unframe that one.
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Banks that Succeed
For those of us who follow and participate in microloan programs, it iswell known that poorer people all over the world are far more likely to pay back a loan (assuming reasonable terms) than are wealthy people. I have seen amazing payback rates with almost every microloan program no matter how poor their clientele.
The key, of course, is assuring that the business relationship between the lender and the debtor is fair and reasonable.
In more traditional banking I have not been sure if the same dynamic applies where poorer borrowers are more likely to repay than richer. What is clear, though, is that banks have mostly been using unfair business practices to try and gouge the poor, and under those circumstances everyone loses. The collapse of Citigroup and Bank of America's stock price is a direct result of their use of predatory practices to gouge poorer borrowers who then couldn't repay. Of course the banks beg taxpayers for bailouts to get them through while the poor who were the victims of these practices are left to suffer.
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Going Beyond Earth Hour
Last weekend was "Earth Hour," a one hour period where people were supposed to turn out their lights. I always feel that such efforts are largely a wasted effort. The impact is minimal. Doesn't mean it doesn't have a purpose in raising awareness and the like, but so much more needs to be done than just one hour a year where people turn out the light.
We need to remake America's energy system. The impact of that would be enormous. It would reduce our national carbon footprint WHILE creating domestic jobs, helping farmers and clearing our air of pollutants. And you, as a consumer, can be part of this remaking of America by purchasing YOUR energy from green energy producers. For only pennies more a month per kilowatt-hour, you can be the change America needs in its energy policy.
Okay, it is slightly more complicated than that. When you buy Green Energy generally you are not necessarily actually getting electrons from green energy. What you are doing is PAYING for the building of green energy production plants and the purchase of green energy from those production plants into the grid. In essence, you are creating the market for green energy in preference to oil and coal plants.
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Felix Salmon breaks down why we need true transparency during these bail out times
The critics of the subsidy implicit in the Geithner plan aren't in general critics on the grounds that it constitutes excessive government spending --we're mostly supporters of the stimulus package, for instance. Rather, my problem with the implicit subsidy is more about the "implicit" part than the "subsidy" part. If you're going to subsidize the banks, let's make it very clear which banks you're subsidizing, and how much you're subsidizing them by.
This is all connected to the nationalization debate, of course. Every time the government throws a certain amount of cash at a bank, it's quite easy to calculate the ownership stake that quantity of money could buy, given the prevailing share price. And so you get pro-nationalization rhetoric along the lines of "we could have bought Citigroup X times over for the amount of money we've given them".
If you hide that money in some combination of PPIPs and the FDIC, however, then it's never possible to calculate how much any given bank has benefitted from the taxpayer plan.
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